Then Hang All the Liars

by Sarah Shankman

  “Off. Off. Take it all off,” one of them called.

  Didn’t anyone ever write new lines to use in this kind of situation?

  Sam stepped closer and caught a glimpse of the dancer’s face as the curtain of hair parted. She looked an awful lot like a girl Sam had heard reading at the Little Five Points Pub. Was stripping what young girl poets did now for a living? If so, Emily Dickinson would have found the eighties a tough row to hoe.

  “I love you!”

  Sam’s glance flipped back again to the three men scrunched together at a table the size of a pack of cigarettes. Japanese businessmen already tanked up and ready for fun before the noon whistle.

  “Help you?”

  She turned. The man who was asking had to be a weightlifter; that is, when he wasn’t collecting tattoos. The tail of a cobra disappeared up under his short sleeve. He could probably put on a hotter show than the listless girl on stage by flexing his blue-engraved biceps.

  “A Perrier with lime,” she said.

  “A what?”

  “Glass of soda.”

  “Ain’t no yuppie sarsaparilla joint.”

  “Haven’t heard that word since the last time I saw a western.”

  The bouncer/bartender smirked. She wasn’t sure if he was being friendly or if he was thinking about excising her gizzard. He fingered his brown beard.

  “You like westerns?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.” She pointed at a table. “Mind if I sit down?”

  He pulled out a chair and joined her.

  “Who’s your favorite?”

  The music ended, and the girl slouched off stage, her G-string about a hundred dollars heavier. The tourists didn’t seem to care about her lack of enthusiasm. Now their heads touched across the table as they giggled in anticipation of the next act.

  “Always liked Tim McCoy, Gabby Hayes,” she said. “On TV, the old Gunsmoke and Palladin.”

  “Partial to Lash LaRue myself.”

  All that black leather and whips. Sure.

  Then the music picked up and a black woman who wasn’t so young slid out on stage like cold molasses to the tune of Armstrong’s “Why Am I So Black and Blue?”

  “Great music.”

  “You drop in to have a glass of water and listen to the sounds or you into girls?”

  First Hoke had called her sexual preferences into question, now this redneck bruiser. Maybe she’d lived in San Francisco too long. It had rubbed off.

  “Neither.” Sam reached in her bag for the card she’d placed on the top of a deck of possibilities.

  “Cheryl Bach. The Peachtree Ad-Visor,” the man read aloud.

  “I’m selling advertising. We’re a new weekly bargain newspaper that’ll be distributed free in the neighborhoods. Can give you a great rate.”

  “You think the yups in the burbs are interested in strippers?”

  “Never can tell.”

  “Lady, you don’t strike me as dumb, and I hope I don’t look that stupid.”

  The woman on stage was doing something with her hips that presupposed being double-jointed. Or maybe triple-jointed. One of the men made a paper airplane out of a green bill and tossed it. It made a perfect hit on her left tassel. She grabbed the money, nodded a smile, and tucked it into her G-string.

  “Well.” Sam shrugged slowly, pretending she was embarrassed to be caught out. Always a good ploy, to let them think they’d snagged you for something little. As if you’d play it straight from then on. “I do sell advertising. But I didn’t really think you’d be interested. Actually, the daughter of a friend of mine bragged that she was working here. I didn’t believe her. We made a bet.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Jackie Randolph.”

  It was one she always had ready in her back pocket.

  “Nope.”

  “Pretty girl. Blonde. About sixteen.”

  He shook his head. “Are you kidding? Chicken like that’ll get you busted.”

  “You ask for their birth certificates?”

  “Nope. No more than I asked you for your badge.”

  She smiled. “I’m not a cop. Actually, I’m with the NOW patrol. I’m casing the joint before we burn it down.”

  It slid right off his massive back. “P.I.,” he guessed again. “Private ticket. Who you looking for?”

  Then they both glanced up, for one of the men had materialized beside their table, his hands neatly folded in front of his thousand-dollar suit. He bowed.

