“Here in Atlanta?” he asked. “I bet you listened to Quixie, huh?”
“Actually, I grew up in Alabama,” Mary Bliss said. “I don’t even remember what station we listened to.”
He opened the door of the entertainment center and put the album on the turntable. Suddenly the room was flooded with “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”
Matt pulled her over to the sofa, sat close beside her, with his arm companionably over her shoulders. She closed her eyes, put her head back, and listened.
“That’s a funny song,” she said when it was over. “Not sad really, but wistful, sort of. And yet, I always think of the Allman Brothers as sort of a good-times boogie band.”
“You don’t really know the Allman Brothers,” Matt said. “They wrote some soul-scorching blues. Like ‘Tied to the Whipping Post.’ ”
“I guess,” Mary Bliss said. “Anyway, who was Elizabeth Reed?”
“According to what I heard, it was a name on a headstone in Rose Hill Cemetery down in Macon,” Matt said. “Gregg told me he and the brothers were sitting around the cemetery, smoking dope and drinking liquor, and the name sort of intrigued them.”
“You know Gregg Allman?”
“Met him a couple times. I worked security at their first concert in Atlanta, back in sixty-nine,” Matt said. “It was this free music festival, held in Piedmont Park.”
Mary Bliss gave him a long look. “You don’t strike me as the kind of person who’d like this kind of music.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“I guess I associate rock and roll with rebellion. Hippies, that kind of thing.”
“I wasn’t always a geezer,” Matt said, laughing. “And maybe I still have a little of the rebel in me. Don’t you?”
She shook her head vigorously. “Afraid not. I’ve always been the good little girl from lower Alabama.”
He traced her hairline with his finger, slowly. “I don’t buy that.”
“It’s true,” Mary Bliss said. She felt herself blushing.
Matt drew her closer. His lips brushed against her cheek in the lightest of kisses.
“You’re not nice at all,” he said, and the airlike kisses were inching their way toward her lips.
“Yes, I am,” she said feebly. But now she was turning toward him, and his kisses were so sweet, so warm. And he was pulling her closer, so their bodies were touching in all the right places. His hands were tight on her back, pressing her toward him. And then he was kissing her neck, and her throat. “Not nice,” he muttered. “But delicious. Very delicious.”
This wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t the plan. She hadn’t come over here to be seduced. To be touched and kissed like this…like that. She shuddered as the tip of his tongue flicked against her collarbone, and then her breast, which seemed to be working its way out of her top of its own accord. But she couldn’t pull away. Wouldn’t. His mouth nipped and teased, and his hands were busy, and she felt things she’d forgotten feeling before.
“A nice girl wouldn’t wear a top that comes untied like this,” Matt said, demonstrating his prowess, cupping his hand under a breast. His beard scratched a little. She felt friction. And heat. She shuddered again. Maybe he was right. Maybe there was a smidge of rebel beaten down inside her. Maybe Parker’s leaving had unlocked this side of her. Or maybe Matt Hayslip had stirred her in a whole new way. Maybe she really was a wild thing, a wicked, wanton woman who took pleasure whenever and wherever she wanted it. God, she hoped so!
Parker. An image flashed in her mind. Parker, in that grainy black-and-white bank photo. She’d begun to believe her own lie. That he was dead, drowned down in Mexico. Out of her life. But he wasn’t dead. And he definitely wasn’t out of her life. Not just yet.
“No,” she whispered, pushing Matt away. She reached for her top, wrapped it awkwardly around her shoulders. “I can’t. This isn’t right.”
He groaned. “I’m too old to be playing games like this.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to work her arms into the sleeves, wrapping the ends around her midriff. “I never should have come over here. I never should have let things go this far.”
He sat back and threw both arms over the sofa back, watching her intently.
“Why did you come over here tonight, if you didn’t want this to happen?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Bliss said. She couldn’t make the damn top wrap right. It was falling off her shoulders now. “Maybe I was lonely.”
