“I need you to lose five pounds, David. To offset the temporary bloating I’m experiencing from so much travel. Immediately.” (Does that make any sense at all?) “And just to be certain.” Bianca sat down beside me, black silk pillowing, scanning the room to make sure none of her staff was eavesdropping, and moved in for the kill. Her cat-green eyes were bloodshot. “Make an appointment with my gynecologist. You know her. The Brazilian girl.”
Yes, I knew her gynecologist, who was Asian. I knew all of Bianca’s people because I was her face. Bianca ignored the fact that sending me to the gynecologist for her didn’t exactly work. So to keep from wasting my time, not to mention wearing the lovely paper gown, I scheduled her appointments then went to lunch with her gynecologist. “Have a thorough examination, David,” Bianca said, “and make certain these idiots aren’t suggesting what I think they’re suggesting.”
Which made even less sense.
The next day, she had me arrange a Johns Hopkins cosmetic intervention party, then dig up high-dollar personal trainers. She flew them in from all over, conducted probing interviews, and hired the one who loved her most, Hans Solo. Hans Something. I call him Hans Solo. And he was a big believer in sculpted muscles. “The body is as the clay. We must mooooold it.”
I don’t know what kind of mooooolding Hans had Bianca doing three times a day (she claimed she and Demi Moore do the same workout), but after several months of it, Bianca looked like she was training for the Olympics. Boxing or Freestyle Wrestling. She had newly-acquired abs of steel, First Lady guns, and she’d bulked up her butt to the point of having her implants removed. (That had to be fun.) So that we might see all her muscles, she was wearing two ounces of a satin slip dress, threatening with her every breath to burst at its satin seams, and mile-high stilettoes. All black, as usual. She pressed a tall glass of designer water to her hot cheeks, because not only had Hans pumped her up, he cleaned her up too. She stopped drinking ten martinis a day, quit her happy pills, gave up gluten (I have no idea what gluten is), and had Cartier custom build a diamond jacket for her Fitbit bracelet. Guess what? She hadn’t lost the weight.
“David.” She fanned herself. “I’m hot. And you need to meet with Hans. You’re getting mushy.”
I’m about to get a lot mushier, the initial reason for our dinner date with Richard and Bianca Sanders. While I thought it would be better if we took care of a few things first—the crime rate, international terrorism, the economic collapse, climate change—Bradley was ready to start a family. He couldn’t do it without me, I usually changed the subject, and yet here we were to inform the Sanderses we intended to move back home to our condo at the Regent, just five little miles away, when Jolie opened in two weeks and Mr. Sanders resumed full-time residence here. The plan, for me to get pregnant five minutes after we moved home, had been in place for months, a date way off in the future, yet here we were. And if all went according to plan, and I spend the rest of my life trying to protect a little guy who looks just like Bradley from armed conflict in the Middle East, infectious disease, and the fact that there will be no drinking water by the time he’s ten years old, I couldn’t be Bianca’s face for who knows how long. Depends on how mushy I get.
That was the agenda when we made this dinner date weeks ago, to break it gently to the Sanderses together, because I needed someone between me and her, so she wouldn’t kill me. We stood outside the Sanders’s front door at five till seven wondering if, in light of the events of the past few days, we should even bring it up.
“Let’s wait,” I said.
“To have a baby? Is this about Social Security?”
Social Security is a big fat mess, no doubt about it, but that wasn’t what I meant. Specifically.
“Let’s wait to talk to them about it.”
He was a patient man.
“We have more pressing issues right now, Bradley.”
“Let’s play it by ear.”
“Good idea,” I said.
He was just about to knock on the door.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.” No.
A little bit of Bradley went a long way with me, and right now, it was just a finger of his hooked with one of mine. Passing between us in that small touch, a promise, a confirmation, and a hope for the future. Surely, something could be done about the budget deficit between when I got pregnant and gave birth.
The Sanders’s new butler (I’ve never seen this guy in my life) opened the door, Bradley and I shared a look and, in that split second, decided to wait.
