Sweet Liar

by Jude Deveraux

  It would be difficult to describe Maxie’s feelings at the time. She didn’t feel terror as she would have thought, only a dull heaviness, because she knew that her life was over. A man like Doc wouldn’t allow himself to be cuckolded without punishing the perpetrator, and she had no doubt that he knew about her and Michael. Maybe it’s what she deserved, she thought, because she had agreed to his rules and she had broken them.

  Silently, he stepped into the room behind her and locked the door with a big key that she hadn’t known existed. Wanting to be brave, wanting to face death with her shoulders high, Maxie turned to him, her back to the long, garishly lit cosmetic counter and faced him as he took a seat across from her

  “How did you find out?”

  With a little smile that made Maxie shiver, he shrugged, obviously not planning to enlighten her.

  He’s enjoying this, she thought, looking at him. My God! he’s enjoying this! Nothing else in life gives him pleasure or excitement, not sex, not food, not people who love him, nothing pleases him but this, knowing that he is going to kill someone—having absolute, life-and-death control over another human being.

  Knowing that now she had nothing more to lose, she said, “Why did you kill Joe?”

  Again Doc shrugged. “He was too clumsy and he was of no more use to me.”

  “As I am of no more use to you?”

  “Exactly.”

  Taking a deep breath, her hands behind her, she braced her body against the edge of the countertop and felt Joe’s blood drying on the front of her dress, stiff and loathsome. “You’d better get it over with. The girls’ act is almost finished and they’ll be in here soon.”

  Doc’s smile widened. “No they won’t.”

  It was as though the blood suddenly drained from Maxie’s body, and her first thought was of Michael. She didn’t know what Doc had planned, but she knew it involved Mike.

  Without thinking what she was doing, she lunged for Doc. He was little and scrawny, but he was strong, and with one backhand slap, he knocked her to the floor.

  Slowly, painfully sitting up, blood coming from the corner of her mouth, she looked up at him. “Kill me,” she whispered. “Do it now.”

  Still smiling, Doc said softly. “Not yet. You’re going to die more than once tonight.”

  At first Maxie thought he meant he was going to torture her, but in the next moment she heard the first blasts of the machine guns and the accompanying screams. In terror, at first uncomprehending, Maxie bolted for the door, meaning to go to Michael, but the door was locked. For a moment tearing at the knob, pulling frantically on it, she turned to Doc. “Give me the key,” she screamed, barely able to hear herself over the sound of the machine guns and the screams of both men and women coming from the ballroom floor. “If you have any mercy in you, give me the key!”

  But Doc just sat there with that enigmatic little smile, watching her, as though he were fascinated with her actions, as though he were a scientist observing a very interesting species of animal.

  The machine guns seemed to go on and on, while Maxie clawed at the door until she had no fingernails left, then crying great sobs that came from her belly, she slid to the floor, leaning back against the locked door.

  It was while she was crying, when she thought the pain in her would never be healed, that she saw what she at first thought was a mirage. On her right was Lila’s big, overstuffed bag that she carried with her, full of clothes and shoes and heaven knew what else. Sticking out of the corner was a tiny pearl-handled pistol. Once, Lila had said that she carried her own bodyguard with her and when the girls had laughed, Lila had shown them the little two-shot derringer.

  Maxie didn’t think about what she was doing. With a movement as lithe as a snake’s, she grabbed the derringer and, still sitting, spun around and fired. Years before, she’d made the mistake of aiming for a man’s head; this time she went for his belly, quickly firing two bullets into the exact center of him.

  She wasn’t a doctor and she couldn’t be sure, but from the way Doc’s legs collapsed under him, she thought she hit his spinal cord. While uttering a high-pitched scream, Doc slid from the chair, the .38 dropping from his hand to the floor.

  Maxie had no thought for Doc’s gun, for her only thought was to get to Michael. The guns had stopped now, but she still heard screams and moans of both pain and terror.

