We were at a red light. He twisted in his seat. “Did you have a bad day?”
I started bawling.
Teeth had yanked me out of Eddie Crawford’s hotel room by the ear, then pulled me kicking and screaming into a stairwell where he ripped me a new one. I thought he was going to bite my head off. I’d been on the receiving end of many protocol and procedure lectures before (the circumventing of), but never across from those kind of teeth. He gave no indication that I had been in the wrong room, or that there was any connection between me and that particular room, he gave me down the road in general about being in any room alone with the door locked. “Were you looking for something?” When he’d had his say, his parting words were, “Go see Natalie.”
I wasn’t about to tell Teeth or Natalie it was the collection of my ex-ex-husband’s personal effects that had prompted the breaking of all those cardinal rules (which I knew absolutely nothing about beforehand), so bracing myself for another lashing, avoiding both the guest and employee elevators (something they had bothered to make me aware of), I hoofed it to the Executive Offices. I poked my head in Natalie’s door.
“Davis,” she smiled. “Come on in. The coast is clear.” She was refilling Mr. Sanders’ cinnamon candy bowl from a ten-pound bag of the offensive stuff, the sight of which made me a little dizzy. Natalie was crisp, cool, calm, and didn’t appear to be the least bit upset with me. She offered me a cup of coffee; she didn’t offer me a cinnamon candy. “Now, Davis,” Natalie smiled. “What can I do for you?”
I scratched at the wig a little. I thought she had asked to see me for round two of Chew Davis Out. “I need a computer,” I said, “and a desk.”
“Okay,” she said. “Why don’t you step in the back and change out of your uniform.”
Gladly. If she’d suggested I step in the back and change out of my life, I’d have taken her up on that too.
After fitting me with street clothes, Natalie set me up in an empty cubicle in the print shop, located several miles under the basement of this gargantuan place. “Keep your head down,” she said. “You won’t run into anyone because the print-shop employees only work graveyard. But if for some reason you do, keep quiet.”
Aye, aye, Captain.
“And don’t ever do that again.”
She said it to my back as I was making my escape. I barely turned, one foot already out the door. “Sorry.” Hand in the cookie jar. “I won’t.”
“Is there anything else, Davis?” She tapped a pen. “Anything we need to talk about?” Her expression was as blank as a Bellissimo bed sheet.
I fell against the doorjamb for support, because with her words, a ghost had snuck up from behind and knocked my knees. Then laughed. “Not that I know of, Natalie.”
I got out of there as fast as I could.
* * *
Not many people go into police work for the money. The ones who do aren’t protecting and serving the public, they’re protecting and serving the dark side. The most I’d ever earned in my life was peanuts, and I hadn’t saved a one of them because at the time, I had a nest egg. Today, at age early-thirties, I had no nest egg, I had no roof over my head, and I’d never work directly in law enforcement again. I could get a job as a computer programmer, but I’d probably blow my brains out by the third day.
This job had shocked me stupid three times now. The whammy-whammy game had slapped me so hard I actually quit. The severe tongue-lashings, both directly and not so directly, I’d received today set me back and gave me more to chew. But both of these events and their bright red Eddie flags paled in comparison to the shock I received when I checked my bank balance.
The Bellissimo was paying me a brain surgeon astronaut’s wages.
In all the interviews, the subject of salary never came up. Not once. I never asked; they never offered. I emailed Natalie my banking information after opening a local account, and she replied that my paycheck would be directly deposited every Friday, and instead of wondering how much it would be, I consulted a calendar, counting the number of Fridays in ninety days. (My interest was more on Visa’s behalf than my own. And I owed my sister a little. My grandmother, too. My father had paid for my car, something my mother didn’t know.)
It took every dime I had to divorce that rat-bastard Eddie Crawford, immediately followed by extreme unemployment. My finances had gone from sad to tragic until I began squirreling away Bellissimo paychecks. Things were looking up in my financial department; Visa and I were both very happy about it. My ninety-day commitment was nearing the four-week mark, but they were paying me so much I caught myself thinking if I could stick it out six months, I could be debt free both inside and outside of my family. If I could hold out an additional six months, I’d have the makings of a savings account.
I looked at myself in the reflection of the elevator doors on my way to the print shop, and gave myself this advice: “Make this work, Davis.”
* * *
I was certain the same Casino Marketing person booked the four guest-victims, but ten minutes after I settled in to solve this caper, I hit a wall. Four different casino hosts were assigned to the four injured parties.
If it wasn’t a casino-host culprit, who was it?
I had no choice but to hack into the mainframe, which, let me assure you, raises your blood pressure through the roof. Years ago, out of boredom, I wrote a program that would shut a system completely down the millisecond it was compromised. The only reason I hadn’t tried to sell it to Microsoft or the iPod people was because I hadn’t had time to develop Part Two, a sprinkler-system device in the monitor that blasted the hacker with tear gas. Hack that, buddy. (The real reason I hadn’t pursued it was is because if it did fly, my hacking hobby would be over.)
Boom. Gotcha. I was in.
I examined the four guest portfolios from their inceptions. After three hours and a headache, I found nothing but typos. No one had altered anything.
