Crime Spells

“ 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 ski

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, so

“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, gra

“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. “So

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 ru

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 fu

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.