The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery)

by Steve Hockensmith

  “So there’s turmoil ahead,” I said, “but you’ll only make it worse if you…follow through on the proposed action.”

  I turned over the next card. It was reversed for Mrs. Grandi, right-side up for me.

  A yes.

  Score one for “kill!”

  “The Five of Swords,” I tried to say.

  It came out “the Fi uv Swuh.”

  I swallowed and tried again.

  “The Five of Swords. Another five. More conflict, but we don’t see it this time. They’re cleaning up after the battle. The fight’s over.”

  That was all the interpretation I was going to give. Best not to dwell on a yes.

  I reached for the next card.

  Mrs. Grandi stretched out a hand and stabbed the triumphant knight on the Five of Swords with a long, blood-red fingernail.

  “That’s the winner,” she said, “and it’s not us. That’s why the card says yes.”

  “Yeah, but look at who he just beat. They’re alive. He’s letting them get away. They lost, but at least they weren’t utterly destroyed.”

  Mrs. Grandi looked unconvinced.

  I was surprised she needed convincing. Did she really believe all this stuff?

  I didn’t know. I couldn’t even tell if I did or didn’t anymore.

  I turned over the next card. It was reversed.

  Another no.

  “We’re on to reasons you shouldn’t kill me,” I said, “and we see the King of Swords turned on his head. A malevolent patriarchal figure upended. Someone with power over you will be undone.”

  Mrs. Grandi rolled her eyes. “‘A malevolent patriarchal figure.’ That’s one way to put it.”

  “How would you put it?”

  Mrs. Grandi just shook her head and pointed at the next card.

  One more no and the spread will have spoken: let them go.

  I flipped the card. It was reversed…to Mrs. Grandi. Right-side up to me.

  A yes to death.

  “Well,” I said. “That’s clear enough.”

  “That’s an end to conflict—a really, really definitive one. You’ll be rid of an enemy.” I tried to smile. “Not that I’m your enemy. Have I mentioned yet that I don’t even know what your family has against me?”

  “We don’t have anything against you. This is a business decision.”

  Clarice started moving toward the table.

  “That’s close enough,” Mrs. Grandi said without looking at her. Her voice was loud, firm. Just a little louder and it would be heard down the hall.

  Clarice stopped. “So two say yes and two say no?” she asked me.

  “That’s right.”

  It was down to the last card.

  “But we’re all smart, educated people here, right?” I said. “No matter what the spread might say, I’m sure we’d talk through all the possible repercussions of—”

  “Show me the card,” Mrs. Grandi said.

  “—whatever decision might be made here tonight. Because the last thing anyone should do is act rashly when there’s so much at—”

  “Show me the goddamn card.”

  I showed her.

  Do you see a fiery pit? Do you see a guy with a pitchfork and a tail who looks like he’s spent way too much time in a tanning booth? No, you don’t. Because in the tarot, Judgement isn’t about deciding who’s good and who’s bad and who’s punished and who’s not. It’s about dying and rising again; hearing the call to start a new life. Sure, Armageddon will be stressful. The screaming and the sulfur and the Beast and the blood are no fun. But without all that, no one gets to begin again.

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  “No, Mrs. Grandi,” I said. I took in a deep breath, held it a moment, savoring it, then let it out. “That’s your answer: no.”

  I’d turned up the Ten of Pentacles. Reversed.

  The cards were saying to let us go. Or not to kill us, anyway, and I didn’t expect the Grandis to ask us to move in.

  I looked over at Clarice and smiled.

  “Why?” Mrs. Grandi said.

  “Hmm?”

  I turned toward her again.

  “I want to hear your interpretation,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I end this while I have the chance?”

  “Oh. Well. All right.”

  I looked down at the card again. It was one I’d never really noticed before, probably because it was so cluttered. Instead of the usual clean, simple design with one or two or, at most, three main figures, it was hard to tell who or what the card was focused on.

  An old man in a Technicolor Dreamcoat sits near an arch—perhaps the entrance to a city—while a dog watches him attentively. Just beyond them are what seem to be three lost extras from Clash of the Titans: a man, a woman, and a child, all dressed in robes. Hovering in the air, meanwhile, are ten of the golden pentagram-plate-Frisbee-balloons that pop up on all the Pentacle cards.

  It was a mess. And Mrs. Grandi was waiting for me to make sense of it.

  The cards had said no, but in her eyes I still saw a maybe.

  “Obviously,” I said with all the certainty I could muster, “we’re looking at a family and its financial well-being. Grandfather, parents, child, even pets—they’re all here, while around them we see something they don’t seem to notice: The Pentacles. Giant coins. The family’s wealth. Times are good, but they don’t even realize how good they have it because the card’s reversed, meaning all this is at risk. The other cards told us there’s conflict ahead; that’s inevitable. But only a bad decision here—doing the wrong thing at the wrong time—could destroy the family and everything it’s built up. And it’s not Swords or even Wands we’ve been given to represent the family. These people aren’t warriors—aren’t killers. Their business is business, and that’s what they should stick to. That’s what the card’s telling you. And it’s right.”

