Sweet Liar (42 page)

“Don't you dare patronize me!” Putting her hand on his chest, her face softened. “Mike, you must take me. If there are any problems, Doc won't kill me and I can protect you.”

“And what makes you think he'll stop at killing you? You know you're not his granddaughter.”

“Because now I know what happened to Half Hand's money,” she said softly. “And if Doc hurts either of us, he'll never see a penny of that money.”

T
hey had to go over the wall.

When they hid their vehicle in the trees, under cover of darkness, and went to the gate to find that it was locked, Samantha's first reaction was to turn around and go back to the city. According to Mike, Frank had bribed the men guarding the gate and it wasn't supposed to be locked.

“We don't have time for you to turn coward now,” Mike said. He was afraid for her, true, but he'd had a lifetime of experience of living with his older brother: If Frank said the gate was going to be open, then it was—they were probably at the wrong gate.

At the far back of the walled property was a tree with a sturdy branch hanging over the tall brick wall. Climbing the tree first, Mike then helped Samantha up behind him. After throwing a few small packages of very fragrant meat onto the uncut lawn to ascertain whether the dogs were penned as they were supposed to be, he lowered Samantha to the ground. Lifting her hands above her head, lacing her fingers, she made a handle for her body, then Mike stretched out on the tree branch, slowly lowered her to the ground, then jumped down behind her.

“Run,” he ordered and took off, Samantha on his heels.

As promised, the side door to the house was unlocked, and there were little night-lights on so they could see their way around furniture. Mike noticed that in a few places there were tables missing and places where chairs should have been.

When they sneaked past the kitchen, they heard voices, even though it was after midnight now and the house should have been asleep. Holding their breaths, they tiptoed past whoever was in the kitchen and went up the stairs.

One of the stairs creaked when Samantha stepped on it. Seconds later, a guard appeared, looking up the darkened stairs, but Mike's quick thinking saved them, for he practically threw her up the two remaining stairs where she crouched behind a sideboard, while Mike pressed himself into a doorway.

“You're getting nervous in your old age,” they heard a man say.

“There's something going on tonight, I can feel it,” answered another voice. “You think the old man's all right?”

“I think he'll outlive us all,” was the answer, and the voice held no love for its employer.

When the men walked away, Samantha let out her pent-up breath and followed Mike when he motioned her to follow him. He seemed to have memorized the floor plan, because he knew where to go and which door to open.

Sitting up in bed, Doc was waiting for them. He wasn't sleeping, he wasn't reading, he was merely waiting. Fully dressed, on top of the covers, he didn't so much as blink in surprise when they entered.

“I heard you on the stairs,” he said to Mike. “You would never have made a cat burglar.”

“I leave thievery to you,” Mike answered, then cocked his head at the man. “You're going with us.”

“I had planned to. I want to see this party you have planned for me. It's been many years since anyone went to such trouble for my benefit, and I wouldn't miss it for the world.”

“What do you know about us?” Samantha hissed at him.

When he turned to her, for a moment, Samantha's blood seemed to grow cold, for in this dim light, he didn't look like a pathetic, crippled old man but like a young, heartless gangster, a man who cared for no one and nothing.

“I did not live as long as I have by not knowing what goes on around me. I know that you have bribed most of my guards into leaving doors unlocked and penning up the dogs.” He gave a nasty grin. “I relocked the front gate. I didn't want you to have it too easy, and in seven minutes I will have the dogs released.”

At those words Samantha thought she and Mike should leave, and quickly, as she didn't want a wild run with snarling dogs nipping at their heels. This seemed to be Mike's idea too, but before he left the room, he scooped Doc's frail body into his arms, then took the stairs down two at a time, Samantha right behind him. By the time the two drowsy men in the kitchen looked up the stairs, the three of them were on their way out of the house.

Mike ran so fast Samantha could hardly keep up with him, but the idea of a pack of dogs coming after them, as well as a few men with guns, put wings on her feet. She had no idea where Mike was going, but she followed him as though her life depended on it—which it probably did.

