The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery)

by Steve Hockensmith

  “What are these?” she said.

  Official lotteries were something new. Most people weren’t used to states running their own scams yet.

  “Those raffle tickets gave me an idea,” Biddle said. “Scratch off the gray stuff on these cards. Here, gently, like this. Just enough to see the numbers. No words. Just numbers. Then we’ll have us some real fun together.”

  “You promise?”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  “Right. Like you were ever a Boy Scout.”

  Biddle pinched the girl’s cheek.

  “That’s my girl,” he said.

  All the tickets were losers, but it didn’t matter. They found two candidates. On one, a seven could become a nine after just a little careful work with a black Bic. On the other, a five could become a six.

  Biddle did the seven, the girl the five. They agreed that hers looked better.

  They had a winner.

  “Now we just have to find the right neighborhood,” Biddle said. “We may be in the Wonder Bread capital of the world, but they’ve gotta have a wrong side of the tracks around here somewhere.”

  It took them half an hour to find it.

  Another half hour after that, the girl stepped up to a middle-aged man pushing a shopping cart out of a discount grocery store.

  “Can you help me? I’m lost.”

  The man stopped.

  “I can see that,” he said.

  He was black, and so was everyone in the store and the parking lot and the streets around them.

  “I was on the bus and I must have gotten off at the wrong stop,” the girl said. “But I didn’t realize it at first and I started walking around and now I can’t even find my way back to where I started from.”

  “All right,” the man sighed, “here’s what you want to do.”

  He started giving directions. The girl nodded as if she cared. Then another man walked up.

  “Excuse me, please,” he said. He had a thick accent of indeterminate pan-Caribbean origin. “I need your help.”

  The older man rolled his eyes. “This is my lucky day.”

  “Maybe it is, sir,” the other man said. He held up a scratch-off lottery ticket. “I think this is a winner, but I can’t turn it in.”

  “Why not?” the girl asked.

  “I’m not from here. I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t have papers. I can’t collect a hundred dollars from a state lottery.”

  “A hundred dollars? Let me see!” The girl grabbed the ticket. “Wow. You’re right. It’s a winner.”

  The older man peeked over her shoulder. He didn’t get much time to look. Just enough to see that the right numbers seemed to match.

  “Where’d you buy it?” the girl asked.

  “Right here. In this store.”

  “And it can be turned in here, too?”

  “Yes. You’d get the money immediately.”

  “And then I’m supposed to come out and just give it to you?”

  “No. I’d give you…twenty dollars.”

  “Hey,” the older man said. He had a “What am I—chopped liver?” look on his face.

  “How do I know you wouldn’t take it all?” the girl said.

  The man from Trinijamahaiti looked offended.

  “What a thing for an innocent little girl to say! How do I know you wouldn’t try to keep it all? Maybe you would accuse me of being a thief when I tried to collect my money!” He snatched his ticket back and turned away. “I’ll find someone else to help me.”

  “Hey,” the older man said again.

  “Wait! I know how we can do this!” the girl cried out.

  She jammed a hand into her Jordache jeans and pulled out a wad of crumpled bills. She counted quickly.

  “I’ll give you twenty-eight dollars right now. Then you just give me the ticket, and we can be done.”

  “Twenty-eight dollars? I don’t know…”

  The older man whipped out his wallet.

  “I can give you thirty-nine! No! Forty! That’s practically fifty percent, cash on the barrelhead.”

  He thrust the money at the other man.

  The other man took it and handed over the ticket.

  “No fair,” the girl whined.

  “The only fair’s the one with farm animals and cotton candy,” the older man said. He swung his cart around and headed back into the store. “Good luck catching that bus.”

  The other man and the girl stalked off in different directions.

  They met again two blocks away, on the quiet side street where they’d left the car.

  “Told you it’d work,” Biddle said.

  He unlocked the passenger door and let the girl in, then walked around and slipped behind the wheel.

  “It’s crude, though,” Biddle went on. “There’s gotta be a way to spin it into something more than a nickel-and-dime short con. The big lotto jackpots—that’s the angle to play.”

  The girl was looking out the window. The houses lining the street were small and old. A few were boarded up. The rest looked like they should be.

  “I don’t like it when we take money from poor people.”

  “If it’s good enough for McDonald’s and Mogen David, it’s good enough for me.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “Neither am I. Hey, I’ve got family in neighborhoods like this. Believe me—plenty of these people are just as greedy and stupid as the rich people up the road. So why discriminate?”

  “But it just doesn’t seem…”

  The girl stopped herself. She wasn’t even sure if she’d been about to say “fair” or “right” or something else. But she knew the look she’d get.

  She got it anyway.

  Biddle cocked his head and gazed at her with eyes filled with pity.

  “Sometimes I forget you’re not a midget,” he said.

  “Oh, blow it out your ass.”

  “My word!” Biddle gasped. “Wherever did you learn such nasty language?”

  Then he smiled.

  He knew.

  “Look,” he said. “Are all rich people bad?”

  “No.”

