I called my husband. “Bradley. Holder Darby’s gone. Poof. Absolutely gone.”
“Davis, get back here,” he said. “The vault has been robbed.”
Two
Cats don’t like cars.
And I never knew cats were so vocal. Or that they moved at the speed of light. I drive a black Volkswagen Bug, and the cat, when it wasn’t hanging upside down from the headliner by its claws, hurled itself face first at the passenger window, which could be why it’s face is so flat.
“The window is closed, cat. You can’t get out.”
I didn’t grow up with pets, cats or dogs, but I thought they loved riding in cars, sticking their heads out the window. The longest eight-mile drive of my life from Holder Darby’s to the Bellissimo, and never again.
Fantasy answered on the first ring. “Are you murdering someone?”
“I’m trying to get a cat in my spy bag.”
Dead silence.
“Fantasy, can you come in to work?”
“It’s my day off, Davis,” she said. “I’m catching up on my stories.”
“Just an hour. I promise.” Where’d that cat go? This isn’t a big car. “And would you stop by Cats R Us on the way in?”
“For what?”
“A cat care package. A cat starter kit. I don’t know. Ask the cat people what cats need and bring one of each. But no mice.”
Kneeling on the hot pavement, I lured the cat out from under the passenger seat with a red Gummy Bear I found in the floorboard. It finally slinked out, then launched itself through the air, landing on and latching into my head. I tried to peel it off—dancing, gushing blood, shrieking—which only encouraged the cat to sink its claws in deeper. After five minutes of going round and round with the cat on my head in the vendor parking lot, behind the Bellissimo, on a blazing hot Sunday, love bugs everywhere, I got a grip. I stopped fighting the cat and stood there, catching my breath. As soon as I calmed down, so did the cat. I reached up and patted it; I spoke in very soothing tones. “Good kitty. Get off my head, you psycho kitty.”
To reward it for letting go of my scalp I gave it the Gummy Bear, which immediately glued its front teeth together, quieting it down and keeping it busy.
Shopping list: Gummy Bears.
Hiding behind sunglasses the size of Frisbees, I entered the building. I had the hair of someone who’d been electrocuted, a few scratches, and a cat tucked under my arm. The cat whipped its absurdly large tail back and forth and slung its head around trying to lose the Gummy. We caught an elevator.
A lady asked, “Is your cat having a seizure?”
The cat, offended, convulsed—its rounded spine digging into my side, and spit at the woman, the red Gummy Bear dangling from one of its dagger teeth.
Good kitty.
I walked in my front door and dropped my Super Spy bag and the cat on the floor. The cat shot off for who knows where. Bradley Cole said, “Oh, my God. Davis.”
* * *
“We have a visitor.”
I nodded.
Bradley gets a look on his face when he wants to tell me something but doesn’t quite know how. He got it now.
“What?”
“Maybe?” He put his hands on both sides of my head and patted about my ears, trying to tame my mass of red hair. I held up a finger, ran down the hall, looked in the mirror, fainted (no, I didn’t), lassoed my hair into a ponytail, dabbed at the blood, then joined him in the foyer.
“Where’d the cat go?” I asked.
“I don’t even care.” He took me by the elbow, led me through, then introduced me to Griffin Chase.
What had been a pleasantly boring summer for me officially ended on this swamp hot Sunday in late July, the same day I woke up with frosting in my hair, took ten lobster calls, and discovered Holder Darby left home in a hurry without her cat. While I’d been busy with all that, the Independent Bankers of Alabama had been pouring into the Bellissimo, five hundred strong, including spouses, sponsors, and vendors. The vendor sponsoring the conference was Paragon Protection, a company that provided security products and services, and the bankers were here courtesy of them. Not only was Paragon paying for the bankers to be here, they held a top spot on our Valued Business Partner list. We’ve done business with them since forever. In fact, they built and installed the Bellissimo vault. This week, in conjunction with the conference, Paragon Protection was scheduled to inspect and conduct any needed repairs to the Bellissimo vault—a chore my husband had been working on for weeks. Paragon built the vault in 1995, installed it in 1996, and came back once a year to make sure everything was A-OK. It was a no-brainer to conduct the annual inspection in conjunction with the conference. For obvious reasons, vault operations needed to be kept hush-hush, and this year’s inspection could be conducted discreetly, flying under the radar and cover of the convention. Timing is everything.
