“This material you gave me. I think I know what’s going on. I don’t spook easily, but this makes me cold.”
Holly sat up straight. “What are you talking about?”
“The photographs in these books. There’s something about . . .”
Holly got out of bed, tied her robe, and came over quickly. “Show me.” She pulled a chair next to his, then peered at the book in his lap. “What photographs?”
“This biography of Maria Tomez. I still have a lot to read, but one thing that’s clear is that Frederick Maltin didn’t just discover her and manage her. In a very real sense, he created her.”
Holly looked curious, waiting for him to continue.
“I’ve never seen her perform,” Buchanan said, “but from what I gather, Maria Tomez sings not just well but passionately. That’s her reputation, a fiery, passionate diva. An opera critic wouldn’t ever go this far, but to put it bluntly, Maria Tomez is . . .”
“Sexy,” Holly said.
“That’s the word. But look at these early photographs.” Buchanan turned pages in the book. “This is Maria Tomez at the beginning of her career. Before Frederick Maltin. When she was singing in Mexico and South America and none of the major critics was paying attention to her.”
Buchanan placed his index finger on a photograph of a young, short, overweight, dark-skinned woman with an insecure look in her eyes, a broad nose, an unbecoming hairstyle, pudgy cheeks, and slightly crooked teeth.
“All that hair piled on top of her head,” Holly said. “And the way her oversized costume hung on her, as if she was trying to hide the weight.”
“The early reviews are unanimous about the quality of her voice, but it’s obvious that the critics are holding back, trying to be kind, talking about her awkward stage presence,” Buchanan said. “What they’re really saying is that she’s too frumpy to be treated seriously as a stage performer.”
“Sexist but true,” Holly said. “The big money goes to the women with a great voice and magnetism.”
“The night Maltin saw her performing Tosca in Mexico City, Maria Tomez wasn’t even scheduled. She was the understudy who had to step in when the production’s star got sick.”
“I wonder what Maltin saw in her.”
“Someone to dominate. Someone to sculpt and shape. If Maltin had heard her perform under other circumstances, he wouldn’t have associated her with a sexy role like Tosca. But once he did, he took advantage of the possibilities. According to this biography, no one had ever shown so much interest in her. Her career was going nowhere. What did she have to lose? She turned herself over to him. She gave him absolute obedience.”
“And?”
“Look at these next few photographs. What do you notice?”
“Well, she’s progressively thinner. And her costumes take advantage of that.” Holly picked up the book to examine the photographs more closely. “Obviously her hairstyle’s been changed. Instead of being piled on top of her head, it’s now swept back. It’s long and thick. It’s loose and curled. There’s a kind of wild abandon to it.”
“As if a breeze is blowing it,” Buchanan said. “As if she’s on a cliff and the sea is crashing below her. What’s the word? Tempestuous? That’s what I noticed, too. The hairstyle has a passionate look to it. Now check this photograph.”
Holly did and shook her head. “I don’t know what . . .” At once, Holly pointed. “Her nose. It’s been narrowed and straightened.”
“And check this photograph taken three months later.”
“This time, I really don’t get it,” Holly said.
“She’s smiling.”
“Right.”
“Is she smiling in the previous one?”
“No.”
“And in the one before that?”
“She’s not smiling there, either, but in this first picture she is, and . . . Oh, my God,” Holly said, “the teeth. They aren’t the same. They’re crooked at the start, and now . . . She’s had them straightened and capped.”
“Or Frederick Maltin did,” Buchanan said. “He promised her that within two years he’d have her career turned around. What none of the publicity mentions is how much physical alteration was necessary. In the next photograph, three months further along, her eyebrows are different. In the photograph after that, it looks as if something chemical or surgical has been done to her hair to raise the scalp line, to give her more forehead, to help proportion the rest of the face.”
“And all the while, she’s been losing weight,” Holly said with excitement. “Her wardrobe’s been getting more stylish. The designs made her look taller. She’s wearing expensive necklaces and earrings that glint and look good to the camera. Those changes attract the most attention, so the other, gradual, step-by-step changes become less noticeable. They’re subtle and equally important, but done over a long enough period, they don’t make anybody realize the degree to which she’s been reconstructed.”
