The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (21 page)

“What for?” she’d asked.

“Believing my story. Not arresting me. Not looking at me the way the other policemen . . . policewomen . . . do.”

“I’m not doing you any favors. Truth is, I actually believe your story.”

“But you keep bringing me back here.”

“I’m hoping you remember something new. There are lots of questions still.”

“You haven’t found the diamonds yet, have you?”

“Nope.”

George lit a cigarette, having resumed the habit since regaining land. He took a deep, lung-expanding hit, then exhaled away from Detective James, but the evening wind picked up the smoke and sent it into her face. He apologized.

“No worries. Smells good. I’m one of those ex-smokers who still likes vicarious smoke. I even miss it in bars.”

“Sometimes I think you’re my perfect woman, detective.”

She laughed, explosively. “That’s not something I hear every day.”

“You’re just hanging out with the wrong people.”

“Tell me about it.”

He took another long drag on his cigarette. “You think you’ll need me here again?”

“Probably. I’m still not convinced that you’ve remembered everything you can.”

“It’s because I’m trying to forget everything I can.”

“I have a suggestion for you,” she said as she rubbed the back of her neck, then straightened the collar of her shirt. She wore no nail polish. In fact, except for maybe rouge, George didn’t think Roberta James wore any makeup at all.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I think you should try to write everything down.”

“I thought that’s what you guys were doing.”

“I think there’s more you could write. Write down every little detail of what happened. Try and describe things. I’m still convinced we’re missing something. It could help us sort out what happened, but I was also thinking it might help you . . . in processing things.”

“You think I’m fucked up.”

“No, but I think a pretty fucked-up thing happened to you. It can’t hurt to write things out. I wouldn’t suggest it if I didn’t think it was something you should do.”

Taking the suggestion, he had found an old blank notebook stashed on his bookshelf and begun to write, in his cramped, nearly illegible script, the events that had transpired. He wasn’t writing things down in chronological order. He would just think of something that happened and try to describe it. It wasn’t pleasant, but it did pass the time.

Lately he was focusing on his attempted escape from Bernie MacDonald at Katie Aller’s house. He described the interior of the house, the look of the laundry room where Katie’s body had been stashed. He tried to remember his thoughts and questions at the time.
How did Bernie know we’re here? Did he follow us in the Dodge, and if so, why has he waited so long to approach us with the tranquilizer gun? Why hasn’t he been worried that we might call the police from our cell phones in the house?

He wrote about his decision to make a run for it out the front of the house, and about the way Karin Boyd looked as he passed her in the hall. The gray of her skin, and the awkward, slumped position of her body. She must already have been dead, or dying, the tranquilizer dose too much for her body size. Then he wrote about seeing Liana in the backseat of the Dodge, how she had been sprawled unconscious. He remembered knowing that she was alive because . . . because of the flickering of her eyelids. It was something that he had been returning to again and again, that slight movement he had witnessed. Had he seen an involuntary twitch or had he seen Liana quickly shutting her eyes when she realized that someone was passing by the car? At the time he remembered thinking that it was involuntary, that she had been knocked out, or tranquilized as well, and that her lids had twitched. Why was he now convincing himself that Liana had been fully conscious in the backseat of the Dodge, pretending to be otherwise?

Was it because it fit with what he kept thinking? That Liana and Bernie had been working together from the very beginning and that everything, including the trip on the boat out to sea, had been orchestrated?

And if that was the case, then why were they both dead and he was still alive? How had Liana allowed Bernie to dump her overboard? Why was Bernie so convinced that the gun from the tackle box wasn’t loaded?

All he knew was that it was helping to write everything down. The more details he recorded the clearer it became to him what had actually transpired over that long weekend. He felt he was getting closer to the truth.

He flipped to the back of the journal, where he had begun sketching. He had drawn several pictures of the boat, trying to remember everything that was on it. This time he drew a sketch from above, showing the positions of the four bodies, two alive and two dead. He stared at it till his focus went blurry, only turning away when he heard the sound of church bells in the distance telling him it was noon.

He got up and went to the kitchen, where he poured the rest of the coffee from its pot into his mug. This time he did add a slug of bourbon.

