The Sweet Thief

by Temple Madison

  Deshi and Lorelei laughed together.

  “Anyway, that money... it’s yours... all of it.” She looked at his innocent face, smiled, then indicated the tray. “Now, finish your sandwiches.”

  Deshi reached down and picked up another messy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, pushed it into his mouth, and followed it with a big gulp of milk. The liquid made an interesting white mustache above his lip as he sweetly smiled up at Lorelei.

  Chapter Nine

  The hot little room was filled with flickering shadows, the spicy smell of sex, and the sounds of soft moans and squeaky springs. As two bodies lay clasped in each other’s arms, a nerdy-looking guy on TV stared into the camera, trying to convince the world that he wrote the Yellow Pages. Sidney Wilde had Gabrielle in a lock of passion when suddenly she pushed him off her and lunged forward. She grabbed the remote control, turned up the volume, and stared hard at Griff standing beside a limousine waving to the camera.

  President Nyle was released from the hospital today with a clean bill of health. His doctor says he recuperated quickly, considering his close brush with death...

  Gabrielle watched every movement of the roguishly handsome president, remembering the day she’d had him on top of her. He had plunged into her so deep and had carried her to such heights she’d thought she would faint.

  “Hey, babe, come on,” Sidney said, his voice sliding seductively. “Let’s get on with it, huh?”

  She struggled as he nibbled at her ear, and then pushed him away. “Get out!” she yelled as she continued to stare at the TV.

  Sidney frowned at her. “What the hell’s the matter with you all of a sudden?”

  Gabrielle turned, grabbed his clothes, and threw them at him. “I said get out!”

  Sidney stood looking at her. “You’re crazy, you know that? You sit here all day and all night staring at that damned TV waiting for that miserable son of a bitch to show his face. Well, you might have slept with him once, baby, but he’s gone on to greener pastures.” The ex-reporter pulled his pants on. “If you had any sense at all, you’d quit looking at his stupid kisser and...”

  Gabrielle whirled around, enraged. She jumped up, ran over to him, and began scratching at him. “He’s not stupid!”

  He held her flailing hands as he frowned down at her. “Maybe not, sweetheart, but you are if you don’t make him pay through the nose. You’re sittin’ on a gold mine, baby. You could get rich, don’t you know that?”

  “I won’t go to the press,” she yelled, then turned, sat back down on the bed, and continued staring at the incredibly handsome image on the screen.

  Sidney sat down beside her and began speaking softly and persuasively. “You don’t have to go to the press. If you do that, it’ll just be another Griff Nyle scandal like all the others, and the senator will come along and get him out of it. No,” he continued, whispering with a look of piercing hate in his eyes. “It’s gotta be something that’ll bury him, something that’ll end his career.” He took on a stony look. “Just like he ended mine.”

  With a flicker, the screen flashed back to the news anchors, and Gabrielle turned the volume down. “I’m hungry,” she frowned, rubbing her stomach. “You got any money?”

  “Tell you what. I’ll go out and get us some burgers and fries. Then I’ll come back here and you can tell me the story of your life.” He gave her a long look. “Sound fair? Dinner in exchange for the deep, dark secrets of Gabrielle Valdis? What d’ya say?”

  She shrugged. “Sure.”

  As he walked out, she lit a cigarette and watched him leave, her gaze cutting through the dense smoke. She hated the bastard, but she was hard up right now and didn’t have anyone else. He had been supporting her since they met, and until she could take care of herself, he would have to do. She wondered how Sidney would take it if she told him the truth.

  No. She couldn’t tell him everything. Only so much—up to a point.

  Her plan for Griff was her own little secret. She looked again toward the door he’d left through and knew that Sidney would try to use her.

  Well, let him.

