Bradley, after giving us a round of the suspicious eyeball, thankfully, let it go. He had bigger things to worry about than cats, collectible quarters, and umbrellas. He reclaimed his spot on his black velvet throne and began barking orders. Get in Holder’s office, go back to her house, find her. Keep up with the convention, don’t drop that million-dollar-revenue ball, and before this day is out, turn all our energies to tracking the platinum. He was at the end of the long list of impossible tasks when the cat scared us all to death by jumping onto his lap. It pawed around for a minute, made two circles, then settled. Bradley held his hands up while the cat did its dance.
“That is one ugly cat you got there, Davis. Its nose is smashed.”
“Fantasy.” Baylor was offended. “It’s a Persian cat. It’s supposed to look that way.”
“That is not my cat.”
Not My Cat was rubbing all over my husband.
“You’re stuck with that cat, Davis,” Baylor said. “He likes it here.”
“That’s impossible, Baylor. No one likes it here.”
Three
It was the collapse of the oil industry in the mid ’80s that did Biloxi in. Things weren’t great before, but they tumbled fast and hard after. What little oil money that had been sneaking Biloxi’s way from neighboring Louisiana, and one oily step farther, Texas, mostly by way of shipbuilding and refining, dried up and left Biloxi in a devastating lurch. By 1992, when dockside gambling was approved for the distressed coast of Mississippi, the city was deep in financial ruin, the infrastructure deplorable, the whole place on the verge of implosion. That it was a coastal community was no help, Biloxi being where the Gulf of Mexico took its nap—the beach manmade and neglected, the water brown and polluted, and not even a ripple in the water, much less a wave. With double-digit unemployment and poverty on every corner, there was a mass exodus for greener pastures. Biloxi hadn’t repaired a road or built a new school in forty years. A new home hadn’t been built in forty-one.
So when Salvatore Casimiro—second generation Italian immigrant with one wife, three mistresses, half of Capitol Hill in his back pocket, four rotten kids, and the seven largest and most profitable properties on the Las Vegas Strip—decided to spread his wings and build a gambling destination in the South, mostly because he needed somewhere to park his daughter Bianca and her new husband Richard, his casino Golden Boy who he’d somehow roped into marrying his narcissistic, amoral, and possibly manic daughter, he knew he’d be building residences too. The first for his son-in-law. There was absolutely nowhere to live in or around Biloxi. The closest thing to civilization, and for all he knew, indoor plumbing, was ninety miles west in New Orleans.
He built a penthouse mansion on the whole top floor of his Gulf Coast project, the Bellissimo Resort and Casino, the tallest building (to this day) in the state of Mississippi, and, at the time, the largest hotel-casino outside of Vegas proper. He hoped to ship his only daughter to Biloxi and keep her in Biloxi. For as long as they all shall live.
Just below her sprawling manor, he split the floor into two mini mansions. The first for the casino’s future general manager, because it would surely take a war chest salary plus a strong residential incentive to find a manager worth his salt who’d be willing to move to Biloxi, and the second, twelve-thousand square feet of celebrity accommodations—four bedroom suites, a dining room for twenty, a personal gym, two pools, sweeping terrace gardens—in hopes of luring A-list entertainers to South, Nowhere. Jay Leno and the like. And that’s where my new husband and I live now, in the other mini mansion, the casino manager’s residence, down the hall from Jay’s place. Directly beneath narcissistic, amoral, and possibly manic Bianca Casimiro Sanders.
We hated it.
The Bellissimo’s Casino Manager Residence was decorated by its first residents at the tail end of the three-year resort construction in 1996, and no one had touched it since. I call it the Big Easy Flea Market. The interior was designed by the Bellissimo’s first casino manager, Ty Thibodeaux, or rather by his wife Magnolia, a Cajun Louisiana crawfish-loving beignet-addicted nutcase. Every stick of furniture came over with the original French settlers and somehow Magnolia had managed to round it all up and drag it here. The walls were laden throughout with slabs of rusty flaking ornamental iron, pieced together gates and fences she’d probably swiped in the dark of night from crypts and mausoleums. They were welded together and everywhere, creating fake indoor Bourbon Street balconies all through the residence, and on every fake balcony, somewhere, was Jesus Christ on the cross. Big, little, dangling, mounted, bronze, silver, wood, three glow-in-the-dark, all with crowns of thorns and nails in the bloody feet. They were all over the place. And they were all looking up, to the ceilings we didn’t have.
