The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (13 page)

“No, but I can find it.”

Thompson gave him the avenue and the cross street, and the paperwork that needed signatures.

George timed his errand to coincide with lunch and ate at the busy Mexican place. The food was good, but he barely had an appetite. He knew with what felt like certainty that in a few hours he would find out the true identity of the girl he’d known as Audrey. How soon after that would he be able to see her again? He paid for his meal and drove to the police station.

Chalfant was out, but Denise had left a stack of yearbooks, including Chinkapin High’s, in his office. Left alone with the books, George started with the most recent. Instead of looking at the individual photographs first, he flipped toward the back, where there were group shots of clubs and teams. He found
“
Speech and Debate,” a half page with a black-and-white shot of about seven students in two rows, and nervously scanned the faces.

There she was. Her hair was not the same in the photo—it was longer and feathered and somehow looked blonder—but the rest was the same, the face, the posture, the half smile.

He read the names printed along the bottom. She was in the second row, third from left: L. Decter. He flipped the pages back to the early section of the senior portraits and found her: Liana Decter. She wore a black, scoop-necked dress and a string of pearls. He stared at the picture for a long time, her eyes staring back at him. They told him nothing new.

He closed the book but kept it on his lap. Ever since Denise had ushered him into the office, he hadn’t heard any activity at all in the hallway. He made his mind up. Leaving the yearbook behind and casually walking out of Chalfant’s office, George passed through the reception area when Denise had her back turned and a file cabinet was open. He swung through the glass doors and into the warm gusty day.

There were six Decters listed in the Chinkapin area. He started with the first and dialed the number, deciding to simply ask for Liana, no matter who answered. Two of the numbers rang and rang—no answer, no machine—and one produced an unpromising message. Twice he was told that he had the wrong number. But on the final try a man’s voice, in response to his question, said, “Who’s asking?”

“I’m a friend of hers, sir.”

“You gonna tell me your name, or do you want me to guess?” The voice was old and wavery, with a thick, phlegmy sound to it.

“My name’s George Foss.”

“All right, George. I’ll let her know you called. Can’t promise you she’ll call back, but that’s your goddamn problem.”

“Thank you, sir.” George rarely referred to anyone as a “sir,” but he realized he’d taken up the habit since arriving in Florida. “Can I give you my number?”

“What, she don’t have it already?”

“No, sir.”

“Then fuck you, boy. You think I’m my daughter’s dating service?” He hung up.

George looked down at the phone book, spread open across his thighs. His index finger, white at the tip, was pressed against the number he’d just called. There was also an address.

K. Decter lived on Eighth Street, and after driving for half an hour, George found it. It was in one of the more run-down sections he’d seen so far. Boxy houses with paved-over yards, most with two or three junky cars in front of them. A drainage ditch filled with greenish water lined the road instead of a sidewalk. Behind the houses ran a fence, and behind the fence was a stagnant-looking artificial lake. Even the palms along the street seemed old and tired. Yellowed fronds littered the ground.

George drove slowly, looking for number 401. He had to turn around once but found the place, not because it was marked, but because the house next to it—397—was. The house at 401 was sided in faded vinyl. Parked in its carport was a battered-looking pickup. In the small patch of dirt was an oak tree, dripping with dirty gray beards of Spanish moss. George, assuming that only the father was at home, decided to watch the house. He pulled his car onto the side of the road under the oak, hoping its shade would keep the car both cooler and less conspicuous.

After half an hour, George realized it did neither. The inside of the Buick heated up like an attic in July, and the few cars that had passed him had all slowed down, their inhabitants craning their necks to get a better look at their neighborhood’s intruder, the perv in the paneled car. He realized it was only a matter of time before one of them stopped or someone emerged from a nearby house to ask him just what the fuck he thought he was doing.

