The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery)

by Steve Hockensmith

  “Hold on. I didn’t say anything like—”

  “I can put you in touch with my boss. He’ll tell you I was at work in beautiful Lombard, Illinois, the day my mother was murdered and the day after, too.”

  “Whoa, whoa!”

  Logan finally stopped walking. We were at the edge of town by now. The rocky red bluffs in the distance darkened as twilight approached, and the clouds over the desert turned purple. The Lone Ranger wasn’t riding off into the sunset over Logan’s shoulder, but he should have been.

  “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression,” Logan said. “You are not a suspect.”

  “Why not? I ought to be.”

  “You just said you shouldn’t be.”

  “I meant I didn’t do it, not that you shouldn’t wonder if I’d done it.”

  “Um, okay. I take it back. You are a suspect.”

  “Good. I’d hate to think you weren’t being thorough.”

  “I am being thorough.”

  “Then you can tell me who your other suspects are.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Because you don’t have any?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  “All right. ‘Can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.’ I get it. I mean, I’m next of kin, not 60 Minutes, but okay. You’ve got rules to follow. If they say to keep a brokenhearted daughter in the dark, keep a brokenhearted daughter in the dark. Why should you talk to me about any progress you might have made? I’m all alone here in town—in the world, really—but you don’t know who I might go blabbing to. You can’t violate confidentiality just to offer a little comfort to me.”

  When I was done, Logan was wincing.

  I’d been hoping for a grimace.

  “Look, I’m sorry, but—”

  “I mean it, Detective. No need to apologize. Really. I’m just trying to make some sense of my mother’s murder, but hey—protocols are protocols. They’re more important than people, right?”

  I got my grimace.

  “I tell you what,” I said. “Forget the suspects. Just tell me who I should avoid here. I’ll be sticking around a while, and I’m guessing my mom had enemies.”

  “Well…enemies is a strong word.”

  “Rivals, then. Competitors. People who didn’t care for my mother.”

  Suspects, in other words.

  Logan cocked his head and squinted at me. He was catching on.

  Not every small-town cop is a rube. Unfortunately.

  I turned away and pointed back up the street.

  “How about her? The old hippie chick who runs the House of Arcana.”

  “Josette Berg? She and Athena weren’t BFFs, I can tell you that. Josette’s one of the true believers. She isn’t fond of opportunists and frauds. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  And I meant it. I’d been raised to think opportunists and frauds were the smart ones. Everyone else was a sucker—especially the true believers.

  “So who else is Josette unhappy with?” I said.

  “It’d be better if you never get to know them, Miss McLachlan. Staying in Berdache is something I wouldn’t advise.”

  “Why is that? Are you saying I’m in danger? Does that mean you’re not so sure my mother was killed by a burglar?”

  Logan winced again.

  How come she’s the one asking all the questions? he seemed to be thinking.

  “You know what?” he said. “I should probably get you back to the White Magic Five & Dime. I’d hate for you to miss the evening rush.”

  On the way back, Logan said he’d talk to my boss after all. Just so I could be sure he was being thorough.

  I gave him the number and the name of the place and who to ask for.

  “Innovative Sales Solutions?” he said as he typed it into his BlackBerry. “Sounds like a telemarketing firm.”

  “For good reason.”

  “You’re a telemarketer?”

  “Employee of the Month fifty months running.”

  “What do you sell?”

  “What do you got?”

  Logan grunted out a gruff chuckle. “You’re really something, you know that?”

  I did. The question was: what?

  I’d been asking myself that for a long, long time.

  “Oh,” Logan said, “can you give me a number for you, too? In case I have follow-up questions.”

  “And what if I have follow-up questions?”

  “I have a feeling that’s less a what if than a when.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Logan sighed. But he gave me his card anyway.

  Clarice was standing in front of the White Magic Five & Dime when we walked up.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” she said to me.

  “I had some things to discuss with Detective Logan here. I assume you two know each other?”

  “Hello, Clarice.”

  “Hello,” the girl replied coolly. Too coolly. It was the kind of cool you only get with effort. “Have you found out anything new?”

  “A little,” Logan said. “I think I’m making progress.”

  “Good.”

  “Well, thanks for the welcome to Berdache, Detective,” I said. “I hope we’ll be staying in touch in the days ahead.”

  Logan just smiled tightly and said goodbye.

  I glanced back at him as Clarice and I went inside. Logan was glancing back, too. Glowering back. At both of us.

  Was I really one of his suspects? Maybe.

  But the girl beside me? Definitely.

  Ignore the sex toy/Mr. Microphone in the lady’s hand. It’s what’s tucked under her robed rump that counts. The Empress reclines on a throne of passion and pure motherly love. From it she reigns over a lush, fertile, beautiful realm—all the bounty that can flow back to you if you learn to give of yourself first. If you don’t learn, you miss out on the river and the trees and the throne and end up with nothing but the sex toy, which isn’t much consolation after a while.

