Mike watched her and she made him feel the words she was singing, made him feel the sorrow of a woman whose man had been stolen by another woman. She was saying the words as only someone who had experienced the emotion could sing them; she sang them the way they were meant to be sung, the way they had been written. It wasn’t as though she were a modern folk singer enraptured with the cute songs the blacks used to sing and trying to imitate them for an audience of WASPs. Samantha was the type of woman for whom the song had been written and she sang it with her heart as much as with her voice.
I’ve got his picture turned upside down
I’ve sprinkled slough-foot dust all around
Since my man is gone I’m all confused
I’ve got those Lady Luck Blues
The mournful song was short. When Samantha finished, all Mike could do was stare at her, blinking in confusion, feeling that he was looking at a stranger in a slinky red dress that slithered over her curves.
To his consternation, Samantha walked toward him in a way he’d never seen any woman walk and put the tip of her high-heeled foot on the chair edge between his legs, leaned toward him, and inhaled on her cigarette holder. He was sure he actually saw the smoke she blew out the side of her mouth.
“Well, honey?” she said, and it was not Samantha’s voice. This woman’s voice was lower, raspy almost, and it was very, very provocative—bewitching, the voice of a siren who was quite capable of luring men to their deaths.
“Samantha?” he whispered, and to his embarrassment, his voice broke like a teenager’s.
With a sultry laugh that would have done justice to Kathleen Turner at her throatiest, she moved her foot and turned away from him. As she walked away, he couldn’t take his eyes from the undulating back side of her, the skin of her back glowing and perfect in the soft light of the single lamp.
“Sam,” he said, calling out to her when she started back toward the bedroom, but she didn’t turn. “Maxie,” he whispered and drew in his breath when she smiled at him over her shoulder, and it was a smile of a seductress, a woman who knew what effect she had on men.
When Samantha disappeared up the stairs into the bedroom, Mike let out his breath, then rubbed his arms. He’d been holding his breath and his muscles were tense. Trying to ease the tension in his body, he walked to the glass patio doors and looked out at the night. The woman who had just appeared in this room was one he hadn’t known, a woman who had many secrets, a woman who was capable of all manner of things—and Mike wasn’t sure she was a woman he especially liked. Maybe she was a woman he’d like to take to bed, since every pore of her body oozed sexuality. Then again, maybe he’d rather not go to bed with her, for the woman who’d just sung for him probably knew more about sex than he did. She was the kind of woman who would fake an orgasm, would fake love for a man. She was the exact polar opposite of Samantha with her openness, her sweetness, her ability to give.
“Well?” Samantha said from behind him.
When he turned, she was Samantha again, face washed shiny clean, hair a tangled mess, her nifty little body concealed under his bathrobe. On impulse, he went to her, surrounded her in his arms, and kissed her soundly, not a kiss of sex or passion, but a kiss of relief, a kiss of welcome home.
“Mike?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
He was holding her so tightly she could scarcely breathe, and it was a while before he could recover himself enough to speak. With a chuckle that even to him sounded forced, he said, “You make me believe in split personalities.” Holding her away from him so he could see her face, he searched it. “Are you all right? You were so…so different. You were…”
“Maxie,” she said. “I put the dress on and I seemed to become her. Did I do a good job?”
He pulled her head back down to his shoulder. “Too good. Much, much, much too good.”
“Mike! Is something wrong? All I did was sing a song and, well, maybe vamp it up a bit.”
He wouldn’t release his tight hold on her. “It was more than that. You changed. Really changed.”
“A little change never hurt—”
Kissing her again, he silenced her. “Sammy, I don’t want you to change. I like you just the way you are.”
As she snuggled against him, Samantha was not at all sure what had upset him so much, but she rather liked his concern. And she liked his compliment. “Mike,” she said softly, “I like you too.” It wasn’t until later that she realized the extent to which he was upset because, for the first time, when they went to bed, he didn’t try to get her to spend the night in bed with him. Something about his reluctance made her smile as she glanced at herself in the mirror over the dresser. Maybe she should be Maxie more often, she thought. Maybe she should not be so predictable, so very boring, a woman without surprises. Stroking Maxie’s dress that was draped over a chair, she smiled, then, on impulse, she took her new pretty sheer white nightgown from where she had hidden it in the bottom of one of Mike’s drawers and put it on. Maxie would have worn a white nightgown if she’d wanted to White or black, lace or satin, big and transparent, or tiny and skin-exposing, Maxie would have worn any nightgown in the world—if she’d wanted to.
21
At five minutes to nine on Sunday morning, Samantha was sitting in the center of Mike’s bed, knees to her chest, wearing her new white nightgown and trying to give herself a pedicure. The fact that the implements she was using had been in her possession since she was ten years old—they were fitted into a pink plastic case printed with tiny white poodles with blue ribbons on their tails—didn’t help the process. So far she hadn’t heard a sound from Mike’s room, so she assumed he was still sleeping.
At nine, she picked up the remote control off the bedside table and flicked on the TV to watch Charles Kuralt’s “Sunday Morning.” She’d been watching the show since they had taken Mr. Kuralt off the road and nailed him to a chair in New York. It interested Samantha to see if he was ever going to get that melancholy look off his face, the look that said, I’d rather be on the road.
In the first few minutes of the show Charles went over the stories that they were going to do that morning, giving each one his special tone of, Can you believe this? Samantha didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying until she heard the word Jubilee, then her head came up sharply, and her eyes widened as she hung on every word Charles Kuralt was saying.
The Jubilee Massacre isn’t as well known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, but then nothing that happened in New York during Prohibition is as well known as what happened in Chicago. Maybe it’s the cynicism of New Yorkers, but what happened that hot Saturday night on May the twelfth, 1928, wasn’t even called a massacre by New Yorkers. Some wit—dare we say half-wit—dubbed it the Changing of the Guard as one gangster mob boss killed the gangsters of a man who would be boss. The shoot-out backfired and the sympathy of the people—crooked cops and such—went with the man who had been shot at. Doc Barrett, then a twenty-eight-year-old hoodlum, took over control of illegal liquor sales after that night, after that dreadful shootout in which seventeen people were killed and more than a dozen wounded. Doc gained but he also lost, for his childhood friend, the man he said was the only man he would ever be able to trust, a man with the colorful name of Half Hand Joe—we are told he lost half his left hand saving Doc from a bullet when they were kids—was killed that night.
It all happened in a glamorous speakeasy in Harlem known simply as Jubilee’s Place. Doc may have gained that night, but Jubilee lost everything he had. His club was destroyed by over three thousand bullets—and by a few thousand souvenir seekers over the next few days.
While the newsman was talking, the camera showed pictures of the exterior and interior of a falling-down old building in a horrible area of Harlem. Rats scurried across the floor as the camera zeroed in on bullet holes in the walls.