Samantha was watching him, and every cynical thought she’d ever had came into her mind. In her experience, when a man started projecting himself into a woman’s feelings, he wanted something. She gave Mike an encouraging smile that she hoped looked full of self-pity.
“Yes, well, I was thinking that you need a vacation, a real vacation. Somewhere cool, away from the heat of New York. Somewhere by the ocean maybe. So, last night I talked to Raine—you remember him, don’t you? My cousin you seemed so taken with? Anyway, Raine is going up to Warbrooke, that’s a town in Maine. It’s on the end of a peninsula and absolutely beautiful. Raine will be there with his whole family, and they have a guesthouse that’s a wonderful place. You can rest and read and go out on boats and catch things out of the water and do whatever you want. You can spend the whole summer there if you want. I was so sure that you’d like this idea that Raine is coming by this afternoon to pick you up to drive you to Warbrooke. Doesn’t this all sound great?”
While he was talking, Samantha was looking at him. His eyes were red-rimmed, as though he hadn’t slept all night and, too, there was something in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. Why was he so intent on getting her out of the city? Why was he sending her away with a man who a few days ago he had been jealous of?
He was sending her to a tiny remote town on the edge of a peninsula, a place where his relatives could look out for her and could take over the care of her. She didn’t for a minute believe that Mike was sending her away because he believed she needed a rest. A few days ago he seemed to think that what she needed was the opposite of rest.
Thinking about last night, she tried to remember everything she could about what had happened. Mike kept talking, telling her about a town he had previously described as nothing but a lot of water. Now he was telling her it was paradise, and that his Montgomery relatives were the kindest, sweetest people on earth. It was his repeated use of the phrase “they’ll take care of you” that made her suspicious.
She reached across the tray to the bedside table to the notepad and pencil there.
Who is Half Hand? she wrote.
Tearing off the note, she handed it to Mike. When she saw him turn white, she knew that in this question was the answer to a great deal.
“You have very nice handwriting, you know that? Nice round a’s and o’s. I tend to close mine.”
Who is Half Hand? she wrote again and handed him the note.
Mike looked like a trapped man. He lay back on the bed, his eyes scrunched closed, as though in great agony. “Samantha,” he said tiredly, and she was beginning to realize that he called her Samantha only when he was annoyed with her. “Samantha, this is not a parlor game. This is real and it’s dangerous. I didn’t have any idea that it was dangerous or I wouldn’t have involved you, but now all I can do is get you out of here and into a safe place.”
If you don’t tell me who Half Hand is, I will call my grandfather and ask him, she wrote.
Mike’s face lost its look of agony; now she saw real fear in his eyes. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” he said softly in that tone a person uses when they’re trying not to explode with rage. “You have to swear to me that you won’t call that bastard.”
Samantha frowned. He is my grandfather!!! she wrote.
Getting off the bed, Mike paced the room for a few minutes. “Sam, I made a mistake, a big one. I told you from the beginning that I thought your father’s will was rotten and I should have done what I knew was right: I should have released your money without taking you to meet Barrett. But I was greedy; I wanted to meet him. No one’s seen him in years and I—”
Breaking off, he wiped his hand over his eyes. “I don’t know if Barrett is your grandfather or not, but I know what kind of man he is. I haven’t told you much about him—I purposely didn’t tell you because I was afraid you’d refuse to meet him if I told you the truth. And now I’m paying for it.”
Removing the tray from across her lap, he sat back down on the bed, then took her hand in his. “You keep telling me that I lie to you. Maybe I have, but I thought I had a good reason.”
He touched the bruises on her neck. “You could have been killed last night, and it would have been my fault,” he said softly. “I should have told you everything from the first and I should have given you your money immediately after your father died. I shouldn’t even have allowed you to come to New York.”
Putting her hand out, she took his, for he was genuinely upset about what had almost happened to her. When he looked at her, she smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back.
