Double Up Page 10

  She’d colored her hair. When Bea popped her head into my office Friday, her hair was still buzz-cut short, but chestnut brown instead of black and white.

  “Pictures?” she asked. “You want me to go look at pictures?”

  “It’s art, Bea. Fine art. I want to know if the art in their gallery is the same art that was in our gallery last week.”

  “How am I supposed to know that?”

  I passed her a burner phone and explained, in the simplest of terms, what I wanted her to do.

  “Why?”

  I said, “I’m just curious.”

  “About pictures.” She shook her head, as if to say I needed to get a life. She stood. “I’m going to walk over there.”

  “Bea, it’s three miles. Drive, or catch a cab.”

  “I got my walker shoes,” she said. “I can walk.”

  “Three miles?”

  “And three miles back.” She looked at the ceiling as if there were a calculator on it. “That’s six miles. I can do it.”

  And she did. She laced up her Nikes and hoofed it to Blitz and back, including the climb over the Biloxi Bay Bridge both ways. Six hours later, just as I was about to send out a pack of search dogs, she finally returned. She looked like she’d walked sixty miles. Uphill. Pulling a buffalo. Or maybe riding a buffalo. One thing was for sure, she smelled like a buffalo.

  She fell into the chair across from my desk. “You got any water?”

  Before it was over, she drank a quart. The sound effects were terrifying.

  She had video, ninety-nine percent of it the ceiling and floor, but enough wall for me to see that Blitz was, indeed, the private collector that now owned the former contents of the Bellissimo’s gallery. Bea declared it junk, and said what they should’ve had was the picture of dogs playing poker, because that made good sense. She knew for a fact they could buy it, already in a nice frame, at Big Lots.

  “Anything else?” Bea was stuffed into orange leggings, spilling out of a tiger-striped stretch tank top, and pouring sweat.

  “That’s all, Bea.” I downloaded the gallery evidence to my laptop. “Not a word of this to anyone.”

  “I know how to keep my mouth shut, Davis.”

  She most certainly did not.

  “I’m going back to my new apartment to rest my feets,” she said. “You let me know if you need anything else. And if I forgot to tell you today, I appreciate you putting me up. Did you know someone comes every day at ten o’clock, when ‘The Price is Right’ is on, and cleans my apartment?”

  I did know that.

  “Nice fella,” she said. “His name’s Juan. I think he’s from Italy. I call him Don Juan.” She grunted up from the chair. “Well, toodleoo.”

  I shook my head. Who was this woman? And what did she leave on my chair? I rose and walked around my desk to the white ladder-back chair on the other side and examined the middle slat. She’d left a smear of gold on the chair. “Bea!” I ran after her and caught her at the front door. “Wait. Stand still.”

  She stopped. “What?” The back of her tiger-striped tank top had a quarter-sized glob of gold—paint? If it was, it was the strangest paint I’d ever seen in my life. “Have I got a bug on me, Davis? Knock it off!”

  Maybe it wasn’t paint. It was more like gold glue. Like glue with gold pigment.

  “I think you have paint on your back, Bea. Don’t bump up against anything.”

  “I already bumped up against something or I wouldn’t have paint on me.”

  She’d walked six miles. There was no telling where she’d run into paint. Maybe the buffalo.

  Back at my desk, I stared at the gold smear on the chair.

  And then a little more.

  I picked up the phone and texted Bea: I need your tiger top.

  She texted back: My who?

  I tapped out: The shirt you wore to Blitz.

  She replied: It might be a little loose on you.

  Four of me could fit in that tiger top.

  I had trouble falling asleep that night. So much trouble, I woke Bradley up.

  “Are you awake?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  He rolled over. He pushed my hair from my face so he could see me. “What?”

  “How well do we know the Sandovals?”

  “The whos?”

  “The pilot, Denver Sandoval, and his wife, Robin. The curator who quit last week.”

