Crime Spells

The True Secret of Magic, Only $1.98, Write Box 47, Portland, ORE. by Joe Edwards

It used to be more than a grift. She’d never meant this to be a con. Even now, she could sense her grandfather frowning from the spidered darkness of his grave. “My sweet patoot,” he’d say in that gravelly voice that always brought in a few extra dollars from the middle-aged women in the audience. “You can’t never lose track of which part is from the world of light and which part is from the world of shadow.”

“Yes, sir, pappy,” she whispered.

Bringing in money through the mails was a risky proposition even at the best of times. Postal inspectors took a dim view of mail fraud. The murmured cant by candlelight in a sideshow tent became a felony when she wrote it down and put a five-cent stamp on it.

It wasn’t the money that was interesting.

She lived in a little walk-up on the third floor of a decaying Victorian apartment house on Portland ’s east side. Buses and trucks wheezed in the street by day, railroad cars rumbled down the pavemented sidings by night. It was never silent here, always too damp, nothing like the bright fields of home. There was little to do here except listen to the ache of her bones. If it weren’t for the mail, she’d have cracked like an old chamber pot long before.

The mail was interesting, not the money. It brought questions-the same kind of sad and quiet whispers people had come into her tent with during the years before and during the Depression.

Dear sir can you pleese find my dog Freeway?

How will I find love?

Where did Aunt Irma hide the silver?

She didn’t even mind the sirs. A whole generation had grown up since the war not knowing that women had done anything besides wear sunglasses and capri pants while lounging outside their husbands’ Levittown homes. The ones who were old enough to recall the Depression, and women working swing shift at the factories after that, they preferred to forget, to pretend. Now America had that nice Catholic boy as president, who’d fought the Japanese armed only with perfect teeth and a Cape Cod tan. He was every woman’s dream and every man’s envy. Not like the wrinkled old men who reminded everybody of the bad times.

She took the money in, a few dollars some weeks, more others, because without it she would have been living on dog food in someone’s cellar. But the money was nothing more than the river on which the questions flowed.

This past week there had been a postcard from Dallas, Texas. A question, of course-money came in envelopes.

Why must he die? it said on the back. The handwriting was strong, with a thick marker pen, like a man labeling a box. There was no return address, only the postmark.

She turned it over as she had every day since receiving it. Texas Theatre, Oak Cliff, Dallas, the letters on the front proudly proclaimed. The movie house’s marquee advertised Cary Grant in The Grass Is Greener, which made the photo several years old. Somehow she doubted the postcard concerned itself with the passing of an actor.

No clues at all. The question was nonsense, and there was no way to answer it anyway. She tucked the postcard into the frame of her mirror, where she kept the saddest and most puzzling ones. It was past time to fold a few more of the brochures to mail to the people who’d sent actual cash money. The money orders she simply tore up and threw away, though those people also received a brochure for their efforts.

There is magic everywhere in this world. From the voodoo priests and priestesses of New Orleans to the smoldering altars beneath castles and palaces of Nazi-occupied Europe, misguided persons have always come together to call power. Professor Marvel LaCoeur’s patented magical pathways will show you the true secret of magic, safe and effective. Win over friends! Get the girl! Have more money than you’ll ever need!!!

Her favorite time to walk was twilight. That was the hour when the distinction between light and darkness melted to a quiet silvery glow, and anything was possible. Sometimes her grandfather whispered to her then, or even walked a few paces beside her. It was hard for him to reach back from where he had gone, but she knew he loved her.

The city was that way everywhere-the day birds were not quite all sleeping, and the night birds were not quite all out. Mercurys and Buicks fled downtown, heading for the nicer homes in Gresham and Milwaukie, even as the first cab loads of drinkers and louche women were already passing west, into the bars that were just awakening. Sun touched the West Hills, but she could see stars over the mountain.

Her time, her day, when answers would come unbidden to questions she had not yet heard. The challenge in her life was matching them up once again.

Blue shall always be unlucky for you.

Trust her tears far more than you trust your smiles.

Take the job, even if it means moving to Mexico City.

It was like having one piece each out of a hundred different jigsaw puzzles. Still, she kept a pencil stub and a pocket memo pad in her purse. When the answers came, she wrote them down. They always mattered again later.

