It happens.
“I put her at your place,” No Hair said. “She understood she was to stay put. She should be there.”
If Bianca is in the Great Gumbo Getaway, someone pass me a blanket and I’ll sleep here.
Bradley focused his attention on Conner Hughes and Fantasy. “The three men in custody in Alabama,” he said, “the same three men who inspected and repaired the vault,” he took a breath, “the same three men who were in charge of the Mint Condition machines—”
“The bad guys,” I said. All heads turned my way.
“—is there anyone else, Conner? Fantasy?” Bradley asked. “Is there anyone else in this building who worked with, worked for, knew Miles Davenport, said boo to Miles Holloway, rode in the elevator with Miles Davenport—”
I raised my hand. “I rode in the elevator with him.” All heads turned my way again.
“To the best of my knowledge,” Conner Hughes said, “if you have him and if you have his three men, you have everyone.”
“Right,” No Hair spoke up. “We need him. Where is he? What’s the plan?”
I heard a ringing in my ears, a clacking, then a siren.
No Hair scanned the faces of his very attentive and suddenly very awake audience. “Am I missing something?”
I could see the rapid rise and fall of Fantasy’s chest out of the corner of my eye.
“Oh, hell no.” Conner Hughes slowly turned his head from side to side. “No, hell, no. Oh, no. No. Hell no.”
“I asked if there’d been any problems at the airport,” Bradley said to No Hair.
“And I said no,” No Hair said. “Because there weren’t. Bianca didn’t show up for her flight, I already had her at your place, and there were no problems.”
“Miles Davenport not being taken down at the airport is a problem.”
* * *
The long night got longer. The bar glasses disappeared and the coffee cups came out. It was three in the morning and we began furiously backpedaling.
Granted, too much had happened in a short amount of time, as evidenced by the fact that all of us looked like we’d been hit by a bus, three times, by three different buses, successively larger buses, and No Hair had been the last one onboard. Bradley thought I’d gone over it with No Hair and in all the Alabama activity, I thought he’d gone over it with No Hair.
As it turns out, neither of us had specifically instructed No Hair to lead the airport charge against Miles Davenport. So Miles Davenport not showing up at the airport didn’t even register on No Hair’s radar, because he knew nothing about it in the first place.
“I thought you had him, No Hair,” I said. “This whole time we’ve been sitting here, I thought he was locked up.”
“I never had him, Davis. I had confirmation that he’d tried to book a Bellissimo jet in Bianca’s name.”
“How did he even know enough about our internal operations to call transportation?”
A question I should have asked hours ago. In my defense, I’d been three hundred miles away and a little busy.
Fantasy found her voice. “You’re forgetting he knows Bianca.” Fantasy found her legs. “He replaced her eyelashes.” Fantasy walks and taps her lips when she’s thinking. The fingertips of her right hand were red and raw. Don’t play with nitroglycerin. “Not to mention he’s had our operating manual for months,” she said, “because he’s had Holder.”
Conner Hughes raised and shook a me-too finger.
No one said, but it was the elephant, that Miles Davenport’s ticket this week had been Fantasy. She’d played right into his (bed) hands. Holder Darby’s life was ruined. Christopher Hall’s life was over. It was yet to be seen if Conner Hughes would land on his feet after the dust cleared, but in the long run, I had a bad feeling the price Fantasy paid for being caught in Miles Davenport’s web would be the highest.
* * *
We contacted surveillance and had them bring up whatever footage they could from the casino floor and all elevators that could be accessed from room 2631. I issued a property-wide APB on him with all of security, pit bosses, slot attendants, valet, the guy emptying ashtrays, and my favorite Friday night hooker in the main casino bar. (Sadie. She knows everyone.) I thought about calling Kinko’s and having flyers printed. All in vain. No sightings, and the video showed only one item of interest: A woman wearing a black trench coat, a wide-brimmed black straw hat, and dark glasses knocking on the door of room 2631.
“Who is that?” Bradley asked.
