DOUBLE MINT (8 page)

Eight

I cracked Holder Darby’s conference file while Baylor was out fetching my coffee.
I printed a list of attendees while he ate ribs. I printed a list of sponsors and
vendors while he took a bubble bath, because he was covered in rib gravy. All that
done, and finally, he was ready to work. He sat down beside me smelling like a bar
of soap as I was going over the conference schedule, which was unimpressive until
the last day, when everything was scheduled on an impossibly tight clock, with the
Dionne Warwick concert and the slot machine tournament running neck and neck. Why
schedule both events at the same time?

I passed Baylor the list of attendees and a fresh legal pad.

“Start entering these names, Baylor. Dig in their guest portfolios, and write down
what room number they’re in and where they work. We’re trying to find the missing
counterfeit money supplier, so we need to know if he’s a banker or not. Over here,”
I tapped, “write down the ones who work at banks and over here— ” I lost him. Baylor
has the attention span of a gnat and can only do one thing at a time. “Just start
looking up these people.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I’m going to see what might be going on with this cash game.”

It was just after lunch (Direct Debit Double Cut Pork Chops) and according to the
schedule, the bankers were taking their first crack at the tournament game. Of all
the questions bouncing around my brain—Where is Fantasy? Why doesn’t my refrigerator
work? How will I ever catch Magnolia Thibodeaux?—the question at the front of the
line was about the slot machines at the bankers conference. Specifically, what’s in
them? I reached for the house phone and dialed Casino Operations. Let’s see what they
don’t know about this game.

While the phone rang, I asked Baylor, “Did you take care of the counterfeit money?”

“Check.”

“Did you get it out of the building?”

“Yes.” At the same time, a man answered the phone in my other ear. “Casino Ops.”

“Hi,” I said. “This is Calinda Wilson from Mr. Cole’s office. I need to speak to the
techs who set up the convention game.”

“Hold on.” Soon enough, another male voice said, “David Sandoval.”

“David, hi. Are you one of the techs who installed the slot machines for the convention
this week?” Dead silence. “Hello?”

“Yeah, I’m thinking.” When he finished thinking he said, “We didn’t install those.”

“Is this Casino Operations?”

“You bet.”

“The department that installs slot machines?”

“That’s us.”

“If you didn’t install them, who did?”

“I don’t have any idea. But I’m looking at our schedule. Our last installation was
a bank of Wicked Winnings in section fourteen, and our next installation is four new
Downton Abbeys in section twenty-nine next week.”

“How in the world does Downton Abbey translate into a slot machine?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“I know the conference game is up and running,” he said, “because we threw the switch
on it an hour ago, but that was just pushing a button. We didn’t set them up. We haven’t
installed a conference machine since the ladybug people were here.”

The Entomology Conference two weeks ago. I knew about it, because some nut in receiving
opened a crate marked “CAELIFERA THIS SIDE UP” and let ten thousand crickets loose.
Those crickets were still all over the place. I said thanks and hung up.

No one in this building knew a thing about the bankers game.

I turned to Baylor, who looked like he was taking the SAT, chewing on a pencil eraser,
pouring over the legal pad plugging in names.

“Baylor, what did you mean when you said you said you took care of the counterfeit
money?”

“What I said. I took care of it.”

“How?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did you take care of it?”

“By taking care of it, Davis.”

This is why people pull their hair out. “Let’s start over, Baylor. Where is the counterfeit
money?”

“I put it in your car.”

Of course he did.

“Why in hell would you put it in my car?”

“Because I drove your car to get you lunch.”

“But you didn’t get me lunch. And why did you drive my car?”

“Because Fantasy has a flat tire. Two flat tires.”

“Two?”

He held up two fingers.

“Why didn’t you drive your truck?” I asked.

“Because it’s out of gas.” He rolled his eyes, duh. “What is your point?”

He
was getting irritated with
me
.

“I don’t want to drive around with counterfeit money is my point!”

“Where do you need to go?”

“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s get back to work.”

