The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery) (5 page)

Ignore the sex toy/Mr. Microphone in the lady’s hand. It’s what’s tucked under her robed rump that counts. The Empress reclines on a throne of passion and pure motherly love. From it she reigns over a lush, fertile, beautiful realm—all the bounty that can flow back to you if you learn to give of yourself first. If you don’t learn, you miss out on the river and the trees and the throne and end up with nothing but the sex toy, which isn’t much consolation after a while.

Miss Chance,
Infinite Roads to Knowing

I thought
about turning the neon sign back on when Clarice and I walked into the Five & Dime. I decided not to bother. For the moment I had plenty to work with without any walk-ins.

“Thanks for not mentioning my freak-out in front of Logan,” Clarice said.

I shrugged. “You haven’t had the best week. You’re owed a freak- out or two.”

“Yeah, maybe. Still, I wanted to apologize. And explain.”

I drifted around behind the display case and leaned on it casually. I wanted some distance between us, but I didn’t want it obvious.

“The thing is,” Clarice said, “Athena always told me she’d take care of me. She wasn’t the most nurturing person in the world—I mean, not with me, anyway. Maybe it was different for you. But still, she was almost like a mother to me. She did her best, in her weird way. So to find out there was a will and I wasn’t even in it and now I’ve got nothing and nowhere to go…?”

Her eyes were big and round. She even cocked her head a bit to one side. If she’d been a dog, I would’ve given her my lunch.

I knew what I was supposed to say to her. And I knew I wasn’t quite ready to say it.

“What about your family?” I said instead.

“Not an option.”

“Your friends?”

“I’m sort of an outcast at school. I’ve got a few friends, but their parents are sick of me already.”

“I’m surprised Logan didn’t arrange for you to go somewhere.”

“He tried. Foster care.” Clarice puckered her face as though someone had just offered her a kitty-litter sandwich. “Thank god I’m emancipated, so they couldn’t force me.”

“You’re old enough to be emancipated?”

Clarice nodded. “Sixteen’s the age you can do it in Arizona. Athena helped me. Over the summer.”

“Wow. That’s really…great.”

And hard to believe. Mom emancipating a slave? Not her style.

I’d freed myself—or thought I had, anyway. If I’d been truly free, would I even be here now?

“Well,” I sighed, “I don’t know how long I’m going to be around, but you’re welcome to keep staying here until you figure out something else.”

“Thank you! I was hoping you’d say that!”

Yes. Yes, you were.

“I could use the help anyway,” I said. “I’m going to open the shop again while I’m here, and it’ll be good to have someone around who knows what they’re doing.”

“You’re going to do readings?” Clarice looked over at
Infinite Roads to Knowing
, which was lying on top of the display case next to me. A pen was sticking out where I’d stopped reading. “Do you have any experience with that?”

“Nope. But I think I can wing it. Everything I know about customer service I learned from my mother.”

Clarice looked dubious. Very dubious. I’m-staring-at-a-crazy-person dubious.

I smiled.

“Speaking of customers,” I said, “Mom must have had a Rolodex or something around here…right?”

Mom was
very modern, it turned out. She didn’t have a Rolodex. She had spreadsheets. On her computer. Which had been stolen the night she died.

I went to the office at the back of the White Magic Five & Dime to take a look for myself. All that was left of the computer were some cables and power cords, a pair of speakers, and a lonely little webcam.

I tried to imagine a meth head going to all the trouble of unplugging everything and carrying off the PC and screen but leaving the power cords behind. Conclusion:
does not compute.

“Any idea why she had this?”

I tapped the webcam.

Clarice leaned in to look over my shoulder.

I would’ve preferred
not
having a murder suspect looming up behind me, but life’s full of little inconveniences.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said, “but I never wanted to
know
. Know what I mean?”

I did.

Online chat rooms.

Lonely bachelors.

Cybersex.

My mom.

Ew
.

Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that I couldn’t nose around in her computer. Who knew what kind of pictures might be lurking in there?

I hadn’t seen my mother in nearly two decades. I didn’t want my first look at her as a fiftysomething-near-sixtysomething to be an outtake from hotgrannies.com.

I repeat:
ew.

I turned to face the window at the back of the room.

“Is that where the burglar supposedly came in?”

“Yeah.”

There was a latch on the window. It wasn’t broken.

“It’s hard to imagine my mother leaving a window open. She was pretty—”

I searched for the right word.

“Paranoid?” Clarice suggested.

“Cautious,” I said.

You’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you
, Biddle used to say.
And if no one’s out to get you, you ain’t trying hard enough
.

“Yeah. You’re right,” Clarice said to me. “She always made sure the windows were closed and locked. Always. She was really uptight about it.”

“Could a customer have come back here and unlocked the window while my mom was distracted?”

“Maybe. It’d be pretty hard to do without being seen, though. You’d have to sneak up the hall right past the reading room.”

“Hmm,” I said.

No burglar, no matter how skilled, could have unlocked that window from the outside. It had to be someone on the inside. Someone who was very good at sneaking around unseen.

Or someone who was right at home.

There was
a filing cabinet beside the desk, and I started going through it as slowly as possible.

“Ah,” I said. “Old bills.”

I pretended to become absorbed in a long form letter from the electric company.

“Well, let me know if you have any more questions,” Clarice eventually said. “I guess I’ll go do my homework.”

“Great. Thanks. See ya.”

The girl went upstairs.

I relaxed. I stopped reading bills, too.

My mother wasn’t the type to leave anything revealing laying around in a filing cabinet. The really juicy stuff would be buried under a rosebush in a locked strongbox or something.

I moved on to another drawer anyway, just in case Mom was getting sloppy. It was empty except for several shrink-wrapped packages of camcorder cassettes. One of the packages had been opened, but there was no sign of any used tapes.

Interesting. My mother had never been big on Kodak moments. She avoided having her picture taken and rarely bothered with snapshots of anyone else, including her adorable daughter. Home movies definitely weren’t her thing.

I’d have liked to look at those tapes. Unfortunately, they were probably under that hypothetical rosebush.

I was moving on to the next drawer when the telephone on the desk rang.
PAY PHONE
, the caller ID said.

I picked up.

“White Magic Five & Dime.”

“Who is this?” a man asked gruffly. He’d either smoked a lot of cigarettes or gargled a lot of acid.

“Miss Chance, seer and teller. How can I help you?”

“Don’t worry about helping me. Help yourself. Get out of Berdache and don’t come back.”

Ah. So it was one of
those
calls. I’d picked up a few for my mom and Biddle back in the day, but I was a little out of practice.

I didn’t reply until I was sure I could stay calm. It took me almost a full second.

“And how would that help me?” I asked.

“You’ll stay alive.”

“Got it. I assumed that’s what you meant, but I wanted to be sure. People can be so vague when they’re trying to be threatening.”

“Stick around and you’ll end up like your bitch mother. That clear enough for you?”

“Very. It tells me almost everything I need to know, in fact. I’ve only told three people that Athena Passalis was my mother, so it shouldn’t be hard to figure out who you are.”

The man snorted. “That doesn’t mean anything. Word spreads fast around here.”

“I bet it does. Practically at the speed of sound. Speaking of which…”

I’d already walked out the back door to the little gravel lot behind the building. Two cars were parked there: my mother’s black Caddy and the rented Camry I’d driven up from Phoenix.

I pressed the phone hard to my ear with my left hand while pulling out the keys for the rental with my right.

I pushed the panic button.

honk honk honk honk honk honk honk

I heard it in both ears. The sound was coming over the phone.

The caller was close. And if I was right—and lucky—I knew exactly how close.

I sprinted around the building, turned left at the street, then right at the first corner.