My heart jumped to my throat when I answered. “It’s Bianca.”
“Surely not,” No Hair said.
We ran the video feed forward and back, then again, and never saw anything but a woman in black knocking on the door.
I turned to No Hair. “You’re sure she’s upstairs at our place?”
“I’m positive.”
“Call her,” Bradley said.
I dialed. “Mrs. Sanders? Where are you?”
“I’m at your home, David, and it is atrocious. I need to speak to you immediately.”
I hung up.
“She’s fine.”
We called transportation and waited to be patched through to the fleet supervisor. We crowded around the gold marble table where my phone, on speaker, was keeping company with coffee cups.
“Walk us through it.”
“The call came in at nine o’clock,” he said, “on the dot, from a man who identified himself as Mrs. Sanders’s butler. He said she would take off at midnight. Exactly midnight. Forty-five minutes before the flight, we called to tell her the car was downstairs waiting to take her to the airport, but she didn’t answer. And she never showed. We waited an hour, then pulled the plane back in the hangar. It’s not the first time Mrs. Sanders has changed her mind or given us conflicting and confusing instructions. Several months ago, we landed in Denver and she said she meant Dallas, and expected us to know it, because she wasn’t wearing her snow boots. She fired the entire crew.”
That’s our girl.
Miles Davenport could have walked out the front door, hailed a cab, and been on his way to Bangkok. Miles Davenport could have easily stolen or carjacked a vehicle and driven to Birmingham to meet up with his platinum. Miles Davenport might still be at the Bellissimo. Watching us right now.
“I know where he is.” All heads turned my way. “He’s at Jay Leno’s place.”
* * *
Except he wasn’t.
I had sensory overload from being with too many people for too many hours and vertigo from the helicopter rides and lack of sleep. I was jittery from the two cups of coffee, and now I had déjà vu.
Inside Jay Leno’s door, Dr. Paisley’s clothes were in a trail to the sofa, a bright red bra dangled off a solid white lampshade, and Baylor, naked from the waist up, his nose still very very broken, sat up from the sofa and pulled a gun on us. “Shith!”
Paisley, her hair styled Light Socket, also naked as far as we could see, rose up from the same sofa.
There’s just no telling what all that sofa has seen.
I picked up Baylor’s pants from the pile and threw them at him. “Get up.”
“Davis,” Paisley said. “I need to talk to you.”
“Not now.”
When they joined us in the hall five minutes later, neither Baylor’s nose nor Paisley’s hair in any better shape than it had been five minutes earlier, Bradley called it. “We’re done. Everyone get some sleep. We’ll meet again in the morning.”
My nice warm bed was just steps away.
“Jeremy, if you would, escort Bianca home.”
No Hair nodded.
“Fantasy, stay with us.”
“I need to go home,” she said.
Bradley didn’t hesitate when he said, “Tha
t’s not an option for you right now.”
She paled. She swallowed. She studied the floor.
“Conner, stay here.” He threw a thumb at Jay’s door. “I’ll post guards at the elevator and at the door.”
Conner nodded. He was so beaten up, he’d have agreed to take the other end of the sofa from Baylor and Paisley.
It was a long walk home down the hall and around the corner. When we got there, neither I nor Bradley had a key.
“No one’s given me a key, Bradley.”
“How have you gotten in?”
“Sears,” I said. “Sears has let me in and out.”
“Stand back,” my husband said. He pulled the gun from under his jacket and shot through the lock before any of us could stop him. I honestly didn’t know how much more I could take. We looked at one another when we heard a loud thud and extreme crying from the other side of the door. Bianca.
Bradley, gun drawn, kicked the double doors open with his foot.
We stared into the foyer of the Big Easy Flea Market.
This one room.
If these fleur-de-lis walls could talk.
We were too stunned to move and the noise, obviously from the cat, was deafening. The cat’s amplified cries bounced and echoed around the room, origin unknown. The magnolia tree in front of us had been decorated with wool streamers. The cat had shredded Bradley’s Armani and Brooks Brothers dress pants and they hung from the tree in ribbons. Every sock Bradley owned was in the foyer, either in the tree or on the floor. The cries were coming from the tree. I ran. Something was so very wrong with the cat.
