Sweet Liar Read online

  As though Maxie didn’t have enough trouble, what with hours of rehearsals every day, co-workers who were cool to her at best and hostile at worst, and the growing annoyance of always having to look utterly perfect for Doc, there was Michael Ransome. He had been hired by Jubilee to dance with the girlfriends of the gangsters who were too fat or too lazy or just plain too tired to dance with them themselves.

  Michael Ransome was indeed a problem to Maxie, for all the girls were in love with him. It wasn’t just that he was handsome, nor was it just that he had eyes that only opened halfway—bedroom eyes the girls called them. Nor was it his cleft chin and eyes the color of a stormy sea, somewhere between blue and gray, or his thick, wavy dark blond hair or his lips, full and sensual. No, what made all the girls love Michael Ransome was his manner, which was honey. Hot honey. Hot, liquid, sweet honey. All Michael had to do was look at a woman and he could sense what she needed—then he gave it to her. He could be gentle and seductive or rough and demanding. He was whatever any woman had dreamed of in a man, and he had been known to seduce a woman without so much as uttering a word. All he had to do was look at her over a chilled glass of champagne with those slow, lazy eyes and women began to feel warm—so warm that they often felt the need to remove pieces of clothing. Sometimes the women whispered to each other that if a woman could somehow resist Mike’s eyes she would never be able to resist his voice. It was deep and smooth and languid. He’d touch a woman’s hand, lift it by her fingertips to his lips, all the while looking at her with that special, shaded gaze, then bring her palm to his lips, those full, sculptured lips, and he’d whisper, “I love you.”

  Never once had Michael failed with a woman. He got what he wanted from any woman and afterward she said, “Thank you.”

  But then Michael Ransome met Maxie.

  The first time Mike came into the dressing room—what did it matter if he saw them without their clothes on since he’d been to bed with each of them—after Maxie started singing at the club, he gave her his second-best come-on. After all, why waste his energy when anyone who could sing with the lust that Maxie did had to be one hot number?

  Instead of the easy conquest he expected, to his consternation, without uttering one word to him, Maxie dumped a full box of face powder over his head. At first neither Mike nor the girls could believe what had happened. Nobody turned Mike down. Going to bed with Mike was a sort of initiation to the club.

  When they finally did realize what Maxie had done, it would be hard to decide who was more angry, the girls or Mike. For months after the powder-dumping incident, Maxie had to endure spiteful little things perpetrated by the women: makeup missing, one shoe not where she’d left it, a smudge on her dress. Maxie endured it all, never complained, never said anything to any of the women, but was always cordial and polite.

  Harder to endure than the women’s spitefulness were the snips that Michael Ransome took at her. He was truly angry that she’d turned him down and done it so publicly. After trying two more times to seduce her, he let the whole club know that she was frigid, calling her names like Ice Princess and telling people she thought she was too good to be in a nightclub. He harassed her without end.

  It was Lila, the lead dancer, who told Mike to lay off and that she was getting sick of hearing his bellyaching and she was beginning to admire Maxie’s fortitude and the way she carried herself. And it was Lila who first invited Maxie to go shopping with her and the girls, asking Maxie if she’d help them choose dresses that weren’t so gaudy. Maxie was a little leery of what the women had planned for her, but she went and she had a wonderful time. When the women found out that Maxie wasn’t so much aloof as she was shy, Lila guessed that the poor kid had never had a chance to learn how to make friends.

  After that the women began to accept Maxie into their group, inviting her places and accepting Maxie’s invitations.

  But Mike kept badgering Maxie, still so angry at her that he intensified his efforts to get a reaction out of her—but he didn’t succeed. When Lila told him to lay off and slammed the dressing room door in his face, Mike was angry enough to kill.

  Then one night Michael’s life changed forever. An hour after he left the club he realized he’d forgotten his wallet, having left it in his tux at the club. Annoyed with himself, he went back to the club to find it locked and dark. Knowing that a second-story bathroom window’s lock was broken, he piled garbage cans on top of each other in a precarious stack and climbed in the window.

  After he had his wallet, as he was leaving the club, he thought he heard something. Walking down a corridor, he saw a dim light shining from under the women’s dressing room door. Silently pushing the door open, he looked in to see Maxie sitting at the table crying, but she was crying in that way that he and the other kids in the orphanage had cried: silently, as though, if they were discovered, they would be punished.

  Without a conscious thought, he did what he’d always wished someone had done for him: He went to her, knelt beside her, and took her in his arms. After an initial moment of Maxie’s fighting him, she calmed down and clung to him—and Mike clung to her. Had someone told him that the reason he bedded all the women was because he wanted to be close to them, that he wanted them to love him, he would have laughed, for he liked to think of himself as utterly independent, needing no one. He liked to think he was a love ’em and leave ’em guy, and he knew that’s what the women thought of him. Not one of them was ever serious about a too-handsome dancer in a bar.

  When Maxie couldn’t seem to stop crying, Mike carried her to the beat-up old couch along one wall, moving a jumble of sequined and rhinestoned garments and torn netting, to sit with her and hold her.

  It was the most natural thing in the world when they started kissing. Months of anger at each other quickly turned to passion as they began fumbling with each other’s clothes, then tearing at them. They made love on the couch once, twice, three times, not talking to each other, afraid that words would break the spell, afraid that each would become what they didn’t want. Mike was afraid Maxie would turn into all the other women, afraid she’d say, “That was swell, Mike, but I need to get back to my old man now.” Maxie was afraid that she was just another one of Mike’s girls.

  It was nearly daylight when Maxie first spoke. Tired, sated, she lay in Mike’s arms and knew she never wanted to leave this place where she felt safe for the first time in her life. “If Doc finds out, he’ll kill both of us.”

  It took Mike a few minutes to calm his racing heart, for her words indicated that she intended to continue seeing him. “We will keep it a secret,” he said, and Maxie nodded, for she sensed that he knew about secrets as well as she did.

  Over the next months she and Mike met clandestinely in a cold-water flat that was a breeding pen for cockroaches and rats. They made love, yes, but they also talked, telling each other all about their lives, for the first time each having a friend to confide in.

  At the club they did their best to keep their growing love for each other a secret. They said all the right things. Mike still called Maxie an icy bitch; he still sneered at her, and Maxie still stuck her nose in the air when he was around.

  But they didn’t fool the women. For one thing, Mike quit making passes at everything in skirts, even behaving himself on the dance floor. For another thing, there was that look in Mike’s eyes. Where once he’d looked at Maxie with eyes that glittered with anger, they now glittered with love. Not lust, love.

  Knowing that the women saw what was going on, one night Maxie tried her best to make them think that she and Mike still hated each other by tossing a glass of champagne in his face.

  Mike ruined everything by grabbing Maxie’s shoulders and kissing her hard on the mouth, and the girls recognized a familiar gesture when they saw one. When Mike walked out of the dressing room, there was silence until Lila said, “Honey, you oughta be real careful with a man like Doc.”

  Maxie could only nod.

  35

  12 May 1928