Heinz Noonan, the “Bearded Holmes” of the Sandersonville Police Department, was pondering a fortune cookie with no fortune. It had no fortune in the sense the fortune it gave, in script, was indistinct and therefore illegible and thus worthless. Noonan had been hoping for fame and fortune in his future – not so much the fame but definitely the fortune, so to speak – and what he got was a misty, faint, unreadable prognostication of his future. While the prognostication was blurred, the ‘lucky numbers” were not; but what Noonan could do with 12 67 84 13 5 was unknown because he had better things to do with $20 than bet on a losing proposition.
He was visually intent on the fortune cookie, in this case in the singular, because he was expecting a call from a woman who had experienced a fortune cookie waterfall. In her case, the fortune cookie waterfall, in the plural, had been in her art gallery. It had been a deluge in the range of a ton of fortune cookies. The local police, grimacing to keep from breaking into hysterical laughter, had advised her to call Noonan as her bad fortune had not been a crime and fortune-nately there was a detective who considered odd matters which, may or may not, be a crime. Fortune-ately for her, Noonan was willing to listen. When she called back, Noonan had his notebook and pen ready.
“Mrs. Swanson, I presume?”
“Yes, sir, Captain.”
“Heinz. I’m Heinz until there’s a crime.”
“OK, Heinz. I’m Harriet.”
“The fortune cookie waterfall survivor.”
“You know my story already?”
“Tell it to me anyway.”
“Well, first, this is not a crank call. I really did have a fortune cookie waterfall. It was planned, but I don’t know why and neither do the local police.”
“OK, how do you know it was planned?”
“First, the fortune cookies were not stolen. Whoever was involved has been buying them in bulk in some other city. We’re a small town so someone buying a ton of fortune cookies here would stand out.”
“How big is your town?”
“8,000. But we are a bedroom community of Flagstaff. It’s got 72,000 something. We’re Humphreys, with an S, just like the mountain for which we are named.”
“OK, go on.”
“Whoever it was, loaded the fortune cookies into the abandoned office on the second floor of the building where my art gallery is located. But before the fortune cookies were deposited in the office, the floor was weakened.”
“Weakened?”
“Right. Whoever it was removed a section of flooring the size of a sheet of plywood. Then they installed an ancient piece of plywood – I’m guessing to make it appear the sheet simply broke because of the weight of the cookies, and it had naturally splintered. We believe but cannot prove, it was kept in place by three 2 x 4s. When the 2 x 4s were removed, the plywood sheet of the floor collapsed. When it did collapse, the ton of fortune cookies on top cascaded through the false ceiling in my gallery and flooded the floor.”
“How do you know 2 x 4s were used?”
“I don’t. When the police examined the hole in the floor above my false ceiling, they found slide marks where some support timbers had been. Because of the weight on the plywood sheet, they guessed the timbers must have been attached by a cable to a car or truck in the back of the gallery. The power of a vehicle would have been needed to pull the 2 x 4s free. Then whoever was responsible detached the 2 x 4s, took them downstairs, dumped them into a car or truck and drove away.”
“How long as the upstairs office been abandoned?”
“Years. The company went out of business long before COVID-19 and it’s been abandoned ever since.”
“How deep were the fortune cookies?”
“Waist high in most of the gallery. Under everything. Fortunately, no one was in the gallery when the fortune cookies came down. It was sometime on Sunday night.”
“Were you open on Sunday?”
“Until 7 pm so the waterfall of fortune cookies had to be after that. We found the place flooded on Monday morning when we opened.”
“Any indication why you got your fortune cookie flood?”
“Not a one. Nothing was missing in the gallery. No paintings, no prints and there wasn’t any money in the gallery.”
Noonan shook his head then he said, “Let me guess, because nothing was missing, there was no crime so the police are not involved.”
“Yes sir eee bobcat tail.”
Noonan thought for a moment and then asked, “Do you have a pen and paper?”
“Yup.”