To tell them.
“We’re not staying for dinner either,” Bradley whispered as we walked through the foyer.
“Amen,” I whispered back.
A tuxedoed waiter tiptoed around topping off everyone’s drinks. Bianca yawned, demanded a thicker slice of lime for her fizzy water, admired her manicure, and crossed her legs the other way every three minutes just to make sure we all caught her ripped hamstrings, while Mr. Sanders and Bradley conducted their version of small talk.
“All’s well in Tunica?” (Bradley.)
“It was when I left two hours ago.” (Mr. Sanders.) “How about here?”
“We’re at sixty percent occupancy, half of that the bankers.” (Bradley.)
“As expected.” (Mr. Sanders.)
Then revenues, profitability, activity, disbursements, gross pay, gross earnings, gross negligence, such fun cocktail talk, I thought I might lose my mind.
“I have a headache,” I announced.
“Well, you’ve given it to me, David.”
We shot off in opposite directions. Me, for the front door. Her, for a hot flash.
Ten
A glass of wine to calm my nerves later, I heard Bradley key himself through the front door, explaining the missing chandelier to Mr. Sanders. Then he told him why we had an Igloo refrigerator in our foyer, and by the time they reached me in Who Dat Hooters, Bradley was telling Mr. Sanders about the babbling brook in the kitchen.
“Sears?”
“Sears,” Bradley said.
Mr. Sanders surveyed. “You could have redecorated five times by now.” Bradley poured and passed him a short bourbon. He looked at us and said, “You don’t want to redecorate. You want out of here.” He sipped the whiskey. “I don’t blame you.”
“Sit, Richard.”
Mr. Sanders chose a magnolia sofa. “I haven’t been here in forever.” He stared at a voodoo doll on the wall. “One forgets.” He stared at the Jesuses. “How are you managing, Davis?”
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“You absolutely hate it, don’t you?”
Yes, but I absolutely liked Mr. Sanders.
“Let’s talk,” he said, “so I can get back to Bianca.”
* * *
Earlier today, while I was in 3B (supervising Baylor’s naps) gathering unwelcome information, Bradley had been busy in, around, or on top of vault business. A second physical inventory conducted by the auditors with Hammond Stevenson Morris & Chase came up clean, everything else accounted for. Even so, Bradley had the vault contents relocated.
Bellissimo armed guards dressed as waiters pushed covered food trays loaded with tens of millions in cash, casino chips, stock certificates, deeds, gold, silver, and a treasure trove of Bianca Sanders’s jewelry she’d gotten bored with straight through the casino, into public elevators, then to three connecting Deluxe Double guest rooms on the 8th floor. The guest rooms around, across, above, and below were cleared, the guests moved. (Upgrade!)
The loot was piled on the beds; the guards piled on the sofas, where they ordered room service and still-in-theaters movies.
The only thing left in the vault was a rotating series of human gorillas with tattoos and Ruger AC-556 assault rifles. Bellissimo bank deposits were rerouted to the human gorillas, who l
obbed it into laundry carts. At shift change, two gorillas covered the loot with pool towels and rolled the carts to a receiving bay, where they handed it off to armored trucks that delivered it to the bank.
Bradley filled in Mr. Sanders.
“How many more days do we have assets and revenue in guest rooms, laundry bins, and on receiving docks?” Mr. Sanders asked.
“If the vault inspection goes well and no repairs are needed,” Bradley said, “one. If Paragon finds they need to do any work in the vault, it might mean up to four days. At most five. I plan to leave the vault contents where they are until the inspection and updates are completed.”
We were wide open, fair game, an easy target for the next one, four, possibly five days. And we knew it. We hoped, for the next one, four, possibly five days, no one else discovered it.
“When will we know?” Mr. Sanders asked.
I sat quietly. Chugging wine.
“I’ll meet with Paragon first thing tomorrow,” my husband said, “and we can expect repairs. They’ve come prepared. They brought a tech team, and they say they’ll have us back in the vault quickly.”
