Liar, Liar

by Lisa Jackson

  Davis had kept scribbling as Remmi told her the sketchy details she knew about her mother’s life before Didi had landed in Southern California and then Las Vegas.

  “Mom called St. Louis, ‘up north,’ so she probably came from south of that, I guess. She never said. It’s like she didn’t want anything to do with her parents after she moved west.” She’d shrugged, trying to remember more.

  “You have their names?” she asked again.

  “Frank and Willa Maye Hutchinson. And my mother had a sister, Vera, and they had a brother . . . Billy. He’s in or was in the service. Army I think. I overheard my mom telling Seneca a little about him, but I only heard that he was a hunter who had gone to the military just after high school. I never met him, either.”

  “You had no contact with any of them?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not even a birthday present or a Christmas card?”

  Remmi had just stared at the detective.

  “Okay,” Davis had said, finally, it seemed, getting it. She’d ripped off the note with the names. “I’m going to contact them and see what we can do. You have to sit tight for a little while longer because,” she’d added a little sadly, “you know that I have to talk to someone at Social Services. You’re a minor.”

  Remmi had sunk farther into her chair, and though she wanted to cry, to break down and sob, she didn’t. Her eyes were hot, but dry, her heart heavy, and as she heard Kendrick returning, the scent of his recently smoked cigarette surrounding him, she knew that her life as she’d known it was truly and finally over.

  They asked her a million more questions about Didi—what happened in the desert, the twins, Seneca, her job with Harold Rimes at the club—and eventually had shown her a picture of Noah.

  Her heart had felt as if it had collapsed in her chest. “Do you know who this is?” Kendrick had asked as she’d stared at the photograph. She’d thought about the short, heated phone conversation with his father, about how Ike Baxter was “gonna give that kid what’s comin’ to him.” But she’d already reacted, so she screwed up her face and shook her head. “He looks kinda familiar. But . . . no, I don’t know him.”

  “You sure? Look real hard,” Kendrick pushed, eyes narrowing as if he was attempting to read her mind.

  “Who–who is he?”

  Davis smiled again, and once more the curve of her lips had seemed forced. “We don’t know, but he was in the desert that night. No ID on him. Taken to the hospital.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Hell, no! He’s not ‘okay,’” Kendrick interjected, his lips turning down at the corners. “Shot in the neck and crashed his bike.”

  Shot? In the neck? Remmi nearly gasped, was able to stifle it, but she felt her face drain of color. She swallowed as she remembered hearing a motorcycle revving in the desert while Didi drove away from the exchange. Pop, pop, pop—the sharp report of a rifle. Aimed at Noah? What was he doing out there? Her mind had raced, her hands clenching into fists and her fingernails biting into her palms. Someone had tried to kill him? Who? Why? But, more importantly, he was alive. That’s what they said, he’d survived. He wasn’t “okay,” but he’d made it.

  “—so, I guess his injuries weren’t as severe as the docs thought, because for whatever reason, before he came out of his coma and would talk to us, he decided to take a hike and release himself,” Kendrick was saying. “Just walked out of Elizabeth Park Hospital in the middle of the damned night and took off.”

  She’d felt a drip of relief, forced herself to uncurl her fingers.

  “There are security cameras, though, you know, and one of them caught him taking off, but”—he flipped a hand toward the ceiling—“then he disappeared.”

  Davis sent him another sharp look.

  “What?” Kendrick asked her. “I’m not telling anything that isn’t gonna be out there. His picture’ll be in the paper tomorrow and on the news tonight. We’ll be asking for the public’s help. So I thought I’d start with her.”

  The corners of her lips had tightened, but Davis had turned her attention to Remmi and said softly, “Are you sure you don’t know him?”

  “Positive.”

  From that point, Remmi had never ever changed her story. She couldn’t imagine what Noah had been doing in the desert that night, how he’d ended up in the hospital, or who would want to kill him.

  Ike Baxter.

  The name had cut through her. But if he’d shot his stepson, he wouldn’t be making threats to unknown girls who called, would he? Wouldn’t he have acted more concerned, pretended like he was worried?