The tops of the rooms were gilded crown molding, even in the five bathrooms, so ornate and sprawling they bumped into equally overdone carved ceiling medallions, there to enhance the many chandeliers. The casino manager’s residence had seventeen tacky chandeliers, one jazz themed and made entirely of tarnished brass trombones and saxophones, all dripping in brightly colored crystals, mini voodoo skulls, or Mardi Gras memorabilia.
The color scheme of our new home was purple, pink, blue, green, yellow, black, red, gold, and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese orange. There were blooming magnolias everywhere—oils of magnolias on the walls, magnolias on each of the six thousand kitchen backsplash tiles, several magnolia-themed sofas, magnolia bath towels and beddings, wool rugs covered in creeping magnolia designs, and a huge silk magnolia tree in the foyer.
We could make a fortune charging admission and giving tours.
The best part? It’s haunted. The whole place. I swear to you, there are ghosts and ghouls and goblins in every corner of the casino manager’s residence. Every single day is Halloween. Neither I nor Bradley could get a decent night’s sleep. I could barely eat in the middle of all this Creole mess. And I wouldn’t even think of conceiving a child in this Spook-Spook Bayou Yard Sale.
One person who absolutely loved it? My grandmother.
One thing that wouldn’t stop breaking since the day we moved in? The seventy-two cubic foot red refrigerator. In what universe do two people need a refrigerator that large? There’s no doubt in my mind Magnolia Thibodeaux kept whole animal carcasses in it and used them for jambalaya sacrifice voodoo ceremonies. Most likely in my bedroom.
Now that I lived at the Bellissimo, there was no “I’m going to run to the store.” Because of my Super Secret Spy status, I had to completely disguise myself to walk out the front door. More often than not, I went Unabomber, hoodie and dark glasses. Every five or six days, I made my escape using service elevators and stairwells. I hiked miles to my car, uphill several ways, in the vendor-only lot behind receiving. I drove to the Winn Dixie on Pass Road and bought a buggy full of comfort food. I retraced my steps, this time schlepping groceries on a luggage cart up to the twenty-ninth floor Who Dat Haunted Mansion, then put them away, only to reach for the milk the next morning and it be room temperature, the refrigerator broken again.
There wasn’t a department within the Bellissimo that could help. Not engineering, not maintenance, not the heat and air guys. No one at the Bellissimo really knew if the new casino manager’s wife lived here or not. They’d never seen her; they’d never set foot in the new casino manager’s home. Because the new casino manager’s wife worked undercover. To let an employee in the front door (a misty beveled glass tarnished copper number wide enough to drive a car through) would be to blow my cover. So I had to call Sears, like everyone else.
“You say you live where, lady?”
“At the Bellissimo. The twenty-ninth floor.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“I am not.”
“Okay, here it is, and the computer says we sent someone to fix it two weeks ago.”
“It’s broken again.”
“There’s actually fourteen pages of repairs here, lady.”
A sad fact I was well aware of.
“Maybe it’s time for you to think about a new refrigerator.”
Wouldn’t that be nice? We couldn’t get the old refrigerator out to put a new one in.
A month into our marriage and new living quarters, after six visits with six different Sears repairmen and no luck, I dragged Bradley into it. I hid in the voodoo pantry, so deep, dark, and cavernous, I’m positive this is where Magnolia kept the dead bodies, while he met with the Sears appliance service manager and a man from the Bellissimo engineering department named Ding Ding. (I wish I were kidding.) (Surely to one of the Jesuses it was just a nickname.)
