Double Up Read online

  “You decent?”

  Why wouldn’t I be? I looked up from my laptop, then reached for my cold coffee, an oddity at my house. “Bradley’s at work, Bea. July and the girls are on the terrace. Come on in.”

  “Look at this.” She held up an eight-by-ten framed photograph of Blitz on New Year’s Eve, the night they opened. Fireworks everywhere. It looked like the fireworks were shooting out of the Moravian star. “You want it?”

  “Thanks, no thanks, Bea.” For one thing, I could look out my window and see Blitz all day every day. For another, the memory of watching the casino opening live from my life sofa was permanently burned in my brain. I didn’t need a reminder on the wall. “Where’d you get it? You didn’t actually pay for that, did you?”

  “I won it,” she said. “I beat Hanger Up One and I got this picture. If you don’t want it, I’m going to have Don Juan hang it in my apartment.”

  (I minded.) (But I didn’t have to look at it.) (Bea, and apparently, Don Juan, were the ones who had to look at it.) (Not passing judgement.) (Especially considering what Melvin was up to.)

  “How are we doing on money?” I asked.

  “Fine and dandy.” She passed me a casino voucher. The value was $2,500, but not redeemable for cash. The only thing she could do with it was play Hang It Up Two.

  “What now?” Bea asked.

  “Keep playing. Let’s see what else they want you to hang up.”

  “Who?”

  Never mind.

  It took three hard days for Bea to beat Hang It Up Two, which cost the cookie jar almost three thousand dollars, and Bea didn’t mind a bit because she received a five-thousand-dollar voucher good for Hang It Up Three.

  “Check it out!” She waved the voucher.

  “Bea,” I tried to explain. “That’s not money. You think you’re winning, but you’re not.”

  “The hell I’m not.”

  And that was the brilliant psychology behind gaming; Blitz had it honed.

  “You don’t call this winning?” She displayed a ten-by-fourteen framed photograph of the Blitz casino waterfalls. “You should see those bubblefallers, Davis.”

  I’d seen the bubblefallers. Everyone had seen the bubblefallers. Blitz’s circular casino was contained by eight-story-tall waterfalls that circulated and purified the air by producing iridescent bubbles that popped just above the casino floor. Part of their Green Gaming Initiative. According to them, the entire operation ran on ten gallons of gurgling spring water. According to them again, the water walls wrapping the casino were “indoor art bringing water to life, electrifying the pure and clean Blitz air, and providing a soothing liquid backdrop for today’s globally mindful gamers.”

  For me, their casino would feel like being at the bottom of a well. And what was the point of being in a casino if the waterfalls drowned out the bells and whistles? The bells and whistles were half the fun. Today’s gamers could stay home, turn on the bathtub, and gamble online if they wanted a “soothing liquid backdrop.”

  By all accounts, the players loved it.

  Whatever.

  “So, what now?” Bea had a Fitbit activity tracker on her left wrist.

  “Go back, Bea. Keep playing. Keep winning.”

  By Hang It Up Four, the stakes were so high I thought I might go broke. I wasn’t the only one. The Hang It Up crowd thinned considerably as Blitz separated the wheat from the chaff. Clearly, they only wanted the richest of the rich in the Masterpiece Salon, the extra deep-pocketed high rollers. Bea Crawford, in her neon active wear, wasn’t anyone’s definition of a high roller, but hear ye, hear ye: Cash talks. She rose through the Hang It Up ranks and by Five, found herself playing with, as she put it, “stinking filthy rich uppities.”

  Between appointed play times, I had her answering several other nagging Blitz questions. What was, exactly, an Herbal Spa Pedicure? (Big mistake. Bea insisted on a show-and-tell. “Just smell my feets, Davis. Smell them. My feets smell like cornbread dressing.”) What, exactly, was a Good Luck Session? (It was thirty minutes with a quack therapist. Bea came back bawling about having put her faith in Melvin all these years when she could have been gambling.) I was curious about the recording studio. (She returned with a karaoke version of her singing Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly.”) (There was nothing soft about the killing.) (No, I didn’t listen to it. She made it the ringtone on her phone.) I sent her on a carriage ride. (“Davis, I felt like the homescoming queen.”) I was curious about the Alysian Cleanse. I’d never heard of such. (“Davis, I felt like a rich pig rolling around naked in that mud. I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”)

  And get this: It was all comped, as in free, for Hang It Up players.