  The police had kept Remmi, prodding her and asking her questions until a willowy woman with dishwater-blond blond hair and a slight overbite, Miss Evelyn Connors from Social Services, had shown up wearing a prim navy suit, what Didi had called “sensible shoes,” a crisp white blouse, and a small silver cross swinging from a thin chain circling her long neck. Miss Evelyn, as she’d insisted upon being called, came with a broad smile and “Praise the Lord,” because of the happy news that they’d located Remmi’s aunt. Not only that, but Aunt Vera and her husband, Milo, were willing to take in Vera’s sister’s abandoned daughter and become Remmi’s official foster parents.

  “It’s perfect,” Miss Evelyn exclaimed, her long-boned fingers clasped together almost as if she were praying.

  As it turned out, not so “perfect,” Remmi thought now, as she walked from the wet street into the parking garage, which was near a small boutique hotel and located her ten-year-old Subaru Outback. But she wasn’t going to think about the intervening years now, that particularly bleak part of her life she’d endured under Aunt Vera’s overly religious thumb, Uncle Milo’s cold disinterest, and her two randy cousins’ off-color jokes and leering eyes.

  She shuddered at the thought as she slipped behind the wheel (long legal now as she’d gotten her license while under her aunt and uncle’s care) and reminded herself to forget about them all. If she could. Because now, it seemed, she might have to deal with them again, and the thought gave her a severe case of heartburn.

  “No, thank you,” she muttered under her breath as she drove onto the hilly, rain-slickened street. No wonder Didi had never spoken to them. She threaded her car through the heavy traffic and headed for the Thomas J. Cahill Hall of Justice on Bryant Street, where investigations of suicide and murder took place.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Didi Storm?” Detective Jorge Martinez asked when he slid into the passenger side of the Ford Crown Victoria, one of the sedans in the city’s fleet. “Who the hell is Didi Storm?”

  Dani Settler, Martinez’s partner, was already behind the steering wheel and twisting on the ignition. She waited as a uniformed officer removed the barrier so they could pull out of the spot they’d secured at the base of Montmort Tower three hours earlier, just before the Jane Doe had taken a swan dive off the nineteenth-floor ledge.

  Settler shivered inwardly at the memory as she’d seen the woman step into the thick San Franciscan twilight, then plummet to her death.

  “The victim looked like her.”

  With a glance up at the tower Martinez prodded, “Again, who is she?”

  “Seriously?” Dani snapped back to the present and stared at her partner as if he’d grown horns. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “On vacation,” he reminded her. At five-seven, he wasn’t quite as tall as Dani, but he had her by about forty pounds of muscle and had been with the department for twenty of his forty-six years. A family man, Jorge had a wife and three kids, all of whom were currently giving him the silver visible in his clipped black hair.

  “Well, still . . . you must’ve been hiding under a damned rock.”

  He pulled the Crown Vic’s door shut. “I was in Cabo. You know that.”

  She did.

  “Wish I was still there,” he grumbled. “I hated to come back to this crap.”

  “C’mon, Martinez, you know you love it.”

  “If you
say so. But I’m gonna retire down there, you watch me. Get a condo with an ocean view, drink margaritas on the beach, fish when I want to.”

  When pigs fly, she thought, but decided not to argue further. As the officer waved them through, Settler eased into the uneven flow of traffic, the lights of the city swimming through low-hanging November clouds, the streets wet and shimmering, Christmas lights and decorations visible in storefronts, as the season was fast approaching.

  Martinez and Settler were heading back to the station. They’d spent most of the day in the hotel room from which the victim, who had registered as D. Storm, had leaped.

  “You were saying,” Martinez prodded. “About our jumper? Didi, whatever.”

  “Storm.” She took a quick left, beating the light as she headed back to the station. “Didi Storm is, like, everywhere right now, even trending on the Internet, I think.”

  “Why? Again, who is she?”

  “Back in the day, she was a celebrity impersonator.”

