“I don’t know.” He racked his rib-addled brain. “Am I supposed to know?”
“And if the counterfeit money wasn’t for the game, what was it for?”
“To pay someone off with counterfeit money?”
His words slid through me. Then settled.
* * *
The slot machine questions wouldn’t be answered until I could find a way into Exhibit Hall B and take a look at them, and I thought I’d better (wait until the conference people were asleep tonight) not bust in on them the first day. I put the slot machines aside for the time being; they weren’t going anywhere. I turned my attention to the man who brought the counterfeit money to the Bellissimo. Who was he, and where is he? After that, I’d track down four million in platinum. And Holder Darby. All in a day’s work.
I reached for my phone and dialed the County Coroner’s office on 23rd Avenue.
“Hi. I’m calling from the Bellissimo. I need to know if you have any information on the body you picked up here. The family has arrived and wants to know something.”
“Who is this?”
“I’m calling from Mr. Cole’s office. Do you have any information about our dead guest?” I could hear keyboard tapping.
“Lady,” the man said, “we didn’t pick up a body at the Bellissimo. We haven’t had a fresh one at all since the middle of the night Friday, and it was from Memorial. The last cadaver we got from you was the toothache man.”
This is a big place, a million guests pass through these doors every year, and we’re going to lose a few. (Think actuary statistics.) Two months ago a man from Gautier (pronounced go shave), right down the road, a Bellissimo regular, died of a toothache. He was playing a $2 Bonus Frenzy with an infected tooth. The tooth went septic and hit his bloodstream, boom, out of that slot chair. It scared the hell out of us, sent us screaming to our dentists.
“What about Holder Darby?” I asked. “Do you have a Holder Darby?”
“Lady,” the man at the coroner’s office said, “I don’t know what kind of roll you’re taking, but you can’t just call here and get an inventory. Check the obituary section of the paper if you need to know who’s passed.”
“Is that a yes or a no on Holder Darby?”
“Who did you say this is? What’s your name?”
“Ooops,” I said. “Wrong number.”
Just in time for me to get a hit on missing money man’s fingerprint I’d loaded into the National Fingerprint Database. I might not have found him in his guest room, or laid out on a slab at the coroner’s, but I did locate him in the system. If you’ve ever been on the wrong side of the law, in the military, in law enforcement, or visited a Disney park, I can find you.
Christopher Hall. The man in room 2650, who’d left dinner on the table and counterfeit money in the bathtub, was an inmate at the United States Penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana. He was convicted on January 21 five years ago on multiple counts of conspiracy to manufacture, distribute, and deal in counterfeit obligations of the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C § 370, four counts of counterfeiting currency in violation of 29 U.S.C § 470, and fourteen counts of dealing in counterfeit obligations in violation of 20 U.S.C § 255.
I found the master counterfeiter.
Why would Christopher Hall be in high-security federal prison for counterfeiting? He should have been (convicted—it’s, duh, illegal to print your own money) in medium security for ten to twenty, not federal for life. A few clicks later, I had my answer. He had a bonus manslaughter charge tacked onto all the counterfeiting counts. His partner, a man named Grover Walsh, died during the commission of these crimes. Christopher Hall was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on the counterfeiting charges. The bonus conviction of one count of involuntary manslaughter during the commission of a federal crime put him in for life without parole.
Where? Where did all this happen?
Click click.
Harrison County, Mississippi. City of Biloxi.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind these crimes were committed in a place I call home. Grover Walsh was crushed to death under a piece of equipment down the hall from where my husband and I sleep.
I took several slow steadying breaths. I could feel my pulse skipping. Small dots swam in front of my eyes. I felt like I was in a dark tunnel and I was dizzy. I sat there a full ten minutes processing my horrific findings.
Eventually, I turned back to the story. I read police reports, case files, court transcripts, rulings, and every article written about the crime, capture, and conviction. Christopher Hall showed up at the Emergency Room carrying his gravely injured partner, effectively turning himself in. He was taken into custody.
Detectives found $1.8 million in counterfeit currency and another half million in fake platinum coins under the floor in Hall’s house. They suspected there was much more where that came from, but repeated searches hadn’t produced anything.
“I can assure you there’s more money,” a United States Secret Service Criminal Investigator testified, “millions and millions. Plus equipment. It’s out there too. We can’t find the money and we can’t find the production plant.”
In all that, under oath, Christopher Hall claimed that he and Grover Walsh acted on their own. Not one mention of the Bellissimo, Salvatore Casimiro, or the Thibodeauxs.
Who sprang this man from prison? And where was he now?
* * *
I’d lost track of time and Baylor had slipped out. I tipped my chair. “Baylor?” I was alone in Control Central. No Baylor, no Fantasy. “BAYLOR!”
“FLOAT ON YOUR TEETH! YOUR TEETH!”
He’d gone down for another nap.
I texted Fantasy: A little help, please?
And from her: Be there in ten.
Which is exactly what she’d said earlier.
I’d like to have called, popped in, or otherwise pestered my husband with the new findings, but I’d learned long ago to not bother him every three minutes so he could work. When he needed me during the day, he called. When I needed him during the day, I rolled my wedding rings around my finger.
