The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery)

by Steve Hockensmith

  “Pull out everything she sold you. I’ll take it all,” I said. “Now let’s talk about computers and camcorders…”

  The computer-and-camcorder conversation was brief. He didn’t have any. So I only walked out with the jewelry—half the baubles and beads in the place. I also walked out without nearly five thousand dollars I’d walked in with.

  Did Mr. Smith sell me a bunch of marked-up crap that hadn’t really come in via my mom? Probably. But did he throw in everything she’d brought him, too? Undoubtedly.

  Stolen property on his shelves was obviously fine. Stolen property that someone could actually trace to his store, not so much. He’d be glad to be rid of it—and to have my money.

  “It’s not that being good is so hard,” Biddle used to say. “It’s just so damn expensive.”

  To my surprise, though, there was no sticker shock. In fact, I was actually looking forward to giving my new jewelry away.

  Easier said than done, it turned out. When I dropped by the Verde River Vista Senior Residences, I was informed that Lucia Castellanos was no longer accepting visitors.

  It was my own fault. The day before, I’d tried to shake up her son, Victor, to see how he’d react. Now I knew: he’d put his mom in solitary just to keep me away from her.

  The woman in the front office looked at me like I was the Angel of Death trying to sneak my way in behind an FTD bouquet. My cover was blown.

  “What a shame,” I said. “I’ll just leave a note then. Do you have an envelope and a piece of paper I could use?”

  I went out to the car to write my message.

  Dear Lucia,

  The cleansing is complete! Ask your son when I can come by to drop everything off.

  Sincerely,

  Alanis

  I sealed the note in the envelope and took it inside.

  In with it was an emerald the size of a gumdrop surrounded by baby diamonds mounted in gold.

  I had no trouble getting into the Dry Creek Assisted Living Community to see Ken Meldon. Security (just like cleanliness, sunlight, and cheer) didn’t seem to be a big priority there. I didn’t see dingoes dragging off any of the residents, but it wouldn’t have been a shock.

  Meldon seemed only mildly surprised to see me. His pleasure was even milder—nonexistent even.

  “Good news,” I said to him. “I found some jewelry. Want to see if you recognize anything?”

  I upended the bag Mr. Smith had given me. (Nothing says class like walking out of a pawn shop with five thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry in a plastic bag that had probably held Fritos and a Coors tall boy the day before.) Rings, bracelets, necklaces, pearls, pendants, and brooches spilled out onto Meldon’s narrow bed.

  The old man stooped in over the booty and pawed through it slowly with gnarled, trembling hands.

  “I don’t know. I can never tell this junk apart. Why women make such a fuss over a bunch of…wait.”

  He lifted up a wide silver ring with a single diamond in the setting.

  “I’ll be damned. This is it.”

  “That’s your wife’s ring? The one you gave Athena?”

  “Yeah.”

  Meldon shuffled to a chair in the corner. The room was the size of a luxurious linen closet, so it only took him four or five hours to get there.

  He slumped into the seat with a sigh, eyes still locked on the ring.

  “You said you gave my mom all kinds of jewelry.” I waved a hand at the bed. “Don’t you want to look for the rest?”

  “Nah. I don’t give a crap about any of that anymore. I just want this.”

  He was turning the ring this way and that, as if enchanted by the diamond’s sparkles. The room was so dimly lit there weren’t any, though. He may as well have been admiring a Cocoa Puff.

  “We had our troubles, Judith and me. Used to go round and round. She even called the cops on me once or twice.” Meldon grunted out a gruff chuckle. “But dammit…I do miss her.”

  I nodded knowingly.

  I waited for a thank you.

  I kept nodding.

  I kept waiting.

  Meldon just mooned over his ring.

  “Well,” I finally said, “I suppose my work here is done.”

  I waited some more. Then I gathered up the jewelry and started to leave.

  “Wait,” the old man said when I reached the door.

  I turned back to face him.

  “You still got that air gun I left at your mom’s the other night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” Meldon said. “Do me a favor and go shoot some cats.”

  Biddle would have laughed. Mom would have said, “What did you expect? A parade?”

  But I didn’t need Lucia Castellanos or Ken Meldon to thank me. I didn’t care if one couldn’t and the other wouldn’t.

  I was the ring fairy. And it felt good.

  Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Two dogs and a lobster walk into a bar. “Get me,” the bartender says, “I’m givin’ out wings!” So the lobster turns into a stack of pancakes and everyone has breakfast. ba-da bing!

  What’s that? You don’t get it? That’s okay—you’re not supposed to when the Moon card comes up. It’s time to disconnect from rationality and plug into your id and your instincts. Dreams, symbols, unconscious desires, your untapped psychic self—all will be trying to assert themselves. Try too hard to “get it” and the joke will be on you.

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  I wrapped the jewelry bag in tinfoil, put it in a Ziploc, labeled it veal parmesan with masking tape and a Sharpie and stuck it in Mom’s freezer behind a wall of Hot Pockets. Then I pulled out the meatloaf and replaced the five thousand dollars I’d borrowed with fresh, unfrozen money I’d just withdrawn from the bank.

