Chapter Six
Then the microphone picked up the faint sounds of him coming into the house. This might be the goldmine, the detective said to himself. He fiddled with the knobs on the equipment to get the best possible signal.
“Honey is that you?” she called out.
“Yes, dearest,” came the feint reply.
“What’s wrong? You sound down in the mouth?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Did you lose money in the stock market?”
“Worse,” came the reply, and his voice was much clearer, so he must have climbed the stairs to follow her into the bedroom.
“Is your mother coming to visit?”
“I’ve had a falling out with the Field Marshal. There won’t be any trip to New York,” he confided.
“Egads! I’ve already told all my friends that I’m going! You better spill the beans, buster! What happened? Did he find out about all your gambling and drinking?”
“Heaven’s no. It isn’t my fault. Not my fault at all!” he said.
“Then what?” she demanded.
“He doesn’t like the fact that you were married once before.”
“What? I was barely married at all. Only legally, not in any other way! Why would you tell him that? Can’t anyone make a horrible mistake without the whole world coming down on them?” she complained.
“I didn’t tell him any such thing. Your ex-husband did.”
“Cramden? Those two know each other? I thought you were taking care of things!”
“Well, some how they found each other,” he puzzled over it.
“That’s going to destroy all my hard work. You better fix it! I have my heart set on being a millionaire! The trip to New York! The exclusive territory!”
“Yes. And the riverboat on the Nile.”
The information was coming so fast that the detective stopped taking notes and started drawing circles with labels and arrows going back and forth.
“He’s wanted for murder. I told you to have him arrested!” she said.
“No, you didn’t. You said that he wouldn’t last very long on the run,” he corrected her with no small amount of indignance.
“That was before we knew he had the artifact,” she said.
“He might still not know its powers,” he said hopefully.
The detective flipped the page on his tablet and wrote down: Salt Shaker, with a question mark after it. Was the whole story about her mother a lie? Or were there two shakers?
“What if he has?” she complained, “The Field Marshal probably told him the same story that he told us! And I believe it. Every word!”
“That it contains god-like power for whoever possesses it?”
“Yes, that!”
“Why would he tell Cramden?”
“The same reason he told us. To get help finding it. He’s two-timing us. Why else would Cramden knock over the museum and kill a man? He has to know what it is!”
“Of course, dearest.”
“I want to go to New York next week, Tom. I already told all my friends.”
“Yes, dearest.”
“I want to meet the Egyptian President. I want a riverboat half way across the world. I want all the ancient Egyptian relics that catch my whimsy. Especially a very particular one. You know which one, Tom.”
“Yes, dearest.”
“Good! Then its settled.”
“What’s settled, Pumkin?”
“That there’s too many men involved in this caper,” she said.
With that, the equipment fell silent. By this time, the detective had a separate page describing the shaker and its unbelievable potential. He also had a page for Ginger, the governor, the Field Marshal, and the car salesman, and their potential liaisons and motivations. He flipped the page one more time, and wrote down the observation that Ginger had not told her husband that she was in possession of the Akhenaten file. Why was that? He put a big question mark underneath.