Chapter 26

T
he police arrived the following morning, a Wednesday, just after nine o’clock. George had begun to brew a pot of coffee and was considering what to do with the long day ahead of him.

There were three loud raps on his door, followed by the shouted words: “Police. Open up.” A male voice. George, fully expecting to be arrested, opened his door and was greeted by O’Clair, accompanied by two uniformed officers. “George Foss. Detective John O’Clair of the Boston Police Department. I have a search warrant for these premises.” He held up two folded pieces of paper. He looked like he’d won big on a scratch ticket and was holding it in the air.

George sat on the couch, drinking coffee, reading his copy of the warrant, while the two uniformed police officers worked their way from the kitchen area through the living room and toward the bedroom. Nora, interested, followed them, zigzagging between their legs and staring into the opened cabinets. O’Clair didn’t take part in the search but stood in the living room, in his shiny gray suit, bouncing on the balls of his feet and occasionally checking his cell phone. “Where’s Detective James?” George asked.

“Oh, she’s apprised of the situation.”

“What are you looking for exactly?”

O’Clair didn’t respond.

George thought of the money that Liana had given him that he had yet to mention to the cops. He had moved the cash to the basement of the building, wrapping it in a rag and tucking it underneath a dryer unit. He had wondered at the time if he was being overcautious, but now he was very glad that he wouldn’t have to explain ten thousand in cash to the Boston PD.

“Detective, we found something,” one of the uniforms said from the bedroom.

O’Clair, doing nothing to suppress the pleased look on his face, told George to stay where he was and entered the bedroom. George racked his brain, trying to imagine what they might have found that would implicate him in any further way. He wished he’d made his bed and picked up the pile of dirty clothes that had accumulated in a corner. Flashes of light came from the bedroom, photos being taken. George stood, just as O’Clair emerged from the room, accompanied by one of the uniformed cops, a short Hispanic woman with Frida Kahlo eyebrows. She wore white rubber gloves and held out an unfolded piece of white paper on top of which were two small rocks, one with a greenish tint, the other pink.

“Can you identify these?” O’Clair asked.

“I’ve never seen them before. Where did you find them?” Even though they looked like rocks, George knew they must be diamonds. The back of his neck prickled.

“We’ll be impounding these as evidence. You’re going to have to come with us to the station.”

G
eorge waited in one of the interrogation rooms. He’d been there alone for over an hour after telling O’Clair that he was waiving his right to have a lawyer present. George wondered if he’d now been in every interrogation room in the Boston Police Department. This one actually had a window, covered with bars. George could make out the Zakim Bridge and, in the distance, the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown. The sky was a washed-out blue, or maybe it was the grimy window that made it look that way.

“Hi, George.”

He turned at the familiar voice, happy to see Detective James. She wore a black suit over a silky white shirt, the collars spread out over the lapels of the suit. If George did eventually get arrested, he was hoping she would be the one who cuffed him and not O’Clair, who would undoubtedly have a smug look on his face.

“Detective,” George said.

“My partner informed me you’re waiving your right to have a lawyer present. Is that still the case?”

George told her it was.

“Okay. Have a seat. I need to let you know that this conversation is being recorded.” She indicated the small camera in the corner of the room. George nodded.

After identifying herself, then George, then the time and the location of the interrogation, James said, “Do you want to tell us about the diamonds we found?”

“I’d never seen them before.”

“Then how do you think they got into your clothes drawer?”

“Are they MacLean’s diamonds?”

“I don’t know. You tell us.”

“I don’t know either. But I think it would be a pretty big coincidence if they weren’t.”

“So how did they get into your drawer?”

“Liana Decter put them there. On the day MacLean was murdered, the night that she spent in my apartment.”

“And you didn’t know about this at the time?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And why would she do that and not let you know about it?”

“I can think of two reasons. One, she was thanking me for my help in ripping off MacLean. Not that I knew I was helping her.”

“And what would be the other reason?”

“She was framing me.”

“And why would she do that?”

“Do you have a while?”

Detective James smiled. “I have all day. And I would love to hear why Liana Decter would frame you.”