It had been a long, long day. I’d been traumatized, terrified, told off, and I’d struck out. Tears were in order.
George waited patiently until I stopped leaking. “What were you looking for?”
We were stuck at a railroad crossing while an endless succession of gang-graffitied railcars rolled by, so I let my head fall back and closed my eyes. “I’m looking into this casino host business, how it works.”
“Nothing to it.”
“How’s that, George?” My head snapped up. “What? Are you a casino expert now? I haven’t seen you in there yucking it up with the casino hosts.”
“Don’t mean I don’t know about it.” He turned and made the rare eye contact again, but I didn’t cry this time.
“I’m listening.” I crossed my arms.
“It’s a sweet gig.”
“In what way?”
“It’s the easiest job in the building.”
“That couldn’t be true,” I said. “It looks to me like they take care of the whims and fancies of a thousand people each.” Clicking on the client-list link of a casino host’s profile, a Rhode Island roster ensues. Page after page, thousands of guests, are assigned to each of the fourteen hosts.
“They have people to do all of their grunt work,” he said. “They spend their time in the restaurants and out on the golf course.”
Thirty minutes later, ignoring my next-door neighbors’ headboard trying to beat its way into my room again, nose to computer screen, I had my mark: Miss Heidi Dupree, Executive Assistant to the casino hosts. She was one of eight executive assistants, but hers were the only administrative initials on the portfolios, a zillion computer screens back, for the four rooms that had been pilfered. I recognized her from her employee profile, too; I’d seen her stepping into a guest room carrying a bucket of flowers.
* * *
The next day, I cleaned seventeen guest rooms. Three were barely touched, only one corner of the bed turned back, and a single pillow had a head dent. I’d learned quickly that not all the guests were there for the glorious guest roo
ms, extra glorious to me now that I knew EconoLodge squalor. A good portion of Bellissimo guests checked in, threw their bags inside the door and hit the casino, never to return.
I’d had one room for three consecutive days, nineteen thirty-seven, whose occupant had yet to get near the bathroom sink, tub, shower, or, for all I could tell, their suitcase. Down the hall, I had adjoining rooms that made up for that one; the occupants and the preschool they brought with them had moved in. Stuffed animals, gummy worms, hills and mountains of discarded clothing, bowl after bowl of liquefied ice cream, tubs used as toy storage, and half-full juice boxes everywhere. In another room, it had rained shiny black condom wrappers, and in yet another guest room, the ravenous occupants had ordered one of everything on the room service menu, taking a single bite out of each dish, leaving all the uneaten food and enough tableware to set a table for ten for me to deal with. The room safes today, like almost every day, hadn’t been touched. The best part? Eddie Crawford had checked out of his room. A guy named Millard Martin had checked in it. I had no beef with Millard.
My coworkers didn’t take lunch breaks so much as they took extended smoke breaks. As the clock inched toward noon, and I said job-well-done to myself about guest room nineteen-thirteen, Santiago, my work buddy, exiting nineteen-fourteen and in the throes of severe nicotine withdrawal, asked, “We lunch?”
“Sure.” I couldn’t see him through the king-sized bed roll of laundry I was hefting. I tipped it into my bin. The muffled music of broken glass filled the space between us. It sounded like I’d dropped a chandelier.
“Oh!” Santiago’s eyes were saucers.
We both cut our eyes up and down the hall, and seeing no one, I shrugged. Santiago shrugged. Whatever I’d just rolled up in the dirty sheets was now Coast Laundry Services’ problem.
I had the small break room behind our supply room all to myself; everyone else had made their way to the employee smoking patio on the sixth floor.
I dialed the Casino Host’s office extension. “Heidi Dupree, please.” I studied my ravaged cuticles and listened for the door. I remembered that I forgot to look under beds all morning. No telling what I’d missed.
“Casino Marketing,” a soft voice said. “This is Heidi.”
She didn’t sound like a safe cracker.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m in housekeeping and one of the guests is complaining they didn’t get a fruit basket.”
“Who is this?”
“Housekeeping.”
“We order the amenities,” she said, soft voice gone. “Room service fills the orders. Call them.” And she hung up on me.
* * *
“I need a hardware store, George.” I dropped the day’s treasures over the seat: two paperback books, a three-pack of disposable razors, and four Snickers bars, one smashed flat.
“No, you don’t.”
I reached over the seat, took the loot back, lowered the window, and tossed it to the traffic.
(No, I didn’t).
“What makes you think you know what I need and what I don’t?” I demanded.
“I just do. Because you can’t get in those safes with a tool.”
My jaw unhinged. How in the world did George know what I was doing?
“Those are S700 Protectaguards,” he went on, “and you can’t hack in. You’ve got to use the code or the electronic pass key. That’s the only way. Whoever you’re looking for has the code or the passkey.”
“I’ll tell you what, George. You take me to a hardware store and we’ll talk about it some other time.” This guy could get on my last nerve. More than that, he was just about to scare me.
“It’s your money.”
Soon enough he was backing into the loneliest parking space Center City Hardware offered.
“George,” I whined, “come on. It’s raining. It’s raining ice. Let me off at the door.”