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  I thought about turning the neon sign back on when Clarice and I walked into the Five & Dime. I decided not to bother. For the moment I had plenty to work with without any walk-ins.

  “Thanks for not mentioning my freak-out in front of Logan,” Clarice said.

  I shrugged. “You haven’t had the best week. You’re owed a freak- out or two.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Still, I wanted to apologize. And explain.”

  I drifted around behind the display case and leaned on it casually. I wanted some distance between us, but I didn’t want it obvious.

  “The thing is,” Clarice said, “Athena always told me she’d take care of me. She wasn’t the most nurturing person in the world—I mean, not with me, anyway. Maybe it was different for you. But still, she was almost like a mother to me. She did her best, in her weird way. So to find out there was a will and I wasn’t even in it and now I’ve got nothing and nowhere to go…?”

  Her eyes were big and round. She even cocked her head a bit to one side. If she’d been a dog, I would’ve given her my lunch.

  I knew what I was supposed to say to her. And I knew I wasn’t quite ready to say it.

  “What about your family?” I said instead.

  “Not an option.”

  “Your friends?”

  “I’m sort of an outcast at school. I’ve got a few friends, but their parents are sick of me already.”

  “I’m surprised Logan didn’t arrange for you to go somewhere.”

  “He tried. Foster care.” Clarice puckered her face as though someone had just offered her a kitty-litter sandwich. “Thank god I’m emancipated, so they couldn’t force me.”

  “You’re old enough to be emancipated?”


  Clarice nodded. “Sixteen’s the age you can do it in Arizona. Athena helped me. Over the summer.”

  “Wow. That’s really…great.”

  And hard to believe. Mom emancipating a slave? Not her style.

  I’d freed myself—or thought I had, anyway. If I’d been truly free, would I even be here now?

  “Well,” I sighed, “I don’t know how long I’m going to be around, but you’re welcome to keep staying here until you figure out something else.”

  “Thank you! I was hoping you’d say that!”

  Yes. Yes, you were.

  “I could use the help anyway,” I said. “I’m going to open the shop again while I’m here, and it’ll be good to have someone around who knows what they’re doing.”

  “You’re going to do readings?” Clarice looked over at Infinite Roads to Knowing, which was lying on top of the display case next to me. A pen was sticking out where I’d stopped reading. “Do you have any experience with that?”

  “Nope. But I think I can wing it. Everything I know about customer service I learned from my mother.”

  Clarice looked dubious. Very dubious. I’m-staring-at-a-crazy-person dubious.

  I smiled.

  “Speaking of customers,” I said, “Mom must have had a Rolodex or something around here…right?”

  Mom was very modern, it turned out. She didn’t have a Rolodex. She had spreadsheets. On her computer. Which had been stolen the night she died.

  I went to the office at the back of the White Magic Five & Dime to take a look for myself. All that was left of the computer were some cables and power cords, a pair of speakers, and a lonely little webcam.

  I tried to imagine a meth head going to all the trouble of unplugging everything and carrying off the PC and screen but leaving the power cords behind. Conclusion: does not compute.

  “Any idea why she had this?”

  I tapped the webcam.

  Clarice leaned in to look over my shoulder.

  I would’ve preferred not having a murder suspect looming up behind me, but life’s full of little inconveniences.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said, “but I never wanted to know. Know what I mean?”

  I did.

  Online chat rooms.

  Lonely bachelors.

  Cybersex.

  My mom.

  Ew.

  Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that I couldn’t nose around in her computer. Who knew what kind of pictures might be lurking in there?

  I hadn’t seen my mother in nearly two decades. I didn’t want my first look at her as a fiftysomething-near-sixtysomething to be an outtake from hotgrannies.com.

  I repeat: ew.

  I turned to face the window at the back of the room.

  “Is that where the burglar supposedly came in?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a latch on the window. It wasn’t broken.

  “It’s hard to imagine my mother leaving a window open. She was pretty—”

  I searched for the right word.

  “Paranoid?” Clarice suggested.

  “Cautious,” I said.

  You’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you, Biddle used to say. And if no one’s out to get you, you ain’t trying hard enough.

  “Yeah. You’re right,” Clarice said to me. “She always made sure the windows were closed and locked. Always. She was really uptight about it.”

  “Could a customer have come back here and unlocked the window while my mom was distracted?”

  “Maybe. It’d be pretty hard to do without being seen, though. You’d have to sneak up the hall right past the reading room.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  No burglar, no matter how skilled, could have unlocked that window from the outside. It had to be someone on the inside. Someone who was very good at sneaking around unseen.

  Or someone who was right at home.

  There was a filing cabinet beside the desk, and I started going through it as slowly as possible.

  “Ah,” I said. “Old bills.”

  I pretended to become absorbed in a long form letter from the electric company.