“I’m going to need some more information, here goes: How large is your gallery, how much business do you do, do you do anything other galleries do not, are you alone in the building, what kind of security do you have, where is the nearest airport, where is the nearest lumberyard, how many employees do you have, how many of the employees are new, do any of your employees have a police record, what kind of automobiles do your employees have, do you have partners in the gallery, were any of the utilities disrupted and how long did it take for you to clear out the fortune cookies.”
“I can answer all of those questions now.”
“Not yet. I have to do some research first. I’ll call you in two days.”
“Works for me.”
* * *
Whenever Noonan received a loo-loo call, he started his research with two tried and true sources of information: history and the local papers. There wasn’t much on fortune cookies he could not have guessed. The only thing he learned which he did not know was the cookie itself was not Chinese in origin. It originated in Japan and came to America with Chinese railway workers who had been imported to build the Transcontinental Railway between 1863 and 1869. The Chinese had been the labor force for the Union Pacific which started in Sacramento, California. The other end of the railway, which started in Council Bluffs, was constructed by Irish immigrants. The Chinese immigrants who did not return to China settled in San Francisco and established – along with the fortune cookie – Chinatown, which is still in existence.
The inclusion of the numbers on the fortunes came later when “The Numbers” racket offered anyone a chance to “make it big” by “hitting it big.”
If you could guess the right numbers.
“The Numbers” racket made so much money it shed its illegality and became respectable and was now generically known as the “lottery,” with each political subdivision referring to it by a different name. And every one of these political subdivision getting a nice slice of the fiscal pie.
The history of Arizona was both enticing and brutal. The actual word “Arizona” was a Spanish corruption of the Papago Indian term alĭ ṣonak which translated as “small spring.” The name, Wikipedia was clear to state, did not come from the Spanish Árida Zona, which translated as “Arid Zone.”
Arizona was discovered by Marcos de Niz in 1539. This was probably a surprise to the Hohokam, Mogollon and previous cultures who had constructed the pueblos which had flourished there for thousands of years before being “discovered” by de Niz. Then came the Roman Catholic Church which dominated the area and the cultures until, well, the discovery that Arizona was a preferable place to spend the winter than the snow-chocked cities of the northern tier of the United States. Arizona was a Spanish Province until 1821 and then became part of the United States after the Mexican-American War of 1847-1848. It became a Territory under President Lincoln, and, interestingly, other names considered for the land at that time were Montezuma, Gadsonia, Pimeria, Montezuma and Arizuma. The name Montezuma was not for the Aztec but for a divine being of the Pima of the Gila River Valley. Gadsonia was a Latinized version of Gadsden for the Gadsden Purchase, the acquisition of 29,670 square miles of desert with one redeeming feature: so the Southern Pacific Railroad would have a deep southern route to California.
The population of Arizona took a staggering leap upwards in the 1950s courtesy of the combination of cheap and plentiful power in tandem with the proliferation of air conditioners. As the economy of the United States surged over the next 70 years, Arizona – all parts – became a winter haven for Americans exhausted with ice, snow, cold weather, long nights, and being too close to extended family members. But it took a brave soul to deal with the heat of an Arizona summer so the land was densely populated during the winter and lightly in the summer.
Albert
Humphreys – with an S – was in Coconio County, the second largest county in the United States. It was more than 18,661 square miles in size – which made it larger than the nine smaller states of the United States. Noonan, with relatives in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough in Alaska, knew this fact on Wikipedia was in error. The Mat-Su Borough was 25, 258 square miles in size while the supposedly second largest county, San Bernardino, was only 20,105 square miles. But then again, the Mat-Su was a “borough” while San Bernardino was a “county” so Coconio was, technically, the second largest “county” in the United States.