  He was half asleep. “Other than the night we met them before the girls were born, we don’t know them at all. Much less well. She showed up with the art. As for the pilot, I’ve seen him at the airport twice. Maybe. Why?”

  “She works for Blitz.”

  “Does she, now?”

  “Blitz bought Mr. Sanders’s art, Bradley.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I saw it on the news.”

  “You watched the news?”

  GULF COAST HEADLINE NEWS! GULF COAST HEADLINE NEWS! GULF COAST HEADLINE NEWS!

  “OFF! OFF! OFF!”

  Twelve

  My second Monday morning back at work July arrived at ten on the nose with two The Farmer Says See ’n Say toys. I had one when I was a little girl—the cow says “moo!” Today July had attempted a ponytail on top of her head, and it looked as if she’d tried to lasso the sun and wear it as a curly crown. She dressed casually, for playtime, in jeans and bright tops with bows, buttons, and always pockets, where she kept a stash of pacifiers. She’d been to our home many times with Baylor—enough not to be freaked out about House—but after only a week as our nanny, I was coming dangerously close to thinking of her as all ours. Only when either of us said something about Baylor did I remember that she wasn’t just mine, Bexy’s, and Quinn’s. She slipped into our home and their little lives as if she’d been here all along. The twins absolutely adored her, and rather than taking away from my parenting, something all the other nannies had tried to do, with July’s help, I loved it even more. The girls had never been away from me, nor I from them, and it was only after July that my daughters and I understood missing each other. I’d pop into the nursery having not seen them for an hour and we were all three thrilled. I finally understood how Bradley was able to leave them and go to work. Because it was so much fun to come home.

  July settled in with the twins and I went to my office behind the kitchen to tackle the second part of my plan to save the Bellissimo: the Falcons. I nosed around the airplane specifications, studied the cabin layout, then pulled the blueprints for the passenger seats. The front passenger cabins had eight white Italian leather chairs in four rows of two. They were oversized, with comfort control and twenty massage options, and stretched out into loungers. The best part? Each seat on the Falcon had its own touchscreen, complete with gesture control, eye-tracking, and directional acoustic sound. The hi-def screen had 3-D and holographic capabilities and was loaded with two thousand hours of in-flight entertainment. I nosed through the entertainment: “Flipping Florida,” a decade of MSNBC, every movie Tom Hanks had ever starred in, and every season of “Mike & Molly.” All that was about to go and be replaced with one in-flight entertainment option—Wheels Up.

  After lunch, I stalked the Sandovals. Their background checks came back without so much as a failure to yield. He did three tours in Afghanistan before he hung up his Apache wings and went private; she was a contract art consultant for the estate administration division of the bank Mr. Sanders bought both the Falcons and the art from. They’d been married without incident or children for fourteen years. She had a degree in Art History from the New England Institute of Technology, and he graduated from the Air Force Academy. Every time I went back to them, they were more boring than the last time.

  There had to be something.

  I couldn’t find it.

  I should’ve had Brad
ley fire him, if for no other reason other than his wife worked for the competition, but that would’ve surely jeopardized my plans to save this sinking ship. For all I knew, his crew would follow him, and where would that leave me? I could pick up the phone and confront her, but with what? Your husband works for us and you shouldn’t work for them? The same thing No Hair said to Fantasy, and that hadn’t gone over so well.

  I compromised with myself. I’d protect the game and the Bellissimo.

  Pfffft, Blitz, their gallery, and their curator.

  I called Bradley.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, you.”

  “Are you busy?”

  It was habit, the question, because my husband’s ten-plus-hour day was nothing but keeping the wolves at bay. No doubt he was busy.

  “In my life, Davis, there won’t come a day when I don’t have time for you. What do you need?”

  “A confidentiality agreement.”

  “What’s so secret?”

  “The game I coded. The details can’t leave the Falcons.”

  “Don’t let the details onto the Falcons, Davis, then you won’t have to worry about them getting out.”

  Of course. I’d wait until the last minute to load the game. “You’re brilliant.”

