“That has the advantage of putting the intruders on our home field, but it has a couple of disadvantages,” Rachel said. “First, it leaves the timing of the translocation up to them. Second, in order to find out anything about them, we would have to interrogate the intruders. By doing that, we would let the bad guys know that we’re on to them. If we let them return to where they came from, their boss would know about us.”
“Are you good at interrogation?”
“I’ve never done any hostile interrogation. I normally get info from people using friendly conversation. I’ll bet Jack is good at it.”
“Do you think Avery would interrogate the bad guys if we captured them?”
“No. He would need probable cause and he would have to be the one to bring them in for questioning.”
“It looks like we’re going to have to go on a trip then. When should we go?”
“I wish we knew for sure which country the intruders came from. It could be China, or if Seth is involved, it could be England. Let me check the world clock on my phone. Hmmm, it looks like London is eight hours later than here, and Beijing is fifteen hours later. That means Beijing is seven hours later than London. If we translocated from here at three in the afternoon, it would be eleven at night in London and six in the morning in Beijing.”
“According to Ernie’s description,” I said, “his ghost didn’t look Asian at all.”
“Ernie’s ghost knew that he was coming to America. His boss would probably send someone who could blend in and also read English.”
“Which brings up the matter of us translocating to China,” I said. “How much information could we gather without being able to read Chinese.”
“By ‘Chinese’ do you mean Mandarin or Cantonese?”
“Both. The written languages are basically the same; it’s the spoken languages that are different.”
“What? How can that be?”
“China is large and several different spoken languages developed. Mandarin and Cantonese speakers can’t understand each other very well, but the written language is not phonetic; it’s symbolic. When writing was developed, it became standardized, more or less, across the country. There is only one symbol for ‘house,’ for instance, but the Mandarins and Cantonese have different spoken words for the same symbol.”
“That’s all very interesting, but it doesn’t help us,” Rachel said. “Neither of us can read or speak any variation of Chinese. If we let them translocate to us, you could zap them with your Snoozer, and we would have almost thirty seconds to search them before the Spell of Translocation snapped them back to where they came from. When they woke up twelve minutes later, they wouldn’t even remember that they had translocated.”
“There are a couple of problems with that,” I said. “Sure, they wouldn’t remember that they had translocated, but they would wake up inside a magic circle all set up for translocation. They would probably figure out that they had been attacked. The second problem is the possibility that they have the Snoozer that was used on Mary and Seymour. If one of them has a Snoozer, he will be immune to my Snoozer.”
“I guess we have to go to them then,” Rachel said. “At least you’ll be immune to their Snoozer.”
“And your Mojo will protect us both from projectile weapons such as bullets, if we stay very close together.”
“It’s getting close to six o’clock—too late to go chasing the intruders today. We’ll have to go tomorrow afternoon.”
I was just about to suggest that we start planning what to do for dinner, when Rachel’s phone rang. She frowned at the caller ID, and it must have looked familiar, because she put her phone on speaker.
“Rachel Chase and Associates,” Rachel said into her phone.
“Am I speaking to Rachel Chase?” said a woman’s voice.
“Yes, I’m Rachel Chase.”
“I’m calling about an antique wand that you sold to Moshi Kiramisu.”
“I didn’t sell any wand to Moshi Kiramisu. He stole that wand from my client.”
“You say he stole the wand?”
“Yes. He offered my client $500 for the wand, but my client refused. Then he assaulted us and stole the wand. I’ve reported the theft to the police, and I gave them Kiramisu’s description, cell phone number, and a photo of the wand. Plus, we got his fingerprints. I told the police he had a California accent, and they’re going to track him down. That wand was worth more than $500, and Kiramisu is going to get put away for grand larceny. If I ever see him again, he’s toast. I see you’re calling from his cell phone, so you’re obviously his accomplice.”
There was no response from the phone. Rachel looked at the screen and tapped the disconnect button.
“She hung up on me,” Rachel said.
