DOUBLE MINT

by Gretchen Archer

  While Fantasy took a public elevator to the mezzanine level on her way to our 3B offices to (book herself a room in the hotel) locate Baylor, I took a staff elevator to the lobby, rolled the money around two corners, then caught the private elevator to the Ya Ya Haunted House. Actually, it’s a semi-private elevator. When Jay Leno’s place is occupied, those guests have access to it too. It didn’t happen often that I was in the elevator with anyone else, but of course it happened today. I was dressed as Olivia Abbott, Special Events Woman, so it wasn’t a security problem running into anyone, just an annoyance. I was against the mirrored back wall, my hand on the extended suitcase handle, when someone stuck an arm out, caught the doors as they were closing, and rushed in.

  I was about to ask to see his passkey for this elevator when he, a tall dark man, looked up from his phone, got an eyeful of me, then slammed himself against the elevator wall, doing his very best to climb it. The whites of his eyes were so very white.

  The doors opened on twenty-nine and the guy bolted out and ran for his life, turning the corner to Jay Leno’s place. Which meant he must be on Dionne Warwick’s front team. Someone always arrived days before the superstars, or, in this case, former superstar, to inventory the honey mustard pretzels and grape Nehi soda we’d agreed to stock Jay’s place with. The more former the star, the more detailed the contract demands. We had a has-been ’70s rock star recently who wouldn’t agree to perform unless all the linens in Jay’s place were blue. Towels, bedding, fluffy pillows, in slate blue. The band, all card-carrying members of the AARP, the drummer on a mobility scooter, had one hit a million years ago, “Blue Yonder.” The week before, Taylor Swift had asked for nothing but enough space and time to meet her fans. And she said please.

  It was only when I dug in my pocket for my front door key, one of those iron skeleton numbers, and why wouldn’t it be, that I looked down and saw all kinds of money sticking out of my bra and the butt of my Glock poking out of the waistband of my von Furstenberg FBI pants. That’s why the poor Dionne Warwick guy was sweating bullets. He thought I was going to shoot him. I thought he was one of those people who hated elevators.

  I opened the front door and the zipper exploded on the suitcase. Money everywhere. At ten o’clock in the morning.

  The Igloo cooler large enough to stuff a dead body in, which is our makeshift refrigerator, sits just inside our front door under the shade of the twelve-foot-tall fake magnolia tree in a hundred-gallon cast iron tub, so we don’t have to lug ice all the way to the kitchen. It made a perfect shelf for a million or better counterfeit dollars. So we wouldn’t trip all over it. I lobbed lobbed lobbed the money. The suitcase was shot. And by shot, I don’t mean I shot it, I mean it was history. I was stacking the money when I got a whiff of something. Or someone.

  She’d been here again. She might still be here. She is so in the middle of this mess, whatever this mess is. I am so sick of this woman.

  “Magnolia? Where are you?” My heels clacked around the foyer. “Magnolia?” I could smell her everywhere and I heard a rustling. It sounded like it was above me, but the origins of noise in Muffaletta Manor were hard to pin down; the refrigerator drowns and distorts them. I got out of my new home, locking her in her old one. Not one to leave anything alone, Magnolia had four huge ficus trees around a black iron patio set in the hall. I dragged the iron bench across the hall carpet and blocked the front door. “Gotcha.” I dusted my hands. Pulling my phone from my pocket, I dialed Bradley’s office.

  Of the masses who work at the Bellissimo, I can safely say only three outside my immediate work circle know who I am and what I do. Maybe four. Okay, at this point, maybe a dozen. One who certainly did was my husband’s personal assistant, Calinda Wilson. Calinda came with Bradley from the Grand Casino, down Beach Boulevard a few miles, where he was the former lead attorney and she was his former personal and legal assistant. She knew me and my job way before Bradley took the casino manager’s position here. She’s been well aware of our relationship too, having caught us on Bradley’s desk. More than once.

  I texted her: Calinda, I need Bradley upstairs right now.

  He’s covered up, she texted back. Four calls and five people waiting.

  It’s urgent. 911.