“Her fame was still growing,” Buchanan said. “She wasn’t under the same close scrutiny then that she would be in her prime, so a lot of the changes wouldn’t have been noticed as she moved from opera house to opera house in various countries. Still, look at these later photographs, after she’d become a sensation. The changes continued. Here. Am I wrong, or has she had cosmetic surgery around her eyes to make them seem more intense? In this photograph, have her earlobes been shortened? There’s something about them that’s different and makes her face look more proportioned.”
“Not only that, but her breasts seem higher,” Holly said. “Possibly some kind of surgery there, as well. Her waist seems longer. This is amazing. At first, it just seems that she’s maturing and glowing from her success. But I think you’re right. She was being sculpted and shaped. Frederick Maltin created her.”
“Once her body matched the passionate roles that Maltin wanted her to play, the critics paid more attention to her voice,” Buchanan said. “She became an overnight sensation that took two years and who knows how many visits to dentists and surgeons. And all of a sudden, she wasn’t awkward on stage—because she wasn’t self-conscious about her appearance anymore. She’d been made beautiful, and she loved being adored. The more her audiences applauded, the better she improved her stage technique to encourage their applause. Her voice blossomed. She became rich. Or rather, she and Maltin became rich. Part of the deal was that she’d marry him. Not that I think Maltin cared about having sex with her. My guess is, he wanted to control her finances, and he could do that better as her husband in addition to being her manager. For fifteen years, he controlled her. Maybe he threatened to reveal the true story behind her success, to release before-and-after pictures, that sort of thing. Then one day at the start of this year, it became too much. She finally left him. She and Drummond met at a charity benefit in Monaco. They struck up a friendship. Drummond became her escort. Maybe he seemed safe to her. After all, he was old enough to be her grandfather. He was thousands of times richer. He probably didn’t want sex. In fact, on the surface, there wasn’t anything she could give him that he needed or didn’t already have. So she kept seeing him, but the gossip photographers wouldn’t leave them alone, and Drummond offered her a chance to get away from the public eye, to relax and regroup, to keep her picture out of the magazines, not to mention to be out of touch from the jerk she was divorcing. Drummond flew her to his yacht off the western coast of Mexico. A vacation in her home country. She stayed on board three weeks, flew back to New York, bought an apartment, retired from singing, and in effect, like Garbo, told the world that she wanted to be left alone.”
“Now months later, she disappears.” Holly frowned. “And your friend who sometimes provided security for her disappears as well. What happened two weeks ago? What’s going on?”
“I don’t think it happened two weeks ago.”
Holly didn’t move for a moment. Then she straightened.
“I think it happened on the yacht,” Buchanan said.
“What happ
ened? I still don’t—”
“The photocopies of the recent articles you gave me don’t reproduce the pictures very well. But this page from yesterday’s Washington Post has clear photographs. A shot of Maltin at his news conference. A recent shot of Maria Tomez during one of her infrequent public appearances. Dark glasses. Concealing hat.”
“Tell me what you’re getting at.”
“It looks like Maria Tomez had some work done on her jawline. It’s just a little different. And the ridges on her collarbone are a little different,” Buchanan said.
“A nose job’s one thing,” Holly said. “But changing a jawline? Altering ridges on a collarbone? That’s major reconstructive work.”
“Exactly,” Buchanan said. “This last photograph. I don’t think it’s Maria Tomez. The more I look at it . . . the more I’m sure it’s Juana impersonating her.”
7
“But how is such a thing possible?”Sounding frustrated, Holly drove rapidly along the busy expressway. Headlights blazed in the opposite lanes. “Sure, Montgomery had a double in the Second World War. Movie stars use doubles all the time. These days, theatrical makeup is so realistic that actors can believably change their appearance. But Montgomery wasn’t showing up at society charity benefits. As far as the movies go, cameras can play a lot of tricks. This is different. We’re talking about a critically acclaimed opera singer. I don’t care how good the makeup was, no one could imitate that once-in-a-generation voice.”