It took me less than thirty seconds to get to the 7-Eleven. I’d remembered it was there because I’d been planning ahead.

Arizona is hot, and I like Slurpees.

No one was using the pay phone out front, but the receiver was dangling from its cord as if it had been dropped in a big hurry.

A delivery truck was idling not far away.

“Excuse me,” I said to the guy loading a dolly with big blue trays of Ho Hos and Twinkies, “was there a man here a minute ago talking on that phone?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know. I don’t stop to check out every dude I walk by.”

“You must have noticed something. The color of his hair, his clothes…”

“He didn’t have any hair, and he was definitely wearing clothes. That’s all I remember.”

“So. A bald non-nudist.”

“I think he was white.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. A bald non-nudist who may or may not be white. Excellent. I’ll put out an APB on Vin Diesel.”

The delivery guy shrugged and said, “Sorry.”

He threw a puzzled glance at the white cordless phone still clutched in my hand.

“What are you? Some kind of cop?”

“I’m from AT&T,” I said. I walked to the phone, stuck a finger in the coin-return slot, and pulled out a dime. “The gentleman forgot his change.”

I returned to the White Magic Five & Dime ten cents richer.

Ninety-nine times
out of a hundred, a threat’s just bluff mixed with wishful thinking
, Biddle sometimes said.

“Is this the hundredth time?” I finally asked him. He and I were frantically packing suitcases while my mother burned papers in a trashcan.

There were bullet holes in the wall behind us.

I wondered what my odds were this time.

I did
a little more searching in Mom’s office, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was thinking about bald men, specifically the theoretically white kind who talk like Darth Vader with strep throat and make threats and wear clothes.

I wanted to meet one. On my terms, of course.

Problem: I didn’t know one. Yet.

After a while, I ordered Mexican from a joint down the street. When I asked Clarice if she wanted in, she said she’d like a vegetarian burrito.

I tried to take some comfort from that. At least the girl wouldn’t kill a chicken.

I locked the front door again after getting back with the food. The back door was already locked. The windows, too, of course. For all the good it might do me.

Clarice and I ate together in the little kitchen upstairs.

“Just curious,” I said between bites from a completely and utterly adequate chile relleno. (I don’t kill chickens, either.) “Did you mention to anyone that Athena’s daughter had showed up?”

“Why?”

“Some guy called who knows who I am.”

“What was he calling about?”

“A possible appointment. He said he might pop in sometime.”

“What’s his name?”

“Mr. Roper.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Maybe I’m remembering wrong. He sounds like he’s in his forties or fifties, has kind of a raspy voice, acts a little cranky. Bald.”

“He mentioned that on the phone?”

“It came up. He said his nickname’s Cueball.”

“Well, he doesn’t sound like anyone I know.”

Clarice turned her attention back to her burrito.

“So,” I said, “have you mentioned it? Me being here?”

“Oh. Right. Yeah, I told a couple people. Why didn’t you ask the guy how he knew?”

“He was in a hurry. Who’d you tell?”

“Just some friends. How’s your food?”

“It’s good. Which friends?”

“People from school. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was nine. Athena used to make fun of me for it. She’d say, like, ‘What’s the use of being at the top of the food chain if you can’t eat everything below you?’ Or she’d take a big bite of steak and start singing ‘The Circle of Life’—that kind of thing. It used to bother me until I figured out she
had
to make fun of me to keep herself from feeling bad. Because if you stop to think about where meat comes from for one second, you’ll never start eating it again. And giving a shit is just
sooooo
inconvenient, you know?”

I let her keep babbling. It was obvious I wasn’t going to get my questions answered tonight.

Eventually she wrapped half her burrito in foil and stuck it in the fridge and announced that she had a test to study for. I might see her in the morning if I got up early enough. Good night.

Later, after she went to her room and closed (and locked) the door, I heard her talking on her cell phone. I couldn’t make out any of the words, but the conversation went on for a long, long time.