After going through the list of conference names twice, I still didn’t find Christopher Hall. I went into the Bellissimo system and found where he’d registered. As Bill Dollar. Cute. Back to Baylor’s legal pad, where he had a big blank beside Bill Dollar’s name.
So he wasn’t registered at the Bellissimo as a banker, a conference sponsor, or even part of the conference. He paid cash when he checked in, which might mean we had counterfeit bills circulating in house, oh yay. But he had to secure the room with a credit card.
Forever and a day later, I tracked the Visa account used to secure Bill Dollar’s room to First Federal Bank in Baltimore, Maryland. Which might as well have been the North Pole, because Baltimore didn’t connect him to any of the bankers attending the conference, who were all from Alabama, or Magnolia Thibodeaux, who’d probably set foot above the Mason-Dixon exactly never, or Holder Darby, not yet anyway. Maybe Christopher Hall’s connection was with the conference sponsors, Paragon Protection. I rolled my chair to the computer full of Holder’s old computer and clicked open the conference file to read their profile.
Paragon Protection manufactured and installed vaults all over the US of A. Their other products included armored trucks and pneumatic transfer systems for financial institutions with drive-through services. They were a veritable superstore for anything and everything to do with securing or moving money. And they had forty representatives here at the conference, which they were sponsoring.
It was on their dime that five hundred bankers were at the Bellissimo, in hopes of selling them equipment and services. The problem I had with it, in addition to it being utterly ridiculous for Holder Darby to have given them the green light on practically banning Bellissimo employees from Bellissimo property, w
as the fact that I think there might be a connection between the escaped convict Christopher Hall and Paragon, and worse, that my husband would spend the entire week with these Paragon people.
Paragon Protection’s home office was located in Oakridge, Illinois, with production and distribution facilities in (click click) Mattawa, Washington; Wickenburg, Arizona; Bottineau, North Dakota, and Galax, Virginia. Their most recent property acquisition was in Horn Hill, Alabama. Which stopped me dead in my tracks.
Now I was getting somewhere.
I tracked Paragon down in accounts payable. Six weeks ago they paid the Bellissimo eighteen thousand for the bankers’ custom slot machines. The invoice was for fifty software and graphic installations for a custom game called Mint Condition. (Cute.) I almost clicked out of the agreement—legal jargon, legal beagle, legal eagle—when I reached page four and fell out of my chair.
Paragon Protection put down a one million dollar deposit on platinum. Platinum on loan from the Bellissimo vault for the Mint Condition game.
What? The bankers’ game had cash and platinum in it?
I couldn’t get my husband on the phone fast enough. Except I couldn’t get him on the phone. I called Calinda.
“Calinda. I need Bradley. Right now.”
“Is this about the refrigerator?”
“No!”
“Davis, he’s in the vault. I can’t call him out unless it’s life or death. I can have him call you the minute he gets out.”
I sat perfectly still until the phone rang, quietly contemplating a job at Subway. I could Eat Fresh. I loved the assembly line of it all. And the peanut butter cookies.
My phone and I jumped.
“Why didn’t you tell me there was platinum in the banker game?”
He sighed.
“That’s how you found out the platinum in the vault was fake,” I said. “The accountants were doing an inventory, but they were also pulling platinum for the Mint Condition game.”
He sighed again. “Yes.”
“Does Paragon know they have fake platinum in the slot machines?”
He inhaled like it was the last breath he’d ever take.
“No.”
“What are we going to do, Bradley?”
“We’re going to find the platinum, Davis.”
And by we, he meant me.
“Can we talk about this after dinner?” he asked.
Dinner. I forgot about dinner. Would this day ever end?
On my way out, I gave Baylor a nudge. “Hey, wake up and go home.”
“TRUCK SNORKELS IN THE TREE.”
On my way to meet Bradley for dinner, it occurred to me Paragon Protection might have the Bellissimo’s platinum. They had access—the annual inspection. And they had it hidden in plain sight. Inside their Mint Condition slot machines.
How in the world did Magnolia Thibodeaux orchestrate all this?
Nine
Richard Sanders, president and CEO of the Bellissimo Resort and Casino since the ribbon cutting, having climbed Mt. Biloxi, and having finally hired a casino manager in whose capable hands he could entrust his billion dollar baby, raised his stakes and spread his wings. He secured controlling interest of the Bellissimo from his ailing and retiring father-in-law, Salvatore Casimiro, then tackled the next item on his list: He branched out.
Mr. Sanders’s job has always involved a fair amount of travel, but as long as I’ve worked for him, he’s always left town bent on returning as quickly as humanly possible to (keep an eye on his wife) be at the helm of the S. S. Bellissimo. That is, until he hired a likeminded first mate, my husband. Bradley and I were married on October 22nd, he was sworn in as operating casino manager on October 23rd, and Mr. Sanders left for Tunica on October 24th.
For us, it meant leaving a home we loved, to live here, in the Booyah Bordello, Bradley working a ninety-hour week, with me reporting directly to him. It’s been an adjustment.
