The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (9 page)

The following morning, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and grits at Shoney’s, George walked across the already glaring asphalt to Dan’s Pre-Owned Automobile Emporium.

“What can I do for you this morning?” said a heavyset, pink-cheeked man wearing a tan suit.

Having internally rehearsed his approach over breakfast, George cleared his throat and said, “I’m in a predicament, and I was hoping you might be able to help me.”

A thin smile pressed itself onto the man’s lips, taking all the blood out of them. “All right, son, I’ll hear you out.” He wore a shiny purple tie that exactly matched the handkerchief that flopped out of a front suit pocket.

“I’m only eighteen, but I need a car for a couple of days. I’ll take any car you have and leave you my parents’ credit card. I’m a very good driver. And I can pay you in cash.”

The man laughed. “That’s a first.” He tilted his head back, exhaled sharply through nostrils that were filled with dark hair. “Tell you what. I’ll do you one better: my employee took his eleventh sick day of the year today, so I’m in a bind.” He spit out the word “employee” as though he were spitting out a piece of gristly steak. “I need to deliver papers and get two sets of signatures, and I need it by noon. If you do that for me, I’ll let you have free rein on one of my cars, provided it stays in Manatee County.”

“All right,” George said. “I don’t know my way around here, though.”

“Can you read a map, son?”

The car was a vinyl-wood-paneled Buick LeSabre with a steering wheel that pulled to the left. With a map and some written instructions from Dan Thompson, George drove past the cow pastures and subdevelopments of Sweetgum and over the Dahoon River into Chinkapin, a town that at least had what appeared to be a center—several five-story cinder-block buildings stuck in close proximity. He brought papers to an insurance broker whose office was between a pawnshop and a thrift store, and then to a couple in the Seavue Trailer Court for Residents 55 and Over who were purchasing a $575 Dodge for their grandson. Back in Sweetgum, he spotted a florist in a strip mall and bought a $10 bouquet of flowers that he was told would be appropriate for a funeral.

Driving back to the used-car lot with procured signatures in duplicate and fiddling with an air conditioner that made a lot of noise but produced no cold air, George imagined Thompson offering him full-time employment. He’d take it and become a world-class car salesman, the best in the county. He’d live in the motor court and eat every meal at Shoney’s, and every day he would deliver flowers to Audrey’s grave. His home in Massachusetts, his semester at Mather, would fade into memory as the days and years passed away. George grinned and lit a cigarette off the car lighter, blackly caked with the residue of a thousand lit cigarettes.

Thompson was with a customer, so George placed the paperwork on his desk, then drove the hundred yards to his motel room to change his damp shirt for the last clean item of clothing he had, a short-sleeved pin-striped Oxford.

He took his flowers, already wilting in the heat, and returned to the Buick. He’d studied the map and knew exactly how to get to Audrey’s parents’ house. He drove about two miles, then spotted the pair of painted coral pillars that welcomed visitors onto Deep Creek Road, a stretch of asphalt recently patched with squirrelly lines of a blacker tar. The houses on Deep Creek Road were mostly two-story dwellings with flowery yards; they looked as though one tiny, shuttered house had been dropped onto another, then painted some tropical color: pink, or aqua, or an occasional neon green.

Number 352 Deep Creek was aqua; its scrubby yard and roof-high palm tree looked like everyone else’s. But 352 had a police cruiser parked on its curb.

George pulled behind the cruiser and killed the engine. Walking toward the door, gripping the flowers, he tried hard not to focus on the two-car garage where Audrey spent her final minutes, breathing carbon monoxide.

The door was answered by a policeman in uniform. “You the kid from Mather?” he asked.

“I am.”

The policeman, who had blotchy skin and a wispy mustache and was probably less than five years older than George, jerked his head to the right. “Come in.”

George followed him into a living room that was located at the back of the house. An L-shaped couch and two leatherette recliners surrounded an entertainment center with a television the size of a large bureau. The closest recliner was occupied by a tall, skinny man wearing a denim shirt tucked into a pair of jeans. He had pocked skin and the kind of blond hair that was almost white. Mr. Beck. His wife, Audrey’s mother, was on the couch. She wore jeans as well, with a black silk blouse tucked into them. A roll of fat, pushed up by the too-tight jeans, was visible under her shirt. Her hair was blond as well, but looked like the color came from a bottle. She was drinking a glass of pink wine.

Next to her was an older man in a nice gray suit. He had silver hair cut short over a scalp that was rubber-ball red. His face looked like it had been punched flat, then squeezed back into normal proportions in a vise. George thought that he might be Audrey’s grandfather.