Those worries competed with a riot of thoughts. His proximity to the home of Liana Decter—also known as Audrey Beck—was conjuring a whole reassessment of her character, her upbringing. He wondered if she had taken the opportunity to switch identities with Audrey as a way to escape some calamitous fate on this very street. And what had been her long-term plan? Could she have gone on being Audrey Beck indefinitely? Maybe she could have at Mather College, all those miles and states and realities away, but eventually the truth would have come out. And in fact it had. Audrey’s death had ensured that. George grappled with all he had learned in the past twenty-four hours while also trying to work out the logistics of what exactly he was doing, staked out in a car. It was Liana he was hoping to see, emerging from her home or returning to it. He wanted to get to her first, to hear her side of the story, to warn her of what was coming, to tell her that the police were aware that Audrey Beck had never been to college.

A car pulled up across the street, some sort of unidentifiable muscle car bubbling black exhaust smoke. George slid in his seat, an unlit cigarette between his lips.

The car door swung open, and a gangly, denim-clad man unfolded himself from it. He looked to be in his late twenties, with long black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail and a face that, from a distance, looked pale and small-featured. He was wearing Ray-Bans.

George watched him cross the street with a long, swinging gait and idle up to the Decter residence. Because of the position of the Buick, under and slightly behind the oak, there was no clear sight line to the front door, but after two minutes the man reemerged into view and casually strolled toward George in his car. Before he arrived, George quickly lit his cigarette, the filter of which had become wet between his lips.

The man placed one hand on the roof of the car, the other on the window frame, then dropped down a considerable distance to place his plate-size face almost into the car. His eyes, an almost pretty blue, scanned the interior of the vehicle. George wanted to speak first but could not think of what to say.

“How ya doing?” the man said, his voice casual, friendly enough to be on radio. George noticed that he had a pencil-thin mustache right over his colorless lip. He had high cheekbones for a man.

“Not bad.”

“I won’t ask ya what you’re doing out here because I know. Liana told me all about you. She said you were a good kid from a good family.”

“I just want to see her.”

“Oh, I know you do. That’s totally understandable. I think, under different circumstances, she would want to see you too. But you have to understand that right now is not a good time. She told me to ask you to leave town and go back to college.”

In what he hoped was a reasonable tone of voice, George said, “So what will happen to me if I don’t go back to college?”

There must have been some calculable time that it took for the man with the ponytail to move his hand from the roof of the car to the base of George’s throat, but George could never have measured it. One second he was finishing his question, and the next he was struggling for breath, the man’s large-knuckled hand simultaneously constricting his throat and pushing him back against the headrest.

“It looks like someone already hit you recently, so you’re probably thinking that taking a punch isn’t so bad. Let’s see what we got here. . . .” The man explored George’s face with his free hand, turning it delicately one way and then the next, like a plastic surgeon examining a woman with crow’s feet. “This must’ve hurt when you took one in the nose.” The man pressed against George’s tender nose with a thumb as wide and flat as a coffee spoon. George reflexively lifted an arm to protect himself.

“Don’t fucking move.” The man squeezed tighter around George’s throat and pressed harder with his thumb against his nose. Fresh blood trickled down George’s upper lip and into his mouth, and he could hear the sound of cartilage grinding together. “If I hit you in the nose, you wouldn’t be up and about the next day. It would be permanent damage. You’d have nothing left but a flap of skin in the middle of your face. You understand what I’m saying to you?” The man moved George’s head up and down like he was a ventriloquist with a dummy. “Good.” A car drove slowly by but didn’t stop. The ponytailed man was unfazed.

“All right, George, I’m going to take off now, and I suggest you do the same. If you see me again, it means that you are about to endure some terrible pain, so you better hope you don’t ever see me again.”

The man released George’s face and stood. George wiped the fresh tears away from his cheek and took a deep, painful breath. He knew he was going to cry at some point, not just tears but sobs and snot, but he thought he could hold off until the man was out of sight. Outside of the car, the man adjusted his tight black jeans—they were topped by an enormous belt buckle with the Jack Daniels logo. Then he strolled, as casually as he had arrived, back to his low, dark car, folded himself into it, and drove away.

Back at the motel, George did cry, but not as long and hard as he thought he would. The worst had passed—the terrible fear that the man with the ponytail was going to really, truly hurt him.
Permanent damage
, he had said, and the phrase had stuck in George’s head.

It was time to leave Florida. He would take a bus back to college, and from there he’d call Detective Chalfant, tell him everything he knew, let him sort it out. Liana was in some kind of trouble that was too much for him to deal with.

