“And this last guy,” my father pushed an index card my way, then tapped it. “George Morgan?” Tap, tap. “Nothing, Sweet Pea. I couldn’t pull up a current residence, a full Social, or even a library card. I couldn’t find where he’s ever purchased a piece of property, borrowed a dime, been in the Big House or the military. All I could find was a vehicle registration and license, and you gave me those. Who is this guy?”
“He’s my driver.”
“Your driver’s living in his car.”
“I suspected as much.”
“How is he in play, Punkin?”
I thought about it a second. “I think he’s been on the Job.”
“Is that so. And?”
I shrugged. “Makes you wonder.” Which, it didn’t. We both knew why a law enforcer might disappear, and it wasn’t pretty.
“Watch your back, Davis.”
“Always, Daddy.”
I watched from the window until his taillights disappeared. The sun would set all too soon—I hate winter—and I had three hours of road to cover.
I’d savored the surprise of what great getup Natalie had in store for me until now, glancing at the duffel bag expectantly several times. The dress-up aspect of my new job was the best part—it made me feel safe and I loved the clothes. I unzipped the bag slowly, tooth by tooth, like opening a present. Natalie Middleton had missed her calling; she should have been a personal shopper instead of a personal assistant.
Inside the duffel I found an envelope with my name handwritten across the front. There was a short page of blah-blah, go here, go there, blah-blah, a car key on a round silver ring, and a tarnished metal key on a green plastic key fob, number thirty-four and EconoLodge stamped in flaking gold ink. Under the envelope were a maid’s uniform, flesh-colored support hose, a dark brown pony-tail wig, and thick-soled white industrial shoes. Size six and a half.
SIX
The EconoLodge sucked. The housekeeping job sucked harder. Two weeks into both, I was sleep deprived, my hands were raw and blistered, my back broken, my feet blown up to small pillows, and I didn’t have a clue who was stealing money from guest-room safes. More than that, I barely cared.
The good news was I’d all but forgotten the bad taste my first Bellissimo assignment had left me with, and the drudgery of this new assignment only had a bad odor. My ninety-day commitment was down to the high-sixties.
A heap of junk that Nattie insisted was a rental car was parked outside room thirty-four at the EconoLodge the first night. “Housekeeping personnel don’t drive brand-new shiny cars, Davis. Drive the rental back and forth to work.”
That pile of scrap metal reeked, died twice at red lights, and the radio only hissed. I decided quickly that my first commute in it would also be my last. I’d rather take the bus. I’d rather hitchhike. I’d rather crawl. I parked it in the employee parking garage, which, as it turned out, was in a totally different zip code than the Bellissimo. As I switched off the ignition the damn thing backfired, the amplified bomb blast bouncing off the concrete walls, taking ten good years off my life. I left that rattletrap there for good. I left the keys in it, very tempted to leave it running. I could walk to work and back in thirty minutes. It wouldn’t kill me.
Eight hours later I was so near death, that walking to the EconoLodge would have been the last straw. At the end of my first day with Guest Services, I felt like I’d pulled a log truck uphill by the bit between my teeth all day. I’d been screamed at in rapid-fire Spanish often and at length. I’d been forced to hover over an endless succession of toilets. I’d inhaled toxic chemicals all day. I’d manhandled mountains of suspicious bed sheets. I’d picked up a thousand gooey bars of soap, and, possibly the worst, I shattered a mirror into a million shiny slivers.
As I stood in line to punch out, everyone else jabbering cheerily as if they’d spent the day poolside, the very effort of inhaling and exhaling was about all I could manage. Walking to the hellhole EconoLodge was no longer an option. The thought of meeting up with the clunker I’d said goodbye and good riddance to almost brought me to tears, and then I remembered my friendly cabbie.
