David Morrell - Assumed Identity

“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 happened? 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.”

“ 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.”