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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