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.
34
Midwestern America
1921
Mary 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.
Sweet Liar Page 38