Liar, Liar

by Lisa Jackson

  “Are you going to deal with that?” he asked, looking at her over the tops of half-glasses.

  “Yeah.”

  “Someone could slip.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up.” She tried and failed to keep the sarcasm out of her voice, but really, she didn’t need a father figure nor anyone looking over her shoulder and pointing out her faults.

  “You’re welcome.” Vance smiled, and his dark eyes glinted. He knew he’d gotten to her. “Again.”

  She sent him a brittle smile in return. She didn’t need this. She was already testy from the long day and lack of food. She dropped one sack and a cup of coffee onto Martinez’s desk, then settled into her own chair and dived into a turkey on sourdough. As she ate, she checked her e-mails, and looked for any report on the leaper, whom she still thought of as Jane Doe.

  She wasn’t buying into the quick ID as Didi Storm, despite the hotel clerk, the registration, and the wig with her name scribbled inside. There was also a suicide angle to consider. It seemed that way from all of the witness accounts, but it was too early to make that call. The police department was looking at footage of the last seconds of the woman’s life. It appeared as if she’d been alone in her room, had stepped onto the ledge, and, after waiting until a crowd had gathered, stepped into the thick San Francisco night, plummeting to her death before the rescue workers could storm the room and the surrounding rooms or create any kind of safety device, such as a giant air mattress, on the ground below. Still, Settler wasn’t convinced of the obvious conclusion. She had to make sure that Jane Doe/Didi Storm hadn’t somehow been helped along in her decision to take a flying leap to her death.

  She’d called the Las Vegas Police Department and found that the detective who had been in charge of the missing person case involving Didi Storm had left the force five years earlier. Settler had been told that his partner, Senior Detective Lucretia Davis, would call her back. Davis had been the junior partner on the case, so Settler had left her number, turned to her lunch, and had just finished half her sandwich when she spied Demetrius Brown, a beat cop, walking along the short aisle between the cubicles to her desk. A step behind him, also heading her way, was a woman who looked to be in her early thirties. Around five-six, with brown hair scraped into a ponytail, and green eyes that seemed to take in the entire room at once, she wore slim jeans, boots, a thick sweater, and a jacket with the belt unbuckled. She was tense, lips compressed, and kept up with Brown, who was tall and lanky, with the long stride of the pro baseball player he’d once been.

  Her gaze found Dani’s before they were introduced, and her expression said that she meant business.

  “You’ve got a visitor,” Brown said, motioning to the woman at his side. “Ms. Storm.” To the woman, he said, “Detective Settler. She’s the one you’re looking for.” His gaze slid back to Dani, eyebrows arching almost imperceptibly, a silent warning that all might not be as it seemed, silently conveying that this woman might not be a straight shooter.

  Ms. Storm? Dani looked the woman over curiously.

  He went on, “Ms. Storm claims she might be the daughter of our Jane Doe from yesterday.”

  Ms. Storm clarified, “The apparent suicide victim. I’m Remmi Storm. My mother is . . . Didi Storm.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “We don’t have an ID on the victim yet,” Settler admitted, but she was all ears. If Remmi Storm, slim and confident even in these circumstances, had information on the leaper, all the better.

  “I figured that when he,” Remmi hitched her chin toward Brown, “called her Jane Doe. Maybe I can help with that. I was there. I saw it happen.” Remmi paled a bit. “But as I said, I think . . . I think she might be my mother.”

  “You were there?” Dani asked, more interested. “To visit her?”

  “No. That’s the weird part—well, one of the weird parts of it. It was totally random.”

  “Do you live or work nearby?”

  “Yes. I moved here about ten years ago,” she said. “And I work mainly from home.”

  “Doing?” Settler prodded.

  Remmi hesitated. “I work for Greta Emerson, at her home. I’m her assistant.”

  “Doing what?”

  “She’s a widow and owns a large home near Mount Sutro. I keep the place up and handle her books. She rents out rooms in the house as well as other properties in the city, so I collect the rent and pay the bills as well as see that she’s cared for by a rotating staff.”