When Mike stopped abruptly, she slammed into the back of him, but he didn't so much as waver on his feet. A narrow gate was in front of him. When Samantha, with a nervous backward glance, pulled on it, she found it latched with a lock with a big dial.

“What's the combination?” Mike asked the man in his arms.

Doc just grinned.

“If the dogs come, I'll throw you to them first.”

“Young man,” Doc said, sounding as though he were on a throne instead of being kidnapped, “you are the type who'd guard a man's life with his own.”

Samantha thought that whatever else Doc was, he was an excellent judge of character, for she knew without a doubt that Mike was incapable of doing something as vile as throwing an ancient old man to a pack of dogs.

“What do we do?” Samantha whispered, scared half to death of what was coming.

For a moment, Mike looked at Doc, who was staring at them as though highly amused by all of this, then Mike turned to Sam. “Try 5–12–28,” he said. It took Samantha a moment to realize that Mike had given her the date of the massacre, the date Maxie had run away.

With shaking hands, Samantha turned the round dial on the lock. When the combination didn't work, she looked at Mike in helpless terror.

“Try it again,” he said, sounding as though they had all the time in the world.

The second time the lock opened, and they hurried through, with Sam taking a few seconds to relock the gate, hoping to hinder dogs and men who might pursue them.

They ran to the little truck that waited under the trees for them. Nearly a week ago Raine had called his older brother, Kit, and asked his advice about a very fast car, stipulating that the car had to have room for four people, one of them not well. According to all of the Montgomerys and the Taggerts, Kit was second only to his mother in knowing more about cars than anyone else in the world.

To the astonishment of them all, Kit drove down from Maine in a little black GMC truck called a Syclone. According to Kit, there had been only a very few of the trucks made in 1990 before the government took them off the market because they were much too fast (0 to 30 in 1.4 seconds). The only road-legal vehicles in the world faster than the Syclone were a Porsche 959 and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari, both of which Kit owned, but they were two-passenger sports cars.

Kit had been intrigued by what was going on and had stayed to help. After outfitting his truck with a camper shell, he helped Blair equip it with an oxygen tank and the accoutrements of an ambulance.

Now, Blair was waiting for them inside the camper shell, ready to take Doc and see that he lived through what might turn out to be a very rough ride. As Mike put Doc inside the shell and strapped him to the bed, Samantha slipped behind the driver's seat. When Mike ran to the front of the vehicle, he told Sam to get over to the passenger side.

“I'm driving,” she said.

“Like hell you are,” Mike answered and started to push her into the other bucket seat, but Samantha was strapped inside her seat belt and didn't move so easily.

“Mike, I can drive! I drove in Santa Fe for four years and never had so much as a fender bender.” She offered this explanation in the same tone that one would say, I won the Indianapolis 500 three years in a row, except that Samantha's words made no sense.

It was at that moment that the first shot rang out and Mike, disgusted, knew that he had no time to argue with Samantha. Jumping on the side of the truck, just inside her open door, he commanded her to drive.

And drive she did. There were three cars heading straight for them, big, heavy American cars, and Samantha maneuvered around them as though she were riding the dodge 'em cars at the state fair, passing them by quarter inches, but never so much as scraping the paint on Kit's precious, rare truck.

When she was past the three cars, she slammed on the brakes and ordered Mike to get inside. Without a word of protest, he rolled across the hood of the truck and dove into the passenger side, slamming the door after him and fastening his seat belt.

As Samantha started to drive again, he looked at her with new respect and not a little awe. For just a second, she turned her head and grinned at him. “If you think that was something, you should try a four-way stop in Sante Fe. No rules apply; it's whoever is the most macho goes first, and I learned to
never
give in.”

