Sweet Liar (43 page)

Midwestern America
1921

M
ary Abigail Dexter shot her fourth stepfather when she was fourteen years old, but by that time he'd been raping her since she was twelve. Her only regret was that she didn't kill him. She'd meant to, but she was crying and hurting and angry, and her aim was off. Rather stupidly, she had aimed for his very small head and not his enormous gut, so the bullet had grazed the top of his hairy shoulder instead of landing in his mouth that was once again laughing at her.

But the shot and the sight of his own blood had startled the bastard long enough for Abby to get out of the shack of a house and run, something she'd repeatedly tried to do in the past without success.

She walked for two days, going without food, but that was nothing unusual for Abby because her mother was usually too drunk or too busy with men to feed her only child. When she was far enough away from her “home” town (a place that fully believed in condemning the child for the parent's sins), she traded the gun for a one-way bus ticket to New York, a place where she hoped she could find anonymity.

When she got to New York, having spent as little as possible on food, she used what little money she had left on a cheap rayon dress, a pair of high heels, and a tube of lipstick, trying to make herself look as old as possible. Picking up a day-old newspaper from a park bench, she began to look for a job.

The only goal Abby had was to never live like her mother, who depended on the sexual desires of men for her livelihood. To men, Abby's mother seemed to be a good-hearted whore, someone who was always good for a laugh, who would do anything at all in bed with them. But Abby had seen her mother's desperation, for her mother had always dreamed of some man loving her and taking care of her forever. As Abby grew up, she learned that if a woman didn't take care of herself, no one else was going to do it for her. She vowed that she was not going to be forty-seven years old and living in the squalor her mother did.

There weren't many high-paying jobs for women listed in the New York paper and certainly none for an untrained, runaway fourteen-year-old. On her fourth day in New York, gathering her courage, Abby went to a bar in Greenwich Village and asked to see the owner to apply for a job as a cocktail waitress. The man took one look at her and said no, but Abby, by now nearly desperate, for she hadn't eaten in two days, had slept on park benches, and had raw and bloody feet from walking for miles in the cheap high heels, began to beg. Begging was something she'd never done before, not even with all that her mother's boyfriends and brief husbands—she often remarried but never bothered with a divorce—had done to her, but now Abby was begging.

“How old are you, kid?” the man asked, knowing that he had children older than this girl.

“Twenty-one,” Abby answered quickly.

“Yeah and I'm Rudolph Valentino.” Willie knew he was asking for trouble if he hired this kid who, if he guessed right, was in her early teens, but he could see under the hair that hadn't been washed in a long time and the cheap lipstick that was caking on her mouth that she had class—and she had brains. She didn't have that dull-eyed rabbit look of most of the girls who were cocktail waitresses at sixteen and would be at sixty if they hadn't died of some venereal disease before then.

“Okay, kid, you got the job,” he said. “But if anybody complains, you're out.”

The gratitude that was in her eyes made Willie shift nervously on his seat. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew a twenty. “Here's an advance. Get yourself some decent clothes and get something to eat.”

What Abby felt couldn't be expressed in words, so she just looked at the man and the bill in her hands.

“Go on, get out of here. Come back tomorrow night at seven.”

When Abby returned the next day, Willie knew that he'd had the best of the deal, for the girl had taste. She was dressed as simply and elegantly as something out of a lady's magazine—and the moment Willie saw her he knew that his life was going to change.

Within two years, his business changed from being a two-bit bar/whorehouse to being a place where respectable ladies and gentlemen could come. Abby, who had been starving for respectability and responsibility, had been allowed to take over the place. She redecorated the bar, redressed the waitresses, made a code of conduct for all employees, and took over Willie's bookkeeping. By the end of three years, Willie was wearing custom-made suits with a three-carat diamond holding his tie in place.

It was in 1924, when Abby was seventeen years old, that she met the up-and-coming young gangster known simply as Doc. Right away, Abby recognized someone as ambitious as she was.

Doc was small and underdeveloped in a way that could only have been caused by malnutrition as a kid. There was a long scar across his neck that told of some old and life-threatening injury, and his eyes were never still. In fact, none of him was ever still, but always moving about, looking behind him, fidgeting with a bullet on a chain attached to his vest, and when he walked, one leg was a bit stiff.

Shadowing the little man was a tall, hulking, rather stupid-looking man with only half of a left hand called, appropriately enough, Half Hand Joe. Joe went everywhere that Doc went, to the restroom, wherever; he even tasted Doc's food before Doc took a bite.

After the first night that Doc came to the club, Abby took care of him herself, which she didn't usually do since she had become the hostess/manager, but there was something about Doc's halting walk and his nervous eyes that made Abby feel they were kindred souls. The two of them had been through a lot in their short lives, and somewhere along the way they had lost the ability to feel as other people seemed able to do.

For six months Doc came to the club and during that time he never spoke a word to Abby, but at the end of the six months, Half Hand came to her and said that Doc wanted to speak to her in his car.

Abby took her time deciding whether to go or not, because she had an idea of what Doc wanted to ask her: He wanted her to be his mistress. On the one hand, Abby liked having the protection of a gangster. They usually gave their women expensive presents that Abby could cash in and use to someday buy her own place. Also, gangsters didn't seem to have very long life expectancies, which to her, when it came to men, was a good point. What she didn't like was the thought of sex with any man. Her mother's life and her mother's husbands had made her never want to have anything to do with sex again.

