The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery)

by Steve Hockensmith

  One glance around the room, and I had it.

  I moved to the bookshelf I’d taken the Kleenex from a few minutes before. The crystal ball on top of it was smoky gray with a shiny black base. The thing was the size of a globe. The only other time I’d seen a crystal ball that big, the person using it had been cackling “Fly, my pretties! Fly!” to dudes in monkey suits.

  I turned the ball around, but there was nothing on the back of the glass but dust. I noticed something in the base, though. A hole about half the size of a dime. Just big enough for an electrical cord to run through.

  I picked the ball up—it was surprisingly light—and started messing with the bottom. After a little righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, I managed to unscrew the base.

  The crystal ball was hollow. And empty.

  But it hadn’t always been.

  You’ve got to love a card this simple. The Lovers signifies love. Well, and sex. And marriage. Any romantic entanglement, really. Or even a non-romantic partnership that elevates those in it to some higher level. Or simply a joining of opposites—yin and yang. (Guess who’s the yang.) It can indicate negative things as well, such as a crippling yearning for a lost love or a naïve faith in an over-idealized Other. So okay, it’s not so simple. And if you really thought a card about lovers could be, maybe you should ask yourself: what do you know about love?

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  I’m going to tell a story. A love story. A true one.

  That’s the kind that doesn’t get told much.

  Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She was seven years old, and she was standing in a casino in Atlantic City. It was 1981, so the people in the casino were dressed even more horribly than the people in casinos today. It was smokier, too. But the noise and the flashing lights and the general feeling that you were trapped in a giant pinball machine with a thousand drunks who didn’t want to get out—that was all the same.

  None of it bothered the little girl. She’d spent more time in casinos than in schools. Casinos, in some ways, were her schools.

  Every now and then (but not as often as you might think), someone would walk up to the girl and say, “Are you lost? Do you need help?”

  Most of the time, she said, “No, thanks.”

  If it was someone who worked for the casino, she smiled sweetly and said, “Mommy’s in the girls’ room. When she comes out, we’re going to the buff-it. Does it have ice cream?”

  Once it was a man with slicked-back hair and thick glasses who leaned in a little too close when he talked, and the girl said, “Back off before I start screaming, perv.”

  The man scurried off to the slot machines.

  The girl really was waiting for her mother. When she saw her, she saw this: beauty. The tall, slender, blond, blue-eyed kind. Big smile. Stylish clothes. Long hair, feathered Farrah-style.

  The big smile wasn’t for the girl, though. It was for the man on the mother’s arm. He looked a little like the Man from Atlantis, only with thinner hair and a thicker middle. He was smiling, too.

  The girl rushed up to them and said, “Momma!”

  The mother and the man stopped walking. And smiling.

  “‘Momma’?” the man said. He had an accent.

  He turned to the woman beside him.

  She wasn’t so beside him anymore. She’d unwrapped her arm from his and slid a half-step away. She spoke to the girl, but her eyes were moving, scanning the faces around them.

  “Gabrielle…my god, honey…what are you doing here?”

  The girl ran up and threw her arms around the woman’s waist. Her mother bent in over her, embracing her, but it looked less like a hug than a huddle. A bracing for a blow.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” the girl said, “so I made Franco take me to the arcade here. They’ve got a Space Invaders and a Pac-Man! But then all Franco wanted to do was play blackjack and he gave me some money and left me all by myself and when I ran out of quarters I couldn’t find him and I was starting to get really, really scared and I’m so glad I saw you!”

  “Franco’s here?”

  “Yeah. Somewhere.”

  The mother straightened up and started tugging her daughter away.

  “You didn’t see me here,” she said. “When you ran out of quarters, you found your way back to our hotel by yourself, and I was already back in our suite because I had a headache and I skipped Engelbert Humperdinck. Do you understand?”

  “What?” the girl said.

  The man took a few hesitant steps after them.

  “Cathy, wait! What is happening?”

  The woman didn’t look back.

  The man stopped following. Whatever country he was from, trouble looked the same there as it did in New Jersey.

  He’d been taking Cathy to his room. Now he went there alone.

  He could still count himself lucky, though. He’d first met the woman at a roulette table the night before. The way she’d looked at him, the way she responded when he approached—it was right out of Diamonds Are Forever, and he was James Bond. They’d never get to Round 2 together, he and she, but Round 1 was something he’d be telling his friends about back in Whereverbourg for the rest of his life.

  A few minutes later, there was a knock on his door. When he looked out through the peephole, he saw Cathy. Just Cathy. But when he opened the door, thinking the bell was ringing for Round 2 after all, the woman stumbled in as if shoved, and a tall black man in a turtleneck and a tan leisure suit stalked in after her.

  “Come on in, Gabrielle,” the black guy said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. This nice man is one of your mother’s special friends, remember?”

  The little girl peeked around the doorway.

  “Listen to Franco, honey,” Cathy said. Her voice trembled, and her eyes were wide and puffy and pink.

  The girl came inside with small, slow steps.