I couldn’t very well whistle through VIP in my maid getup and hail myself a taxi, so I left through the employee-service entrance and circled around the property on foot, which was about six miles cross country; I could have walked to the EconoLodge just as easily. George was right where I left him, and he was asleep. I found a nice big magnolia tree to hide behind and lobbed cherry LifeSavers, one at a time, onto the hood of the dirty white car.
The LifeSavers came from a guest room I’d all but licked clean, at the bottom of a basket of goodies the room’s last occupant had walked off and left, along with a rancid water glass full of drowned cigarette butts on a non-smoking floor. The rule seemed to be if the guest was still a guest, leave everything as close to where you found it as possible. If the guest had checked out, anything they left was fair game. This was explained to me in pantomime.
I eyed the basket.
Finder’s keepers—the only, single, solitary perk of this job.
There were only two LifeSavers left when George finally stirred, craned in my direction, and beckoned me with no energy and no recognition.
I ducked my head and made a run for the backseat.
He let out a huge sigh. He didn’t turn when he said, “You make a better redhead.”
I froze. I stared at the back of his head until he turned around and acknowledged me. We locked eyes. “Shut up, George, and drive.”
He cranked her up. “Where to?”
“The EconoLodge.”
I swear I heard him snicker.
We pulled into the parking lot, and he drove straight to my Volkswagen. I knew I was right about him; he’d been on one side or the other of the law. Otherwise, he’d have had no idea what I drove. Or what color hair was under the wigs.
“What time do you want me to pick you up in the morning?”
See?
I huffed. “Six forty-five.” I passed him a plastic bag full of loose change I’d collected off nightstands and dressers. He shook the bag, then looked at me.
“What? I can’t pay you a hundred dollars every time you take me three blocks!” I got out, slammed the door, and braced myself for my next chore—surviving the EconoLodge a second night.
* * *
“It couldn’t be that bad,” Natalie said. “There’s very little turnover in housekeeping.”
“That’s because they’re raking in the dough on that job. The housekeepers are filling up ten bags a day each with loot from the rooms.”
At the end of my second week, Natalie and I were having a sit-down at the casino next door, the Gold Mine, hidden amongst gigantic slot machines.
“Why are we here?” I’d asked.
“I love their coffee,” she’d replied.
“The job is nasty, Natalie,” I told her. “People are just gross. And they steal everything that isn’t nailed down. Today? Today I had a room that had a lamp missing. I cleaned the same room yesterday and the lamp was there.”
“What about the safes?”
Each guest room has a ten-inch recessed wall safe inside the closet. It was there to tease the guests: Go to the casino and get a pile of money to put in me. When the guests check in the little vault is wide open, the instructions loud and clear: leave this thing as you found it. If they have any reason to use the safe, they program their own top-secret four-digit code that allows access to whatever valuables they place in the safe, and if they happen to check out without opening it, the housekeeper has to stand there and try four-digit number combinations until they guess the correct one.
Just kidding.
Ninety-nine percent of the time the wall safes, like the two sheets of Bellissimo stationery in the desk, aren’t touched. Here’s an interesting fact: the Gideon organization doesn’t place a free Bible in casino hotel rooms. Does that make any sense? You’d think they’d put two in every room.
“Everyone seems t
o follow procedure,” I told her. “If we get to an unoccupied room where the guest left it locked, we call the supervisor. She brings the master key and opens it.”
“Have you run across that?”
“Once,” I told her.
“What was inside?”
“French fries.”
Natalie’s head jerked. “What?”
“Congealed French fries. I swear.” I flashed her the Scout’s Honor salute. Or maybe it was the Witches’ Honor. “They were swimming in so much ketchup I thought someone had locked up a body part, like a kidney or a big nose.”
“What did you do?”
“I had to pick up the nasty things, then scrub out the safe.”
Nattie recoiled.
“See? I told you.”
* * *
The room safes were being broken into randomly; the common denominator eluded me other than baby powder, because traces of it were found all four times. All I really knew was that I hated cleaning hotel rooms and that the thief was wearing Pampers.