As he stepped into the room, passing the young skinny cop, George held the flowers toward Mrs. Beck, who regarded him with puffy eyes. “Mrs. Beck, I’m so sorry. These are for you.”

The man in the suit stood, hoisting himself upright by pushing his right hand against the armrest. He held a mug of coffee in his left. “This him, Robbie?” He was speaking to the uniformed cop.

“Yep.”

“You the boyfriend from Mather College?”

With the eyes of the room on him, George felt as though a gesture was needed: a speech about the love he felt for Audrey, or a burst of emotion. Instead, he nodded. Why were the police at the house?

“What’s your name?”

“George Foss.”

“Uh-huh. I’m Detective Chalfant. This is Officer Wilson. Have a seat. We have some questions.”

George sat on the edge of the available recliner. “I’m a little—” he began.

“Don’t worry about it,” said the plainclothes detective. “I’ll explain it all in just one minute. How’d you get down here, son?”

“I took the bus.”

“You didn’t take the bus all the way from Connecticut to Sweetgum.”

“I took the bus to Tampa, then I got a taxi to here, and then I borrowed a car. That’s how I got here today.”

“So you know some folks in this town? You’ve been here before?”

“No. Never,” George said. “I borrowed the car from Mr. Thompson at Dan’s Emporium. I did him some favors, and he let me borrow it. Am I in some kind of trouble?”

“Not at all, George. We’re just trying to find out everything we can about what might have happened with Audrey.”

George flicked his eyes toward the giant television, the top of which was clustered with framed photographs. Front and center was a picture of Audrey, what looked like a graduation photo. He realized he had never seen a photograph of Audrey before, and without asking, he stood and walked toward the television. As he neared the picture he realized it wasn’t Audrey after all, just a girl who looked a little bit like her, a girl with dark blond hair piled up high on top of her head. She was probably about eighteen and might have been pretty after washing off some of the green eye shadow. She had bunched-up lips and dark eyebrows.

George cast his eyes over the other photographs on top of the television. There were several school portraits of the same girl, but there were no photographs of Audrey.

“You can look, George.” It was Audrey’s mom.

George turned, confused. Detective Chalfant came up behind him and said quietly, “Can you identify that girl in the picture?”

“No. I’m sorry. Should I?”

“Are you sure?” The detective turned back and looked at the family. George’s mind raced. Had he come to the wrong house?

Mrs. Beck said, “Oh God,” then rocked forward a little and began talking to herself, saying something indiscernible. Mr. Beck stood up and walked across the room with three great strides, then stopped and turned.

“Goddammit,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” George said. “I’m confused. Who is this a picture of?”

“That’s Audrey Beck,” the detective said.

Chapter 11

A
nd what was her name?” Detective Roberta James asked, a ballpoint pen poised over her unfolded notebook.

She had accepted the offer of a seat and was settled on George’s couch. Her partner, O’Clair, had chosen to stand. He was still bouncing almost imperceptibly on the balls of his feet, glancing around George’s apartment as though looking for rodents.

George had bought some time after inviting them inside by going into his bedroom to pull on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. While he was there, he took the stack of money that Liana had left behind and tucked it toward the back of his sock drawer. His mind was still scrambled from lack of sleep, from the sudden disappearance of Liana, and from the news that MacLean had been murdered. It was all connected; he knew that much. Either he’d been set up or MacLean had been set up, and Liana had left in the early dawn because she knew that detectives would soon be arriving here, or at least she suspected. Still, as he slowly pulled the T-shirt over his head, he was wondering if, once the questions began, there was a way to protect her while at the same time protecting himself. He knew that he was being foolish, that the only logical move was to squarely face the two detectives and tell them everything he knew, but he couldn’t shake the image of Liana’s face, only hours earlier, a few inches away from his own in the colorless predawn light, her eyes damp, telling him that her biggest regret in life was having to let him go, having to let that one semester of normalcy go, and, George, despite knowing better, had believed her.

So after he’d told Detective James that he’d been to see MacLean to hand over money as a favor for a friend and she asked him for that friend’s name, he looked her in the eye and said:

“Audrey Beck. I knew her from my freshman year of college, but hadn’t seen her since.” It was a lie with some truth in it. They could check it. They probably would check it. And they’d find out that Audrey Beck was a dead girl from Sweetgum, Florida. But if George was questioned again, he could always claim that that was the name he remembered. He had known her for three months. Her name was Audrey. It was a long time ago.

“So help me get this straight,” Detective James said. “This Audrey Beck, whom you hadn’t seen in about twenty years, approaches you at a bar and asks you for a favor?”

“I recognized her at the bar, and I approached her. We made plans to meet the following day. She came to my place, here”—George had decided to leave out the situation with the two Donnie Jenkses and the cottage in New Essex—“and that’s when she asked me to do her this favor. She had worked for Gerry MacLean, and she had taken some money from him—”

“She’d stolen money from him?”