“I don’t blame her. I’m quaking in my boots, and I’m not even the thief. That was a great performance. Do you think that was Moshi’s boss or wife?”
“I think that she was his boss or a representative of his boss. If she wasn’t his boss, then I’ll bet his boss thinks I could recognize his voice, so he had the woman call me. I don’t think that his boss bought whatever story Moshi told him about the wand. I think the boss was trying to trick some information out of me, and instead, I dumped a whole load of misinformation on them.”
“Did you recognize the woman’s voice?”
“No. I didn’t recognize her voice and I didn’t pick up any particular accent in the two sentences she spoke. My intent was to get Moshi in trouble with his boss and to cast doubt on any story Moshi came up with. If Moshi told his boss that we stole back the wand, I doubt that the boss will believe him now.”
“What if Moshi is a long-time trusted henchman? Wouldn’t his boss believe him rather than you?”
“If Moshi was a trustworthy henchman, the woman on the phone wouldn’t have thought that you sold the wand to Moshi. Moshi would have told the truth about our meeting. She would have said something like ‘I understand that you have an antique wand.’ If she was fishing for information, she wouldn’t have made a statement that I knew was a lie.”
“Good point. When it comes to people’s motives, your powers of deduction are better than mine. What should we do about Moshi now?”
“I think we should pay another visit to Moshi’s house tonight.”
Chapter 17
Rachel said that eleven o’clock would be a good time to translocate to Moshi’s house, so we agreed to meet in my apartment at ten forty-five. I spent about an hour after dinner making a scabbard for my Snoozer Wand. I used the cheap sewing machine I had bought at a yard sale to sew a tube of black denim. The Snoozer is about seventeen inches long, so I made the tube thirteen inches long. With one end of the tube sewn shut, the Snoozer slipped in easily with about four inches of the handle sticking out. I sewed a loop strap of the same material to the open end of the tube so that I could put my head and left arm through the loop. This allowed the Snoozer in the scabbard to hang under my left arm with the handle just in front of my armpit—sort of like a shoulder holster for a pistol.
At ten forty-five, Rachel knocked once on my door and let herself in. She was wearing a black skirt with black tights and a black pull-over sweater—perfect attire for a July night in Huntington Beach, California. I was wearing black jeans, a black polo shirt and a long-sleeved black shirt over the polo shirt. In this attire, we wouldn’t stand out as cat burglars if we were seen in public. Rachel was unarmed, but I had my Snoozer in its scabbard and a small backpack with a few magical items in it.
“Let’s use your big tarp magic circle so we translocate outside of Moshi’s house,” Rachel said. “I don’t want to pop up in his study without first looking around the property.”
I set up the big circle in my living room using the chunk of wood that Rachel carved off of Moshi’s desk as the homing beacon. When we were both ready, I cast the spell, and shimmer, flash, shimmer, we found ourselves in Moshi’s side yard. Lights were on in the house, but the curtains were drawn in the
window of his office. Fortunately, the curtains didn’t quite meet in the center of the window. After looking around and not seeing any activity in the vicinity, I picked up the symbol cards and homing beacon, and we moved over to peek in the opening in the curtains.
Moshi was with an auburn-haired woman dressed in nice pants and a white silk blouse. She was wearing heels that made her taller than Moshi. They were discussing something, but not loudly enough for us to make out what they were saying. The woman seated behind the desk opened a drawer and took out the sandalwood box in which we had placed the fake wand. She opened the box and both she and Moshi stared into it.
Then the woman picked up a pair of bamboo toaster tongs and used them to manipulate something, presumably the wand, in the box. Moshi opened another drawer and handed a magnifying glass to the woman who used it to inspect the contents of the box.
“They’re examining the burned wand,” Rachel whispered. I nodded.
The woman wrote or drew something on a legal pad, looked through the magnifying glass again, and added to her notes. Twice more, she used the tongs to do some more manipulation and examined the object with the magnifying glass. Then she closed the box and held up the drawing for Moshi to see. The drawing was part of the long sigil that Ward had engraved on the shaft of the wand. Evidently, the tip of the wand hadn’t completely burned, and some of the sigil was still legible. When Moshi saw the drawing, he nodded.