For Mike it was a ride in hell. With the three cars pursuing them on the freeway back into the city, Samantha wove in and out of traffic as though she were an animated shuttle on a tapestry loom. The little truck was not only sickeningly fast, but it was also highly maneuverable, what's more it was four-wheel drive,
real
four-wheel in which all four wheels are independently driven, which meant that the truck could probably climb greased telephone poles. When Samantha saw an opening in the fence, she made a sharp right and ran up the very steep side of the embankment and suddenly changed freeways. Unfortunately, the truck had the road clearance of a BMW, which is to say that it had none at all, so they scraped bottom all the way up the hill, but when they'd made it to the top, they had lost their pursuers.

When they reached Maxie's nursing home, they had none of Doc's men behind them—but they did have three police cars.

Getting out of the truck, Mike found that he was shaking. Nothing he'd ever done in his life, not kidnapping a man and being nearly attacked by killer dogs or anything else, had frightened him as much as Samantha's driving. She, however, seemed perfectly calm as she ran up the stairs into the nursing home, leaving Blair and Mike to deal with the police, who would be shown the now-sleeping figure of Doc and told their drive through hell was a medical emergency.

As she ran into her grandmother's room, Samantha knew Maxie would be awake and waiting for her, for she'd known what Mike and Sam had planned to do tonight.

“It's done,” Samantha said as she climbed into bed with her grandmother.

Maxie put her arms around Samantha. “Then he's here,” she said softly.

“Yes,” Samantha whispered, and in another minute she was asleep.

Here, Maxie thought. Doc was here under the same roof with her after all these years.

A
fter spending the morning in the bathroom relieving herself of her dinner from the night before, Samantha spent the rest of the day of the performance with the other women in a brownstone hair salon in the East Eighties getting her hair set in a Marcel wave and a lesson in 1920s cosmetic application. Vicky had arranged everything. The women, who were to play gangsters' girlfriends, cigarette girls, and waitresses were happy and giggly and excited. Only Sam was subdued as she sat under a dryer and flipped through the latest issue of
New York Woman.

Back at Mike's house there was no peace to be found, no quiet corner where she could sit and think about the approaching evening, for the house was the headquarters for everything that had to be done. It had come about naturally that Pat Taggert would become the crew boss, as she called herself.
“You
raise a dozen kids and see if you ever think anything else in life is difficult,” she said to Sam.

One bedroom was a last-minute fitting room, another the makeup room, where Vicky had a couple of experts helping the women apply the cosmetics. Two other rooms were briefing rooms, one headed by Mike's father as he informed his players what they were to do. When Ian saw Sam standing in the doorway, without a smile, he shut the door in her face.

In the late afternoon, Samantha escaped to a corner of the garden to try to be by herself. She couldn't explain how she felt: calm but agitated, excited but tranquil. She wished Mike were with her, but he was away from the house, doing things he wouldn't tell her about.

When Kane's boys suddenly appeared before her, storybooks in their hands, she looked up and smiled at their father in gratitude. Pulling the heavy boys onto her lap, she began to read to them about Curious George.

It was evening when Vicky told her it was time to go to Jubilee's Place and get ready for the show. Kissing the boys goodnight, wishing she didn't have to leave them, Samantha went outside to the waiting car and started the drive north to Harlem.

In the previous weeks when everyone had been working, while Sam had been rehearsing with Ornette, no one had allowed her to see the renovation of Jubilee's club. Now, slipping in the back door of the stage entrance, she silently moved away from Vicky and walked to the front, where she stepped into a shadow, hidden from view so she could watch what was going on.

Jeanne had done a breathtaking job on the club. It looked like something straight out of the Art Deco period, which was the hottest, latest way of decorating in 1928. Everything was turquoise and silver, the dance floor in front of the band looking as though it had been appliqued with silver leaf. Behind the dance floor were tiny tables, what looked to be a hundred of them, each covered with long turquoise cloths and a little lamp in the center of each table.

