Sears was bent over the half of the granite island still standing, catching his breath, waving through the Saint Somebody dust, repeating, “Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.”
“Are you hurt?” I patted Sears down, not finding any weapons or broken bones, the cat, the whole time, singing the fire alarm song, my phone, the whole time, ringing.
“I’m okay,” Sears said, “but for God’s sake, shut the cat up.”
I slid back to the cat. I tried to lift the ice bin, the cat begging me, at top volume, to hurry. Turning to Sears, I asked, “Can you help me lift this thing? Grab one side.” The cat had moved on to Air Raid Siren, and no coffee yet. The whole time. No coffee. Not a drop. Not one drop.
Sears shook it off, shuffled over, and together we fought to lift the ice bin.
“Why is it so heavy?” I asked.
Veins popped through the Saint Somebody dust on Sears’s face. “I have no idea. It’s not even an ice maker, you know,” he grunted. “It’s an ice machine.”
“Is there a diff—?”
And that’s when whatever had the ice bin tripped up and stuck gave way, just in time for the cat to shoot out in a blur of yellow fur and the front panel of the ice bin to snap, split, and spill thousands of platinum coins all over me, Sears, down the freezer, onto the floor, and all across the kitchen. None of us—me, Sears, or the cat—could do anything but watch the deluge of coins spill out of the freezer. It was so, so, so Pirates of the Caribbean.
Just then my husband, wild-eyed and red-faced, burst into the kitchen, stopped dead cold, and tried to take it all in—me, Sears, Saint Somebody, the cat, who was hanging upside down from the swinging chandelier where it had landed, the kitchen island destroyed, and the platinum, so much platinum, still clinking and settling. Lots and lots of platinum.
Sears found his voice first. “I’d say all this has been the problem with the refrigerator the whole time.”
Sixteen
“Calls came in from all over the building, Davis.”
“It was loud,” I said. “So loud. Really loud.”
My husband stood, surveyed the destruction a little further, then turned to Sears. “Obviously,” he said, “I need you to use a little discretion here.”
Sears locked his chalky lips, then threw away the key.
Bradley pulled his phone from his pocket, dialed, and said, “Calinda, I need a cleanup crew on twenty-nine.” A pause. “Yes,” he said, “the refrigerator, then some.” Another pause. “At least twice the number of people it took to clean up the chandelier Monday.” A pause. He ended the call, then his eyes fell on the empty coffee carafe. He was momentarily stunned, as if it was the strangest thing going on in the kitchen. He turned to me. “You need coffee.”
My head rolled around in affirmation.
He called Calinda again. “Have someone from Beans bring Davis a pot of coffee right away.”
I love him.
Bradley, Sears, and I started lobbing frozen platinum coins into the cat’s freezer bin. We got the last of them into the bin and the three of us dragged it across the tile floor to a remote corner of Who Dat Hooters, where I tossed a dancing crawfish fleece blanket over millions in platinum, then called Baylor in to see it safely to the temporary vault where Magnolia Thibodeaux would never find it.
“Do you hear me, Baylor? Go to the eighth floor and get yourself two big guys carrying two big Rugers, bring them here, then move the platinum to the temporary vault and nowhere else. Not my car or your truck.”
He told me his truck was still out of gas.
Good to know.
Bradley, hands on hips, turned to me. He opened his mouth to speak and I waved him off. He knew I knew he was sorry he hadn’t believed me about birdbrain Magnolia running in and out of here and I didn’t, I would never, make him say it. Maybe I’d redeemed myself. And if I was several million to the good with Bradley, in spite of the spying and vault business, so be it, because I’d need the leverage when he found out I actually had been hauled off to jail while he was being held at gunpoint in the vault. He kissed me bye, thanked Sears again, and left for his office just as the cleaning crew entered.
Sears, mopping sweat, fell into one of the purple pleather recliners. I collapsed on the purple pleather beside him.
We sat in silence for a good long while. Numbness set in when I realized if we had the platinum, Paragon Protection didn’t. If we’d just located all the missing platinum, it wasn’t in the Mint Condition slot machines. I’d need a good count on what we’d just rescued to know. If Paragon wasn’t stealing platinum from us, I’d have to write this week off to wrong roads, dead ends, jail, a cat, and menopause. Then try to move on with my life.
“Where’d your cat take off to?”
“Not my cat,” I told Sears, “and I have no idea.”
* * *
Sears capped off the water line to the red refrigerator, the only thing left standing in the kitchen, then water was restored to the twenty-ninth floor. I walked him to the front door. He wrote his cell phone number on the back of an appointment card. “If you ever need anything.”
“What’s your name?”
“You can call me Sears.”
“Do you have a truck full of tools, Sears?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“What do they pay you?”
“Fourteen an hour,” he said. “No benefits, but I get mileage.”
Have I got a deal for you, Sears.
The cat jumped out of the magnolia tree in the foyer and followed me to the alligator gumbo bedroom where I finally had a cup of coffee. Soon enough, I was showered and feeling human. While I was getting dressed, the cat had been busy pulling Bradley’s Armani and Brooks Brothers pants off hangers and kneading them in to a fat bed in Bradley’s closet.