  “Are all poor people good?”

  “No.”

  “So what makes them different?”

  “Money.”

  Biddle shook his head. “Luck. Dumb luck. Some people are born Kennedys, and some people are born here. It has nothing to do with who deserves it. Hell, nobody deserves anything. We don’t deserve a Russian bomb to fall on us, but it might any minute. So we may as well buy us some ice cream with the money we didn’t deserve to get today.”

  “I don’t know, Biddle.”

  “You don’t know if you want to go to Baskin-Robbins?”

  “No. I don’t know if—”

  There was a hard rapping sound. Metal tapped to glass three times.

  The glass was the driver’s-side window.

  The metal was the barrel of a gun. Pointed at Biddle.

  The girl made a sound that wasn’t a word and wasn’t quite a scream. She wasn’t surprised, though. Not entirely. Some part of her had been expecting this for a long, long time.

  How long could you do wrong and not be punished? Forever?

  No. There had to be a sometime. There had to be a finally.

  And here it was.

  “Gimme your money!” someone said. He sounded young and angry. All the girl could see of him was his plain white T-shirt. It hung on him limply, like a toga. The body beneath it was lean.

  Biddle pulled out his wallet, then rolled down the window and handed it over. He was moving very, very slowly.

  “Men with guns either want respect or to kill you,” he’d told the girl once. “If they don’t kill you right off, just give them the respect and you’ll be
fine.”

  “Hers, too,” the boy or man outside the car demanded. He pressed the gun against the side of Biddle’s head. “Come on, come on!”

  Slowly, calmly, Biddle held a hand out to the girl. Her hands were shaking so badly the bills she pulled from her pockets rustled and fluttered like wings. But she managed to give Biddle every dollar she had, and he brought it all to the window, and then it was gone.

  The gun and the T-shirt disappeared, too. The girl could hear footsteps slapping on asphalt hard and fast.

  “Don’t look back,” Biddle said.

  He was staring straight ahead. After a long, silent moment, he started the car and put it in gear. He was still moving slowly, slowly, slowly. He drove away slowly, too.

  The girl felt lightheaded. Her scalp and feet tingled. There was a low buzzing in her ears that sounded like the static between TV channels. Her hands were still shaking. A sob was welling up in her chest.

  Biddle burst out laughing. He laughed and laughed and laughed. More than a block went by before he could even speak.

  “Round and round she goes!” he said. “Where she stops, nobody knows!”

  “It’s not funny, Biddle! It’s not funny!”

  Biddle stopped laughing. But he couldn’t keep the grin off his face even as he looked over at the girl and saw that she was crying.

  “Oh, don’t be upset, sweetie. Everything’s fine. The universe just has to mess with you every once in a while, that’s all. It’s over now. Before you know it, you’ll be eating rocky road on a sugar cone.”

  “What are we gonna do—steal it? That asshole took all our money!”

  And the girl began crying even harder, though it wasn’t the money she was crying about at all.

  Biddle let her cry for a while. Then he pulled something small and stiff from his shirt pocket and put it on the girl’s lap.

  “Now, now,” he said. “See there?”

  The girl looked over at him, sniffling.

  Biddle was still smiling.

  “We’ve got another lottery ticket,” he said. His smile grew wider. “People like us always do.”

  A blind lady swinging a sword big enough for Conan the Barbarian seems like a bad idea. But look: this Justice has the traditional sword and scales but no blindfold. (Her muumuu’s a lot spiffier than the usual toga, too, but that’s beside the point.) The implication: screw impartiality. If things are to work out as they should (and that’s what justice is really all about), the important thing is to look at the situation—and yourself—and truly see.

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  “Don’t try anything funny,” the old man told me.

  Obviously he was an amateur. Professionals never tell you not to do anything funny. They let their guns do the talking. His was either saying “geez, it’s cold in here” or “earthquake!” because it was shaking like someone had slipped in a quarter for the Magic Fingers.

  “Whatever the problem is, sir, I’m sure we can resolve it,” I said slowly, gently. I was standing very, very still. “Without a gun pointed at me.”

  “I’ll believe that when I have my jewelry back!”

  “Your jewelry?”

  I started wondering if someone had let grandpa go off his meds.

  It was dark in the White Magic Five & Dime, with only light from a streetlamp outside to see by. Yet I could tell the old guy wasn’t the jewelry type. He was dressed for a brisk shuffle around the YMCA, not a home invasion. Anything more than a plain gold wedding band would’ve been too froufrou for the likes of him.

  “Yes, my jewelry,” he said. “Don’t pretend you don’t know where it is. There’s probably a trunk of the stuff around here someplace.”

  “I’m sorry, but really—I haven’t run across any treasure chests. I only got here yesterday, though, so who knows? If you’d just put your gun away, we could start poking around together and maybe—”

  “Don’t patronize me!”

  He jabbed the gun out toward me. It was too murky to make out the model, but I assumed it was the kind that goes boom and makes holes in things when the trigger’s pulled—whether the pull was on purpose or not.

