Murder Most Fancy, page 20
Previously I would have been too cautious to wear a pair of vintage anything, but in a post-Dylan Moss world, I would have them treated with a heavy-duty disinfectant then reheeled and re-soled. I was a freshly minted rebel with a black AMEX and a penchant for pretty, sparkly things. Second-hand status would no longer stand between me and happiness.
Esmerelda and I passed the evening in the tiny pool house theatre, alternating between Nancy Meyers kitchen movies and Point Break. I went to bed when Point Break went on for the third time. I fell asleep and dreamt of Searing, my new lingerie and sparkly shoes. This dream was rudely interrupted by subconscious machinations about the life and death of Max, the man in the lilies. Even in sleep my brain rudely continued to grind information, searching for solutions.
*
I was woken at 7.30 am by Patricia. She slapped a white plate with an unevenly toasted piece of chillingly square bread smeared with butter (God, I hoped it was butter) and Vegemite down on my bedside table. Next came a thunk and a slosh and the stinging odour of instant coffee invaded my nasal cavities. In a random mug! Were there words written on it?
Maybe if I rolled over and pretended, this breakfast would magically turn into poached eggs and smoked salmon on sourdough covered in hollandaise sauce. I rolled over, then back. Damn! Instant coffee and Vegemite. It was like a budget lock-in.
‘What did he do?’ I exhaled, sliding out of bed.
‘The guard out at the front gate doesn’t answer the inside bloody phone, does he? No. That Dylan creature keeps calling. If I don’t answer, he leaves messages and the system won’t let me delete them without playing them. I’m sick of the sound of his smarmy voice!’
Patricia plunked herself down in the shell chair and put her head in her hands. She gazed up at me with a deadly serious expression.
‘I did something stupid. It’s bad, Indigo, it’s very, very bad. I was desperate. I didn’t know what else to do.’
Had Mother’s maid ordered a hit on Dylan Moss, PR guru to none of the stars you have ever heard of? I forgot all about my slippers and robe and crossed the room to her.
‘What did you do?’ I asked, terrified.
‘It was late. He’d just left a two-minute sonnet. And not one of the good ones either.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I … I gave him Esmerelda’s mobile number. Told him to go harass her instead of me.’
‘Ooh!’ I gasped and I shrank back. This was bad. Esmerelda had some serious privacy issues. She was ferocious about it. I didn’t even have Esmerelda’s mobile number. Then again, I didn’t have a phone. And I couldn’t seem to shake Esmerelda.
We were so engrossed in our discussion about ways to break this news to Esmerelda, we didn’t notice Esmerelda enter.
‘Like, what are you two like?’ she said, snacking on the Vegemite toast. ‘Just block his frigging numbers.’
I eyed Patricia. ‘You didn’t block his number?’
She blinked heavily a few times. ‘Would you’ve thought to block his number?’
That didn’t seem like a fair comparison. Thinking of techy things was not really my specialty.
‘Sure,’ I lied. ‘I would have thought of it.’
‘Really?’ Patricia countered disbelievingly. ‘Do you know how to block a number?’
‘I think Esmerelda is waiting for an apology,’ I said, blatantly trying to derail her by pointing at Esmerelda. Patricia rolled her eyes.
‘Don’t stress. I’ve blocked his mobile number, his home number, his office number and some other random number he uses on all the personal, business and private home and mobile phone lines,’ she paused for effect and stared at Patricia, ‘including mine.’
Patricia immediately got to her feet and walked out the door.
‘Where are you going?’ I shouted after her.
‘To make waffles!’ she gaily shouted back. ‘Lots and lots of waffles!’
Esmerelda fist-pumped the air before resuming her cool demeanour and polishing off the final uneven triangle of Vegemite toast.
‘What?’ she said to me. ‘Like you were gonna eat it.’
‘Oh,’ came a final shout from Patricia outside, ‘another letter came for you.’
I scanned the room until I landed on it propped up against the window. A typed envelope with a golfing Santa stamp, addressed to Indigo Jones-Bombberg.
I had a long jasmine-scented shower and waited for a real breakfast to arrive. I was not opening that envelope on an empty stomach.
‘There is something medically wrong with you,’ I said to Esmerelda when I caught her mid-giant waffle in the pool house dining room. ‘You just should not be able to do that.’
‘It’s totally not that hard to program a phone to block a number,’ she said, dipping an end into a puddle of maple syrup before using it as a scoop for her whipped cream.
I didn’t have the emotional energy to get into a protracted discussion with Esmerelda about metabolic rates and open another mystery envelope.
This was the third envelope. If letters were like dates, this was a significant step in the relationship. Opening this letter would be like committing to the search for Max Weller. The real Max Weller, whoever he was. Was I ready for that type of commitment?
In an eerie, worrying sign, while I was mentally pondering this question, my body raced ahead of me. I came to having already opened the latest envelope and eaten three waffles.
There were two cards in the envelope and their content cemented my relationship with Max. I was not only going to find out who he was, but, I decided, I was also going to find his killer. Tough talk for a woman who could not boil an egg or finish a crossword. Or start a crossword. The cards read:
The dead body you found had:
• vertebra degeneration
• arthritic changes in both hands
• historical thickening of skin on hands, knees and feet
I had no real idea what any of that meant beyond the obvious. Nor did I know what anything on the next card meant, except the last line:
The dead body you found had:
• faint prepatellar bursitis scarring
• a mastoidectomy
• severe whipping scars on back, likely from childhood & adolescence
Whoever Max was, he’d had an abhorrent childhood. Somehow, he had survived and grown into a man who had managed to amass a great fortune. A rich man, yes, but also a kind man, a generous man, a man people seemed to like. Then he had found love with Dame Elizabeth. And then he had been smashed over the head and murdered, left out in the open dressed as a homeless person, perhaps so that he would once again be overlooked and discarded.