Note to self: Paragon brought their own tech team for vault repairs and slot machines. To do list: Find out if it’s the same crew.
“Who knows the vault is empty?” Mr. Sanders asked.
“In addition to the three of us,” Bradley said, “only our guards and Paragon.”
* * *
In the pecking order of things, moving money around a casino gets the top spot. So for the next half hour, we pored over the details. Routes, timelines, personnel, procedures. When Mr. Sanders began looking antsy and glancing at his watch, I steered the conversation my way. The vault was Bradley’s job—to safeguard the contents and oversee the expected refurbishing, a job he’d be doing around the clock for the rest of the week. My mission was to find what was missing. People and platinum.
I asked Mr. Sanders to tell me everything he knew about the escaped convict Christopher Hall. After his shock at even hearing Hall’s name again in this lifetime, he told me all he knew. Which was no more or less than what I’d learned earlier. I asked if the fake platinum found in the vault could have been an old sin committed by Christopher Hall and Ty Thibodeaux.
“So you’re suggesting that sometime before his retirement, Ty Thibodeaux and Christopher Hall stole four million dollars in platinum from the vault and replaced it with counterfeit?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see it, Davis,” Mr. Sanders said. “Ty Thibodeaux would have never stolen from Casimiro.”
Stealing from Salvatore Casimiro would be a death sentence.
“Thibodeaux was a good casino manager.” Mr. Sanders loosened his tie. “I’ll give him that. Which is not to say I didn’t suspect my father-in-law had him running illegal errands behind my back, but none of it on my books,” Mr. Sanders said. “Nothing criminal crossed my desk, and I had enough on my desk without asking for more.”
“Did you know Christopher Hall, Mr. Sanders?”
“I never heard his name until the day he was arrested,” he said, “and even then I had no idea who he was. I didn’t know we had a counterfeiting operation in-house until Thibodeaux retired.” He tugged at his collar. “I socialized with the Thibodeauxs as little as possible, and I was only a guest here a handful of times through the years. It wasn’t until they moved out and I did a walk-through that I found the equipment. Which is when I realized that not only had my father-in-law sanctioned it, he’d installed and operated it, literally under my nose.” He stared at a Jesus dangling from a balcony. “It’s one of several precarious predicaments he had me in that I wasn’t aware of until after the fact. For what all could have happened to me since the day I met Salvatore Casimiro, I’m lucky I’m not in prison.”
Well, I thought, you are stuck with Bianca.
He told us why, upon discovering the printing and coining equipment, he didn’t dispose of it. It couldn’t be physically removed from the residence without sounding copious alarms. Which made sense. You can’t really roll a coin minting machine the size of a minibus out the front door without raising a few eyebrows. “Not only that,” he said, “I’m not sure I want the equipment out of the building.”
Right. Keep the secrets close. He, we, a lot of people could be indicted. The equipment down the hall could close the Bellissimo doors for good. Four thousand employees on the street. Innocent people would go to prison. Bradley and I had known about it for nine months, Mr. Sanders a little longer, and none of us had made a move. We were culpable, all three of us. We were liable and we were in a tight tough spot.
Mr. Sanders went on to tell us he’d hit the same moral, legal, and personal wall we’d hit. The sins of Casimiro’s and Thibodeaux’s past would jeopardize too many presents and futures to pursue it. “What am I going to do? Send my only child’s grandfather, my wife’s father, an old man who doesn’t know what day of the week it is, to prison?”
We sat quietly, except for the gluck gluck from the kitchen.
“Bianca’s father is almost ninety,” Mr. Sanders said. “He has dementia. He’s out of the casino business altogether. Even if I went to him and demanded an explanation or retribution, it wouldn’t happen. I could ask where the missing platinum is a hundred times and never get an answer. From what I understand, Ty Thibodeaux isn’t in much better shape. We’re at a dead end.”
When I hit a dead end, I put it in four-wheel drive and keep going.
