Lowcountry Bombshell (A Liz Talbot Mystery) (2 page)

“Lemon, mint, or both?”

“Mint, please,” she said. “Thank you, ever so.”

I scrambled to the kitchen. While I waited for the tap water to run hot, I heard Mamma’s voice in my head lamenting my lapse in hospitality. I scrubbed my hands and slathered them with sanitizer. No sense running the risk of making us both sick. Bacteria are forever on the offensive, but they thrive in hot weather. Some people think roaches would be the only thing left after a nuclear apocalypse, but I’m convinced bacteria would not only survive, they’d kill off the roaches. Certain members of my immediate family make great sport of trying to trace what they refer to as my “nervous habit” to some incident in my childhood, or genetic mutation. This is ridiculous. I simply have a healthy regard for personal hygiene.

I fixed two glasses of tea, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Then, I headed back to the living room silently chanting, don’t stare, don’t stare, don’t stare… 

I set the glasses on coasters on the mahogany end table between us and returned to the wingback. “Please,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

She took a sip of her tea. “My, that’s good.” She stared at the glass for a moment. When she looked up at me, her eyes shimmered. “This will sound absurd.”

“You’ve come to the right place. I have an appreciation for the absurd.”

The edges of her mouth crept up. She fixed her gaze on something far away, outside the row of floor-to-ceiling windows.

“I was born June first, nineteen seventy-six, at nine-thirty a.m., in Los Angeles General Hospital. My birthday was the fiftieth anniversary of hers. To the minute.”

I reached for my tea glass but didn’t take my eyes off Calista.   

She paused for a moment. “My mother named me Norma Jeane. On my birth certificate, it says a man named Mortensen is my father, but I’ve never met him and I doubt that’s his true name. When I was two weeks old, my mother put me in foster care. With very few exceptions, the first eighteen years of my life followed the same pattern as Marilyn’s.”

I set down my glass and picked up my pad and pen. “Wasn’t her last name Baker?”

“She was baptized Norma Jeane Baker, same as me. Her mother’s first husband was John Baker, but he was out of the picture long before Norma Jeane was conceived.” Calista shrugged. “Martin Edward Mortensen was her mother’s most recent husband when Norma Jeane was born, so he’s on the birth certificate. It was pretty much the same with me, or at least, that’s what they told me. Not the same Martin Edward Mortensen, of course.”

I focused on keeping my expression neutral. “Go on.”

“Sometimes my mother would pick me up on Saturdays from whatever foster home or orphanage I happened to be living in and take me places. To the movies, mostly, and out to lunch. I lived with her a couple of times, but it never worked out.” Calista blinked. “My mother insisted I was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, though I think her friend Grace put that idea in her head to begin with, probably before I was even born, when the doctor told Mother her approximate due date.

“You see, Mother’s maiden name is Monroe. She lives in Los Angeles, and they’ve always been fascinated by Marilyn. Mother is very impressionable. Grace is…ambitious. They were very close, Mother and Grace. Aunt Grace. That’s what she had me call her.”

“Uh-huh.” I felt my eyebrows creep up.

“I think they tried to make my life just like Marilyn’s, the foster care, living with relatives, the orphanage. All of it.”

“But they couldn’t have known how much you’d grow up to look like Marilyn.”

“No.” Calista slowly shook her head. “At first I think the date ignited Grace’s imagination. She was always into numerology, Tarot cards, horoscopes, all of that. As I got older and actually resembled Marilyn, she became more and more obsessed. The strangest thing of all is I don’t look as much like her as it seems.
My
hair is naturally this color, Marilyn’s wasn’t. The head of Columbia studios arranged for electrolysis to raise her hairline, and to have her hair bleached with peroxide and ammonia. Another studio type she had an affair with took her to the orthodontist and had her overbite corrected. Her agent had work done on her nose and her jaw. I’ve never had any of that done. I look like she looked when they got through with her.”

I caught myself staring at her with a tilted head, straightened and smiled. Best not to advertise how I thought she might be making this up. “When did you change your name?”