“She would frame me because I’m the only one who knows that she’s alive and if I’m in jail I can’t come after her.”

“Previously, you told us that you witnessed Liana Decter being killed by Bernie MacDonald.”

“I’d like to change my story.”

“So you didn’t see her strapped to a cement block and thrown into the ocean?”

“No, I’m saying that I saw that happen, and I still think she’s alive.”

“How would that be possible?”

“I’m not sure exactly how she did it, but in my gut I don’t think she drowned that day.”

James stretched her neck one way, then the other, like she was preparing for a boxing match. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

“You sure?”

“As I said, I have all day.”

“Okay,” George began. The words came easily. He’d been rehearsing this speech in his head for the past several days. “For lack of a better starting point, I’m going to say that this all started down in Barbados. We know for a fact that Liana, or Jane Byrne, as she was going by, was working at the Cockle Bay Resort, and that’s where she met Gerry MacLean. She knew he was rich, and she knew he was corrupt, meaning that he probably had cash assets. He was a mark, and she conned him. She knew what his two wives looked like. She copied their look and seduced him, won him over enough so that he brought her up to Atlanta to be his mistress. Gave her a job—or she asked for one—and that gave her access to his business records. Then, one way or another, she discovered that he had converted a lot of his cash into diamonds and that they were in a safe up here in Massachusetts.

“So how do you break into a safe? She came up with a perfect plan. She’d steal money from him, which was easy because he regularly sent cash down to the islands and she had access to it. She’d take one of these shipments for herself and skip town. He’d be upset, but she knew, because of the nature of the shipments, that he wouldn’t contact the police. She probably knew that he’d sic his regular investigator, Donnie Jenks, on her. Then all she would need to do would be to contrive a way to return the stash to him up here in Boston. And when someone brings cash to your house—a lot of cash—what do you do? You open your safe and put the money in there. That’s what she was counting on.

“She needed some help, so she recruited a local bartender in Atlanta by the name of Bernie MacDonald. And then she recruited Katie Aller, or contacted her at least. Katie was someone she knew from working at one of the resorts in the Caribbean. I’ve found out a lot about her. She was an only child, and both her parents were killed in a boating accident when Katie was eighteen. They were loaded, and it all went to her. They owned the land with the house and cottage on it in New Essex, plus they owned some property in Florida and Mexico. Her father had sold luxury yachts out of Fort Lauderdale. Katie was a drug addict, maybe because of Liana’s influence, and maybe not. When Liana knew that she and Bernie needed a place to stay in Boston, she got in touch with Katie. My guess is, she brought Katie up here with her, got her installed in her old home with enough drugs to keep her happy, and used the property. It turned out to be a perfect place to stage my meeting with Bernie, or as I knew him initially, Donnie Jenks.”

“Why did he pretend to be Donald Jenks? It seems pretty obvious that you would figure it out.”

“It didn’t matter if I figured it out eventually. She always knew that I would cotton on to the fact that I’d been used to get at MacLean’s diamonds. I figure that Donnie Jenks’s name was the easiest to use since he already worked for MacLean. Maybe I would try and check it out before agreeing to the money drop. I don’t really know, but I know that what Liana needed to do was to convince me to help out by bringing the money to MacLean. Liana wasn’t sure she could do that herself, so she figured, if I was introduced to Bernie and he seemed genuinely terrifying, then my protective instinct might kick in and I would agree to deliver the money to MacLean.”

“I understand why she needed Bernie and why she needed Katie, but why did she actually need you?”

“She didn’t really. At least not for the first part of the plan. She probably could have gone to MacLean’s house herself, or she could have even sent Katie to do it. The only reason she wanted me to deliver the money was to get me involved. She needed me to be a witness when she was dumped into the sea. Everything was leading up to that. Taking the money from MacLean was just the beginning. But she had a bigger plan. She not only wanted the diamonds, she wanted a completely clean getaway, a closed case in which she’d be dead.”

“So you think that you were meant to survive the day on the boat?”

“I do. Not only do I think I was meant to survive, I think Bernie knew I was supposed to survive as well. He was in on it. What Bernie didn’t know was that
he
was supposed to die.”