The problem wasn’t Baylor; the problem was summer. We’d sat around since Memorial
Day watching Sandra Bullock movies, and now, all of a sudden, we needed to be firing
on sixteen cylinders, and Baylor was always the last to load. On the other hand, he’s
funny, he’s cute, he’s strong, and he’s a dead-eye. Most days it’s like Fantasy and
I have joint custody of Baylor more than anything else, but when things got tight,
as they’ve been known to do, he comes through like a champ.

Thirty minutes later and I still hadn’t connected the slot machine dots.

“The bankers slot machines are up and running, but we didn’t install them.” I was
thinking out loud. Looking at Baylor, but thinking out loud. “The game is full of
money, but not counterfeit money, because the counterfeit money is in my car. So why
were the conference people waiting on the man who brought all the counterfeit money,
and what’s in the game?”

“I don’t know.” He racked his rib-addled brain. “Am I supposed to know?”

“And if the counterfeit money wasn’t for the game, what was it for?”

“To pay someone off with counterfeit money?”

His words slid through me. Then settled.

* * *

The slot machine questions wouldn’t be answered until I could find a way into Exhibit
Hall B and take a look at them, and I thought I’d better (wait until the conference
people were asleep tonight) not bust in on them the first day. I put the slot machines
aside for the time being; they weren’t going anywhere. I turned my attention to the
man who brought the counterfeit money to the Bellissimo. Who was he, and where is
he? After that, I’d track down four million in platinum. And Holder Darby. All in
a day’s work.

I reached for my phone and dialed the County Coroner’s office on 23
rd
Avenue.

“Hi. I’m calling from the Bellissimo. I need to know if you have any information on
the body you picked up here. The family has arrived and wants to know something.”

“Who is this?”

“I’m calling from Mr. Cole’s office. Do you have any information about our dead guest?”
I could hear keyboard tapping.

“Lady,” the man said, “we didn’t pick up a body at the Bellissimo. We haven’t had
a fresh one at all since the middle of the night Friday, and it was from Memorial.
The last cadaver we got from you was the toothache man.”

This is a big place, a million guests pass through these doors every year, and we’re
going to lose a few. (Think actuary statistics.) Two months ago a man from Gautier
(pronounced
go shave
), right down the road, a Bellissimo regular, died of a toothache. He was playing
a $2 Bonus Frenzy with an infected tooth. The tooth went septic and hit his bloodstream,
boom, out of that slot chair. It scared the hell out of us, sent us screaming to our
dentists.

“What about Holder Darby?” I asked. “Do you have a Holder Darby?”

“Lady,” the man at the coroner’s office said, “I don’t know what kind of roll you’re
taking, but you can’t just call here and get an inventory. Check the obituary section
of the paper if you need to know who’s passed.”

“Is that a yes or a no on Holder Darby?”

“Who did you say this is? What’s your name?”

“Ooops,” I said. “Wrong number.”

Just in time for me to get a hit on missing money man’s fingerprint I’d loaded into
the National Fingerprint Database. I might not have found him in his guest room, or
laid out on a slab at the coroner’s, but I did locate him in the system. If you’ve
ever been on the wrong side of the law, in the military, in law enforcement, or visited
a Disney park, I can find you.

Christopher Hall. The man in room 2650, who’d left dinner on the table and counterfeit
money in the bathtub, was an inmate at the United States Penitentiary in Pollock,
Louisiana. He was convicted on January 21 five years ago on multiple counts of conspiracy
to manufacture, distribute, and deal in counterfeit obligations of the United States
in violation of 18 U.S.C § 370, four counts of counterfeiting currency in violation
of 29 U.S.C § 470, and fourteen counts of dealing in counterfeit obligations in violation
of 20 U.S.C § 255.

I found the master counterfeiter.