“I was barely sixteen when I married Jimmy, my first husband. He was five years older, and working at Lockheed. I’d been living with Grace and her family for a while. Grace’s husband showed a little too much interest in me. Mother was in some kind of clinic halfway house when she wasn’t at Grace’s. I’d been dating Jimmy, and Grace arranged for me to marry him. It was either that or go back to the orphanage, since she said they were moving and I couldn’t go with them. I had no choice. It was exactly like that with her, with Norma Jeane.”

What kind of crazy people invested that much effort into making a child’s life a perfect reflection of someone else’s?

Calista continued. “Except
her
first husband didn’t want her to be a model, and didn’t want her to be in the movies. All mine wanted was for me to be a star. He kept setting up photo shoots, sending pictures of me to agents. Mother and Grace prompted him to do it. They nagged him about it. They signed me up for acting classes. They were obsessed with Hollywood, all the glamour. I was there ticket in.” She closed her eyes and shuddered. After a moment, her eyes popped open, large and emphatic. “The last thing I wanted to be was a movie star. The summer I turned eighteen, I left California. I got as far away from Hollywood as I could. I divorced Jimmy and I changed my name. I never wanted to see any of them again.”

“What made you choose Calista McQueen?” An irrelevant question. I was rattled, no doubt about it. I’d heard some crazy things in my line of work, but this freakish saga stretched the limits of plausible to new dimensions. And yet, her appearance testified to the truth of it.

“I picked Calista because I like the way it sounds. I chose McQueen because I was making my getaway. I always liked that movie, you know?
The Getaway
, with Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw? It’s old, but I love old movies. I just don’t want to be in them.”

“So you left California in, what, nineteen-ninety-four?”

She nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

“But you haven’t been in Stella Maris since nineteen-ninety-four.” Our small town was on an island near Charleston, South Carolina. You might hide from an ex-husband here, but you couldn’t hide from your neighbors.

“No, I just moved here a few weeks ago, when my house was finished,” she said.

There’d been only one new home built in Stella Maris in the last year. It sat on the shore of the small bay between North Point, where I lived, and Devlin’s Point. The contractor, Michael Devlin, and I had a complicated relationship. There’d been a time when I wanted nothing more than to share my life with him, but too much had happened, or perhaps not enough.

The house stood less than a mile down the beach from mine, and Michael had taken me through it a couple of times. It was state-of-the-art hurricane proof. The concrete walls were nearly a foot thick.

I’d watched a crew test the steel shutters one afternoon. The sleek, contemporary home turned into a fortress with the flip of a switch. It wasn’t huge, maybe twenty-five hundred square feet, but on a prime, three-acre, oceanfront lot, the house was worth several million dollars.

“Nice house,” I said.

“Thanks.” She didn’t volunteer any information about the house just then, like where she’d come by that kind of money, or how she ended up on Stella Maris. “I lived in Charleston—West Ashley—for nearly sixteen years.”

“What did you do there?” I asked.

“I worked in a bank. Of course, I dyed my hair brown and wore it flat. I wore these funny little glasses with no prescription and too much makeup. That’s the one thing I enjoyed in the acting classes Mother and Grace made me take, becoming someone else. That’s come in handy.

“Anyway, I went to school at night at the College of Charleston. I wanted to be a journalist, but I decided to stay in banking. I thought the money would be better. It’s a good thing I did, because one of us needed to have a decent paycheck.”

“Us?”

She turned from the window to look at me. “My second husband, Joe, was a baseball player.”

“Of course.”

It occurred to me that this could be a practical joke. My sister, Merry, and my brother, Blake, were both artists in the field. I didn’t know much about Marilyn Monroe’s life story. But I knew she’d been married to Joe DiMaggio, and I knew he’d been a famous baseball player for the New York Yankees.

“I met Joe when I was a senior at College of Charleston. He had played for the Charleston Riverdogs. They’re a class-A farm team for the New York Yankees. A friend set us up on a blind date.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Is that how they met? Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio? Blind date?”

“Yes,” Calista said. “Well, he asked to be introduced to her. It was—”

“Pretty much the same?”

“Yes. I was twenty-five, and he was thirty-nine. Only a knee injury had kept my Joey out of the majors. By the time I met him he was coaching the Riverdogs.” She sipped her tea, set down the glass, and turned back to the window. “Of all the ways I wanted my story to be different from hers, I wished this one thing could have been the same. I always wished Joey could have made it big. He had the bat. His average was nearly four hundred.”

