Murder Most Fancy, page 16
*
I woke up the next morning still not knowing how I was going to identify Max Weller. The real Max Weller. Patricia brought my breakfast tray at 11.10 am. Oven-fresh, crispy on the outside, soft in the middle, imported French croissants with a trio of homemade jams and a trifecta of creams (clotted, whipped and pouring). The French press coffee brought a lovely balance.
The moment the coffee hit the bottom of the smooth turquoise Shanghai Tang cup, Esmerelda strolled through the door. No doubt, she had exceptional sensory gifts.
By the time I had crunched my way into my first croissant with raspberry jam and whipped cream, Patricia had made the bed, fluffed the pillows and collected the dry-cleaning.
Esmerelda plopped herself into the shell armchair and poured herself a coffee.
‘You do know this is my private bedroom,’ I said.
‘This your jam, Patricia?’ Esmerelda asked Patricia, ignoring me.
‘Of course,’ Patricia said, pausing on her way out of the bedroom.
‘Did you put Steel Magnolias on in mother’s home theatre last night?’ I quizzed Esmerelda.
‘Totally. It’s a classic.’
I was deeply tempted to ask why, specifically, she felt that way but I was distracted when Patricia produced an envelope from her pocket.
‘I almost forgot. This came for you this morning,’ she said.
My stomach sank. I immediately recognised the typeface.
‘Duuude,’ Esmerelda warned after glancing at it.
I took the envelope and thanked Patricia. She almost fell out of the room in shock.
I examined the front of the envelope carefully. It was addressed to Indigo Jones-Bombberg. It had the same postage stamp, a golfing Santa. That was something Searing had failed to mention in his professional assessment. It also had the same post mark, SWPF. Only five million people living in Sydney. Easy.
I opened it. It was typed on the same card: a good base stock, nothing too fancy.
The dead body you found had:
• 24 dental implants - batch number 1331550011
• a row of four identical 5 mm stab wounds, exactly 30 mm apart, in right upper thigh
‘Did you know he had stab wounds?’
‘No. I didn’t see any blood. But five millimetres.’ I pinched my thumb and forefinger closely together and squinted as I peered through what I estimated to be a five-millimetre gap. ‘That’s tiny. And his pants were a dark colour and pretty grubby.’
‘Why would they be identical?’
‘Maybe they were all made by the same weapon.’
‘Yeah, but why would they be the exact same distance apart?’
I shrugged. ‘A very neat attacker?’
This got me a deadpan look.
My eyes roamed the room searching for OCD weapons. There were a surprising number that fit the bill: my fork, a row of hooks, the wooden spindles that formed the back of a vintage chair in the corner.
‘Cutlery? Furniture?’ I mused out loud.
‘Well,’ Esmerelda said, clearly giving up on me, ‘at least we got a batch number on the dental implants. That’s more than we had before.’
‘Bailly said there could be thousands of implants in each batch,’ I said, placing the card on the table.
‘Yeah, but that’s like up to. And like, she doesn’t have our contacts,’ she said, dunking her croissant in her coffee. Which is the Parisian way to breakfast, but she didn’t know that. Could Heinsmann and Dame Elizabeth be right? Did Esmerelda have something? I examined her outfit. No. Not possible.
‘What contacts?’ I queried, pulling my mind back.
‘Dude, you like own a plastic surgery empire thing. They do loads of implants. They can track implants, right?’
My late husband had built and then bequeathed Sydney Plastics, a boutique, but still very substantial, international plastic surgery empire to me. Well, 67.5 per cent of it. The bulk of the rest he’d left to his not-so-dead family, whose quarterly dividend cheques were posted to them in Ireland.
‘There is a large difference between a breast implant or a cheek implant or a whatever implant and a dental implant,’ I said.
‘Why? What’s the diff?’
I thought about it. I drank my coffee. I ate a croissant. I hated to admit it, but she was right. Maybe there was no difference.
If anyone could trace Max’s implant batch number, it was the new general manager of Sydney Plastics, Harvard MBA and all-round organisational genius, Rachael White. The brains behind plastic surgeon to the stars, Dr Bradley White.