  “Well, let me know if you have any more questions,” Clarice eventually said. “I guess I’ll go do my homework.”

  “Great. Thanks. See ya.”

  The girl went upstairs.

  I relaxed. I stopped reading bills, too.

  My mother wasn’t the type to leave anything revealing laying around in a filing cabinet. The really juicy stuff would be buried under a rosebush in a locked strongbox or something.

  I moved on to another drawer anyway, just in case Mom was getting sloppy. It was empty except for several shrink-wrapped packages of camcorder cassettes. One of the packages had been opened, but there was no sign of any used tapes.

  Interesting. My mother had never been big on Kodak moments. She avoided having her picture taken and rarely bothered with snapshots of anyone else, including her adorable daughter. Home movies definitely weren’t her thing.

  I’d have liked to look at those tapes. Unfortunately, they were probably under that hypothetical rosebush.

  I was moving on to the next drawer when the telephone on the desk rang. PAY PHONE, the caller ID said.

  I picked up.

  “White Magic Five & Dime.”

  “Who is this?” a man asked gruffly. He’d either smoked a lot of cigarettes or gargled a lot of acid.

  “Miss Chance, seer and teller. How can I help you?”

  “Don’t worry about helping me. Help yourself. Get out of Berdache and don’t come back.”

  Ah. So it was one of those calls. I’d picked up a few for my mom and Biddle back in the day, but I was a little out of practice.

  I didn’t reply until I was sure I could stay calm. It took me almost a full second.

  “And how would that help me?” I asked.

  “You’ll stay alive.”

  “Got it. I assumed that’s what you meant, but I wanted to be sure. People can be so vague when they’re trying to be threatening.”

  “Stick around and you’ll end up like your bitch mother. That clear enough for you?”

  “Very. It tells me almost everything I need to know, in fact. I’ve only told three people that Athena Passalis was my mother, so it shouldn’t be hard to figure out who you are.”

  The man snorted. “That doesn’t mean anything. Word spreads fast around here.”

  “I bet it does. Practically at the speed of sound. Speaking of which…”

  I’d already walked out the back door to the little gravel lot behind the building. Two cars were parked there: my mother’s black Caddy and the rented Camry I’d driven up from Phoenix.

  I pressed the phone hard to my ear with my left hand while pulling out the keys for the rental with my right.

  I pushed the panic button.

  honk honk honk honk honk honk honk

  I heard it in both ears. The sound was coming over the phone.

  The caller was close. And if I was right—and lucky—I knew exactly how close.

  I sprinted around the building, turned left at the street, then right at the first corner.

  It took me less than thirty seconds to get to the 7-Eleven. I’d remembered it was there because I’d been planning ahead.

  Arizona is hot, and I like Slurpees.

  No one was using the pay phone out front, but the receiver was dangling from its cord as if it had been dropped in a big hurry.

  A delivery truck was idling not far away.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the guy loading a dolly with big blue trays of Ho Hos and Twinkies, “was there a man here a minute ago talking on that phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he look like?”

&nb
sp; “I don’t know. I don’t stop to check out every dude I walk by.”

  “You must have noticed something. The color of his hair, his clothes…”

  “He didn’t have any hair, and he was definitely wearing clothes. That’s all I remember.”

  “So. A bald non-nudist.”

  “I think he was white.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. A bald non-nudist who may or may not be white. Excellent. I’ll put out an APB on Vin Diesel.”

  The delivery guy shrugged and said, “Sorry.”

  He threw a puzzled glance at the white cordless phone still clutched in my hand.

  “What are you? Some kind of cop?”

  “I’m from AT&T,” I said. I walked to the phone, stuck a finger in the coin-return slot, and pulled out a dime. “The gentleman forgot his change.”

  I returned to the White Magic Five & Dime ten cents richer.

  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a threat’s just bluff mixed with wishful thinking, Biddle sometimes said.

  “Is this the hundredth time?” I finally asked him. He and I were frantically packing suitcases while my mother burned papers in a trashcan.

  There were bullet holes in the wall behind us.

  I wondered what my odds were this time.

  I did a little more searching in Mom’s office, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was thinking about bald men, specifically the theoretically white kind who talk like Darth Vader with strep throat and make threats and wear clothes.

  I wanted to meet one. On my terms, of course.

  Problem: I didn’t know one. Yet.

  After a while, I ordered Mexican from a joint down the street. When I asked Clarice if she wanted in, she said she’d like a vegetarian burrito.

  I tried to take some comfort from that. At least the girl wouldn’t kill a chicken.

  I locked the front door again after getting back with the food. The back door was already locked. The windows, too, of course. For all the good it might do me.

  Clarice and I ate together in the little kitchen upstairs.

  “Just curious,” I said between bites from a completely and utterly adequate chile relleno. (I don’t kill chickens, either.) “Did you mention to anyone that Athena’s daughter had showed up?”

  “Why?”

  “Some guy called who knows who I am.”