“I wonder.” I stretched. “If the machines she sends these players to are machines her husband has worked on right before.”
Teeth’s face scrunched up.
“And the money she’s giving these clients isn’t currency, it’s tickets he’s taken out of the machines when he’s working on them.”
Teeth’s beady eyes narrowed to slits and he didn’t seem to be breathing. I knew this because the man is a mouth breather. Who complains about chewing noises.
“And the player,” I babbled on with my theory, “goes to that machine with the ticket, because it puts it back in the right place. And when they eventually win they have to give her a nice cut.”
He stared at me as if I’d just said the Earth was flat.
“Get it?” I asked. “She’s not giving them money, she’s giving them tickets.”
His nostrils flared.
“Or,” I tried to backstroke quickly. Obviously I was way off.
“That’s exactly it.”
He slammed a fist.
I jumped a mile.
“The tickets Beth Dunn gives the players are lifted,” Teeth said. “The tickets they give back to her,” he shook the envelope containing the evidence, “are legit. She can go cash them out.”
We enjoyed a stunned silence. I don’t know who was more stunned, me or Teeth.
“That’s exactly what they’re doing.” He stood. He walked a circle. He pulled a straight chair up and straddled it, interrogation style. He was in my face. “What team are you playing for?”
I stared into Teeth’s eyes, and found nothing there.
He didn’t intend to move until I gave him an answer.
“Are you asking me if I’m a lesbian?”
He jumped up and the chair went down. “I don’t care if you’re a lesbian.”
He picked the chair up, holding it midair, and I thought he was about to throw it at me. Instead, he righted it and sat back down. In a lower voice he said, “I’m asking you if you’re a criminal, because you think like one. All. The. Time.”
* * *
I’d taken to wearing Bradley Cole’s clothes. All. The. Time.
I climbed into his bed at two that morning wearing his green V-neck cotton sweater that came to my knees.
Did I think like a criminal? And was that a good thing, or a bad thing? Certainly, some (okay, all) of my post-divorce antics fell under the category of outside the letter of the law. But those were special circumstances, and let’s not go there. The crazy thing was, and I couldn’t possibly have known it then, my next assignment at the Bellissimo would be the one that would lead to a mug shot of my very own.
The question as to whether or not I had criminal tendencies, or just how far I was willing to go, would soon be answered.
TWELVE
Over the weekend, while I made myself more comfortable in Bradley Cole’s condo, if that were even possible now that I was using his razor to shave my legs, Teeth and No Hair went to the movies, watching surveillance feed of Hank Dunn tinkering with slot machines.
Four out of five times the problem was a paper jam in the internal printer that produced the cashout tickets. He fiddled until the paper was free, printed a test ticket, sometimes two, sometimes ten. Next he’d scribble in a notebook housed inside the machine door, look at his watch, jot down the time, lock down the machine, then feed the test tickets back in. Teeth and No Hair backed up the tape, counted the test tickets he’d printed, then counted the test tickets he fed back into the machine. The count was off by one or two tickets almost every time.
We met in Mr. Sander’s office on Monday. Teeth, No Hair, and I sat in chairs in front of his desk, Natalie in a chair beside and slightly behind Mr. Sanders. She had a pad of paper in her lap, a pen in one hand, and the coffee cup that went everywhere with her in the other. Teeth and No Hair just sat there taking up loads of space and sucking up all the oxygen. They both had such big feet it was hard not to stare. Did either of them fit in a normal bed? Car? Swimming pool?
“The test tickets are supposed to be zero value,” Teeth said, “but he can override that and print them for any amount without altering the machine’s count.” Teeth was decked out in slate gray today.
“And the cash boxes are only audited on Tuesday and Friday,” No Hair added. He was wearing a fruit salad tie: mandarin oranges, green apples, cherries, and kiwis. “If the test tickets are all back before the audit, no one’s the wiser, because as we all know, it’s an automated count. The audit’s only going to flag a missing ticket, not a late one.”
I kept my mouth shut, too busy staring at Richard Sanders to add to the conversation. In the short amount of time I’d spent in the same room with him, I’d decided his hair was his best feature, unlike Bradley Cole, who’s each and every feature was his best.
Richard Sanders, however, had great man-hair. It was so much longer than you’d expect; it was the length of a sexy construction worker’s hair. He could have pulled it into a ponytail. It was shiny, blond, and spilled over his collar in loose corkscrew curls.
“Davis?” Natalie asked. “Are you still with us?”
Everyone was looking at me.
“Sorry.”
Great Hair cleared his throat. “How much money are we talking about?”
“He printed more than fifty for last week,” Teeth said. “But we can only see where they disbursed sixteen of it.”
They were talking dollars; I didn’t have to ask. I was catching on to this casino business.
“Okay,” Mr. Sanders said, “so we can’t account for the balance?”
“We have no clue where all those tickets went,” No Hair said.
“Maybe,” the boss said, “they’re feeding what they don’t use back into the machines themselves.”
I piped up, so everyone would know I was paying attention. “What are the chances she’s selling them for cash, for less than their printed value?”
There was a dead silence while everyone else’s jaws dropped open.
