The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (12 page)

George said that he was.

“We’d like to speak with you.”

George, hesitant to invite them into his apartment, suggested a nearby coffee shop. They found a back corner table as far as possible from the counter. George bought himself a large iced coffee, but neither Karin Boyd nor DJ ordered anything. When George sat down at the table, the pint glass of coffee already slick with condensation, DJ said, “We’re leaving the murder investigation up to the police, Mr. Foss, but we’d like your help in possibly recovering what was stolen. There’s a lot of money involved.”

George, in the time it took to buy himself a coffee, had decided to tell them just as much as he’d told the police. He would leave out the part about someone impersonating Jenks. He knew he might eventually have to tell everything, but for now he still felt like there were things better left unsaid until he understood them better himself. A part of him was worried about Liana, and a bigger part was now worried about Irene.

“The police didn’t tell me much,” George said. “What happened?”

DJ and Karin glanced at one another, and Karin said, “Just tell us how you became involved first. Why were you sent by Jane Byrne to return the money she stole?”

“I’ll tell you what I told the police. Jane was someone I knew in college, although I knew her by a different name—”

“What name was that?” DJ asked and pulled out a cell phone with a keyboard. George told him, “Audrey Beck,” the same name he had given the police, and DJ typed it in with his thumbs as quickly and smoothly as a texting teenager.

“I hadn’t seen her in twenty years. We met at a bar . . . it was near here . . . and she asked me to do her this favor. It seemed strange, but she explained that she wanted to return the money without having to come face-to-face with MacLean—with your uncle,” he said to Karin. “It made sense to me at the time.”

“Where did you go after you left the house?”

“I drove to Saugus and met . . . Jane at the Kowloon. I told her how it went. She seemed relieved. We had dinner. Can one of you please tell me how MacLean was killed? I think it would help me in trying to help you. Did it happen right after I left?”

Again they glanced at each other, and Karin almost imperceptibly nodded at DJ. It was clear that he was now in her employ.

“He was hit on the back of the head with a hammer.” DJ tapped the back of his head with a hand that was small for his size. He wore a wedding band, and his fingernails looked as though they were professionally manicured. “It was in his bedroom, and it was probably just moments after you left the house. You’re very lucky that Karin saw you leave the house, Mr. Foss, or I think the police would have you in custody right now.”

“You saw me leave?” he asked Karin. George didn’t remember seeing her on his way out of MacLean’s house.

“I have an office on the second floor. My uncle popped in after his meeting with you, and before he went to his room, just to let me know that everything had gone okay. I stepped out of my office, and I could see you from the balcony. There are windows above the front door. You were getting into your car and leaving. You understand that this doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re involved with my uncle’s death.” Her eyes had the flat impassive look of a trained interrogator.

“I promise you that all I thought I was doing was returning money for a friend. I knew nothing about a murder until the police showed up at my place this morning.”

Karin looked at him with her unchanging expression. She had pale, slightly freckled skin and was not wearing makeup. A pinkish blotch had spread at the base of her throat, caused by either the humidity of the day or the stress of the situation.

“We believe you, Mr. Foss,” DJ said with the calm tone of a lawyer about to reveal his surprise witness to win the case. “What we’re really after is some kind of lead to finding out where Jane Byrne is, or to finding out who she really is.”

“So I take it that the money is gone?”

“The money that you brought in the suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“Well, yes, that money is gone, but that’s not entirely the issue at hand. The reason Mr. MacLean went to his bedroom after seeing you was to put that money in his safe. We’re assuming that whoever killed him was waiting in that room for him. A second-floor window was open at the back of the house, and we think that’s how they got in. There were gardeners around, and they usually bring ladders, because of the wisteria. None of this is an excuse. We should have had better security. Anyway, the safe had been opened, and everything but his papers was gone. Mr. MacLean didn’t trust in currency, not completely anyway, and for several years he’d been buying up uncut diamonds. Expensive ones, with rare colors. It became almost a hobby with him, wouldn’t you say, Karin? He had significant assets in that safe. Worth a lot of money, a
lot
more money than five hundred thousand dollars. We can only assume that the money was returned in order to get him to open up the safe; then he was attacked, and the safe was looted. I am positive that it was the diamonds they were after. Your friend clearly knew about them. This is a very serious situation.”