  While Doc looked up at her from the floor with eyes that blazed with pain and hatred, she rummaged in his pockets until she found the door key, then with shaking hands, she unlocked the door.

  Doc’s voice made her pause at the doorway, her back to him. “Please,” he whispered. “Please help me.”

  For a moment the humanity in her hesitated, but then she kept going, running toward the front of the club.

  She was not prepared for what she saw: blood and more blood. People with limbs missing. Lila was lying in a pool of her own blood, half of her face perfectly made up, the other half gone. Maxie saw three other girls, all three of them dead.

  Already the place was filling up with hospital people and Maxie knew that in order to get here this fast they had to have been notified before the massacre. Doc’s idea of compassion, she thought bitterly.

  Stepping around the people, ignoring the way her shoes stuck to the floor, she searched for Mike—and when she saw him a white-gowned man was pulling a blood-soaked sheet over Michael’s beloved face. Running toward him, the orderly caught her shoulders.

  “He’s dead and I don’t think you should look at him. They blew the bottom half of him away.”

  Twisting hysterically, Maxie tried to get away from the man and go to Mike.

  “Either you calm down or I give you something to knock you out,” the man said. “We have enough to deal with here without the uninjured going crazy on us.”

  For a moment Maxie could only stare at him. Uninjured? she thought. She was far from uninjured.

  “That’s better,” the man said when Maxie stopped struggling. “Why don’t you go home?”

  Go, she thought. That’s what she should do, because if she stayed here she wouldn’t be allowed to live another forty-eight hours. Right now she cared nothing for her own life, but she cared a great deal about Michael’s child that was growing in her womb.

  Mechanically, she turned away from the people writhing on the floor, looked away from all the blood and went back to the dressing room. Without so much as a glance at Doc lying on the floor, even though she could feel his eyes on her, she picked up her purse and the bag Half Hand Joe had given her. Somewhere inside her she knew that she should pick up Doc’s gun and kill him, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t put him out of his misery as one would do for a beloved pet; she wanted him to stay alive and suffer as she was going to suffer.

  Her eyes straight ahead, she walked out the back door of the club.

  36

  1991

  Samantha awoke as though coming out of a hypnotic trance, and suddenly she was no longer Maxie but herself and it was no longer 1928 but 1991. She had thought Mike was going to train someone to play Doc, but he hadn’t, for in front of her was the diminutive man himself—and he had that knowing little smile on his face. Everything had been played out as it had happened, nothing had changed with the passage of time.

  On that night in 1928, Maxie had shot Doc and severed his spinal cord, yet for two years he’d managed to keep secret the fact that he was crippled before he told the world that he had been hurt in a car accident. Maxie had taken away his mobility and she’d taken away all the money Half Hand, acting under Doc’s orders, had stolen from Scalpini. Doc, already eaten with hatred of Maxie for betraying him, made it his life’s quest to kill her and anyone who knew anything about her. In 1964, when he’d seen the photo of Maxie with her granddaughter, apparently happy, he’d nearly gone berserk. His mistake had been in calling her to threaten her. By the time he sent a killer for her, she had already left Louisville.

  By 1975, his days of power were on the wane so
he’d sent a man to Louisville to find out if Maxie’s family knew anything about Half Hand’s missing money—his money.

  Now, knowing all of this, Samantha found herself standing in front of the shrunken man sitting in his wheelchair—and there was a gun in her hand. At this range, whether the gun was loaded with blanks or live bullets, if she shot him, she’d kill him. Up until now she’d seen him as an old man, but now she saw the man who had mowed down a nightclub full of people to get to the man who’d impregnated “his” girl. She saw the man who, in order to gain control of illegal liquor sales, had killed his own men, blaming it on another mob boss.

  “You killed a man who loved you more than he loved his own life,” Samantha whispered, speaking of Half Hand. “You’ve murdered anyone who has ever tried to care about you. Has it been worth it? Now you sit here, an unloved old man, alone and lonely, and there isn’t a person in the world who cares about you. You were crippled by your own greed. Has all the money been worth the pain?”