“If I tell you what I know, will you leave the city? Will you go with my cousin and stay under his family’s protection until I can solve this thing?”
How could she promise something like that? She didn’t yet know what he was talking about. She thought a burglar had tried to kill her, but now she was beginning to understand that the man had wanted her specifically. Why? What did he think she knew that she should be killed for it?
Seeing her reluctance, Mike understood it. Maybe he didn’t deserve her trust since he’d used her to get to see an old man. Mike swallowed. No book in the world was worth nearly causing the death of another human being.
“First I want to tell you about Barrett,” he said softly. “I want to make you understand what kind of man he is. Sam, I don’t want you to glorify this man. Just because he may or may not be your relative is no reason to endow him with godlike characteristics.”
His lips tightened at the look on her face and at the way she scribbled furiously on the pad of paper.
He may have done some bad things in the past, but—she wrote.
He grabbed her hands before she could finish the sentence and held her wrists tightly for a second, but he released them, then calmed himself. “You’ve heard him called Doc, haven’t you? Do you have any idea why he’s called Doc? No, don’t answer me. You’ll probably say that he was given an honorary Ph.D. somewhere.”
Pausing, Mike looked at her hard. “He’s called Doc because it’s a nickname for his real nickname. He’s called the Surgeon.”
She turned her head away from him, but Mike cupped her chin and turned her back to look at him.
“I don’t care whether you want to hear or not, because I’m going to tell you anyway. When Barrett was nine years old, his prostitute mother abandoned him. I doubt if anyone ever knew who his father was. But whatever his mother was, Barrett seems to have been devoted to her, so maybe it unhinged him when she just walked out. For years the skinny little kid did what he could to survive. For the first year he nearly starved, but then he stole a cooking knife from a restaurant kitchen and learned to use it. There was a story that I couldn’t verify that said he chopped off the fingers of another kid who tried to take food from the garbage can that Doc considered his.”
“No,” Samantha whispered, putting her hand to her throat in pain.
Mike continued. “When Barrett was fourteen, he was so malnourished he looked as though he were ten and he was sick of living hand to mouth every day. Scalpini was the crime boss of that day so Barrett decided to work for him. Barrett had a hell of a time getting through Scalpini’s bodyguards, but he did one night just as Scalpini was sitting down to dinner at his favorite Italian restaurant. The bodyguards tried to kick Barrett out, but Scalpini said he wanted to hear what the kid had to say. Barrett said he wanted to work for Scalpini, that he would do anything for him, anything at all. All of them, including Scalpini, laughed at this kid who looked to be a child, but Scalpini, still laughing, said, ‘Bring me Guzzo’s heart, kid, and you got a job.’ ”
Again, Samantha looked away from him. She wasn’t sure where he was going with his story, but she knew that she didn’t want to hear it. Mike didn’t say a word until she looked back at him.
“The next day, when Scalpini sat down to dinner, this scrawny, dirty kid tried to get through the bodyguards. Scalpini, probably liking the kid’s perseverance and hero worship, waved him through. B
arrett took a bloody ball of newspaper out of his jacket pocket and tossed it onto Scalpini’s plate. Scalpini opened it and inside was a human heart.”
Samantha didn’t say a word for a while, just sat there looking at him, feeling the blood draining from her face. “How?” she whispered.
“Five days a week at four o’clock Guzzo visited his mistress for exactly one and a half hours. He liked to pretend he was making love to her for all of that time, but everyone knew the truth. He hardly ever touched the woman; his snores could be heard two blocks away. Barrett was so scrawny he slipped down the chimney into the bedroom, slit the man’s throat while he slept, then cut out his heart. A few minutes later his mistress came into the room, saw her lover with a cut throat and a gaping, bloody hole in his chest, and started screaming. In the ensuing confusion, Barrett walked out the front door, stopping only long enough to wash some of the soot off his face and hands before he made his delivery to Scalpini. One of the bodyguards said the heart looked like it had been removed by a surgeon, and that’s how Barrett got his nickname. Over the years the name’s been dignified to Doc.”
