Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper)

by Gretchen Archer

  I still had secrets to keep; otherwise, I’d end up behind bars.

  * * *

  Of the hours I’d logged on the job so far, very few had been in the casino. During my three weeks of toilet scrubbing, I’d forgotten it was even there. The casino-host office gig had been adjacent, but accessed from outside the casino. It all came flying back when I hit the red and gold carpet.

  It was nine o’clock on Wednesday evening, just the right time for a cocktail. I was Marci Dunlow from San Antonio, Texas again, but with a Bianca Casimiro Sanders makeover. Before I left Bradley’s place I did two things: I called my sister and described every detail of my outfit, and I checked the Bellissimo guest list and casino activity on the computer. No Eddie Crawford.

  Marci was dressed in black capri pencil pants, an oversized pearly cashmere sweater on top of a white silk tank, and she was prancing around in four-inch Jimmy Choos of a dark metal color. My blonde hair, cut shoulder length, was pulled back loosely. My eyes were money green.

  I wore Coco Chanel shades all the way through the casino.

  When I reached the backlit waterfall that greeted the big fish, I took the sunglasses off and dropped them into my black Fendi hobo like they were a pack of Juicy Fruit. Natalie added jewelry to the mix this time, by way of two-carat princess-cut diamond solitaire earrings, a David Yurman turquoise and platinum cuff bracelet on my right arm, and a platinum and diamond Rolex on my left.

  “It’s all about the shoes and the watch, Davis,” she told me. “If you’re wondering if someone really has money, check their shoes and watch.”

  I was checking the fancy Rolex watch. I hoped it was waterproof, because I think I was drooling on it. “These are on loan from the jewelry store downstairs,” she said. “Do not let anything happen to them.”

  I could feel all the luxury; my skin was hot beneath it. There’d never been a time in my life that I’d wanted for anything, but I had to admit that living the Fab Life gave me an entirely different attitude. Sixteen-hundred dollar shoes on my feet slowed my pace. What was the big hurry? I’d already arrived.

  I felt no less than twenty sets of unblinking eyes on me, and I didn’t know if that was simply because I’d stepped into the room or they thought I was Bianca. A young man on loan from Hollywood walked up and gave me a slight bow. “Welcome, Miss Dunlow.”

  I gave him a small sigh and an even smaller nod.

  The whale room was more of the same and less of the same: more opulence, less people, more gaming, less noise. One thing was noticeably absent: the air of desperation. Either the waterfall sucked out the anxiety I’d seen on so many gambling faces, or these people had so much money it simply didn’t matter.

  The ratio of employee to gambler in the main casino was probably one to a hundred; in here it looked to be ten tuxedoed employees per gambler. Everything in this room was cranked up a notch, or ten, and at the same time, scaled down a notch, or twenty. The waterfall, in addition to the tranquility it lent, effectively blocked the noise behind it, and this was like being on a movie set. It was decadence at its finest.

  Standing in the entrance I could see, to my right, an Asian man quietly playing blackjack, with his own entourage behind him and a Bellissimo dealer and pit boss in front of him, and I could hear someone playing a slot machine on my left. It would seem that I made three.

  “This way.” Hollywood held his arm out, and I felt him behind me as the Jimmy Choos sank into the thick carpet. Another tuxedoed man twenty yards away gave me a little bow and swept his right arm out like a ballroom dancer.

  Half of the room was devoted to slot machines, the other half, tables. The two sides were separated by a bar and sunken seating area that fell in line behind the waterfall. I passed a short row of twenty-five dollar slot machines. They led to three rows of one-hundred dollar machines and the last two rows, five-hundred dollar machines.

  “This way, Miss Dunlow,” Tuxedo Two said.

  I turned the corner and came face-to-face with four slot machines that ate five-thousand dollars per push of the button, and there they were, to the left of those: Double Whammy Deuces Wild video poker progressives. Nine of them, side by side, holding up a dark wall. A small LDC display above the three middle machines quietly announced the progressive total: $1,287,059, and climbing. These were one-hundred dollar machines. A full wager cost five hundred dollars. I saw the small logo: TGT. Total Gaming Technologies. It was the same game I had played weeks ago with the sisters, and it was exactly like the one in Bradley Cole’s small dining alcove, except these weren’t open and in a million pieces. And the stakes here were definitely higher.