  “I thought guys did that,” Martinez said, wiping the condensation from the inside of the passenger window. “You know what I’m talkin’ about, the dudes with the fake boobs and wigs and makeup. I never have figured out how they hide their junk. Can’t be easy.”

  “Well, you’re right. It’s not easy being a woman,” she said dryly.

  He snorted, but his lips twitched in his goatee. “Especially for a guy.”

  “Don’t be so sexist.” She turned on the defrost to clear the windshield. “Women can be impersonators, and Didi Storm had her own show in Vegas, years back. She wasn’t an A-lister, but she did okay, and then she disappeared.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because as I said, she’s everywhere right now. Not literally, of course, but there’s a book out, kind of a tell-all about her life that hypothesizes about what happened to her, if she’s alive or dead, that kind of thing. And with the book come articles online and in papers. A buzz.” She went on to explain about the unusual case, rumored to have involved the selling of babies, explosions rocking the desert, and Didi Storm’s disappearance.

  “Okay.”

  “I have a copy.” With her eyes on the road, she reached behind the passenger seat and into her open bag to pull out the hardback of I’m Not Me, with the subtitle The Untold Didi Storm Story. The cover was a closeup of Didi’s face, one side made up to look like Marilyn Monroe, her perfect features appearing to be ripped in half as part of the artwork, the other side a stripped-down picture of Didi Storm.

  “You read it?”

  Signaling for the next turn, she nodded. “Uh-huh. Finished it last night.”

  “Good?”

  “Kept my interest, and now . . .”

  “Yeah. That’s weird, isn’t it? The book comes out and then . . . huh.” He scratched at his goatee. “I thought for a second when I saw the victim, she was damned Marilyn Monroe—”

  “Who’s been dead over fifty years.”

  “Even so, at least I knew who she was. This Didi Storm?” He was shaking his head and lifting his shoulders. “And for sure, I wouldn’t buy any book about her.”

  “You wouldn’t buy a book unless it was about fishing.”

  “Well, yeah. Maybe.”

  “There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. But other people, like me, would pick it up because her case is interesting. And that’s not all, there’s even talk of a made-for-TV movie about her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because when you were busy wrapping things up with the M.E., I checked the Internet on my phone.”

  He was finally engaged, his eyebrows drawing together. “So why would she jump now? If she’s suddenly famous, why—”

  “It’s not her,” she said. A snarl of traffic was visible ahead, and she cut across two lanes and took a sharp turn to avoid the congestion. The street was narrow and steep, cars parked on either side as huge skyscrapers knifed into the low-hanging clouds.

  “I thought you said it was. And there’s the wig.”

  Not only had the victim been dressed in vintage clothes and a short platinum-blond wig, but inscribed within the skullcap of the wig was the name Didi Storm, bold as you like. But there was no other identification in her hotel room, just a small suitcase with a pair of pajamas and makeup. Not even a purse or wallet, though the clerk at the desk swore he’d seen a California driver’s license, or at least he thought so, but when pressed, he wasn’t able to clearly remember the name on it, nor did he take a copy. He just recalled that it was busy when she checked in, he was stressed, and the license seemed legit.

  “I said it looked like her.” Edging into the other lane, she worked her way around a van that was double-parked. Traffic today seemed even worse than normal. She asked, “But how old do you think the victim was?”

  “Forty, maybe forty-five.”

  “Didi would be in her fifties now. Unless she found the damned fountain of youth, she’s not Didi Storm.”

  “Some people age well.”

  “Not that well.”

  “How could you tell? She was pretty . . . y’know, broken up,” he said, frowning as he mentioned the body. “These days there’s all kinds of plastic surgery or injections. Botox, whatever. Ten years isn’t that much. Some people look twenty years younger than they are.”

  “Fine. Wanna bet that retirement condo in Cabo on it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Fingerprints will be in soon. We’ll see if the victim is in the system.”

  “And if she’s this Didi Storm?”

