Authors: Gretchen Archer
FIVE
My paycheck is ridiculously large. I have two jobs, so I receive two salaries, but just one check every other Friday. Direct deposit money dump every other Friday. Once or twice a month, I pull up my banking information just to stare at the big numbers.
The negotiations had gone down shortly after my release from prison earlier this year.
“At this point, Davis, you know what I expect of you in the corporate realm.” Richard Sanders was on his side of the desk. I was in the hot seat across from him.
“Yes, sir.” Under No Hair’s supervision, our team solves pesky internal problems that are part of the fabric of day-to-day casino operations. Simply put, cheating at games probably dates back to dinosaurs in cahoots with pterodactyls who spotted for them during boulder bowling for a cut in on the bucket-of-turtles jackpot. Today, with the eleven thousand cameras and a security staff of one-eighty at the Bellissimo, things hadn’t changed much. All players want an edge, and there will always be those who are willing to go over it.
Surveillance systems are in place for the small-time casino cheat. Purse snatchers, chip scoopers, past-posters, and dice sliders are expected. They show up regularly and are promptly shown the door, where they’re introduced to the Biloxi Metro Police. Tough sentences discourage apprentices; time served for emptying out a bank vault runs neck-and-neck with time served for marking cards at a blackjack table in Mississippi.
There is, however, another layer of cheating, the one No Hair, Fantasy, and I wallow in. The Bellissimo employs almost four thousand people, and let me assure you, they’re not all true blue. It takes more than a security suit and videography to catch a dealer partnered with a gang of counterfeiters, or a front desk manager skimming and selling random guest credit card information. Our team covertly immerses ourselves in the problem area, sniffing out the bad guys.
That’s my first job.
Bianca Casimiro Sanders is my second.
“I don’t know how this will work, Davis,” Mr. Sanders had said that day. “But I can’t imagine it will take that much of your time.”
(Wrong.)
Richard Sanders, Nevada native, UNLV graduate, mid-40s, blonde-athletic-handsome, is a stand-up guy and scary smart. The one area of his life that doesn’t fit the rest is his marriage.
“It’s not a bad idea for you to impersonate Bianca on occasion,” he said, “but I’m at a loss to set parameters or assign a value to something so unprecedented.” He shrugged, tapped a silver pen against his desk. “I think the Bellissimo will benefit from the goodwill Bianca’s stronger presence will bring.” (Behind every good man and such.) “But more than that,” he dropped the pen, “she’s dead set on it.”
Why wouldn’t she be? I honestly think that it had more to do with the fact that I was ten years younger than her (and let’s face it—five pounds lighter, seven on a skinny day) than anything else. At the time Richard Sanders and I sat down, I’d attended two events pretending to be Bianca—the Biloxi Mayor’s Breakfast and a ribbon cutting at the new children’s wing of Biloxi Memorial—and while she’d cut out her own tongue before admitting it, I think she liked the good press. A few days after the ribbon cutting, she’d tossed me an Oscar de la Renta Picasso Newsprint swimsuit. She added a sheer jacket, red stiletto heels, a hoola-hoop sized hat with matching straw bag, and four hundred dollar sunglasses. Then she sent me to the Bellissimo pool.
“Don’t take the shoes off.”
I guess that meant no swimming.
I had zigzag sun marks on my feet for two weeks.
People gawked all day, and it could have been that the swimsuit, folded, could have fit in my ear. If my father had walked up, he’d have thrown a quilt over me. The pretty pool boys, four of them, never spoke directly to me, and never left my side. They spritzed me with chilled Evian water. Brought me iced, spiked lemonade. Fed me grapes. (Kidding about the grapes.) My photograph appeared, a half-page, in an oversized, glossy New Orleans lifestyle magazine a few weeks later with the caption
The Bellissimo’s First Lady of Leisure
. The man who does our hair, Seattle, had it enlarged, matted, and framed, and I see it every time Bianca makes me have my eyebrows threaded.
Here’s what I think: Bianca is aging, and she’s not being very graceful about it. She wasn’t going down without a war either. The specialist’s surgery suite was her battleground, and the strongest weapon in her arsenal was me.
And here’s something else I think: If the Sanders’ marriage playbook hadn’t changed, everything would have been fine. But it did, and the reality of the new rules staring her right in her Juvidermed face had resulted, I was soon to learn, in her shooting herself in the foot.
After the first round of the slot tournament, I had to go see Bianca.