  The truth was, it didn’t take a lot of smarts to know what Sidney had in mind, and the only reason she even tolerated him was because it involved Griff Nyle. Sidney had a lot of stupid ideas, but so what? She’d listen to his ideas, but it would be her pulling the strings. It would be easy, since they both wanted the same things—to see this great man fall from power. But she wanted something more—to see Griff’s handsome face above her time and again, rapt with passion until she tired of him. Then, and only then, would he take his place among her other victims. The games were about to begin, and the prize was waiting—and she was out for blood!

  Just then, Sidney pushed in the door and called out, “Soup’s on.”

  “You back already?” she asked, surprised.

  “Didn’t take long. Burger joint’s just across the street.” He grinned. “Didn’t miss me, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said, grinding out her cigarette.

  He chuckled.

  Later, after Gabrielle had taken the last bite of her burger and fries, she sat back and sipped her beer. As her fingers squeezed the thin metal of the can, she looked up and saw Sidney staring at her. “What’s your problem?”

  “Our deal. Dinner for your life story. Remember?”

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. How you got mixed up with Griff Nyle, I guess, and all about this hocus-pocus stuff you mentioned. You know... everything.”

  Gabrielle frowned. “You ain’t still a reporter, are you? I mean, I ain’t gonna wake up some mornin’ and see this all over the paper, am I?”

  “Relax, baby,” he said, with an unlit cigarette clenched between his lips. “Reporters are just naturally nosey, that’s all.” As he touched a flame to it, he inhaled deeply, and added, “Occupational hazard, that’s all. Hard to shake.”

  * * * *

  Lifting his eyes, he looked at her curiously through a cloud of smoke, waiting. Seeing her hesitation, he knew he’d have to give her a little nudge, so reaching over and flicking his ashes, he began. “So, where do you come from? Was your family—”

  “My family,” she said, cutting him off. “My family,” she repeated softly. “They don’t matter. When I found out who my family really was, I left.”

  “Your real family? What do you mean? Were you adopted?”

  Gabrielle leaned forward. “Sidney, do you believe in reincarnation?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “What if I were to tell you that my family is Circe, Mina Harker, Lucretia Borgia, Delilah...”

  “You mean those dames that...”

  “Led men to their doom,” she finished for him.

  He remembered saying those very words to the First Lady, and now to have them thrown right back in his face gave him an icy chill. Shaking himself, he chuckled nervously. “Hey, those dames were... what do they call them? Femme fatales... enchantress... vamp...”

  Gabrielle angled a look toward him. “Exactly.”

  “Are you sayin’ you’re a fe... one of them?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So you’re right up there with the other vamps, huh? Delilah, Lucretia Borgia... and Gabrielle Valdis.”

  “Quit making fun of me,” she complained.

  “Delilah cut Samson’s hair, Lucretia Borgia poisoned men, didn’t she? And how about Mina Harker? Wasn’t she Dracula’s girlfriend?” He snorted. “Some family you got there.”

  “Yeah,” she said proudly. “They’re my sisters.”

  He looked at her closely. “Oh, my god,” he said, realizing how sick she was. “There’s a word for dames like you, and it ain’t enchantress, it’s schizophrenia. You’re as schizophrenic as hell.”

  “I’m not schizophrenic!”

  “Okay, okay,” he yelled. “But you’d better hope you’re schizophrenic, because if you ain’t, you’re crazy as hell.”

&nb
sp; “You’re just like all the rest.”

  “You mean I ain’t the only one that thinks you’re crazy?”

  “That’s why I was locked up. I killed a guy when he decided to move on. I was only fourteen.”

  “Oh, hell,” Sidney said. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered, her eyes clouding over. “I went a little crazy, I guess. I don’t remember much about it, but somehow I got to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and stabbed the bastard with it.” Her gaze slid back to Sidney with a strange look in her eyes. “They put me in an asylum, or a sanitarium, as they called it.” She lifted her beer can and threw it across the room toward a trash container. “The bastards shrunk my head and kept me ’til I was twenty-five.”

  “Why twenty-five?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and dug a cigarette out of the pack on the table. “It’s some kind of rule or something. I was a minor, and they couldn’t keep me any longer.”