“What about Magnolia Thibodeaux?” I asked. “Let’s say you’re right, Mr. Sanders, and Ty Thibodeaux had nothing to do with stealing platinum from the vault. But what about her?”
My suggestion was met with extreme skepticism.
“Have you met her, Davis?” Mr. Sanders asked. “Granted, I didn’t know her that well, but I do remember she had great difficulty navigating,” he fumbled for words, “simple tasks. To breach our vault would be a gargantuan undertaking that I don’t believe she’s capable of.”
Am I the only one? Seriously?
“I’m not saying she masterminded a vault heist, Mr. Sanders. But I believe she knows about the platinum and she thinks it’s here.” I used both hands to present Jambalaya Junction in all its glory. “In this residence.”
“What makes you think that, Davis?”
“Because she won’t stay out of here. She keeps breaking in. She either doesn’t know where it is and she’s looking for it, or she knows where it is and she’s hauling it out a little at a time.”
And with that, I lost them. I couldn’t get anyone on my Magnolia bandwagon—some say witch hunt—and when this is said and done, when I’ve nailed her, I’ll remind these men of this moment when they looked at me as if I’d lost my very last marble.
Richard Sanders shook his head at our grave marker coffee table.
“Magnolia could not have known about a counterfeiting operation that even I didn’t know about.”
“She had to have known Christopher Hall was running in and out of her home. How could she not?”
Mr. Sanders shook his head.
“Bianca doesn’t pay a bit of attention to anything that happens in our home unless it’s directly related to her.”
Which needed no explanation.
“Do we know how this man got here from prison?” Mr. Sanders asked. “Or why he had a million counterfeit dollars in one of our guest rooms?”
“I have a theory,” I said. “But at this point, that’s it. A guess.”
They were listening.
“I think the money was a payout.”
“To whom?” Bradley asked.
“Someone he wanted to take down.”
“What makes you think that?” Mr. Sanders asked.
“The money we gathered from his guest room was a trap. A deliberate trap.”
&
nbsp; “What kind of trap?” Mr. Sanders asked.
“A go-straight-to-jail trap,” I said.
Gluck, gluck.
“Who would Christopher Hall want to go straight to jail?” Bradley asked.
“Magnolia.” They looked at me as if they’d heard me wrong. Again. “We may have stumbled into the middle of a fight between Magnolia Thibodeaux and Christopher Hall that has nothing to do with us.”
My husband and Richard Sanders weren’t buying it.
“If you don’t like that theory, you won’t like this one either,” I said. “Because if it’s not them, it’s Paragon.”
“Absolutely not.” (Mr. Sanders.)
“No.” (My Husband.)
“Listen,” I said. “Several months ago Paragon Protection bought property in Horn Hill, Alabama.”
“Horn Hill?” Bradley tried to place it in reference to my Alabama hometown of Pine Apple.
“Horn Hill is in Covington County,” I said, “a hundred and fifty miles northeast of Mobile, on the other side of the Conecuh National Forest. Six people live there, and there’s nothing there in Horn Hill but a long-gone sock factory, dilapidated warehouses, and one gas station.”
Bradley and Mr. Sanders waited patiently.
“Holder Darby is from Horn Hill.”
Bradley broke the long stretch of stunned silence when he asked, “When did you learn this?”
“An hour ago.”
Mr. Sanders asked, “Is it possible all these people are involved in a sting revolving around this convention?”
“Who would be the ringleader?” Bradley asked. “It couldn’t possibly be Conner Hughes. He doesn’t have a semblance of a life beyond Paragon Protection.”
“And it’s not Magnolia Thibodeaux,” Mr. Sanders said, “she simply isn’t capable.”
I was shaping the right words to tell them I’d find who was behind it, but in the meantime, we’d better get our guard up for what was getting ready to go down, when from the foyer we heard a decidedly atrocious noise. It was a ticking retching rhythm that grew louder until it crescendoed into a choking gag, and for once, it wasn’t the refrigerator. Someone or something was being strangled near the front door. Someone was dying in the foyer.
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