“That’s what she said. It was a complicated story, but she’d worked for him, and they’d been romantically involved, and I guess he dumped her. That’s why she took the money. But she’d had second thoughts and wanted to return it. That’s why she was in Boston.”

“How much money had she stolen?”

“About five hundred thousand dollars.”

Detective O’Clair turned in George’s direction and sniffed loudly. Detective James raised a single eyebrow. “That’s a lot of money,” she said. “Did you see it?”

“As I said, I brought it in a gym bag to MacLean. I looked at it briefly but didn’t count it. MacLean did.”

“And this . . . Audrey Beck . . . came up from
where
to deliver all this money?”

“I’m guessing she came up from Atlanta. That’s where MacLean’s company is located. I really didn’t get a whole lot of personal information from her.”

“Well, it sounds to me like you
did
get a whole lot of personal information.” The detective smiled, and it changed the contours of her face. Without the smile, her face was a downward-sloping mask, almost wooden in appearance. The wide smile lit up her golden brown eyes, and it had the immediate effect of making George feel bad that he was lying to her. She continued:

“She told you about her affair with a married man and that she was jilted and stole money from him. Why didn’t she simply drive out to MacLean’s house in Newton and drop the money off? Why did she need you to do it?”

“She said she was scared. She said he had hired someone to get the money back.”

“Did she tell you who that someone was?”

“She didn’t, but she seemed genuinely scared. I think she also didn’t want to face up to MacLean again.”

“The way you’re telling it, you didn’t seem to think it was at all strange that someone you hadn’t seen for twenty years shows up out of the blue and asks you to deliver stolen money for her?” She smiled again. It was her weapon of choice. O’Clair stopped bouncing on his feet for a moment and waited for George’s answer.

“Sure, I thought it was strange. It’s not the type of thing that happens to me every day.”

“But you agreed to do it.”

“It’s been a boring summer.”

Detective James made a throaty sound that could have been a cough and could have been a laugh. “Fair enough. Had you been involved, romantically, with Audrey Beck back when you first knew her?”

“Yes,” George said.

“Okay. So I wouldn’t be too far off in assuming that part of your willingness to perform this errand for someone you barely knew was that you hoped it might lead to more romantic entanglement? Or am I being too coy about this? Was it a quid pro quo?”

“What do you mean?” George asked.

“Audrey Beck spent the night here last night, didn’t she?”

George hesitated, just long enough that it would have made no sense to deny it. “She did.”

“I thought so. You have the look of a man who didn’t get too much sleep last night. You know, I think my partner and I might have actually seen Ms. Beck.” She looked up at O’Clair, who shrugged and frowned. “We had to drive around in a couple of circles to find your place this morning, and we passed a woman walking down toward Charles Street. She had a green dress on, dark hair about shoulder length?”

“That sounds like her.”

“I thought so. Didn’t look like the type of dress one wears early on a Monday morning. So we just missed her.” She made a frustrated clicking sound. “Did she tell you where she was going?”

“She left before I woke up. I was surprised she wasn’t here.”

“And what about my earlier question? Was it a deal? You return the money and she returns the favor? Or did she give you some of the money? I’m assuming that not all of it was returned.”

“No, that wasn’t it at all. There was no mention of sex. Obviously, the fact that she was an ex-girlfriend and that I was still attracted to her . . . it crossed my mind. Or maybe the better way to put it is that I was hoping.”

“You were hoping that by returning the money she would agree to sleep with you.”

“No, I was hoping to sleep with her, period. I returned the money as a favor.”

“Uh-huh.” She looked skeptically at her notebook. As far as George could tell, the only words she had written were Audrey Beck’s name. “So I’d like you to tell me about going to see MacLean. Ms. Boyd said you arrived at the house at a quarter to four in the afternoon.”

“Is Ms. Boyd the assistant who let me in?”

“Yes. Karin Boyd is also MacLean’s niece. She’s the one who found the body.”

“Where was he killed? What happened?”

“We’re trying to find out what happened. That’s why we’re here to ask you questions. So you arrived at quarter to four?”

“That sounds about right.”

“And how long were you there at his house?”

“If I had to guess, I would say I was there about forty-five minutes.”

Detective James glanced at her partner, then back at George. “That’s close enough to what Ms. Boyd said. Why were you there for that long? I thought you just had to pass over the money.”

George told them how MacLean had invited him in, how he’d been patted down, how he’d been left alone with MacLean, who told him his side of the story. He left out the part where MacLean had said that he suspected that Liana had set him up all along, that she had dyed her hair to look like his dead wife, and that she had pursued him from the start down in Barbados. But George did tell them that he had seemed to have a lot of anger toward Liana.