  “Sir, please,” I said soothingly. “If your jewelry’s here, I swear I’ll find it for you. But I can’t even start looking if I don’t know what it is or who you are.”

  “Just get Athena down here. She’ll tell you who I am.”

  “Athena’s…not available.”

  “Busy with another sucker, is she? Well, I don’t give a damn. Hey! Athena! Get your buns out here this instant or your little friend’s gonna have a bullet where her brains used to be!”

  “Athena’s dead.”

  The old man tilted an ear toward me. There was a hearing aid in it.

  “What did you say?”

  “Athena’s dead.”

  “Ha. You must think I’m senile.”

  Yes.

  “No,” I said. “I just think you’re a little behind on the news. Athena was murdered right here in the White Magic Five & Dime. They still don’t know who did it. I could find a newspaper article about it if you want to see proof.”

  “Athena…dead?” the old man said. He lowered his gun and started swaying like a reedy little tree in the breeze. “Murdered?”

  I took a hesitant step toward him.

  “Can I help you sit down? There’s a couch right over here.”

  He nodded, and I took him by the arm and guided him to the waiting area.

  “I’m Alanis, by the way,” I said once I had him settled. “Athena’s daughter.”

  The old man scowled. “She never mentioned any daughter.”

  “We didn’t get along.”

  He kept glaring at me a moment, then decided to believe me.

  “Sorry about this,” he said, putting his gun on the coffee table before him. “It’s just a toy. They keep taking away my guns.”

  I waited for him to go on.

  “They” the aliens? “They” the men in white suits?

  “My name’s Ken Meldon,” he said. “I was your mother’s fiancé.”

  Mom and the old man must have had a love-hate relationship, which was really the only kind to have with my mother (love optional).

  Kenneth Meldon was one of the names on Detective Logan’s list. Mom’s “fiancé” had complained about her to the police.

  A projector whirred. Light stabbed the darkness. Images appeared. The whole thing played out like a movie in my mind—the kind where you know the ending two minutes in.

  Still, I said, “Oh my goodness! How did you meet?”

  Once a week for more than a year, Athena Passalis had donated two hours of her time to the Dry Creek Assisted Living Community. Which told me that the Dry Creek Assisted Living Community was run either by crooks or fools (but who was I to judge, being a little bit of both myself?).

  Athena did free readings for residents and talked to them about tarot. Naturally, the conversations could get personal. She came to know which residents had family troubles, which had money troubles, which were lonely (which was all of them). Which, like Meldon, were widowers.

  “She read my palm and she stole my heart,” he said.

  The jewelry had belonged to his wife. Piece by piece, it went to Athena. At first they were given out of gratitude. Then they were shows of affection. Eventually, after Athena turned up both the Lovers and the Two of Cups during a reading, Meldon offered her an engagement ring.

  (“The Two of Cups?” I asked.

  “Yeah. That was the clincher,” Meldon said. And he carried on with his story without any further explanation.)

  “I’ll have to think about it, Ken,” Athena had said when he proposed. “Can I keep the ring in the meantime? I like how it feels on my finger.”

  “Of course!”

 
So Athena thought about it. And thought about it. And thought about it. And each time she came, she was wearing the ring…though it seemed thinner now, with a smaller setting. And hadn’t the band been silver? Meldon couldn’t be sure. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, and he’d never paid much attention to jewelry anyway.

  “It all looks the same to me,” he said.

  Then one day another resident, “an old man” (the old man called him), let Meldon in on a secret. He and the pretty lady with the blond hair and the weird cards? They were engaged—or would be soon, anyway. She was still thinking about it.

  The next time Athena came to Dry Creek, Meldon demanded the jewelry back.

  “What jewelry?” Athena said.

  “The jewelry I gave you. My wife’s brooches and pins and…oh, you know what I’m talking about. The jewelry.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “But you’re wearing Judith’s ring right there on your finger!”

  “This? I’ve had it for years. I have to say, I’m very disappointed, Mr. Meldon. I thought we were friends, and then you go and accuse me of stealing. I don’t know if I should come here anymore.”

  She didn’t. And when Meldon started telling people about his doomed affair with the fortunetelling gold-digger, no one believed him. Not even the old-old man who’d claimed she was engaged to him. He could barely remember who Athena was or who Meldon was or who he was himself.

  “So you went to the police,” I said.

  Meldon nodded. “They said they didn’t believe me either. Sons of bitches. They’ve never liked me ’cuz I stand up for my rights.”

  A-ha.

  The old guy’s story wouldn’t have any aliens after all.

  “They keep taking away your guns,” I said.

  “Yes! I used to have dozens—a real collection. But take one out of its case to show some punk who’s messing with your mailbox or a dumb bastard who thinks he can drive past your house playing his music so loud it rattles the windows, and whoops—there goes the Second Amendment! And then when my kids moved me into Dry Creek, they wanted the whole bunch. Well, I didn’t give ’em up without a fight.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” I said. “So—the police wouldn’t help you, and today you decided to get the jewelry back yourself.”