Sweet Liar (27 page)

There was already a crowd outside Jubilee's brownstone when she and Mike arrived, not in a taxi but in a car that Mike had hired that was to wait for them. The driver of the car was a very large man with skin the color of coal and a long pink scar that started on the back of his neck and disappeared into his shirt, and he seemed to be a friend of Mike's. Nervously, Samantha just smiled at him a lot, which seemed to amuse him a great deal.

On the trip north to Harlem, Samantha did not look out the window, for it was much too frightening. Poverty on such a scale, poverty so close to such immense wealth as there was in midtown Manhattan, was not something that she could really understand.

When they at last arrived at Jubilee's house, the only nice-looking house on the block, Samantha gave a sigh of frustration, for it looked as though a riot were about to begin. It seemed that most of New York watched Charles Kuralt's television show, and they'd come to see Jubilee—or come to borrow money from him or sell him something or get him to look at the songs they'd written.

In the doorway stood a big, tall woman with iron gray hair and a look of fury on a face that had once been handsome. Holding aloft a broom as though it were a weapon, she was trying to discourage the watchers from climbing the front steps. Samantha saw two men get smacked in the face with the broom.

Mike put his hand on her elbow. “I don't think now is the time,” he said as he began ushering her back toward the car.

Samantha twisted out of his grip. “No! I'm going to talk to him now. I don't think I'll have enough courage to come back here again.”

“That's the best piece of news I've heard yet.”

“Mike, can you get me through that crowd? If I can get near enough to that woman, I want to tell her that I want to ask Jubilee about Maxie.”

Mike thought about wasting time arguing with her, but the futility of the exercise didn't appeal to him. Besides, the truth was, he wanted to meet Jubilee too and wanted to know if the old man knew anything of importance about Maxie and why she had left her family. Looking over her head, Mike nodded in question to the big black man standing by the car, and the man gave an answering nod.

Within minutes, Samantha had her hand firmly clasped around the back of Mike's belt as he plowed his way through the people, the enormous black man behind them. When Samantha got to the bottom of the stoop, the woman with the broom made for the three of them. But the black man caught the broom handle before it touched them, thus giving Mike and Samantha time to call out that they wanted to ask Jubilee about Maxie.

From the look on the woman's face, she had heard the name before. With a grimace, she nodded to a child standing behind her, and the boy scurried into the house. Moments later he returned and waved his arm for them to enter. Mike with Samantha close behind him entered the house while their driver returned to the car.

The inside of the house had the used, worn look of houses that had been bought many years ago, decorated then, and not touched since. The baseboard and the ceiling moldings had been painted probably thirty or forty times over the years and were never washed in between, so the paint, over dirt, was peeling and flaking. The thickness of the paint hid most of the detail of the wood.

They followed the child up steep, narrow stairs to the top of the house, where it was hot and sunny and looked as though it hadn't changed since Jubilee was born. It was on the second landing that a man stepped out of the shadows and nearly frightened Samantha to death. He was a tall black man, extremely good-looking, and he had the angriest eyes Samantha had ever seen on a human being. He wasn't just angry at the moment but angry for a lifetime, angry forever, angry at everyone and everything.

After an arrogant, flared-nostril look at Samantha, he disappeared down a hallway. Swallowing, and after a reassuring glance back at Mike, Samantha continued to follow the child up the stairs.

The child opened a door at the top of the house, allowing Samantha and Mike to enter, then left them alone in the room. The instant she saw the room Samantha loved it. Two walls were covered, floor to ceiling, with shelves containing hundreds of piles of what she knew to be sheet music. From the looks of the torn, yellowed covers, the music probably comprised the years from now back to the Flintstones. Dominating the room was an enormous grand piano, one of those black, glossy pianos that men wearing tailed tuxedos played. It was obviously an instrument that was loved, for it was polished and without so much as a scratch on it. A couple of old upholstered chairs with the stuffing protruding comfortably from the arms sat across from the piano.

Both Samantha and Mike were so intent on looking about the room that they almost missed the tiny man sitting on the piano bench, his head barely visible above the music stand. The TV camera had managed to hide a few of Jubilee's wrinkles and the lighting had softened the fact that there was no meat on his body, just dark, leathery skin over bones. He looked more like a mummy than a human, and his sparkling eyes were incongruous in his ancient body, as though some showman had found a way to make
his
mummy exhibit look more realistic.

Samantha grinned at him and he grinned back, showing a rather fabulous pair of false teeth.

“My name is Samantha Elliot and I'm Maxie's granddaughter,” she said, extending her hand to him.

“I would have known you anywhere. Look just like her.” His voice was good, and Samantha had an idea that he'd never stopped using it, but his hand felt as much like skin as a good-quality piece of leather did. As he spoke, his fingers played softly with the piano keys in an absent-minded way, as though he weren't conscious of what he was doing; playing the piano was like breathing to him.

Mike stepped forward and began to tell Jubilee why they were there, about Doc and Maxie, about Samantha's father, about the biography he was writing.

As Jubilee listened, he continued to tinkle with the piano keys, a faraway look in his eyes. When Mike stopped speaking, he looked at Samantha. “Maxie used to sing the blues. Sang them as well as any woman alive.”

Smiling, Samantha sang the words to the song Jubilee had been playing, “Gulf Coast Blues,” ending with the words,

The first look of disbelief on Jubilee's face was replaced by joy, but a special joy, for here was an old man seeing something that he thought had gone from the earth. For just a moment there looked to be tears in his old eyes. “You sound like her, girl!” he said and turned to the piano fully, both of his old monkey hands going to the keys. “Know this one?”