  “How much would you like to start with, Miss Dunlow?” Hollywood asked quietly as a cocktail waitress wearing shoes every bit as expensive as the ones I had on passed me a huge cut-crystal stemless globe full of white wine. I had to hold it with both hands. I tipped her twenty dollars, and she accepted the tip without taking her eyes off me and without saying a word. Nor did she move a muscle.

  Hollywood cleared his throat.

  The waitress snapped to and quietly left.

  “Oh,” I said to Hollywood, “ten?”

  “Certainly.” He backed away and returned with two tickets on a small silver tray valued at five-thousand each. “Your marker balance for the evening is forty thousand.”

  I blinked okay.

  “Do you need anything else?”

  I blinked no.

  “Good luck, Miss Dunlow.” And he stepped away leaving me alone to blow ten thousand dollars.

  The wine was positively delicious, just like the shoes, and I made quick work of it. The waitress arrived with another without me asking. She leaned down to place it beside me and whispered, “Are you her sister?”

  “Whose sister?” I asked innocently.

  * * *

  I didn’t eat for four days beginning Sunday, August 28, 2005. I lived on coffee, whiskey, and very little sleep. One of those days, because my mother badgered me incessantly, I choked down three pretzels. I stayed glued to the television, then the police scanner and weather radio, then back to the television, as Hurricane Katrina sickeningly tore the holy shit out of my backyard. Eighteen hundred dead, more than one-hundred billion in destruction. Even in Pine Apple, almost two hundred miles inland, we were all but washed away, and spent more than twenty-four hours without power, wringing our hands by the glow of a lamp plugged into the generator at the station. Meredith and I slept in Eddie and Jug’s cell, Mother and Daddy on cots between the desks. My husband of less than a year and his former partner-in-crime were in their truck doing electrical things most of that time, and when he wasn’t working, Eddie was several miles away with his own parents. It was a horrifying, unimaginable, and helpless time. It got so much worse before it got any better.

  “Listen, Davis,” Eddie said on the Friday morning after the Storm, the television news in the background showing scene after scene of devastation and mayhem. “Me and Jug are going to head down there.”

  “Down where?”

  “To New Orleans.”

  I turned down the volume on the television. “Is there a humanitarian hidden somewhere in you, Eddie? Do you want to save people? Do you want to pass out bottles of water?”

  He actually scoffed at the idea. That’s what a low-life he is.

  “Why do you think?” He rose from his seat at our kitchen table and poured himself more coffee. “There’s so much work there, I’ll be able to retire off what I can make in the next six months.”

  “You can’t even get on Interstate sixty-five,” I said. “Much less fifty-nine. How do you plan to get down there? Sprout wings? And once you do, how do you plan on getting in? Land on the Super Dome?”

  He never made it to New Orleans. He got as far as Biloxi, where he signed on with Coast Electrical Contractors to get the Bellissimo back up and running. After six months, I think we both forgot we were even married. He never really came home until the summons to appear in divorce court finally caught up wit
h him years later, which was around when, some say, I began behaving badly.

  Eddie was right about one thing: there was round-the-clock work in the beginning. The problem was he blew his paychecks at the casinos as they reopened. For the next three years he had everyone believing he was still hard at it, showing up in Pine Apple for the occasional Thanksgiving or Fourth of July, only he failed to mention he was hard at draining my investment fund of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, not hard at anything that resembled work. For my part, I knew I didn’t want him back in Pine Apple, so I left well enough alone. As far as the money went, I’d never kept an eye on it, because I’d never had a reason to. The statements were delivered quarterly, electronically, and they never had anything new to say so I didn’t scroll through the seventy pages, just forwarded them to an accountant in Montgomery. I even missed it on the tax returns, with E & J Electric being set up as a C-corporation, there were three hundred pages of IRS forms to dig through, and it never occurred to me to look for the one-liner buried in there showing the taxes due on withdrawals from the investment account. After Eddie had been on the Gulf for almost three years, I accidentally downloaded and opened a statement. Out of boredom, I read it. By that time, the money was long gone.

