The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (3 page)

Chapter 4

G
eorge got back to Boston a little before three. He considered stopping at a hospital on the way back but kept driving. The need to be home in his own neighborhood seemed greater than his need to deal with a potentially ruptured kidney. The nausea and dizziness had passed, but every time he turned the steering wheel to the left it felt as though a small rip in his side was getting larger. He instinctively touched his side to make sure his insides weren’t spilling out into the car.

He parked in his garage, tried to smile at Mauricio, the garage attendant, as he took the keys and asked how the Saab was running, then walked the long half block up the steeply inclined street to his building. His place was the minuscule converted attic of a luxurious town house, accessible by a stairwell, built onto the back of the brick building, at the end of a cobblestoned pedestrian walkway that was charming for three seasons of the year but smelled of urine and garbage for most of the summer.

Sitting on the bottom step of the back stairs, exactly where George had been sitting the previous night, was Liana. She looked pale and nervous, her knees clamped together, an elbow on each knee, her chin on a hand. Next to her was a small black purse, a perfect square of well-worn leather.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” George asked.

“Look, I’m sorry, I—”

“Fuck off, please. Go away,” George said and maneuvered around her.

“Look. I can explain. I tried to call you, but you’d left the bar. My friend came back with my car.”

“Why didn’t you stay there and wait for me? You knew I was coming to you.” George kept walking up the stairs gingerly, trying not to pass out.

“That’s what I need to talk with you about. There’s someone who’s after me, and I think he might have found out where I was.”

“His name’s not Donnie Jenks, is it?”

Liana took a large intake of breath. “Jesus. Was he there? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. I just . . .” He stopped and turned. Liana was looking back down the alleyway.

“Did he follow you here?” she asked.

It was a possibility that hadn’t crossed his mind. “I don’t know. Maybe. He left before me, but I guess that doesn’t mean anything. For all I know, he’s on his way here right now. You should probably leave.” He looked down at Liana, who seemed small and frail, her shoulders impossibly narrow.

“Did he hurt you? You’re hurt. I can tell.” She took two steps up toward George and put a hand on his arm. “What can I do?”

“I want you to leave here, that’s what you can do. I’ve been beat up three times in my life, and each time it was by someone you knew. Please just leave.” He continued up the stairs, and she followed him. George felt her presence behind him, and it made him want to lash out backward with a fist. The encounter with Donnie had shaken whatever courage George felt he had. He was suddenly grimly aware of his own cowardice and felt that after the shock wore off he was probably going to have a good long cry. He didn’t feel good about it, but he also felt lucky to be alive and longed to be back in his apartment alone.

His hand trembled as he put the key into the lock. Liana was right behind him now, her voice pleading. “George, I need a favor. I’m really sorry that I’m asking you, but you are the only one I can ask.”

He knew instinctively that turning around was the worst thing to do, but he turned anyway, looking in the general direction of her face, avoiding her eyes that shone wetly under the high sun. Her eyebrows were raised a fraction, her mouth set in a worried half frown. “It’s one favor, and it’s going to get rid of Donnie Jenks for good, and I promise that it won’t be dangerous for you.”

He looked at her hairline and felt the muscles in his face contract.

“Please,” she said, and the sound of her voice in the echo chamber of his stairwell reminded him so much of the girl she had been, eighteen and unsophisticated, when they had first met.

“If I let you in, and if I think for one moment that one of your friends is going to show up here, I’m calling the police.”

“That’s fine. They won’t come here.”

He went through the door and left it open behind him.

She followed, and George heard the oily click of the door latching shut. They both stepped into the apartment, George’s home for over ten years. It had slanted ceilings with heavy beams, and the architect who had converted the space had put in large skylights and a modern kitchen. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but George loved it regardless. He’d lined the largest walls with bookcases and bought a few good pieces of midcentury furniture, all of which had been shredded and scratched by Nora, his fifteen-year-old Maine coon cat.

“You always liked books,” Liana said, casting her eyes across the apartment.

