Lowcountry Bombshell (A Liz Talbot Mystery) (4 page)

THREE

The doorbells jangled a welcome as I stepped inside the Cracked Pot. Somehow, Moon Unit had achieved a light and airy, yet cozy ambiance. The mix of an old-fashioned counter lined with swivel stools, an eclectic group of tables, tropical plants, and a wall-sized collage of island residents provided the perfect setting for one of our town’s primary hangouts.

I scanned the dining room for my brother and found him in the back booth.

He looked up from his cheeseburger as I approached. I slid in across from him and waved to Moon Unit.

Blake was the stuff single women closing in on thirty dream about. Early thirties, fit, tanned, never been married, and has a job. His medium-brown hair was perhaps a little longer than your typical law enforcement style. Like Merry and me, he had inherited our mamma’s cobalt blue eyes.

“What are you into today,” he asked in his big brother voice. Blake was only one year older than me, but he subscribed to the notion that this gave him sacred rights and responsibilities concerning my welfare. It was sweet, on days when it didn’t drive me crazy.

“Not much.”

Sometimes Blake was happier not knowing the details of my cases. To say that he was not pleased with my career choice would be an understatement. He didn’t like it one bit when I lived in Greenville. His angst had doubled since I moved home. He didn’t care for having a private investigator—any private investigator—on his island. We’d worked out an arrangement. If I ran across something he needed to know about, I found a way to tell him without violating my client’s trust. If I needed backup, I called him, although sometimes not soon enough to suit him. Because our small town’s law enforcement budget did not allow him to have dedicated detectives, if he needed one, which was rare, he would bring me in as a consultant. So far, so good.

“You finish that S.O.B. divorce case?”

I nodded. “Thank heavens.” Clients from old-money Charleston, many of whom lived south of Broad Street—S.O.B.—on the peninsula, made up most of my growing client base. They liked hiring an investigator who was once removed from their world, but spoke the same language and knew the unwritten rules.

Moon Unit arrived with my iced tea. “Hey Sweetie.” Moon Unit Glendawn and I had been friends forever. We graduated from Stella Maris High the same year. Her wavy, honey-colored hair was pulled high into a ponytail, her hazel eyes warm.

“Hey Moon.”

“What chu want for lunch?” She didn’t bother with a menu. I knew what was on it. And she knew that I took that list as more of a suggestion—sort of an inventory of what was available in the kitchen.

“You know that Southwestern chicken salad you had last week on special?”

“Uh-huh.” She scribbled on her pad.

“Could you make me one of those, only add some avocado, hold the corn, and bring me some salsa on the side instead of the dressing?”

“Sure thing.”

“And no corn chips.”

“Got it.” She spun off before I could modify her recipe further.

Blake shook his head and picked up his cheeseburger.

“Have you met the woman who just moved into that new house in the bay?” I pulled out my hand sanitizer.

“The McQueen woman? Drives that fifty-nine Eldorado Biarritz?”

“Yeah.”

“She came in Monday to report a B and E.”

“Say what?”

“Yeah—wanted to talk to me. Wouldn’t talk to Clay or Sam. Even Nell.” He shrugged. “It was a slow day. She’s new in town. Thought it’d be good for public relations.”

“What was taken?” I asked.

“That’s the screwy part,” Blake said. “Nothing was taken, but she says someone broke in and left a bottle of sleeping pills on her bedside table.”

“Sleeping pills?” Hells bells. There was something she left out?

“Yeah, they were capsules, labeled Nembutal. Warren says you can’t even get that stuff in capsules legally anymore, in this country. The liquid is used in hospitals, and hell, they use the stuff for lethal injections.”

Warren Harper was our town physician, and, when necessary, the coroner.

“Were they in a prescription bottle?”

Blake nodded and raised his eyebrows as he finished chewing a bite of cheeseburger. “Yeah, but get this. The doctor on the label doesn’t exist. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to dummy-up a prescription label.”

“Have you had the drug tested?”

“Oh, yeah. My CSI lab got right on it.”