  “Too bad you had to spend all your teenage years locked up.”

  “Maybe,” she said as she held the cigarette between her fingers and touched a flame to it. “But it got to feelin’ like home after a while. Even the bars on the windows didn’t bother me too much. My sisters—they helped me—made it easier for me.”

  “Sisters? What do you mean?”

  “You know...” She slid her eyes over to him. “My sisters. What the hell—haven’t you been listening? Some reporter you are.”

  “So what did you do when you got out?”

  “At first, I was scared... I mean thinkin’ for myself again... doin’ anything I wanted. I felt like I was fallin’, you know? With no one to catch me. I was almost wishin’ I could go back. Even though I had a job and a little hole to live in, I felt lost. Insecure.” Her eyes took on a haunted look. “Have you ever thought about what it’s like for someone to spend years in a place where meals are provided? Somebody tellin’ you what to do every second of the fuckin’ day as if you can’t think for yourself?” She took another puff off her cigarette. “After a while, you can’t, and to be thrown out into the world after that is cruel, real cruel.” She looked down at the lighted end of her cigarette. “There ain’t no such thing as a habitual criminal. They just want to go back home.

  “Anyway, I got a break when they got me a job at Neiman Marcus in Dallas. I might’ve been emptyin’ trash cans, cleanin’ toilets, and moppin’ floors, but at least I had money comin’ in and a place to sleep. After a while, it began to get to me. It was the same damned thing, day in and day out. Everything I made went to rent and a few scraps of food. I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t afford anything decent to wear. My hair was always fallin’ down in my face. I had one lousy sweater with holes in it.”

  A smile tugged at her lips. “Then one night I saw a letter. It was layin’ in Ms. Moore’s Inbox.” She looked over at Sidney. “She was Neiman’s Interior Designer. She advised the customers with colors, fabrics, cost, and acted as collaborator between the customer and the design team, and even went into their homes to do her job if necessary. Anyway, the letter was still in the envelope, and hadn’t even been opened yet.” She looked down as if she held it in her hand. “The return address was really classy. It just read The White House.” She smiled and looked up at Sidney. “Just like that, you know? Chic, simple, beautiful. No street address, just those three words.” With a mischievous look spreading across her face, she continued. “I picked it up and read it.”

  “Yeah? What’d it say?”

  “They was wantin’ someone to come to Washington to assist the First Lady with the interior decoration of the private quarters of the White House.”

  “Why didn’t the Neiman’s here in town help her?”

  “I don’t know. Something about scheduling difficulties, I think. Anyway, at that moment, I would’ve given anything in the world to be Margine Moore. To be invited to the White House where he was.”

  “He?”

  “He... him... the president!” she said with an irate voice. “It was the only chance I’d have, and I wasn’t about to let it slip through my fingers.” She leaned toward Sidney, looked right in his eyes, and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial tone. “Then I got an idea. What if I went to Washington and used her name, pretended to be her? They didn’t know Margine Moore from a hole in the ground.”

  “Have you had experience in interior design?”

  “Hell no, but how hard could it be? You just have to know what colors go good together. I’d just get an idea of what she wanted, order it from the store, then get someone else to do the hard work. What’s so hard about that?” She sat back and shrugged. “So, I grabbed the letter, put it in the pocket of my sweater and went home. I wanted to get outta there anyway, and answerin’ that letter was the best thing I could’ve done for myself.” Insolence glimmered in her eyes. “No more cleanin’ up somebody’s else’s shit. I was goin’ to Washington.”

  “Didn’t they check?”

  “Check on who? The only name they had was Margine Moore, and she was as clean as a whistle.”

  “What about the parole board? Didn’t you have to report to them?”

  “I wasn’t on parole, you dope,” she said angrily. “I had served my time. I didn’t have to keep that crappy old job if I didn’t want to, either.” Suddenly a mischievous twinkle shone in her eyes as she leaned toward him. “Know what else I did?”

  He looked at her questioningly.