  Is it about the refrigerator?

  No.

  I’ll let him know.

  Calinda is in her late forties, knows what Bradley needs before he does, and is armed with a degree in paralegal studies from Georgetown University and a banana milkshake. Calinda drinks banana milkshakes all day every day, trying to stay an ounce above bone thin. She’s bone thin, because she has no taste buds. She can’t taste a thing, so she cares very little about eating. Every once in a while, she says, she can taste a hint of banana, thus the banana milkshakes instead of chocolate, or my favorite, strawberry, but otherwise, nothing. Wouldn’t she be fun at parties? Tossing back jalapeno poppers like they were popcorn?

  I waited on Bradley’s call behind and between two of Magnolia’s ficus trees, with an eye and a loaded gun on my front door and occasionally, the elevator. My phone buzzed.

  “Wife.” He sounded out of breath. “I’ve been out of the vault two minutes and I only have one minute to talk.”

  “Bradley. Magnolia is in our haunted house. I’ve got her cornered. Get up here.”

  He ate up half of his one minute with total silence.

  “And I have more than a million dollars in counterfeit cash I just took from a guest room.”

  Nothing.

  “Bradley, Magnolia’s in our house.”

  Nothing.

  “Bradley! Two and two! Fake coins! Fake money! She’s behind every bit of this.”

  I could hear him breathing.

  “Davis, we’ll get to the bottom of this, and I promise you, it won’t be Magnolia. That being said, I’ll be there in a minute. Stay put.”

  I screamed when the elevator doors opened, my phone flew through the air, I accidently shot the ceiling three times—bang, bang, bang, accident, accident, accident. Baylor and Fantasy flew out of the elevator and drew on (me) the shooting trees, and all this happened on the exact click of the clock as Dionne Warwick’s front man was rounding the corner. He let out an otherworldly crazy shriek when he saw me crawling out of the bushes with a smoking gun at the same time Fantasy and Baylor turned on him. They trained their sights between his eyes, and that was when the ridiculous entryway chandelier, a Smart Car-sized lead glass drippy thing garnished with bobbing jeweled magnolias and lucky recipient of the three rounds I’d accidently fired, decided to come tearing out of the ceiling.

  Dionne Warwick’s guy passed out.

  Just then the elevator doors, unprovoked, closed, scaring the living daylights out of us. It’s nothing short of a miracle we didn’t shoot each other.

  There was panting (me and Fantasy) and foul (foul) language from Baylor, the kind of language I reserve for vehicular surprises, like when someone tries to run me off the road, smoke and dust rising from the chandelier rubble in the floor, and it was Fantasy who said, “Holster! Everyone! Holster your guns!” It was a good idea, but before we could click on our safeties and maybe get Dionne Warwick’s guy off the floor, the elevator doors opened, again, for no good reason—none of us were pushing elevator buttons—and it was but by the grace of God we did not execute my husband.

  * * *

  Bradley crunched through the chandelier.

  I opened my mouth to explain and he stopped me with a hand. “We’ll talk later.”

  Baylor and Bradley went in first to catch Magnolia. Fantasy and I waited in the chandelier rubble, keeping an eye on Dionne Warwick’s guy.

  “Some people just can’t handle the least little bit of excitement.”

  I fanned him with a branch I’d snapped off a ficus tree.

  Fantasy said, “He’s cute. Corporate cute. I like
his socks.” His socks were mint green, with little black birds on them. She kneeled down and checked him again. “Strong pulse. He’ll be okay. He smells good.” She looked up at me. “What in the world is going on here? Holder Darby, the vault, Mr. Funny Money, this guy laid out on the floor. It’s summer, you know? We’re supposed to be taking a breather.”

  “The only thing I know is that Magnolia Thibodeaux is behind every bit of it. That’s all I know.”

  “Davis,” Fantasy said. “You have to stop with that.”

  “She’s going down.”

  But maybe not today. Bradley and Baylor claimed she wasn’t there. They also claimed to have inspected under every bed, in every closet, and even the refrigerator. They were back in five minutes, which isn’t enough time to find an elephant in the French Quarter Freak Show, much less Magnolia, who’d lived here almost twenty years and knew where to hide.