  “Dance?”

  He was speaking to her.

  “No, thanks.”

  Even if she were interested, she had at least half a foot on him. He’d have planted his nose in her cleavage.

  Then he pointed at the girl on stage.

  “Dance?”

  “Me? Like that? Oh, no,” she said and laughed.

  He bowed again and pulled an eel-skin wallet out of his jacket pocket and peeled off two hundred-dollar bills and held them out to her.

  “No.” She shook her head.

  He added another hundred.

  “You don’t understand.” She could feel the blood rising. She didn’t look at the bouncer. She could feel the heat of his grin.

  Now the fanned-out ante was five hundred.

  “More than you made for ten minutes of work in your life, ain’t it?” The bouncer was loving this.

  The tourist was reaching into his wallet again.

  Sam pushed back from the table. It was a long way to the exit sign, but that didn’t stop her admirer from trailing her every step. She didn’t look back to see how many bills he was waving by the time she reached the door.

  “Hey, cowgirl,” the bouncer called, “you want the rest of your soda water?”

  Next he’d be hollering not to let the door hit her in the butt.

  Four

  “My dear,” said George as she slipped in beside him on a stool at the Trotters bar. “I was afraid you weren’t going to be able to make it.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said and kissed his cheek. “I got held up by a dancer.”

  She turned to order her standard bottled water and lime from the white-jacketed man standing behind the massive carved bar, but he was already tucking a napkin under her glass and pouring it. “Ms. Adams,” he said and nodded.

  Trotters is that kind of restaurant—where, if you come three times for dinner in one year, they know your birthday, your wedding anniversary, your place of business, and your preferences in wine and drink. This is high-tech Southern hospitality, aided and abetted by a computer that sends you a birthday card and invites you in for a bottle of wine, puts you on the mailing list for the restaurant’s newsletter featuring your most recent promotion. An ailing regular might be delivered his favorite meal at home or in the hospital, compliments of the management. For one international stockbroker who makes Trotters his lunch hangout, the restaurant has installed a telephone at his regular table beneath a pink-fringed lamp copied from the Orient Express. He has never been sent a phone bill.

  It’s smart marketing in the Buckhead neighborhood that houses, wrote Fortune magazine, the top encampment of business executives in the Southeast. Buckhead—it’s uptown New Atlanta, mirror-faced office towers, a crystal-chandeliered Ritz-Carlton, art galleries, high-prep commercialism abutting Tuxedo Park, the city’s richest in-town suburb filled with mansions and castles. Buckhead is rich, almost exclusively white upper crust.

  Sam, one of the three women in the room, sipped her drink and surveyed the well-tailored, carefully barbered crowd. No casual eccentricity here, no Giorgio Armani linen slouch, no Miami ease. Atlanta business wears a conservative, spanky-clean uniform.

  She leaned toward George’s ear. “Where do they keep the cookie mold that stamps out these guys?”

  George’s blue eyes twinkled. “In the basement of the Buckhead Men’s Shop. They send ’em out onto Peachtree all wound up and ready to go.” Of course, George had always worn the prescribed haberdashery, too, but he enjoyed a
joke.

  “Speaking of clothes.” He stared down at Samantha’s bow tie. It wasn’t one of those not-quite-a-tie, not-quite-a-scarf affairs that women dressed for success wear, but a big green-and-black polka-dot one that was great with her green silk blouse, antique black tuxedo jacket, and a pencil-slim white linen skirt. “You look wonderful, my dear, but whatever are we going to do with you?”

  “Feed me, for starters. I’m starving.” She checked her Mickey Mouse watch with the rhinestone band. “What time is our reservation?”

  “One-fifteen. Emily couldn’t get away before that.”

  “And here she is,” Sam announced.

  George stood and waved in the direction Sam was pointing, though she knew he couldn’t see that far. His encroaching blindness was shrinking his world day by day, inch by inch.