“You’ve been lonely before,” Matt said, his voice even. “Tell me the truth now. Why did you invite yourself over here tonight if you didn’t intend to go to bed with me?”
She blushed to the roots of her hair. “I can’t figure you out.”
He laughed. “I could say the same thing about you. Come on, now, be straight. What’s this come-hither act all about?”
She felt a sudden flash of anger and embarrassment. “You tell me,” Mary Bliss said, leaning forward, staring into those dark gray eyes of his. “You come around my house on false pretenses, asking all kinds of questions. You come to my husband’s memorial service, show up at my house. Act like you want to be my friend.”
“I do want to be your friend,” Matt said, caressing her face. “More than a friend, actually. I’m nuts about you, Mary Bliss McGowan.”
“You’re a damn liar!” Mary Bliss cried, pushing his hand away. “You never played tennis with Parker. I checked. I don’t think you even knew Parker. And I know you told Charlie Weidman that Parker isn’t dead. You showed him what you said was a picture of Parker, taken in Columbus, Georgia. You’ve been sniffing around here for weeks on totally false pretenses. I want to know who you really are and what you really want.”
She jumped up and ran into the dining room. She attacked the first packing crate she saw, ripping it open. “I don’t think you live in this house at all. This is all just a sham. This house isn’t real. I don’t believe you ever met Gregg Allman. You aren’t real, damn you.”
He just sat there, she could see him through the arched doorway, sitting on that loveseat, looking dazed and angry.
The box was full of file folders. She grabbed one, held it up for him to see. “Am I in here? Is this what you do? Keep files on people?”
“You’re not in that box,” he said calmly. “And if you’ll come in here and stop acting like a maniac, I’ll tell you what you want to know. What you came over here to find out.”
“You will?”
She dropped the file.
He nodded. “What about you? Are you capable of telling the truth?”
53
“You first,” she said, perching on the edge of the loveseat, as far away from him as she could get and still be seated in the same room.
He sipped his wine. “What do you want to know?”
“Is your name really Matt Hayslip?”
He nodded.
“And you really live here?”
He nodded again.
“But you don’t work for Southern Utilities.” She made it a statement.
“Not really,” he agreed. “I borrowed that sedan from a buddy who does security work for them. I made the business cards on my PC.”
“What do you really do?” she asked. “Why are you so interested in us? In Parker?”
“I’m a private investigator, I guess you’d say. I really did retire from the GBI a couple years ago. Towards the end of my career there, I sort of developed a specialty. White-collar crime. Financial fraud. I worked some cases that turned out well. Put some bad guys in prison. Met some important people. After I took early retirement, I decided that was the kind of work I’d pursue. Nice, clean, white-collar crime. No homicides, no maggots, no gunplay. But it wasn’t all that easy. I’m not a CPA, not a forensic accountant. I couldn’t get any assignments.”
He glanced at her to see if she was paying proper attention.
She gave him a withering look. “Poor you.”
“Until this May,” he sai
d. “I got a call from a guy who knew a guy who knew me. My first big client.”
“Whoopee,” she said.
“My client runs a company that provides human-resource services to firms that don’t want to handle that themselves. He does all the payroll work, taxes, benefits, all of it. He had billings of fourteen million dollars last year. He was thinking of going national, franchising.”
“I take it back,” Mary Bliss said. “This isn’t that fascinating.”
“I’m getting there,” Matt said. “A year ago, my client, Jerry, hired this brilliant software consultant. His name was Parker McGowan.”
Mary Bliss’s eyes widened.
“Parker was going to supply him with new software that would streamline all the billing functions,” Matt said. “He had impeccable credentials, referrals out the ying-yang, all of it. And things were going gangbusters.”
“Until,” Mary Bliss said.
“Until Parker McGowan disappeared. Into thin air.”
“He drowned. In a boating accident in Mexico,” Mary Bliss said.