But it only had a population of about 150,000, not even a small city by American standards. Mount Humphreys was just over 12,000 feet in altitude, and to Noonan, again with a gaggle of in-laws in Alaska, that made it more of a pimple than a peak. The peak and the community had been named for Andrew A. Humphreys, a Union General who later became the Chief of Engineers in the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Oddly, before the Civil War had started, he had worked with then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis on Pacific Railroad surveys which later became portions of the route of the Transcontinental Railway. Substantially older than most generals during the Civil War, Humphreys was nicknamed “Old Google Eyes” because he wore glasses. He was not well-liked by his men and the Assistant Secretary of War for the Union, Charles A. Dana, who referred to him as a man of “distinguished and brilliant profanity.”
None of these facts offered a clue as to the Fortune Cookie Waterfall so Noonan proceeded to the local papers.
Of which there were none for Humphreys.
There were limited references to Humphreys in other papers, most likely because it was a bedroom community of Flagstaff. But there was quite a bit of coverage of the arts scene in the Flagstaff area. With the introduction of the internet, the financial world of art took a dramatic turn.
And it was profitable.
In the old days, which was referred to as “a while ago” and “previous to electronic marketing” by art gallery owners, artists needed to be present to sell their wares. This was true all the way down the art food chain. If an artist wanted to sell a painting, whether it was a $40 creation or $40,000 masterpiece, the buyer wanted to meet and chat with the artist. Then came the explosion of the print market. While the top of the market stayed the same, there was a substantial change toward the bottom. More and more people were interested in $300 prints signed by the painter rather than the $10,000 original. And art galleries were more interested in selling 300 print at $300 rather than one painting for $10,000.
Thus the print market boomed. A gallery could produce 200 quality prints and all the artist had to do was sign each print and put number at the bottom. The number was in two parts, one for the actual number of the print and the second the total print run. The numerals 12/300, for instance, would indicate this particular print was the 12th to be sold of a total run of 300.
With the proliferation of prints, the artist did not have to be everywhere the prints were being sold. Even more important, financially, for the gallery owners, mailing a print was cost-effective as opposed to the packaging of an original painting. And if the print was damaged in the mail, a replacement was simply a matter of changing the handwritten number on the bottom of the print.
Even better from the point of view of the art galleries in Flagstaff, the artist did not have to be local in the sense he/she lived in the area year-round. Hundreds of artists had their studios in Maine, Michigan, upstate Illinois, Montana and both Dakotas but conducted their sales in Flagstaff.
During the winter.
This made Flagstaff – and presumably Humphreys – throb with artistry from September to May, from snowfall in the north to arrival of summer head in the south.
And a distant bell clanged in the deepest recess of Noonan’s brain cavity.
* * *
When Noonan called Harriet Swanson he had few extra questions. “I could not find a newspaper for Humphreys so I have a few general questions for you.”
“OK, what can I do for you?”
“How many actual paintings did your gallery sell last year?”
“That’s a tough question to answer, but I’ll try. If you mean the high end, say above $10,000, three. But they were to the same buyer, a museum. That was because it had a grant for art of that particular variety. Then there was a large gap to the $1,000 to $4,000 range and the answer is about two dozen. The bulk was to businesses who could write off the acquisition. We also took in artwork from those same businesses so they could rotate their collection. We have quite a few seasonal rentals in Humphreys and the rental homes want to have different paintings for their guests every time they arrive for the winter. I would say we sell about a dozen paintings a year in the multi-thousand dollar range that do not rotate.”
“Go on.”
“The big money for us is in prints. An artist in Michigan, let’s say, produces a painting which she wants to turn into a print. We send the original artwork to a print shop and we get 300 prints. The artist signs and numbers the prints and we keep them in the gallery. Then, during the winter, we and the artist advertise the blazes out of the prints. She’s here in Humphreys and does the meet-and-greet until May. She can be here every day if she wants to be.”
“Can she sell all 300 prints in one season?”
“Not really. Not unless she’s well-known. Usually she sells about 100 a winter.”
“And you save the rest for the next winter?”
“We save what we have. When the artist goes back to Michigan she will do art shows there and sells prints there. If she sells a print, we mail it from here.”