  “I’m telling you, Bradley, she’s in there.”

  “And I’m telling you, Davis, she’s not.”

  Past the twelve-foot-tall silk magnolia tree and the Igloo fridge smothered in counterfeit cash, then through the King Cake tearoom, is the great room of the Jambalaya Junkyard. Think high-school-gymnasium-slash-Hooters. This is where the Thibodeauxs, big LSU fans, watched football with two hundred of their closest friends. The room had a total of sixteen sofas and thirty-two club chairs, all arranged around big screen televisions in the four corners of the room. And by big screens, I mean you could park RVs in here and call it a drive-in theater. The fake Bourbon Street balconies closest to the entertainment pits were football themed. Jesus and Tigers, Tigers and Jesus. Bradley and I claimed one of the corners as our own, the one closest to the kitchen, and stayed as far away from the rest of the stadium as we could.

  Bradley and Baylor lugged Dionne Warwick’s guy to one of the many, many magnolia sofas, and Baylor accidentally banged the poor guy’s head as they lowered him onto it.

  “Oh. My bad, dude.”

  I said, “I don’t think he can hear you.”

  Fantasy slipped a pillow that said Geaux Tigers under his head. “How do we know this guy is on Dionne Warwick’s front team?”

  “I rode up with him earlier,” I said. “He’s got to be on Dionne Warwick’s front team or he wouldn’t have a key to Jay’s place.”

  She shrugged. I shrugged. There are tens of thousands of people in this building at sunrise on Easter morning. We can’t know, or keep up with, every single one of them.

  Baylor fell into a green velvet loveseat that sprouted six-inch gold rope tassels from every seam and started singing, “Here, kitty kitty.”

  I’d forgotten all about the cat.

  Fantasy and I sat across from Baylor in side by side matching purple pleather recliners. Bradley, who generally keeps a cooler head than the rest of us, stepped into the kitchen and returned with a drippy kitchen towel. Fantasy took it from him and put it across Mr. Dionne Warwick’s forehead. Next, Bradley Cole poured three generous shots of breakfast bourbon from a crystal decanter and passed each of us one. We made quick work of it.

  He paced. Back and forth. “Who is this man?”

  Three huge shrugs.

  “What happened to the chandelier?”

  Baylor and Fantasy pointed at me. (Thanks a lot.)

  “It was an accident, Bradley.”

  “Of that,” he said, “I have no doubt.”

  We sat quietly as Bradley paced. After five minutes of wearing the magnolias off the rug, he said, “Stay with him,” to Fantasy and Baylor. “You.” He pointed. “Come with me.”

  The man on the magnolia sofa could have been in a medically-induced coma wearing noise-canceling headphones and Bradley would still want to step out of his hospital room rather than discuss anything in front of him. I followed my husband to the kitchen, where the big red monster made enough cover noise to give us privacy.

  “What is going on, Davis? First the wedding, which was a disaster, and now this. We have to, at the bare minimum, keep the doors open. So far,” he looked at his watch, “two hours into this work week, and we’re not doing so well.”

  “Did you see all that money?” I nodded in the direction of the foyer. “Number one, it came from a guest room. Number two, it’s counterfeit. And number three, the guest is gone. Poof, gone. As in Holder Darby gone.”

  “I saw the money. I tripped over the money. And the first thing I need you to do is get the money off the property. I don’t want it anywhere near the conference game.”

  A conference perk: Conferences get private slot tournaments in the events hall of the conference center. Last year, we hosted a cupcake conference, and their slot machines were all cupcakes. Fortunes and Frosting. So cute. (Not real cupcakes. You can’t get a cupcake inside a slot machine. The slot machine graphics were cupcakes. When the players hit the right combination of cupcake and frosting, they won. The jackpot was three birthday sprinkle cupcakes in a row. The candles lit and the player won $25,000.)

  “Obviously,” I said, “we want the counterfeit money out of here. But why specifically away from the bankers conference?”

