The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery)

by Steve Hockensmith

  “Who? Kathleen? In the coffee shop? You think so?”

  “I was lucky to get out of there without having a café americano dumped over my head.”

  “Oh. Sorry. That’s a sad story, actually. Kathleen’s got a thing for cops, and I’m the only one in Berdache who’s not married.”

  “So what’s the problem? She’s attractive in a too-old-to-be-working-at-Hooters-anymore kind of way.”

  Logan shivered.

  “She always smells like French roast,” he said. “Anyway, let her make assumptions; so much the better. She’s the gossip queen of the county. By the end of the day, half the town’s going to think we’re engaged, and that might discourage certain people from making more threats.”

  “Got it.”

  Up ahead, I could see a middle-aged woman cupping her hands to the White Magic Five & Dime’s glass door. She was trying to look inside.

  “That was impressive how you spotted Clarice pulling a shortchange,” I said to Logan. “Most people would’ve been looking at the necklace.”

  “Well, cops aren’t most people.”

  “Yeah.”

  The woman was knocking.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “do you know what a Michigan role is?”

  “Some kind of danish?”

  “No. How about the Jamaican switch? Ever hear of it?”

  “Sounds like a dance move.”

  “Right. Same with the block hustle. You know that one?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The badge-play comeback? The oak tree game? The precious pet?”

  Logan shook his head and shook his head and shook his head.

  “I think I just failed a test,” he said.

  “Oh, no. You passed. You are a very nice man.” Who doesn’t know squat about confidence games.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” I said, and I darted off after the woman who’d been trying to get into the White Magic Five & Dime. She’d started to walk off, and I couldn’t let my first customer get away.

  The Hierophant’s got the priestly robes, the worshipful acolytes, and the keys to knowledge both worldly and spiritual just lying there at his feet. He even seems to be saying the Boy Scout pledge. Who could be more worthy of our trust, right? But watch out—this isn’t wisdom we’re seeing, it’s pomp and circumstance. Ritual. Spectacle. Dogma. And we all remember what happened to the dogma when it got too close to the karma.

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  “Sorry!” I called out. “Coffee break!”

  The woman turned to face me, looking confused.

  I waved a hand at the White Magic Five & Dime.

  “We’re open, if you’re interested. I just ran down the street to the coffee shop. Can’t get my eyes open in the morning without a cappuccino. Not even my third one.”

  The woman didn’t stop looking confused and start looking something else.

  “My third eye, I mean,” I could have stammered. “You know…like psychics supposedly have? In, uh, mysticism and stuff? Sorry. I’m new at occult humor.”

  Instead, I smiled. Hell, I beamed.

  A confident bastard will get a lot further than a saint with low self-esteem, Biddle used to say.

  The woman peered past me at the shop. She was fortyish, heavyish, shortish, owlish—extremely -ish all around. As blandly American as a block of Velveeta.

  Her hands looked strong and rough, though. And her arms were long enough to reach across a table.

  You wouldn’t see her type on wanted posters very often, but that didn’t mean anything. I was looking for a victim—an angry one—not a criminal.

  “Is Athena in?” the woman said.

  She seemed sincere. But then again, so did I.

  “I’m afraid not,” I said. “There’s been a change of ownership. I run the Five & Dime now. Come on in and I’ll make you a cup of tea. Is Red Zinger all right? I’ve got friends who swear by it, but like I said, cappuccino’s the only thing that gets my motor running.”

  This was hustling-the-mark-along talk. But the woman wasn’t moving.

  I got her unstuck the easy way.

  “Did I mention? Returning customers get their first reading free.”

  She followed me inside.

  Her name was Alice Fisk (she claimed), and she lived in the next county over. She didn’t get into Berdache much, but the last time she had she’d come into the White Magic Five & Dime on a whim. Athena had been very persuasive. Very perceptive. Very helpful.

  Very patient.

  Alice hadn’t cleaned out her life savings so Athena could invest in the deal she’d foreseen would make them rich. She hadn’t dug out her private papers—including birth certificate and social security card—so Athena could use them to “work up a chart” that would plot the course of her entire life. All she’d brought, she told me, was forty dollars for the “special expanded reading” Athena had promised her.

  “Oh,” I said. “I can do those.”

  We didn’t have any Red Zinger next to the microwave and minifridge in the office, so I made do. Alice got a tablespoon of Lipton Diet Lemon Iced Tea Mix stirred into boiling-hot water.

  “Here you go.” I put the mug on the table in the reading room.

  “Thank you.”

  The woman picked up the tea and brought it toward her mouth, then simply blew on it and put it back down. I’d nuked it so long it wouldn’t be cool enough to drink for a week.

  “What happened to Athena?” Alice asked.

  “Health issues. Came on very suddenly.”

  “Oh, no. I hope she’ll be all right.”

  “She’s stable at the moment. The doctors don’t expect her to get any worse.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “It is, it is. Now…please shuffle these.” I slid a tarot deck across the table and tried to remember Josette Berg’s patter at the House of Arcana the day before. “While you’re doing that, meditate on your question. What is it you’d like the cards to tell you?”