“What happens to the original painting? The one used to make the print.”
“The artists doesn’t sell it if that’s what you are asking. We, the galleries, use the original artwork as advertising. We hang it in our gallery during the winter and the artist takes it with her to Michigan.”
“What happens to the prints you cannot sell? I mean, if you’ve only sold one or two prints in five years and the artist dies, what happens to the leftover prints?”
“We keep them in the storage unit for a while just in case the artist makes a comeback. We may donate some of them to schools or libraries and the rest we recycle. They are an asset to the business so we have to keep track of them. There’s no reason to steal them because they have no value if that’s what you are hinting at.”
“I was. Now, do you have the answers to my questions?
“Sure, here goes. Our gallery is 2,500 square feet plus a storage unit of 500 square feet, more or less. During the winter, we do about $70,000 a month in sales. During the summer we are lucky to get $10,000 from the gallery but print mail orders make up the difference. About $20,000 a month in print sales.”
“During the summer,” Noonan cut it.
“Correct.”
“How many print sales during the winter?
“About $20,000 of the $70,000.”
“Go on.”
“We are doing the same thing all art galleries in the Flagstaff area are doing; we’re just smaller. We have different artists so we have a different traffic pattern. We are only different in the sense we do not offer desert artwork. Every other gallery in Arizona offers scenes of the desert. We can’t compete with the big galleries so we specialize. We don’t have a specific theme, just not sand, cactus and sunsets. We have forests, ocean beaches, maritime animals, snow peaks. We’re different in that sense.”
“And those prints sell all summer?”
“Yes.”
“How about the actual physical gallery?”
“That was next on my list. We are in a standalone business. The building has two floors with the abandoned office on top of us, the second floor. It has 2,500 hundred square feet and it has been vacant for three years. We have security cameras on the outside but only facing our back and front, where the doors are. The surveillance cameras on the other two sides were owned by the upstairs office and have been turned off for years. Security inside is pretty tight. Everyone logs in and out. No one logged in or out the night of the fortune cookie waterfall. It was just a normal Sunday.”
“Started that way, any way,” Noonan said.
Swanson continued, “The nearest airport is in Flagstaff, about 12 miles away. The nearest lumber yard is about that far away as well. I have had a total of 15 employees, the bulk of them during the winter. This time or year I am down to 8, but only half of them are on the floor. The others are bookkeepers and janitors. All of the people are the floor are seasonal so I’d guess you can call them new. The police ran checks on everyone and except for speeding and parking tickets, nothing else. My support staff, the bookkeepers and janitors, have been with me for years. All of my employees have different kinds of cars and trucks and my partner in the gallery is my husband and he makes it a point to have nothing to do with art or the gallery. He’s an outdoorsman and prefers, well, the outdoors. Let’s see, none of the utilities were disrupted during the night and we are still cleaning out the fortune cookies. To get them all out, we have had to clear out the inventory in the gallery and move it to the storage unit. Then, as the fortune cookies are cleaned out, we moved the inventory back into the gallery.”
A clang went off in Noonan’s brain.
“Did you take an inventory of everything you moved from the gallery to the storage unit?”
“Had to. The insurance company requires it. That’s how we know nothing was missing.”
Now the clang was reverberating.
* * *
When Noonan came into his office the next Monday, he was humored to see his desk covered in fortune cookies. Upright in the pile was a sheet of cardstock with a handwritten note: WHAT’S IN YOUR FORTUNE COOKIE FOR TODAY? As he was taking stock of the cardstock, Harriet, the newly-promoted office manager and still the office common sense maven, came into the office with a notepad. She gave the pile of fortune cookies a stern look, flipped some sheets on her notepad and said with faux concern, “Humm. Gift of fortune cookies. Definitely not kosher. That’s a gift and you, an officer of the law, cannot accept gifts, emoluments, freebies or, in this case,” she took a fortune cookie off the pile, “meals.”