“Mr. Cole, I don’t know how they ever got this refrigerator in here, but I can assure you, we can’t get it out without a crane and tearing down a wall or two. If this refrigerator comes out whole, it’ll have to go down the side of the building. The freight elevators can’t even hold the weight.”
“Then you’re going to have to repair it.”
“I’m telling you, Mr. Cole, we’re at our wits’ end with this monster.” I heard him tap on the blood red doors. (The refrigerator has four doors. Four. All red.) “For one, it’s a dinosaur. I was in first grade when this thing was built. It’s a Jenn-Air custom, we can’t find anyone who knows a thing about it, and there’s not parts for it or a manual on it, and we’ve done just about everything we can possibly do.”
“And you can’t get it out?”
“You see that?” Ding Ding pointed to the top of the refrigerator, where it disappeared into the ceiling. “The problem is none of the wiring or plumbing is behind the refrigerator. Or even below it. It’s all up top. The only way to get it out is to come down through the ceiling.”
“Go right ahead.”
“Well, we can’t. We’re right below Mrs. Sanders’s closet. I’ve already tried that route. I filled out the paperwork and my boss shot back that he didn’t care what kind of repairs were needed below the Sanders’s residence, the wife would never go for it, and we needed to figure something else out.”
Bianca Sanders couldn’t care less if we had a refrigerator or not. I could have told Ding Ding that.
“Now, if you could move this saint somebody,” Ding Ding said.
Yes. In my kitchen, across from a massive gold-inlaid island was a five-foot-tall garden angel on a two-foot cement cube base, with a wing span of four feet, made of moldy cast resin, and, bonus, it was a fountain. It cried black tears that pooled into its own hands. When we’d been married two weeks, I spent my first night alone here. On my way to refill my glass of wine, I bumped into the angel. Barely bumped, like grazing the sofa or catching the corner of the bed. Boom. I went down—spread eagle on the floor, passed out, and somehow on the way down, I cracked my head open. That angel knocked me flat on the ground. Probably with its moldy breath. I came to later with a bloody line across my forehead and blood in the middle of both of my palms.
Like Jesus.
“’Cause there’s plumbing behind this statue, see?” Ding Ding told him. “And we can get a new refrigerator here.”
There were four thousand places to put a new refrigerator in the Fat Tuesday Fort. Every time we were fed up and ready to order one and plug it up in our bedroom, or beside the television, or in one of the many powder rooms, we tried one more time to repair the big red devil, the whole time hoping against hope we’d get to move back to our condo where we had a perfectly wonderful and working refrigerator, leaving this place as we found it. (Haunted.)
“I think we have quite enough refrigerator as it is,” Bradley said, “and I don’t care if we have to rebuild every motor in it, I need this refrigerator working. Understand?”
“You got it, Mr. Cole.”
It had been a full eight months since that day and the refrigerator wasn’t fixed yet. It was an ongoing problem, like the ridiculous décor of my home was a problem, the ghosts, good grief, the ghosts were a problem, but my biggest problem lately was Magnolia Thibodeaux.
Several weeks ago, I ran around shaking the fake magnolia trees looking for the real one. I came in from work one day and the whole place was blooming. When in bloom, magnolias produce an unmistakable cloying sticky sweetness, with a wisp of pepper and citrusy undertones, like lemon or grapefruit. There’s no missing it and I smelled it. It happened again a few days later. About the same time, I began noticing things missing—a voodoo doll here, a Jesus there—and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind Magnolia Thibodeaux had been sneaking in here. Because she probably still has a key and she’s one of two people, her husband being the other, who know the twenty-ninth floor setup well enough to sneak past the surveillance cameras on their way in and out. She was so slippery, the cameras couldn’t catch her and neither could I. In the past month, I knew for a fact she’d been here no less than five times. I was on the verge of booby traps.
I’d called her. She didn’t answer, so I left a nice message. “Mrs. Thibodeaux, I know you’ve been here and I’d appreciate it if you’d call me the next time you need in. I’ll be happy to help you with anything. I mean it, Mrs. Thibodeaux, anything you need or want out of the residence.”