“That’s incredible,” I said, as if I knew a solitary thing about batting averages.

She swiveled her gaze back to me. “I always wondered if it was my fault.”

“If what was your fault?”

“Like, if by making things different, not becoming a movie star, you know? If that messed everything up for Joey. Maybe that’s even what got him killed.” A tear escaped her eye. She brushed it away and looked down at her lap.

The second husband was killed? I was still adjusting to the information that he’d been a baseball player. I took a cleansing breath. We sat there for a minute listening to a couple of birds chirping in the magnolia tree outside the windows. I didn’t know how acquainted this improbable tale was with reality, but I knew that she was either a skilled actress, or she was grieving someone she loved. I recognized heartbreak.

“What happened to Joe?”

“He was killed by a carjacker one night after a game a couple of years ago. He must have made Joe get out of the car at Brittlebank Park. That’s where they found him the next morning, shot in the head. The police told me he wasn’t killed in the car, but on the bank of the Ashley River. They speculated that the killer planned to throw Joey into the river, but something spooked him and he left in a hurry. They never caught the lousy son of a bitch who did it.”

“Wait. Somebody robbed and killed your husband across the street from the police department and was never caught?”

She raised her hand in solemn oath. “For eleven bucks and change and a short ride in a lousy fifty-year-old Cadillac convertible.”

“How did you know how much money he had? If the carjacker took it?”

“Joey told me. He called before he left the field house. He was going to stop and buy a lottery ticket.” She waved her hand dismissively. “He was always buying those damned things. I wanted him to hurry home. It was after eleven. I’d missed the game. I had a migraine. He was going to stop at an ATM, and then by the mini-mart near our neighborhood. He needed thirty bucks for the ticket, and he only had eleven dollars and some change.”

“A thirty-dollar lottery ticket?” I asked.

“He always played the same numbers. My birthday, his, the day we met, our first date, the day we got engaged, and the day we got married. He bought a ten-draw ticket, with power play. Thirty dollars every five weeks.”

“So, he never made it to the ATM?” I had no idea what her second husband’s death had to do with why she needed protection, but I was enthralled.

She shook her head. “No, they checked the camera. At first they thought he’d been robbed at the ATM. But he put the top down, and some guy hopped into the car with him as he was leaving the ballpark. A couple of the guys on the team saw it happen, but they just thought the scum was a friend or something. They didn’t think anything about it until they heard Joey’d been killed.”

I didn’t say anything, just waited for her to go on.

“The killer took Joey’s wallet and the watch I gave him for our anniversary. They found the car later that day, abandoned behind a warehouse near the Cooper River Bridge.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “I know you must be wondering what all of this has to do with why I’m here.”

I pressed my lips into a tight smile and tilted my head in a half nod.

“I just don’t know what matters and what doesn’t. Do you know what I mean?”

“Sure,” I said. Usually I had the opposite problem. People left things out that got them, or me, or both of us in trouble.

Calista was staring out the windows at yesterday again. After a few minutes I asked her, “What have you been doing since Joe died?”

“Dabbling,” she said.

I picked up my pen, suddenly conscious of the fact I hadn’t taken a single note. I searched for what to write down. “Dabbling in…?”

“Oh, this and that. I’ve traveled some. At first I just went from one place to another. I spent almost a year in Maine before I came back. It was too painful, being in that house where we shared a life. I sold it, had everything boxed up and moved without ever going back inside.”

Lots of questions popped into my head, but I let her talk.

“I stayed in a condo at Wild Dunes, you know, on the Isle of Palms, while they were building my house. I don’t think I could ever leave the Lowcountry for good. I figured Stella Maris was close enough to all my Joey memories without being too close.”

I nodded, as if she was making perfect sense. After a minute or two, I prompted her, “You must have done very well in banking.”

“Oh no, I could have, if we’d moved to a city that was a banking center, like maybe New York, or even Charlotte. For a while, anyway. Now, banking isn’t really the field to be in, is it?”

I shook my head in commiseration. I doodled on the pad for a minute, then looked up at her. “All of that traveling must have been expensive. And your house…”