“Five days a week at four o’clock Guzzo visited his mistress for exactly one and a half hours. He liked to pretend he was making love to her for all of that time, but everyone knew the truth. He hardly ever touched the woman; his snores could be heard two blocks away. Barrett was so scrawny he slipped down the chimney into the bedroom, slit the man’s throat while he slept, then cut out his heart. A few minutes later his mistress came into the room, saw her lover with a cut throat and a gaping, bloody hole in his chest, and started screaming. In the ensuing confusion, Barrett walked out the front door, stopping only long enough to wash some of the soot off his face and hands before he made his delivery to Scalpini. One of the bodyguards said the heart looked like it had been removed by a surgeon, and that’s how Barrett got his nickname. Over the years the name’s been dignified to Doc.”
Mike stretched out on the bed, waiting, giving her time to digest what he’d just told her. “With what little I’ve been able to find out about Doc, I know that most of that story he told you yesterday was a lie. Or, maybe not a lie, just a stretching of the truth.
“First of all, Doc was trying to get your sympathy with all that about its being the Great Depression: 1928 was before the stock market crashed. Secondly, on that night when Scalpini shot up the speakeasy, it wasn’t because Doc’s receipts for that day had been especially good. It was because Doc had raided every safe, every till Scalpini had. The take was in the neighborhood of three million dollars.”
When Mike turned to look at her, he saw that Samantha was listening, wide-eyed, to his story. “The man who picked up all the money from Scalpini was Doc’s friend, the man Doc told you was the only man he had ever trusted: Joe, better known as Half Hand Joe.”
Mike gave a little grin. “Want to know how Joe got his nickname?”
Samantha shook her head no, but that didn’t stop Mike from telling her.
“Half Hand was older than Doc and as slow-witted as Doc was fast. No one knows whether Joe was born slow or came to be that way, because his father’s hobby was hitting Joe on the head with whatever was handy. Joe met Doc when Joe was seventeen and Doc was ten, and Joe attached himself to Doc like a faithful old dog. When Doc started working for Scalpini, so did Joe. They went everywhere together, did everything together. When some rival hoods fired on Doc with machine guns, Joe pushed his little buddy aside. Joe took four bullets in the outside of his left hand and blew it away.”
Mike held up his left hand to demonstrate, showing how Half Hand was left with two fingers and a thumb. “He was called Half Hand after that night, and he was even more dedicated to Doc than ever. It’s my guess that Half Hand realized that his future depended on Doc’s safety, so he began sleeping outside Doc’s door at night.”
Mike took a breath. “Then came that night in 1928 and everything changed. Doc wanted to be the head of all the illegal businesses going on in New York, and in order to do that he had to get rid of Scalpini. Doc spent months planning the robbery and the killings it entailed. Everything went off on schedule except that Scalpini didn’t wait to find out who had robbed him, he just took some of his boys and went to the speakeasy and opened fire. But they didn’t get Doc. But they did kill Joe—Joe who was the only one who knew where the three million dollars was hidden.”
Mike didn’t speak for a moment, so Samantha wrote, Why me? and handed him the note.
Mike looked pained. “I don’t know why I didn’t think about others knowing the old story. In underworld circles the legend of Half Hand’s money is like the Lost Dutchman Mine. There are a great many people who suspect that Maxie took it and that’s why she disappeared that night. She wanted to get away from Doc and the gang; she saw an opportunity and she took it. Doc told you that Half Hand took a bullet in the head and died instantly. Some people said that Half Hand had been hit in the head so often by his father that a bullet couldn’t pierce his skull. They say that he lived long enough to tell Maxie where the money was.”
Turning, Mike looked at her. “What neither Doc nor Scalpini knew until years later was that the money they had, had been marked by the FBI. If it hadn’t disappeared that night, whoever used it would have been holding evidence that could have convicted them. Whoever took it from Doc saved him from prison.”
Was it found? Samantha wrote.
“Sort of,” Mike said. “A hundred-dollar bill turned up in Paris in 1965.”
Samantha had been listening to him intently, but the date jolted her. Her eyes widened.
“Right,” Mike said. “That’s the year after your grandmother Maxie left her husband and family. That was thirty-seven years after the massacre, and no one was looking for the money. The old bill was spotted by a sharp-eyed clerk in the treasury office. After that one was found, they kept a lookout for more bills, but no more showed up—not that anyone caught anyway. The clerk who spotted that one had just returned from a six-month leave of absence, so for all anyone knows the entire three million could have come through the treasury and not been seen.”
There was too much information for Samantha to take in at one time.
Mike took the tray from her lap and started for the door. When he came back into the room, he said that he wanted her to sleep, that she needed rest after her ordeal and that her throat needed to heal. But as he started to tuck her in, he stopped. “When was the last time you cried?” he asked softly.
Samantha looked away from him, frowning.
Taking her chin in his hand, Mike turned her back to face him. “I’m not going to go away and I’m not going to allow you not to answer me.” He handed her the pencil and notepad.
After a fierce glare of defiance, she wrote, I was crying the day the principal came to tell me that my mother was dead.
15
Samantha didn’t leave New York that afternoon, but she had to promise Mike she’d obey him if he allowed her to stay with him for two more days—the amount of time Blair said it would take her throat to heal enough to speak. The truth was, she had a decision to make and she thought she could make it better if she stayed where she was than if she went to yet another unfamiliar place.
Mike wasn’t easy to convince because he wanted her out of the city, wanted her in a safe place. He no longer wanted her to have anything to do with Doc or Maxie or any of what he was researching. Samantha wrote him a note asking him if he was going to continue writing his biography. When Mike said he was, Samantha did not point out that he wasn’t any safer than she was, that someone might think he knew about Half Hand’s money as well as she did. Nor did she mention that it was her grandmother involved, not his.
She simply didn’t want to leave Mike’s house, didn’t want to get into a car with another man and drive to yet another place. She didn’t want to leave Mike.
When she woke it was midafternoon and Mike brought her lunch on a tray. He looked tired and he hadn’t shaved in two days. He wanted her to go back to sleep, but she pantomimed that she’d keep her lips zipped and throw away the key if he’d just let her sit on the couch and not have to stay in bed.
After reluctantly agreeing, he picked her up and carried her into the library and settled her on the couch as though she were helpless, a light blanket wrapped around her legs. When she was settled, he went back to his desk and started looking through his bundles of papers.
As Samantha watched him, she knew that she wanted to know more about the man who may or may not be her grandfather, so she wrote Mike that she’d like to type more of his notes. Refusing to allow her to sit at the desk at the computer and type, he asked her if there weren’t small computers and she described a laptop. He asked her to write down what she needed so he could order it. Even though Samantha said a laptop computer would be too expe
nsive and that she could sit at the desk, Mike refused to listen to her. At last she wrote down the name of a powerful little laptop, and on impulse, she wrote “King’s Quest V and a mouse.” Mike called a store and within two hours the equipment was delivered to the door.
After the equipment arrived, she got off the couch and installed the mouse and the graphics game on the color screen of the big computer while Mike was in the shower. When he entered the room, he was damp from his shower and wearing nothing but a pair of white tennis shorts. For a minute, Samantha thought her heart was going to stop at the sight of him, but Mike’s eyes were on the computer screen and the opening graphics of the game. As though he were hypnotized, he walked toward the computer, touched the mouse on its pad, and when he saw the little man in the game move he was caught. Smiling at his beautiful, broad, bare back, Samantha saw that he couldn’t figure out how to type notes, but within minutes, he had mastered the principles of a computer game.