George scratched Nora’s chin, then went into the bathroom, where he took four ibuprofens and swallowed them down with water directly from the tap. He exited the bathroom to find Liana standing in the middle of his living room, almost dreamily gazing up at the skylights.
Liana Decter is in my apartment,
he thought to himself.
She’s real again. She’s in my life.

“Can I get you something?”

“A glass of water. And, George, thank you for letting me in. I know that wasn’t easy for you.”

George got two waters, then sat in an upholstered chair while Liana perched on the edge of the low couch, her back rigid, her glass of water on the tile-topped coffee table. “I never would have let you go to that place if I’d thought that Donnie might find it. I hope you know that.”

“I don’t know anything.” George took a long sip of his water and wished he’d gotten himself a beer instead. He positioned his body in such a way that he felt the least pain.

“I owe you an explanation. I know that. I’ll tell you everything, but I want you to believe me when I tell you that I never intended for you to get hurt. Tell me about Donnie.”

George told her about the encounter, all the details, including how scared he had been and the information he had offered up.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Now you can tell me why he’s after you. You owe me that.”

She drank the remainder of her water, and George watched her pale throat move. In the clear light of George’s apartment, she looked more beautiful than she had the night before. She wore a navy blue pencil skirt with a wide leather belt; her tucked-in blouse had small black polka dots. Her legs, unlike her face, were tanned to a honey brown color. Her hair was pulled back by a clip, and her face looked freshly scrubbed and clean of makeup. The only sign of stress was a dark smudge under each eye. “Can I have more water?” she asked.

George rose. “Do you want a beer instead? I’m going to have one.”

“Sure,” she said, and George remembered that that was how they’d met. Over a beer. He almost said something, but stopped himself. If anyone was going to get sentimental first, it wasn’t going to be him.

He pulled two bottles of Newcastle from the fridge, popped their caps, and returned to the living room. He gave Liana her beer and sat back down. Nora scratched at the leg of his chair, then leapt up and into his lap, purring. She settled in and eyed the guest. She was a cat that had always been skeptical about other females.

Liana took a sip of her beer, licked the foam off her upper lip, leaned back a fraction on the couch. “Can I put my feet up?” she asked.

“Sure,” George said and watched as she leaned over to unstrap her sandals. Her blouse fell open, providing a brief glimpse of a pale breast cupped in a simple white bra. She straightened up, pulling her legs up onto the couch, her knees bent, her feet tucked up close to her bottom, and leaned against the arm of the couch. For George, it was like hearing a song he knew every note of but hadn’t heard for twenty years. This was the way Liana sat. He’d seen it a hundred times in her dormitory room that freshman year of college. How could something be so familiar and so forgotten at the same time? As though reading his mind, Liana said, “Like old times.”

“I guess,” George replied.

After another sip of her beer, Liana spoke. “Donnie Jenks has been hired to find me. He was hired by a man named Gerald MacLean. He owns a furniture business called MacLean’s, primarily in the South. He’s one of those guys who does his own commercials. But it’s all a front, at least I’m ninety percent sure it’s all a front. He has way too much cash coming and going. I know he operates offshore gambling sites, and I also know that he manages a fairly shady investor group. Anyway, he’s worth a lot of money. I was his personal assistant for about a year. In Atlanta, where his corporate headquarters are. I was also his girlfriend.”

“And he was married.”

“Was married, is married, but his wife is sick. She’s young, much younger than him, but she’ll probably die, if she hasn’t already. She has pancreatic cancer. She’s his second wife, and Gerry made it very clear to me that he wasn’t going to make me his third. It was a bit of a blow.”

“You expected to be?”

“Honestly, I didn’t. I just didn’t expect to be tossed aside so easily. I didn’t harbor illusions that we were some great love, but I also thought I was a little more than a paid mistress. Maybe it was just pride on my part. As you can imagine better than most, I haven’t exactly been living a legal life for the past twenty years. When I first met Gerry, all I saw was a rich old man. I wasn’t living in America then, and he gave me an opportunity to come back here and live. He didn’t ask for proof that I was who he thought I was, and he paid me under the table, and everything was basically copasetic.