“But Juana didn’t have to,” Buchanan said, still frozen by the implications of what he’d discovered.
Holly steered quickly around a truck and drove faster.
“The newspaper articles are emphatic,” Buchanan said. “Maria Tomez retired from performing after she finished the cruise on Drummond’s yacht. She went into seclusion in New York, except for brief public appearances, none of which involved singing. In some of these articles, she complains about having had pneumonia, about recurring laryngitis. The reporters note that her voice was hoarse. Since that’s the one thing Juana couldn’t have faked, she removed the problem by pretending to have problems with her voice. Otherwise, both women are Hispanics, with the same general build and facial characteristics. Maria Tomez kept changing her appearance in gradual ways, after all, so if Juana didn’t look absolutely like her, it wouldn’t have attracted attention. It would have been just another case of how Maria Tomez continued to change. As long as Juana’s special makeup guaranteed that the similarities far outnumbered the differences. How many people know Maria Tomez intimately? Her ex-husband, whom she refused to see. Her other business contacts, whom she shut out after she retired. Her entourage, which she apparently changed after the cruise. Alistair Drummond, who continued to see her after the cruise and accepted her as Maria Tomez. We’re talking about a woman who guarded her privacy to begin with. All Juana had to do was take a few phone calls from time to time, complain about a cold, appear briefly in public, get her picture in the paper, and no one would suspect that she wasn’t the person she pretended to be.”
“Except you.” Holly steered around another vehicle, squinting from the glare of headlights. “You suspected.”
“Because I had a reason to suspect. Because I’d seen the makeup room in Juana’s house. Because I became more struck by Juana’s resemblance to Maria Tomez as I looked at the photographs. Juana was on my mind, so I made the connection. What she did was brilliant. I can’t get over what a genius she was at impersonating. I could never have done the equivalent.”
“The question is, Why?” Holly said. “Why did Juana impersonate her?”
“One common denominator is Alistair Drummond. The retirement, the need for seclusion, came after the cruise on Drummond’s yacht. Drummond accepted Juana as Maria Tomez, and it was someone working for Drummond who paid Frederick Maltin to stop talking to reporters about his ex-wife. The disappearance . . . I think I understand,” Buchanan said quickly.
The tone in his voice made Holly shiver. “What?”
“There were two disappearances.”
“Two?”
“It wasn’t Maria Tomez but Juana who disappeared a few weeks ago. Drummond’s doing his damnedest to find her. Why? Because if I’m right, nine months ago Maria Tomez never got off Drummond’s yacht. That was Juana, and Drummond doesn’t want anyone to know about the switch.”
Holly clenched the steering wheel. “What in God’s name happened on that yacht?”
8
La Guardia Airport. To get there, they’d used Holly’s car rather than a taxi because, after checking out of the Dorset, they didn’t want to attract attention by leaving her car in the hotel’s garage for an indefinite period. At the airport’s parking ramp, however, it wasn’t unusual for cars to be left for quite a while.
They’d been forced to rush. They had needed luck with reservations and traffic. Nonetheless, they’d managed to get two tickets on the last flight out of La Guardia for Miami, and although they got to the boarding gate with only seconds to spare, that didn’t matter. The point was, they were on the plane.
During the flight, both were too tense to sleep. They had no appetite. Still, they ate the lasagna the airline served, needing to maintain their strength.
“Your itinerary. Cancún, Mérida, and Fort Lauderdale,” Holly said.
“I’ve never admitted to being in any of those places,” Buchanan told her.
“But the rest aren’t in doubt. Washington, New Orleans, San Antonio, Washington again, New York, now Miami and points south. All in two weeks. Hanging around with you could be exhausting. And this is normal for you.”
“Better get used to it.”
“I think I’d like that.”
