JACK BEST AND THE SCORPION BLONDE

by Steve Olley

Just when you think this thing you call your life seems to have reached a comfortable arrangement with the world, God throws you a curve ball, and of course you are never ready for it; it sweeps you up onto your toes, sends you reeling uncomfortably backwards, and you look desperately across at the umpire, and he shrugs his shoulders, looks you sternly in the eye and says, “That's life man! You're out!”

It was late on a Friday afternoon in October, the rain had been falling all day, and the office was filled with that languorous feeling of departure, wishing away those last few hours till we could pack up and go home for the weekend. But that's when God pitched that curve ball, and the door opened and she walked into the room: the blonde in the dark overcoat; the woman who I would always remember as the Scorpion Blonde, for the sparkling silver broach of that deadly creature that was pinned to her breast.

“Are you Jack Best?” she purred in a soft velvety voice, looking at me with intense sapphire blue eyes that seemed to invade my mind, throwing grappling hooks around inside my head.

“Yeah, that's me,” I said, trying to regain my composure, hoping she couldn't hear my heart that was pounding like one of those base drums they get the big guy to carry in a marching band.

“My name is Patricia Reid. I need your help. Can I sit down?”

I managed to nod my head and she draped herself across the chair.

The Scorpion Blonde must have been in her mid thirties, slim build, well dressed, shoulder length blonde hair, blue eyes, and a hard but beautiful Nordic face.

“How can I help you, Miss Reid?”

“I need some protection for a cash sale I intend to make this evening. There's a large sum of money involved and I don't trust the person I'm going to be dealing with.”

“Forgive me for asking,” I said, “but you say that this will be a cash sale?”

“Yes, the amount of cash I will receive will be fifty thousand dollars.”

“I see,” I said, sitting back in my chair. “Now it's my experience that when sales like this take place for cash, then there's usually something not quite legal about them.”

“In a way Mr. Best, you're right, but we are not talking about drugs or anything like that. The articles in question are a pair of bracelets whose legal ownership, should we say, is in question.”

“They must be quite some bracelets to be worth fifty thousand dollars.”

“Oh, but you see Mr. Best, they're worth a whole lot more than that.”

“Then why…I mean…I don't understand. Why would you sell them for less then their worth?”

Patricia Reid crossed her legs and looked out of the window for a moment, deciding in her head whether she was going to proceed or get up and leave. She looked back at me, seeming to search my look for a moment, as if she was hoping to find something, and I guess she found it.

“A few months ago, my father passed away. He left me his old house and his debts. But in the house were the remnants of his life's work. My father was an archaeologist and among his things I found these bracelets. Would you like to see them?” she said, her eyes sparkling in the light from the lamp on my desk.

“You have them here with you?” I asked.

She pulled a small velvet bag from her purse and laid it on the desk. I reached forward, loosened the drawstring and felt inside the bag, and pulled out two heavy silver bracelets; well worn, inlaid with turquoise in the shape of a butterfly. At first glance they seemed just a pair of simple bracelets, but as I looked at them in the lamplight, I became, how can I describe this, aware of them; as if hidden in their deceptive simplicity lay a beauty that age would never fade.

“You are probably thinking that they don't seem too valuable, Mr. Best.”

I looked up, outside the night came early into a cloud filled sky and the darkness seemed to fill the office. I looked at her, her sapphire eyes seemed almost to have a glow of their own, perhaps a trick of the light.

“It is not their worth in today's terms that makes them valuable,” she said, “but their merit in historic terms. Those bracelets that you hold in your hands are over four thousand years old. They once belonged to an Egyptian queen called Hetepheres. She was the mother of the great pharaoh Khufu; the one who the great pyramid at Giza was built for, four and a half thousand years ago.”

And all at once I understood what it was I felt as I held those silver bracelets, once possessions of the great Queen. The turquoise butterflies seemed to twinkle in the lamplight, as if to give them life; and in my minds eye I saw the craftsman working his art as he watched the butterflies skirting the bulrushes on the banks of the Nile all those years ago. And now here they were, in my hands, time-travelers across the entire history of humanity. They seemed to sing to me in the growing darkness of all those moments from our long storied past.

‘Those bracelets, to some people, are absolutely priceless.”

“So why sell them at such a low cost?”

“Because they don't belong to me.”

I looked up at her concerned but beautiful face.

“My father,” she said, “worked at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in the 1960's. He got a craftsman in the old city, who was sworn on his life to secrecy, to fashion a pair of forgeries. It was relatively easy for my father to switch them with the real ones. No one noticed, or so he thought.”

“But why did he do it.”