‘Do you think Rachael could do that?’ I pondered, looking up from peeling the warm, crispy skin off my third croissant.
‘She says she’ll try,’ Esmerelda said, pocketing her phone. ‘Give her a couple days.’
‘You’ve already contacted her?’ Sometimes Esmerelda was frightening in her speed and efficiency. I didn’t even get a response from this question. I had insulted her. ‘You do know you work for me,’ I prodded.
‘I know,’ she said, sipping St. Helena coffee out of a $200 china cup while eating an imported $17 pastry. ‘Like, work, work, work.’
Do not go there. Let it go. It’s a trap.
I picked up the card and pondered. Bleached hair shaft.
I heard Searing’s voice in my head: who uses the words shaft and bleached. Bailly had used exactly the same words: His hair shaft was bleached. It was an unusual, very specific way of expressing it.
By the time I came to from my second reverie for the day, I had eaten two more croissants.
‘How hard would it be to find out where a department of justice employee lives? Specifically, their home address,’ I asked Esmerelda.
‘Not too hard,’ she said, rearranging her chair to get more sunlight through the window.
‘Really?’ I was surprised. I would have thought the home addresses of justice department employees like judges and prison wardens would have been highly protected and elusive.
She eyeballed me. ‘Like, you totally don’t know how to spend your money properly.’
‘You would,’ I lowered my voice, ‘bribe someone?’
‘You think your family got rich by following the rules? Your nanna’s a freight train, man. Anyone she doesn’t take out, she buys out.’
Her tone did not indicate derision. Surfer spy girl had strange heroes. Which is not to say I had any issue with buying my information. Or anything else. I just did not want to get caught.
‘I already got it anyway,’ she said, pulling the phone from her pocket. ‘You want me to write it down? I can like totally do it in code.’
I had no intention of asking her about the code.
‘You already have Bailly’s home address?’
If Esmerelda and I kept thinking the same thoughts, I was going to have to fire my therapist and replace her with a trained seal. I could not live in a world where Esmerelda and I lived in the same headspace.
‘What? Dude, no,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Searing. I got Searing’s home address.’
After the enormous relief of not being at one with Esmerelda passed, a deafening reality dawned on me. I had the power to find Searing at home. Alone. At home alone. My mind wandered Phi Phi far away. It was bad enough when Searing had been in my bedroom. A bedroom birth-control uncomfortably close to Mother’s house. Having the location of his bedroom, far from any prying eyes or ears, was mind-bending. It was too much information. Too much power. It was like having Ryan Gosling’s home address. Or being able to drop in on Chris Hemsworth … except … I knew where both of those men lived. So it was obviously much worse than that.
Esmerelda had been talking but I had no idea what she had said.
‘… gotta get that fixed.’
‘Pardon?’
She examined my face. ‘You really gonna drop in on Bailly? I mean, if you got a plan and you’re not gonna get busted, I could find her, but, like, you know.’
Did I know? Esmerelda sounded somewhat serious. How bad was it to confront a forensic pathologist working on the murder investigation of your fictional great-uncle in her home?
I wrinkled my nose. ‘Is it that bad?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s not, like, not bad. It’s not as bad as a judge, but it’s like worse than a prison guard.’ Her hand moved up and down in measurement, closer to the ground being a lowly social worker and closer to the ceiling being a High Court judge or the police commissioner.
We were running out of croissants.
‘Why would you?’ she wanted to know. ‘Bailly said we could check in with her in a couple days. Like, what’s the rush?’
‘What if Bailly is the leak? What if she’s sending the cards?’
‘Well, yay for us then, ’cause she’s helping out,’ she said, choosing one of the last croissants.
‘You don’t feel like that would be utterly deceptive? She gives us information via these typed cards and then tests us on it when we meet her? That seems a little sick and twisted.’
‘I totally don’t think bullshitting’s her style. But,’ she shrugged, ‘who knows what goes on with super-smart people? They’re almost as freaky as rich people.’