I didn’t have the energy.
I told it to stay out of the way and out of trouble in our bedroom until I got back and it didn’t even look up, just swished its fat yellow tail.
The noise of the cleaning crew still at it, removing the vestiges of Saint Somebody, forced me to go all Audrey Hepburn before I stepped out—scarf tied under my chin, square dark sunglasses—so if they told anyone they’d actually seen Mr. Cole’s elusive wife, they wouldn’t have details beyond she’s very sophisticated and has a cat.
When I reached the foyer, my fifth mile of the day, I had to step around a wooden pallet stacked waist high with Saint Somebody leftovers. The man in coveralls securing the pieces, arms and a concrete sandaled foot, looked up at me. “Did you know someone cut out the whole back of this thing with a welding torch?” he asked. “Made it unstable.”
“Terrible,” I said, then stepped out the front door, something catching my eye down the hall at Jay Leno’s place.
A big dark something at the door. I took a few tentative steps, then broke into a run, digging in my spy bag for my gun and my passkey.
Honestly, it was barely nine o’clock in the morning.
Before I reached the door, I stepped out of my brand new $650 Alexander Wang white leather open-toed wedge booties so I wouldn’t ruin them, then dropped them into my spy bag. My feet sank into the wet carpet. I swiped the door to Jay’s place, pushed it open, and a gush of water rushed out the door, over my feet, and into the hall.
Note to self: Stop flooding the building. Last weekend, the Hello Kitty wedding hall. Yesterday, my kitchen. Today, Jay’s place.
“Hello?” I took in the scene. The whole scene. “Hello?”
I sloshed through to the master bath, where the waterfall fixture on the Olympic-sized bathtub was wide open, releasing gallons and gallons of water per second, spilling over the rim of the bathtub, across the marble floor, down the hall, and out the front door. I was in water up to my ankles. I wasn’t about to swim into the tub, so I shot a towel bar off the wall,
bang bang, reached for it when it floated my way, and used it as a hammer to turn off the water, thud thud, then rode three thick guest towels down the hall and out the front door, scoot scoot, which dried my feet. Safely out, I traded my gun for my phone and stepped back into my shoes.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Hey!”
Someone was awfully chipper this morning.
“Road trip,” I said. “Meet me at my car.”
“Where to?” she asked.
“New Orleans.”
“Are we going to kick Magnolia’s ass?”
“Something like that.”
“I like it,” Fantasy said. “Have you smoothed things over with Bradley?”
“I think so.” To the tune of four million big ones.
“You can tell me all about it on the way.”
And you, Fantasy, can tell me all about Dionne Warwick’s guy.
* * *
Mile six, to my car. I called Bradley. I thought it best to butter him up first. He caught on right away. “Just tell me.”
“When is Dionne Warwick checking in?”
“Oh, no, Davis. No.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Just tell me. What happened?”
“When is she checking in?”
“Her band gets here today. Four o’clock. What happened?”
“I’m not really sure, but we need a cleanup crew at Jay Leno’s place quick. Some wet-vacs, and maybe a little carpet.” And that was when I stepped out of the building and saw what was parked in my spot.
* * *
“This is truly disgusting beyond words. We could drive my car, you know.”
“You have two flat tires, Fantasy.” My appointment with Bianca’s gyno was in four hours. Just enough time to get to New Orleans, have a little chat with Magnolia Thibodeaux, and back to Biloxi. “Get in.”
I could barely maneuver the nasty boat of a car to the Starbucks drive-through speaker, and only after I’d destroyed all of Starbucks’ landscaping did we make it to the coffee, where five Starbucks people were squeezed in the window to get a better look, all of them glazed over.
“How much!” I had to yell over the knocking engine.
One of the Starbucks people waved me on. And that might be the appeal of this humiliating clunker to Eddie the Ass. Free stuff.
Fantasy finally pulled her sweater down from her face so she could drink her coffee. “Why does it smell so bad and what’s up with the stupid bull horns?”
“I have no idea.”
“You look like a twelve-year-old driving this rattletrap.”
I couldn’t begin to see above the boat helm of a steering wheel. I needed a booster seat. It had no power steering, and we weren’t ten miles from the Bellissimo before my arms, shoulders, and neck were exhausted.
“The glove compartment is full of condoms, Davis. This is disgusting.”
“I’m going to kill Baylor,” I said. “I’m just going to kill him.”
“I’ll help.”
We rode in relative silence, considering how loud the damn car was, for several miles, until Fantasy figured it out.
“You don’t want to go to New Orleans and kick Magnolia’s ass, Davis. You want to trap me in this ridiculous car of Eddie’s and kick my ass.”
“I’m trying to save you.”
“I don’t need to be saved.”
We were on I-10 West, sixty miles of straight road ahead. Now my legs hurt, because both the gas and brake pedals needed extreme coaxing. The Cadillac burned oil at a rapid rate too, leaving a trail of sooty smoke, and the damn thing lurched every sixteen seconds for no good reason. Like just now, sending Fantasy into the dash.