The process began with a physical inventory this morning, conducted by Griffin Chase, of Hammond Stevenson Morris & Chase, the Bellissimo’s outside accounting firm that audits all things gaming. And it was Griffin Chase, managing partner at the firm, who broke the bad inventory news. Missing from the vault: four million dollars in platinum coins. Present in the vault: four million dollars in fake platinum coins.
“Who has access to your vault, Brad? Do you know who could have done this?”
I did. I knew exactly who could have done this.
“You’re sitting on more counterfeit coins than I’ve ever seen or heard of in one place. And excellent replicas,” he said, “amazingly realistic in quality, color, weight, and design. Do you have any idea where they came from?”
I certainly did. I knew exactly where they came from.
“Do you know who might be responsible?”
Yes, I did. You bet I did. I knew exactly who was responsible.
“Do you want me to contact the Treasury Department?”
“No,” my husband said. “We’ll handle it.”
We locked the door behind him, then took shaky steps to the only seating in our foyer, an Igloo cooler the size of a steamer trunk.
“We’re not moving home in two weeks, are we, Bradley?”
We met almost three years ago when I first moved to Biloxi. Two years later, on our wedding day, he accepted the casino manager position at the Bellissimo and we moved here. That was nine months ago.
He pulled me in. I buried there. “Probably not.”
“Maybe we’ll be one of those happy childless couples.”
I could feel his chin on my head. “We’re going to have ten babies.”
Let’s not go overboard.
“What’s up with the cat, Davis?”
I looked at my hands. Scratched all to hell. No telling where the cat was.
“The cat story is a long one.”
I felt him nod. “Maybe later.”
(Later.) “Bradley?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t really know what platinum is.”
“Yes, you do.” He reached for my left hand. “Your wedding band is platinum. It’s a precious metal. The missing platinum was minted into commemorative Bellissimo coins. Like gold or silver coins, but these are made of platinum.”
“Why would the Bellissimo have so much platinum?”
“Just an asset, Davis,” he said, “part of our portfolio. The vault has gold and silver too.”
“For a rainy day?” I asked.
“For a rainy day.”
He traced a deep scratch across the back of my hand.
“Four million dollars is how many coins?” I asked. “Bigger than a breadbox?”
Bradley stretched his legs until his shoes ran into a cast iron tub large enough to swim laps in. “Platinum is like pork bellies, traded on the stock market. And t
he value fluctuates. An ounce of platinum is worth anywhere from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars, depending on the market.” His shoes tapped the iron tub. “Any way you look at it, four million dollars is two thousand coins or better.”
“Like dimes?” I asked. Because two thousand dimes seemed stealable. I remembered a story in the news years ago, when a trucker hijacked her own eighteen-wheeler full of dimes. She went to Vegas and hit the Strip with a Dooney & Bourke bucket bag full of dimes. She parked herself between two ten-cent slot machines and went to town. When she ran out of dimes, she went back to the dime stash in her hotel room and loaded up her Dooney & Bourke again. Busted before the day was out. No one has that many dimes.
“Much larger than dimes,” Bradley said. “They’re measured on the Troy scale, Davis, and they’re the size of silver dollars, but heavier.”
How does he know all this? How do I not know all this? Who is Troy?
“So the platinum didn’t walk out of the vault.” I have a beautiful collection of purses—Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and a Chanel—and not a one of them could hold two thousand coins.
“No,” he said. “It didn’t.”