  I’d keep it in my office, on my laptop, until then. Denver Sandoval couldn’t tell Robin Sandoval what he didn’t know. And I couldn’t find anything on them anyway, which finished solving the Sandoval problem, and honestly, I was relieved. I liked what I was doing. Being back in the work saddle returned my misplaced brain and energy. It didn’t feel like before the girls; it felt infinitely better. I wondered, quietly, in spite of continuing to live my life mostly confined to the twenty-ninth floor of the Bellissimo and still not knowing exactly what our future held, if I might’ve stumbled onto the answer to the question of the meaning of life. Because this felt like having it all. And I was glad my Super Secret Spy days were over.

  The next day, I officially went back to work as a Super Secret Spy.

  Tuesday morning after July bounced in with two pairs of hot pink suede Baby UGG boots, I settled in my office behind the kitchen to determine the maximum length of Wheels Up’s contiguous subsequences when the lab results from the chemical composition analysis I’d ordered on Bea’s buffalo tiger top dinged into my inbox. The verdict? High-gloss acrylic compound used by artists for painting, drawing, staining, glazing, and inking.

  You’ve got to be kidding me.

  I picked up the phone and called Bea Crawford. “I need another favor.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I need you to go back to Blitz.”

  “It’s three miles there.”

  “Yes.”

  “And three miles back,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “That’s six miles.”

  “Excellent.”

  “But I’m up to eight. I’ll just loopy-loop and make it eight.”

  I pulled the phone away from my head and looked at it.

  “You want me to take pictures of the pictures again?”

  “No.”

  I weighed my next words carefully before they left my lips. I could let it go or pursue it. I was back at work in a capacity I was comfortable with. I could get to my daughters in two seconds flat and they could get to me in one. (July was lightning fast, sometimes just a blur of blonde.) The step I was about to take with Bea bordered dangerously close to my old job, and we all knew how that turned out. I couldn’t help myself. The words came out.

  “I want you to go to Blitz and buy a piece of art from their gallery.”

  An hour later, she called.

  “Davis? Davis Way? Is this you? It’s me, Bea, at the Blitzer.”

  “Bea! Take it down a notch. Can anyone hear you?”

  “I’m calling you from church. There’s nobody here except me and the preacher. You think the preacher is going to rat me out?”

  “Why are you in a church? What church? Where?”

  “It’s a wedding church. Just for weddings. Back here in the woods behind the casino.”

  Blitz’s wedding chapel. I’d seen it on their website, but not out the window as it was hidden behind the casino.

  “It’s cute,” Bea said. “Big white piano. Makes me think of Liberace. You know Liberace? He might be dead. Movie stars die so fast these days. Do you know if he’s dead or not?”

  “Bea.”

  “What?”

  “Did you buy a piece of art?”

  Bea wasn’t in the wedding chapel with a shiny Liberace piano with a painting, drawing, watercolor, or print from the Blitz gallery, because the art wasn’t for sale. The only way to acquire art from the gallery at Blitz was to win it. First, by playing through six levels of an art-themed slot machine called Hang It Up. Which even I had to admit was clever. Only when a player beat Hang It Up could they earn a seat in the Masterpiece Salon, a separate, private, and exclusive art-exchange casino above the gallery. What happened in the Masterpiece Salon was unclear, other than the Hang It Up winners leaving with fine art. Blitz acquired Mr. Sanders’s art collection for the sole purpose of turning it around. Twice. Once through Hang It Up, raking in casino dollars hand over fist, and the second time through the Masterpiece Salon, selling it.

  They were casino marketing savants.

  It took Bea forever to tell it, and my grueling Q&A afterward, in which I attempted to boil it down from Bea Garble to fact, like mining for microscopic gold, took even longer. I was left with one burning question: Was Blitz turning a profit on the art a third time? Were they running an art scam? Were players investing in the Hang It Up game for the chance to play in the Masterpiece Salon and walking away with forgeries?