  “How long have you worked for her?”

  “About five, no, now almost six years. Before that I worked in offices, insurance, bookkeeping, technical stuff.” She handed the detective her card with her street address, e-mail address, and a couple of phone numbers.

  “So you were near the Montmort building because . . .” Settler prodded, pocketing the business card.

  “I found out that the agent for the person who wrote the book on Didi actually worked in the city, just a block or two from the Montmort. I wanted to talk to her, to ask about whoever had done all this research on my mother. I was on my way there.”

  “It was after five.”

  “I wanted to surprise her as she was leaving, as I had called and she wouldn’t see me. On the way, I got distracted,” Remmi said, drawing a careful breath. “My mother and I are estranged. I mean, I haven’t heard from her in twenty years, and I didn’t know if she was dead or alive, and then, then yesterday . . .” She shook her head. “It’s all so unbelievable.”

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning,” Dani suggested. “Sit down.” She indicated a chair near the side of her desk, and Remmi slid into it. “Do you want something? Water? Coffee? A soda?”

  “No, no. I’m okay.” But she didn’t look okay. In fact, she’d paled since approaching Dani’s desk.

  She took in a long breath, seemed to give herself a quick mental shake. “Years ago, my mother, Didi, worked in Las Vegas; she had had her own act—impressions, singing, a little magic, that kind of thing—and she did a spot-on impersonation of Marilyn Monroe, back in the day.”

  Settler listened and took notes, though she knew most of the story. She just wanted to hear this woman’s rendition of it. She didn’t doubt that the woman was Remmi Storm; she’d seen pictures of her as a teen, and yes, this woman was one and the same.

  “This all happened twenty years ago.” She met the detective’s gaze. “But I think you already know that.”

  “I do. I read the book.”

  “Oh.” Remmi’s eyes shuttered a bit.

  “I take it you don’t approve.”

  She grimaced. “No one interviewed me for the story, and I think that’s kind of weird. I mean, there’s always been speculation, and every once in a while, I read something online about Mom . . . do you know she has a fan club now? With a Facebook page?”

  “We haven’t gotten that far.”

  “Well, it’s true. So there have been articles about her on and off, nothing serious, but then this book comes out and . . . and she’s more famous than when she was . . . when she had her act. I tried writing the ‘author’ through her website and her own Facebook page, but it all looks fake to me.”

  “Fake?”

  “Like the author has a pseudonym, a ghost writer, I guess you’d call it. Maryanne Osgoode. Not a real person. At least I can’t find a picture or mention of her, other than the studio shot at the back of the book and another more casual photograph on the website with two dogs, French bulldogs. The website itself is very bland, tells you nothing. Says she’s from ‘California,’ but that’s pretty vague considering the size of the state, and that she lives with her husband and two dogs, which, by the way, are in the only other picture.” She thought for a second, then said, “So when I found out the agent who represents the writer is from San Francisco, I went to meet her, like I said, to surprise her, and then I walked past the Montmort Tower . . .”

  “That’s a helluva coincidence,” Settler said, leaning back in her chair.

  �
�That’s what I thought.” She swallowed. “The agency is just three buildings down, and since every time I called, I got a recording, and no one responded to my e-mails, I decided to just show up. So I was on my way, and there was this crowd gathered and I . . . I saw her jump.”

  “Jesus,” Brown, who was still standing nearby, whispered.

  Settler kept on point. “And you think it was your mother?”

  “I–I’m not sure. It would be like Didi, to want to make a big splash and go out with a bang, but not after all this time of being in hiding. And she would have played to the crowd more than . . . than the victim did. So, no, I don’t think it’s my mom, and I don’t want to think it.” She squared her slim shoulders. “But I want to see her. The body, I mean. I have to. And then . . . And then I’ll know for sure.”

  “After all this time?”

  “Yes.” Remmi Storm seemed more certain of that fact than of anything since she’d started talking.