The woman then picked up a cell phone from the desk and tapped the screen a few times. Then she held the screen beside the drawing as if comparing the drawing to a picture on her phone. Then she tapped the screen a few more times, held the phone up to her ear and had a short conversation before she hung up. She stood up from the desk, picked up the sandalwood box, and pointed her finger at Moshi as she said a few words to him with a stern expression on her face. She took the box and stormed out of the room.
We heard the front door close, and we knelt down in the shadows beside the house. We saw a car pulled out of the driveway with the woman in the driver’s seat. The car disappeared down the street.
Looking back into the window, we saw Moshi sitting at the desk with his head in his hands. He stood up and left the room, turning out the light as he left.
“Let’s get out of here,” Rachel whispered.
We retraced our steps from our previous getaway, and set up the Spell of Translocation in the same driveway we had used before. Once again, I drew the Fire Starter Spell on opposite corners of the paper circle to destroy evidence of our translocation. Shimmer, flash, shimmer and we were back in my living room.
“What did you make of all that?” I asked as I picked up the symbol cards and started rolling up the tarp.
“It looks like Moshi is in big trouble with his employer.”
“Do you think that woman is his employer?”
“No, I think Debra is a representative of Moshi’s employer.”
“Debra?”
“Yeah. Don’t you think she looked like Debra Messing?”
“Who’s Debra Messing?” I asked.
“She’s the actress who was on the Will and Grace TV series.”
“Oh, I guess she did look sort of like her, but Debra Messing is prettier.”
“Debra Messing is an actress on TV with professional makeup. If the woman in Moshi’s house was professionally made up, she would be as pretty.”
“She didn’t seem very pleased, did she?”
“No she did not,” Rachel agreed. “I think that Moshi and Debra work for the same mastermind, but Debra is much higher up the organization chart. I think Debra called her boss and told him that the markings that are left on Moshi’s fake wand match the symbols on a Snoozer Wand.”
“So enough of the sigil remained unburned for Debra to conclude that the fake wand was genuine,” I recapped.
“I think that’s what happened,” Rachel agreed.
“How will she explain that the wand burned?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel answered. “That question falls into your department, partner.”
“Oh. Well, they can tell that the wand burned while inside the box. There’s bound to be smoke on the copper lining of the box. If they examine the box, they won’t find anything unusual about it. The only way that the wand could have burned is by magic. I guess it depends on how much the Mastermind, as you called him, knows about Snoozers. If Gabriel told us everything there is to know about Snoozers, then there’s no way one could spontaneously combust. If, however, the Mastermind doesn’t think he knows everything about Snoozers, then they could have a self-immolation feature.”
“Why would they have that?”
“Well, let’s see. If I programmed a Snoozer, what might I add to the feature list? We know that a Snoozer has to be bonded to one specific user. If someone steals a Snoozer, they have to cleanse it, like I cleansed my Snoozer, and re-bond it to another user. What if I wanted to create a Snoozer so that if I couldn’t use it, then nobody else could use it either? Let’s assume the thief knows how to cleanse and re-bond a Snoozer, so how can I keep him from doing it?
“One thing I could do is program it to burst into flame if it were ever cleansed. Another feature could be to self-immolate if it were out of the aura of the bonded user for a period of time. Those are just two possibilities. If the Mastermind wasn’t sure that he knew everything about a Snoozer, then he could probably come up with these possibilities and even more.”
“What if Seth is the Mastermind?” Rachel speculated. “We’re pretty sure that one of the magicians in his coterie, Harry Blackstone, had a Snoozer. We even think that your Snoozer might be that very one. When Blackstone was arrested, he didn’t have the Snoozer on him. I had assumed that Seth provided Blackstone with the Snoozer and Blackstone had returned it to Seth. But what if the Snoozer was bonded to Blackstone from the beginning? What if Blackstone was independently trained? It could be that Blackstone had a few tricks that even Seth didn’t know.”