  As I closed the freezer door, the phone in the White Magic Five & Dime began to ring. I hurried downstairs to get it. It had been an entire day since anyone had called to threaten me, and I was feeling neglected.

  The caller ID said donald fisk. I didn’t recognize the name. Fine. Two of the three leads Logan had given me were played out anyway, and I didn’t have high hopes for Victor Castellanos as a suspect. Kids might assume their gym teacher’s capable of cold-blooded murder, but I didn’t think this one was. Although what I based that on I couldn’t say. Maybe I just liked the way he filled out a track suit.

  I picked up the phone.

  “The White Magic Five & Dime, now under new management. Ask about our two-for-the-price-of-one exorcisms.”

  “Hi,” a woman said. “Is this Alanis?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wanted to call up and thank you. Everything you told me was right on the money. You can’t believe what’s happened to me the last two days!”

  I couldn’t imagine it, either. Because I had no idea who I was talking to.

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Oh yeah! I confronted Donald just like you told me to, and he admitted everything! Not just about Julia Luchetti but about how he’d been siphoning money off for their little fling. I’d been going broke because they’d been going to the Quality Suites three times a week!”

  Ahhh. That hussy Julia Luchetti. Now I remembered the voice.

  It was my first customer calling back. The woman I’d done a reading for a few days before—Alice. (You wouldn’t get far in my old profession if you couldn’t remember names—both your marks’ and all the ones you’ve come up with for yourself.)

  “That’s awful, Alice,” I said. “I’m so sorry to find out I was right.”

  “That’s not the half of it. I got in touch with the Llama and Alpaca Association like I said I would, and you’ll never guess what they told me.”

  I had a feeling she was right about that.

  “Oh?” I said again.

  “The biggest
exotic animal breeder in central Arizona died last week. Got knocked over in one of his pens, and a camel stepped on his head. Now his family’s desperate to sell off over five hundred medium-wooled curaca llamas! Isn’t that great?”

  “I’m thrilled.”

  “I know! The timing’s amazing. If I’d called a week later, I’d have missed out. But as it is, I had just enough money left to scalp the poor bastards for the whole herd. Now the llamas are on their way to my ranch—and Donald’s on his way out. My whole life’s turning around, all because I talked to you!”

  “I don’t think I should get all the credit.”

  “But you should, you should! That reading was a revelation. When can I come back for another?”

  “Another?”

  “Of course! Now I have to decide if I’m going to tell Jack Luchetti the whole sick story or just let Donald and Julia stew in their own juices for a while.”

  “Hmm. That is a dilemma, isn’t it?”

  We made an appointment for Friday.

  I started to walk to the front of the White Magic Five & Dime. I was going to turn on the neon sign and lure in more customer/suspects.

  I stopped halfway up the hall.

  My reading for Alice Fisk hadn’t accomplished anything—not for me, anyway. Alice hadn’t killed my mother. Donald Fisk and Jack and Julia Luchetti hadn’t either. And Mom hadn’t ripped any of them off. What were the odds the next person to walk through the door would be any different?

  I gave it a million to one. Maybe a gazillion. And who’d take that bet?

  So why would I waste my time on another reading for Alice or anyone else? Why would I…?

  I stopped and thought about it, just to be sure.

  Yes. Yes, it was true.

  Why would I look forward to it?

  Easy money? A con artist’s professional pride? A cheap laugh at someone else’s expense?

  It didn’t feel like any of that. So what was it?

  I was standing next to the reading room. The tarot cards were still on the table from my session with Marsha Riggs the day before.

  “What are you looking at?” I said to them.

  They didn’t reply. Punks.

  I gathered up the deck and started shuffling it just to show who was boss. As I worked cards in and out, out and in, a question came to mind. A good one.

  “What am I really doing here?”

  I put the deck down and started to turn away.

  Then I turned back, whipped off the top card, and flipped it over.

  Oh. Well. There you go. My question was answered.

  What was I doing?

  I was making Satanic plates for the Franklin Mint.

  Duh. Obviously. Ask a stupid question…

  It was weird, though. As much as I wanted to sneer and stomp off or go do something useful (whatever that might be), I kept standing there staring at the card.

  I’ve never been big on arts and crafts, so pounding out pentagrams didn’t strike me as a ton of fun. But the plate-making guy seemed okay with it. More than that. He seemed content somehow.

  He was practicing a craft; using his skills to create, to build something. And maybe that made him happy.

  So if this was supposed to be me, what was the craft? Meddling in police investigations? Finding long-lost relatives? Delivering rings to old folks’ homes?

  Reading tarot cards?

  Ha. I didn’t even believe in tarot cards.

  Right?

  “So, Josette—what do you think of the Eight of Pentacles?”

  Josette Berg turned toward me and laughed. She hadn’t even noticed me cross the street and come into the House of Arcana. I’d waited not particularly patiently while she finished her conversation with a tourist who didn’t know the difference between a healing crystal and the kind you find in Folger’s coffee. My question had been my hello.