Bianca was against the back wall wearing my pink bathrobe and drag queen false eyelashes, two sets, tops and bottoms, none anywhere near straight. She blinked the big things and I swear the accompanying draft blew my hair from my face.
The cat was crying its cat heart out. I was at the base of the tree moving branches and magnolia leaves as fast as I could and I couldn’t find it, I could only hear it. Changing positions, I caught a different view of Bianca through the tree limbs. She was standing between two chairs holding a taser gun.
“Bianca?” I heard Bradley’s footsteps cross to her. “Where did you get the gun?”
“It’s David’s.”
“What have you done?” he asked.
I couldn’t see the cat, but I could see the scene from between the branches. Bound and gagged in one of the chairs was poor Sears, and his face was a maze of crisscrossed lines of dry blood: His eyes, his lips, and ears were slashed slices of inflamed flesh. He looked like he’d walked through a glass door, and he rocked in his prison chair, wild-eyed.
In a second chair, on the other side of Bianca, a chair that had tipped over on the floor, the thud we’d heard, was Miles Davenport. He too was bound and gagged and he’d been beaten to a pulp. One of his eyes was swollen completely shut, like he was wearing an eye patch, and when his chair tipped over and hit the ground, it trapped his bent leg. We were looking at a one-eyed one-legged master criminal.
Long John Silver.
Bianca, with her gargantuan crooked eyelashes, trained her taser gun on him. “Tell them what he did to me, David! Tell them!”
“They know, Bianca,” I said from under the tree. “Tell us what you did to him.”
Hands on hips, she spun my way and used the taser gun to mark her words. “I never gave you permission to call me by my first name.”
“And you’ve never known mine.”
The cat. The cat. I finally found a blur of yellow, but I couldn’t catch it. The cat raced up and down the tree trunk from me to the sock nest, then back to me. When it got to me it put its cat nose almost against mine, cried, then raced back up the tree. I was helpless to slow it down, figure out what was wrong with it, stop the crying, or catch it.
“Something is wrong with your cat, David.” I pulled my head out of the tree and found Bianca. She blinked several times, probably starting a typhoon in the Gulf.
“Did you tase it?”
The cat, realizing I wasn’t under the tree with it, started crying again. I dove back in. I moved in the direction of the noise, directly in my ears now, it was so dark at the base of the tree. When I pulled my head out again to ask for a flashlight, I saw Bradley behind Sears, trying to remove his Marcoliani sock gag. I hoped he wouldn’t go for his new favorite toy and shoot the sock off Sears’s head.
“Why do you have Sears tied up, Bianca?” Did she know something we didn’t? Was Sears in on this?
“That man,” Bianca pointed to Sears with her taser gun, “obviously did something to your cat, David. He’s an animal abuser.”
Sears, finally free of his sock muzzle, made his presence known. “STAY AWAY FROM THE CAT! GET AWAY FROM THE CAT!”
I pulled my head out of the tree.
“What?” I asked Sears. “What?”
Sears hadn’t walked through a glass door. The cat had attacked him. This was what he’d been trying to tell me.
No Hair had the barrel of his gun aimed between Miles Davenport’s eyes. He didn’t look away as he said, “Fantasy?”
Her slow march to where Miles Davenport’s overturned chair bounced against the marble floor as he hopelessly struggled would have been the footsteps heard round the world had the cat not been going out of its cat mind.
“Trade places with me, Davis,” Bradley said. “Get Sears untangled and let me find the cat.”
I took another look at Sears’s face and decided it wasn’t a bad idea. I didn’t want the cat to tear up my face too. Not that I wanted it to tear up Bradley’s. Climbing out of the cast iron bucket I was halfway in, I caught a glimpse of Paisley who (had no pants on) I’d totally forgotten about, beside Baylor who (had no shirt on) I’d forgotten about too.