  “I don’t wish to be rude,” the man said, “but—”

  “Close the door,” Franco told him.

  The man blinked. Twice.

  He wasn’t used to tall black guys in turtlenecks barking orders at him, and this had an effect.

  He closed the door.

  Franco was already walking across the room. It was a big room, but not a suite. Nice but not gaudy or over-furnished. The kind of room a casino gives you when you have money but you don’t know how to throw it around yet. When you don’t know what to expect.

  Franco turned on the TV, then patted the queen-sized bed.

  “Over here, Gabrielle,” he said. “The grown-ups need to talk.”

  The girl walked past her mother’s special friend—“Uhhh, now, hold on just a moment,” he was saying—and settled herself on the edge of the bed and started watching The Love Boat.

  She knew the show well. There were few shows she didn’t know well. Half her childhood had been spent parked in front of hotel TVs or dumped for the day at public libraries or roadside tourist traps.

  She’d learned a lot that way, actually. She knew who Gavin MacLeod was. She’d read Animal Farm (because it looked like it would be funny, but it wasn’t). She knew that the Battle of Gettysburg was fought in 1863 and that the Union army had won and they must have been sweating like crazy in those blue suits of theirs because, wow, you got hot wandering around that place in July.

  And she knew that if you walked up to kids at a chintzy local museum and said, “Did you see the leprechaun? They keep it in a jar in the back,” about half the time you could get a buck out of them before you convinced them to go out the fire exit.

  The Love Boat was a rerun. The half-whispered conversation behind her was a rerun of sorts, too, but she listened anyway.

  Franco: Do you have any idea whose wife you’ve been messing with?

  Cathy: I told you he doesn’t.

  The guy: I don’t. I
really don’t.

  Franco: And in front of his kid, even?

  Cathy: She didn’t see anything.

  The guy: The lady and I were just walking together.

  Franco: Just walking with the lady, he says. Just walking! To your room. Again.

  Cathy: Oh god. You set me up, didn’t you? Oh god. You bastard.

  The guy: If I’d known she was—

  Franco: It doesn’t make any difference whether you knew or not. You did what you did, and that’s going to make my employer very, very unhappy.

  Cathy: Oh god.

  The guy: Look, I’m just a businessman who’s—

  Franco: Hey, my boss is here on business, too. Atlantic City business. You understand me? He’s that kind of businessman. Only he likes to take the wife and kid along sometimes. Because, you know, to him family is everything. Everything. And if he found out his wife was out bed-hopping with Eurotrash instead of catching the show at the Sands…

  Cathy: Son of a bitch.

  The guy: This is…I don’t know…it’s crazy. I don’t want any trouble.

  Franco: Well, you’ve got it. More than you can handle. Let me ask you. Do you like coming to Atlantic City?

  The guy: Yes, I guess.

  Franco: Do you like gambling?

  The guy: Yes.

  Franco: Do you like breathing?

  Cathy: Oh god.

  Franco: Answer me. Do you?

  The guy: Yes.

  Franco: Well, if you want to keep coming to Atlantic City and gambling and breathing, you’re going to make sure our little secret doesn’t leave this room. Which means you need to keep your mouth shut, and you need to convince me to keep my mouth shut.

  Cathy: Do it. Please. Just do it. Whatever he wants.

  The guy: But…but…what do you want?

  Franco: You’re a businessman. What do you think?

  It was mostly technical and boring after that. There was talk about expense accounts and exchange rates and traveler’s checks and casino chips. The only interesting bit came when the guy said something like “that’s the best I can do” and there was the crinkly rustle of someone moving fast in polyester, and the woman cried out “Franco, don’t!” And the guy suddenly realized he could do better after all, and not long after that they were leaving.

  “What about her?” the man said, nodding at the girl as she followed her mother toward the door. “She won’t say anything?”

  “Say anything about what?” Franco said. He reached out a big hand and ruffled the girl’s brown hair. “You like your show?”

  The girl shrugged. “It was pretty funny. But the kissing parts are gross.”

  “I know what you mean,” Franco said.

  The man locked the door behind them as soon as it was shut.

  The three of them walked back to their hotel—Holiday Inn, not the Sands—without saying a word. The moment they were in their room, though, the woman whirled on Franco and threw herself into his arms.

  “I told you it’d work! Four thousand bucks! Ha!”

  And she kissed him. He kissed her back, then broke it off.

  “Yeah, you were right. We did good.” He looked over his shoulder at the girl, who was standing perfectly still just inside the door. “All of us. Though I still don’t think we need—”

  The woman wrapped her hands around his face and jerked it toward her and kissed him again.

  “Come on,” she said when she let him up for air. “Let’s celebrate.”

  She pulled him backwards toward the nearest bed.

  Beside it were three suitcases, packed, closed, and ready to go.

  “We’ve gotta get out of here,” Franco said.

  “We can spare twenty minutes.”

  “But…you know…what about…?”

  “Bath time,” the woman said to her daughter without looking at her.

  “Now?” the girl said. “I thought we were trying to—”

  “Just get in the goddamn tub, huh?”