“I think,” said the Scorpion Blonde, “that my father was under her spell; the magic of Queen Hetepheres had hypnotized him, and despite his life's work, he was willing to risk everything to satisfy his addiction to her.”

“I hear a woman can do that to a man.”

“Especially a woman like Queen Hetepheres: the mother of the Pharaoh who built the greatest wonder of the world.”

“She must have been quite an amazing woman,” I said, as I looked into Patricia's eyes. She didn't say anything, but just stared out of the window, as if she was looking through the darkness back into the past.

“She was,” said the Scorpion Blonde. “The first great Queen of the World.”

The fire in her eyes, and the murmur of her voice had hypnotized me, as if the Scorpion Blonde were Queen Hetepheres herself, alive once more, filling the darkening office with her enchantments.

A car sounded its horn, somewhere far off in another universe, and it brought me back through the centuries, rushing loudly into the present, rudely bringing me back to my senses. Patricia was speaking to me.

“Now the buyer who contacted me used to work for my father, and somehow she found out what he did. Once she knew he was dead, she understood that at last she stood a chance of possessing them. She wants them not because she is hypnotized, but because she probably has a buyer for them who will pay her four times what she will pay me. She said that if I don't sell to her, then she will expose me, reveal what my father did and ruin his reputation forever. As far as I can see, I don't have any choice. At least the money will help pay off father's debts and his reputation is kept intact.”

I nodded and put the bracelets back into the velvet bag and pulled the drawstring tight. She held her purse open and I put them back, alongside a brush that partially hid a hotel room key. The name of the hotel and the room number were hidden, but I saw 4 smaller numbers: 3777.

“There's one thing you have not explained yet,” I said. “How did you and these bracelets come to be sitting across the desk from me here in New Dresden? I mean we're not the centre of the universe here, and you don't exactly look like a local.”

“You're right, Mr. Best, I'm not from New Dresden, I'm from New York . The buyer arranged the meet for your neighboring city here.”

New Dresden was a small town that hid in the countryside to the north of a large congested city where I used to work as a cop. But the grind got to me, so I quit and set up shop as a detective, out here in New Dresden; where I get to see a field once in a while and the people don't talk about life as if it were a bad four letter word.

“So how come you didn't look for a detective in the city, why make the trip out here?”

“I need someone I can trust, and all the detectives I came across down there seemed to have an angle.”

“What makes you think I don't?”
“Do you?”

“Maybe.”

“I think not Jack. Can I call you Jack?” She tried to pull me in again with those eyes. It didn't take too much to convince me.

“So you need a bodyguard?”

“Yeah, that's right, a tough guy with a gun.”

“Well I've got a gun,” I said, “but the tough part might be a bit difficult to arrange.”

She gave me a whimsical smile. I raised my eyebrows in reply.

“You look pretty tough to me, Jack.”

“Oh don't let this face fool you, underneath I'm about as tough as a box of kittens.”

The cliché hung in the air for a moment as she stared at me and I returned her smile.

“Well it's a good job you've got the gun then isn't it,” she quipped.

“Is it something I might need?”

“I don't think so, but I don't trust this woman, and if I go there without back-up I might not get the money and just end up losing the bracelets.”

***

The hand-off was to be made at an old warehouse in the north of the city. I knew the area from the time when I was a cop. It was a good place to meet. It was a long warehouse, with a large sliding door at either end. We were to approach from the south; the buyer came from the north.

At the appointed time I drove my car to the city, with the Scorpion Blonde sitting beside me, the faintest hint of her perfume intoxicating me. We pulled into the warehouse. A black Ford Taurus was waiting for us. A woman in her 50's, with an overweight body trying to fit in to too small a dress, and unruly brown hair framing a blunt looking face, leant against the car. She was talking to a young looking guy who sat in the car behind the wheel.

When they saw us arrive, the man handed a suitcase out of the car window to the woman and then she walked towards our car. The young guy stayed in the car.

“Stay here,” said Patricia Reid.

She got out of the car and walked forwards to meet the woman half-way between the cars. There was a brief exchange of words and then they switched bags. The buyer opened the velvet bag and looked intensely at the bracelets, while the Scorpion Blonde opened the briefcase and began to count the money. Suddenly the buyer stopped looking at the bracelets and peered towards the car. She was staring directly at me, and then her eyebrows rose up her forehead. Patricia Reid seemed to sense something, and snapped the briefcase shut and walked back to the car, leaving the buyer still standing there, peering at me with a strange expression on her face.

Patricia Reid got in the car beside me.

“Okay let's get out of here,” she said urgently. I presumed she had picked up on a vibe out there, as if something was about to go down. I put the car in reverse gear and sped backwards out of the warehouse. Once we were clear of the building, I thrust the stick into first and we raced out of there.