I felt unreasonably angry with Jem Bailly. What if she wasn’t just a quirky, super-smart scientist? What if she was a diabolical, manipulative mastermind? A fierce anger rose at the notion.
I’d had enough of being lied to. Enough of machinations going on in the deep background and being the last to know. Enough of being deceived by someone I trusted. Someone I respected. Someone I …
It itched at me.
What if it was someone from within the investigation? Rope or Winters? Was Rope sophisticated or creative enough to hand-type a card? Would Winters jeopardise his career to help us? Not likely. Besides, how would they even know we were investigating? As far as they knew, I was just a fire-happy Heiress who happened to stumble across a body.
I had come full circle with no answers.
‘Find the address,’ I said finally.
‘Geez, that took you a while. I thought I was gonna have to get a Happy Meal to snap you out of it.’
I said nothing. I was sulking.
‘You look pissed,’ she said, grinning. ‘I’d betta drive.’
CHAPTER 13
BAKE OUT
Bailly lived surprisingly close, in a beachside suburb called Maroubra. The drive out of Vaucluse through Rose Bay, Bondi, Bronte and Coogee to Maroubra was soothing. I sat in the passenger seat (I was not in a driving mood) watching the hypnotic coastal landscape. It inoculated me to the fact that we had slipped silently out of the golden triangle and into the zone of middle-class beach dwellers. Maroubra had a flash-in-the-pan history of race riots accompanied by a more systemic side of violent surf gangs. It currently showed no signs of turmoil. Gentrification, skyrocketing real estate prices, social evolution and a limit on the number of houses and apartments you could physically build along the Sydney coastline had chased out all but the most vigilant bigots and bullies. This left a raft of middle- to upper middle-class Sydneysiders. These varied from forensic pathologists (Bailly), to school teachers (my high school English teacher), to share homes (my Pilates instructor) and blended families (just a guess, it seemed like a blended family kind of place) to deal with the many real estate brokers, British and Swedish backpackers and the eternally present cohort of sunbathing and surfing devotees.
We pulled up across the road from Bailly’s address. Her white, five-storey, twin apartment block seemed to have been designed by a moderately sophisticated Ronald McDonald. Judging by the identical rectangular red front doors, the two blocks were each three apartments wide. The buildings were conjoined by a pair of walkable golden arches which had been haphazardly stuck on their fronts. The gap between the two blocks under the arches would have made a fine drive-through. Thinking about golden arches and drive-throughs made me hungry.
The problem was hunger was all I had. I didn’t know what to do next. The calming drive down the coast had taken some of the sting out of my anger. I suspected Esmerelda was right. Jem Bailly was probably just a smart eccentric doctor. But then there was the itch. The what if.
It was possible I had trust issues.
‘You got that look again,’ Esmerelda said. ‘If you’re gonna be a while I could …’ And she pointed to the ocean.
If I let Esmerelda loose on a beach, I might not get her back for days.
‘No,’ I said definitively. ‘I have decided. I’m going to ask her flat out if she has been sending me letters.’
‘Cards,’ Esmerelda corrected.
‘Whatever,’ I huffed. ‘I’m going to ask.’
‘Three A. Third floor, first door on the left,’ she said, pointing to a door near the left arch.
‘Okay.’ I nodded. ‘Great. Terrific.’
Then I sat very still in my seat. Esmerelda lasted under twenty seconds.
‘Like, today you’re gonna ask? Or like telescopically you’re gonna ask?’
Telescopically?
‘Telepathically?’
‘Yeah, you know,’ she said, eyes wide with inflection. ‘With your mind.’
‘In person. I’m just waiting for her to come home.’
‘How’d you know she’s out?’
‘Or to go out,’ I volleyed. ‘I’m just waiting for her to appear at her front door. Or in the drive-through, I mean garage. When she’s outside, I will ask her.’
‘You’re not going in?’ she asked, pointing to the building.