The phone rang, and he almost didn’t answer it.

“Hi, George,” she said.

Chapter 16

G
eorge stood in the bathroom of the coffee shop, the nausea passing but the panic still there. He needed to decide what to tell Donald Jenks and Karin Boyd. He owed it to them to tell them everything, but still wanted to be careful. Not to protect Liana, but to protect himself. In his interview with the police, he hadn’t mentioned meeting the other Donnie Jenks, or going to the house in New Essex, or even knowing Jane Byrne’s real name. But at that time he also hadn’t known the extent to which he had been conned and used by Liana; he hadn’t known that his participation had led to a murder. It had been a brilliant and simple plan. How do you get someone to open a safe? You give him something that will cause him to open it and then just wait and watch. George was the perfect actor for the situation because he didn’t know he was acting. Just a good guy trying to do the right thing. Return money to its owner. Keep a woman from being terrorized. Return the world to order. And while he was doing his part, someone—probably the man who pretended to be Donnie Jenks—was waiting upstairs by the safe, holding a hammer. How did he get in there? Had he arrived with the gardeners?

There was still some part of George that wanted to believe that Liana was innocent, that she was not behind the robbery and the murder. He wanted to believe this not because he thought she wasn’t capable of such crimes, but because he hoped she wasn’t capable of using him for those purposes. Just as George had always stayed a little bit in love with Liana, he hoped that she had always stayed a little bit in love with him. But protecting Liana was not enough of a reason for not going to the police with everything he knew. If she was innocent, then she would be in danger as well.

No, what was really stopping George from telling everything he knew immediately to Karin Boyd and DJ, as well as to the police, was that Irene had been approached by the fake Donnie the night before. It had been a warning, specifically for him, that his actions affected not just his welfare but hers as well. But why? Surely, after killing MacLean and taking the diamonds, all that was left to do was to meet up with Liana and skip town. Neither of them could be traced. He knew Liana’s real name, but she hadn’t used it for years, and he had no idea who her accomplice really was. So why had they threatened Irene? And how had they even known who Irene was and how to find her? George suddenly realized that whatever had occurred over the weekend must have been planned far in advance.

He returned to the table more composed and with a plan for what he was going to say. Karin and DJ were talking to each other in low voices but stopped when he pulled his chair back and sat down.

“You okay?” Karin asked.

“I’ve been better. Until right now, I don’t think I realized exactly how planned out everything was. It’s a little bit of a shock to find out that I unwittingly assisted in a murder.”

DJ’s eyes brightened, and his thin mustache twitched a little under his nose. “You want to tell us everything that happened?”

“I will,” George said. “Everything. But I can’t do it right now. I need a few hours to straighten a couple of things out.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” DJ said, sounding like a professor being asked for an extension on a paper.

“It’s the best I can do. Trust me, when I tell you all I know, you’ll be disappointed. I don’t know where Jane is, or where the diamonds are. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re long gone from here. But I’m going to have to call you later.”

DJ suddenly looked resigned, but Karin was turning red, the flush from her chest spreading up her neck. She twisted a ring on her finger. “If you know something, you have to tell us,” she said, looking back and forth between George and DJ. “Right? We’ll call the police. You’re withholding information in a murder investigation.”

“Karin, it’s okay,” DJ said, holding out his soft-looking hand. Karin’s voice had escalated in volume, and the barista behind the counter had looked up.

“I’ll tell the police everything I know too,” George said. “I just need a couple of hours. I promise.”

“We can’t let him go,” Karin said.

“It’s okay. We don’t have a choice. Mr. Foss, you’ll call me?”

“I will.”

“You understand I’ll have to let the investigating officers know that you have information you are withholding.”

“I understand.”

Karin’s cell phone was ringing in her purse. As George stood she spoke quickly into it, informing whoever was calling her that she’d phone right back.

“You have my card,” DJ said, and George touched his shirt-front pocket, where he had put it.

“I’ll call you,” he said and turned and left.