  “Should I say it out loud?”

  “If you wish.”

  Alice closed her eyes as she shuffled. After about twenty seconds, she put the deck down and opened her eyes again.

  She looked at me expectantly.

  Silently.

  Great.

  You don’t have to push for details, Biddle used to tell me. Citizens never pass up an opportunity to talk about themselves.

  Sometimes Biddle was full of shit.

  I put my hand over the deck and drew it toward me. I had to fight the sudden irrational impulse to palm the top card. That was how I’d been taught to play. But it was a whole new game I was trying to master now.

  I started laying out the cards in the pattern I’d seen Josette use—“the Weather Vane.”

  “You’re not going to use the whatchamacallit?” Alice asked. “The Celtics Cross?”

  “No,” I said. Because I didn’t know what a “Celtics Cross” was. I hadn’t seen anything about them in Infinite Roads to Knowing.

  Then again, I was only on page 98.

  “This is a spread of my own creation,” I said. “I call it the Phoenix.”

  “Looks like an airplane.”

  “Exactly. Both move on the winds of chance.”

  Alice looked dubious.

  I flipped over a card, fast, and found myself looking at a knight of the Round Table planting giant carrots.

  “Ahhh,” I said. “The Seven of Rods.”

  “Rods?”

  “As it is called in the old texts, yes. You might have heard it referred to by its newer name”—I stole a quick squint at the little words printed faintly across the top of the card—“Wands. Now, this first card represents your current life situation. If we look at it closel
y, we can plainly see that you’re…”

  What? Sir Lancelot? A giant carrot farmer? They both seemed unlikely.

  “On the defensive,” I said. “The man there, he’s building a wall around himself. A fortification. He feels besieged.”

  Alice’s eyes went wide and watery.

  Bingo.

  I turned over another card.

  “Very interesting. The Seven of Pentacles.”

  On the card, a guy who looked like Robin Hood was leaning against a hoe as he looked down at golden pentagrams growing on vines like a bunch of Satanic watermelons.

  “Here we see what’s in your conscious mind. You’re contemplating past decisions and endeavors—taking stock of the fruit of your long toil. It looks like you’ve got a fine crop there…but is it really?”

  Alice gave me an encouraging nod.

  I had accurately perceived that someone who visits a fortune-teller would be thinking about the choices she’s made in life.

  Like, amazing, right? I must be psychic.

  I moved on, sticking as close as I could to Josette’s gibberishy script.

  “And here we find what’s in your subconscious mind.”

  “Oh-ho! The King of Swords! Now isn’t that something?”

  What kind of something, I didn’t know. The picture didn’t give me much to work with: just a dude with a sword on a throne. Maybe the illustrator ran out of ideas after the devilmelons.

  “Here we see someone who’s very…kingly,” I said. “He’s calm, cool, totally in charge. This is what you’d like to be—what you aspire to. But you’re not sure if you can achieve it.”

  Alice nodded again, more vigorously this time.

  “With the next card, we gaze into the past to see what shaped your life as you know it now—the choice that brought you to your current predicament. And we get…ahhh.”

  “Ahhh?” Alice said. She put her hands on the table and leaned forward to stare at the card. A band of gold was wrapped around the ring finger of her left hand.

  “A man,” I said. “One who seemingly comes to you bearing some great gift. But see? He’s upside down. Whatever’s in the chalice pours out. The gift is squandered. The promise is broken.”

  The hogwash is blatant.

  I wasn’t risking anything, though. If the woman had a happy marriage, she’d think of some other man who’d let her down. There’s always one, if not dozens. And if she didn’t have a happy marriage…

  Tears began to well up in Alice’s eyes.

  That answered that.

  To my right, pressed up against the wall of the reading room, was a squat bookcase. Sitting on top of it were a box of Kleenex and a crystal ball so big you could take it bowling.

  I passed the Kleenex to Alice. She dabbed at her eyes.

  “It’s so true,” she said. “That’s just the way things turned out. So much big talk in the beginning, but then what?”

  I nodded sympathetically, although I felt bad for Mr. Alice. Here I was making him the bad guy and I didn’t even know his name.

  I decided to give the next card a happy spin no matter what it was.

  “Now we turn to the future.”

  Oops.

  Alice was crying again before I could even speak.

  “I knew it,” she sobbed. “There we are, starving in the snow!”

  “That’s just a possible future, Alice. How things could turn out. Like in…”

  I was momentarily torn between A Christmas Carol and Back to the Future Part II. But I couldn’t assume that Alice had read the classics or (like me) watched ungodly amounts of hotel room HBO circa 1990.

  “…the writings of the great Roarke Villechaize Ricardo,” I said instead. “In the words of the master, ‘Yesterday was, now is, but tomorrow is only maybe.’”

  “Huh?” Alice said.

  Which was disappointing. I thought it had sounded pretty good considering how far I’d reached up my butt to get it.