  Doc laughed at her as though she were a simpleton. “You stupid child. You think everyone is like you. Yes, it’s been worth it. I have never been bored a moment in my life. I’ve taken anything I wanted and I’ve won every game I’ve played. There is nothing more to life than that. I have won.”

  “My mother—” she whispered.

  “She was nothing. Half Hand was nothing. Maxie was nothing except that she almost beat me. I had been told she’d taken a lover but I never knew she was pregnant until I heard from your muscle-bound boyfriend. I knew you weren’t related to me and I never would have seen you if it hadn’t been for the money.”

  It was difficult for Samantha to understand reasoning such as his. Maybe he was right and she did believe that everyone was just like her, but she’d always thought that everyone in the world wanted love and friendship. But if that’s what all people wanted, there wouldn’t be people like this man.

  “I hate you,” she whispered.

  He smiled at her, a soft, smug little smile, as though he knew every thought that was in her head, and it was at that moment that Samantha knew he wanted her to kill him. Trying to look at him without hatred clouding her vision, she saw an old, frail man, and worst of all, she saw a poor man. Mike had said that, from what they could find out, Doc had no more money, that protecting his own life had taken everything. Who would take care of him if he had no money to buy caretakers? she wondered. Would he spend the rest of his life in a nursing home with overbearing nurses calling him Tony?

  Looking again at him, she knew that if she shot him, he’d go to hell thinking he’d won the final round, for he’d made her go to prison for killing a murderer.

  Moving her hand slightly to the right, she fired the pistol, all six rounds, into the wall behind him.

  The next thing Samantha knew, Mike was holding a snifter of brandy to her lips. “Drink it,” he ordered and she did, but Mike had to hold her hands as she was shaking too badly to hold the glass herself.

  “How…” When her voice was trembling too hard to speak, she had to start again. “How did Michael Ransome survive?”

  12 May 1928

  When the orderly saw the body of Michael Ransome, he knew without a doubt that the man was dead; nobody could lose that much blood and live. There had to be at least twenty bullets in the bottom half of him; his legs looked like ground meat.

  But when the orderly bent over him, the man opened his eyes, and instantly, the orderly yelled, “Hey, this one is still—”

  With the little bit of strength he had left, Michael clutched at the man’s arm and said, “If you have any kindness in you, don’t let them know I’m alive.”

  The orderly was sure the man was going into shock and had no idea what he was saying. “You’re bleeding to death.”

  “If they know I’m alive, I’ll bleed more.”

  At that moment some man walked up, a big man with a bulge that could only be a gun under his coat and looked down at Mike’s mutilated body. “How’s this one?”

  The orderly knew that this was a gang killing, but this time there were several women dead. In fact, all the women in the chorus had been mowed down. One uninjured man, who had seen everything, said that the women were the first to go, as though the men with the machine guns had been told to kill them first, as though they had a grudge against the women. The man had also said that three machine guns had aimed specially for this man under the sheet who should have been dead but wasn’t, and for some odd reason, they’d shot him only below the belt.

  The orderly covered Michael’s face with the sheet. “He’s dead.” At that, the big man nodded and walked away, looking as though he were satisfied.

  When the man was gone, the orderly leaned over Mike and whispered, “I’ll do what I can to keep anyone from knowing you’re alive.” Later, he felt bad when he had to tell the woman that Mike was dead, but if he’d told her the truth, she would have given the secret away. The minute the orderly had a chance, he went backstage and tried to find her, but she was nowhere to be seen. In what was obviously the women’s dressing room the orderly saw a pool of blood, but there was no body.

  The orderly had to wait until all the people who were officially alive had been removed until he could get the man under the sheet to the hospital. At the hospital the doctor yelled at him for leaving a bleeding man for last and had even told the orderly it was no use trying to patch him up, that this man was beyond hope and he had others who needed him more. But the orderly had nearly begged and so, with a sigh, the doctor sent Mike to the operating room.