When we were clear I reduced my speed and looked across at her. She was breathing fast after the exhilaration of the moment, and her breast rose and fell in rapid movements. Her hands were trembling. I reached across and laid my steady hand across hers.

“It's okay,” I said. “It's over now.”

She looked at me with those eyes. “Thank you, Jack,” she said and it was my turn for my heart to race.

“You know if you want me to, I can track her down again, maybe get you more money.”

“No, no, Jack,” she said. She moved her hand away from mine. “Leave it there; don't go any further with it. My father's reputation is worth more than money.”

Back outside the office, she paid me for my time, thanked me again, and then climbed into her rental car and drove away; leaving me standing there, watching the tail lights of her car pull away, and wondering if I'd ever see her again.

It was hard to sleep that night. I tossed and turned, unable to get her face out of my head, and the thought that somehow I had let her down. As I turned up at the office the next day it was still eating away at me, but then all that was about to change.

Waiting for me were two detectives from the city police force, and Lou Harry from the New Dresden detachment, and to my great surprise the woman who had bought the bracelets the night before.

It seems the reason that the woman had acted so weirdly before was that she recognized me. Several recent cases that I had solved had earned me a story and a photo in the local newspaper; it was great for business. Last night she knew she had seen my face before and after we had left her she remembered. And as I had taken part in selling stolen relics back to the museum system, then she felt it her duty to inform the police.

“Whoa! Whoa! What are you telling me?”

It seemed the Scorpion Blonde had played me for a sap. It was a good job Lou Harry was there because he believed my side of the story, and backed me up with the others. They took his word that I was a straight up sort of guy and cut me some slack. But still I hated being fooled like that.

The buyer last night wasn't a crooked ex employee, but the honest deal, she'd come to retrieve the bracelets on behalf of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo . It was the Scorpion Blonde who was the trickster here.

“We've known for a long time that the bracelets in the Cairo Museum are fakes, Mr. Best. We've been trying to find them for many years. I guess something must have happened for the thief to come forward offering to sell the bracelets back to the museum. Of course the Egyptian Museum in Cairo instructed me to take whatever measures were needed to insure the bracelets' safe return, so rather than lose them to the black market I paid the buyer what she asked.”

“You talk as if this was a kidnapping and ransom.”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Best, it happens all the time. The world is full of greedy unscrupulous people.”

After they left me I sat alone in the office. I realized that I could still detect a faint whiff of the Scorpion Blonde's perfume. It smelt like…betrayal.

The urge built in me: I was going to find her; prove to her that I wasn't the hick she obviously thought I was. And once the idea came to me, I realized I did not have much time if I hoped to catch her. It wouldn't be long before she headed back to New York , if indeed that was where she was from.

I remembered when I put the bracelets back in her purse, the hotel key partially hidden beneath the brush at the bottom of her bag. I had not seen the name of the hotel, but I did manage to see, what I now realized were, the last four digits of the hotel's telephone number: 3777. It was an easy number to remember and I guess that was the whole point. I pulled a telephone directory and scanned the yellow pages for hotels, and soon found it plastered across an advertisement for The Happy Inn. I knew it; it was just off the ring road in the north of the city.

I went down to my car and drove off quickly, out of New Dresden and onto the highway, and the short drive to the city. As I drove south I was surprised how happy I felt, and then realized the reason: the chance of seeing her again.

When I reached the outskirts of the city, I cut across on the ring road and then took the Penn Street exit. I could see the hotel from the highway.

It didn't cost me too much to convince the guy at the desk to tell me what I needed to know. There was no one going by the name of Patricia Reid staying at the hotel, but when I described her to him, he knew who I meant. Men did not forget the Scorpion Blonde too easily. She went by the name of Margaret Andersen, which sounded more Danish to me than Patricia Reid; perhaps she was truthful about her father. But I'd just missed her by about an hour.

When I asked the clerk if he knew where she was heading to, he told me the airport, and was probably going to take back the Avis rental car first.

I was out of the door before he had finished talking, and my car was straining as it raced back onto the ring road. The traffic was light at this time of the day, and I seemed to shoot through it, weaving in and out of it, till pretty soon, the turnoff for the airport was ahead.

I followed the directions for the Avis rental car return, parked illegally and ran into the small office of the rental parking lot. She wasn't there. $20 later the clerk on duty told me he remembered her. She'd been in there 20 minutes before. As I reasoned aloud that she was headed back to New York , the clerk disagreed with me saying that, that was not the return airport code tag on her bag, but that it was an airport code that he did not know: YYZ.