“Sarcasm does not become you.”

“Listen. That woman has a screw loose. Five will get you ten there’s nothing in those capsules but powdered sugar.”

“Was there evidence of a break in?”

“None. My opinion? She typed that thing up herself.”

“But why would she do that?”

“Who knows? Maybe she just wanted an excuse to talk to somebody—get some attention.”

Coming from Blake, this position didn’t surprise me. Women had done all manner of kooky things to get his attention.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “She hired me this morning. Paid my retainer. She thinks someone is going to try to kill her.”

Blake set down his tea glass. “Five thousand dollars?”

“Yep.”

“That’s a lot of money to pay for a joke.”

“Did anything strike you about the way she looks?”

“I’m used to all that crap.”

I wrinkled my face at him.

“Blue stripe in her hair, fourteen piercings, tattoos. I hardly even notice that mess anymore.”

I smiled and nodded. “Me either.”

What did this woman really look like? Had she worn a Marilyn costume when she came to see me? Or was she tired of going around looking like a pinup poster, so she’d gone to see Blake incognito?

Likely, she’d worn the same getup to meet with Michael, which was why he hadn’t mentioned he was building a house for a dead movie star.

Moon Unit delivered my lunch. “Here you go.” She drug out ‘go’ into five syllables. “Can I get you anything else?”

“Not right now, thank you, Moon,” I said. “Hey, have you met Calista McQueen?”

“Mousey little thing that drives that big red convertible?”

Blake and I looked at each other.

“Sure,” Moon said. “She comes in a couple-three times a week. I declare, that girl needs to get in to see Phoebe. I bet you with some highlights and different makeup she’d be a looker.”

“I bet you’re right,” I said. “Have you talked to her much?”

Moon Unit raised a perfectly arched eyebrow. “Well, sure. I talk to all my customers.”

Blake rolled his eyes and looked over his shoulder. Moon Unit saying she talked to all her customers was like Paula Deen saying she put a little butter in all her recipes.

“What exactly was that look for?” Moon demanded.

“Not a thing.” Blake dug back into his cheeseburger.

“Michael just finished her house, down from the Pirates’ Den,” I said. Usually, if you gave Moon Unit a prompt, she’d take it and run. Her parents, John and Alma Glendawn, owned the Pirates’ Den, a popular restaurant and bar.

“Yeah, Mamma and Daddy sold her that three acres. She gave her word it would be built to environmentally friendly standards, and, you know, they knew Michael was going to build it and they trusted him. They still have more than a hundred acres. What were they ever going to do with all that land?”

Moon Unit, and everyone else on the island, sang a different tune if the topic was commercial development. We loved our small beach town just as it was.

We were not in need of condos, time shares, or resorts of any kind. Land was usually a very serious topic. Several bodies had piled up in the war over protecting the land on Stella Maris back in April.

“Moon, does she come in by herself?” I asked.

“Always. Bless her heart, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the poor little thing with anybody else. We need to introduce her around. I don’t think she knows a soul except me, Michael, Mamma and Daddy, and Robert Pearson.”

“Robert?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. He handled the closing on the land. She asked me about attorneys and I gave her his name. I don’t know if he handles other business for her or not.” Moon laid a ticket on the table. “Y’all holler if you need more tea.”

   Blake flashed me a stern look. “There is not one mousey thing about the woman
I
met who drives a red Cadillac. What have you not told me?”

I sat back in the booth. “When she came to see me, she looked just like Marilyn Monroe.”

“How do you know we’re all talking about the same woman?”

“Same name, same Cadillac.”

“I told you she was crazy. Maybe some kind of con artist. Apparently, she has nothing better to do with her time than play dress up. She’s just trying to get attention. End of story.”

“We’ll see.” I had a bad feeling Calista’s story was about to take an even more bizarre turn.

As soon as I started the car after lunch, I pressed the voice command button. “Shuffle, artist, Kenny Chesney.” “Sherry’s Living in Paradise” floated through the speakers. I rolled down the windows. I could deal with the heat. Like Sherry, the salty air soothed my soul.