On a dais was the band, with Ornette looking fiercely handsome in his tuxedo as he talked to his musicians, his beloved trumpet in his hand, and the sight of him made Sam smile. Under Ornette's façade of anger, he was a sweetheart, a perfectionist who loved music more than life, but a man who was afraid to show his soft inner parts. Now he was warming up his orchestra with a jazzy little number, and Sam knew he'd soon start on the blues. In 1928, during the very happy, rich time before the stock market crash, the country was wild for the blues, but after the crash, people only wanted cheerful songs, such as “Happy Days Are Here Again.” As a result, singers such as Bessie Smith went out of favor.

As Samantha watched from her shadowy hiding place, she saw people begin to enter the club, laughing, the women beautifully, exquisitely dressed in long gowns. The 1920s fashions today might look shapeless, but there was so little to them that they showed off everything a woman had. When a woman walked, the draping fabrics swayed and clung to her in a very sexy way.

Two pretty young women came in together, their gangster men behind them, the men looking tough and complacent, smug even.

Watching them, Samantha moved farther back into the shadows so they wouldn't see her, for she was beginning to feel as though she were an anachronism in her slacks and casual blouse. Gradually, the club was beginning to fill up, and the more people who entered, the more Samantha felt as though she had stumbled into a time warp, for all the people and their surroundings were part of 1928.

When Mike entered the room, Sam pressed herself back against the wall as she watched him move about the club, obviously very familiar with it. Maybe she should have been jealous, for Mike flirted with every female in the place, but she wasn't, because this man didn't seem like
her
Mike; this man was Michael Ransome. This Mike walked differently in his beautifully cut tuxedo, and he used his good looks to advantage.

Samantha watched Mike go to one tootsie—the name perfectly suited the woman: too much makeup, movements too silly, a giggle that could be heard in Peoria, and, frankly, to Samantha's eye, too much breast—and ask her to dance. With a squeal of delight, the woman stood, actually, she wiggled into an upright stance, managing to make all the excessive parts of her jiggle. Before Mike took the hand she was offering to him, he looked to the man sitting across the little table for permission. The man had a fat belly that he'd encased in a spectacularly tasteless vest of black and yellow plaid. Looking over his belly, he gave a superior nod to Mike, as though he were a king granting a request to a subject. It always amazed Samantha that a person could feel superior because he or she was a criminal, as though the person had accomplished something that had meaning in life.

Escorting the woman to the silver dance floor, under lights so soft they would make the Wicked Witch look good, Mike took the woman in his arms and led her in a tango. Startled, for a moment Samantha held her breath, for she'd just discovered another of Mike's lies. He'd said he wasn't any good on a dance floor, at least not for anything except holding a girl tight and rubbing together, but as Sam watched him, she saw that he was a dream of a dancer. With as much muscle as he had at his disposal, he could lead a woman who was a less than perfect dancer in a dip; he could turn her when she was supposed to turn. Mike was even able to make the bimbo in his arms look as though she could dance.

When the tango was over, Mike led the floozy back to her gangster. After looking at him for permission, Mike kissed the back of the woman's hand.

“Hey, kid!” the gangster said as he imperiously motioned for Mike to come to him.

With no sign of what he must be feeling at such an autocratic command, Mike went to the man who then stuffed a ten-dollar bill in Mike's jacket pocket.

Samantha had to catch herself, for she was about to step forward into the light. How dare that two-bit nobody whose only claim to fame was that he'd engaged in illegal activities treat Mike like that!

“Are you ready?”

Startled, Samantha turned to see Vicky, who was wearing a lovely, slinky dress of blue satin, white feathers sticking up at the back of her head, a triple band of what Samantha had no doubt were real diamonds about her forehead. “Yes, I'm ready,” Sam answered softly.

Following Vicky back to the dressing room, Samantha knew that with each passing minute, she was beginning to lose touch with reality. When Vicky opened the door, Sam was sure she was no longer in the nineties. Daphne and the other women were in various stages of undress; there were clothes strewn everywhere in front of a long, garishly lit, mirror-backed counter that held countless dirty bottles and pots of makeup.

