Sweet Liar (37 page)

“Y
ou want to tell me about you and Nelson?”

“Nelson?” Samantha asked vaguely, for her mind was on the twins, the dear boys Kane had taken away immediately after breakfast. It was almost as though he were afraid that if he left the boys with her any longer, she might succeed in taking them away from him.

“The guy in the bar. You remember him? You met him when you paraded yourself before half of New York while wearing practically nothing.”

Samantha laughed. “Ah, yes
that
Nelson. Mike, do you think I have the qualifications to be one of those five-hundred-dollar-a-night call girls?”

Mike grunted in answer. “Are you planning to tell me what Nelson wrote on that piece of paper he gave you or not? Of course, I could be like you and snoop through all your possessions to find it, but I have more ethics than that.”

As she picked up his dirty lunch plate, she kissed the tip of his nose. “Couldn't find it, could you?”

For a moment, Mike looked away, not meeting her eyes, then he left the table to follow her into the kitchen. “Samantha,” he said, “what are you up to?”

“The paper had a name on it, Walden, and a telephone number.”

As he watched her load dishes into the washer, he realized that she was avoiding his eyes. Putting his hands on her shoulders, he turned her to face him. “And what have you done about this name and number?”

“I called the number and it seems that Mr. Walden is an attorney and I have an appointment to see him today at three.”

“Were you planning to go alone? Maybe you were planning to tell me that you wanted to do a little shopping, then sneak away to the appointment?”

“Mike, it's not as though I was planning to secretly meet somebody like Doc by myself. This man is an attorney, and he's young, at least he's younger than most of the people who know anything about Maxie are, so he couldn't have been
too
involved with what happened in 1928. Mr. Walden is only fifty-five.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I, well, asked his secretary. I told her I thought he was a man I'd met at a singles' bar and described him as about twenty-six, blond, and tall. She informed me that Mr. Walden was fifty-five years old, married with four grown children, and five feet six and had gray hair and a potbelly. If he's that young, what can he know about my grandmother? Do you think he handled some legal work for her or do you think he does actually know something?”

“I guess there's only one way to find out, isn't there? Get dressed and we'll go see him.”

“Mike, you don't have to go. I can meet him, then come back here and tell you what he had to say.”

It half enraged Mike and half pleased him that she was trying to protect him, for he knew that's exactly what she was trying to do. He'd made it clear that he wanted her to stop sticking her nose into the mystery of what happened to cause Maxie to leave her family. Now she was continuing to search but was trying to keep her searching from him.

He kissed her softly. “Do you realize that it's after two o'clock now? If you plan to get into one of those suits of yours and spray your hair with that epoxy stuff and paint your face and—” Samantha was already running toward the bathroom.

At three-fifteen, Samantha and Mike were ushered into Mr. Walden's office by his thin, pinched-looked secretary. Through a process that Samantha found infuriating (Mike had sent Samantha off to the restroom while he sat on the desk of a very pretty receptionist, looked at her through lowered lashes, and asked her questions about Mr. Walden) they had found out that Walden was a criminal defense attorney; he took on the cases of the most reprehensible men and kept them out of jail. The receptionist had shuddered prettily as she described some of the underworld characters who sometimes came into the office. She said that Mr. Walden didn't seem to mind the fact that his brilliant defenses kept the most awful people on the street.

“Underworld connections,” Mike said. “No wonder Nelson knows him. What's wrong with you?”

Samantha was walking beside him so stiffly that her legs hardly bent. “Absolutely nothing is wrong with me. Why should anything be wrong with me? Just because you were looking down that woman's blouse is no reason for anything to be wrong with me.”

Smiling, Mike took her arm and wouldn't let her move away. “She had a nice pair of—”

“If you like cows!” Samantha said through clenched teeth, jerking her arm away and walking ahead of him.

When they were ushered into Walden's office, Samantha was angry and Mike was chuckling. Mr. Walden, who was exactly as he'd been described, took one look at the two of them as they sat down and said, “I don't handle divorce cases.”

With a laugh, Mike reached for Sam's hand resting on the arm of the chair in front of Mr. Walden's desk, but she snatched it away. “Actually, we've come here on another matter. Your name was given to us indirectly through Jubilee Johnson.”

For just a second the expression of joviality on Walden's face changed. It was odd to think of this man as a defender of criminals, because put a white wig and beard on him and a red suit and he'd be every child's picture of Santa Claus. “Ah, yes, Jubilee. I hope he's well and his family is doing all right.”

It was at that moment that Samantha saw Walden's left hand. When she'd entered the room, she'd been so upset with Mike that she hadn't really looked at Mr. Walden or noticed much of anything about him except that he was such a pleasant-looking man that she immediately thought that he could know nothing about Maxie.

Now she was staring at his left hand. His hand had been tattooed a solid black from his wrist upward, covering his smallest finger and the one next to it, and those two fingernails were polished with black enamel.

“Half Hand,” she whispered, because at first glance his hand looked as though half of it were missing. “Half Hand,” she said louder, interrupting whatever Mike and the man were saying.

Stepping around the desk, Walden smiled at her, then held out his hand, palm down, and she took it in her own, looking at it. Releasing his hand, she looked up at him. “Who are you and what do you know about Maxie?”