After a while, she decided to see what Doc had to say, so she went to the car, a long black limousine, and sat with him, only the ever-present Half Hand in the car with them. Abby had been surprised by Doc's request: He wanted her for his mistress, but he wanted her for show only. The rules were, no sex between the two of them and no other men for her. In return for her being his showpiece, he'd take care of her financially, even if she wanted to stop working at Willie's and do nothing all day but take care of her hair and nails. But Abby felt a great deal of loyalty to Willie, and even though he underpaid her and never said thanks for what she'd done for him, she wanted to stay with him; he needed her. Doc couldn't have cared less, and Abby breathed a sigh of relief, glad that he wasn't the demanding sort.

Sitting in the back of the limo, Abby agreed to Doc's terms and he presented her with the first of many presents: a diamond necklace. Over the next year Abby received a furnished apartment, the deed in her name, furs, jewels, and beautiful clothes. For her part, when she wasn't working she went with Doc wherever he felt he needed to go and she always looked her best, for that was what mattered most to Doc: He wanted to show the world that he could have the classiest of women on his arm.

It was in 1926, when Abby was nineteen years old, that she left Willie's. By that time, Abby had hired entertainment for the bar. One night the singer had strep throat and couldn't sing, so Abby was left with no one to entertain the customers. After spending hours trying to find a last-minute replacement, she decided to give singing a try herself.

From the moment she stepped on the stage, she knew she had come home. Everyone, including Doc and Willie, thought that Abby was a cool customer, that she was as cold inside as she appeared to be outside. No one had any idea of the passions that raged within her, for those passions came out only when she sang. Abby couldn't tell people what she felt, but she could sing what she felt. Every word of the blues songs she sang dripped with her misery.

Afterward, the audience came to its feet in thunderous applause, and hearing it, Abby knew what she wanted to do with her life.

The only person who didn't want her to sing was Willie, for he looked to the future and saw Abby leaving him and knew that he couldn't run his club without her, so he told Abby she was no good. With only his own needs in mind, Willie said that the applause had been for her looks, not her voice. With those words he lost Abby's loyalty. Abby had been willing to forgive him for not paying her well and for all the other slights, but she hated his lying.

She went to Doc and told him that she wanted to sing in a nice place, that she wanted to leave Willie's, so Doc installed her in Jubilee's Place in Harlem, a place where the women glittered with diamonds and the men were surrounded by auras of power. It was when she was signing a two-year contract with Jubilee that her name was changed to Maxie.

Maxie had trouble adjusting to the new place, for the other women didn't like her. At Willie's the women had been scared of their own shadows, and they had been in awe of Maxie. At Jubilee's, the girls in the chorus were also mistresses of gangsters, some of them working for Scalpini, who was a great deal more powerful than scrawny little Doc.

As though Maxie didn't have enough trouble, what with hours of rehearsals every day, co-workers who were cool to her at best and hostile at worst, and the growing annoyance of always having to look utterly perfect for Doc, there was Michael Ransome. He had been hired by Jubilee to dance with the girlfriends of the gangsters who were too fat or too lazy or just plain too tired to dance with them themselves.

Michael Ransome was indeed a problem to Maxie, for all the girls were in love with him. It wasn't just that he was handsome, nor was it just that he had eyes that only opened halfway—bedroom eyes the girls called them. Nor was it his cleft chin and eyes the color of a stormy sea, somewhere between blue and gray, or his thick, wavy dark blond hair or his lips, full and sensual. No, what made all the girls love Michael Ransome was his manner, which was honey. Hot honey. Hot, liquid, sweet honey. All Michael had to do was look at a woman and he could sense what she needed—then he gave it to her. He could be gentle and seductive or rough and demanding. He was whatever any woman had dreamed of in a man, and he had been known to seduce a woman without so much as uttering a word. All he had to do was look at her over a chilled glass of champagne with those slow, lazy eyes and women began to feel warm—so warm that they often felt the need to remove pieces of clothing. Sometimes the women whispered to each other that if a woman could somehow resist Mike's eyes she would never be able to resist his voice. It was deep and smooth and languid. He'd touch a woman's hand, lift it by her fingertips to his lips, all the while looking at her with that special, shaded gaze, then bring her palm to his lips, those full, sculptured lips, and he'd whisper, “I love you.”

Never once had Michael failed with a woman. He got what he wanted from any woman and afterward she said, “Thank you.”

But then Michael Ransome met Maxie.

The first time Mike came into the dressing room—what did it matter if he saw them without their clothes on since he'd been to bed with each of them—after Maxie started singing at the club, he gave her his second-best come-on. After all, why waste his energy when anyone who could sing with the lust that Maxie did had to be one hot number?

Instead of the easy conquest he expected, to his consternation, without uttering one word to him, Maxie dumped a full box of face powder over his head. At first neither Mike nor the girls could believe what had happened. Nobody turned Mike down. Going to bed with Mike was a sort of initiation to the club.

When they finally did realize what Maxie had done, it would be hard to decide who was more angry, the girls or Mike. For months after the powder-dumping incident, Maxie had to endure spiteful little things perpetrated by the women: makeup missing, one shoe not where she'd left it, a smudge on her dress. Maxie endured it all, never complained, never said anything to any of the women, but was always cordial and polite.

Harder to endure than the women's spitefulness were the snips that Michael Ransome took at her. He was truly angry that she'd turned him down and done it so publicly. After trying two more times to seduce her, he let the whole club know that she was frigid, calling her names like Ice Princess and telling people she thought she was too good to be in a nightclub. He harassed her without end.

It was Lila, the lead dancer, who told Mike to lay off and that she was getting sick of hearing his bellyaching and she was beginning to admire Maxie's fortitude and the way she carried herself. And it was Lila who first invited Maxie to go shopping with her and the girls, asking Maxie if she'd help them choose dresses that weren't so gaudy. Maxie was a little leery of what the women had planned for her, but she went and she had a wonderful time. When the women found out that Maxie wasn't so much aloof as she was shy, Lila guessed that the poor kid had never had a chance to learn how to make friends.