  “You have the name of that agency?”

  “The Reliant Agency. Jennifer Reliant is the agent of record, but it seems pretty fly-by-night to me,” she admitted. “Everything about the book and the small publishing house seems off. And there’s not much about Jennifer Reliant or the agency on the Internet that I can find. Seems like a one-woman operation, if that.”

  “Meaning you’re not sure it exists?”

  “Meaning I have yet to talk to a real person or get a response from one, just some kind of answering service, I think, so that doesn’t say a lot.”

  Brown had been lingering. His cell phone chirped, and Dani met his gaze. “I’ve got this,” she said and he took the hint and answered his phone as he walked away.

  As he left, Remmi reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out two pictures, worn and faded, both of which she handed to Dani.

  “These are of your mother?”

  “Yeah, both of them were taken about a year before she left, I think,” she said, and there was a trace of bitterness in her tone. Settler hadn’t seen either of the photographs before. There were some black-and-white shots in the book, but not either of these. And she’d seen pictures of Didi Storm on the Internet; these were different, personal.

  “When was the last time you talked to her?”

  “The night she took off.”

  “Twenty years ago?”

  “She said she’d be back in the morning.”

  “And she never returned?”

  A shake of the head, ponytail bobbing, mouth even tighter. “She just disappeared.” Dani guessed the woman sitting so rigidly across her desk was in her mid-thirties. If that were the case, then she’d been a teenager when the mother had vanished.

  Settler studied the two photos. One was of a Marilyn Monroe look-alike and the other of a woman of about thirty-five with darker hair and little makeup. With even features, devious eyes, and a little, almost naughty smile, she was staring at the photographer and hoisting a half-full martini glass.

  Could this woman in the photo be the Jane Doe who was lying in the morgue, her body broken from a near twenty-story fall to hard pavement? There was a definite resemblance, but Settler didn’t think so.

  “So, in the intervening years, you were with your dad?”

  A quick shake of the head. “Nope. Out of the picture.” Her demeanor suggested the subject of her father was taboo. But Settler left it for now. She knew firsthand how messy family dynamics could be. She had a stepmother and a couple of half siblings to prove it. But if it was important to the case, Remmi and Didi’s relationship with Dear Old Dad would have to be put under a microscope—especially if the victim did, in fact, turn out to be the missing Didi Storm.

  Which she was still betting against, despite the resemblance of the photographs to the victim. “What happened then? You had to have been in your teens when she left.”

  A beat. For a second, Settler thought Remmi Storm was going to lie. “I went to live with my aunt. My mother’s sister, Vera, and her family. I hadn’t even met them before I moved in,” she added. “I hadn’t met anyone in my family. My mother and her parents weren’t close and never spoke, as far as I knew. Same with Vera, but since I was a minor, Social Services located Vera and her husband, Milo. They agreed to take me in, but I only lived with them for a couple of years.”

  “And the rest of the family?”

  “No. My grandparents were still in Missouri, a place called Anderstown; my aunt filled me in. She let me know that they’d passed on a few years ago. I have an uncle, too. Billy. He was in the military, I think, and is probably out by now. But I have no idea and really, no interest. They were all strangers to me.”

  So far, Remmi’s story fit with what Settler already knew. She’d decided to keep her information on Didi Storm to herself and let the other woman talk and see if what she told deviated from what Settler believed to be fact. So far, Remmi Storm hadn’t outwardly lied. When Settler asked about the baby, her half sibling, Remmi corrected her and said there were actually two, a boy and girl, who would be going on twenty-one—nearly adults, if they’d survived. Talk of her infant brother and sister seemed to sadden her, and she insisted that one, the girl, Ariel, had been left in the desert with her father, though he thought he was getting a boy, for a quarter of a million dollars, which he had paid with what had turned out to be largely fraudulent bills. The boy had been left with Remmi, then stolen by Seneca Williams, a midwife who, too, had disappeared. Remmi feared the little girl had died in the desert when the car her father had been driving had exploded.