Why would Christopher Hall be in high-security federal prison for counterfeiting?
He should have been (convicted—it’s, duh, illegal to print your own money) in medium
security for ten to twenty, not federal for life. A few clicks later, I had my answer.
He had a bonus manslaughter charge tacked onto all the counterfeiting counts. His
partner, a man named Grover Walsh, died during the commission of these crimes. Christopher
Hall was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on the counterfeiting charges. The bonus
conviction of one count of involuntary manslaughter during the commission of a federal
crime put him in for life without parole.

Where? Where did all this happen?

Click click.

Harrison County, Mississippi. City of Biloxi.

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind these crimes were committed in a place I call home.
Grover Walsh was crushed to death under a piece of equipment down the hall from where
my husband and I sleep.

I took several slow steadying breaths. I could feel my pulse skipping. Small dots
swam in front of my eyes. I felt like I was in a dark tunnel and I was dizzy. I sat
there a full ten minutes processing my horrific findings.

Eventually, I turned back to the story. I read police reports, case files, court transcripts,
rulings, and every article written about the crime, capture, and conviction. Christopher
Hall showed up at the Emergency Room carrying his gravely injured partner, effectively
turning himself in. He was taken into custody.

Detectives found $1.8 million in counterfeit currency and another half million in
fake platinum coins under the floor in Hall’s house. They suspected there was much
more where that came from, but repeated searches hadn’t produced anything.

“I can assure you there’s more money,” a United States Secret Service Criminal Investigator
testified, “millions and millions. Plus equipment. It’s out there too. We can’t find
the money and we can’t find the production plant.”

In all that, under oath, Christopher Hall claimed that he and Grover Walsh acted on
their own. Not one mention of the Bellissimo, Salvatore Casimiro, or the Thibodeauxs.

Who sprang this man from prison? And where was he now?

* * *

I’d lost track of time and Baylor had slipped out. I tipped my chair. “Baylor?” I
was alone in Control Central. No Baylor, no Fantasy. “BAYLOR!”

“FLOAT ON YOUR TEETH! YOUR TEETH!”

He’d gone down for another nap.

I texted Fantasy:
A little help, please?

And from her:
Be there in ten
.

Which is exactly what she’d said earlier.

I’d like to have called, popped in, or otherwise pestered my husband with the new
findings, but I’d learned long ago to not bother him every three minutes so he could
work. When he needed me during the day, he called. When I needed him during the day,
I rolled my wedding rings around my finger.

After going through the list of conference names twice, I still didn’t find Christopher
Hall. I went into the Bellissimo system and found where he’d registered. As Bill Dollar.
Cute. Back to Baylor’s legal pad, where he had a big blank beside Bill Dollar’s name.

So he wasn’t registered at the Bellissimo as a banker, a conference sponsor, or even
part of the conference. He paid cash when he checked in, which might mean we had counterfeit
bills circulating in house, oh yay. But he had to secure the room with a credit card.

Forever and a day later, I tracked the Visa account used to secure Bill Dollar’s room
to First Federal Bank in Baltimore, Maryland. Which might as well have been the North
Pole, because Baltimore didn’t connect him to any of the bankers attending the conference,
who were all from Alabama, or Magnolia Thibodeaux, who’d probably set foot above the
Mason-Dixon exactly never, or Holder Darby, not yet anyway. Maybe Christopher Hall’s
connection was with the conference sponsors, Paragon Protection. I rolled my chair
to the computer full of Holder’s old computer and clicked open the conference file
to read their profile.

Paragon Protection manufactured and installed vaults all over the US of A. Their other
products included armored trucks and pneumatic transfer systems for financial institutions
with drive-through services. They were a veritable superstore for anything and everything
to do with securing or moving money. And they had forty representatives here at the
conference, which they were sponsoring.

It was on their dime that five hundred bankers were at the Bellissimo, in hopes of
selling them equipment and services. The problem I had with it, in addition to it
being utterly ridiculous for Holder Darby to have given them the green light on practically
banning Bellissimo employees from Bellissimo property, was the fact that I think there
might be a connection between the escaped convict Christopher Hall and Paragon, and
worse, that my husband would spend the entire week with these Paragon people.