Papa leaned so close she could smell the cloves and hemp on his breath. He whispered: Because otherwise the boatman would be king.

She hadn’t put her memo pad away yet, but she thought long and hard before she wrote that answer down.

The next day she shuffled off to the post office to mail the three brochures she’d received payment for the previous week, as well as the one money order she’d thrown away. Portland at the end of summer was already crisp. The air was like the first bite of an apple even though the sun was still brass-bright. Nothing like the golden fields of her youth, but little else in life was like her youth either.

There was no one outside the East Portland postal station. She stopped to examine the rhododendrons that struggled in their concrete-lined beds. The season’s last spiders hung on in their optimism, webs strung to catch the straggling flies.

She looked up through the windowpane by the door to see a man in a cheap gray suit looking back at her. Time to go home, she thought, but even as she turned away he stepped out the door.

“ Box 47.” It wasn’t a question. His voice, though… this one could have worked beside pappy back in the good days. A big man, shoulders that pushed skinny kids around on the playing field not so long ago, with close-cropped black hair and narrow gray eyes.

She might have fancied him, decades past.

“Es tut mir bang?” She used the voice she always used for pushy strangers and people who asked questions-thick, European, confused. “I’m sorry?”

“Ella Sue Redheart.” His smile didn’t try very hard. “You’re no more Yiddish than I am, lady.”

So much for the accent. “That’s ma’am to you, sonny.”

“Ma’am.” You could have sliced the sarcasm in his voice and sold it by the pound. He pulled a sheaf of papers out of his coat pocket. No, letters, she realized, two envelopes and a postcard. “You are the box holder at number 47?”

“Who knows?” She shrugged.

His smile quirked again, with a dose of sincerity this time. “I do.”

“Big government man, shaking down little old ladies. Your mother know you do this?”

“Cut the crap, granny.” He reached in again and pulled out a badge. “We both know I’m a postal inspector, and we both know you’re Miss Redheart of Box 47.” He snorted. “Magic? Really? You got supernatural powers?”

“Oh, I got supernatural powers, boy. They tell me you’re going to buy me a cup of coffee down the street there, and we’re going to talk real nice.”

“How’s that?”

“Because you haven’t yet told me your name. A cop always starts out either with the truncheon, or the I’m Officer Blueshirt of the pig farm routine. You want something. Don’t try to grift a grifter, boy.”

“Coffee it is.” This time he really did smile. He didn’t give her the letters, though.

The source is within you. Every one of us is born with a shard of the Pearl of World deep inside our hearts. Most children have it taken out of them by spankings, by prayer, by the mindless lockstep of school. Free yourself and you can find that Pearl. Once you take it in your hand, you can make the world your oyster! You begin by looking back before your first memories, when even your mother was a stranger to you.

She blew across the coffee cup. It was beige with green striping and could be found in any diner in America. The coffee within was as dark as a Chinaman’s eyes. No cream, no sugar, not her.

The postal inspector stirred his tea. She’d been surprised by that. She’d have thought him a coffee man. All the big ones were. Coffee, and scotch in the afternoons.

Pappy’s first rule was never volunteer anything to the heat. She wasn’t pappy, and besides that she was as small time as they came. Still she held her silence as tightly as she held her cup.

He finally put the letters on the table. “Two days, three letters. That’s what, six simoleons in your pocket?”

“Less advertising, printing and mailing,” she said quietly.

“I’ve seen your little booklet.” He leaned close. “A moron wouldn’t believe that stuff.”

“You’d be amazed what people believe, copper.” She sipped her coffee. “You’d be even more amazed how many of them are right.”

He kicked back and drank some of his tea. “Maybe. I seen a lot. First Korea, then a flatfoot in Seattle, now minding the mails for Uncle Sam.” He examined the letters. “That’s six years right there, three instances of postal fraud. For you, I’m guessing it don’t matter what the fine is, you can’t pay it.”

She hunched down. She wasn’t often ashamed of herself, but this man opened doors in her memory. “I live on ten dollars a week, fourteen in a good week. What do you think?”

“I think, why the hell is someone committing federal offenses for ten dollars a week?”

“It’s a living.”

“Not much of one.”

She put her cup down and took the letters from his hand. “Sonny, I’ll be seventy in a couple years. I ain’t never had no Social Security number, been cash and carry all my life. It’s what I got.”