“I learned a lot about his business, discovered that he was making the majority of his money operating as a feeder fund for an unregulated outfit in New York. He attracts investors from the Atlanta area and offers some ridiculous rate of return. The money’s funneled back to New York, and MacLean makes a commission on every sale. It’s an old-school Ponzi scheme, I’m sure of it. The marks think they’re investing in the gambling websites that are operated down in the Caribbean. I don’t know exactly how it all works, but some of it’s legitimate and some of it’s not. The gambling sites are real, but I don’t know how much money they make. I heard Gerry talking once with someone from New York, about how they needed new money or the house would crash. It’s all a pyramid, but it’s made MacLean rich. And there’s cash around, so I assume that very little of his profits are being reported. He paid me in cash. Obviously I was off the books. But he did get tired of me, and one night he got drunk and started crying about his wife, and that’s when he told me that as soon as his wife died he wanted me gone as well. Out of his company and out of his bed. Like I said, it was a blow.”

“So what did you do?”

Liana fingered the hem of her skirt. “I stole his money. It wasn’t particularly hard. He was always sending cash down to some bank in the islands. So all I did was wait for a particularly big cash shipment, and I took it. It was half a million dollars.”

“You thought you’d get away with it?” George asked.

“I didn’t think he wouldn’t notice, if that’s what you mean. I just thought he wouldn’t necessarily care. It seemed a small price to pay to give him what he already wanted—me out of his life. And I figured the money was not quite enough for him to cause a stink, but I guess I was wrong. I guess I pissed him off. He sent Donnie after me. I didn’t even know he knew people like that, although that was probably naïveté on my part.”

“How did you find out about Donnie?”

“After I took the money, I went to the middle of nowhere in Connecticut, found a motel that would take cash, and just laid low for a while. I have no idea how he found me. I was eating dinner at a casino one night, sitting at the bar, and he sat down two stools away from me, started making small talk. I thought he was just some creepy guy, but I let him buy me a drink, and then in the middle of our casual conversation he began calling me by name.”

“Jane, right?”

“That’s right. That’s been my name for a while actually. What do you think?”

“It fits you.”

“Plain Jane.”

“I was thinking more of Jane Doe.”

She twisted the bottle of beer in her hands. “Where was I? Oh, Donnie Jenks at Mohegan. After he used my name, he moved over and told me that he’d been hired to get the money back, and that he’d been given carte blanche to deal out any punishment he saw fit. He told me he’d decided to kill me, but he thought it would be more fun if he gave me a fighting chance. He kept smiling. It was all I could do not to wet my pants. I don’t scare easily, but he’s pretty scary.”

“He kept smiling at me too today.”

“His signature move, I guess.” She bit her lower lip. “Again, George, I’m sorry about that.”

“He didn’t try and shake your hand, did he?”

“He did actually. When he left the bar, he took my hand and kissed the back of it, said how glad he was to have met me and how we’d meet again real soon, and then he left.”

“What did you do?”

“I somehow got up enough courage to go back to my motel in my taxi and grab my stuff. He’d been there. Not that anything was disturbed, but I could tell. I’d been smart enough to not leave any money there, which was probably the reason I survived that particular night.”

“Where was the money?”

“It sounds hokey, I know, but I’d stashed it at a storage locker at the Hartford train station. Obviously, when Donnie searched my motel room and didn’t find the money, he decided to approach me at the bar, try and scare me into making a mistake. I realized he wasn’t going to kill me till he knew where the money was, but even knowing that, the five minutes it took for me to pack my bags and check out and get back to the taxi were the longest five minutes of my life. I was so sure he’d come out of the shadows and slit my throat. But he didn’t. The cabbie took me all the way to New Haven. I was sure I’d been followed. I walked into a downtown hotel, then walked out the delivery entrance and caught another cab. I did this enough times to finally feel like I must have shaken him. Then I got a bus to Hartford, got my money, and bought a car with cash. I hoisted a Delaware plate. I don’t know how he tracked me to Connecticut, and now I don’t really know how he tracked me here to Boston. It’s almost like he can smell me or something. I’m actually scared. And I’m tired.