  And I believed it. By god, I really, truly believed it.

  As for Mrs. Grandi…

  The old woman looked at me, looked at the cards, looked at Clarice, looked at me, looked at the cards. Then she leaned back in her seat until it squeaked and looked at me some more.

  It was Judgment Day, only instead of having my fate decided by God or Satan or St. Peter, I was facing one of the Golden Girls. The little, crabby one.

  Her eyes narrowed, her lips puckered. Then she nodded brusquely—one quick dip of the chin. She’d made up her mind.

  She reached into her handbag and pulled out a gun.

  “Whoa! Hold on!”

  “No!” Clarice cried.

  Mrs. Grandi shushed us. Then she put the gun on the table and pushed it toward me.

  “You’re going to need a hostage to get out of here,” she said.

  She gathered up the tarot cards and put them back in their box.

  “You want me to take the gun?” I said.

  “Would I give it to you if I didn’t?”

  “But…I don’t understand.”

  Mrs. Grandi waggled her perm toward the door—and her son and daughter waiting down the hall.

  “Neither do they.” She held up the card case. “This is just mumbo jumbo to them. They’ve never respected it. And if I want to keep their respect, I have to act like I don’t either. If I walk out of here and tell them to let you go because I got a reversed Ten of Pentacles—? They’d stick me in an old folks’ home the second they were done burying you.”

  She stuffed the case into her purse, then folded her hands together on the table, eyeing me coldly, expectantly.

  “Well?” her look seemed to say. “You gonna save yourself or not, dipshit?”

  I put a hand over the gun without picking it up. It was a little silver automatic—a pretty, petite, ladylike thing. A piece of jewelry that could blow a person’s brains out.
<
br />   Call me old-fashioned. I hated it.

  “You can’t just tell them to let us go?” I said. “They act like they’re scared of you.”

  “That’s habit. I’m an old woman now. They still listen to me most of the time, but tonight, about this—?” Mrs. Grandi shrugged. “You really want them to put it to a vote?”

  I picked up the gun and pointed it at a spot just above the old woman’s nose.

  “You know, there’s another way we could play this: a straight-up shootout. I’d have the element of surprise on my side, and if I pulled it off I’d have three less Grandis to worry about down the line.”

  Mrs. Grandi rolled her eyes. “Oh please.”

  “I’m serious, lady. I’ll do it—unless you tell me what I want to know. Who killed my mother?”

  Mrs. Grandi tapped the cards on the table. “Why don’t you ask them?”

  “I’m asking you. And I think you know the answer.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  “No maybes. Tell me or I’ll blow a big hole in all that talcum powder you’ve got plastered to your wrinkled old—”

  “It’s not loaded, Einstein.”

  “What?”

  “No bullets. You think I’m nuts?”

  I slumped and lowered the gun. “Shit.”

  “You do know, though, don’t you?” Clarice said. “Who killed my—killed Athena.”

  Mrs. Grandi gave her a long, scowling stare.

  Clarice didn’t look away, didn’t blink.

  If it was a test, she passed.

  “I don’t know, but I’ve seen enough to guess,” Mrs. Grandi said. She turned to me. “And so have you.”

  The old woman planted her palms on the table and started pushing herself slowly to her feet.

  “Now let’s get this over with,” she said. “I want to be home in time for The Tonight Show.”

  “Anthony! Rosalee! Come here!” Mrs. Grandi called out.

  When they reached the end of the hall, they found their mother with a gun to her head. I was holding the gun.

  “Which one of you morons searched this bitch?” Mrs. Grandi snapped at her children.

  Grandi looked like he’d just been slapped across the face with a herring, yet he didn’t miss a beat.

  “Rosalee did,” he said, pointing at his sister.

  “Ooo, you bastard!” She pointed right back. “It was him, Mom!”

  “Shut up! All of you!” I pushed the little bulletless automatic harder into Mrs. Grandi’s crunchy-stiff Aqua Net–shellacked hair. “Guns on the floor! Now!”

  Rosalee started to slide a hand under her windbreaker.

  “Slowly,” I said. “With just the tips of your fingers.”

  You don’t subject yourself to every episode of T. J. Hooker as a kid and not pick up a thing or two.

  Moving in slow motion, Rosalee pulled out her gun and, pinching it by one end like a pair of diapers bound for the trash bin, gingerly placed it on the floor.

  Grandi didn’t move.

  I tried to fix him with a steely glare.

  “Put down your gun or the old bat gets it!”

  Grandi seemed to be thinking it over.

  “Anthony Thomas!” his mother barked.

  He put his gun down beside his sister’s. Clarice scuttled up and collected them.

  “Cell phones and car keys, too,” I said. “On the floor.”

  Grandi slowly snaked a hand into his pants pocket.

  “We just brought you out here to talk, you know,” he said. “Why don’t you lower that gun, and we can—?”

  “She’s not an idiot—unlike some others around here,” Mrs. Grandi cut in. “Just do what she says, and let’s get this over with.”

  A few seconds later, Clarice and I were locking the Grandis into their own homemade prison.

  “Wow,” Clarice said. “I can’t believe that actually worked.”