  “I stole a couple of fancy dresses with Neiman Marcus labels in them. I knew I couldn’t go to Washington looking like a bag lady, so one night when I went to work, I picked out a couple of real pretty dresses, took some lacy underwear and night things, and I was all set. Hell, I even went to the beauty shop and used the facilities to do my hair. It was during my shift, so no one was around at that time of night. I had nothing but time until the store opened the next morning, so I gave myself the works. By the time I got through, I looked like a queen.” She studied him for a moment, then said, “Promise you won’t tell?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I found some money in the break room. It was just layin’ there in a bowl. Wasn’t much, but it helped. I tried the cash registers, but they were locked. It wouldn’t have done any good anyway. They don’t keep any money in there. They lock it up in a safe until they bank it.” She grinned at him. “So, what do you think? Pretty sharp, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  “My money didn’t go as far as I thought it would. When I got here, I didn’t even have enough for a place to stay. Had to sleep with some jerk for a motel room and a cold ham sandwich. When I finally got rid of him, I called the White House. The next thing I knew, my dream man was on top of me, givin’ me the best fuck I’ve ever had.”

  As Gabrielle was talking, Sidney’s mind was working. He looked hard at her, sizing her up. She was the best fuck he’d ever had, and you just didn’t toss a talent like that aside. She had the looks—blonde, beautiful, and a body that wouldn’t quit, but this business about family and sisters—hell, she had to be the nuttiest fruitcake on the shelf.

  “Tell me more about this hocus-pocus junk. You ever used it on a real man? Think you could fix up a drink that would make him tell you anything you wanted to know? Like secrets and such?”

  * * * *

  Here it comes, Gabrielle thought. “Sure, why?”

  Sidney moved himself forward and narrowed his gaze on her. “Gaby... baby... how would you like to have so much money you could tell the whole damned world to go to hell? Think about it. No more insecurities, no more psycho-palaces... just mountains of greenbacks!”

  Bingo! she thought, and gave him a sultry smile. “Who do I have to kill?”

  “Not a soul. Just try and remember all that mumbo jumbo shit. I have a feeling you’re gonna need it.”

  As soon as Sidney left, Gabrielle quickly went to her closet and fished out an eight-by-ten glossy of Griff and one of herself. She carefully shredded each of them and placed them in a
silver bowl. With a wand, she tapped the bowl seven times and called upon the femme fatales of centuries past.

  Oh, goddess of hidden secrets,

  Oh, goddess of mysteries old,

  Speak in accents soft and clear

  Of the fateful gift I must behold

  Take me to that secret place

  And open that inner door,

  Where wisdom waits in shadows dim

  To impart its priceless lore.

  Slowly, a high, singing wind began to blow, and Gabrielle felt a presence. A voice of quiet evil echoed from out of the wind.

  I am called Circe. I am the fate spinner

  and a weaver of destinies. I am the goddess

  of physical love, sorcery, enchantments,

  erotic dreams, evil spells, vengeance, dark

  magic and cauldron witchcraft. I have

  come from the shadows of the past to answer

  your request, my sister.

  “Thank you, mistress of the under-hells,” she whispered. “I come seeking the love of a man whose image mingles with mine in the silver bowl.”

  Love can never be, but carved upon

  his heart will be your image. This will

  cause him to seek you out... to crave

  your touch... to hear your voice... to see

  your image. To achieve this you must

  begin with an elixir red like blood to

  mix with the ancient recipe I will give

  to you. But remember! The elixir must

  be consumed within five minutes of

  preparation or the element will die!

  The moment the words were said, Gabrielle was gripped by waves of pain that lashed through her head. She reeled with knowledge that ruthlessly plundered her screaming mind. From out of the swirling wind, she heard a faraway cry, and an image of her sister’s hands appeared within a red, swirling cloud. They were heavily studded with rings madly adding potion after potion to a cup of wine until the magic elixir was complete. These ingredients were carved deeply into her psyche as she slowly wilted to the floor.