  I had an epic fit that ended with a horrible credit rating, a welcome divorce, and my father saying to me, “Turn in your badge and your gun before someone gets killed.”

  * * *

  “Makers Mark. Make it a double. Neat.”

  I gambled in Private Gaming three nights in a row with one eye on the door and one on the game. I hadn’t stopped looking for him, but I hadn’t been listening. So on the fourth night, when I was very close to unclenching, I almost fell in the floor when I heard the biggest mistake of my life order a drink.

  He turned the corner and was no more than ten feet away from me before I could even catch my breath. He sat down at the end of the row. There were four empty chairs between us, which weren’t nearly enough. He tossed a pack of Marlboro Reds to the side of the video poker machine.

  “Thanks, darlin’,” he said to the waitress as she passed him the drink.

  “Cheers,” he finally turned my way, raised his glass, then froze mid-toast.

  I suppose I reminded him of someone.

  Here we were—Davis and Eddie—and he didn’t even recognize me. Or her. What I’d dreaded for days was over. The whole thing was like having my eyebrows waxed: waiting for it was always the worst part. Eddie Crawford couldn’t put two and two together on his best day jacked up on a massive dose of Adderall. Give him a whiff of whiskey, and he couldn’t tell you his own name. It was borderline comical. He’d obviously had a few, so he couldn’t decide if he was sitting across from his ex-wife, Bianca Sanders, or a perfect stranger.

  I closed the space between us, took the glass of whiskey out of his hand, knocked it back in one swallow, took off my right Dolce & Gabbana lace platform pump, then drove the four-inch heel through his left eyeball.

  (No, I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that to a shoe.)

  I did, however, take the opportunity to look at Eddie from behind my green contacts, as he tried to get his bearings. He knocked back the whiskey in one swallow.

  Eddie looks like the cover of a really trashy romance novel (Rake in My Garden) and—or—Zorro. That’s the way it’d always been. He was a stray who didn’t belong with the pack, or he could very well be the result of a hospital baby-swap. Mel Crawford was all gangly bones, stooped over and sunken, with a nose that took up most of his face. My former father-in-law always looked as if he’d just been dipped in a vat of boiling oil: the result of a lifetime of standing over a fryer and overserving himself Bombay Sapphire gin. His wife, Bea, who could eat no lean, had a little piggy head set atop a body that could only be replicated with jumbo beach balls, beady brown eyes set alarmingly far apart, and a mouth so small it was amazing all her trash talk escaped it. How they produced Eddie should be the Eighth Wonder of the World. And if it was a hospital faux pas, I’d sure hate to see the baby the Crawfords were supposed to take home.

  Eddie Crawford was a gorgeous man—short messy black hair, black eyes, and a five o’clock shadow ten minutes after he shaved—easily the prettiest thing to ever hail from Pine Apple, and his good looks were his downfall. He’d leaned on them so hard he hadn’t bothered to develop any other human characteristics.

  Those who hadn’t married him twice might say the good stuff came below his chiseled chin, with a dip that was almost a dimple, and while I’d love to disagree, I couldn’t. Eddie Crawford was perfectly proportioned, had a knack for making any manner of clothing look good, carried himself so elegantly you’d think symphony music was playing in his head, and was unbelievably and inexplicably ripped.

  With equal airtime, he was as dumb as a rock. It was all over the second he opened his mouth. Which he did.

  “You look like two women I know,” he said, “but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.” Then he smiled his let’s-get-naked smile.

  My heart pounding out of my chest, my face surely the color of a beet, I cut my green eyes at him, cashed out my machine, and got out of there as quickly as I could. If I acknowledged him in any way, I’d blow it all.