“These aren’t meals,” Noonan sniffed. “They aren’t deserts either.”
“Usually not good with numbers either,” Harriet said as she sat down. “The office didn’t buy these cookies, by the way. They came from someplace in Arizona.”
“Humphreys,” said Noonan. “With an S.”
“Could have been. With this note,” Harriet said and she snapped a note to her fingers as if she were a magician. “You were right! It reads, ‘Here’s your reward for good fortune!’”
Noonan grumbled.
“Now,” said Harriet as she sat in the chair beside his desk and pushed some fortune cookies aside so she would put her elbows on the desktop. “Tell Momma everything.”
“Not much tell. You know about the fortune cookie waterfall.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to miss the wrap-up.”
“Not much to say. Nothing was missing when they cleaned out the gallery to get rid of the fortune cookies. The fortune cookies were a stroke of genius. You can buy boxes of them anywhere and no one cares. Whoever was involved didn’t have to worry about anyone knowing they were ripping up the floor in an abandoned office because it set off no alarms. Up comes a section of floor and in goes an old sheet of plywood. They braced it with some 2 x 4s and probably put cables from the ends of the 2 x 4s so they could attach the 2 x 4s to a car. There was going to be a lot of weight on the plywood sheet, so they’d need the power of a car to pull the 2 x 4s loose.”
“So,” Harried yawned. “Out slides the 2 x 4s and down come the fortune cookies. Why?”
“Ah, the clever part of the plan. Whatever was to be used to flood the art gallery had to be small, light, and have the ability to scatter. Fortune cookies were perfect. They flooded the gallery waist high but were so light they did not break anything. And they scattered under everything. That meant the gallery had to move everything to get the cookies out.”
“Why not just leave the cookies where they were?”
“Probably to keep from attracting mice. Once you get those critter inside they’ll chew on everything, including paintings and prints. So everything had to be moved to get rid of the cookies.”
“So everything got moved. So what?”
“Everything got moved but no one, and by that I specifically mean the police, knew for sure if a crime had been committed. The police only get involved in matters where laws are broken. There is no law against a gag like letting fortune cookies fill up a business. But if the waterfall of cookies was to steal paintings, that’s another matter altogether.”
“But nothing was stolen. I know that. That’s what the woman who owns the gallery told me.”
“Yes and no.”
“I hate answers like that.”
“We all do. To clear out the gallery, everything had to be taken to a storage unit. So, as objects were moved they were audited to make sure nothing had been stolen. Then, when the gallery was clean, the objects were moved back to the gallery.”
“So?”
“So no one was auditing what was going back into the gallery. I suspected someone had snitched some of the prints. I’m betting some artist back in Michigan or Montana was going to sell those prints on their own. But the artists needed the prints and didn’t want the art gallery to get a slice of the profits. So the artists arranged for the fortune cookies disaster. His or her prints were audited when they were removed from the gallery …”
“And then stolen from the storage vault. Clever.”
“Yes, it was. My bet is a bookkeeper was in on it. If the artist and bookkeeper stole, oh, 60 prints, the bookkeeper would simply adjust number of prints that were on hand. Or maybe over-ordered prints in the first place. It really doesn’t matter which. Once the prints left the storage vault they would be renumbered. Unless there was some kind of a fluke matching print numbers, no one would ever know of the duplication. Even if someone did discover the duplication, it would be years from now.”
“What kind of money are we talking about?”
“Oh, say 100 prints were missing and they could be sold for $300 apiece, $30,000. And that was cash, no percentage taken for the gallery. I don’t know how much an artist makes on each print but I assume it’s about 15%. If the gallery sold 100 prints for $30,000, the artist would get $4,500 and have to pay taxes. But with this scam, the artist gets half of $30,000. Not bad for a day’s work.”
“At least for one night’s work,” Harriet said as she spread the fortune cookies. “The bookkeeper’s going to the pokey. I wonder what my future is going to be.”
Noonan pointed at the pile of cookies, “Take your pick.”
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