I had Jeopardy! turned low on the television to muffle the noise of my neighbors, who’d had screaming sex twice already, once during the news and then again during Wheel of Fortune, with the four incident files and a take-out pizza spread out on the EconoLodge’s version of a bedspread: it was made of plastic, didn’t provide a single blanket element other than covering the cardboard sheets, and it smelled like feet.
I’d studied these files for two weeks now, and still a pattern hadn’t emerged. Truth be told, I only glanced at the stack the first week, unable to hold anything as heavy as a sheet of paper after my grueling day shifts, but began digging through them in earnest over the weekend. Two things dawned on me while staring at the stain patterns on the thirty-seven EconoLodge ceiling tiles: one, the Bellissimo had higher sanitation standards than the EconoLodge, and two, the reward for catching the thief would be a different assignment, something that didn’t involve removing gooey things from the bottom of hotel garbage cans during the day or having pervy neighbors at night.
The security footage was the same. I ran all four clips a dozen times on my teeny computer, backed them up, and watched them a dozen more. A dark-haired man, the same man each time (who knew the camera angles, because I couldn’t get a full shot of his face), stood outside a guest room chatting it up with the housekeeping floor supervisor. She used her pass key to give him entrance to an occupied room where he went on to relieve the room safe of its pesky contents. Only, as it turned out all four times, he wasn’t the occupant.
The timeline was erratic, the first theft occurring in August of last year on the twenty-eighth floor, the second in November on sixteen, and the last two during the same week in December, the first on the twentieth floor and the follow-up break-in on floor thirteen. The victims claimed losses that totaled forty-nine thousand in cash, with the third incident on the twentieth floor including jewelry, bringing the grand total up to almost sixty-thousand dollars the guy had walked off with.
For the late-summer heist, he was decked out in golf attire, lugging a bag of clubs. For the second, he wore tennis whites, a racquet tucked under one arm, hands full of Bellissimo Café take-out. The third—this was cute—he wore a spa robe and slippers. For his final act, only two days after his lucrative spa adventure, he seemed to have run out of energy. He was dressed in nondescript street clothes: khaki pants, a V-neck sweater over a button down, and leather loafers.
How did he know there was anything in the safes worth stealing and how, once in the room, was he getting into them?
* * *
It was noon on a bright sunny Monday, my third on the housekeeping assignment, and I knew it was his room the second I entered it. You don’t marry someone twice and not know a bed they’ve slept in.
Sixteen hundred and twenty guest rooms, more than five hundred people issued the same black, tan, and white uniform I was sporting, and somehow I was the lucky one who knuckled the door (“Housekeeping!”), card-swiped the lock, strategically blocked the door with my cleaning cart, and entered my ex-ex-husband Eddie’s hotel room. I fell against my cart, sending a hundred tiny shampoo bottles flying off the other side.
“Okay? Okay?” Santiago, my coworker, cleaning the even-numbered rooms to my odd, raced across the hall to lasso the shampoos. “Okay?”
“I’m fine, Santiago,” I panted. I squeezed my eyes shut, pinched the bridge of my nose, and tried to concentrate on standing upright.
“Bad stinks?”
That would work, so I nodded.
“You me do?”
I shook my head. “I’m fine, Santiago. I’m going to close this door so no one walking by gets a whiff of this.” I waved my hand in front of my face.
Santiago gave me his I-have-no-idea-what-you-said smile and asked again, “You me do?” this time, pointing to me, then himself. He drew his toilet-brush sword. He tilted his head back, sniffing the air.
“No, Santiago, but thanks.” I closed the door to an urgent string of speedy Spanish. An interpreter would have come in handy just then, because what Santiago was trying to tell me was that we weren’t allowed behind closed doors in a guest room. We used two card keys: one to enter and clean the room, the other to exit and let all interested parties—our boss, the front desk, and, as it turns out, Natalie Middleton, should she want to know—that the room was ready. If the door closed between the two swipes, warning bells sounded all over the building: Someone on the housekeeping staff was locked up in a guest room. Hello, lawsuit.