He tugged the postcard out of his pocket. “No, this is what you got.” He turned it over in his finger like a stage magician with the Queen of Hearts.

She looked, suddenly terrified it might be from Dallas, Texas. But no, this one said, “Greetings from Scenic Lake of the Woods!”

The card stopped flipping. He read aloud, “I can make fifty dollars a week and send my kid to college, but I have to go so far away. What should I do?”

“Take the job,” she whispered. “Even if it means moving to Mexico City.”

“You don’t charge for those,” he said flatly.

She shook her head. Two bits a reading, a long time ago in a tent beside dusty red dirt roads. Not now. Not any more.

He pulled another card out of his coat. A photo, she realized. A head shot of a man of medium build, average looking with short dark hair. He seemed like an earnest fellow. This one could have been her son, if she’d ever had a son. “This tell you anything?”

Someone has a camera, she thought, but bit off the words. “N-no.”

“Hmm.” He stared. “I’ll buy you coffee again next week. You think of anything, you write it down in that little book.” He left thirty-five cents tip on the table and stood, taking his hat off the coat hook on the wall.

As the postal inspector left, she realized two things. She hadn’t pulled out the memo book since meeting him, and he’d never told her his name. At least he’d left her the letters.

She palmed the tip as she picked up her mail and shuffled off for home.

That Friday there was another postcard from Dallas in her box. This one showed a city park, with a road running through it to disappear under a railway overpass. There were a few monuments scattered around. She looked at the back, at the almost familiar handwriting.

Why not tell him to stay in the white house?

Hands shaking, she set the postcard down. She laid her copy of Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew atop it and set to folding more brochures.

She spent the entire weekend wondering if the postal inspector would reappear. She assumed he’d be at the East Portland postal station, but with him anything seemed possible. She sat on bus benches and waved the drivers past, then shuffled onward when she’d been in one place too long.

They’d run more than a few times, she and pappy back in those years. Somehow it had always been funny. Afterward, at least, if not in the moment. Sheriff’s deputies, town constables, preachers, angry wives, angry husbands-her memory was a parade of red faces and southern accents and the squeal of tires on gravel. Even when they’d been cornered, as happened once outside New Orleans, and probably a few other places as well, pappy would launch into some oration in that voice of his and eventually find the keys to unlock the hearts of their pursuers.

She’d thought her grandfather was old then, but she would swear to being older now. His gift had been the gift of gab, the flim flam grift that flowed from his lips like sand from a child’s fingers.

Her gift was real. They both knew it back then. They just never used it for anything. She could have played the ponies, picked stocks, found some way to make it into real money so they could retire to Havana or Miami or Nag’s Head. But it was never time, and there was always an element of danger, of betrayal.

So she’d told fortunes across the south and west for so many years she’d forgotten to ever make her own. Besides which, people didn’t want to know their real future. They wanted to know their imagined future, the one they cherished instead of fearing.

He was waiting for her Monday. He had her mail again, one grubby letter. Sometimes those didn’t even have money, just a simple request. Rarely begging, but she knew how to read an envelope just like she knew how to read a mark.

“Tell me,” the postal inspector asked as they walked to coffee-and-tea. “What is the true secret of magic?”

In spite of herself, she laughed. “You really want to know?”

“Sure. We got time.”

She heard the lie in his voice and knew that something drove this man, something invisible to her but as real as cholera in a well. “A dollar ninety-eight.”

“You want me to pay you?” He sounded disgusted now.

“No, no, you don’t understand. The true secret of magic is in the numbers. You have the numbers, you have everything. Like elections, you see? It’s not the votes, it’s the counting.”

“Hmm.”

She went on. “Wall Street. Who makes money? The brokers, not the poor bastards who pay for the stock. Numbers are magic.”

“That’s not magic. That’s… that’s economics.”

“An economist can tell the future.”

“But he’s not right,” the postal inspector protested.

“How do you know? Anyone can call spirits from the vasty deep, but will they come?”

His eyes narrowed. “You’re twisting the question.”

“Oh, a big cop like you, he never did such a thing?”

He laughed. “You must have been quite something in your day, lady.”

“Ma’am,” she said quietly.

“Ma’am.”

