9.
 Of course I could never tell her or anyone else the truth, for example about my last meeting with Harry Grimacher. My conversation with Harry had been short and to the point. I was to turn in a clean report and walk away with a quarter million dollars in smallish bills. He had the cash ready and waiting when I got to the house. It was all the conversation we needed. I signed a receipt; that way we all had each other by the balls, and nobody could rat.
But there was the whatever you want to call it, the love thing, the infatuation. I stopped by Doyle's. He was surprised when I told him, but relieved that Harry and I had it all settled and there'd be no further inquiries. I didn't really want to greet Ana Maria Liana Esquivel in person. It was enough that I saw her lumbering from the living room to the kitchen during a commercial, then back to the living room with another quart of ice cream.
John Paul Doyle (the Conlons had been his adoptive parents) took me in the yard, under the moonlight, where he could smoke. He offered, but I declined; I was still slamming along on pills at that point, and the thought of another strong drug made my system want to crash. "You want to know why," he said without asking. "I'm sure you do. I don't blame you. And nobody else will ever know. Well, I was unhappily married, you know, the itch hit, and I desired someone young and passionate. Then one day the answer came. In church. I tried to explain to my wife, but she never understood anything. I'd always wanted to be an artist, and I had talent, but we married early and had kids, so I never had time to draw or paint. I was daydreaming in church, looking at a young woman across the aisle while the organ music played and the choir sang. In the midst of all that purity, I was having this erotic daydream, and it struck me that I could bring it all together by learning photography. Somehow, I could fall in love with an image, capture it, possess it. So I got into cameras. My wife didn't understand. We split up. I tried the singles scene, but I was too sensitive and people really chew you up when you open your heart to them. Then I met that young woman again. Her." He pointed over his shoulder, speaking in a whisper, just as Liana made another trip past, perhaps for some pate or a nice cheesecake. "I was no stud either, Lambert. But I saw the beauty in her face. We reached for the stars together. She gave herself to me, this girl, this woman who had so much love, but no self-confidence. I was her self-confidence, Lambert, I still am."
"That's why you two kept going back together," I said.
"Sure," he said. "We lost a lot of weight, got into shape. Do you know how I felt the first time a woman propositioned me? I was speechless, and she said 'of course I don't really fit in with YOU people...?' Lambert, it was a new world for Ana and me."
I showed him the photo. He looked at it fondly but didn't want to touch it. "Yeah, that's Liana. We will always treasure that short little time. Like having paradise and losing it."
I filled in: "So you invented new identities."
"Borrowed," he corrected. "Conlon, after my adoptive parents. In her case, she was really Ana Maria, but she took a sister's name..."
"A nun in Mexico."
"Yeah, how did you know?"
"There were over a dozen children, among them an Anna, a Maria, and an Ana Maria."
"That's right. She took the stage name Liana to further hide things."
"A jungle vine."
"Right. And then as you know we were out of control. We were famous and wealthy and beautiful, but we were miserable. I was drinking too much, and she was beginning to eat again. The end was in sight. A month or two longer, and we would have been tabloid food, big blobs."
I said: "So you took the quick way out. A phony suicide." He nodded. I knew the rest. The agent, Harry Grimacher, had arranged the insurance scam. To really fake their deaths, they had to leave all their possessions untouched. Only her parents knew, the toothless lady I'd spoken with and her husband she'd called right after my visit. None of her other relatives had known that their obese Ana Maria had been the same as the famous, luscious Liana. Harry had set them up in their barrio hideaway. Harry had rolled her Jaguar off the cliff and Doyle had driven Harry home in his roadster. Within months, Doyle and his woman were unrecognizable. A scheme like this will work if all the right people are paid off. In this case, they have been.
"How did you get onto us?" Doyle asked.
I waved the photo. "Lots of little things. But the clincher was, the handwriting on the photo matches that of a card your girlfriend sent her mother. I finally figured it out. The autograph wasn't from Maria to Anna. It was from Ana Maria to Maria, who is a nun and probably never got a picture of her sister in the bikini. The photo ended up in our files."
Doyle and I had said goodnight, and goodbye.
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