Santiago was on the other side of the door hollering about piñatas, enchiladas, and conquistadors. The housekeeping supervisor was thumping down the hall, slinging Spanish curses right and left. Natalie Middleton was in action, sending an emissary to both save me and read me the riot act.
I was behind closed doors, so I didn’t know.
I fingered Eddie’s hanging shirts and poked around in his shaving kit. No surprises. I grabbed my clipboard and flipped through, wondering how I’d missed this. We’re issued our marching orders at the beginning of every shift. If almost always gives us the surname of the guest in the room and if not, it gives clues. VIPs are highlighted with a pale green stripe, which most of this floor was, and Casino Marketing guests are listed as just that. No name, just Casino Marketing Guest. You don’t know a thing about the room’s occupant other than they were there on the casino’s dime. So Eddie Crawford was a Casino Marketing guest. Which is exactly when it hit me. Buried deep in the incident files, behind the reports, profiles, photographs, claim forms, and interview transcripts, were the single-sheet housekeeping assignment charts for the day of each robbery. All four room-safe thefts had occurred in Casino Marketing guest rooms.
An urgent pounding on the door scared the very life out of me. It was most certainly Eddie.
I dropped my clipboard, clapped my hand over my mouth to muffle my screams, and wondered, wildly pacing a small circle, what to do. My eyes were drawn to the Gulf of Mexico, out the window and nineteen floors down. Suicide? This early in the morning?
He knocked again.
I jumped a mile and screamed into my hand.
“Everything okay in there?”
It wasn’t Eddie.
I stretched to the peephole, and saw a perfect set of glow-in-the-dark choppers. Their owner could have chewed through the door. Accompanying the teeth, a great big man dressed in head-to-toe white. He looked like Dr. Death.
Shit. Shit. Double shit.
SEVEN
“Is this it?” George shook a can of mixed nuts.
“It can’t be Christmas every day.” In the two weeks that George had been shuttling me back and forth to and from the lovely EconoLodge, I’d loaded him down with things I found in the guest rooms: food, candy, wine, soft drinks, bottled water, flowers, T-shirts, coffee mugs, four hundred little jars of condiments, visors, golf balls, hand lotion, and enough cell phone chargers to open his own kiosk at the mall. The first few days I simply left the loot in the car. The day he
almost got us killed because he was craning into the rear-view mirror to see what I’d be leaving instead of watching the road was the day I began handing the boodle to him when I got in. For reasons I might never know, old George loved the flowers the best, although he’d be driving the governor’s limo before he’d let on. The most I ever got out of him was a grunt. The three times I’d climbed in and passed him flowers, though, he’d been speechless, which is to say he didn’t grunt. So old George did have a soft spot.
He shook the can again. “Peanuts?”
“I only cleaned two guest rooms, George. And unfortunately for you, I didn’t find a pot of gold in either.” I rubbed my temples. I needed a drink.
“You spent all day cleaning two rooms?” He waited until there wasn’t a car within five miles of us in either direction before pulling out onto Beach Boulevard. “Must have been some big rooms.”
I didn’t have the energy.
“And is that the new maid’s get-up?”
I didn’t owe George a wardrobe explanation.
“You don’t strike me as the kind who’d take the time to be good at that sort of thing.”
Was George baiting me?
“I probably would have let you go two weeks ago.”
I shot up in the seat, my energy miraculously returned. “I didn’t get fired, George. I’ll have you know I stared at a computer screen all day.”
George made a noise he was so good at, I think he invented it. It said, uh-huh, sure you did, in just one guttural syllable.
I came this close to bailing out of a moving vehicle, because breaking a leg or two would have been the best part of my day.
Three blocks later he asked, “What’d you find?”
“I’m not speaking to you again, George. Ever, ever.”
“Fine.”
“Nothing,” I caved. “Nothing.”
Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) Page 5