As soon as DJ mentioned the safe, the air inside the coffee shop began to swim a little in front of George’s eyes. Not because he was confused, or overtired, or confounded by too much information, but because it was suddenly so clear to him, the final piece falling into place. All along he’d been thinking that what was at stake was a gym bag full of money, more cash than he’d ever see in his lifetime, but that was just bait, a device used to get MacLean to open his safe at a specific time.

“You okay?”

“Sorry,” George said. “I didn’t know about the safe. How much were the diamonds worth?”

DJ and Karin looked at each other. DJ spoke: “I’m not at liberty to say exactly how much, but it was significant. At least five million dollars, we think. We are not accusing you of taking the diamonds, I hope you understand. . . .”

“No, no, I understand completely. Sorry. This is a new development to me. Obviously.” George looked helplessly at his half-filled iced coffee. A cube of ice shifted in the glass.

“As I said,” DJ continued, “we were wondering if you had any idea how to contact Jane Byrne, or where she might have been staying while she was up here. Anything would help.”

George barely heard the words. His mind was racing to keep up with the new information he was getting. And it was all bad news. Unwittingly or not, George knew he’d been involved in getting a man killed. He took a sip of his coffee to buy time, but his stomach churned and saliva squirted into his mouth. Breathing deeply through his nose, he said, “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to keep up with what you’re telling me, and it’s a little upsetting. I need to go to the bathroom.” He said these words while pushing back his chair, rising, and walking away from the table. He was now convinced he was going to be sick. The men’s room door, toward the back of the coffee shop, swung open, and he pulled and latched it. Its fluorescent light fluttered in an irregular pattern. The floor was wet, as though recently mopped, but it still looked dirty, dark hairs clinging to the tiles. George kneeled down in front of the toilet. The smell of ancient pipes reached his nostrils, and he buckled, now willing himself to be sick despite the shooting pains in his side. Nothing else happened. The churning nausea disappeared and was replaced by dizziness. He pushed himself back onto his feet by gripping the edges of the toilet bowl. He ran cold water from the tap and washed his hands several times, then splashed water onto his face and the back of his neck. He breathed deeply again through his nose and stood, leaning against the sink.

He looked at himself in the mirror. The paleness of his skin shocked him. His hair was wet with sweat.
I’ve been a fucking fool,
George thought, staring at his reflection for another minute, waiting for the dizziness to pass.

Chapter 15

G
eorge rolled his body so that he was on his back. Two men entered the room and shut the door behind them. One of them, the smaller and skinnier of the two, tried to stomp on George’s knee and missed. The other one, taller and fatter, said:

“Get up, asshole. I’ll fucking kill you.”

George slid back toward the middle of the room, his eyes adjusting to the lack of light. The men were his age, or younger, still in their teens. They looked like a couple of high school linebackers dressed to go to a Burger King on a Saturday night. They each wore stonewashed jeans and tucked-in Ocean Pacific T-shirts.

“Maybe I’ll stay down here,” George said.

“Fucking faggot,” said the one who hadn’t spoken before. “If we say get up, then you get up.”

“Let me think about that for a moment.”

The littler one, the stomper, reached down and grabbed the front of George’s last clean shirt. George tried to punch him in the nose, missed, and hit him in the Adam’s apple instead. He made a ragged sucking noise and jumped back, his hand at his neck, his mouth wide open in an “O.”

“Asshole,” the kid managed to croak.

George stood up. He knew he should feel scared, but his instinct for survival kept him calm. He held both hands palms out. “I don’t know what you two want—” he began.

The larger kid charged him. George tried to throw a punch, but before his fist even got all the way back he was tackled and dropped to the top of the freshly made bed. His assailant twisted George’s limbs so that he was pinned facedown, the back of his neck held by a forearm, the small of his back speared by a knee.

“How do you like that, asshole? How do you like that?”

Assuming it was a rhetorical question, George said nothing in return. The kid he’d punched in the neck walked over to the edge of the bed, stepping into the slivered light that came through the pulled blinds. He was breathing easier and gingerly fingering his neck. He had a narrow chin, red with acne, and a crew cut that showed a white scalp speckled with moles.

“I oughta fucking kill you,” he said, his voice raspy.

“Just tell me what I did,” George said.

“You know what you did,” the big guy said as he leaned all his weight onto the knee that pushed against George’s spine. A spring broke inside the bed.

“Honestly, I don’t. Has this got something to do with Audrey Beck?”

“No duh,” said Skinny, who was now moving his jaw in a circular motion, like an airline passenger trying to pop his ears.