I called again the next week. “Magnolia. I know you’ve been here again. Please give me a call.”
I called the next week too. “Look, lady. I’m not going to put up with this.”
It happened again about ten days ago. I smelled her all over my house. “Magnolia, I’m telling you, I’m going to catch you running in and out of here like you still live here and you’re going to be sorry. It’s called breaking and entering.”
Calling her wasn’t doing any good, so I gathered up a load of her Bourbon Street baubles and had Baylor deliver it to her. He took Jesuses, ceramic alligator busts, Mardi Gras beads, eyes of newts, everything that wasn’t nailed down. Maybe what she wanted was in there. It also cleared out one percent of her jambalaya junk. I sent six-foot-tall two-hundred-pound Baylor with a box stuffed full and a dire warning: If what you’re looking for isn’t in here, too bad. Break into my home again and I’m calling the police. Magnolia beat Baylor up with an umbrella and told him to stay off her property. Then lobbed Jesuses at him. The worst was, I couldn’t get anyone to believe me. My immediate supervisor, No Hair, widely addressed as Jeremy Covey, didn’t believe me.
“She is not sneaking into your house, Davis.”
“Yes, No Hair, she is.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She’s looking for something.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because I can smell her.”
Nor did my husband believe me.
“Davis, I swear I don’t smell a thing.”
“How can you not smell it? It’s her. I smell her.”
“Do you want me to have cameras installed?” Bradley asked. “I will. Say the word.”
No. No cameras inside. We’re newlyweds, for goodness sake.
I stepped out of my inner circle. “Erika? Do you smell flowers in here? Magnolias?”
Nose in the air, sniff sniff. “I smell Mr. Clean and Lemon Pledge.”
Erika Cleaning Woman is scared to death of this place. She runs in once a week with a leaf blower, blasts off the top layer of étouffée dust, then runs out screaming. She refuses to be here alone, so now we have Erika Cleaning Woman and Erika Cleaning Woman’s Sister, Tonette. Tonette asked me if I’d considered having the residence exorcised. She knew a priest.
And this is where we live.
Apparently, with a cat.
I’ve slept with animals before (I was married to the same ape twice before Bradley, a long story I don’t want to tell), but never with a four-legged furry animal. Bradley and I fell into bed on Sunday night and the damn cat hopped up and settled in between us like it was supposed
to be there. I tried shooing it off and it bowed up and hissed at me with glow-in-the-dark eyes, sending me scrambling up the headboard. Bradley reached for the cat and calmed it down until it purred, then it settled at his feet after trying its best to shred my duvet cover into ribbons with its needle claws. We turned to each other in the dark. In addition to the distant gurgling noise from the kitchen, I could hear the cat, who I think might be asthmatic, trying to breathe through its smashed nose.
“Now do you believe me, Bradley?”
“I always believe you, Davis.” He traced a line down my nose with his finger, something I’d been watching him do to the cat. “I totally believe in you, Davis.”
“About Magnolia.”
He rolled onto his back. The cat rolled onto its back.
“Davis, honey, if the platinum were here, we’d have found it by now.”
“Bradley, honey, that’s why she keeps breaking in. She’s the one who stole the platinum, she stashed it here, and she keeps coming back to get it, a load at a time.”
“I find that so hard to believe.”
“I find it hard to believe we have a cat in the bed.”
Four
On a normal workday, Bradley hit his desk while it was still dark out, five or so. I usually slept in till seven. Sometimes noon. Monday morning, promising to be anything but normal, found me up and out of the bed at the ungodly hour of six, Bradley long gone, the shower almost dry, and I could barely smell his sandalwood soap. I wondered if he’d slept at all.
On the long list of things I love about being married to him, it starts every day with coffee. He sets up the coffee pot for me before he leaves, so when I stumble to it, all I have to do is push the “brew” button. I stumbled to it, but stopped short, because there was a dead fish in the kitchen. I slapped my hand over my nose and mouth. Beside the coffee pot was a bowl of gray fish mush. With yellow flecks. Cat food.
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