  I sent Bea in every shop and restaurant, through doors marked Employees Only, and all over the grounds. At the end of the week she beat Hang It Up Five, dragging an eighteen-by-twenty-four framed photograph of the Blitz Ferris wheel and advancing to Blitz’s high stakes room for level Six, the last rung on the ladder before the Masterpiece Salon. With her level Five win, she was presented with the key to a two-bedroom suite for the duration of her Hang It Up play. Which said to me Blitz wanted to keep an eye on the players who were within shooting distance of the Masterpiece Salon.

  “I’m not wanting to move to the Blitzer, Davis. I like it here just fine.”

  I was reading the Blitz marketing letter congratulating Bea and awarding her the suite. “No one’s asking you to move,” I said. “They’re rewarding you for doing so well on the Hang It Up game. It’s a casino comp.”

  “A who?”

  “It’s complimentary,” I explained. “You should at least go take a look. Check out the sheets while you’re there.” Blitz’s website claimed the bedsheets in the guest rooms were handstitched, the fabric an exclusive sateen weave from France with a thread count of two thousand. There was no such thing.

  “You want me to take a nap?”

  I explained I wanted her to report back on the sheets. Just look. Feel. Not steal. She returned that afternoon with a set of king-sized bedsheets stuffed in her pink and orange polka-dot Spandex capris and two pillow cases stuffed in her camo sports bra.

  “I don’t think I can swiper a bedspread,” she said. “It’s pretty big.”

  I hadn’t asked her to swiper sheets. Sheets that felt like butter. Before and after I ran them through the sanitize setting in my front load.

  She said, “I hate to say it, Davis, but this place is a dump compared to that one.”

  And I hated to hear it.

  “Now what?” Bea asked.

  I showed her a picture of Robin Sandoval.

  “I know her,” Bea said. “She’s the picture woman.”

  “I want to know her, Bea.”

  “Like how?”

  “Everything,” I said. “Everything about her.”

  Something wasn’t right at Blitz. They were rolling out the plushest red carpet I’d ever seen for the Hang It Up players. Why? To get them to the Masterpiece Salon. And who was in charge of the Masterpiece Salon? Robin Sandoval.

  Maybe Robin wasn’t as boring in real life as she was on paper.

  Something was going on in the Masterpiece Salon, and our former curator might be the key. I hadn’t said a word to anyone, because I hadn’t found a lock the Robin key fit in. When I did, I planned on telling Bradley everything. I wasn’t quite there yet on our third Date Night.

  “Davis?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Why is Bea Crawford still here?”

  Of my many choices, I went with, “I’m not sure.”

  I was sure.

  We were in Bellissimo guest room 1400, a gorgeous corner room, and just a little elevator ride away from home. I was wearing a Bellissimo bathrobe. Bradley wasn’t wearing a Bellissimo bathrobe.

  “Is she bothering you?” I asked, knowing ful
l well their paths hadn’t crossed once. I never brought up her name, and it was my daily fervent hope he’d forgotten she was here.

  Apparently not.

  “I can’t believe she’s not bothering you. I can’t believe she’s not driving you out of your mind.”

  Oh, she was.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  “No.” I very much didn’t want to tell him I had Bea loaded up with the coolest spy gadgets on the market—a keyring DVR, digital camera eyeglasses, and a hidden earpiece she called spy ears—and hoofing it to Blitz every single day. Bradley had his hands full. I didn’t want to bother him with it until I had something concrete to bother him with, because one of us bothering with Bea and Blitz was quite enough.

  “There’s no love lost between me and Bea, Bradley. I’m past ready for her to go home.”

