Ren
Undercover at Bingo
The Prompt:You’re on a top-secret spy mission—for your grandmother. She can’t make it to her Monday Night Bingo (you tell us why), but she’s certain that one of the regulars is cheating, and she sends you to check it out. Conduct a covert operation to catch this cheater in the act.
**
Lawrence Hendershot sat at his desk, typing up one final brief for his boss. It was Friday and it was nearly nine at night. The sun had long since set and it was only Larry and the janitor left on the twelfth floor of the building.
Larry was supposed to have met up with the guys for Friday night beers at the dive around the corner, but when he had cleared his desk of the piles of closed out files, long forgotten ones, weeks overdue, had been hidden beneath.
And so he sat, in his office on a Friday night, eyes strained and migraine hovering behind a brow. As he hit save and sent the last E-mail, the shrill ring of his cell phone cut through the otherwise silent office, startling Larry enough to knock his cold, half-empty coffee cup off the desk. He stared disdainfully at the puddle on his carpet and sighed before reaching for the phone. Out of habit, he checked the screen before answering. To his surprise, “Gram Grams” flashed in front of his face.
“Hey, Grandma,” he answered, smiling. “How are you doing?”
“Lawrence, I need your help,” his grandmother yelled into the phone. He couldn’t help but roll his eyes. She didn’t understand that these “newfangled contraptions” transmitted her voice perfectly fine, and insisted she needed to shout since he was all the way across town.
“With what, Grandma? I was just over there yesterday-”
“No, no, it’s nothing like that,” she interrupted impatiently. “It’s that good for nothing, cheating bitch, Margaret Grendenhauser!”
Larry gasped audibly. “Grandma!” he admonished. “That’s not nice!”
“Well neither is cheating! It’s fair turnaround. And I know she’s cheating! No one wins at Bingo five weeks straight! She isn’t even bothering to hide it! Now I know you have access to all sorts of gadgets and gizmos at that secret job of yours-”
“Grandma, for the last time, I sell stocks and bonds.” Larry forced as much exasperation into his voice as he could. This was an old argument. Ever since she had stumbled across the night vision goggles and grappling hook in his briefcase, she insisted he was some sort of secret agent.
She was right, of course, but she didn’t need to know that.
“Sure you do, dear,” Grandma continued. “Anyway, Margaret Grendenhauser is going to be at Bingo Monday night, cheating again, I’m sure, and I had a plan to catch her in the act, but now I can’t make it. So I need you to go in and catch her for me! Get that cheating scum banned for good!”
“And why can’t you go, with this foolproof plan of yours, exactly?”
“Oh, I’m banned now.”
“From Bingo?” he asked incredulously. “How do you get banned from Bingo?”
“I punched her in the face.”
“Grandma!”
“What? I confronted her about cheating and she denied it! Can you believe the nerve of her, to lie to my face? Never tolerate a liar, Lawrence. A liar cheats, and a cheater lies. They go hand in hand.”
“All right, Grandma. I’ll see what I can do. I’m not promising anything, though.”
“Oh, Lawrence, I knew I could count on you!”
Larry nodded, even though his grandmother couldn’t see him through the phone.
“Okay Grandma, I love you,” he said, and then hung up the phone.
It was a good thing he’d finished all the work he needed to. He had a long weekend of planning ahead.
***
Monday evening came almost too quickly for Larry. He spent the weekend creating a plan to catch Margaret Grendenhauser in the act. It was a simple plan. He was trying to catch an 85 year old woman cheating at Bingo. How complex was it really supposed to be? He felt like it was a waste of time, but it was Gram Grams, after all. He couldn’t say no. Larry loved his Gram Grams and the least he could do was humor her. He’d make it look good; he ‘borrowed’ a few micro cameras and some other goodies from the equipment room at the office. But he really didn’t expect to come up with anything substantial. After all, who cheats at Bingo?
How does anyone cheat at Bingo?
If anyone was cheating, Larry was about to find out. He stepped into St Catherine’s and went downstairs to the basement Bingo hall. His eyes reflexively shot to the ceiling at the far left corner, and the speaker’s podium, ensuring that the micro cameras he had installed the previous night were still there. They were. As wrong as he knew it was to break into a church, he’d had to install the cameras when there was no one around. He was pretty sure there was now a special place in hell, reserved just for him.