“Seriously, I don’t know anything more than you probably know. I don’t even know if I really knew her.”

“You get her into drugs?”

“Look, I don’t think we’re talking about the same person. Audrey Beck didn’t go to college. Someone went in her place. Audrey went down to West Palm Beach with someone named Ian King. I swear to God.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Let me up a moment. I’ll tell you.”

“Yeah, right,” said Skinny, while the kid holding George performed another complicated set of wrestling moves and turned him so that he was on his back, the knee now in his solar plexus. George got a look at his primary assailant. He was wide and tall with a fat chin and a forehead bigger than the rest of his face. His blond hair was short on the top and sides and long at the back.

“Will you just listen to me for a moment? I’m not lying. I don’t think I ever met Audrey Beck.”

Forehead shook his head, like a parent being lied to by a young child. “If we find out you had anything to do with what happened to her, I will hunt you down like a deer and shoot you. You understand?”

“Yeah, b—”

“You understand, asshole?”

“Yeah.”

“Scott, let me punch him in the throat like he punched me.”

“I’ll do it,” said Scott and reared a doughy fist back. George scrunched his shoulders up and tucked his chin down to his chest so that when he got punched it was partly on the upper lip and partly on the nose. Blood sprang from both places, and tears streamed from his eyes.

The boys took off as fast as they had come.

George stumbled to the bathroom and put his face into a thin towel that smelled of bleach. The worst pain was in his nose; second place was a tie between his cheekbones and eye sockets. He held the towel against his face for about five minutes, then realized that the door wasn’t locked. He walked across the room, locked the door, then sat down on the bed and dialed the phone number from the note he’d found on his car. His heart was pulsing in his chest, and he wondered if he’d have trouble speaking when it came time to speak.

“Hello?” It was a girl’s voice, worried-sounding, and with a slight Southern hitch to it, but other than that, not very much like Audrey’s voice.

“You left me a note, with this phone number.” George sounded as though he had a bad cold.

“Are you the one here from Mather College?”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“I was friends with Audrey.”

George shook his pack of cigarettes until one filtered end appeared. “So was I, I thought, but I guess I wasn’t.”

“She didn’t go to college,” the girl said.

“Well, someone did. What’s your name?”

“It’s Cassie Zawinsky.”

“So you knew that Audrey didn’t go to Mather?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Do you know who went in her place?”

“I don’t know her name, but I know that someone did. She was from Chinkapin High, I think. You met her, you knew her, right? What was she like?”

“She was my girlfriend. She was nice.” George lit the cigarette. The first drag unclogged his nose a little, and he could smell blood.

“But you don’t really know anything about her?” Cassie asked.

“Look, I have lots of questions for you too. I don’t even know how you know I’m here or what you’re trying to figure out. Maybe we could meet?”

“I could do that.”

“Do you know the Shoney’s off the highway?”

“Sure.”

T
wo hours later, showered, dressed, with a bruised nose and a cracked and sticky lip, George waited in a back booth, an extra large Coke in front of him.

Shoney’s was filled with couples, old ones who were alone and young ones with boisterous kids. Cassie was easy to spot when she walked in—alone, George’s age, wearing a man’s vintage suit vest over a Crowded House T-shirt and a pair of tight, ripped jeans. George waved in her direction, and she came over, slid in across from him.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Two guys met me at my motel and wanted to know what I’d done to Audrey. Maybe you know something about it.”

“What kind of guys?” She had short reddish hair, small blue-green eyes, a button nose with a snub tip, and a huge mouth with big white teeth. It didn’t help her looks that she was wearing about a quarter-inch of bright red lipstick and some of it had come off on one of her canines.

“I don’t know. Jocks. One of the names was Scott.”

“Oh jeez. Scotty’s my brother. Was the other one skinny with Frisbee ears?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s Kevin Lineback, my brother’s sidekick. Ah jeez, I’m sorry about that. They had no . . . They wouldn’t’ve even known you were here if it wasn’t for me.”

“I still don’t understand how you knew.”

A waitress appeared, and Cassie ordered a Dr. Pepper.

“So you were at the Becks’ today, right?” she said. “Did ya see Billy Beck, Audrey’s brother? Yeah, well, he was the one who called me and told me, probably about a minute after you left the house. Thing is, he was like the only other person besides me who knew that Audrey wasn’t planning on actually going to college, and he knew I knew, so he called me right away. My brother, the a-hole, must have overheard me talking on the phone with Billy. That’s what I figure anyway. Scott went out with Audrey for about five minutes last summer, and he’s all hung up on her still.”