Matt put his fingers to her lips. “Shh. It’s not your turn yet.
“Parker disappeared. But even before he disappeared, Jerry started having some doubts. Revenues weren’t what they should be. Something was off. Jerry’s a bright guy. He has good instincts. He took a closer look at his software, and he found out Parker’s little secret.”
Mary Bliss raised one eyebrow.
“Ever hear of a practice called graveyarding?” Matt asked.
“No.”
“Parker knew all about it, which kind of surprised me,” Matt said. “It’s been around a long time. I used to do it myself, back when I was a rookie patrolman. Here’s how it works. Say the lieutenant gives you a quota—write six traffic tickets today, or don’t come back. It’s a slow day. You maybe only catch two or three lawbreakers. So you take a drive over to the nearest cemetery. Find a recent headstone. Copy down the name and date of birth and death. Take a run over to the library, look up the name in the phone book or a recent city directory. Write up a ticket for the dead guy, take it back to the lieutenant. Everybody’s happy.”
“Parker was never a cop,” Mary Bliss said.
“No,” Matt agreed. “But he was a criminal. And he was real good at graveyarding. Here’s what he did. For every one of Jerry’s clients, Parker set up two or three graveyard employees. He even gave ’em fake social security numbers, and mailing addresses, all of them at post office boxes. So every pay period, those ghost employees were getting paid, and their paychecks were being sent out—to post office boxes rented by your husband.”
“I don’t believe it,” Mary Bliss said. “Parker never so much as ran a red light. He wasn’t capable of something like that.”
“Really?” Matt looked amused. “He was capable of stealing your marital assets, capable of refinancing your house and potentially leaving you and his daughter homeless, but he wasn’t capable of something like that?”
Mary Bliss pressed her lips together tightly. “He was my husband. He’s dead. I can’t dwell on the mistakes he might have made.”
“You better start dwelling on them,” Matt said, leaning forward until his face was only inches away from hers. “Because, lady, you’re making some big mistakes of your own.”
Mary Bliss stood up and paced around the room. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He stood up himself, strode out of the room, and came back a minute later, holding out a piece of paper.
She took it and looked at it. It was a picture of Parker. Grainy and black-and-white, as Charlie had described it. This one appeared to be taken outside. Parker stared straight into the camera, his dark glasses flipped up. He wore a sleeveless white T-shirt, and a chain with a medallion on it. She’d never seen Parker wearing any jewelry other than his wedding wring and a wristwatch. The front of a car was barely visible over his right shoulder. There was a time and date stamp on the bottom of the photo, indicating it had been taken the day Parker should have died in Cozumel, Mexico.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered, handing the photograph back.
“It was taken at an ATM machine in Macon,” Matt said. “The one I showed Charlie was taken in Columbus, the day before. Parker McGowan. In the flesh. Looks pretty lively to me.”
“It’s somebody else,” Mary Bliss said. “It has to be.”
“It’s him,” Matt said flatly. “He had accounts in banks all over the state. We’ve found three so far, all in the names of those ghost employees he created. There are more too. We just haven’t tracked ’em all down yet. All together, we figure he ripped off Jerry and his clients to the tune of about four hundred thousand dollars.”
“He, he couldn’t,” Mary Bliss said, faltering.
“He did,” Matt said. “He’s a thief. And I aim to catch him.”
She shook her head. “I still don’t understand. You’re not with the police? What do you want from me?”
“I’m not a cop,” Matt repeated. “My client doesn’t want the police involved. Not yet. He’s shut down the graveyarding operation, notified his clients that he was defrauded, and has made restitution. He wants what I want. Parker McGowan.”
“I don’t know anything,” Mary Bliss said. “I had no idea. Parker never talked to me about business.”
Matt grabbed her wrist. “You must know something. He must have said something, left a note, some records, something.”
