Crimes of Magic: The Yard Sale Wand

by Richard L. King

  The redhead looked up as we entered, smiled and said, “May I help you?”

  “I’m Rachel Chase and this is Professor Walker,” Rachel said. “We’re private investigators working as part of Mary Martingale’s defense team.”

  “I’m Connie Planck, the office manager,” the redhead said as she rose to greet us and offered her outstretched hand. Connie was a plus-size woman, about five ten wearing a plain dress and comfortable shoes.

  We both shook hands with Connie, and she gestured to the guest chairs. “Please have a seat,” she said, and we all three sat in small armchairs around a low table.

  “What can I do for you?” Connie said pleasantly and efficiently.

  “As I said,” Rachel explained, “we’re private investigators working with the Hastings-Cooley law firm that’s defending Mary. Are you aware of Mary’s situation?”

  “Oh yes; it’s terrible,” Connie replied. “I’m glad Charlene Mosley is working on her defense. With Seymour dead and Mary arrested, I’m all alone here in the office.”

  “Do you know Charlene?”

  “Oh yes, she’s helped me with customs issues from time to time.”

  “Are there any other employees?” Rachel asked.

  “We only have two other employees. Burt and Ernie work in the warehouse and drive the truck.”

  “Burt and Ernie?” I asked.

  “I know. We tried calling them Ernesto and Burt, but it didn’t stick. Burt Patten and Ernesto Verde are their names.”

  “Are they at work today?”

  “Yes, they should be in the warehouse. They let me know if they leave for lunch or something.”

  “Do you have a few minutes to talk with us?” Rachel asked.

  “Oh sure,” Connie replied. “I may have to answer the phone if it rings, but I’m glad to do whatever I can to help. How is Mary doing?”

  “She’s coming home this afternoon. She can’t leave the house right now, but they’re releasing her from jail.”

  “That’s good. I would hate to have to stay in jail. Can I call her at home?”

  “Sure, no problem with that,” Rachel said. “If you don’t mind, could you explain your duties here?”

  “I do all the logistics and back office work,” Connie said. “Seymour is our buyer and Mary is our salesperson. I make sure that the things Seymour buys make it to the warehouse, and the things Mary sells make it to our customers. I also do payroll, bookkeeping and so forth.”

  “Are you open for business Monday through Friday?” Rachel asked.

  “Officially, we’re open Monday through Friday from nine to five, but sometimes we work on weekends.”

  “Did Seymour and Mary both work in the office every day?”

  “About half the time. Usually one of them is in the private office back there. When they’re both here, Mary usually sits out here with me so Seymour can use the office for phone calls. He has a loud voice so we usually stick him back there. They both work from home sometimes, because most of what they do is on the phone or by email. One or the other of them is usually here to keep me company.”

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “I’ve worked here for sixteen years. When Mary and Seymour started the business twenty years ago, they were young and did everything themselves. They had a small retail gallery in Northeast Portland. As they grew the business, they hired me. They began doing more and more wholesale and gave up the gallery to focus on wholesale importing.”

  “You’ve worked here a long time,” Rachel observed.

  “Yes, it’s a good job. I don’t have to deal much with customers. I mostly work with shippers and customs offices, and I keep Burt and Ernie scheduled. I make decent money and Burt and Ernie do all the heavy lifting.”

  “Are Mary and Seymour easy to work for?”

  “I’ve had worse bosses. Seymour is loud and forgetful, but he isn’t, unreasonable. Mary is nice and easy to talk to, she’s just very picky and detail oriented.”

  “What do you think will happen with the business, now that Seymour’s gone?”

  “I think we’ll be OK. Mary will have to pick out the inventory we get from our suppliers, but I can handle the day-to-day supplier hand-holding. Mary will have to travel more now. Seymour was always flying to Asia to scout out more product. To tell you the truth, buying is the easy part. Sometimes Mary couldn’t move the inventory fast enough, and I would have to tell Seymour to dial it back a little; take some time off.”

  “Are you an expert on antiques?” Rachel asked.

  “Oh no, I’ve learned a lot on the job, but I can’t tell a genuine artifact from a fake or a reproduction. I can handle all the buying and selling details, but Seymour or Mary would have to decide what to buy and how to price it.”

  “So Seymour had the contacts to find antiques?” Rachel probed.

  “Yes, Seymour grew up in Hong Kong. His parents worked there for the British government. He also studied art, history and religion in England. He was working for a shipping company in Hong Kong when he met Mary. Somehow, Seymour’s company get stuck with a shipment of Chinese antiques because their customer got arrested or went bankrupt or something, so they assigned Seymour the job of selling off the shipment. He sold most of the stuff to contacts in England, but he cold-called a few galleries in this country. Mary had a gallery, and she bought just one of his items, but I guess they hit it off and got married.”

  “So Mary was the antiques retailer?”

  “Yes, she’s the salesperson. She knows art as well as Seymour does, uh did, but she never went to Asia without Seymour. He spoke Mandarin, Cantonese and a couple of other languages, I think. Mary only speaks English.”

  “Has there been anything different about the business lately?”