  “I don’t know exactly what went down that night,” she admitted. “I heard gunshots, saw the explosion, and heard later from the police that a kid on a motorbike, Noah Scott, had been shot out there, too. Before they could interview him, he left the hospital. How it all ties in? I don’t know.”

  “Where’s Noah Scott now?” Settler asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “A whole lotta people just up and disappeared back then.”

  “Yeah,” Remmi agreed. “And now . . .” She let her voice trail off, then expelled a long sigh. “Look, before we go any further, I think we should find out if the victim is my mom. Otherwise, this is all pointless.”

  “I have pictures.”

  “I want to see the body.” Remmi visibly braced herself, her jaw setting. The determined glint to her eyes suggested she wasn’t about to be dissuaded or even that she suspected Settler or maybe the police in general might try to pull a fast one.

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I have to be honest with you. This won’t be easy. The body’s not in great shape.”

  “I get it. I was there, and I did catch a glimpse of her before the cops pushed the crowd back. I assume you need to know if the woman is Didi, and you realize I’ll be able to recognize my own mother.”

  Or not. Settler found several pictures taken at the scene before the body of the Jane Doe had been examined by the M.E. Her gauzy pink dress was bunched around her waist, the blond wig askew, her arms and legs at weird angles, blood pooled beneath it all, but at least this side of the angelic-looking face was unmarred; the other side was crushed by the impact. Settler handed two of the least gory shots to Remmi.

  Remmi sucked in a quick breath and visibly cringed. All the color drained from her face, but she gritted her teeth and forced herself to study the pictures. “Why would anyone do this?” she whispered, then said, “I . . . I can’t tell. Not from these.”

  “How about the clothes? Was that dress part of her costume when she impersonated Marilyn Monroe?”

  “It looks like it, yes, but there have to be dozens, hundreds of knockoffs.”

  “What about the wig?”

  “What about it? It’s a short blond wig. Mom had several.”

  “Did she put her name in them?”

  “I believe so.”

  Dani handed over another picture, this one a blowup of the skullcap, with the name Didi Storm scrawled across the insid
e in her distinctive, loopy style.

  Remmi stared at the picture. Her throat worked. “That’s her signature. She labeled all of her things herself with a permanent laundry marker, and she’d laugh and tell me that when she was famous, all her things, signed as they were, would be worth a fortune.” Clearing her throat, she added, “But someone could have bought it on eBay or in a nostalgia store. She sold some of her things before she left—things she’d quit wearing, you know, when she’d updated her costume wardrobe. She’d sell something or pawn them when money got really tight, which, unfortunately was pretty often.” Her lips folded in on themselves as she stared at the photograph of the wig. “You have this—here?”

  “Yes. If it’s not already in an evidence locker, it will be soon. As soon as the crime-scene techs have processed it. Same with her clothes and personal belongings.”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  “When I can get them,” Settler promised. “Sure.” What would it hurt?

  “I need to verify if it’s really hers, if I can,” Remmi said. “I’d know her signature, and it looks authentic, and—” She shook her head, as if clearing cobwebs, then handed the pictures back, her gaze locking with Settler’s. “Why would anyone do this?”

  “Dress up as Marilyn Monroe and jump?”

  “Dress up as my mother impersonating Marilyn Monroe. Not only do the clothes look like they came from Mom’s wardrobe, but see, this, the left hand—” She held the photo back so that Settler was looking at it. “The ring finger has one of Mom’s rings on it, and more than that, the fingernail is painted black. That was her signature, not Marilyn Monroe’s—at least, I don’t think so. If Mom ever wore black nail polish, like for Halloween or something, she’d paint that finger orange or red or something else. She always kept that fingernail a different color.” She let out her breath slowly and said, “What I really need to do is to see her. The woman who jumped. For myself. I need to know if she’s my mother.” She shot Settler a look. “I can handle it,” she said evenly, and the detective wondered what else this woman had seen that made her so certain she could deal with viewing what might be her own mother’s broken body.