  “Let’s move on to something positive,” I said.

  I smiled even as my mind screamed, What comes next? Something about…energy?

  “Bettering energies to harness for personal engooderment,” I said. “And here we get—”

  A dude eating a nasty-looking grapefruit as he gazes out at the ocean from between two beanpoles.

  Very helpful.

  “Obviously,” I lied, “what we have here is a master of his domain. He’s not a king, but he’s powerful and proud. He’s got the whole world in his hands and he’s looking to the horizon, facing the future with supreme confidence. This is who you need to be.”

  “Yes. Yes. You are so right.”

  Alice sat up a little straighter in her chair and blew her nose in a firm, resolved sort of way.

  “And finally,” I said, “negative energies. Energies to avoid.”

  I turned over the last card.

  We’d be ending with an easy one. The same card had come up in my reading with Josette.

  The Eight of Swords. A woman blinded and trapped by her misconceptions and limitations.

  I recycled what I could remember of Josette’s shtick about swords—how they were all about smarts versus heart and the need for action, etc. blah yada—then segued into the wrap-up.

  “The cards are speaking to you clearly, Alice. They’re saying that you’ve been passive for too long. Your life isn’t what you’d like it to be, but you have the tools to change that. Start using them. Take control. No one’s going to solve your money problems or fix your home life but you. And no one’s stopping you but you. If you embrace your power today, tomorrow and all the tomorrows after that are going to look a lot brighter.”

  I didn’t add that she should keep her feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars, but I could have.

  Alice didn’t blink once through the whole spiel. Her fists were clenched. Her jaw jutted out. She had the look football coaches want to see on their players at halftime. Yes, her ribs were bruised, her kneecaps were shattered, and she had a concussion, but damn it she was there to play.

  She bought it all. She could do anything!

  There’s a reason Tony Robbins is a gazillionaire.

  “Thank you,” Alice said to me.

  “My pleasure.”

  “Everything you said is so true.”

  “It’s all in the cards.”

  “I don’t have to be a martyr anymore.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “It’s time I started asserting myself.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “I’m as smart and capable as anyone.”

  “Exactly.”

  “If Donald doesn’t think llamas can turn the ranch around, well, that’s too damn bad.”

  Pause.

  “Right,” I said.

  “The second I get home, I’m calling up the Llama and Alpaca Association and buying a whole damn herd!”

  “Wonderful.”

  “And when Donald gets home, I’m telling him, ‘Congratulations, dipshit—you’re a llama breeder!’”

  “Fantastic.”

  “And then I’m going to tell him if he doesn’t stop boning Julia Luchetti, he’s going to end up with a steak knife where his wiener used to be.”

  Pause.

  Pause.

  Pause.

  I eventually managed a feeble “you go, girl.”

  It seemed to make Alice happy.

  “I’m sorry about Athena,” Alice said as I showed her out. “But I’m glad it’s you who took her place. You’re every bit as good as she was.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Thinking: God, I hope not.

  I locked the front door. I hadn’t turned on the neon sign in the window that morning, and I didn’t turn it on now. />
  I went back to the reading room and sat down.

  The Phoenix spread was still on the table. Completely by accident, I’d picked a fitting name for it.

  My mother was dead, and who comes rising out of her ashes? Me.

  No thanks.

  I had a debt to repay. I owed my mother justice. But I wouldn’t become her to get it. Not for real. Not for keeps.

  Not if I could help it.

  I took stock of my progress.

  Lesson learned #1: Unless Alice Fisk was the Meryl Streep of Arizona—and she wasn’t—she didn’t kill my mother. Alice hadn’t spent enough time with Athena to have been that screwed by her, so whatever homicidal rage she had in her was safely directed at her husband. I had successfully eliminated a suspect. One down, the rest of the state to go.

  Lesson learned #2: I needed to work on my tarot patter. Improving interpretations hadn’t been hard. The cards looked like The Lord of the Rings as illustrated by Salvador Dalí. Most of them packed in enough kooky symbolism for a dozen Lady Gaga videos. It was kind of important to get the names right, though. And I wouldn’t be able to get away with bogus spreads like the Phoenix—not with my mother’s regulars. If someone wanted a Celtics Cross or a Trump Tower or a Reading Rainbow or what have you, I had to lay it out without blinking.

  Lesson learned #3: Donald Fisk was shtupping Julia Luchetti. Which wasn’t useful in and of itself, but generally speaking it was helpful to hear. It was a reminder that Biddle had been right all along: people love to talk about themselves. And they wouldn’t come into the White Magic Five & Dime if they didn’t mean to do it. Alice had held out longer than most, I guessed, but when she finally did open up, what had poured out along with the tears was pure gold.

  What if this Julia Luchetti had a husband? What if she had money?

  She’d find out she could keep one but not the other, that’s what. If my mother had still been around, anyway.

  I knew what to look for next.

  He said/she said sometimes works out okay, Biddle used to say, but “just listen to what you said” never fails.