  Two days later, it was the orderly who came to Mike’s room and told him he had to get out. “They’re checking the hospital and I think they’re looking for you.”

  In a haze of drugs and pain, Mike asked the orderly to take him to a telephone, saying that he had to call someone.

  Mike called his war buddy, Franklin Taggert, a man whose life he’d saved. Afterward, in the hospital, Frank had told Mike that if he ever needed anything at all, all he had to do was ask.

  Now, Mike asked his friend for help.

  Within two hours a barrage of police cars appeared and took Mike away to a waiting plane, and Mike was flown to Chandler, Colorado, to the home of his friend, where he was given the best of medical care. When he was well, his friend’s family became his family.

  During those years Mike wondered what had happened to Maxie, but he dared not make inquiries for fear of Doc’s finding either one of them. Mike liked to think that Maxie and their child were safe somewhere, but it wasn’t until 1964, when he saw the picture in the paper that he knew for sure that the woman he loved had not only survived but was happy, as he could see from the picture of her holding her pretty little granddaughter. Our granddaughter, Mike thought, glad that he was going to leave something of himself behind. It was after seeing the news photo that he began work on a book that was going to be titled The Surgeon.

  1991

  “I think you’d better come now,” Blair said softly to Mike, her eyes telling him what he didn’t want to hear.

  “Sammy,” he said softly.

  Samantha took one look at him and knew. “I’m not fragile, Mike,” she said, standing and smoothing Maxie’s red dress. On the front of it was blood, not real blood, but the glycerine-based movie blood that stayed fresh and red forever. H. H. Walden had played Half Hand and it had been his father who had been the little boy hiding in the closet and seen Doc kill his father. It had been Maxie who had paid for H.H.’s education, as well as his siblings’, and, after she had found them, had kept his family from starving over the years.

  “My grandmother is dying, isn’t she?” Samantha said, looking from Blair to Mike.

  Mike wasn’t going to lie to her, nor was Blair. “Yes,” Blair said.

  “Does she know?”

  “Yes. She’s asked to see you and Mike. She wants to talk to you.”

  “Yes,” Samantha said, “I need to know about Granddad Cal.” It suddenly seemed important to her to
know that the man she’d loved so much had been loved by his wife, that Maxie hadn’t just loved Michael Ransome.

  Samantha didn’t have to force herself to smile when she saw her grandmother lying on the bed covered with pretty pink sheets. Blair had had her moved to Jubilee’s Place early in the day so she could watch everything, but after Samantha as Maxie had walked out the back door, Blair had moved her patient to a private room—the room that had once been Michael Ransome’s dressing room.

  As she always did, Samantha climbed in bed with her grandmother, but now Maxie was too weak to clutch her in return.

  “Tell me what happened,” Samantha said, smoothing Maxie’s hair from her forehead, feeling that her body was already growing cooler. Both she and Mike had to lean forward to hear her.

  “I walked out,” Maxie whispered, her voice raspy. “I had no luggage, just what I had on, my purse, and the cloth bag Joe had given me. I went to the train station and bought a ticket, using all the money I had in my purse. I could go to Louisville, Kentucky, and no further. When I got to the depot in Louisville, I sat down on a bench. I was hungry—I hadn’t eaten in two days—the man I loved was dead, I had wounded, possibly mortally, a man who would want revenge, I was three months’ pregnant, and I had no home, nothing. All I thought I had was ten thousand dollars in a cloth bag, marked money, money that would cost me my life if I spent a penny of it, and some jewelry that could be traced if I pawned it.”

  As she took a breath, Sam and Mike waited for her to continue, knowing that she had to tell what she knew. “It was in Louisville, when I went to the restroom to try to wash the blood out of my dress, that I looked in the bag and saw a little pouch in the bottom of it. It was a pouch full of large diamonds, three million dollars’ worth to be exact, all of Doc’s take. Half Hand must have converted the money to diamonds to make it portable. After I saw those stones I knew for sure that if Doc or any of his men found me my life would be over. I went back to the waiting room to debate whether to end my life or not.”