Knock-knock. “Mrs. Sanders?” It was a scene from The Princess and the Pea. The bed was a linen parking lot. A family of five could sleep in it comfortably. It was a study in pillows, too many to count, several propping up her injured foot, which was swathed in a silk Gucci scarf featuring green horses. I noticed she had a brand-new perfect pedicure. (Ouch.) Her little dogs were adrift somewhere in there, I could hear them snarling at me.
“You look terrible, David. What is
wrong
with you?”
“It’s Davis.”
She waved me off.
“I think I have a virus.”
(No, I didn’t.)
She dove behind pillow number seventy-three. Her muffled outrage escaped. “You need to leave immediately!” One of her arms shot out from the many fluffy duvets and I caught a glimpse of fur flying as she scooped her rat-dogs under the covers and away from my germs.
Ha ha.
“Just one thing, then I’ll go,” I said.
“Make it quick,” the pillow said.
“Why did you shoot Peyton?”
The pillow came down. “Because Richard is sleeping with her.”
* * *
One of the two elevators inside the Sanders’ residence went directly to a hallway behind Mr. Sanders’ office. And by directly, I mean in a hurry. Like a bomb. When it came to a stop (three seconds later), I found myself contemplating my lifelong adultery theory. Be it lack of opportunity, libido, or pulse, I’ve held fast to the belief that there was a slice of the male population pie immune to cheating. With each passing birthday, Democrat, and marriage (of mine), the slice has thinned. With this news, it may be gone.
In spite of my opinion that he has every reason to, there was no evidence of Mr. Sanders being unfaithful to his wife. There’s never been a whiff, hint, or trace. I found it hard to swallow that he’d start now, and in his own home.
But I’ve been wrong before, and in
my
own home.
My father could make anything work, even being married to my mother. The parts of their lives that aren’t perfect are her fault. Because he is. (Perfect.) Like any other family, though, we’d had our share of dysfunction. Sadly, most of that can be chalked up to me; I’ve had a few bumpy years/divorces.
I remember very little of middle school—the childbirth movie, pre-algebra, the 8
th
grade trip to Six Flags—but one thing our family never talks about-slash-will never forget is the two-year chill that settled in our home after Daddy returned from a week of hostage-negotiating training in Montgomery, as if anyone in Pine Apple would ever take anyone else hostage. At the time, I paid very little attention. I was busy twirling my baton. And I’d all but forgotten it until a few years ago, when Mother and Daddy were at odds as to how to repair the toll the tanking economy had taken on their 401K, and Mother went behind Daddy’s back, moving the money without his blessing. It got ugly. Meredith said, “This will be worse than the time Mother caught Daddy with that hostage-training woman in Montgomery if they don’t get this worked out soon.”
I walked around without blinking for a week.
From behind Mr. Sanders’ office, I regained a little of my equilibrium as I made my way to a second elevator ride that would take me to the Bellissimo lobby. From the lobby, I wove my way through the casino and from there, I took a steep escalator ride to the convention level. And by steep, I mean straight up. Like a missile.
The real question, though, was this: Would Bradley Cole ever cheat on me?
I made it inside the door just in time for Round Two of the Mystery Shopper slot throwdown. A lady with sliver hoop earrings as big as bicycle tires checked me in and passed me a slip of paper. I barely perched on the edge of a chair before I heard Matthew Thatcher call out from behind his microphone. “Where’s number sixteen? Number sixteen! You have less than a minute to get to your slot machine!” I looked at the slip of paper in my hand. Sixteen.
I shot up and the lights went out.
* * *
“You
what
?” Fantasy asked. “You
fainted
?”
“Yes,” I said. “I passed out cold.”
“You stood up, then went down.”
“That’s what happened.”
“And this was last night?”
“Round two of the tournament. On my way to round two.”
It was too early Sunday morning. Weekends meant nothing around here.
“So the old lady who lives in a church is still on the loose?”
“I never saw her.”
“She won.” No Hair came barreling into Mr. Sanders’ sunny office, our appointed meeting place. Around his neck, a noose. His tie was a noose. The hang someone kind. In all my time at the Bellissimo, I’ve never seen No Hair wear the same tie twice.
“She what?” I asked. “Out of all those people, she won?”
“Jewell Maffini won the Mystery Shopper grand prize. Twenty-five thousand in cash.” No Hair didn’t seem happy for her. “And you missed it.” Or with me.
I opened my mouth to defend myself but he stopped me by holding up a huge paw. “I’m pushing the pause button on her,” he said, “until we find
her
.”
He slapped a picture of Peyton Reynolds in the middle of the round, glass-topped conference table. We all took a seat, and Fantasy added a file containing our painfully thin background report. No Hair looked at me. “Don’t say it.”