“I’m still something today, sonny. I’m just something different.”

A few minutes later, over their steaming mugs, he leaned toward her. “So, what do you know about my boy there?”

“ Texas,” she said, surprising herself. She wasn’t inclined to trust him, not a cop, especially one who wouldn’t even give her his name.

“He the one sending you those postcards?”

“Who knows?” She sipped. “All I can say is Texas. I don’t know why.”

“I hope you get better at spirit calling.”

Step outside on a new moon night. Walk to a park or a railroad siding, or even a rooftop, somewhere away from the street lights and the late night buses. Now look up and try to count the stars.

How many did you find? How many do you think there are?

Magic tells you that you don’t need to know, that there are as many stars as the sky can hold. Magic tells you how to find the one you want, like looking for a diamond in a mile of beach sand. Magic is the art of picking out the impossible from all the things which might be or have been. Magic is the star under which you were born.

They went on into the autumn, meeting every week or two. He badgered her, he twitted her, but he never pushed her. She came to respect him for not trying to pull the answer from her. Somehow this man with the gray suit and the badge understood at least that much about what she did.

He let her keep answering her letters. Eight dollars one week, twelve the next, once a twenty-dollar week. She put three dollars aside that week, in her coffee can, and that was after buying a pork chop at Fred Meyer’s.

Still, something drove him. His attitude became slowly more urgent. She got more postcards from Dallas, all of them cryptic. Pappy whispered the answers to her, no less strange.

A textbook killing.

Hobos hidden atop the grassy hill.

Officer Tippit has three children.

She kept the answers to herself. There were some things he did not need to know. Coffee every week or two did not buy trust. Besides, he’d surely read all the Texas postcards.

In mid-November, she got another one of the postcards from Texas on a day when there were no other letters. This one had a mail order rifle ad from the Sears catalog pasted over the face. On the back it read, Why only one bullet?

She stood in the post office, looking at the card. His hand reached around and plucked it from her grasp. “You’ve received one hundred and two letters since I’ve had you under surveillance, Miss Redheart. That’s one hundred and two separate counts of postal fraud. You’ve also received twelve of these postcards from Dallas, mixed in with thirty-eight others from around the United States. A secret admirer in Texas, perhaps?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.” She thought of the earnest young man in his photograph of the previous summer. “Maybe you should ask that fellow whose picture you showed me.”

“I’d like to,” he said. “I really would. I just don’t know who he is.”

“Why did you bring him to me?”

He glanced at his shoes a moment. “Because I saw your classified in the Oregonian. I… I received that photo in a very strange fashion. Nothing I could make sense of.” He tugged it out of his pocket and turned the picture over. On the back was written 11/22/63 in the same bold, black handwriting as all her postcards. Below it was a drawing of a goblet with a line through it. He continued, “I’ve been waiting for an answer I could give someone. Something I could say.”

“An answer about what?” she asked, her voice so soft she could barely hear herself.

“Why I’m so afraid of this picture.”

“Big man like you, afraid of a photo?” She was sorry for the words as soon as she said them, but it was too late. His face hardened and he turned away.

Go to Dallas, said pappy plain as day just behind her ear.

The postal inspector turned back. “What?”

“My father says you should go to Dallas.”

He drew a deep breath. “It’s too late, I think. You should have told me that a long time ago.”

“I told you Texas, the first time we met.”

He nodded. “Yes… I suppose you did.”

She went home and folded brochures. It all made sense now, except the why. Something in the numbers of the world had tried to warn her of the true secret that would arrive tomorrow. A man, a gun, a bullet. She wondered if the postal inspector would board a night airmail plane and fly to Texas, looking to stop whatever might have been.

The shadows deepened in her tiny apartment, day slipping westward as the night took up its watch on the horizon’s battlements. As the first stars came out, she found her coffee can and took five of the eleven dollars out.

She hadn’t eaten steak in years, and besides, the world was going to end tomorrow, or good as. Magic was little more than grift, pappy had been dead for years, and the postal inspector had never asked her the right questions that might have saved a man’s life on November 22nd, 1963.

The boatman who would be king was going to die tomorrow. She ate well on the scant proceeds of her mail fraud and drank to his life, before stumbling home amid the memories and ghosts of night.

Maybe it was time to change her ad.