  “We’re in one of our excess inventory phases right now. We need to make more sales before we bring in more inventory, but Seymour had recently developed a new source deep into China, and he wanted to get the pipeline going by buying something from them.”

  “What do you mean by ‘deep into China’?”

  “Most of our suppliers are in Southeast Asia including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Shanghai, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Beijing in North China. This new source is able to get product from Inner Mongolia, Northwest China and even Tibet.”

  “Do you only sell antiques?”

  “Yes, the older the better. All our Chinese inventory is pre-Republic, before the collapse of the dynastic system in 1912. Seymour preferred items made before the Seventeenth Century, that’s the Ming Dynasty or earlier. It’s very hard to find genuine Chinese antiques legally.”

  “What do you mean by ‘legally’?”

  “It’s hard to get artifacts out of China these days, because the government wants to keep them. If you were to examine our customs paperwork, you’d see that our Chinese antiques originate in Singapore, Vietnam, or the Philippines, for example. How they got from China to these other Asian ports is anybody’s guess.”

  “Do you think Seymour and Mary knew how they got there?”

  “I think Seymour probably did.”

  “So not all your antiques have paperwork showing their authenticity?”

  “A lot of them don’t have provenance, but our customers are art or antiques dealers themselves. They have their own experts to examine the product and make sure it’s authentic.”

  “Do you get a lot of complaints about authenticity?”

  “No we don’t. Mary won’t sell to someone who can’t independently verify authenticity. We have had a couple of customers whose experts disagreed with Seymour, so Mary refunded their money and didn’t deal with them anymore.”

  “So you only sell to customers who agree with Seymour.”

  “You could look at it that way. We also only buy from suppliers that don’t try to cheat Seymour.”

  “Do you ever use an outside expert to check the authenticity of something you’re buying?”

  “I don’t remember that ever happening.”r />
  “It sounds like Seymour was essential to your business.”

  “I think Mary can authenticate as well as Seymour could. She just usually didn’t have to.”

  “Did Mary ever disagree with Seymour’s appraisal of an item.”

  “Rarely. However she did disagree with him about some items from our new Chinese source.”

  “What kind of items?”

  “I have them over here,” Connie said as she got up and walked over to a file cabinet. She unlocked the cabinet, took a wooden box out of one of the drawers, and brought it over to the table by our chairs. She opened the box to reveal a Post-it note and two objects lying on silk pillows.

  Connie picked up the Post-it and read out loud, “‘I took the bi home. S.’ It looks like Seymour came in over the weekend and took one of the artifacts home with him. He took the bi, which is a jade disk with a round hole in the center. It’s a well-made piece, but it’s broken with a piece missing.”

  “If it’s shaped like a disk, why is it called a bee?” Rachel asked.

  “In English, it’s spelled ‘B.I.’ and pronounced ‘bee’,” Connie explained. “This is a jade cong,” she continued as she took the first item from the box. She handed it to Rachel who looked it over and handed it to me.

  The object was basically a jade bar about eight inches long and two inches wide with a square cross section. A cylindrical hole, about one and a half inches in diameter, had been bored through the length of the bar, which was carved into seven sections. It looked as if you had seven squares of jade, each a little over an inch thick, with a circular hole in the center having a diameter almost equal to the width of the square. If you then stacked the seven squares on top of each other, it would look similar to this cong. The actual cong was a solid piece of emerald-green jade carved to look segmented. There were symbols carved on all four sides.

  “How old is it and what was it used for?” Rachel asked.

  “It’s about 4,500 years old, but we don’t know exactly what it was used for. Some experts say the circle represents the sky and the square represents the earth, but nobody knows for sure. This isn’t the only one in existence; thousands have been found over the years in different sizes and conditions, but this one is an exceptional example.”

  The other object in the box was a flat piece of jade about six inches long and an inch and a half wide. It had symbols carved on one side which was very slightly convex. The other side was flat and blank.

  “This piece may be even older that the bi or the cong,” Connie said. “Once again, we don’t know what its purpose was.”

  “How valuable are these artifacts?” I asked.

  “There are two types of jade,” Connie replied, “jadeite and nephrite. Most prehistoric Chinese jade is nephrite. Jadeite is the slightly heavier and more valuable type, and all three of the artifacts, including the broken bi, are jadeite. Even better, they’re very high quality jadeite which is called Imperial jade when it’s this emerald color. Also notice the workmanship. For artifacts over four millennia old, the carvings are very high quality and very well preserved.

  “The cong is probably the most valuable of the three,” Connie continued, “and Seymour estimated the retail value at over a quarter of a million dollars. All three artifacts would probably sell at auction for four hundred thousand dollars. We’ll probably wholesale them for about three hundred thousand.”

  “Did Mary agree with Seymour’s appraisal?” Rachel asked.

  “No. Mary thought that the quality of the workmanship and excellent condition indicated that they are not as old as Seymour estimated. Mary thought that they must have been created during the Zhou Dynasty a little over two thousand years ago. She thought that she could only get a hundred thousand dollars for the three of them, if they are authentic. Mary thought that they might be fake.”

  “Did Mary often disagree with Seymour’s appraisals?”