“Shit!”
“Don’t try to change the subject, Fantasy.”
“Pull over somewhere, Davis, and let’s hitchhike. We’ll buy a car, rent one, or call a Bellissimo limo to come get us. And I’m not trying to change the subject.” She couldn’t find a cup holder, because they didn’t make cup holders during the Civil War when this car was built. “The subject is I don’t need you to save me.”
“Then tell me why your Jean Paul Gaultier dress is hanging off the lampshade at Jay Leno’s place, and tell me who drank four bottles of champagne, and then tell me why the bathtub water was on. That thing’s a lap pool, Fantasy, and you, or Dionne Warwick’s guy, or both of you ran out of there naked and forgot to turn off the faucet. When the water was turned back on this morning the whole suite flooded. I don’t know where we’re going to put Dionne Warwick, and I will get blamed for this, because I’m the one who turned off the water main last night while you were running a bubble bath.” I caught my breath. “What is going on with you? What are you doing, Fantasy?”
“I didn’t run out of there naked, thank you.”
“Did you sleep with that man?”
She stared out a filthy window the size of Macy’s storefront. “No.”
The next ten miles were nothing but bald whitewall tires and hearts turning.
She stared out the filthy window the size of a Macy’s storefront.
“Yes.”
I let my forehead bounce off the horn cap of the steering wheel.
* * *
Twenty silent minutes later, I wrestled the Cadillac to the curb at Ty and Magnolia Thibodaux’s house. Google Earth didn’t do it justice. It was a three-million-dollar Garden District home on 3rd Street, 7,000 square feet of Crescent City’s finest. Eight bedrooms, and no telling how many ghosts. It was pink, with twenty lime green shutters, and six iron railed balconies jutting from six sets of French doors, which Magnolia surely loved.
The Thibodeaux’s street was as good a place as any.
“Look, Davis. It’s my vacation.”
“So?”
The engine wheezed and popped long after I’d turned it off.
“Two weeks of my year, I don’t have to be home,” she said, “cook dinner, do homework, laundry, or answer to anyone.”
“Do you cheat on Reggie every time you don’t have homework or laundry?”
“No!”
“Have you ever cheated on him before?”
We’d never had this talk. There’d never been a reason to have this talk. I wish we weren’t having it now.
“No.”
“Are you going to cheat on him again? At work?”
“I work all the time, Davis. If I don’t cheat on him at work, when am I supposed to cheat on him?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of something behind one of the lime green shuttered windows.
“Aside from the fact that you’re married and have three kids,” I said, “do you realize what a security risk it is for you to sleep with a guest? Do you even know this man? Did you bother to check him out at all?”
Her eyes rolled to the battered convertible headliner of Eddie’s disgusting car. “Of course I did. He keeps his credit cards in alphabetical order.”
“Fascinating. I’m not impressed. Did you bother to run one of the credit cards? See how many women he might be sleeping with?”
“Davis, that’s just mean.”
Maybe.
“His watch chimes, like a church bell, every hour.”
“Oh, that would have me peeling off my clothes too.”
She had nothing to say.
“What were you thinking?”
She let her head fall back on the seat, stretched her legs, closed her eyes, then said, “I have no idea. I wasn’t thinking. The chandelier fell on him, we had coffee, then drinks, then dinner, then—”
I held up a stop sign. I know what comes after dinner. “Does he have a name?”
She looked at me with dreamy eyes. It was all so high school. Except fo
r the fact she’s married with three kids. “Miles.”
“Miles,” I repeated.
“Miles.”
For how his name came out of her mouth, you’d think she slept with Mr. Darcy Pope Francis Johnny Depp.
We were in deep trouble. Big trouble, bad trouble, unbelievable trouble.
We didn’t see it coming when Mini Me started beating on the dirty car window. Fantasy and I screamed out a lung each.
* * *
A small woman in a black and white maid’s uniform straight from the wardrobe department of The Help showed us in, placed a tray of drinks in front of us, then took a position at the door, glaring, curling her lip, and daring us to touch something.
A minute later, a honey cloud of blooming magnolias entered the room well before Magnolia did—she surely bathed in it—and it’s exactly what I smell when she’s been on one of her French Quarter treasure hunts in the Creole Crazy house.
Fantasy the Adulterer sneezed.
The maid shuffled out of the way when she smelled Magnolia coming.
“That’ll be all, Teensy.”
Teensy took off.
Hostile posture was assumed by all.
“I know you,” Magnolia announced. “You’re Jeremy’s girl, married to the new casino manager.”
“My name is Davis.”
“That’s a stupid name.”
Said the lady who’s named after a tree.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “What is it you want?”
I reached in my pocket and pulled out one of the fake platinum coins found in the Bellissimo vault. I flipped it off my thumb and through the air, a trick I learned from Cooter Platt when I was six. The heavy coin twirled and twisted, landing on her powder blue skort, two points for me, you’d have thought I tossed a tarantula in her lap.
She stared at it for the longest. “Is this real?”
“Is that real?” (Mini Me.)
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