After quickly glancing around to ensure the equipment was still in place, Larry saw Mrs Grendenhauser sitting right where Gram Grams said she would be, at her own table in the front. Apparently no one sat next to her because she was such a volatile, rude, horrible old woman. So, naturally, that’s exactly where Larry sat down.
“And who are you?”
Larry spared Mrs Grendenhauser a sideways glance. She was glaring at him over the top of her bifocals, not quite hiding a sneer.
“You look much too young to be here,” she continued, speaking in an obnoxious, nasal monotone. “This is Bingo. You know, for old people.”
Larry forced a smile, barely making it pass as friendly. “Oh, my apologies. I didn’t realize there was a minimum age requirement.”
The cantankerous old woman snorted and went back to her Bingo board without another word. She had only one, and one marker. Larry didn’t know much about Bingo strategy, but he did know that Gram Grams bought multiple boards per game, to increase her chances at winning. As he looked around the room now, he saw that most of the other participants employed that same technique. How Mrs Grendenhauser planned to win with just one board, Larry could not fathom. He himself also only had one board, but he wasn’t there to win. He was there to observe.
Only a few short minutes passed after their exchange before the emcee took to the podium and began to spin the spherical cage, mixing up the ping pong balls with letters and numbers written on them. She reached in and pulled one out.
“B-7!” the middle-aged woman called out to the room.
The process repeated itself several times over. Spin the cage, call the number; spin the cage, call the number. Larry had marked off two boxes (I-12 and O-43) on his card out of the ten numbers called, and chanced a look at his neighbor’s board. She needed one more box in the G column to win. Squinting a bit to see better, the last box, the third in the column, he now noticed was blank.
So that’s how she did it. She was writing in the numbers herself. He had to give her credit. The numbers looked just like they had been printed. She was quite the artist.
“G-84!”
As Larry watched from the corner of his eye, Mrs Grendenhauser picked up the black marker and in that empty box in the ‘G’ column, she proceeded to skillfully draw an 8, and it looked just like it would have if a computer had printed it. For good measure, Larry waited until she began the 4 before sliding the card out from under her hand. Mrs Grendenhauser looked up, confused for a moment, before realization dawned across her wrinkled face.
“Excuse me!” Larry called, standing up and waving the Bingo card above his head. The room went silent. “I’m so sorry for the interruption,” he continued, directing his words toward the emcee at the front of the room. “But it seems as though we have a cheater in our midst.”
“Liar!” Mrs Grendenhauser jumped to her feet, pointing accusingly at Larry. “He meant to frame me! Jealous of my winnings, he is! This young hooligan just barges into our weekly Bingo without invitation!” She turned to Larry, poking her accusing finger into the middle of his chest. “Don’t you even think about it, sonny! You are not welcome here! You’re at least 40 years too young to even be here anyway! Now, I’ll thank you to give me my Bingo card back so we can finish this round!”
Larry was far from phased. From the stories Gram Grams had told him, he had expected an outburst like this. Instead of rising to the cheating hag’s bait, he calmly smiled down at the shrunken woman and held her Bingo card high above his head for all to see.
“If you can see this card here,” he said to the room at large, rotating it so everyone had a chance to see. A chance, because he was pretty sure at least half the room was legally blind. “It’s very difficult to make out, Mrs Grendenhauser is quite the artist, but she came in with a blank card and has been drawing in the winning numbers. As you can see here, in column G, the third box down, she finished the 8 and made it halfway through the 4 before I interrupted her. If you doubt me, there are three hidden cameras in the room, I’d be glad to put the footage up on the projector screen for everyone.”
One by one, pairs of eyes drifted from the card held high above Larry’s head down to Mrs Grendenhauser.
“It was that Gladys Hendershot, wasn’t it? She ratted me out! I should have known... Doesn’t have the courage to come herself, does she?”
Larry shook his head at the old woman, dropping the Bingo card to the table.
“I trust you won’t be giving my grandmother, or any of these other players, any more trouble. My grandma was banned for punching you in the face, I think it’s only fair you be banned for cheating.”
“I agree,” the emcee piped up from the podium. “Mrs Grendenhauser, you are hereby banned from these premises. Except for Sunday mass. You may come for that. And Mr Hendershot...”
Larry looked up to the woman.
“Please remove those illegal cameras.”
He smiled. “With pleasure, ma’am.”
Not sure if it was ment to be humorus but it was a good funnie to get back into things.
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