For Richard and Bianca Sanders, it meant a physical separation, because Bianca Sanders wouldn’t even say the word Tunica aloud, much less go there. She barely goes here. It’s been frustrating.
Tunica is the number two gambling venue in Mississippi. It’s in the northwest corner of the state, as far away from Biloxi as you can get and not cross the state line, and the only things in Tunica are farming, wildlife, and gambling. There’s nothing in, around, or under Tunica but coyotes and a strip of three-star casinos in the middle of cornfields.
All that was about to change.
Mr. Sanders had been ready to put his dog in the Tunica fight for years, and broke ground for the city’s newest and grandest casino, Jolie, the week I would have otherwise been honeymooning, and the worst of it for me turned out to be he took my immediate supervisor, No Hair, with him. Since then we’d barely seen either of them. Mr. Sanders was three-for-four—three days here, four days there—for nine months. When he is here, he had his desk to clean off, his spoiled rotten wife to appease, and his new casino manager to conference with for eight-hour stretches. As soon as he finished those chores, he was back on his Gulfstream 650 to the Jolie. That plane could probably fly itself to Tunica and back at this point.
“Tell me about the wedding, Davis. I heard you wound up with cake on your face. And what’s this about you having a cat?”
“Oh, dear Lord.” Bianca Sanders. “A cat?”
Mr. Sanders—forty-five years old, blonde hair lighter at his temples, blue eyes behind small, round, tortoiseshell glasses—wanted to hear my version of the Hello Kitty wedding. We arrived for dinner at the Sanders’s at seven and before we’d taken a sip of our cocktails, I was already in the hot seat.
“The wedding got out of hand, Mr. Sanders. And before it was over, we were all covered in frosting.”
“Honestly, David.” Bianca Sanders was disgusted. “Show some decorum.”
My name is Davis.
Bianca Sanders is, at (most) times, the bane of my existence. She’s almost ten years older than I am, but in spite of our age difference and aside from pesky details like coloring, scruples, and general disposition, we look just alike. Part of my job is to dress up and prance around making public appearances for her, and she’s addicted to it. She’s forever telling me I’m the face of the Bellissimo, and what she means by that is do it for me. She says it all the time—I’m her face—as if it’s a compliment. I don’t want to be her face, I don’t have time to be her face, but after three years of running her each and every public errand, her activities beyond the 30th floor penthouse had dwindled to one: commuting to Million Air, the private airport, to board a Bellissimo jet to anywhere that wasn’t here. She could jet set for as long as she pleased, because she had me to cover for her. Bianca didn’t hang around long after Project Tunica started. Ten minutes, maybe. The Sanderses had been here together no more than five days of the month for nine months running.
The day he left for Tunica, she took off shopping. She was gone three (glorious) months, only stopping back in to (torture me) drop off her goodies to make cargo room for more, and the whole time no one knew she was gone because I was being her face.
She toured Europe first and we didn’t hear a peep from her for six weeks. From there, she hit Tokyo. Then she slowly made her way back to Biloxi via San Francisco, Las Vegas, Austin, Chicago, and NYC, Mr. Sanders in Tunica the whole time. Finally fed up with living out of seventeen Louis Vuitton trunks, she got home and had me on the phone within an hour, threatening death by boredom. My death, if I didn’t do something about her boredom.
“And I’m ill, David! Something dastardly is going on with my physical person! I need a team from Johns Hopkins here today. Did you hear me, David? Today!”
Sadly, with Mr. Sanders and No Hair absent, exercises like these (cost a small fortune) were all mine.
A team of life-saving physici
ans were ripped away mid life-saving procedures and flown here. Guest suites were revamped into five-star medical facilities for the four different specialists. At the end of two weeks—she’s a terrible patient; pricking her finger is an all-day affair—it was determined Bianca was in excellent health. The only thing the million-dollar doctors found was she’d gained five pounds since the last time they’d been summoned for a luxury vacation at the Bellissimo because she’d sneezed, and they attributed it to fluctuating hormones, perfectly natural, at her age.
She had a fit like no other fit in the history of fits.
“David.”
It’s Davis.
Bianca had dark circles under her eyes, her neck red and splotchy, and I could see a thin sheen of moisture across her top lip.
“I want them all fired for incompetency. I want lawsuits filed. Talk to your husband. Today. I want their credentials stripped! Their grants revoked! Their licenses rescinded!” She demanded I have her top-notch physicians taken out back and shot while hiding the extra five pounds under ten yards of a black silk muumuu. It was a designer nun’s habit. She stomped back and forth in front of me, the black silk billowing around and trailing behind her. “I need a new team of doctors. STAT, David. I am offended at their delivery, their incompetency, and never has anyone been misdiagnosed so erroneously.”
Never has anyone fought aging with the energy, investment, and arsenal as you, Bianca.
“Write this down, David.”
I’d been taking notes the whole time: Mrs. Bradley Cole. Mrs. Bradley Cole. Mrs. Bradley Cole.
“I will not make a public appearance until I lose this weight. Not one! Do you hear me, David? It’s all you.”
It’s Davis. And you haven’t made a public appearance since the day you met me.
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