“Can you help a little, Baylor?”
“With whath?”
He had a point.
“How abouth I noth leth anyone elthe in, Dabith?”
That would work.
I almost ran into Bianca’s eyelashes as Bradley and I switched places. My robe did not fit her. Words were pouring out of Sears as I approached him, including socks, refrigerator, stun gun, cat, nothing I could make any sense of until he said, “That woman with the eyelashes beat that black man within an inch of his life!”
“Bianca.” I stopped everything. “Give me back my taser gun and quit with the weight lifting.”
“Give it to her, Bianca,” Bradley said.
Her eyelashes quivered at me, then at Bradley, the one below her left eye losing ground and headed south. “Why is everyone calling me Bianca?” she wailed. “When did I give any of you permission to call me Bianca?”
Bradley didn’t get anywhere near under the tree to rescue the cat when he let out a yelp and was right back out. I whipped my head around to see a bright line of blood beading a diagonal line across his cheek. He didn’t find the cat, but the cat sure found him.
“Back,” I said. “Trade again. At least the cat isn’t trying to kill me.”
Fantasy had a black boot on Miles Davenport’s bloody, busted up ear, an itchy gun on him, and she was posed, with her foot on his head, as if she’d reached Mount Everest. Miles Davenport, from under her boot, still bound to the chair and in the floor, had the fear of God in his eyes. Just like Monday, when I’d first seen him in the elevator, but this time he meant it.
“You know the difference between me and you, buddy?” He trembled. “I have faith. That’s why I’m standing here with a gun on you and you’ve had your ass kicked on the way to prison. You have no faith. You should work on that.”
The cat let out a war cry and I dove under the tree again, this time from a different approach. I was finally close enough to reach it when Bianca stopped traffic again.
“Someone get me a drink. You with the black eyes a
nd broken nose. You’re not busy. Get me a drink. Anything with alcohol in it. I’m exhausted with sobriety. David, climb down from that tree and get me a drink. Someone get me a drink.”
“No!” From behind me, Dr. Paisley spoke up. “No, Bianca. You can’t drink. You’re pregnant.”
The room grew deathly quiet, the cat and I blinked at each other, and the silence wasn’t broken until Bianca passed out cold onto the floor.
I swallowed. Hard.
“Cat?” The cat stared at me with huge, sad, unblinking eyes. It looked up to the sock nest, whimpered, then back at me. “Show me, cat,” I whispered. “Show me.”
The noise all around me was that of Bianca being administered to.
“Who knocked Biacath upth?”
“Bianca. It’s me. Dr. Paisley.” Slap slap. “Someone get her water.” Slap slap. “Can you hear me?”
“Davis! What in hell did you do to this kitchen?” (No Hair.)
“I’m what? I’m what?”
She’s back.
“My weight gain! This is my weight gain! David! Where is David? I’m with child! Where is Richard? Where is my husband? David!”
Laughter cut through the tree branches. Fantasy. “Oh, my God! Bianca! You’re pregnant. You’re going to have a baby!”
“Everyone stop calling me Bianca!”
Fantasy tapped Miles Davenport’s busted ear with her boot. “See there? Life goes on.”
I would have so enjoyed every bit of this had I not been in the tree with the cat.
“How could I be pregnant? Does Richard know? David, get Richard on the phone this minute.”
“How olth are you, Biancath?”
“Shut your mouth, young man, or I’ll shut it for you.”
“SHE WILL ZAP YOU!”
I’d forgotten Sears. I poked my head out of the tree and found him. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine, Mrs. Cole.” He dabbed a wet magnolia hand towel around his injured face. “But we need to talk about my wages. I might need hazard duty pay.”
“Sears,” Cat pawed my hand. No claws, it just wanted me back under the tree. “Go out the front door, take a left, and keep going until you reach the Leno suite. Knock on the door and tell the man staying there we need him. His name is Conner. Tell him we have his cat.”
DOUBLE MINT Page 24