“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.
Chapter 12
George called his supervisor at the office to let her know he was running late, then showered and shaved. It seemed surreal to him that it was a workday, a Monday, when he was expected to be at his desk, despite his sudden status as a murder suspect.
It was even more surreal to him when he arrived at his office on the third floor of a converted factory building halfway between the Back Bay and the North End. Darlene, at the front desk, greeted him by uttering a prolonged “Ughhh, huh?” It took George a few perplexing seconds to realize that she was referring to the Red Sox, who had dropped three in a row since Friday.
“Good thing it’s a long season,” George said as he made his way toward his office.
“Thank God,” she said to his retreating back.
The magazine had been shedding jobs for several years but hadn’t yet relocated to a smaller office, probably because the landlord, scared of the downtrending market, kept lowering rents and offering incentives for the magazine to stay. For this reason, George’s long amble to his south-facing office, passing bare desks and empty meeting rooms, had become increasingly bleak. He had begun work at the magazine less than a year after graduating from Mather College. It was his second postgraduate job; he’d worked at a chain bookstore during the stint in San Francisco when he was living with Rachel, his senior-year girlfriend. That arrangement had lasted only six months, ending when George came home early from work and found Rachel in bed with one of the bartenders from their favorite neighborhood dive.
He’d moved home. His mother had never been a particularly happy woman, but over the years she had become more and more verbal about the disappointments of her life; she felt as though she’d given up a career in the arts for a life as a wife and mother, and now she was left with nothing but an empty nest and a near-silent workaholic husband. She’d joined a potters’ group, and George wondered if she was having an affair with one of its members. George’s father, unlike his mother, had become noticeably quieter in his later years. He still worked hard, coming home exhausted and red-faced on a nightly basis, settling into his predictable nightly routine of one large drink, dinner, then reading in his study. Despite his father’s quiet, unreachable nature, George felt more at ease with him than with his mother. His father was a man who seemed comfortable in his own shoes.
During George’s two-month stay, his father had told him, after a rare second scotch and water, that he believed the key to happiness was to find one job and do it as well as possible. He said that his own father had told him the same thing. Be a builder and learn to hit a nail straight and you will never lack for happiness. George’s father also confessed that he feared and dreaded his retirement years. It was the most revealing conversation George ever had with his father, an
d it was a conversation he thought of often, especially after his father had a massive heart attack and died at the age of sixty-five just a few years later.
While home, George scoured the newspapers for job listings, then applied for, and accepted, a position as an administrative assistant in the accounts department of Boston’s most prestigious publication. “You were always excellent with numbers,” his father opined. His mother was impressed with the magazine’s stature in the literary world.
George moved to the city and found an apartment, one floor of a cheap triple-decker in Charlestown, to share with a pair of acquaintances from Mather College. George excelled at his job and was taken under the wing of the magazine’s business manager, Arthur Skoot, a man who had never married and who was, at the time of George’s arrival, the most senior member of the magazine’s staff. Arthur showed George how to do everything, quickly promoted him, and took him out for long semi-boozy lunches. George found the job both satisfying—putting out a magazine on time and on budget was akin to hitting that nail as straight as possible—and also stimulating; he enjoyed the idea of being part of a grand literary and intellectual tradition, even if his job was just to balance the ledger sheets.
The magazine paid for George to take night classes, and in a few years he received his CPA degree. The bump in salary allowed him to move out of Charleston and into the rent-controlled attic apartment he still occupied. It was the first time he had lived alone, and he found that he loved it. He kept the apartment exactly as he wanted, book-lined and dust-free. He began to date Irene, an assistant editor who seemed in no rush to either move in with George or get engaged. And in this way, George swam merrily through his twenties and into his early thirties. Although he thought less and less about Liana, he still kept an eye out for her, catching himself scanning crowds for her face or her walk, and he still had powerful and disquieting erotic dreams in which she loomed large and inescapable.
About a year after Arthur’s forced retirement, George was promoted to business manager. It was during a tumultuous time at the magazine: The Internet was exploding, and ownership had recently changed. The staff was downsized, and the magazine’s bent shifted dramatically from the literary to the political. Short stories were jettisoned from the monthly issues and ghettoized into a summer fiction issue. Poetry was eliminated. A feeling of doom swept the office. Irene got a plum job in the website division of the Boston Globe, but George stayed put, knowing that as long as the magazine stayed in business he’d have a job. He always kept the nails straight. Plus, George knew that the new ownership group, overseer of many profitable enterprises, was happy for the magazine to take a monthly loss, which it did in a staggering way.
Now at his desk, George scanned his in-box for any looming emergencies, and when he didn’t find any, he went online to hunt for information about Gerald MacLean’s death. There wasn’t much, just a few stories reporting that MacLean had been found dead in his home in Newton and that the cause of death had not been disclosed. Anyone reading it would assume that the elderly MacLean had succumbed to a heart attack. One of the stories ran with a photograph, a corporate shot of MacLean in a light blue suit that was at least fifteen years old. The common description of MacLean, phrased almost identically in both stories, read, “Gerald MacLean, founder and president of MacLean’s Furniture, a wholesale outlet operation headquartered in Atlanta, had recently partnered with Paul Hull to form the Hull Foundation, a charitable organization devoted to cancer research. Mr. MacLean leaves behind a wife, Teresa MacLean née Rivera.”
No mention of murder. No mention of feeder funds and Ponzi schemes. No mention of offshore accounts. And no mention of gym bags full of cash.
