Pawn Shop Purchase

“$19000,” the Pawn Shop owner offered for the transcripted copy of Beowulf from the 19th century.

“$21000,” I counter-offered. The Pawn Shop owner, Davis, of the Darien and Brother Pawn Shop in downtown Richmond, considered the counteroffer for a second.

“$20000,” he finally said. I thought about it for a second. The book was said to be worth at least $40000, a price that I was never going to get. But $20000 when I only paid five dollars for the book at a yard sale? Now that was a deal.

“Alright, $20000,” I agreed, shaking his hand. I was 20000 dollars richer, not bad for a Virginia State Police detective.

Davis took the book. “Let's just go do some paperwork and you’ll be $20000 richer.” While he went about preparing the paperwork, I glanced over to the TV. Interestingly, he did not have the game on for the store patrons, instead, he had on the Senate Confirmation Hearing for that Yale professor for Secretary of State. I didn’t think much about it, my job kept me pretty busy, all things considered. “So…” Davis started, getting my attention with obvious small talk. “A cop?”

I nodded. “Yeah.. well, now I’m a detective with the Bureau of Criminal Investigation.”

“Nice. I was a cop myself years back. Ten years with the Arlington County Police Department.”

“Oh really? Why did you leave?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Just wasn’t for me. I tried to make a difference, but nothing I did made any difference, so I gave up. Plus, the pay is a lot better here.” I noted a touch of sadness when he spoke, making it clear that he held onto some regrets from his time as a cop.

I decided to shift the subject for the time we had to fill out paperwork. “What was your final case?”

“The Lauren Painting Case.” Oh god, the Laurening Painting Case, a robbery where a thirty million dollar painting was stolen from a rich beneficiary, “I was part of the team that responded to the initial robbery. But certain… events afterward caused me to resign. Never did find out what happened or if the painting was found.”

“Well, fortunately for you, I was also part of the case. I was brought on just after being promoted to the BCI. The painting went missing in 2008. In 2010, after a joint task force failed to find it, the insurance paid the man his thirty million for the lost painting. But then, three years ago, in 2014, we were raiding an abandoned warehouse we suspected of being used as an illegal weapons depot for local gangs in Norfolk, and lo and behold, we found the painting,” I explained.

Davis stopped filling out the paperwork and looked at me with a bewildered face. “You found it? By accident?”

“Yup,” I answered. “And get this. In the process of confirming it was the one stolen from Arlington back in 2008, we learned that it was a fake.”

“Woah,” Davis said. “A fake? But how is that possible? The appraisal that the insurance company would have done should have caught it as a fake.”

I shrugged, not knowing the ends and outs of the investigation into the insurance company that insured the painting. That was done by the FBI. “I don’t know. But as part of the joint task force that was recommissioned after the painting’s rediscovery, we looked into the man that had received the thirty million payouts. Took a bit to track him down, but we figured out that he moved to Seoul, South Korea after being paid and six months later was found dead.”

“Hmm…. that doesn’t sound suspicious at all,” Davis muttered, resuming filling out paperwork.

“Not at all,” I agreed. “However, Korea’s National Police Agency ruled that the death was from natural causes and he was cremated. What is suspicious in itself is the thirty million went missing. Turns out, it vanished a week after he got the payout. Three years we have searched for it, but nothing has turned out. The only thing we know is that money never went to Seoul with him, but we don’t know what he did with it.”

Davis had a little chuckle with that, apparently finding it amusing. “If I may, I would like to offer a theory,” he said as he pushed the paper over to me, indicating he needed my signature. “While I’ve only been working here for a few years, I’ve learned a few things. People who want to hide a small fortune sometimes break up the money and hide in purchases. When they want the cash, they come here or go to an auction and get their money back. If they were lucky and the market is with them, they’ll make again on their investment.”

“Huh…” I had never considered that.

Davis continued, “Anyhow, this is especially useful when you want to hide money that you gained through illegal ventures. That’s how a drug kingpin who we took down during my third year with the ACPD was hiding his money. The success is in that it is hidden in plain sight and only those with the eye for such objects would even catch it. For example…” Davis opened a drawer and pulled out a small box. Opening it up revealed a small, golden coin. “I bought this coin from a fellow who got it from a yard sale like you for $70000 last week. Now, I can get over twice that in an auction, but in this example, someone likely paid less for that to hide the money. You can put this in a coin collection and no one except those who know what they are looking for would find it. Hell, even your book could count in this regard. You stick that in a bookshelf and it simply becomes one of the books. It doesn’t stand out in any way and no one would know it's even there. In all likelihood, that guy likely bought up a ton of valuable but inconspicuous items and hid them. You could stare at one of the items for hours and not even realize it's part of the missing cash.”

I had to admit, that was quite a theory. It wasn’t something that we had considered when investigating him. But before I could continue to consider everything, something clicked. I had seen that coin before. Not in person, but in a little black book that I had picked up from the same yard sale that I bought the Beowulf transcription copy. That’s how I knew that $20000 would be the best price I could get for the book. “Hey, remind me, what did you pay for that coin?” I asked.

“$70000,” he replied as he finished filling out the information on the check. “Here’s your money and good luck on that investigation. Hope I was of some help.”

$70000… “Thanks,” I said, distracted, taking the money. My mind was elsewhere. I walked out of the pawnshop, solely focused on that coin. Reaching the car, I opened the trunk and pulled out a locked box. Inside the lockbox was a little black notebook that I had bought from a kid for five bucks in the same yard sale I got the Beowulf book two days ago. It contained items from coins to books to even salt shakers, what their actual value would be and how much you could reasonably get at a pawn shop or auction. Flipping through it, it didn’t take long for me to find what I was looking for, the coin that Davis had shown me when talking about his theory. The picture was the same as what I saw and the amount it was worth was $140000. Half that, the reasonable amount one could get that was listed as $70000, the same amount that Davis bought it for.

I had originally believed that this black notebook was the result of some hobby, but after what Davis had told me, a different theory was forming. Selling it for the same amount that was listed in the book? One hell of a coincidence for what I had just been told. Acting on a hunch with this theory, I took out my phone and began the task of adding up all the reasonable sell values for all the items listed in the book. If my crazy hunch was right, the reasonable amount wasn’t a reasonable sell amount, but what the guy paid for them.

It took a bit, but my heart dropped when I finished adding up everything in the black notebook. It came out as a perfect 30 million. “Son of a…” I didn’t want to believe it. I could have shrugged it off as a coincidence, but my gut was telling me something entirely different. When it came down to it, my gut was usually right. This little black notebook contained the missing thirty million dollars that we have spent the last three years looking for.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.