“How did you know to leave a note on my car?”

“Billy told me that you followed the policemen to the station. And he told me what your car looked like. I figured that I’d leave just a phone number. That way if anyone else saw it, it wouldn’t give anything away.” Keeping her hands down by her sides, Cassie leaned forward and sipped at her Dr. Pepper through her straw. She looked pleased with herself.

“So how did Scott and his friend know where to find me?”

“Billy. He told me over the phone, and I must’ve repeated it out loud or something, because Scott heard. Or else he listened in. I have a phone in my room, but it’s not my own line, so anyone can pick up anywhere else in the house. Anyways, that’s how Scott found out where you were staying. I guess he beat me to you.”

“So what I don’t understand is why Audrey didn’t want to go to school. She must’ve applied.”

“She had to. Her parents made her do it. She’s like one of the few kids from Sweetgum who could even afford to go to a four-year college, let alone get into one. Anyways, her parents told her she had to go. She picked Mather, I think, because it was so far away. But she didn’t want to go. At all. She was into this guy Ian King—”

“From Gator Bait.”

“Oh my gosh, you’ve actually heard of them.”

“No, not really. The detective told me about them today. He said Audrey went off with this guy Ian.”

“That was her plan—what she told me anyways. She was telling her parents she was going to go to school, and then she was just going to skip town. She figured, what could they do to her if they couldn’t find her?”

“But then she found someone to go in her place?”

“Yeah. The thing is, Audrey didn’t tell me so much about it. We were friends, Audrey and me, but not like best friends forever or anything. We all kind of grew up together. My dad knows her dad. My mom knows her mom. That’s how come Billy and I know each other, and Scotty and Audrey. It’s like a family thing. So when Audrey told me she wasn’t going to go to school, I was like . . . I don’t know. But then she told me that she met this girl from Chinkapin who kind of looked like her, and she was totally smart but came from a bad family with no money, and she wanted to go to college real bad.”

“How did they meet?”

“Forensics, I think.”

“What’s that?”

“Competitions for the debate club. I don’t know so much about it.”

“But she never told you this girl’s name?”

“I think she got spooked that she told me so much as it was. As I said, we weren’t best friends or anything. She told me I better not rat her out, and I promised that I wouldn’t. I guess now I feel a little guilty. Maybe I should’ve said something.”

“Refills, guys?” The waitress had materialized.

They both nodded.

“Have you two figured out what you want to eat?”

George said, “I’m actually not that hungry.”

“You wanna split a plate of fries?” Cassie asked. “They’re good here.”

The fries, crinkle cut, arrived in ten minutes on a big oval platter. Cassie had a lot more to say, but the crucial information had already been spoken. The girl George was looking for was from Chinkapin, and she was on the debate team. The following day he could find her name by going through yearbooks again. What he hadn’t decided was whether he would try to do that on his own or enlist the help of Detective Chalfant.

George walked Cassie to her car. She looked up at the star-flecked sky. “Look, it’s the Big Dipper,” she said, pointing.

“You don’t think this other girl had anything to do with what happened to Audrey, do you?” George asked.

“Sure, I thought about it. But Audrey was pretty into drugs, so who knows, you know?”

“Will you call me if you find out anything more?”

“I promise. And don’t worry—I’ll tell Scotty you had nothing to do with this, and he won’t bother you again.”

“I’ll be ready for him next time.”

“He’s kind of mean.”

“I noticed.”

S
poradic bursts of rain came in the night as George lay awake, his face still aching, on his broken mattress. The joints of the weathered motel clicked and whistled. Cars on the highway cast shadows that wheeled through the room, long to short to long again. George filled the ashtray with butts and turned the television on and off several times. At dawn, when the wind had died and the rising sun bathed everything in the same thin light, he fell asleep, lips stinging, mouth thick with the taste of cigarettes.

He called Chalfant in the morning, told the detective that he thought the girl they were looking for might come from a neighboring town; maybe he could look at more yearbooks. George told Chalfant he thought Chinkapin was a possibility. Chalfant told him to come by the station after lunch.

Dan Thompson lent George the car again. “You speak Mexican?”

“Sorry, no.”

“That’s okay, but it would help. I do need one favor from you. There’s a Mexican joint—Abelito’s—you know it?” He wore the same light tan suit again, but with a different matching set of tie and handkerchief. Today they were a shiny neon blue.