  I wasn’t the least bit ready for her to go home.

  “You’re sure?” my husband asked one last time. “There’s nothing you want to tell me?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Fourteen

  When I hit my desk that fourth Monday morning, I had a revolutionary game in luxurious private planes and sixteen players from New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Aspen, who paid the Bellissimo $50,000 each for the chance to compete against each other in the first Wheels Up tournament forty thousand feet in the air. The first place winner would receive $100,000 of Bellissimo casino credit and a week in the penthouse. The second place winner received $50,000 of casino credit and a week in the celebrity suite next door to me. The virtual pilots who came in third, fourth, and fifth places won $25,000 in casino credit and a week in a condo on the twenty-fifth floor. Everyone else won $10,000 in casino credit, a week in a two-bedroom suite, and first shot at the next Wheels Up tournament. The entry fees handily paid for the flights, fuel, and prizes, but more importantly, big-time players would be back in our casino, not the one across the Bay. If I could keep the Falcons in the air and full of players for eight weeks, they would generate enough income to build out the game on the casino floor, and if all went according to plan, I could fill up the casino and the Bellissimo could possibly ride out this storm.

  There was nothing, absolutely nothing, like Wheels Up in gaming.

  Nothing.

  Wheels Up would put the Bellissimo back on the map.

  The best thing? It was all ours. Our competition, the industry, the flight crews, even the players knew nothing about the actual game—they were in it for a chance to fly in the Falcons—which was the beauty of writing Wheels Up solo behind my kitchen.

  And that wasn’t all.

  Bea Crawford had dropped twenty-seven pounds. Her body had to be in shock. She’d put more than two hundred miles on her new Nike Lunarglides and wanted another pair in hot pink. She walked out the door of Condo Ten the first day and hadn’t stopped yet. She kept a daily calorie count and asked me if I’d ever heard of the yogas. She’d sworn off Mountain Dew for the rest of her livelong days, her skin had cleared up, her puffy eye was gone (the puffiness, not the eye), and she’d donated her Hawaiian muumuu dresses to Goodwill. To my knowledge, she hadn’t called home once and, according to my father, no one in Pine Apple was the least bit curious or concerned about Bea. Most shockingly, she’d turned out to be a half-decent spy.

  In the same month, this one little month, Bexley and Quinn had sprouted eight teeth, four each (the cutest teeny teeth I’d ever seen in my life), were half-crawling half-scooting all over the place, and had grown out of all their size six-to-nine-month clothes, which might have been about the two cases of baby bananas they’d plowed through. I called Dr. Calliope and asked what she thought about me having a glass of wine. She said if I timed it far enough away from a feeding, I could have the whole bottle, then she said if I told anyone she said it, she’d deny it. She told me the girls were on their way to mouths full of teeth, spareribs, and drumsticks, and I’d better prepare myself for the inevitable. (People bras.) For the first time in a year and a half, I could see my future in terms not exclusive to motherhood, and it was all thanks to July. If I didn’t have her to help me chase my babies—they scooted in opposite directions—and get the bananas out of their ears, I didn’t know what I’d do. July came just in time, for the girls, for me, and for Bradley, who loved Date Night. We were on our way to Date Night when Bea texted from Blitz.

  I beat HANGER UP SIX. I got a picture of Mr. Football. I’m going to have Don Juan put it on my wall in my bathroom tomorrow. It’s a big one. I’m going to the Masterpieces on Sunday. And if I haven’t told you today, I thank you kindly for my new apartment and my spy job. I got all kinds of pictures of your girl Robin, and I’ll go back tomorrow and get more. I’ll get them to you Monday. I’ll be easy to find. I’ll be the one with the Masterpieces.

  She attached a picture of the picture she’d won for beating level Six. It wasn’t a framed photograph, like the others she’d dragged from Blitz. It was a framed oil portrait of Hyatt Johnson—huge, above the mantle huge—in his Iowa State football uniform, the gold sun setting behind the goalposts.