“What?” My hand flew to my chest. Had I said something stupid again?
“See?” Teeth asked the others. “You see what I’m saying?”
There was some coughing, some shifting in some seats, and some uncomfortable silence.
“We’re going to need to catch them in the act,” the boss said. “And let’s make it section ten.”
They all turned to me again. “What?” My heart was pounding. “Is this about the vacuum cleaner?”
Natalie pressed her lips together and looked away.
“Give us a minute,” Mr. Sanders said.
We all stood.
“Not you, Davis. Keep your seat.”
Oh, dear.
“Close the door, Natalie.”
Oh, double dear.
* * *
We sat there smiling at each other for the next several hours, me, nervously, him, too cool for school. Between us, a dish full of cinnamon candy.
“How’s it going, Davis?”
“Fine, Mr. Sanders.”
“Is the new job working out for you?”
“Yes, sir. I really like it here.”
“You’re doing great. We’re very pleased.”
“I saw your wife.” (A police trick. Deflect.)
In a blink, every muscle in his face did the opposite of what it had been doing. I’d seen the same expression on his face before, the day I met him, when he realized I looked like her. He was equally shocked today to learn that I knew. He rolled his wedding band around his finger at warp speed, then said, “Tit for tat. We need to talk about your ex-husband, Mr. Crawford.”
I’m pretty sure I passed out, because I’ve never heard anyone refer to Eddie Crawford as mister.
* * *
Somewhere in the Bible, it says don’t leave your money to your children; leave it to your grandchildren, which is what Papa Way did when I was four years old. It wasn’t all that much money by today’s standards—thirty-two thousand each—but after sitting in an i
nvestment trust through the dot-com bubble, Meredith and I had some buck on our hands when the estate attorney from Montgomery let us at it. It came in handy for her, because she had single-parenthood in her future; at the time, though, she used the bulk of her inheritance to open her shop, The Front Porch.
It came in handy for Eddie Crawford, too, because he stole almost every penny of mine.
The first thing I did after seven years of college and moving back home was to turn around and leave again for more education. My Basic Training was two hours away, and lasted from January until April, giving the residents of Pine Apple—namely my mother, along with Mel, Bea, and Eddie Crawford—plenty of time to get used to the idea of me being home.
I was twenty-three years old the first time I wore an officer’s uniform, and the first time I ran into my ex-husband Eddie was my second day on the job, when I picked up him and his sidekick, Jug, for drinking and driving. While they were certainly drinking, they weren’t driving so much as they were parked against the double doors of the Piggly Wiggly, our only grocery store, trapping four very angry people inside. They learned after the first twenty times they’d tried this trick that if they didn’t block the back before blocking the front, the hostages were immediately free. By the time I was on the job, they’d honed it. I’d already been warned this was a bi-weekly occurrence, and that Daddy never actually booked them.
“They don’t mean any harm,” Daddy said. “It’s Jug’s way of flirting with Danielle.”
Danielle Sparks was a girl I’d gone to school with all my life, and she was a cashier at the Pig. Jug had been after her since second grade. I’d butted heads with her since first.
I had the two idiots in the back of my patrol car and called my boss. “What do I do with them now, Daddy?”
“First move the car away from the door and let everyone out.”
“I did that.”
“Take them to the station, lock them up, and I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Do you want me to stay with them?”
“I’ll come down, Sugar.”
Was this really happening? “No, Daddy, go back to bed. I’ll stay.”
“They know where their pillows are. Call me if you need me.”
It was Mayberry, and I was Barney Fife. They were Otis and Otis.
Jug had a lot of harsh words for me during the entire process, while Eddie didn’t/wouldn’t make eye contact, much less speak. I nodded off to Jug’s drunken diatribe, me at the desk, them behind bars, and jolted awake to find Eddie Crawford’s laser gawk locked on me. Oh, boy.
“Damn, you’re pretty, Davis.”
He was, too, but I wasn’t about to say it.
“Who was that baby’s daddy?”
It became a very boring routine, spending the night in my father’s chair with them sleeping it off fifty yards away behind bars. The most I can say is that Eddie and I finally found some middle ground.
“Eddie,” I told him one swelteringly hot night, “you’re just bored. Why don’t you find something to do with yourself?”
“I work.”
“You go to the diner at eleven, slap out ten plates of meatloaf, and you’re gone by noon,” I said. “That’s not work.”
Eddie stared at me and sucked something out of his front teeth. “Easy for you to say, Miss Money Bags College.”
“I will not have this fight with you, Eddie.”
“You know, Davis.” Jug had sobered. A little. “If you’ll let me out of here for ten minutes, I’ll fix the air.”
Everyone knows that air conditioning compressors only break in July, and it was the tenth of. Daddy had put a call in to a repairman in Montgomery who said he’d try to get to us the next week. I was pretty sure I’d die of a heat stroke before then. I wasn’t worried about my prisoners.
“You will not, Jug, and I’m not about to let you out until daylight. You’ll just go wake up everyone at Danielle’s. Her daddy’s going to come after you with a shotgun if you don’t leave them alone.”