Mr. & Mrs. Bradley Cole, sitting on an Igloo cooler in the foyer of their home, quietly considered the ramifications of a vault breach. And in that contemplative moment I realized this heist, regardless of where it started or how it ended, wasn’t so much the missing platinum or even the value of the missing platinum—let’s face it, four million bucks in the broad spectrum of casino economies wasn’t all that much money—as it was that the platinum was discovered missing on Bradley’s watch.
“Have you told Mr. Sanders?”
“I just got off the phone with him.”
“Who did this, Bradley?” I held my breath while waiting on his answer.
“Me.” He threw his hands in the air. “Richard and I are the only ones with vault access,” he said, “and he’s not here.”
Wrong answer.
“Start at the beginning,” I said. “When’s the last time you knew the platinum was in the vault?”
“I’m not sure I ever knew it was there. I’ve been in the vault exactly twice. A walkthrough when I took this job and an inventory six months ago. Both times with Richard. We opened the bins, we looked, they were full of platinum. It didn’t occur to either of us to authenticate it. We were there to count it.”
“So the platinum could have been fake six months ago.”
“Davis, the platinum had to be fake six months ago. I haven’t been in the vault, I haven’t accompanied anyone into the vault, and I haven’t authorized anyone for vault entry.”
Our eyes locked. I thought about what our futures held if we didn’t find the platinum. (Unemployment.) (Indictments.) (Incarceration.)
The front doors burst open and Fantasy filled them with huge shopping bags in both hands. Baylor was behind her holding a carpeted cat playground. “Where’s the cat?” she asked. “What happened to your face?”
* * *
We settled around our coffee table, an actual headstone on iron legs. It said, Hypolite Bizoton De La Motte—1893 – 1959—HE MET WITH DEATH.
Baylor, the muscly member of our team, who looks, lives, and loves like the lead singer in a boy band, went all over looking for the cat. No cat. “Did you scare the cat?”
“No! Why would I do that?”
“It isn’t hiding from you because you were nice to it, Davis.”
“Maybe it’s hiding from you, Baylor.”
“You need to get another cat,” he said. “You can’t have just one.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bradley’s jaw working, clenching, unclenching. “I don’t even want one cat.”
“It has to have a friend to play with or it will drive you crazy.”
“I tell you what,” I said. “You take the cat and get it a friend to play with.”
“I can’t,” he said. “No pets in my building.”
“They let you in,” Fantasy said.
Bradley shot up from his seat, a black velvet Baroque throne thing trimmed in flaky gold, and said, “Not one more word about the cat.”
The subject had been Holder Darby. Specifically, Holder Darby’s sudden disappearance. We’d gotten sidetracked talking cat. Earlier, while Bradley and I had been waiting for Fantasy and Baylor to (cat shop) arrive, I’d nosed into Holder’s personnel file finding nothing out of the ordinary and only one item of interest; she was from a teeny Alabama town, Horn Hill. I called her in-case-of-emergency contact, her sister, Helen Baldwin, who lived one town over in Gulfport.
“Miss Baldwin, I’m with Animal Control in Biloxi, and we’re trying to locate your sister, Holder.”
“Yeah?” Helen might be Holder’s brother. His/her voice was deep, thick with testosterone. “Me too,” Lady Man said. “I’ve been calling her since Friday. I think she’s really busy at work and her cell phone’s dead.”
Lady Man, she isn’t busy at work and she might be dead.
“Why is Animal Control looking for her?” Lady Man asked.
“We have her cat.”
“She doesn’t have a cat.”
“Excuse me?”
“No cat. Holder doesn’t have a cat. She’s never had a cat.”
“Are you sure?” Did I bring Tasmanian Cat to my home for no good reason? “Big yellow cat with a smashed-in face? I think its Holder’s cat.”
“Look,” Lady Man said. “Holder doesn’t have a cat. Period. I’ve talked to her every other day of my life and have had lunch with her every Tuesday since we were in our twenties. Holder doesn’t have a cat. No cat.”