“Weepin' Willow Blues,” she said softly as the man began to pound out the notes. There couldn't be much strength in that frail body, but what there was, was in his hands.

Samantha opened her mouth to sing, but closed it when, through the window, sounding like a ghost, came the mournful wail of a trumpet with a mute on it. For a moment she looked at Mike to reassure herself that she was still in the nineties, for a muted trumpet was not a modern sound.

“Don't pay him no mind,” Jubilee said impatiently. “That's just Ornette. You know this or not?”

Samantha knew without asking that the horn player was the ferocious-looking young man she'd seen on the stairs, and she also knew that she was being tested. If that young man could play something as old and obscure as “Weepin' Willow Blues,” then he had to have learned it out of love, not to make money on it. She also knew without being told that he didn't believe a little blonde woman could sing the blues.

Opening her mouth, Samantha began to wail the old song about a woman who'd lost her man. At the end came the staccato verse:

When she finished, Jubilee didn't say a word, but Samantha could tell from his face that she had indeed sung the song correctly. There was that look that needed no words to explain it: You sound just like her, hung in the air.

On impulse, while both Jubilee and Mike were staring at her in wonder, she went to the window and yelled angrily in challenge in the direction of the horn player, “Did I pass, Ornette?”

At that, both Mike and Jubilee burst into laughter, Jubilee sounding like an old accordion that had a few holes in it.

“Sassy like her too,” Jubilee said, nearly choking. “Maxie was never afraid of anybody.”

“She was afraid of something,” Mike said soberly, “and we'd like to find out what it was.”

Jubilee would tell them nothing about Maxie. He kept playing the piano, asking Samantha if she knew this song and that and repeating that he hadn't seen Maxie since the night she disappeared. When Samantha asked him if he had any idea
why
Maxie had disappeared that night, he mumbled that no, he didn't.

A hundred and one years old, Samantha thought, and he
still
couldn't lie convincingly. She tried to calculate how many times she was going to have to visit him, how many Bessie Smith songs she was going to have to sing, before he told her what he knew about Maxie.

When she and Mike told him good-bye, Samantha kissed the old, leathery cheek and said she thought she'd probably see him again.

On the landing, waiting to lead them downstairs again, was the little boy, but he did what Sam thought was a rather odd thing: He slipped his hand into Mike's. She'd already seen that Mike had a natural rapport with children, but still, there was something unusual about this. It wasn't until they were outside and she saw Mike slide the hand the child had been holding into his pocket that Samantha realized that the child had given Mike a note. From Ornette, she thought, and she knew without a doubt that Mike was going to keep whatever was on that note a secret from her.

In the backseat of the car, all the way back downtown, she acted as though she knew nothing about the note. “Ornette,” she said lightly. “I think I've heard that name before.”

“Ornette Coleman. Alto sax,” Mike said, looking out the window.

When they were back at the house, Mike instantly disappeared into the bedroom and Samantha was sure he was looking at his secret note. When he came out, he was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and had the Sunday
New York Times
under his arm. They ate lunch (deli delivered) outside in the garden, both of them looking at the paper. Later, they sat in wooden deck chairs, Mike still with the paper, seeming to spend hours on the financial section, while Samantha put the laptop computer on her knees and tried to write down all the facts she knew so far about Maxie.

There wasn't much. Maxie maybe had been and maybe hadn't been in love with two men, or three if you counted Cal. However many there had been, in the end, she had left them all. Where had she gone and why?

Every few minutes she would get up from her chair, mumbling something cryptic, such as, “I need another floppy,” then disappear into the house, where she took as long as she dared to search for the note the child had given Mike. She searched the clothes he had worn that morning, looked in every box in the guest bedroom he was using (and felt a little pang of guilt that she had run him out of his bedroom), and even looked in the toes of his shoes.

It was on her sixth foray into the house that she dared to look in his wallet. Somehow that seemed to be the ultimate invasion of privacy, and she hesitated before picking it up off the dresser. But once she looked inside it, she made a thorough search. He had three credit cards, all gold, and twelve hundred dollars in cash, the amount making her draw in her breath a bit. There was nothing else in the wallet, no list of phone numbers or account numbers, nothing, but then she thought that maybe a man who could multiply as Mike could might be able to memorize the numbers he needed to know.

Just as she was about to put the wallet down, she remembered that when she was a child her father'd had a wallet with a “secret” compartment, and he used to allow her to find treats in it. Digging around in Mike's wallet, she found a hidden compartment and pulled out the piece of paper she found inside.

She nearly had to sit down when she saw that the hidden document was a photo of herself—a picture of Samantha when she was in the fifth grade, and she knew that Mike had to have taken the photo from her house in Louisville. Was it a gift from her father or did he take it from her room where she knew he had stayed? Why was he carrying it in his wallet?

Guiltily, she put the photo back into its hiding place, but when it wouldn't slide back in smoothly, she knew without a doubt that she'd found the note.

Nelson—Paddy's Bar in the

Village—Monday—Eight

With the speed of lightning, she put everything back the way she'd found it and went back into the garden to sit with Mike. Her curiosity got the better of her, and after sitting quietly for a few moments, she asked him what his father's office telephone number was. Without looking up from his paper, Mike answered.