I thanked him and shot out of there and ran across the road into the terminal, and there before me was a computer screen mounted high up on the wall; it listed departures. YYZ, I knew because I had been there before: Toronto . There was one flight headed there, but it wasn't due to leave for an hour and a half.

I remembered at that point to catch a breath, and I thought for a moment. If she had arrived here 20 minutes before me, then she would hardly have set off for the gate so soon. She'd probably get something to eat first.

There was a small collection of restaurants, most of them were burger joints, full of screaming kids and teenagers, and harassed looking adults. But away from the burger joints was a secluded bar, through the windows it looked dark and the clientele was older.

As soon as I walked into the place and heard “'Aint Misbehaving'” playing softly from the speakers, I knew I was in the right place. I scanned the room and at first I didn't see her, but then when I looked again something glistening in the light caught my eye. It came from an overcoat that lay on the bench in a cubicle, opposite its owner, who sat with their back to the door so you wouldn't see them. But I knew what it was that sparkled and called to me from across the room: the silver scorpion broach.

I crossed the room and slipped into the seat with the coat, and there opposite me was Margaret Andersen, the Scorpion Blonde. If she was surprised she didn't show it. She looked at me with those dazzling eyes and smiled.

“I thought you'd find me, Jack,” she said, her voice purring from her ruby lips.

“But you played me for a fool,” I said.

“Well I was wrong wasn't I, Jack.”

“Guess who showed up at my office this morning, accusing me of taking part in a kidnapping and ransom?”

The blonde shook her head.

“Don't you just hate all that self-righteous crap,” she said.

“You took me along just incase somebody tried to arrest you, didn't you. Thought I'd get you out of there. Protect you.”

“Something like that,” she said.

“One thing I don't understand though. Why did you sell it back to them?”

“Because, Jack, despite what they may think, my family aren't a band of crooks.”

“Or maybe it was safer dealing with soft museum staff,” I said, “rather than someone harder than yourself.”

Margaret didn't seem to hear me; she was staring at her overnight bag.

“She didn't deserve them,” she said in a calm voice.”

“Who?”
“That woman.”

“The woman from the museum?”

“My father was a genius, and that woman…” The blonde shook her head in disgust. “She couldn't even tell that those bracelets were fakes.”

Margaret Andersen slowly looked up at me and a small smile played across her lips.

I smiled too, and shook my head. “No, you didn't?”

“I did,” said the blonde. “Father had two sets of bracelets made. One for the museum and another incase anyone got too close.”

“So those bracelets I looked at in my office were fakes?”

“No, Jack, they were the real deal. I switched them in the car.”

We both sat there for a moment in silence, the last notes of ‘Aint Misbehavin' were fading away. It seems that Margaret Andersen had played us all for fools; each of us chosen by her to play our parts in her little charade. But my finding her here was not part of the script.

“So Jack are you going to keep me here till the police arrive?”

She stared at me with those sapphire eyes for a long time, and for the briefest of moments I saw a smidgen of fear; just enough for me to want to protect her.

“I have not called them yet,” I said.

“And will you?” she smiled and her top lip trembled slightly.

“Yes,” I said.

She blinked and looked away.

“I plan to call them about an hour after your plane touches down in Toronto ,” I said. “That should give you enough time. I hear Canada 's a pretty big place to lose yourself in.”

She smiled, and there was relief etched into that smile.

“But Margaret, the bracelets; you know that it's not right to keep them from the rest of us. There's a magic about them that should not belong to one person alone. Even the Queen wore them so that others might share their beauty.”

She smiled at me. “Doing the right thing, eh, Jack.”

She was mocking me again, but I was only telling her what she already understood herself. After all, she hadn't needed to tell me that she had switched the bracelets.

It was time to leave. Canada beckoned.

“If you're ever up there, Jack, look me up.”

“Where will you be?”
“Oh, I think a man like you will find me if they want to.”

“There you go again with the fooling.”

She smiled.

“Don't underestimate yourself, Jack. You'll find me.”

“I guess so.”

She looked at me for a long time with those beautiful eyes, then leant across the table and kissed me on the cheek.

“See you around, Jack”

She stood up and I helped her on with her overcoat, the scorpion broach sparkled in the light. She picked up her bag. I moved close to her and slipped my arm around her waist, her body seemed soft and delicate. I pulled her close, looked into those sapphire eyes that seemed to sparkle like the silver scorpion on her breast, and then I kissed her.

“Good-bye, Margaret,” I said.

Her eyes had been closed for the kiss, and now when she opened them there was a glow to her face. She looked at me and smiled, and then she turned and slipped away; out of the bar and into the crowd of people, lost once more into that big world where we all live our lives; a life for me that would now always be marked by the sapphire eyes of the Scorpion Blonde.