  Emily’s smile was as crisp as her tailored tan linen. “Sorry I’m late. I couldn’t get out of the damned house.”

  “You’re not. And we’re delighted to see you again,” said Sam. “I just got here.”

  “She was with a dancer,” George offered.

  “How lovely. Felicity champions theater, but it’s dance for me. Ballet?”

  Once again Sam saw the nearly naked, triple-jointed black woman on stage, the snakelike movement of her hips.

  “Classical,” she said and smiled.

  “Well, my excuse is that one of my bitches was whelping. I couldn’t tear myself away, though I’m sure she would have been perfectly fine without me.”

  “Emily raises cocker spaniels,” George explained, and then to Emily, “Samantha has a dog, a little white Shih Tzu named Harpo. He runs our house.”

  Sam laughed. “My friend Annie Tannenbaum in San Francisco used to say that if there were such a thing as reincarnation, she would come back as a Shih Tzu in a Jewish household. And then she’d turn right around and bring Harpo chopped liver from the deli.”

  “I know what you mean. But I breed and sell, so I try not to become too attached to the pups. It’s hard, though. They are so adorable. An old maid’s children.”

  “Some old maid,” George demurred. “Emily has always been the belle of Atlanta.”

  “Not always, dear. I only go back to the War Between the States.”

  “You know what I mean. Always elusive Emily, the heartbreaker.”

  “I just never did seem to want to be tied down.”

  “Emily’s like me, always on the go. We counted up one time, and between us, we’d done seventy-five countries.”

  “Of course, I was an army nurse for a long time. The military will help you cover a lot of territory.”

  “When? Ever in wartime?” Sam asked.

  “Oh, yes.” And then she could see memory rise in Emily’s eyes behind the tortoise-shell glasses that matched the large pins that kept her white chignon in place. “I was in the Philippines, Bataan.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, there were nurses, too, in the camps there, held by the Japanese. Four and a half years. But,” she said and shifted back to the present and the pleasant in the way that Southern ladies do, “now I just putter around with Lighthouse for the Blind.”

  “Putter, my foot. She’s the director. The place couldn’t run without her.”

  “Well, they’re going to have to learn to. I’m phasing out now, training my replacement. But they still let me come in and flirt with the older gentlemen.”

  “Flirt and beat us with a stick. I never had a tougher taskmaster when I was a boy at military school.”

  “Well, we’ve got to train you right. It’s bad enough that you contracted that damned disease in the Amazon. We don’t want you falling down manhole covers.”

  “Your table is ready, Mr. Adams,” the maitre d’ announced. “This way, Ms. Edwards. Ms. Adams.”

  The horse-racing theme of the restaurant carried from the plaster jockeys outside, through the silks hung in the bar, to the prints on the walls in the Jockey Room where Emily, Sam, and George dined on tagliolini with andouille sausage, cold roasted duck with snow peas, and scallops with ginger, shallots, and mushrooms.

  “The food is excelled only by the service,” George complimented their waiter as he cleared and poured them coffee. They shared caramel custard and raspberries with cream for dessert.

  “Now that we’ve stuffed ourselves like pigs at Emily’s expense,” George said and pushed back a little from the table, “let’s talk.”

  “Isn’t that just like a lawyer?” asked Emily. “Soften you up and then steal your eye teeth.”

  “Now you called this meeting, dear, as I remember.”

  “I’m only teasing. And I do appreciate your time.” Then she leaned forward on her elbows and her face grew serious. “Well, I know this may sound silly, but I’m worried about Felicity, and I want to ask your advice about what to do. Now I know you don’t do these kinds of favors for people anymore, George.”

  “I am trying to keep out of trouble.”

  Sam only half listened to George as he continued. She was remembering Felicity from the night before, lovely in her fuchsia Fortuny, the pleats dipping and swaying as she traveled somewhere in her own private world.

  “But I also know you’ve always been the soul of discretion in these personal sorts of matters,” Emily said.