  It was the moment I officially recruited Bea Crawford to be my Blitz spy. The only way to know if Blitz was passing off forgeries as genuine art was to get my hands on a piece of it. The only way to get my hands on a piece of it was for her to win it. Which turned out to be harder than writing Wheels Up.

  “Bea,” I said. “Get out of the church and go play the Hang It Up game.”

  It was two hours before I heard from her again.

  Actually, I heard from House.

  UNKNOWN VISITOR! UNKNOWN VISITOR! UNKNOWN VISITOR!

  I looked through the peephole.

  “Is the coaster clear?”

  “Come on in, Bea.”

  A month ago, a year ago, a decade ago, if anyone had told me those words would pass these lips, I’d have laughed.

  “I couldn’t get anywhere near that thing, Davis.” She sat in the gold paint chair across from my desk wearing lime green bicycle shorts, a bright orange tank top, and a lime green terrycloth sweatband sliced through her forehead. “And when I did, here’s all I got.” She dove a hand deep into her industrial sports bra and came back out with a limp something. She held it out.

  I didn’t know what to do, because I didn’t have tongs, surgical gloves, or a ten-foot pole in my office behind the kitchen. It was an instruction card for an online Hang It Up application. Blitz players had to qualify to play Hang It Up. Blitz was screening out the riffraff. I thought it best to let the instruction card cool down.

  When it did, I scrambled my IP address and did everything but burn off Bea’s fingerprints. She went from Bea Crawford, Pine Apple, Alabama, fry cook, to Bea Crawford, Detroit, Michigan, filthy rich eccentric modern art collector with a fat wallet and an obese portfolio. I didn’t dare list her address as the Bellissimo, which would raise Blitz eyebrows, so I cyber-moved her into a four-bedroom penthouse condo at the Ocean Club on Beach Boulevard. I hit send and sat back. She was approved in five minutes.

  Blitz was running an art scam. With Mr. Sanders’s art.

  Now I had two jobs: saving this casino and taking that one down.

  Me: I really need to run something by
you. In person maybe? Coffee? Come see the girls?

  Her:

  Thirteen

  My plan to save the Bellissimo needed one final component, the most important component, virtual pilots. They were my focus on my third Monday back at work.

  I calculated flight times to Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, and Jacksonville, cities I knew had high concentrations of players who frequented the Bellissimo. From takeoff to landing, all four flights in the high-performance Falcons were well under an hour. I recalculated, slowing the planes down twenty knots, if that was even a thing—I’m no pilot—and the flights were still less than an hour. I needed the players in the air longer. I applied the same flight math to New York, California, Washington, and Colorado. That was more like it. I pulled every player name who’d ever set foot in the door from New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Aspen. The list was impressively long, considering the geography, almost fifteen hundred names. I sorted the players by net worth, took the top two hundred, then narrowed the list down to the sixty-seven players whose internet browsing history showed an interest in aviation. Twenty-one were aircraft owners, the nicest one a thirty-year-old six-seater prop plane, and fourteen had taken flying lessons at one time or another. These players were going to love flying in the Falcons and love the game even more. I had my target tournament players. I copied the names and contact information to a separate document, printed it, taped it to the wall, and began recruiting, the whole time Bea Crawford was playing Hang It Up at Blitz.

  I had to give her this: she worked tirelessly, eight- and ten-hour shifts, playing her way to the Masterpiece Salon.

  I had to give me this: I was going broke.

  When Bea won, which was about half the time, she put the winnings right back into the game. When she lost, which was the other half, I had to hit my secret cash stash cookie jar. If she didn’t win her way to the Masterpiece Salon quickly, I’d be asking House to put Oreos on my grocery list. Hang It Up was a tight game, not easy to win, and probably designed that way so Blitz could separate the casual money from the serious. It took several long days of play for Bea to beat Hang It Up One, which cost my cookie jar several thousand dollars. She poked her head in the door of my office Wednesday afternoon.