George walked, fatigued and sweaty, down the alley that led to his back stairs. He fully expected someone to be waiting in front of his entrance. Liana with tears rolling dramatically down her cheeks, or the fake Donnie Jenks wielding a hammer, or a team of detectives with search warrants and questions. But there was no one there, and no one in his apartment either. Just Nora, asleep on a shirt he’d left on the floor. He picked her up, cradling her in his arms. She purred, happy that it was just George back in the apartment. He agreed with her, wondering suddenly how he had ever disparaged his uneventful life.

He put Nora down and turned the window air conditioner to high in his bedroom. One advantage of his ancient unit was that it made so much noise that he would never hear his phone or someone knocking at his door. He stripped out of his clothes and crawled under the bunched sheets of his bed, expecting to still smell Liana but somehow he couldn’t. She’d faded already. Or maybe this had all been a feverish dream. It was his last rational thought before falling into a deep, empty sleep.

H
e woke in the early evening with that fuzzy unreal feeling that comes from sleeping through an afternoon. The air conditioner, rattling at a symphonic pitch, had chilled the room to midwinter temperatures. His skin was sticky where the sweat had dried, his mouth still had the bitter taste of coffee, and his teeth were furred. Lying still, he looked at the diminished light that struck his ceiling and tried to guess the time, when all he had to do was turn his head to look at his bedside clock.

Beneath the air conditioner’s hum, he could hear the faint rhythms of a frantic scratching, Nora protesting at his locked door. It must be her dinnertime, probably six.

He closed his eyes again and felt the heavy blanket of sleep descend. Maybe he’d just sleep through till morning. What day was today? Did he have work tomorrow? As soon as those thoughts entered his consciousness, other thoughts did as well. He remembered his promise to Karin Boyd and Donald Jenks that he would tell them what he knew. He remembered what he had decided about Irene, how she needed to know everything that was going on. His eyes opened again, and this time he turned to look at the clock. It was just past seven.

He fed Nora, then checked his answering machine. He remembered hearing the distant sounds of a phone ringing somewhere in his deep afternoon sleep, but there was no message. Maybe he’d dreamt it. He showered and dressed, then went to his tiny alcove of a kitchen to search for food. He toasted an English muffin, ate it dry with a glass of milk. The shower and food, instead of reviving him, made him even more tired. He longed to lie down on his couch, see if there was a baseball game on, or an old movie, but he had woken with a plan and he needed to follow through.

I
rene lived just over the river in Cambridge. She owned a loft-style condo in a three-story brick building that had once been a shoe factory. It had been converted to airy, eco-friendly lofts in the 1990s, right before the real estate boom in the greater Boston area. At the time, Irene had paid what seemed an outrageous price for her 1,200 square feet, but it now seemed an incredible bargain. The purchase of her loft had precipitated the first of many minor crises in George and Irene’s early relationship. They’d been together just under two years, both living in cruddy postcollege apartments, when she’d mentioned the possibility of purchasing a condo and asked him if he’d want to go in on it with her. They’d visited the empty space together with a big-haired real estate agent who treated them like they were a young married couple as she pointed out the reclaimed timber, the stainless steel, the built-in skylights. All George had seen was a mortgage he couldn’t afford at the time and a space with no interior doors, a grown-up’s apartment where he and Irene would be spending every waking minute in each other’s company. Over beers in Allston that evening, he told her it was too much, too fast. She’d been disappointed but determined to purchase the condo on her own. It was the first of many small detonations that year that eroded their relationship.

He parked a couple of blocks from Irene’s building. There had been no need to call first; it was a Monday evening, and he knew that Irene would be home for the night. She was a believer in routine, and one of those routines was never going out on a Monday evening, which was reserved for simple dinners and imported English dramas on public television. He walked through Irene’s dense neighborhood, the narrow streets crammed with triple-deckers. The converted factory she lived in took up nearly half a block on its own; it was like a yacht moored among a hundred sailboats. The stairwell to her top-floor condo was reached by walking through an open-air central archway, then gaining entry through a locked door. George pressed the button adjacent to her name (
I. DIMAS
) on the burnished metal panel next to the heavy door. As he waited he looked up through the fire escapes at the darkening sky. Despite the lingering heat, summer was nearing its end and the days were getting shorter. “Hello?” came her hollow voice through the intercom.