  “Tell me what’s troubling you.” George’s bedside manner was better than most doctors’.

  “You saw Felicity the other night at the theater.”

  “Yes,” he said and nodded. “She seemed to be in wonderful spirits.”

  “And she is, most of the time. But she’s a touch senile. She comes and goes.”

  “It happens to the best of us, dear. I remember thirty years ago much more clearly than I do yesterday. And I can’t remember where I left my glasses five seconds ago.”

  “Of course.” Emily smiled. “But it’s more pronounced with Felicity—the swings are wider and deeper. But that’s not really what I want to talk with you about. That’s medical; that’s my field. And much of that can be helped with medication if I can get her away from the clutches of the real problem.”

  “Which is?” Sam asked.

  “Randolph Percy.”

  “And who might this Mr. Percy be?”

  Emily described the man’s good looks, his charm, his winning ways. She picked up a pack of matches and tapped the racing logo. “I think he plays the horses. And,” she said and sighed, “I don’t know his family.”

  “Now, Emily, we old fogies place too much stock on families, I think.”

  “I’m not an ass about that kind of thing, George. I don’t mean that I want to see his pedigree. But I would feel better if I knew something more about him. He just appeared out of thin air, as it were, at one of Margaret Landry’s dinner parties, and swept Felicity off her feet. He’s with her practically every moment, doing his card tricks, keeping her in stitches.”

  “Doesn’t sound bad to me,” said George. “There must be more.”

  “Two things. Felicity has been manic-depressive since we were girls. It’s hereditary—our mother was given to moods, too. Hers is not a severe case, but she does need to take her medication, especially now that her age is complicating matters.”

  “And she’s not?” asked Sam.

  “No. Not since she started keeping company with Mr. Percy. The man not only does card tricks; he believes in all this mumbo-jumbo magic elixir business. Something he says he gets from some hot springs in California, for God’s sakes.” Then she caught herself. “Excuse me, Samantha, I didn’t mean that all Californians are crazy.”

  “Please.” Sam pushed away the apology.

  “Does this endanger her health?” George frowned.

  “Not her physical health. But emotionally she’s a roller coaster.”

  “Hummph.” George closed his eyes and grasped the bridge of his nose, thinking.

  “But is she happy with him?” Sam asked.

  “Deliriously. When she isn’t sobbing about something that hap
pened twenty or thirty years ago.”

  “You mean she slips in and out of time.”

  “I mean she doesn’t distinguish between now and then. Sorrows from her past are as real as if they’re happening now. But mostly she’s happy, like you saw her the other evening.”

  “You said you had two concerns. What’s the second?”

  “I think Randolph Percy is going to try to kill Felicity for her money.”

  Without taking his eyes off Emily’s, George raised his hand and signaled for another pot of coffee.

  Five

  “Well, you just never know, do you?” Sam asked, fastening her seat belt. Her car, freshly washed by the valet service at Trotters, had been waiting for them when she and George stepped out the restaurant door.

  “About other people’s lives? Nope. Man sitting next to you on a plane, innocuous fat man with brown shoes and short socks, could end up telling you things’d keep you awake nights for weeks. Yes indeed, lawyering and reporting—both give us license to dig around, then stand back and watch the worms crawl.”

  “Ever make you feel funny? Sometimes I don’t want to know. But I do it. Suck ’em dry.”

  “They talk to us because we listen, Sam. People spend their whole lives talking, talking, talking with nobody paying any attention at all.”

  “And we do it for a living.”

  They were passing the High Museum. Richard Meier’s white-enameled structure gleamed in the sunlight.

  “Fabulous,” Sam said.

  “The only art museum in America that’s architecture, ten, art, one.”

  “The furniture collection’s not bad.”

  George snorted and Sam wheeled sharply to the right to avoid a car cutting in front of her. Peachtree was an insurance agent’s nightmare, the lanes changing number and direction every other block.