  This job was supposed to be solving pesky internal problems. They’d really hired me to pretend like I was the boss’s wife, get her boyfriend good and drunk, and find out how they kept filling their wallets. There had to be another way, because this way was never going to work.

  * * *

  I was still shaking when I climbed into the backseat.

  “Rough night?” George asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer. He pulled out, and we made the commute to Bradley Cole’s in silence. He parked the car, but left it running.

  “I need more stuff, George.” I passed him a slip of paper.

  He muttered something under his breath, probably because I’d demanded he go to the grocery store for me the day before and I had tampons on the list. I was working day and night, either in my pajamas pulling a slot machine apart and trying like hell to make sense of his son’s notes from years ago, or dressed up like a runway model playing a slot machine. I’d averaged three hours of sleep a night for the week. I couldn’t do it without him, and he knew it. So he could mumble all he wanted. I’d just sat five feet away from my ex-husband, whom I loathed, and I didn’t, at the moment, care.

  He pulled reading glasses from his pocket and held the paper close to the glowing dash. “What is a Simonhex?”

  “It’s computer software,” I told him. “No telling where you’ll have to go to get it. Just ask around.”

  “Is it big?”

  “It’ll be a disk, George, or a slip of paper with numbers on it. You can put it in your pocket.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It disassembles computer programs. It lets you read computer language backwards.”

  “Why do you need it?”

  “I have a hunch.”

  “When?”

  “When did I have the hunch?”

  “No,” George said. “When do you need the Simonhex?”

  “Absolutely as soon as possible.”

  “What’s your hunch?”

  “My what?”

  “Never mind.”

  The phone woke me at the ungodly hour of six the next morning. He didn’t bother with hello. “They’re telling me you buy it on the computer.”

  “I can’t. I have to load it manually.” I hung up, rolled over, and went right back to sleep.

  I was too groggy to explain to George that downloading it onto my computer, with what I intended to do with it, would nail me if this thing went sour. But I might as well have downloaded it. I could have taken out a personal ad: DAVIS WAY, OF PINE APPLE, ALABAMA, IS USING THIS SOFTWARE TO CRACK THE CODE OF A SLOT MACHINE, WHICH IS TOTALLY AGAINST THE LAW, SO COME AND GET HER.

  Because George using my debit card (that I’d forgotten I’d given him for Pop Tarts and peanut butter) was the equivalen
t of taking out an ad.

  “Watch yourself,” Mr. Sanders had said to me. “Because the Gaming Board won’t care what your intent was.”

  “I get that.” But did I? Did I really understand the significance of those words?

  “Anything that happens on this property is within my jurisdiction,” he said. “But I can’t help you or anyone else if the Gaming Board gets involved. That’s federal stuff, Davis.”

  Now I get it.

  Boy, do I get it.

  FOURTEEN

  I hacked into every account Edward Meldrick Crawford ever dreamed of having. Next I hacked into the accounts of Mel and Bea Crawford, then the Mel’s Diner accounts. I ran all three Social Security numbers forwards, backwards, up, down, and diagonally through every database known to man.

  Between the three of them, a whopping $38,575 in income was reported to the IRS last year. I ran title searches, checked mortgage applications, and ran all of their credit cards. I looked at every single deposit, withdrawal, and processed check image for the last six months. Mel and Bea bought a new washer and dryer on their MasterCard last September, wrote one substantial check—$2,100 to Earl and Daughters Construction—and financed a new two-vehicle metal carport at Lowe’s. (At 28% interest. Were they completely nuts?) (Yes.)

  In the same six-month time period, Eddie made small cash advances and swiped his debit card at department stores, salons, and restaurants. There wasn’t a single Bellissimo hotel charge, but there were multiple charges for the Lucky Tiger, a cheesy run-down excuse of a hotel-casino somewhere nearby. How cheesy? The room charges were $32.88 per night. He had one monthly direct debit: Good Body Gym in Biloxi. $49.99. (Welcome to your thirties, Eddie.) His income was intermittent, and cash, $3500 here, $3700 there, about once a month. It barely covered his living expenses. Where was homeboy getting his gambling bankroll for the Bellissimo?