She yanked her hand away. “Leave me alone. I told you. I don’t know anything. Parker’s dead. I’m sorry he stole from your client. He stole from me too. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“Let me help you,” Matt said. “Drop this insurance claim. Trust me. If I figured out it’s bogus, the insurance people will too. My God, this is a felony theft, Mary Bliss. You could do real jail time. Is that what you want? Parker’s gone, you’ll be in prison. What will happen to your daughter then?”
She felt tears rising in her eyes, but she blinked them back. She was tired of crying, tired of feeling helpless, of being trapped.
“Trust me,” Matt was saying. “Let me help you. Tell me the truth. I’m gonna find Parker, and when I do, we’ll make him pay. For deserting you, and Erin. For lying and stealing. He’ll pay for all of it.”
She was so tempted. Let somebody else take care of things. She wanted to go work in her garden. Paint her kitchen, read a book. She wanted to be taken care of.
What had her mama told her when they’d gone down to Florida to bury her daddy? Nina had held her hand tightly all through that brief service but never shed a tear. The preacher who preached her daddy’s funeral gave them a ride back to the bus station. He acted like he liked Mama, wanted to give her money for dinner. A love offering, he’d called it. “Let me know if I can help,” he’d said before letting them out at the station.
Nina had just nodded, her face expressionless. “The Lord helps them who help themselves,” she’d told that pastor. Her mama watched the car drive away. “We’ll do for ourselves now,” she’d told Mary Bliss. “Don’t never depend on somebody else to take care of you, sugar. Trust in the Lord, and then you just take care of yourself, and things will work out fine.”
“You want to help me?” Mary Bliss asked Matt. “Leave me alone. You say you care about me. If you do, you’ll tell your client what I already told you. Parker is dead.”
“He knows Parker’s not dead,” Matt said, impatient now. “He’s seen the pictures, seen the banking records. Parker is out there, somewhere, living the high life. You saw that picture. He’s on permanent vacation. While you’re pawning your family silver and hiding from bill collectors. He’s laughing at us. Laughing at you. Because he fooled everybody. The liar.”
“Who’s the liar?” Mary Bliss asked, whirling around. “You know about the silver? You’ve been following me? For how long? Have you had my phones tapped too? All of this,” she said, sweeping her hand around the room, “all of it was part of your game pla
n. You thought I knew something. Had something you wanted. So you went after it. You pestered me and petted me. You knew I was vulnerable. And God help me, I was. Another five minutes here and I would have been naked. I would have done anything you wanted, just to have somebody hold me and touch me.”
“That’s not what this was about,” Matt said. “I was telling the truth about caring for you. I started out looking for Parker, yeah. But then I met you. In that damned wet nightgown of yours. You’ve been lying through your teeth since the day we met, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t stay away. And then, tonight, you called. I knew something was up. You were the one who came over here, lady. You knew exactly what you were doing.”
“No,” Mary Bliss said. “I didn’t understand the kind of person I was dealing with. But now I do. You’re like every man I ever met. It’s all a game to you. Like with Parker. You’re like him, aren’t you? Because you’ll both do whatever it takes to win.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. She found her purse in the kitchen and walked straight out the front door without looking back.
54
Mary Bliss had all the trays of poached chicken lined up on Katharine’s kitchen counter. The house was so quiet, all she could hear was the ticking of the kitchen clock.
She was mixing the dressing with the sour cream and honey, letting the wire whisk clang satisfyingly against the glass bowl, when the overhead lights switched on.
“Well?” Katharine hopped up on one of the bar stools at the island. “How was your fact-finding mission?”
“Awful,” Mary Bliss said. “He’s a private investigator. Parker ripped off his client for about four hundred thousand dollars, and now he won’t stop until he catches Parker and makes him give back the money.”
“Maybe he can make him give back your money while he’s at it,” Katharine said, dipping her pinkie in the mixing bowl. “Hmm. Good. Just like Mamie used to make. You’ve got this all written down?”
Little Bitty Lies Page 29