  “I hope you don’t have a customer waiting over in the White Magic Five & Dime for an answer,” she said.

  “No. It’s for me. I mean, it’s just something I’ve been wondering about. Interpretation-wise. How do you read it?”

  “Well, it depends on the context, of course. In general, though…”

  Josette closed her eyes. It seemed like a strange time to start meditating, but you can never tell with New Agey types.

  “You see a craftsman honing his skills,” she said. She was picturing the card. “He’s not in his shop, though. He’s working outside—in the world—so there’s a connection to something larger than himself. Beyond him, in the distance, is a doorway. A building. A town. There’s a community waiting for what he makes. His skills have a purpose. They’re not an end in and of themselves. There are people the craftsman can serve, and those people will, in turn, support him.”

  Josette opened her eyes.

  “Wow. And here I was thinking it was about how to make a Frisbee,” I said.

  That wow kept echoing in my head, though.

  Wow wow wow wow.

  It must have been so loud even Josette could hear it.

  She cocked her head, and her smile turned pensive, concerned.

  “Is everything all right, Alanis?”

  “Oh yeah. I’m fine. I’ve just been busy. So many arrangements to make, you know?”

  “Is there going to be a service for your mother?”

  “We had one yesterday, actually. Very informal, very small. Immediate family only.”

  “I didn’t know you had more family here.”

  “Me neither. Well, I can see you’re busy…” I flapped a hand at the throng of customers clogging the aisles. (There were two.) “So I’ll toddle along. Thanks for the pearls of wisdom.”

  “Anytime. I hope the tapes help.”

  I was already halfway to the door.

  I stopped and came back.

  “Excuse me?”

  Josette looked chagrined, as if she already regretted what she’d said.

  “I said, I hope the tapes help. Detective Logan didn’t mention them to you? I know you and he have been…staying in touch.”

  The pause before “staying in touch” was so pregnant I could have thrown it a baby shower.

  Great. Let a guy buy you lunch at a French joint and everyone in town assumes something’s going on. And maybe a little teeny-weeny something was or could or might, but still. The man was investigating my mother’s murder. Don’t get sick ideas, people! Let me mourn…for a day or two.

  I pushed all that aside.

  “Logan told you about the tapes?”

  “No, I told him about them. They’re mine, after all.”

  “I’m sorry…which tapes are we talking about?”

  Josette turned to point at a camera mounted near the ceiling in a far corner of the store.

  “The ones from my security camera. Which tapes did you think I meant?”

  “The ones from my mother’s crystal ball,” I could’ve said if I’d felt like explaining, which I didn’t.

  “Just some of my mom’s old cassettes,” I said instead. “Neil Diamond, Supertramp. It doesn’t matter. What do your tapes have to do with me?”

  “It’s what’s on them. They don’t just show my store. The camera’s pointed at the display window.”

  Josette traced an invisible line from the camera to the window and the street beyond.

  “You can see the White Magic Five & Dime on the tapes,” I said.

  “Well, the sidewalk out front and part of the door. It’s pretty blurry, though.”

  “Still—that means you have a record of the comings and goings at my mom’s place.”

  “Exactly. A few tapes’ worth, anyway. That’s why Detective Logan’s going through what I’ve got. He’s hoping the mur—uh, the person he’s looking for will be on them.”

 
“But I thought the murderer broke in through a back window.”

  Josette shrugged. “Maybe he did some sneaking around first. You know—‘casing the joint.’ Looking for other ways in. Speaking of which…”

  Josette was peering past me, out the front window.

  Across the street, a man was trying to get into my mother’s store.

  “Officer, I’d like to report a crime,” I said as I walked up to the White Magic Five & Dime.

  Detective Logan turned around to face me.

  I’d recognized him right away, even from behind.

  He had a highly recognizable behind.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Attempted breaking and entering.”

  “Can you describe the suspect?”

  I looked Logan up and down. “Tall. Dark hair. Conservative clothes. The kind of face that drives baristas wild.”

  “I’ll put out an APB.” Logan waggled his thumb at the door behind him. “I thought you’d be open for business. You did say you were going to try running the place for a while. I knocked, but when no one came to the door…”

  “You got worried? That’s sweet. I was just talking shop with Josette Berg.”

  “Oh yeah? Comparing notes on reading tea leaves?”

  “No. Chicken entrails. I couldn’t remember if gizzards represent your finances or your love life.”

  “I hope they never have anything to do with my love life.”

  “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” I furrowed my brow and scratched my head. “I’m not even sure what I meant by that.”

  The banter had been flying by too fast even for me.

  “So what’s up, Detective?” I said. “Got some news?”

  “No and yes. Care to discuss it over an early dinner?”

  “All right.”

  “Great.” Logan grinned. “I know a little place that does great chicken gizzards.”

  We ended up at Café Vortex again.

  “I don’t see gizzards on the menu,” I said.

  “I think it’s this thing called escargot.”