“Let him get the air on,” Eddie said, fanning himself with the shirt he’d stripped out of. “He can fix anything.”
“If that’s true, then why don’t you have a job, Jug?”
Just then, the oscillating fan on my desk popped, sparked, sizzled, then died. What would push the hot air around now? I did let Jug out. And I’ll be damned if he didn’t fix the air.
“Just needs rewiring,” he said over his shoulder.
“Is that all?” I asked.
Six months later, I became the financial backer for their new business, E & J Electric. Eddie and Jug stopped drinking 40s for breakfast. They went to community college. They got licensed. They joined the IBEW. Jug bought a razor and learned to use it.
Things continued down a prolific path for the former troublemakers, with them staying clear of the back seat of my patrol car. The day the two local boys proved that they really could be productive was the day they finished laying underground lines throughout all four miles of Pine Apple, and we joined the twenty-first century with cable television and wireless Internet. It was the biggest thing that ever happened in Pine Apple, and it would seem the hometown boys had finished their metamorphosis from Neanderthal to civilized. By that time, I was settling into life in Pine Apple again.
One devastatingly lonely night, I settled into a bottle José Cuervo. A very large bottle. The next thing I knew, Eddie Crawford showed up and my Seven jeans went missing, at which point (have to give him this and only this) Eddie and I found some very common ground. For all he wasn’t, there was one thing he was. And just that one. It took him awhile to convince me to marry him again, because I knew in my heart that he didn’t want to be married to me any more than I wanted to be married to him. I had the nagging suspicion he simply wanted revenge for the first go-around. But you know what they say: Revenge is a dish best served by a really good looking man. So I married him again. We were twenty-five years old. Then a hurricane hit.
* * *
My landlord, Bradley Cole, for all he was, wasn’t much of a cook. The kitchen was stocked with these things: salt, mustard, two cans of Little Nibbler dog food (hadn’t seen a Little Nibbler around), and wine, wine, lots of wine. I was living on delivery pizza and wine, wine, lots of wine.
So after that lovely chat with Mr. Sanders, in which I was forced to say Eddie’s name aloud several times, I was determined to go to the grocery store and buy some comfort food, but not until after I made my daily perimeter of the building looking for my driver, George.
I knew they knew. They knew I knew they knew. Knowing they knew, and them knowing I knew they knew, was quite another matter. At least I didn’t have to worry about being fired if they found out, since they already knew.
I knew they knew. Dammit.
Note to self: Get in front of your scrubbed record when applying for a job because they already know.
Richard Sanders was neutral about the whole thing; he didn’t pass judgment.
I didn’t deny anything, apologize, or make excuses. I panicked, certainly, but held my own.
He actually gave me a compliment: “You’re talented with a computer, Davis,” he said, “and I wouldn’t want to cross you.”
“There’s no love lost, Mr. Sanders, I need you to know that. I’m not here to win him back.”
He rolled his wedding ring around, not saying anything.
“And I’m not here to settle a score on your time.”
Roll, roll, roll, the wedding ring.
“The thing is, he’s going to recognize me.”
“No, he won’t,” Richard Sanders said. “He’ll see my wife.”
How did Eddie the Ass know what his wife looked like?
“I’m going to look at my calendar, Davis, and see when we might be able to talk about this more.”
This what more? Hopefully his wife. I’d done all the talking about Eddie Crawford I cared to.
* * *
Natalie was pouring over a gargantuan stack of repo
rts as if it were nine in the morning instead of nine in the evening. If his lights were on, hers were, too. I watched a look of relief cross her face as I staggered from Mr. Sanders’ space to hers, probably because the door was the way she wanted it. Open.
“Got a minute?” I asked her.
“I always have a minute for you, Davis.”
I found a chair and collapsed into it. “The cat’s out of the bag.”
She half smiled, half shrugged, the two halves making a whole expression of understanding my plight. “It’s okay,” she said. “We all have skeletons.”
“It’s hard to explain marrying the same idiot twice.”
“You don’t owe anyone an explanation.”
“Tell that to my mother.”
I looked to the open door that led to Mr. Sanders, who was on the phone. “Am I going to lose my job?” My ninety days weren’t up. I hadn’t made enough of a Visa dent. And now I had a big, fat condo lease.
“No!” Silly! “You’ve had plenty of opportunity to gun him down in the casino if that was your intent.”
I hadn’t even thought of that.
“Sometimes,” she said, “you have to let things go.”
“He stole a lot of money from me, Natalie.”
“He’s stolen a lot more here, Davis.”
And there it went, another piece of the puzzle.
* * *
I could barely hold my head up. I left the vendor parking lot (where I hid my Bug) and drove around to the VIP entrance.
He looked up. We stared at each other for a long minute. I put it in reverse, swung a half circle, and drove off.
* * *
I was up and on the road at eight thirty Friday morning to be in New Orleans, a sixty-mile drive, by eleven. Having no idea where I was going, I allowed myself plenty of extra time. Natalie had warned me: “If you’re even one minute late, just turn around and drive back.”
My destination was the Salon du Beau Monde on St. Joseph’s, for an appointment with someone named Seattle, the proprietor, and stylist to the stars.
Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) Page 11