She met him at her door wearing short pajama bottoms and a faded Red Sox jersey; he knew without looking that it had Tim Wakefield’s name and number on the back. Her hair was held back with a cloth headband, and her face was shiny, as though she’d recently washed it and put on some sort of overnight moisturizing agent. She’d applied a fresh bandage to the side of her face where Donnie Jenks had punched her, and even just since he’d seen her that morning the skin around the bandage had puffed and yellowed.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Sorry for dropping by, but I need to talk with you. Can I come in?”

The inside of her loft was darker than outside, and before they sat together on her sofa she turned on a tall lamp. It cast a pool of soft light in an irregular circle. Despite the cold geometry of Irene’s spacious loft, she’d designed it beautifully so that pockets of it were as cozy as small warm rooms. George didn’t spend a whole lot of time at Irene’s place—it was a constant reminder of their failure as a couple, a museum exhibit that demonstrated his absence, his inability to commit. He didn’t believe Irene thought that way about the place that had been her home for over a decade, but when he came there it was impossible not to think that it might have been his home as well.

He turned down a drink, settling onto one end of Irene’s enormous couch. She sat across from him.

“Remember on Friday night when I talked about that woman at Jack Crow’s?” he began.

Irene nodded.

“She
was
that girl I’d told you about from college. Liana Decter.”

“I thought she might’ve been. You were a little too spooked to see her. Did you go back and see her? Is that why you told me you weren’t feeling well?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ve spent the weekend with her, I take it?”

“I did, but that’s not why I’m here. It’s a bigger story than that, and it has to do with what happened to you on Sunday night.”

He told her everything, exactly as it had happened. Irene barely spoke through the whole tale until he got to the part about Gerry MacLean, and she mentioned that she’d just been reading about the suspected murder in that day’s
Globe.

When he’d finished, she said, “Georgie, Jesus,” and wiped at an eye with the corner of her jersey.

“You’re upset?”

“No, I’m scared. For you. What the fuck were you thinking? She killed people.”

“I know. I’m scared too. You can’t imagine what it was like to have you tell me your story about being punched, knowing the whole time that it was my fault and feeling like I couldn’t tell you that.”

“I don’t know why you thought you couldn’t tell me. I’m a big girl. I would’ve handled it, and it would have saved you having to make this trip.”

“I know. I’m sorry about everything. It’s been a confusing day, and I’ve just now figured out what I need to do.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to tell the whole story to the police, and to MacLean’s detective, and to anyone else who wants to know. I’m not going to protect Liana or her identity. Right now I feel like I owe her nothing. And that’s why I came here first, to you. I needed you to hear the whole story, and another thing . . . I think you should leave Boston for a while.”

“What do you mean?”

“For whatever reason, on the night that Donnie Jenks took the diamonds from MacLean’s safe, he went and visited you, showed that he could hurt you, and left his name. He knew I would hear about it, so it was a direct message to me. To do what, I don’t know, but it was probably a message telling me to keep my mouth shut. I can’t think of what else it could be. So now that I’ve decided to not keep my mouth shut, you need to leave town, go visit Alex in San Francisco or something. I’d feel much better.”

“I have work. I have a meeting first thing tomorrow.”

“This is non-negotiable.”

She laughed. “Are you serious? What does that even mean?”

“It means that my stupidity has put you in danger, and that you’ve already been hurt”—he gestured vaguely in the direction of her beat-up face—“and I need you to do me this one small favor so that I don’t have to worry about you anymore. I’ll pay for your trip.”

“It’s not the money. . . .”

“I know that. It’s just . . . I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to you. If I’m overreacting, then that’s the reason.”

Irene’s mouth pursed. He knew she was gently biting the inside of her lip, thinking about what he’d told her. Her eyelids, usually darkly made-up, always looked vulnerable when they were scrubbed free of makeup. She sighed, shifted on the couch, moving her right leg up onto the cushion. Her cotton pajama bottoms stretched thinly across her dimpled thigh. George turned his eyes away; he knew she was self-conscious about the thickening of her legs. She pulled her other leg up onto the couch, pressed them both together. George was suddenly flushed with an almost unbearable desire for her, a feeling he knew had more to do with comfort and safety than sex.