I zipped my lips.
“What’d you get out of Bianca?” No Hair asked.
“Brace yourselves.”
Fantasy grabbed the edges of the table with both hands.
“Bianca thinks Mr. Sanders is having an affair with Peyton. And that’s what all the shooting was about.”
After five minutes of total stunned silence as they contemplated the improbable possibility, No Hair cleared his throat. “What else?”
“Nothing else,” I said. “She wasn’t in the mood to talk.” Not that I had been in the mood to listen.
“Make your calls,” No Hair said. “Cancel whatever you have going. Inform your loved ones. We’re staying on this until we find this girl.” He slid the assistant’s photograph closer to us. “My best guess is that she ran,” No Hair tapped the picture, “because there’s nothing up there other than her fingerprints. Not a shred of evidence that she took a bullet.” He leaned back in his chair. “So she ran. You two figure out where, why, and how the cameras missed it. Get back up there with Bianca.” (He lobbed that one at me.) “Get her to tell you exactly what happened, and find that seventh round.”
“Is he?” I asked.
“Is who what, Davis?”
“Is Mr. Sanders having an affair with the assistant?”
No Hair took a deep noisy breath. “That’s none of our business.”
And that was our cue to scoot. Fantasy and I began gathering our things, minding our own bee’s wax, making a run for it, when No Hair stopped us. “One more thing.”
I
hate
it when No Hair says those words.
“Davis.”
I hate it when he says that word, too.
“Is it true Thatch caught you?”
Fantasy dropped her purse and her jaw. “
No
!”
I dropped back into my chair. “It really wasn’t that big a deal.”
“
Matthew
Thatcher?” Fantasy asked. “Mr. Microphone?”
“I don’t know that he caught me so much as he was holding me when I came to.”
“Whatever,” Fantasy said. “What’d he smell like?”
I turned to No Hair. “How do you even know about that?”
“First,” he shook a finger, “I know everything, and don’t forget it. Second, he called.”
“You?”
“He called Richard,” No Hair said. “It got routed to me.”
“Why would he call Mr. Sanders?” I asked. “To tell him someone fainted at the slot tournament?”
“No,” No Hair said, “he called because he couldn’t find the someone who’d fainted at the slot tournament.”
“Why was he looking for me?”
“I don’t know, Davis.” No Hair laced his big fingers across his barrel chest and tipped his chair back. “Why would he be looking for you?”
“Mr. Microphone is a notorious boy-slut,” Fantasy said. “He
likes
you, Davis! He wants to play
doctor
with you!”
“Oh, poo.” I could feel my face turning red.
“That is why he called.”
What?
“He looked you up.”
“How and why,” I asked, “did he look me up?”
“He called your room to check on you,” No Hair kept going, “then called here because there wasn’t a marketing portfolio set up on you, which he found odd.” He took a beady-eyed swat at Fantasy, who was in charge of base-covering when it came to aliases.
“How and why,” I asked, “does he have computer clearance for marketing portfolios?”
“I found it odd, too,” he spoke directly to Fantasy, “that there was no marketing portfolio.”
“Oh, brother,” Fantasy said. “Don’t turn this into a federal offense on my part, No Hair. You’re the one who sprang all this on us. There were probably ten new players in the tournament whose portfolios weren’t complete. We’ll just call her a new player and leave it at that.”
“The microphone guy shouldn’t have access to player information.” Could anyone even hear me?
“That’ll work this time,” No Hair said to Fantasy, “but these little details—” after that, it was blah, blah, blah, and yada, yada, yada. I didn’t hear another word until “—so I gave him your number.”
“You what?” I shot straight up.
“Davis. The guy asked for your number. I told him I’d look into it and get back with him, and I had two choices: Tell him who you are or give him a contact number. I gave him a contact number.”
“What number?”
No Hair reached into his jacket, pulled out a burn phone and tossed it to me. “This one. And he’s called you twice. And it sounds like he does want to play doctor, or something, with you.” No Hair snickered.
“You
listened
to the messages?” I was offended. “My
private
messages?”
Fantasy was clapping with glee. She was, like the rest of Harrison County, including Mr. Sanders, a huge Matthew Thatcher fan.
“What am I supposed to tell Bradley Cole?” I demanded.
“He knows you have a job to do, Davis,” No Hair said. “No one’s asking you to sleep with the guy.”
Just then, the burn phone rang. I tossed it through the air hot-potato style. It landed on the floor in the middle of the room. We all stared at it as it sang its ring song.
“Answer the phone, Davis,” No Hair barked. “And find that girl.”