“And he kept the money?” the detective asked.

“Yes. Then he asked me to leave. He mentioned returning to his wife’s side. She’s sick.”

“They think she’ll die this afternoon. Apparently they’re not telling her what happened to her husband.”

“Oh.”

“What was your impression of MacLean? Did he seem scared at all?”

“Scared? No. He seemed irritated that he even had to be in the position of accepting his own money back, and he seemed sad about his wife. And I also thought that he seemed like he needed someone to talk with. I was surprised by how much he opened up to me. Can I ask you how he was killed? Was it shortly after I left?”

“Did you notice anyone else around the house? It was Ms. Boyd who let you in, right?”

“There was Ms. Boyd. And the man who patted me down. MacLean called him DJ, I think.”

“Donald Jenks. He works for Mr. MacLean. Are you sure those are the only people you saw at the house?”

George thought for a moment, pressing his fingertips against his closed eyes. A delayed hangover from all the rum and beer he’d drunk the night before was beginning to set in, and he was also acutely aware of just how much lying he was doing to the police officers. He had initially planned on telling the truth, except for Liana’s real name, and suddenly he had found himself omitting big details, like the fake Donnie Jenks. “There were gardeners,” he finally said.

“We know about them.”

“But they finished their job and left before I did.”

Detective James flipped backward through her notebook. “You sure of that?”

“Yes, I remember coming out of the house, and the van wasn’t there anymore.”

“The gardeners’ van?”

“Right.”

Detective James wrote in her notebook. George glanced at her partner, who was still standing, and wondered for a moment if he was a deaf-mute. George hadn’t heard him utter a word. “Do you mind if I get myself a glass of water?” he asked into the space between the two police officers.

Detective James told him he could.

“Can I get either of you anything? Water? Orange juice?”

Both declined, Detective James in words and Detective O’Clair with his Zen-like mastery of silence.

George walked unsteadily to his alcove kitchen and poured himself a tall glass of water. He drank it down, refilled it. Before he sat back down, Detective James said, “I just have a couple more questions. Can you tell us what the bag of money looked like, and how much
exactly
was in there?”

“I didn’t count it myself, but Audrey said it was four hundred and fifty-three thousand. As I said, MacLean counted it. It was in a black gym bag.”

“When you were alone in the car with this money driving out to MacLean’s house, you didn’t decide to take a look at it?”

“I know what money looks like.”

“Or take any of it for yourself?”

“I was trying to do my friend a favor, not get her into any more trouble.”

Detective James tilted her head to the side a fraction, as though trying to straighten out a kink in her neck. “Where do you work, George?”

He mentioned the name of the literary magazine, and recognition flickered across her face, as though maybe she’d heard of it sometime far away in the distant past.

“I don’t suppose you have contact information for Audrey Beck? An address? A cell-phone number?”

“No, I don’t.”

Detective James didn’t immediately speak, and George drank his water, willing himself to not chug it down. Nora had settled herself on a nearby windowsill next to a neglected spider plant.

“One last thing: do you know someone named Jane Byrne?”

George almost denied it, but caught himself just in time. Of course he would know that Jane Byrne was the name that Liana was going by. It was the only name MacLean would have known, and it was the name that the assistant/niece would have given to the police.

“That was the name MacLean knew her by. I guess she was using a different name when he worked with her.”

Detective James smiled and glanced at her partner. “You didn’t think to mention that to us?”

“Sorry. I knew her as Audrey Beck, and that’s how I think of her.”

“And you have a lot of friends who go around changing their names at a whim?”

“No, I don’t. Just Audrey. Look, to tell the truth, Audrey might not even be her real name. She was only at Mather College for half a year and never came back. I remember hearing that she got into some trouble down in Florida, that maybe she’d faked her way into college.” George didn’t know how far the detectives would check into the Audrey Beck/Liana Decter story, if at all, but he figured he should cover himself, if only a little. Obviously, if they decided to go so far as to read the original case reports, his name would come up, and they’d know he’d been lying. He’d deal with that if it happened.

“You’ll let us know if you see her again, or if you think of anything that might be helpful.”

“Of course,” he said.

Before standing up, Detective James slid a card out of her notebook and placed it on the coffee table. George walked both the detectives to the door. James had turned her back to him and was leaving when her partner said, “One more thing, Foss. Don’t leave town.” His voice was high and nasal, and hearing it for the first time almost made George jump.

“Oh,” he said. “Am I a suspect?”

“Yeah, you’re a fucking suspect,” Detective O’Clair said and smirked from one side of his face.