All the cat talk had derailed us. Bradley was anxious to stop talking about the cat and start talking about the vault. Specifically, someone replacing real platinum coins with fake platinum coins. We’d gotten sidetracked on that one too. Baylor had a quarter collection, one from each of the fifty states.
“It’s one of those things I want to throw away and can’t,” Baylor said. “I mean it’s like four hundred dollars in quarters.”
“It is not, Baylor.” Fantasy broke the bad news. “It’s like twelve dollars in quarters.”
Baylor, who’s big and burly and in his mid-twenties, has dark curly hair, smooth olive skin, black bedroom eyes and a little dimple in his chin becoming more pronounced with each of his birthdays, makes a pouty face when women turn him down or when he learns the quarter collection he’s been dragging around since high school isn’t all that valuable. Women rarely turn him down, so we don’t see the pouty face too often, he wasn’t very practiced at it, and he looked all of sixteen when he made it.
Fantasy patted his knee.
“It’ll be okay, sweetie.”
Bradley, at the moment, did not care. He may never have a moment when he cared about Sweetie’s quarters.
“Enough, please.”
We all cleared our throats and sat up straighter.
Bradley walked a slow circle around our crack team. “The conference starts tomorrow. The vault has been compromised. Holder Darby is gone, Richard is gone, and Jeremy is gone. It’s just us, and it’s up to us to at least keep the doors open.” We nodded. Yes yes yes. “I need you three to focus. Starting now.”
I could focus until I had a migraine and still not know where Holder Darby had run off to, but we knew where Richard Sanders, who owns the Bellissimo, and my immediate supervisor No Hair, who others call Jeremy Covey, were. They had been on assignment all summer at the site of our new sister casino, the Jolie. Which left us in charge of the Bellissimo. Which was along the lines of the fox guarding the henhouse.
“We have two people to find,” Bradley (the fox) said. “Holder Darby and the person who made off with four million dollars in platinum from the vault.”
&n
bsp; “Bradley.”
He stopped behind my chair, a purple pleather recliner. I tipped my head back and looked up. He’s just over six feet, with dusty blonde hair he keeps short, metallic green eyes, perfect teeth, a dip in the middle of his chest I can’t leave alone, built like a Major League pitcher, and he rocks his lawyer clothes. I guess they’re casino manager clothes now, today a white oxford shirt, yellow tie with tiny Carolina blue emblems, and dark gray gabardine pinstripe pants. His sleeves were rolled up, his tie tossed over his left shoulder. “We know exactly who took the platinum.”
“Oh, shit, not this again.” Fantasy rolled her whole head. “There goes my vacation.”
“I am not going back to that woman’s house,” Baylor said. “That nutjob beat me with an umbrella.”
Bradley’s grip tightened on my chair.
“When and why were you at her house, Baylor?”
I shot Baylor a do-not-get-me-in-trouble-with-my-husband look.
“My bad.” Baylor surrendered. “I’ve never been beaten with an umbrella.”
“Davis?”
“Bradley I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
My husband, who just turned thirty-six, has been in the gaming industry his entire professional life, but from a legal perspective, which is very different from where he is now, in the trenches, the stakes higher, and the pressure tenfold. It was beginning to show in the corners of his eyes, and he hadn’t slept well since we married, which isn’t about being married to me, but a combination of the job and where we live. His job is a pressure cooker, and even that isn’t so much about the day-to-day running of an empire; it’s more about his ridiculously large salary. A big-money job comes with a big responsibility to earn out your big paycheck. While making the big bucks, he was still on the Bellissimo learning curve, a ride, I’m afraid, that never ends. It’s a laugh a minute around here, with each hair-raising adventure leaving us nowhere near prepared for the next. It’s CasinoLand. You never know what will happen.
DOUBLE MINT Page 2