  “Very rarely. I believe that she just thought that these were too good to be from ancient China.”

  “What do you think of these artifacts, Professor?” Rachel asked.

  “I think they’re beautiful,” I said. “I’d like to test them if you don’t mind.”

  “What do you mean ‘Test them,’” Connie said. “I can’t let you damage these valuable artifacts.”

  “Of course not,” I replied. “I won’t even touch them while testing them.”

  “Will your tests prove their authenticity?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said. “My test won’t reveal their age or even their composition. I’ll be testing them for magic.”

  “Are you serious?” Connie asked skeptically.

  “I’m totally serious,” I replied, “but I don’t blame you for being skeptical. As you said, we don’t know what the purpose of these artifacts was or is. If they were used for spiritual or ceremonial purposes, my test may reveal that.”

  “What kind of private investigators are you?” Connie asked.

  “Rachel is the licensed investigator,” I replied. “I’m her consultant in occult matters.”

  “I’d better call Charlene. Please wait here,” Connie said as she put the objects back in the box and took the box with her into the inner office.

  “Better go get your magic bag out of the car,” Rachel said handing me her keys. “I’m sure Charlene will vouch for us.”

  “Better give me your Mojo?” I said. “It’ll interfere with the test for magic.”

  “Here you go,” Rachel said as she slipped the amulet’s silk cord over her head.

  I went out to Rachel’s car and retrieved the Coriolis and its tripod from my magic bag. I put Rachel’s Mojo in the small steel box I keep in my magic bag so that I can shield magical objects. I left the bag in the car, relocked the car, and went back inside. Connie was emerging from the inner office when I returned.

  “Charlene says you’re the real deal,” Connie said, “but you’d better not damage the artifacts.”

  “I promise,” I said. “Is there a table I can use to lay the artifacts on?”

  “Let’s go across the hall into the conference room,” Connie said as she picked up the wooden box and led us to the room on the other side of the hallway.

  The conference room had a table with eight chairs around it. I sat in the chair at one end of the table and set up the aluminum tripod. I took a charcoal pencil from my pocket and drew the symbol on the Coriolis that turned it into a detector of magical devices.

  “A pendulum?” Connie said incredulously.

  “It’s special,” I replied. “Would you please set the box at the other end of the table, I need to test the objects one at a time.”

  Connie complied, and I attached the string of the Coriolis to the tripod so that the tip of the Coriolis was about three inches above the table.

  “Connie, could you hand me the flat artifact?”

  Connie handed me the flat piece of jade with symbols carved on one side. I placed it under the Coriolis and started it swinging in counter-clockwise circles.

  “Right now, the pendulum is generating a magic field that will induce magic into any magical device placed under it. It’s kind of like one of those metal detectors scavengers use on the beach. If this piece of jade is magic, the pendulum will change from swinging in a circle to swinging back and forth along the lines of magical force.”

  Sure enough, the Coriolis changed to swinging back and forth for about three inches along the length of the jade artifact.

  “This one is magic,” I said. “Let’s test the cong.”

  I handed the magical piece of jade back to Connie and took the cong, placing it under the Coriolis. I started the Coriolis swinging in a circle, and it very quickly shifted to swinging back and forth for about four inches along the length of the cong.

  “This one has powerful magic,” I declared.

  “What kind of magic? What does it do?” Connie asked.

  “I don’t know. Unfortunately, my test is just a ‘Yes/No’ test. It do
esn’t tell me what kind of magic is present.”

  “What do we do now?” Connie asked.

  “I think you should lock these artifacts away. Put them in a steel safe if you have one. They may be even more valuable than Seymour estimated. How many people know about these artifacts?”

  “Just Seymour, Mary and me, plus whoever gave them to Seymour.”

  “You don’t know who Seymour got them from?” Rachel asked.

  “No, there was no paperwork with them. I don’t know if they’re samples or if Seymour bought them. I haven’t wired any money for them, so if Seymour bought them, we owe somebody something.”

  “We’d better not tell anyone else about them,” I suggested. “May I take photos of them?”

  “OK,” Connie agreed.

  I used my phone to take a series of photos documenting the symbols on the artifacts.

  “Could you introduce us to Burt and Ernie,” Rachel asked.

  “Sure,” Connie said. “Let me put these away, and I’ll be right back.”

  Connie took us back to the warehouse where we saw two men sitting at a table eating sandwiches and drinking Cokes.

  “Burt, Ernie,” Connie said, “I want you to meet a couple of people.”

  The two men stood up and wiped their hands on their jeans.

  “This is Rachel Chase and Professor Walker. They’re working on Mary’s defense team. This is Burt Patten,” Connie said gesturing to a black man in his forties, “and Ernie Verde,” she said indicating a wiry Hispanic man about the same age as Burt.

  “It’s OK to answer all their questions,” Connie said. “I’ll see you two when you’re ready to leave,” Connie said to us, and she went back to the office.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch,” Rachel said.

  “It’s just sandwiches,” Burt said. “They’ll keep.”

  “We’re private investigators working with Mary’s lawyer,” Rachel said. “We’re gathering information to help prove that Mary is innocent.”