Sweet Liar

by Jude Deveraux

  One morning, two days before the performance, Samantha threw up. “Nerves,” she said as Mike handed her a washcloth. As he’d done before, Mike held her head while she heaved, then smiling mischievously, he suggested breakfast, which sent Sam back to the toilet.

  By midmorning she felt better, ate some toast and juice, and took the vitamins Mike handed her. With a wicked grin, she said, “How’s the dancing coming?” It had taken her four days of badgering to get Mike to tell her what he was doing to prepare for his role of Michael Ransome. When he’d at last told her, he’d had such a look of martyrdom on his face that she couldn’t help laughing. Mike was taking lessons in ballroom dancing.

  At eleven Mike went with Sam to Maxie’s, then waited outside for what turned out to be three hours while Maxie told Samantha everything she knew about that night in 1928. When Samantha came out, she was white-faced and drawn looking.

  “Find out?” Mike asked, taking her hand.

  “Yes,” she answered. “Most of it, but not all.” Looking at Mike, her mouth was a hard line. “That corrupt old man,” she said, and Mike knew she was referring to Doc. He also knew that Sam would have cursed, but there were no words to describe what she felt about the man.

  Everything had gone so perfectly that there had to be something that went wrong, and it did. On the morning before the day of the performance, after Samantha had thrown up for the third time, Kane called and said that one of his sons was sick. He said it was nothing, but Samantha could hear the worry in his voice.

  “Blair’s with him and she says it’s nothing to be concerned about, but I don’t want to leave him. Could Mike get Dad or Frank to go with him to…”

  “To get Doc?” Samantha finished for him.

  “Yes,” Kane said with a sigh, wishing Sam didn’t know so much. “Dad will know what to do.”

  After Samantha hung up, she called Mike into the library and told him what Kane had said.

  “Sure, I’ll get Dad,” Mike said as he moved toward the door, but Sam put her body in front of it.

  “I am going with you.”

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,” Mike’s humorless voice said as he reached for the knob.

  Samantha put her hand over it. “Mike, listen to me, it makes sense. I know what you and Frank have done, and don’t even think of lying to me about it. Your brother thinks money can buy anything.”

  “For Frank it usually does.”

  “I know that this time his money bought the guards at Doc’s place.”

  “It wasn’t too difficult since they haven’t been paid in weeks. Doc holds them off with promises of big money coming in from Europe, but I think he’s broke. Frank could find out nothing about any money coming in from anywhere.”

  “Who did he ask? His Wall Street friends?”

  “Money is money everywhere. Frank asked in places you don’t want to know about.”

  “Simple little Sam, too dumb to hear all the facts.”

  “Dear little Sam whose life is in danger,” Mike shot back at her.

  Calming, Samantha looked at him. “How many of Doc’s guards were you able to bribe?”

  “Most of them. Okay, okay, eighty percent. There were three of them we couldn’t get to and there’s the house staff, such as it is. It’s going to be dangerous getting in there.” He leaned toward her. “Samantha, those guards carry guns.”

  She took a deep breath. “Mike, I’m small. I can go places you and your muscled brothers can’t. I can climb fences and trees. What if you and your dad have to climb a fence? Who lifts whom? You can toss me over like a javelin if you need to.”

  “And land on your pretty head?”

  “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.”

  32

  They 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 ri
ght 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.

  33

  After 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.