“Brilliant!” I exclaimed. “Blackstone probably hid the Snoozer when he realized that his capture was imminent, and someone later found it. That could be how it wound up in a yard sale in Astoria. Maybe Seth knew Blackstone had a Snoozer, but he didn’t know all of its properties. I’ll bet that Seth found out that Blackstone didn’t have the Snoozer when he was arrested, and Seth has been looking for it ever since. Seth could be Moshi’s and Debra’s Mastermind.”
“That’s all pretty speculative,” Rachel said, “but I’m inclined to believe it. I’ll bet Seth, if he is the Mastermind, wishes that he had sent someone more competent to buy the Snoozer from you. He probably thinks that he should have sent Debra. If Seth is the Mastermind, then he knows that we, his nemi-sissies, uh adversaries, are the people Moshi stole the wand from. Seth probably thinks that we are genius magicians who made the wand burn up when it was stolen from us.”
“As I said, Seth has lost five henchmen trying to best us. As unbelievable as it sounds, Seth could think that we are actually competent magicians.”
“That’s hilarious,” Rachel said. “We’re just bumbling along, trying to make heads or tails of the magical things happening around us, and Seth thinks we know what we’re doing.”
“I’ll bet if the truth were known,” I said, “a lot of people who seem competent at what they are doing are actually just bumbling around. As an investor in the stock market, I know how easy it is to confuse luck with genius.”
“Professor, do think that it’s possible that we really are better at this magic thing than we think we are?”
“As far as I can tell, it’s just luck. I will admit that having Gabriel on our side may be providing us with advantages with which we are unaware. Magic works in dimensions beyond our 3D world. I guess anything’s possible.”
“What should we do now?” Rachel asked.
“Now that question falls into your department, partner.”
“Oh. I’ll have to think about that. I guess we should go to bed now.”
What? Oh, I get it, I thought, It’s time to go home for the night. “Yes, it’s been quite a day. Why don’t you come up for breakfast tomorrow?”
“Is it OK if we make it a late lunch? Remember, we have to go chasing Seymour Martingale’s killers at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”
“Sure, lunch is fine. How about two o’clock?”
“That’s great. I’ll see you then.”
And with that, Rachel went down to her own apartment.
Chapter 18
At two o’clock the next afternoon, Rachel knocked and let herself in.
“I’m in the kitchen,” I called. “We have iced tea, turkey sandwiches, potato salad and pickles,” I said as Rachel took a seat at the kitchen table.
“Wonderful. I haven’t eaten today.”
“It’s a good thing I prepared a little lunch,” I said. “We need to be fortified for our translocation to parts unknown.”
“Are you ready to hunt?” Rachel asked before taking a bite of her sandwich.
“As ready as I’ll ever be. It’s time to get back to work on the Martingale case. I feel like we arrived at a bit of closure on the subject of Moshi and the Snoozer.”
“I hope so,” Rachel commented. “The only question now is, does the Mastermind really think that the Snoozer is destroyed?”
“Either he thinks it’s destroyed, or he thinks that we replaced the Snoozer with a forgery and somehow managed to burn it remotely, which is what really happened.”
“What do you think?” Rachel asked.
“Well, I just have to ask myself, if I’m the Mastermind, which is more likely? Did a Portland private investigator and her nerdy friend create a forgery of a magic wand that would burst into flame whenever we wanted it to? Or, did Moshi steal a real magic wand from a couple of dilettantes, and that magic wand had a self-destruct feature? I think I would have to go with the second theory.”
“Yeah, I don’t think Seth, if he’s the Mastermind, would think that we’re a couple of magical geniuses, even though it was fun to speculate on that last night. I agree with your conclusion, Moshi stole a magic wand that had abilities beyond their knowledge. Due to their lack of knowledge about the wand, Moshi allowed it to self-destruct as it was programmed to do. That makes the most sense.”
Crimes of Magic: The Yard Sale Wand Page 13