Back at the Dorset, Buchanan had wondered if the home port for Drummond’s yacht would be the same as the city where Drummond’s corporate headquarters were located. Knowing that all large vessels were required to file a float plan indicating the length and itinerary of an intended voyage, he had phoned the Coast Guard in San Francisco. However, the officer on duty told him that the yacht was based somewhere else—they didn’t have a float plan for it. Buchanan had then phoned the National Association of Insurance Underwriters at its main offices in Long Beach, California. Eight P.M. eastern time had been 5:00 P.M. Pacific time. He made contact just before the office closed.
“My name’s Albert Drake.” He pretended to be agitated. “My brother, Rick, works on . . . God, I can’t remember. . . . The Poseidon. That’s it.” Buchanan knew the name from the research Holly had given him. “Alistair Drummond owns it. A two-hundred-foot yacht. But Rick didn’t leave an itinerary. Our mother’s had a stroke. I have to get in touch with him, but I don’t know how else . . . The Coast Guard suggested . . .”
Large vessels require such large amounts of insurance that the underwriters for the insurance companies insist on knowing where those vessels are at all times. As soon as Drummond’s yacht reached a new berth, its captain was obligated to report his location to the insurance officials.
9
KEY WEST
After arriving in Miami past midnight, Buchanan and Holly used Charles Duffy’s credit card to rent a car and began the 150-mile drive south along the Florida Keys. During the trip, they stopped for takeout coffee and alternated driving while the other dozed, mercury-vapor lights along the extensive forty-two bridges of the Overseas Highway hurting their eyes and adding to their fatigue.
It was just before dawn when they arrived at their destination, the southernmost community in the continental United States. Key West, only four miles long and one and a half miles wide, had a permanent population of almost thirty thousand. One of the last bastions of the counterculture in America, the sand-and-coral island remained synonymous with the unorthodox lifestyle of Hemingway, who had once lived there and whose home—with its numerous cats supposedly descended from the novelist’s original pets—was a National Historic Landmark. The town’s atmosphere and architecture were an exotic blend of Bahamian, West Indian,
and Cuban influences. It was known for its deep-sea fishing and its tropical foods. There was a U.S. naval air station. John James Audubon once had been in residence, also Harry Truman. The singer-novelist Jimmy Buffet was its most famous current spokesman.
But there was only one thing in Key West that Buchanan cared about, and after he and Holly caught a few more hours of sleep at a cheap motel that accepted cash in advance (he was getting nervous about using Charles Duffy’s credit card), they cleaned up, ate, then got down to business. An hour’s stroll around the crowded harbor, where they bought sandals, short-sleeved pullovers, and cutoff jeans so they wouldn’t be conspicuous, gave Buchanan ample chance to pose seemingly casual questions to vendors and fishermen. Soon he and Holly were able to stand on the wharf, lean forward against the railing, breathe the humid, tangy salt air, and study their target.
Drummond’s yacht, gleaming white against the green-blue of the Gulf of Mexico, was anchored a hundred yards offshore. Two hundred feet long, with three decks and a helicopter pad on the top (the chopper had taken off a few days earlier, heading south, Buchanan had been told by a fisherman), the yacht should have inspired awe, but instead it made Buchanan feel cold despite the eighty-five-degree temperature. The sleekly styled profile seemed threatening, like the curved tip of a massive hunting knife. The large sunning area at the stern, with windows providing a view from the upper decks, made Buchanan think of voyeurs and exhibitionists. Regardless of its resplendent white exterior, the yacht appeared cloaked in a black pall of gloom.
“Sometimes,” Holly said, “when you’re deep in thought, your eyes and face change. You look like a stranger.”
“How?”
“Solemn. Troubled.”
“Just so we understand each other, this has nothing to do with Maria Tomez,” Buchanan said. “I want to know what happened to her, yes. But more than anything, I want to know what happened to Juana.” He turned his attention from the yacht and focused on Holly, who concentrated on his gaze, confused. “A lot of this doesn’t make sense to me. What I feel about you, for example. But I have to settle old accounts before I start new ones. After this is over, you and I can talk about what we have.”
Assumed Identity Page 48