  “Anthony, put that down!” I heard Mrs. Grandi say.

  I pushed Clarice up the hallway. “Run run run!”

  There was a sharp, high pop, like the tinny blast of a firecracker, then another and another. Anthony Grandi was shooting at us. The gun was small—tiny enough to fit in an ankle holster, say—but the door was so cheap and thin you probably could shoot through it with a water pistol. Bullets whizzed past us up the hall.

  Lesson learned.

  Searching prisoners. Important.

  “I dropped the guns!” Clarice said when we reached the end of the hall and hooked around the corner. “Should I go back for them?”

  “What do you think?”

  I never stopped running.

  We flew out the front door and threw ourselves into my mother’s Caddy, and I was very, very happy when it didn’t do the classic horror movie dead-battery sputter. It roared to life when I jammed in the key and gave it gas, and soon we were zooming up the road toward the highway.

  “Oh my god oh my god,” Clarice panted. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

  “The night is young,” I said.

  I called Detective Josh Logan.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Josh.”

  “Alanis. Is everything all right?”

  “Not really. How soon can you meet me at the Five & Dime?”

  “I can be there in twenty minutes. What’s wrong?”

  “That remains to be seen. How good are you with traps?”

  “Traps? I don’t know. Are you in one?”

  “Not anymore. But I need you to help me spring a new one.”

  “Christ, are you going to be this cryptic all night?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Dammit, Alanis—”

  “All right, all right. How’s this? I know who killed my mother.”

  Someone opened the back door of the White Magic Five & Dime.

  “I’m down here!” I called out from the reading room.

  There were footsteps in the hall.

  “I came as fast as I could.”

  Logan appeared in the doorway.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me.

  The table was covered with tarot cards.

  “What else do you do with cards when you’re alone?” I said. “I’m playing solitaire. It almost works if you ignore the Major Arcana. Have a seat.”

  “Enough with the games, Alanis,” Logan said. He sat down, though. “If you really think you know who killed your mother, you need to tell me.”

  I reached out and separated a card from several others of the same suit. On it, a man wearing a crown and flowing robes sat on a throne, a sword in one hand.

  I slid the card toward Logan.

  “The murderer is…King Arthur?” he said.

  “The King of Swords,” I corrected. “Reversed.”

  Logan groaned and rolled his eyes. “Oh god. The cards told you?”

  “Yeah, kind of. I did a reading tonight, and there he was, right in the middle of everything.”

  “No offense, Alanis, but I thought you were too cynical and manipulative to believe in crap like this.”

  “No offense taken. I used to think that, too. I wouldn’t have called you if it was just the reading, though.” I patted the King of Swords. “It fits.”

  “So does that represent someone specific or am I supposed to haul a playing card off to jail?”

  “It represents someone—someone who was blackmailing my mother. The five thousand dollars a month, remember? And I think the Grandi family’s being blackmailed, too. That’s why Anthony Grandi started threatening me before I even had any idea who he was. He was told to. And he was told to stop when I tracked him down—because that took me a step too close to the person giving the orders. And tonight he was told to get rid of me.”

  “Get
rid of you? Did Grandi attack you?”

  “Let’s set the Grandis aside.” I slid my hands under the table and sat up a little straighter. “I’d like to talk about you.”

  Logan cocked his head to the side and half smiled, looking like a man who’d laugh at a joke if he could only figure out what the punch line meant.

  If only I’d been joking. For once, I was all wisecracked out.

  “What about me?” Logan said.

  “You send a lot of mixed signals, you know that? Since the day I got here, you’ve been telling me to back off, back off—yet you’ve kept yourself so very close at the same time.”

  “I was concerned.”

  “Right. So concerned you steered me toward William Riggs, who had a history of assaults and probably wife beating. Ken Meldon, who’d had run-ins with the police over guns. And Victor Castellanos, who recently broke a man’s collarbone during an argument about the treatment of his mother.”

  “Jesus, Alanis—I was sticking my neck out to do you a favor. You’re the one who wanted to meet people who’d complained about your mom.”

  “And those were the only three you could find? Really? After she’s been here three years? I don’t think so. I think you hoped dealing with them would be so unpleasant or even dangerous that I’d stop snooping around.”

  Logan started shaking his head. “Oh, Alanis…”

  “That’s why you kept pushing me to go see my mom’s body, too. You weren’t trying to help me find closure. You wanted me to look at a murdered woman and freak out and get out of town.”

  Logan put his face in his hands and sighed.

  “I knew you didn’t respect me as a cop. But this? Ouch.” He peeked up at me with eyes filled with pain. “That you could actually think that I’d—”

  “Why did you come in through the back door just now?”

  “What?”

  “I left both doors open—front and back. You came in through the back. Why?”

  “Because I parked in the back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there are rumors flying around town about us already. People see me popping in for a late-night visit, they’re going to take that as proof.”

  “Good answer,” I said. “But I’ve got a better one: the security camera in the House of Arcana. You don’t want your car on tape—like it was the night my mother died, I’m assuming. That’s why you got the tape from Josette, right? So you could destroy it?”