  “So there’ll be no confusion.”

  Which confused me.

  “So the counterfeit money won’t end up in the conference game,” he explained.

  “The conference game? In the game? How could it end up in the game?”

  “The bankers have a cash game, Davis.”

  “What?” I’d never seen a cash game. “Cash in the game?”

  “Yes,” Bradley said, “they’re in the money business. They have a cash game.”

  “Bradley, how is that not a security nightmare?”

  “It’s Paragon’s problem,” he said. “It’s their money, and their job to safeguard it. They brought their own security specifically for the game.”

  “And they brought their own counterfeit money for it too.”

  He shook his head. “No. No they didn’t.”

  “The conference people were waiting for the counterfeit money, Bradley.”

  “You said they were waiting on the guest. No one said they were waiting on the money.”

  Something made me think of prison food, which would be our steady diet for the rest of our lives if we allowed a game to be played or paid out in counterfeit money. The Bellissimo would close, and we’d all be in prison.

  “There has to be a reasonable explanation,” he said, “because Paragon would no more deal in counterfeiting than we would.”

  “Fake coins. Fake money.” I tipped my head in the direction of the counterfeit production plant hidden deep in our home. “The only other reasonable explanation is Magnolia Thibodeaux.”

  He threw his hands in the air.

  “Okay,” I said, “if you want me to get to the bottom of this, and, as you say, keep the doors open, get me into the conference and I’ll take it from there.”

  “You are in. You’re Holder Darby.”

  “I need farther in,” I said, “past the reception desk. All the way in.”

  “There’s no way to get you in without setting off alarms. Last week, we could have worked it out. Now that the conference has started, I don’t think it’s a good idea. We will not put this conference under a microscope.”

  “I need to see the game.”

  “You’re not going to.”

  “Okay, I want to see the game.”

  “You’re not going to.”

  That quieted things down for a minute.

  “It’s odd to me, Bradley, that we’re not allowed access to our own facilities.”

  “Of course we are,” he said. “But not the way you’re approaching it, locked and loaded.” He looked me in the eye. All the way to the back of my head. “Davis?” He was so tall. Top of my world tall. “Stay away from the conference game.
And Magnolia Thibodeaux has nothing to do with anything. Don’t waste time. Understand?”

  I did not understand.

  “Find the missing guest and you’ll have your answers.” He kissed my forehead. “I have to get back to work.”

  * * *

  We sat as still as church mice in Bradley’s wake until Fantasy reached for the bourbon and poured us a round of brunch. At some point, Dionne Warwick’s guy, without us noticing, assumed a sitting position on the magnolia sofa. “Who are you people?” He looked around. “Where am I?”

  Seven

  This place was creepy enough without a jumpy cat hiding in it. A cat who, again, I’d forgotten. It was a simple noise that petrified and produced it.

  A mundane task, pulling a bottle of water from my Igloo refrigerator, scared the cat, who’d been hiding somewhere in the magnolia tree above the cooler, out of its skin. All I did was reach in and pull out a bottle of water for Dionne Warwick’s guy, causing ice to collapse around the space, and not in a gentle way, which sent the cat tearing out of the magnolia tree, landing square on my head, which had hardly healed from the cat’s last dance on it, then scraping its way down my back with its claws.

  When it happened, I didn’t know if Magnolia Thibodeaux was slashing me with a butcher knife, if I was being sucked into a mulching machine, or if a bomb had gone off and I was full of shrapnel. I wound up spread eagle on the floor, panting. I could taste metal, and all I could see were stacks of fake money.

  Footsteps pounded behind me. I heard gun safeties click. Fantasy, after some sailor language, helped me to a sitting position. Baylor, after some kitty kitty baby talk, cradled the cat, petting long strokes down its back.

  The cat’s eyes were closed, its thick tail whipping back and forth, and I asked if I had any hair left in the back of my head.

  “Your jacket’s not going to make it,” Fantasy inspected, “but your hair is fine.”

  “You can’t scare cats, Davis. Haven’t you ever heard ‘scaredy cat’?”