‘There aren’t any laws against running into a forensic pathologist or a judge or a parole officer on the street,’ I said, improvising (lying) through my teeth. ‘If we just accidentally, coincidentally run into her out here and ask a question or two, that would be completely innocent. You could not prove that we illegally acquired her home address. We would be blameless.’
Esmerelda eyed me suspiciously then nodded in appreciation. ‘Smart,’ she said, tapping the side of her head. ‘Crazy like a cat in a box.’
Stakeouts on television always appear in thirty-second montages. In reality, stakeouts are long hours spent sitting in a new-car-smelling Lexus, listening to the sound of the ocean, drinking one-dollar coffee and eating whatever fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts remain at the 7-Eleven across the road. This is topped only by the indignity of having to relieve oneself in a nearby ‘self-cleaning’ public toilet block. I don’t know how much stakeout police get paid, but whatever it is, it should be more.
Esmerelda on the other hand seemed happy, content to lie back on the buttery leather of the reclined driver’s seat and rest.
The sun literally set on our stakeout. Rays of red, orange, yellow and pink lit the whole building, bringing the golden arches to life. Perhaps it was not as bad as staking out a drug den in a ghetto, but still.
I’d been sitting in the darkness forever, we were out of doughnuts and my bottom ached.
‘How long do these things usually take?’ I asked, not for the first time.
‘Dude, like I said, I don’t know. She should’ve been home ages ago if she was at work, or come home if she was out. It’d be so much easier if we just needed to snoop around inside. Snooping’s easy. Waiting sucks.’
It is a universal certainty that Esmerelda continued to talk, but I had no idea what she said. My day had been filled with croissants, doughnuts and uncertainty. Plus, I was parked in front of a building that reminded me of a restaurant that produced Happy Meals, but did not itself produce Happy Meals, which made me both unreasonably hungry and resentful—hungful. I fell asleep, dreaming of cheeseburgers with extra pickles and perfectly cooked fries covered in a salt that was so highly addictive, it could have been a neurotoxin and I would probably still have craved it.
The blinding rays of the rising sun woke me. Magnified by the reflective pale blues of the ocean, they were dazzling. I had slept in a car. This was a new social and personal low. At that stage, Jem Bailly could have been selling algorithms to manipulate the US and British elections to the Chinese and the Russians and I would not have stayed another minute sitting in that seat. I was done.
I was too afraid to look in the mirror. My hair and make-up required strenuous upkeep and were attended to almost daily by Franny. My thick mane must have been a poufy, lion-like terror, and my face was bare of any helpful products, save for the remnants of yesterday’s mascara.
I groped in my Dior tote for my sunglasses, wedged them onto my face and fell out the door. My dazed legs buckled underneath me, unaccustomed to sleeping rough, and I hit the pavement with a thud. Esmerelda stretched like a Bengal cat, ran a hand through her newly razored hair and looked photoshoot ready. Some days I really hated her.
‘I’m done,’ I said, crawling across the concrete path.
‘Thank fuck for that,’ she said. ‘I gotta get a coffee.’
It had finally happened. One of my bad habits—caffeine—had rubbed off on Esmerelda. I also felt somewhat relieved that she too was in such poor mental condition after a night in the car that she forgot not to swear. She looked incredible but she felt lousy, so there was some justice.
‘There’s a bakery ’round the corner,’ she said, offering me a hand.
‘Is it bad?’ I asked, touching my hair and face.
‘What? Nah, but like, you gotta get up. If you’re on the footpath at the beach at sunrise, you can get done for vagrancy. That’d be bad. I’m still technically on parole,’ she said, hefting me up off the kerb.
Esmerelda saving me from vagrancy. My Heiress life had taken a sharp left turn into hell. This was tempered by the smell of the bakery—fresh yeast, hot dough, sugar glaze and roasting Jamaican coffee—mixed in with the salty-crisp-and-clean of the ocean breeze.
We trudged down the footpath, took a single right turn and crossed the street to the appropriately named The Cranky Baker. I collapsed onto the least salt-rusted chair at the cleanest rickety wooden table in front of the shop and handed Esmerelda my entire handbag. I was not willing to wait for table service.