  Fifteen

  Monday morning, four days before Wheels Up, Bradley walked out the door at seven-thirty with a World’s Best Dad cup of coffee and Bea Crawford walked in it at seven-thirty five with a clear Blitz tumbler full of something thick and green.

  “It’s a spinach smoothers.” She held it out. “You want some?”

  I did not.

  “You’re going to need something stronger than a smoothers anyway, Davis, ’cause I got bad news.”

  Bad news for Bea might be “Let’s Make a Deal” was cancelled. “What, Bea?”

  She settled into her Monday morning debriefing chair by the window with a loud sigh. She slapped her knees. I was stacking ABC soft blocks on the rug in front of my life sofa between Bexy and Quinn. I stacked, they knocked down. I stacked, they knocked down. “What bad news, Bea?”

  She said, “It’s gone.”

  “What’s gone?”

  “Everything.”

  I looked up from my tower of blocks. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Hanger Up game.”

  After four weeks of hard casino time on her part and a whole cookie jar of cash on mine, I expected Bea to show up that morning with Mona Lisa’s sister—I had an appraiser waiting in the wings—and she was telling me the game was gone? “Slow down, Bea, and explain.”

  “How am I supposed to explain gone to you?”

  “What’s gone? And where did it go?”

  “The whole kit and caboodle is gone. Blitzer took down the Hanger game and all the pictures are gone out of the museum.”

  “Art,” I said. “From the gallery.”

  “Potatoes, tomatoes.”

  “There’s no way.”

  “Way,” she said. “The Hanger game is gone, there’s a ladies’ clothes store where the pictures used to be, and the big gold room is closed down.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You said Hang It Up was gone.” It happened every day in casino land. If a slot machine wasn’t making money for the house, it was unplugged, rolled out, and replaced with a cash cow. There could easily be a new game in Hang It Up’s place. Take It Down. Or Turn It Around.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “And you’re saying high stakes is closed too?” Blitz’s high stakes gaming room, where, in addition to Hang It Up Six, blackjack table minimums were a thousand dollars a hand and slot-machine wagers started at five hundred dollars per spin, couldn’t possibly be closed.

  “You mean the gold room?”

  I could say high stakes ten times and she’d hear gold room eleven. “Yes, Bea. The gold room.”

  “I’m not just telling you the gold room is closed,” she said. “It is closed. The circle elevators are all boarded up and the curtains are pulled. You can’t even see in.”


  I fell back against the foot of the sofa. “Bea, they might have moved high stakes, but they didn’t do away with it.” Why would they? I knew every megapixel of Blitz’s website, and I’d memorized their high stakes room. It was nicer than anything this side of Vegas, it looked like the gold vault at Fort Knox, and judging by the live feed Bea had streamed, it stayed busy, every gold seat occupied. “There isn’t a casino on Earth that would close high stakes.”

  “Well, Blitzer did,” she said.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Sometime after Friday night. When I left Friday with my football picture everything was the same. When I got there Sunday morning to play my Masterpieces everything was different.”

  BREWING COFFEE! BREWING COFFEE! BREWING COFFEE!

  Bex and Quinn looked up from their blocks. “AAAAGGGG!” and “BAAAAAAA!”

  “Bea, why are you just now telling me this?”

  “Because you said never call with spy news on the weekenders.”

  After more than a month spent with my ex-ex-mother-in-law, all in an effort to acquire a piece of art from Blitz I just knew would be a fake, they’d eliminated the entire operation within hours of me getting my hands on hard evidence? I’d been tracking their every Masterpiece Salon move on www.winatblitz.net. Of the thirty framed works of art they acquired from our gallery, the last time I checked, which was Friday, there were two Masterpiece Salon winners. No details, no photographs, just names. And I had no idea what they’d won in cash or bought in art, but I knew three days ago there were only two winners. Which left a lot of art. The promotion should have gone on for months. And they’d yanked it? In the dark of the night? With no explanation? Maybe there was an explanation. “I bet they were caught.”