  She slowed for a stoplight, waiting as pedestrians in coats, hoods, and umbrellas hurried across the street, the crackle of the police-band radio in the background. “If it’s Didi, and I’m not saying it is, why would she jump now? Why, when there’s a book out about you, when you’ve always been looking for fame, would you kill yourself?” She couldn’t imagine the desperation or the horror of one’s life that would make leaping from a tall building seem like the only answer.

  “Maybe she didn’t mean to jump.”

  “You mean like a publicity stunt gone wrong?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “That would fit. From what I read, she was a drama queen, one who wasn’t afraid of much.”

  “You got that from the book?”

  “I read between the lines,” she said, turning up the tempo of the wipers as the drizzle turned to a steady rainfall and a trolley, people packed inside, clanged its way up the hill. “It interested me, so I looked her up online.”

  “And?”

  “A publicity stunt would be right up her alley, but this . . . I don’t know. Who would stand on a ledge nearly twenty stories over the city just to garner attention? She was flamboyant, always played to an audience. From what I’ve read, she wouldn’t be one to just quietly take some pills; she’d want to go out with a splash.” She shook her head. “Then again, she was into self-preservation. A fighter.”

  “You know a lot about her.”

  “I hadn’t thought about her for years, then I pick up a book and do a little digging and—”

  “Splat. She lands at your feet.”

  She grimaced. “You don’t have to be so graphic.”

  “Just tellin’ it like it is.”

  “But I don’t think it’s her.”

  “Just someone who’s impersonating a missing impersonator and takes a flying leap to . . . ? I dunno, Dani, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

  “Me, neither,” she had to admit.

  “Why did she disappear in the first place?”

  “The big question. She had a child that year, that much is known, but there’re rumors that there were two babies, a boy and a girl, both gone. I read about the case years ago, when I was a teenager. It was in all the newspapers at the time, and so I scanned a few of those articles again, a couple of days ago, after reading the book.” Dani Settler had been fascinated with crime and criminals since she was an adolescent and a kidnap victim, one who had m
anaged to survive her cruel captor. Once the trauma of her ordeal had ebbed a bit, she’d decided she’d become a cop, and she’d devoured every true-crime book she could get her hands on. She’d never wavered from that goal, and after college and a master’s degree, she’d been hired by the San Francisco Police Department.

  The traffic light turned green, and she stepped on the gas, narrowly missing a jogger who’d run against the light. She and the car next to her slammed on their brakes just in time.

  “Holy cats!” Martinez braced himself on the dash as their seat belts tightened.

  “Lucky idiot,” she muttered, carefully touching the gas again. As she turned into the parking structure for the department, Martinez said, “It’s your turn,” reminding her of the ongoing deal they had about catching a late lunch. Whenever a case called for unexpectedly long hours, one of them picked up sandwiches from their favorite deli. He was right; tonight, it was her turn. “Roast beef with extra horseradish, and don’t let them forget I need a pickle. Sometimes they forget.”

  “Really? In this rain? You expect me to go out?”

  “Really. Yeah.”

  She parked, then tossed him the keys. “Coffee?”

  “Two sugars.”

  “I know. I got it. You just take care of the car.”

  As he checked in the city’s Ford, she walked the two blocks through the increasing rainfall to Sammy’s Deli, where she picked up the two sandwiches and heard a little of the local gossip from the small tables crammed near the windows. As she waited for her order, she heard bits of conversation—a couple of women talking about their teenage daughters, two men discussing the San Francisco Giants’ future, and a group of four discussing the leaper at the Montmort Tower, though she didn’t hear Didi Storm’s name.

  By the time she’d returned to the police station, her raincoat was shedding water, and the white sack holding their lunch was starting to fall apart. She hung her raincoat on the hall tree near her desk.

  Water dripped onto the floor, and she caught a glance from one of the senior detectives, Ted Vance, ten years older than she and always ready to impart his great wisdom from years of experience on the job. He also was a neatnik who frowned on any sort of lapse in protocol or etiquette and wasn’t afraid to show his displeasure. The tiny pool of water collecting on the floor was sure to get under his skin.