  The girl went into the bathroom and closed the door. She turned on the tap, but she didn’t bother undressing. She just sat on the hard, white linoleum and listened to the water splashing and gurgling behind her.

  The door opened, and Franco leaned in.

  “You okay?”

  The girl nodded.

  “We’ll take a break after this,” Franco said. “Go somewhere fun. Just enjoy ourselves for a while.”

  “You said we were taking a break when we came here.”

  “Hey, you know how it is. Some dollars just belong in your pocket even when they’re in someone else’s. When you see ’em, you gotta take ’em.”

  “Bullshit,” the little girl said.

  Franco didn’t look shocked. He looked proud.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but what isn’t?”

  “I’m waaaitiiing,” the girl’s mother sang out.

  Franco winced.

  “Here,” he said before he left. “I brought you this.”

  He held out a copy of Of Mice and Men the girl had stolen from a branch of the Cleveland Public Library a few days before. She’d only read a couple pages—she’d gotten distracted by another book—but she was still wondering when the mice would show up, and when they did, would they talk? That would be fun.

  The girl turned the water gushing into the tub down to a trickle, just enough to make some noise, before she took the book. Then she sat back against the john and started over from the beginning, full of hope.

  “Thanks, Biddle,” she said.

  The Chariot is the card for people who are really going places. It signals progress, momentum, achievement. This particular charioteer is so good, he can control the strength of conflicting drives—one black, one white, each pulling in different directions—without reins or even a harness. Let’s see Ben-Hur do that. Then again, Ben-Hur didn’t have to worry about his horses running away. Or turning around and eating him.

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  Blackmail—a classic. The video camera in the crystal ball was a nice new touch, though. Say what you will about my mother—it wouldn’t be anything worse than what I’d say—the lady was original.

  Now I knew what the camcorder cassettes in the office had been for. Of course, a digital audio recorder would’ve been a lot easier to hide than a Handycam, but I’m sure Mom had her reasons for going old school.

  My guess: a hand-off just seems so much more real when there’s a physical object involved. You give someone a tape and at least they can have the satisfaction of stomping on it. “Transfer the money into my PayPal account and I promise to delete the mp3 file from my hard drive” just doesn’t have the right ring to it.

  There’d be downsides, though. Tapes would be a pain to back up, for one thing. And knowing that—that these were most likely the original recordings, with no copies—certain someones would be tempted to steal them.

  In fact, I was pretty sure a certain someone had stolen my mother’s tapes. The camera was gone. You’re going to take that and not whatever it had recorded? No. That’s why all the cassettes I’d seen had been unopened. The ones that had been used were who knew where.

  So who’d want them? Three kinds of certain someones came to mind.

  A victim.

  A rival.

  An accomplice who wanted to be a rival.

  I still didn’t know enough about the three groups to know which it was. I needed a lot more information. And I didn’t even have to leave the shop to start getting it because one of the certain someones did me a favor.

  He called me.

  The caller ID said PAY PHONE.

  It had to be him again. Mr. Phlegm. The Man with the Exfoliating Voice.

  He’d be calling from somewhere farther away this time. No way he’d be waiting for me
at the 7-Eleven with a cherry Slurpee.

  I thought about letting him talk to voicemail.

  I’m not here to murder at the moment. Just leave your death threat after the beep…

  But no. He’d probably be too smart to leave a message with a distinctive voice like that. And contact with him was an opportunity.

  Sometimes you’ve got to rattle the cage to get the monkey to play, Biddle used to say. Of course, in real life the monkey’s liable to throw crap in your face or bite off your fingers, but point taken.

  I cleared my throat—talking to people who want to kill me always gets me a little verklempt—and picked up the phone.

  “Lex Luthor!” I said. “How goes it?”

  Nothing.

  “Hello? Mr. Luthor?”

  More nothing.

  “Listen, Lex, I gotta tell you: the silent intimidation thing doesn’t work anymore. Everyone just assumes their cell phone dropped the call.”

  “You’re not on a cell phone,” the gruff-voiced man finally said. “You’re still in the White Magic Five & Dime. Mistake.”

  “That’s more like it! I was starting to think, ‘What’s this guy doing? Calling up so he can mime threats?’ ”

  “Shut up and listen. If you know what’s good for you—”

  “Lex.”

  “—you won’t spend another night—”

  “Lex.”

  “—in this town.”

  “Lex. Rude! I’m trying to talk to you! That’s the whole problem with this relationship. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy our chats; really, I do. All those light bulbs you’ve been eating have totally paid off because man do you have a voice for menacing phone calls. But our conversations are so one-sided. Let’s have a little give and take, huh? Get to know each other. Me first. I’m a Leo, I love piano rock and reggae, I don’t eat meat but I can’t stand tofu, my favorite movie is The Goonies, and I didn’t kiss a boy until I was twenty. Now—your turn. I know you’re not a member of the Hair Club for Men and you were at the 7-Eleven around the corner yesterday and as a welcome wagon you leave a lot to be desired, but beyond that I’m in the dark.”