“Lila?” Samantha whispered.

“Yeah, honey?” Daphne/Lila said, then turned to look Sam up and down. “You better get ready. You're on in no time flat.” Bending forward, Lila whispered. “Wouldn't want to disappoint Mike on the last night.”

As though she'd been kicked in the stomach, Samantha drew in her breath. Lila wasn't supposed to know that this was Maxie's last night to sing in Jubilee's club.

Looking over her shoulder at the other girls, Lila whispered, “Don't worry, not one of them is going to tell.”

Maxie—no, Samantha—nodded.

“Your dress,” Vicky said, and when Sam turned, across Vicky's arms was Maxie's dress. It wasn't a reproduction as first planned, but the original dress. Mike had explained that it would have cost too much to reproduce the dress, so Jilly had contacted the Costume Society of America and through them had found a conservator who could clean the dress properly.

Samantha's hands were shaking as she took the dress from Vicky.

“The jewelry is on the table, and underwear is behind you.”

“Break a leg,” Lila called as she and the others trooped out of the dressing room, followed by Vicky.

Standing in the middle of the dressing room, the once-bloody red gown across her arms, alone in the long, narrow room, Samantha felt a chill go through her. Turning, she saw the couch, as always, covered with the discards of the women: torn hose, soiled blouses, heelless shoes. In the corner was another pile of clothes and Samantha knew without a doubt that buried under the heap was Maxie's little traveling purse that contained the life savings of both her and Mike, about five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.

Still trembling, Samantha draped the dress over the back of a chair and began to take her clothes off, then put on Maxie's underwear. As before when she'd put on Maxie's clothes, she began to feel as though she were a different person. It was almost as though the clothes had magical properties that transformed the wearer into someone else. And no wonder, Samantha thought as she pulled the silk gown over her head. What the dress had witnessed that night was enough to leave an impression on fabric.

A few days ago her grandmother had told her what had actually happened that night that had changed so many people's lives. Maxie had told Sam everything up until she had walked out the stage door carrying her purse and Half Hand's bag.

Samantha had listened to her grandmother, had even felt some of what she was telling her, but sometimes it seemed to Sam as though she were almost numb. Just days before she heard Maxie's story she had been told that her mother had been tortured before she had been cold-bloodedly murdered. Wasn't there a limit to how much a person could feel? How much a person could even comprehend?

With the dress on, she sat down at the counter to check her makeup.

“Ten minutes, Maxie,” came a man's voice from outside the door.

In ten minutes she was going to have to go in front of these people and sing for them; she was going to have to do what Maxie did that night.

Abruptly, she looked at the closed door of the dressing room. It was dirty looking, but there were no lacerations on it. No one had tried to claw her way out of
this
dressing room.

Making herself turn back around, Sam looked in the mirror. She had to remember that this was just a play; she was acting and she was trying to help Mike. He said he was going to have pictures taken to use in his book and he was—

Bowing her head, she put her head in her hands. Ornette was playing outside now, and she was having difficulty remembering that this was just an act. She was having a very hard time not thinking about her mother and her granddad Cal's loneliness after his wife had left him. Everything that she knew seemed to be screaming in her head, not being quiet as she usually managed to keep it.

It had all started on this night, everything that had happened began on this one long harrowing night: lives ruined, lives extinguished, hatreds kindled.

“I can't do this,” Samantha whispered and started to get up, but then she saw a box of powder on the counter. It was an ordinary box, blue and white, with a big lambswool puff with a pink ribbon on top; the box was full of ordinary dusting powder.

Picking up the puff, she looked at it. Maybe it had started with the powder Maxie dumped over Michael Ransome's head. For a few moments Samantha put her head on her arms on the counter, releasing her mind to all that she had been told, not fighting it, but letting herself go, allowing herself to remember everything.

“You're on,” Vicky said as she opened the door.

When Miss Samantha Elliot stood up, smoothing her blonde hair back in its perfect waves, she
was
Maxie, and she was ready.