Mr. Walden chuckled, sounding like the man he resembled. “I was born with the name of Joseph Elmer Gruenwald 3d. Since my father was called Joe, I was called Elmer. Ugly name. It's difficult to get ahead in this world with a name like that because you spend a lot of your life hearing jokes about Elmer Fudd. To counteract the name I think I spent a lot of time thinking about my gangster grandfather.”

It was Mike's turn to speak. “Half Hand.”

“Yes,” Mr. Walden said. “Half Hand Joe was my grandfather. My father was nine when Half Hand was killed and I think he glorified him. Rather than facing the facts that his father was nothing more than a hired killer, my father tried to make him into a hero, so I grew up hearing about how great Half Hand was.” He hesitated. “When Half Hand died, my father was given some money, but my grandmother went through it within six months.”

Holding his left hand up, Walden studied it. “When I was sixteen, I got drunk for the first time in my life, and when I woke up I found that I had gone to a tattoo parlor and had this done to my hand in memory of my grandfather. When I was sober I wanted to have it removed, but my father said it was an omen.”

When both Samantha and Mike looked puzzled at that, Mr. Walden chuckled. “My dad had a rich fantasy life. He got married when he was little more than a kid and I was soon on the way, so he never had a chance to go to school. After he saw my hand, he said I was destined to become an attorney and save men like my grandfather. I don't know how a sixteen-year-old with a hellacious hangover and a tattooed hand equaled attorney to my father, but the whole scheme sounded good to me. I went to law school thinking that I was going to be spending my life saving misunderstood men and women, but I find that I defend the dregs of humanity.”

His words and his expression were at odds with each other, for he looked well pleased with himself.

“Why?” Samantha asked.

“Money, my dear. The scum-of-the-earth wouldn't do scummy deeds if it didn't make them a lot of money, and defending them has made me a rich man. My parents lived in a two-room apartment with five kids. I have a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and an estate in Westchester. I've sent my four daughters to Ivy League schools, and my wife has her clothes made for her in Paris.”

He smiled at the innocence of the two handsome young people before him, for their faces were readable, telling him that they would never sell their souls for money. But, then, from the looks of the way they were dressed and from the way they carried themselves, neither of them knew what it meant to be hungry or cold or have the landlord evict them in the middle of the night for nonpayment of rent. His daughters were like this pretty little Samantha, well groomed, well fed, not haunted by memories of poverty. Inadvertently, the garbage he defended had done this good deed and helped put something clean and good on earth.

“When I was twenty-one, I changed my name to H. H. Walden, a nice WASP name that I used all through law school. It helped me with the blond tennis players, and later, I could tell the bums I defended that the H. H. stood for Half Hand, so it helped me there too.”

“Because they had heard of Half Hand's lost three million,” Mike said, making Walden smile.

“You've done some searching, haven't you?”

Mike told him about the biography he was writing and about Maxie being Sam's grandmother. “What can you tell us about her?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Mr. Walden said, his eyes locked with Mike's and never flinching.

A practiced liar, Mike thought. “Not even the name of the nursing home she's in?” Mike asked. “Do you have any idea who's paying her bills?”

At that Walden put his head back and laughed uproariously. “Caught me, did you? Yes, I know where Maxie is, but I'm not paying her bills. If you want to know that, you should ask her where the money comes from.”

“She pretends she's someone named Abby and won't even admit she's Maxie.”

“Ah, well, that's understandable. She's probably afraid for the young lady here, afraid Doc will do something to her, or if not Doc, then someone else. The legend of Half Hand's money is still alive in some circles. Of course, you do know that her name really is Abby, don't you? No? It's Mary Abigail Dexter. When she signed on with Jubilee to sing in his club, she initialed the contract, but instead of using her initials of M.A.D., she wrote M.A.X. Jubilee's bookkeeper, who needed glasses, thought her name was Maxie and the name stuck.”

Mike gave Walden a hard look, for he had a feeling the man was withholding information, information that he had no intention of telling them. “Someone broke into an upper floor of my house and tried to kill Samantha.”

Walden didn't so much as blink, but then he lived with death and murder and mayhem on a daily basis. “Did they now? You catch him?”

“No,” Mike said tightly. “You have any idea who it could have been? Someone you know?”

Walden smiled. “It could have been any one of thousands of people I know. There isn't a person I've defended who isn't capable of climbing into a window and trying to kill a pretty girl. You just have to tell me a time and a place, and I can match a murder with it.”

Samantha opened her mouth to speak, but Mike beat her to it.

“February 1975, Louisville, Kentucky,” Mike shot out, but he didn't turn to look at Samantha who was glaring at him. That was the time and place when her mother had died.

“I'd like to go now, Mike,” she said softly, but Mike kept looking at Walden and didn't move from his chair.

After looking from one to the other of them, Walden punched a button on his phone and told his secretary that he wanted anything she had for the date and place Mike had given him. “She has everything on computer so it should take only a minute,” he said into the silence that had developed after Mike asked his question.

For five long minutes he sat back in his chair and looked at the two of them, trying to figure out what was going on besides the writing of a biography. He wondered if they knew the full extent of what a nasty creature Doc was, or if they thought he was a sweet old man merely because he had defied the devil long enough to reach the age of ninety-something.