Sweet Liar Read online

  “I wanted us to leave the club right then and go get married, but Maxie said she had to sing that night, that she couldn’t let Jubilee down. I agreed only if she’d promise that it would be her last time to perform in public. In those days there was no talk of a woman wanting a career. All Maxie wanted was what I wanted: a home for the two of us and our children.”

  Barrett stopped and looked out the window. “She sang that night and I’d never heard her sing prettier. Like a bird.

  “About ten o’clock, I guess, she took a break and I got up from my table to go backstage to see her. On the way I made a trip to the…you know, and when I was about to leave, just as my hand was on the door, I heard the first shots and the first screams. I knew right away what had happened. Back in those days I was small potatoes in the business. By that I mean I sold to only a few places, most of them up in Harlem. Most of the city was controlled by a man named Scalpini. I had already figured that Scalpini would have heard of our haul that day and I knew he’d be mad, but I thought he’d just send some of his guys over to try to work out a deal with me. But he didn’t do that. He sent eight men to Jubilee’s Place with typewriters—machine guns.

  “I knew the men were after me, but all I cared about was getting to Maxie. I pushed open the door and already the club was full of screaming, hysterical, running people and blood—blood was everywhere. I had to push a woman’s body aside to get the door open, then I had to walk over two people who were screaming on the floor. The bullets were flying everywhere and I took one in my shoulder then a second one in my side, but I kept going. I was afraid Maxie would leave her dressing room and come out or that maybe Scalpini’s men would go after her because Maxie wasn’t the kind of woman to think of herself first. She’d never run out the back door if she heard shots coming from the front.

  “I almost made it to the back when something fell and hit me on the head. I think it was a chandelier. Whatever it was, it knocked me out cold. When I woke, it was hours later, and there was a man in a white coat bending over me. ‘This one’s alive,’ he yelled and walked past me. I grabbed his ankle and tried to ask questions, but he shook me off. I think I passed out after that, because when I woke again, it was the next day and I was in a hospital, and my side and shoulder were bandaged. It was another day before I found out what happened. Scalpini had decided to get rid of me and all the men who worked for me, so he sent his men over to shoot all of us. It didn’t matter to him that there were probably a hundred people in the nightclub that night and that most of them had nothing to do with me. Scalpini meant to kill us all and he very nearly did. I lost seven men that night.”

  He paused for a long while, and when Barrett spoke again, there was a catch in his voice. “I lost Joe that night. Joe was my childhood friend, and he’d saved my life when we were kids. He was the only person I have ever before or since trusted. Joe was dead, took a bullet right through the forehead, so he must have died instantly. And there were twenty-five or so others either killed or injured that night. But worst of all, Maxie disappeared. No one knew what had happened to her. For a long time after that I searched for her, but I couldn’t find any trace of her. She walked out, and I’m sure it was my fault. Maybe she knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything that wasn’t exciting, maybe she didn’t want her child raised with a gangster for a father. I don’t know. All I know is that I never saw or heard from her again.”

  He stopped talking for a moment, then took some long, slow breaths to calm himself. “I changed after that night. I’d lost the two most important people in my life—my best friend, my only friend, and the woman I loved. Samantha, can you understand how miserable I was after that night?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I understand what it feels like to lose everyone.”

  “It’s better not to talk about the next few years of my life. I was not a pleasant person. I don’t know what I would have become if this hadn’t happened.” He put his hands on the controls of the wheelchair. “I was in a car accident two years later, and my spinal cord was severed.”

  Comfortingly Samantha put her hand over his.

  “I’ve done things in my life that I’m not proud of, but I think I would have been a different man if that night hadn’t happened. I used to think about it a great deal, what would have happened if Maxie hadn’t stayed to sing that night. If she’d left with me before Scalpini’s men showed up, we probably would have been married before we heard the news of what had happened. If she’d left with me, Joe would have gone with us and he wouldn’t have died either.”

  He looked off into the distance. “If Maxie hadn’t wanted to stay and sing, everything would have been different.” Reaching out, he touched Samantha’s cheek. “Maybe if I’d married her and waked up to hear of the bloodbath at the club, maybe it would have scared me into going straight. Maybe…” His eyes grew misty. “Maybe now you would be my granddaughter, not just my biological granddaughter, but living here with me.” He smiled. “Perhaps not here. Perhaps I’d be living in a house in suburbia somewhere, a retired insurance salesman.” He touched her blonde hair. “Like Midas, I’d trade all my gold for the warmth of a child.”

  13

  “I wonder what happened to her?” Samantha asked.

  She and Mike were sitting in the backyard at the picnic table, eating from several white paper cartons of Chinese food that they’d had delivered.

  “Happened to who?” Mike asked, although he knew very well who she was talking about.

  “If my grandmother didn’t leave my granddad Cal to go to Mr. Barrett, where did she go?”

  “That’s what your father wanted to know,” Mike mumbled, looking down at his plate. Something was bothering him, and he wasn’t exactly sure what it was. They had left Barrett’s house immediately after the old man had finished his long, sad story. All the way into Manhattan Samantha had been very quiet, looking out the window with a slight smile on her face, as though something had pleased her very much. Now she wasn’t eating but making little piles of her food on the paper plate.

  “Do you think he lives alone in that huge house?”

  “Probably. He seems to have killed most every person he’s known over the years.”

  Samantha gave him a look of fury. “Why do you have to say so many bad things about him? I thought that writers were supposed to like the people they’re writing about.”

  “Oh? How about the writers who do studies on serial killers? I don’t like Barrett and I never will, but the man fascinates me. No one has ever tried to document what he’s done in his life. No one actually knows what the man is capable of doing.”

  Samantha took a moment before she spoke. “He seemed like a nice man to me,” she said softly.

  Mike had to swallow before he could speak; he had to take a breath before he could say a word. “What is it about women and their love of a sob story? Some man you’ve never met hands you a tearjerker about true love lost and you fall for it. I especially loved the Midas part. I wonder if he rehearsed his little speech before he told it to you?”

  Standing up, she glared down at him. “And I am sick of your jealousy! From the moment I first saw you, you have acted as though you own me. You have invaded my privacy; you have followed me and humiliated me and, in general, made my life miserable. And I don’t even know you. You are nothing to me.”

  “I’m more to you than Barrett is,” Mike said, standing up and leaning across the table toward her.

  “No you’re not,” she said quietly. “He’s my grandfather, my last living relative on earth.”

  Mike drew his breath in sharply. Now he knew what had been bothering him about the expression on her face when they had been riding back from Barrett’s place. She had been smiling in contentment, smiling as though she’d found something that had been lost. “Sam,” he said, putting his hand out to touch her.

  But she drew away from him, not wanting to hear what he had to say. He could afford to be a know-it-all about her having found a living relative be