Mike stretched out on the bed, waiting, giving her time to digest what he’d just told her. “With what little I’ve been able to find out about Doc, I know that most of that story he told you yesterday was a lie. Or, maybe not a lie, just a stretching of the truth.
“First of all, Doc was trying to get your sympathy with all that about its being the Great Depression: 1928 was before the stock market crashed. Secondly, on that night when Scalpini shot up the speakeasy, it wasn’t because Doc’s receipts for that day had been especially good. It was because Doc had raided every safe, every till Scalpini had. The take was in the neighborhood of three million dollars.”
When Mike turned to look at her, he saw that Samantha was listening, wide-eyed, to his story. “The man who picked up all the money from Scalpini was Doc’s friend, the man Doc told you was the only man he had ever trusted: Joe, better known as Half Hand Joe.”
Mike gave a little grin. “Want to know how Joe got his nickname?”
Samantha shook her head no, but that didn’t stop Mike from telling her.
“Half Hand was older than Doc and as slow-witted as Doc was fast. No one knows whether Joe was born slow or came to be that way, because his father’s hobby was hitting Joe on the head with whatever was handy. Joe met Doc when Joe was seventeen and Doc was ten, and Joe attached himself to Doc like a faithful old dog. When Doc started working for Scalpini, so did Joe. They went everywhere together, did everything together. When some rival hoods fired on Doc with machine guns, Joe pushed his little buddy aside. Joe took four bullets in the outside of his left hand and blew it away.”
Mike held up his left hand to demonstrate, showing how Half Hand was left with two fingers and a thumb. “He was called Half Hand after that night, and he was even more dedicated to Doc than ever. It’s my guess that Half Hand realized that his future depended on Doc’s safety, so he began sleeping outside Doc’s door at night.”
Mike took a breath. “Then came that night in 1928 and everything changed. Doc wanted to be the head of all the illegal businesses going on in New York, and in order to do that he had to get rid of Scalpini. Doc spent months planning the robbery and the killings it entailed. Everything went off on schedule except that Scalpini didn’t wait to find out who had robbed him, he just took some of his boys and went to the speakeasy and opened fire. But they didn’t get Doc. But they did kill Joe—Joe who was the only one who knew where the three million dollars was hidden.”
Mike didn’t speak for a moment, so Samantha wrote, Why me? and handed him the note.
Mike looked pained. “I don’t know why I didn’t think about others knowing the old story. In underworld circles the legend of Half Hand’s money is like the Lost Dutchman Mine. There are a great many people who suspect that Maxie took it and that’s why she disappeared that night. She wanted to get away from Doc and the gang; she saw an opportunity and she took it. Doc told you that Half Hand took a bullet in the head and died instantly. Some people said that Half Hand had been hit in the head so often by his father that a bullet couldn’t pierce his skull. They say that he lived long enough to tell Maxie where the money was.”
Turning, Mike looked at her. “What neither Doc nor Scalpini knew until years later was that the money they had, had been marked by the FBI. If it hadn’t disappeared that night, whoever used it would have been holding evidence that could have convicted them. Whoever took it from Doc saved him from prison.”
Was it found? Samantha wrote.
“Sort of,” Mike said. “A hundred-dollar bill turned up in Paris in 1965.”
Samantha had been listening to him intently, but the date jolted her. Her eyes widened.
“Right,” Mike said. “That’s the year after your grandmother Maxie left her husband and family. That was thirty-seven years after the massacre, and no one was looking for the money. The old bill was spotted by a sharp-eyed clerk in the treasury office. After that one was found, they kept a lookout for more bills, but no more showed up—not that anyone caught anyway. The clerk who spotted that one had just returned from a six-month leave of absence, so for all anyone knows the entire three million could have come through the treasury and not been seen.”
There was too much information for Samantha to take in at one time.