He ripped into one of the candy bars. “If you’re going to waste your time and mine, you can waste some of it walking.”
I could reach up and smack the back of his head so easily.
“And don’t get a jackhammer,” he said through chocolate. “If you’re going to get something, get a multi-tool, like a Gerber.”
Gibberish. “What?”
He swallowed and caught my eye in the mirror. “You think you’re going to break into the safe, right?”
I blinked.
“Don’t think they’re going to let you lug a power tool into a hotel room. Get a multi-tool, like a Swiss Army knife, that you can slip in your pocket. But it won’t work. All you’re going to do is tear the thing up.”
I had one angry foot out in the rain, and I quickly pulled it back in. “How do you know that, George? How do you know any of this?”
He shrugged one shoulder.
I got out, slammed the door as hard as I could, and ran through the biting rain.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, we pulled up to the entrance of the Silver Moon Resort and Casino, a shrunken Bellissimo, and the only other show in town that bragged on their website about the foolproof S700 Protectaguards. A bellman craned his neck our way. George waved him off, because he didn’t need any help with his bags. “Are you going to get out or are you going to sit in my car all night?”
My new goal in life was to slam the car door so hard that it fell off. Of course, if I were successful, it would probably land on me.
The bed begged me to get in, the thick white comforter screaming, “I’m soft! And I smell good!” and I complied, for two dreamless hours I don’t remember a second of. The rest of the time I tried to break into the S700 Protectaguard safe with no luck whatsoever. None of the ninety-three tools that jutted out from the eight-pound thing I’d purchased at the hardware store, including the two-tine fork, fazed the safe. The only thing I managed to do was scratch the hell out of it and ruin most of the appendages on the tool.
“So?” George asked the next morning.
“I’m late, George. Get going.”
The next night, I dialed the hotel operator after an hour-long blistering shower. “My safe won’t open.” She transferred me to the security office.
“Have you forgotten your code?” a man asked.
“No,” I lied. “It just won’t open. It’s stuck.”
“What’s in it? You might have jammed the door.”
At which point my mind began racing. The safe was empty. I had a little more than forty dollars in cash, which wouldn’t impress them much.
“We’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said.
I looked across the room to my purse. My wedding rings were somewhere in the bottom keeping company with lint, year-old peppermints, and loose change.
EIGHT
There’s a framed photograph of my first birthday celebration at my parents’ house, on the shelf of a bookcase in the upstairs hallway, right outside of Meredith’s old room. In it, I’m barely balanced on roly-poly legs in the middle of the dining room table at ground zero of a cake and frosting explosion. It looked like fun, and I wish I could climb on a table and eat birthday cake with both hands again, although I wouldn’t smear it in my hair this time. On one side of me are my parents, my father beaming, my mother glazed over. On the other side is my mother’s childhood friend, Bea Crawford, her eighteen-month old son Eddie in her lap. So I never actually met Eddie, he just always was. Eventually he became, out of small-town boredom, my boyfriend, and I was sort of dating him when it was announced I was pregnant (again, out of small-town boredom) at the ripe old age of sixteen. It was my mother, the keeper of the inventory of feminine hygiene products, who broke the news to our family at breakfast one morning, and none too gently. I was as stunned and slack-jawed as my father and sister were. In retort, I threw up everywhere, providing my mother with the proof she sought.
“See?” my mother demanded.
No one wanted to see.
“I knew it,” she spat.
My mother was thrilled at this new development—her being th
e goose to my gander—insisting all our lives that her four years of higher education were a complete waste of time and money (cutting her eyes at me) and Meredith and I might as well skip it and go straight to the real deal: dirty diapers, pot roasts, and ironing boards.
Mother wasted no time telling Eddie’s parents, turning their breakfast into a celebration. His dad probably wrestled him into a bear hug and gave him noogies. “Way to go, son!” Mel and Bea Crawford were beside themselves with glee, because we were as close to royalty as it got in Pine Apple. They envisioned a future of no parking tickets, the end of those annoying restaurant report card failures, and they probably thought sharing a grandchild with the Chief of Police/Mayor of Pine Apple would make them exempt from federal taxes, too.
Why, after all these years and heartache for everyone involved, I still lugged around my wedding rings was anyone’s guess. They weren’t worth hocking should I need the cash, the combined weight of the diamond chips maybe totaling an eighth of a carat. They had no history; it’s not like they were Crawford Estate jewels retrieved from a vault hidden behind an oily portrait of great granddaddy. They weren’t even pretty; they had been on clearance at Sears, the rock of the Westside Mall in Montgomery.
There were two reasons I kept them handy: they reminded me of what could happen if you lived a big, fat lie, and they were proof that no matter how hard you tried, some points weren’t worth making. There was a distant third reason; I secretly longed for the opportunity to give them back to Eddie in a fashion that would require subsequent surgical removal from his person. With long, pointy tongs. And no anesthesia.
They sounded like two pennies going into the safe as the knock came on the door.
“Security,” I heard.
I closed the safe door, pressed in the code I’d assigned the night before, pushed the star button to lock it, tied my robe tighter, and let the crew in.
Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) Page 6