Free DOUBLE MINT by Gretchen Archer

in there.”
    “And I’m telling you, Davis, she’s not.”
    Past the twelve-foot-tall silk magnolia tree and the Igloo fridge smothered in counterfeit
     cash, then through the King Cake tearoom, is the great room of the Jambalaya Junkyard.
     Think high-school-gymnasium-slash-Hooters. This is where the Thibodeauxs, big LSU
     fans, watched football with two hundred of their closest friends. The room had a total
     of sixteen sofas and thirty-two club chairs, all arranged around big screen televisions
     in the four corners of the room. And by big screens, I mean you could park RVs in
     here and call it a drive-in theater. The fake Bourbon Street balconies closest to
     the entertainment pits were football themed. Jesus and Tigers, Tigers and Jesus. Bradley
     and I claimed one of the corners as our own, the one closest to the kitchen, and stayed
     as far away from the rest of the stadium as we could.
    Bradley and Baylor lugged Dionne Warwick’s guy to one of the many, many magnolia sofas,
     and Baylor accidentally banged the poor guy’s head as they lowered him onto it.
    “Oh. My bad, dude.”
    I said, “I don’t think he can hear you.”
    Fantasy slipped a pillow that said Geaux Tigers under his head. “How do we know this guy is on Dionne Warwick’s front team?”
    “I rode up with him earlier,” I said. “He’s got to be on Dionne Warwick’s front team
     or he wouldn’t have a key to Jay’s place.”
    She shrugged. I shrugged. There are tens of thousands of people in this building at
     sunrise on Easter morning. We can’t know, or keep up with, every single one of them.
    Baylor fell into a green velvet loveseat that sprouted six-inch gold rope tassels
     from every seam and started singing, “Here, kitty kitty.”
    I’d forgotten all about the cat.
    Fantasy and I sat across from Baylor in side by side matching purple pleather recliners.
     Bradley, who generally keeps a cooler head than the rest of us, stepped into the kitchen
     and returned with a drippy kitchen towel. Fantasy took it from him and put it across
     Mr. Dionne Warwick’s forehead. Next, Bradley Cole poured three generous shots of breakfast
     bourbon from a crystal decanter and passed each of us one. We made quick work of it.
    He paced. Back and forth. “Who is this man?”
    Three huge shrugs.
    “What happened to the chandelier?”
    Baylor and Fantasy pointed at me. (Thanks a lot.)
    “It was an accident, Bradley.”
    “Of that,” he said, “I have no doubt.”
    We sat quietly as Bradley paced. After five minutes of wearing the magnolias off the
     rug, he said, “Stay with him,” to Fantasy and Baylor. “You.” He pointed. “Come with
     me.”
    The man on the magnolia sofa could have been in a medically-induced coma wearing noise-canceling
     headphones and Bradley would still want to step out of his hospital room rather than
     discuss anything in front of him. I followed my husband to the kitchen, where the
     big red monster made enough cover noise to give us privacy.
    “What is going on, Davis? First the wedding, which was a disaster, and now this. We
     have to, at the bare minimum, keep the doors open. So far,” he looked at his watch,
     “two hours into this work week, and we’re not doing so well.”
    “Did you see all that money?” I nodded in the direction of the foyer. “Number one,
     it came from a guest room. Number two, it’s counterfeit. And number three, the guest
     is gone. Poof, gone. As in Holder Darby gone.”
    “I saw the money. I tripped over the money. And the first thing I need you to do is
     get the money off the property. I don’t want it anywhere near the conference game.”
    A conference perk: Conferences get private slot tournaments in the events hall of
     the conference center. Last year, we hosted a cupcake conference, and their slot machines
     were all cupcakes. Fortunes and Frosting. So cute. (Not real cupcakes. You can’t get
     a cupcake inside a slot machine. The slot machine graphics were