George attempted to work. The magazine was hosting a summer conference—really more of a fund-raiser at which paying customers could come and hobnob with some of the magazine’s more famous writers—at a college in western Massachusetts. The college required that a certificate of insurance be added as a rider onto the magazine’s insurance for the duration of the conference, and George had become the go-between for a very fickle college administrator and a very lazy insurance agent. He began an email to the agent, explaining the exact phrasing that was needed in the certificate, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish it. His mind kept returning to the events of the weekend and how he might have fit into them. He could only assume that MacLean had been murdered for the money that had been returned. And if that was the case, then Liana would not have been involved in the murder. She’d had the money to start with; then she’d returned it. It was one mildly comforting thought.
Midmorning, George’s desk phone rang. It was Irene.
“Did you forget?” she asked.
“Apparently.”
“We’re supposed to be having lunch.”
“Right,” he said. George vaguely remembered making plans with Irene for a Monday lunch. “Where again?”
“That new place on Stuart Street. It’s got sort of a Mexican name.”
George waited for Irene outside the restaurant. The temperature had climbed back into the nineties, and no sign remained of the biblical deluge of rain that had pounded Boston the previous night. He read the menu framed outside the door. It was standard Tex-Mex mixed in with entrées such as pork belly tacos and cilantro margaritas. He felt starved all of a sudden; the hangover from the previous night of beers and bad Chinese food had been lurking at the edges of his consciousness all morning. He decided on the shredded-beef burrito and a large Diet Coke, maybe with some rum in it.
George spotted Irene from three blocks away. She was walking slowly and with her head down, her arms clamped tight to her sides. He’d joked with her that twenty years of Boston winters had permanently altered her physicality so that she always looked as though she were moving through subzero temperatures. She claimed that she always was cold, even in Boston’s humid summers, that the terrible winters had crept into her bones and stayed there all through the year. Watching her walk toward him made the bizarre events of the previous two and a half days seem even more unreal. She is my real life, George thought, like it or not, and she was coming toward him in all her average glory. Irene was only Irene. Bookish, sarcastic, hardworking, but so loyal that she wouldn’t even give up on an on-again off-again disappointment of a boyfriend. With Irene still a block away, George decided that he wouldn’t tell her the story of his weekend. Not today anyway. He wanted an hour of his previous life, to drink and eat with Irene and feel normal again.
But when Irene came up to George in the bright swimming air and raised her face to his, he could see a strip of white bandaging from the outside of her left eyebrow that went down about two inches along her face. The skin around her left eye was a pale bluish white, and the eye itself, a sliver of which was visible between her swollen lids, was completely red.
“What the fuck?” George said.
“I’ll tell you about it inside. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“No, tell me now. What happened?”
She shrugged and said, “I kind of got mugged.”
“What do you mean ‘kind of’?”
“Well, he didn’t take anything. Long story short, I was coming home last night at about eleven, and this man asked me for the time in front of my building. I looked at my watch, and when I looked up he punched me in the face.”
“Jesus,” George said.
“I know. That’s what I thought. I hit the pavement and thought I was a goner, but then he just took off. He didn’t even take my purse.”
“Did you call the cops?”
“I almost didn’t. It just didn’t seem real, but I thought better of it, and since he’d given me his name—”
“What do you mean he’d given you his name?”
“I don’t know if it was a real name, but after he punched me in the face and before he walked away, he very politely introduced himself.” Irene smiled, then winced a little when her bandage moved.
“What do you mean he introduced himse
lf to you?”
“I was on the ground, expecting to get raped or shot in the head, and he looked down at me and said, ‘Nice to meet you. My name’s Donnie Jenks.’ And then he walked away.”
Chapter 13
Over the next ten minutes, George was shown several other photographs by Detective Chalfant. He studied them all. The Audrey Beck he was shown was not the Audrey Beck whom he had known at Mather College. Both girls had dark blond hair, blue eyes, fair skin. On the wide spectrum of human differentiation they would have been close to each other, but they were indisputably different girls. The nose of the girl in the picture—the real Audrey?—had a slight bump, the type of thing a richer girl might have eradicated with plastic surgery. Also, the pouty mouth was wrong, and the eyes were too close together.
“I don’t suppose you have a picture of your girlfriend? Not with you, I know, but back at your motel, or at college?” Chalfant asked.
“I don’t have any pictures of her at all. I thought of that already, after I heard she’d died.”
“And you’re sure this isn’t her?”
“I’m sure. Positive.” Still baffled by what had transpired in the course of a quarter of an hour, George kept registering little bursts of comprehension and hope. If his girlfriend wasn’t Audrey Beck, then she was still alive. He wanted to ask this of the detective, to confirm what seemed to be happening, but he was acutely aware of the grieving family of the real Audrey Beck around him. The father continued to pace, shaking his head and sighing to himself.
“What’s going on?” The voice, a new one, came from the front door. All the heads in the room swiveled. A teenage boy had entered the living room, a tallish blond kid with braces, wearing a Florida Gators T-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts.
“Nothing, Billy,” said Mr. Beck.
George thought to himself: This is the brother, but she never mentioned she had one. She said she was an only child. He turned to look at Detective Chalfant, who said, to the room in general, “Let’s wrap up here. George, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to come down to the station so we can get an official statement from you. There’s no reason to bother the Becks any longer. George, you’ll follow us in your car, unless you’d prefer to ride with Officer Wilson and myself.”
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