FOUR

Back at the house, I got busy building Calista’s case file. I entered everything she’d told me into the standard interview form Nate and I used.

“The following interview was conducted by Elizabeth S. Talbot, of Talbot & Andrews Investigations, on Wednesday, July 25, 2012, at Stella Maris, SC. On this date…” 

The form is a clone of the FBI’s FD 302, chosen for its popularity with judges and attorneys, who become familiar with the form in law school. I can’t prove it, but I hold the belief that they consider anything typed in this particular format to have a better pedigree than ordinary case notes. I printed out the form, dated and signed the page, and placed it in the folder I’d created earlier along with Calista’s contract.

Next, I started creating electronic profiles for Calista and everyone who touched her life in any significant way. For every case, I construct a basic time line for a subject’s life, then fill in the blanks using a variety of public databases and paid subscription services. I like having the whole of a person’s life in front of me—you never know what might turn out to be important. Each fact could be a piece to the puzzle.

Not many years ago, this step would’ve taken days and involved mailed requests for documents, trips to courthouses, and library visits. These days, in most cases, a PI could accomplish basic vetting in a few hours on the Internet.

Calista was my first profile. I would’ve bet a case of my favorite pinot noir that in short order I would discover I’d spent my morning with either a con artist or a delusional woman. I would’ve lost that bet. Everything Calista told me about her background checked out—from her birthdate and time, to her history with the foster care system, to her marriage to James Edward Davis. Even to when she legally changed her name from Norma Jeane Mortensen Davis to Calista Faith McQueen, moved to West Ashley, and married a ballplayer named Jose Raphael Fernandez. I felt something cold with little feet crawl up my spine. It was creepy how much the first eighteen years of Calista’s life paralleled the other Norma Jeane’s. 

Jose’s early life was not the near-perfect parallel to the baseball icon’s that Calista’s had been to Marilyn’s. After a little digging, it was clear that beyond his chosen variation of his name and his profession, Joe’s background bore no similarities whatsoever to Joe DiMaggio’s. This came as a great relief. The crazy was limited in scope, and that’s always easier to deal with. Jose was an only child. His family was of Cuban descent, but had lived in Florida for three generations. His parents had died in a car accident in nineteen 1997.

I was most intrigued by Calista’s mother, whose name had been Gwen Monroe when Calista—Norma Jeane—was born. The surname Monroe gave me pause. Was this the seed from which the obsession had sprung? Gwen changed her name to Gladys the following week, the same day a woman named Donna Clark at the same address had changed her name to Grace McKee. To go to the trouble of changing their names, these women must have been heavily invested in the whole recreating Marilyn fantasy.

I found no trace of a man named Mortensen in Gwen’s history. Likely that was just a name she and Donna gave the hospital for the birth certificate to begin building their reincarnation fantasy. As far as I could determine, neither of them had ever been married. Here were the con artists—not Calista, as Blake had suggested. She was their victim. Dressing in outlandish costumes suddenly seemed tame as quirks go. If I’d been raised by crazies like that I might have a few screws loose, too.

My iPhone quacked like a duck, which meant a client was on the line. I glanced at the screen and answered. “Hey, Calista.”

“Liz, can you come with me to Charleston?” Calista’s voice sounded thick, like she’d been crying.

“Right now?”

“Yes. Please. Harmony’s dead.”

“I’m sorry—Harmony?”

“My life coach. Her assistant just found her. She’s been shot. Please.”

A life coach? “Did the assistant call 911?”

“I’m sure she must have. She called me because I had an appointment this afternoon. She didn’t want me to arrive at a crime scene.”

“That sounds like good sense to me. I’m sorry for your loss, but there’s nothing you or I can do, and the police won’t appreciate our being there.”

“I’m quite sure they will want to talk to me. I’d like you to be there.”

“Why would they want to talk to you?”

“Because I’m the one who got her killed.”

“I’m on my way.” I grabbed my iPhone and my favorite summer Kate Spade tote.