“Back up some. Why did Bernie threaten your friend . . . Irene, was it? Why did he threaten her, and why did he take that shot at you from the car?”

“It had to look as though Bernie had gotten paranoid, that he had gone a little crazy and wanted to either shut me up or kill everyone who was involved in the heist. And it was crucial that I know this story because I was the one who would be telling it. The basic story would be that Liana, instead of leaving town with Bernie immediately after the diamonds were stolen, wanted to see me one more time and this was what drove Bernie into his paranoiac rage. It was a stretch, I know, but I believed it for a while. I think Liana was playing on my vanity, assuming that I would choose to believe she would stay around an extra night to be with me.”

“You’re talking about Sunday night?”

“Right. After Bernie stole the diamonds, it would have made perfect sense for the two of them to get as far away as possible. Instead, Liana met me at the Kowloon, then came back to my apartment and spent the night. Before leaving, she planted two of the diamonds in my clothes drawer, hidden away where I wouldn’t immediately find them. She was cutting it very close, knowing that MacLean’s body would be found and the police would start looking for me. I think that she was willing to take that risk and that it was important to her plan to spend the night with me—to keep me hooked, to plant the diamonds, and also to provide a plausible motive for Bernie MacDonald to go off the reservation.

“Bernie pretending to freak out was crucial to the second part of the plan. The first was to get the diamonds from MacLean—which was easy enough, as it turned out—and the second was to fake her death and eliminate Bernie. Then all the diamonds would go to her and people would stop looking, because she would be dead. She
knew
she could pull off the first plan, and the second plan was just gravy. This part is crucial to understanding what happened, what I believe happened. Everything that happened after the robbery was like a quarterback taking a shot at the end zone. A Hail Mary at the end of the second half when your team already has the lead. Is this making any sense to you?”

“What is this football that you speak of? No, go on, I got it.”

“Okay. It was far too complicated for her to know that she could get away with it. It was a Hail Mary, but if it didn’t work out—if, for example, I instantly decided to turn her over to you guys, or if I was unable to kill Bernie on the boat—then she would still have the diamonds and she would still disappear. Thinking about it this way is the only way it makes sense.”

“So talk about what happened on the boat.”

“The way I see it is that Liana must have told Bernie that the plan was to keep me alive as a witness to her death. Why he went along with it, I don’t exactly know, but I assume he was at least partly under Liana’s spell and wanted to please her. She must have convinced him that she needed to disappear forever. So all along the idea was to get me onto the Allers’ boat, which was tied up by the cottage, and then take it out to sea. I made it relatively easy for them by showing up at Katie Aller’s house, although unfortunately I showed up with Karin Boyd and she became collateral damage.”

“What if you hadn’t come out to the house?”

“Then Bernie would have found some other way of kidnapping me. He was clearly following me. He followed me the night I went to visit Irene in Cambridge, the night he fired a shotgun at me and ran over the real Donald Jenks. He could have killed me then, but that wasn’t the plan. He was still play-acting. The real plan was to take me alive, and that’s why he had the tranquilizer rifle. Why else would he have such a thing?”

“We traced that gun, by the way, back to a zoo in Atlanta. It had been reported stolen. Seems Bernie might have had a friend who worked there.”

“Which goes to show that this plan was in effect for a while. The gun was a chance to take me alive, which was crucial. Karin was a wrinkle in the plan, but it only meant that Bernie had to take us both out. He’d mixed the tranq dart to knock a man of my size unconscious, but it was too much for Karin and she died from an overdose. Not that it would have made any difference since she would have been killed anyway.

“While this was happening, while Bernie had me cornered in Katie Aller’s house, Liana was waiting in the car. The way I see it now, she was fully conscious, lying on the backseat pretending to be knocked out, on the odd chance that I would race by the car and see her. Which I did. I was fairly convinced that I was looking at an unconscious woman, but I did see her eyes move, I’m sure of it. At the time I thought it was just a side effect, some sort of tic from being knocked out, but now I remember it differently. What I think I saw was Liana quickly closing her eyes when I appeared at the window of her car.”