Mike took the tray from her lap and started for the door. When he came back into the room, he said that he wanted her to sleep, that she needed rest after her ordeal and that her throat needed to heal. But as he started to tuck her in, he stopped. “When was the last time you cried?” he asked softly.
Samantha looked away from him, frowning.
Taking her chin in his hand, Mike turned her back to face him. “I’m not going to go away and I’m not going to allow you not to answer me.” He handed her the pencil and notepad.
After a fierce glare of defiance, she wrote, I was crying the day the principal came to tell me that my mother was dead.
15
Samantha didn’t leave New York that afternoon, but she had to promise Mike she’d obey him if he allowed her to stay with him for two more days—the amount of time Blair said it would take her throat to heal enough to speak. The truth was, she had a decision to make and she thought she could make it better if she stayed where she was than if she went to yet another unfamiliar place.
Mike wasn’t easy to convince because he wanted her out of the city, wanted her in a safe place. He no longer wanted her to have anything to do with Doc or Maxie or any of what he was researching. Samantha wrote him a note asking him if he was going to continue writing his biography. When Mike said he was, Samantha did not point out that he wasn’t any safer than she was, that someone might think he knew about Half Hand’s money as well as she did. Nor did she mention that it was her grandmother involved, not his.
She simply didn’t want to leave Mike’s house, didn’t want to get into a car with another man and drive to yet another place. She didn’t want to leave Mike.
When she woke it was midafternoon and Mike brought her lunch on a tray. He looked tired and he hadn’t shaved in two days. He wanted her to go back to sleep, but she pantomimed that she’d keep her lips zipped and throw away the key if he’d just let her sit on the couch and not have to stay in bed.
After reluctantly agreeing, he picked her up and carried her into the library and settled her on the couch as though she were helpless, a light blanket wrapped around her legs. When she was settled, he went back to his desk and started looking through his bundles of papers.
As Samantha watched him, she knew that she wanted to know more about the man who may or may not be her grandfather, so she wrote Mike that she’d like to type more of his notes. Refusing to allow her to sit at the desk at the computer and type, he asked her if there weren’t small computers and she described a laptop. He asked her to write down what she needed so he could order it. Even though Samantha said a laptop computer would be too expe
nsive and that she could sit at the desk, Mike refused to listen to her. At last she wrote down the name of a powerful little laptop, and on impulse, she wrote “King’s Quest V and a mouse.” Mike called a store and within two hours the equipment was delivered to the door.
After the equipment arrived, she got off the couch and installed the mouse and the graphics game on the color screen of the big computer while Mike was in the shower. When he entered the room, he was damp from his shower and wearing nothing but a pair of white tennis shorts. For a minute, Samantha thought her heart was going to stop at the sight of him, but Mike’s eyes were on the computer screen and the opening graphics of the game. As though he were hypnotized, he walked toward the computer, touched the mouse on its pad, and when he saw the little man in the game move he was caught. Smiling at his beautiful, broad, bare back, Samantha saw that he couldn’t figure out how to type notes, but within minutes, he had mastered the principles of a computer game.
That night, she found herself nodding off, and only when Mike started to pick her up did she wake. Out of instinct, she began to fight him, but he held her close. “It’s me,” he whispered. “Me, Mike, no one else.”
It took her a moment to relax against him, sleepy, her throat still painful. But when he put her in his bed, she panicked, trying to get away from him.
Startled, Mike stepped back from her, his face full of anger. “I am not a rapist,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m not going to hurt you and I am not going to bed with any woman who doesn’t want me in bed with her.” Turning away, he went to the doorway, his hand on the light switch. “If you need me, I’ll be next door in the guest bedroom.” There was no warmth in his voice.
Samantha lay awake for a while in Mike’s big bed, on pillows that he had slept on, and looked up at the ceiling. Inadequate, she thought. She had always been inadequate when it came to men.
Sweet Liar Page 16