Tina:  Well, I guess we can thank Melvin for that. The result was that you never miss an opportunity to hug the kids or me. And I love it.

Bette: I swore when our children were born, that I would tell them daily that I love them. They would never have to guess about how important they are in my life. And I made that same pledge to you after some of the problems we have had. I do not want anyone in my family to have to guess if they are loved by me.

Harriett: So, what else would you like to know?

Tina: When did you find out that Maxine was alive?

Harriett: Oh gosh, it was within a couple of years after she supposedly had died. Probably 1975, maybe? Melvin went into his office and called me in and asked me to sit down and take some notes. He was very agitated.  He never asked me to sit down in his office. I was usually in his office no more than five minutes and he would bark his orders. Or he would pick the phone and tell me what he wanted done. I kept his schedule and did all his correspondence and made his travel arrangements. On this particular day, he had met with some attorney in our criminal division. He was representing a client who had been picked up in an FBI sweep of arrest. Our client swore he was not involved with the John Gotti family nor any other family. Anyway, during the investigation, it had been discovered that someone had survived that liquor store massacre. But no one knew who that was. Melvin wanted to know more about this person who survived. He wanted to know if it possibly could have been Maxine. And my question was then is: if it was Maxine Porter, why didn’t she just come home to her husband and child? Well, he said that if she didn’t come home, there was a reason. He needed to either confirm or deny this person was Maxine Porter. So, I was to call in an investigator which would not be employed by the firm but by him personally. He met with the investigator and with Gabriel Scott several times but I do not think they found out very much. I think they confirmed that the survivor was a woman and that her name and identity had been changed for protection. I think that he also found out that this woman was pregnant at the time of the incident. That made Melvin beside himself. If this woman was Maxine, then he had another child out there in the world. And he wanted to know this child. It became an obsession for a while until all the trails disclosed nothing. He did find out that her name was Mary Southerland and she was in protective custody of the FBI. Again, these were the days before computers. Hell, zip codes had only been in existence for about 10 years at that point. So, finding someone was difficult unless you had a social security number and a birthdate and someone who had access to FBI data. None of which did we have. What we had, had all been buried in Oaklawn Cemetery. After a while, Melvin stopped looking. He was getting nowhere. He was spending money which was yielding no results what so ever. Then about a decade later, Melvin decided to search again. The child this woman had would then be about 12 or 13 years old. Now, there were two people to search for. And finding them may be a little easier. Maybe. And Melvin decided to call in another investigator and try again. After about six months of looking, I remember they had found a potential candidate in or near Phoenix Arizona. I remember that he received an envelope of 8 by 10 black and white glossy photos of a woman. She was wearing sunglasses but when he showed them to me, I could clearly see that was someone who look a lot like his dead wife Maxine. I was flabbergasted. There she was just as alive as you and I but living in Arizona. Then Melvin met with an FBI agent who advised Melvin not to make contact as her life was in danger. She was responsible for putting a multitude of people in jail and she would be a prize if the Mafia families found her. If he valued her life and that of her daughter, he would not contact her. So, Melvin went to work to provide for the educational needs of Maxine’s daughter. He and Gabriel Scott and some other attorney were working on a scheme to send her to private schools. I never understood exactly how it was supposed to work. All I know is that Melvin’s attitude picked up greatly. Elizabeth, you had already left for college and he was now an empty nester. And this seemed to be his sole interest outside of work at the time. He was not dating at the time. Kit was on the west coast and moving along with her music career. But Melvin became obsessed about providing this third child with an education.