The idea that Max would be uncared for in both the first and last moments of his life was unacceptable and repugnant.
‘What day is it today?’ I asked Esmerelda, pushing my plate away.
‘Sunday,’ she said, without looking up from her riveting handset.
‘What time is it?’ I pressed.
At this, she set down her phone and raised a suspicious eyebrow at me. ‘Eight twenty-five. Why?’
I needed to speak to Bailly. I needed to know if the things written on the cards were true. I needed to know what the other things written on the cards meant. I needed a whiteboard to keep up with all these clues.
I was certain the clues were accurate and authentic and that they were not coming from Bailly. For better or worse, I trusted her. They weren’t coming from Rope or Winters either. I’d been oblivious about these new clues, so they certainly weren’t coming from me or the house or the car being bugged. Plus, Searing had swept the place. That left me … nowhere.
If I asked Bailly what these new clues meant, she might become suspicious I was a phoney relative. She might cut me off. But … what if I could work out what the new clues meant? Then I could feed the information back to Bailly. This might give me more credibility as Max Weller’s niece, and Bailly might be able to give me some more insight into Max’s life. Insights that might help me find out who he was, and who had killed him.
Surely there were lots of doctors around who knew what a prepatellar bursitis was? Maybe I didn’t even need a doctor. Maybe I just needed a search engine.
While I had little faith I could actually solve these mysteries, I had nothing else to do, and about a billion dollars to do it with.
I turned to Esmerelda. ‘Could you go to Officeworks and get a whiteboard, a cork board thing and some of those coloured pins? Oh, no, wait, just get whiteboards and a load of magnets. And whiteboard markers.’
She stared at me in disbelief. ‘Officeworks? Seriously? You know that word has like, the words office and work in it?’
‘Thank you for that, yes, I am aware.’
I handed her the cards. As she read them, her face became set and her posture changed from frolicking seal pup to great white shark on the hunt. She stiffly handed the cards back to me and stalked out of the room.
By midday, Esmerelda and I had turned the pool house’s largest room, the open-kitchen-informal-dining-informal-lounge area into a mashup of a police detective squad room and a film director’s office.
The walls were lined with a series of whiteboards, set up much like movie or television storyboard panels. Each whiteboard panel had a set of clues on it, things we knew about Max Weller/UP Rose Bay 0909 Winters in the order we had discovered them. We were about halfway around the room and had somewhat deciphered the latest set of clues.
It turned out that vertebra degeneration was when your spine slowly started to fall apart and didn’t work as well as it used to. Usual cause? Ageing. Arthritic changes were something about cartilage and bones and cushions. Usual cause? Normal wear and tear. These sounded like things that just happened as you aged. We had written Got old under both of those.
Historical thickening of skin on hands, knees and feet was a bit of a weird rabbit hole. Skin thickening was caused by any number of things, from various unpronounceable skin diseases to OCD rubbing. Although how you could compulsively rub your hands, feet and knees was a mystery to me. Thickening also ranged in severity. We had no idea which end of the spectrum Max fell into. Or how long ago Historical was. We put Old rubbing and then a question mark under that one.
Prepatellar bursitis was also known as housemaid’s knee. It came from repeatedly kneeling for extended periods. The card said scarring. I guessed that meant the injury was old. Perhaps he used to have a job where he knelt a lot? Like a gardener or a plumber. Perhaps it was related to the knee rubbing? We wrote, Used to kneel a lot? At work? under that.
A mastoidectomy was a type of ear surgery. People often had it to fix damage caused by severe, untreated middle ear infections from childhood. It sounded painful. I felt sick as I wrote Untreated childhood ear infections.
The final point about scars from severe childhood beatings did not require further explanation.
The morning was not all misery. Patricia was so thrilled to be rid of Dylan Moss that she had immediately filled Mother’s walk-in pantry and protein fridge with all manner of illicit sugar-filled processed foods and beverages for Esmerelda’s benefit. On her last visit down to the pool house, she had brought ice-cold Peach Snapple and Grape Fanta (apparently these were Esmerelda’s favourites), along with a vast array of cavity and artery plaque forming snacks.
Esmerelda was currently sitting on the marble kitchen bench, munching on a giant red bagful of something called Samboy Atomic Tomato Sauce chips which she was washing down with a perfectly chilled Peach Snapple. Esmerelda had, much to everyone’s surprise, rejected the Grape Fanta. Apparently too much time with Mother had taken all the fun out of the multitudes of artificial colours and flavours found therein.
Patricia was so bubbly with joy she took no offence to the rejection and promised to give the Grape Fanta to the security guard. That seemed logical: iced tea for the blocker of phones, grape soft drink for the blocker of doors, diabetes all round.
Since I was seen to be the cause of the Dylan Moss problem, I received no special treatment or treats, which was fine. The fridge in the pool house was well stocked with crispy sauvignon blanc and the remainders of the La Cotta risotto I’d had delivered the night before.
Patricia left, promising Esmerelda a spotlessly clean room and bathroom, new sheets, all clothes washed, ironed and hung, and a tidy underwear drawer.
Once we had filled as many whiteboards as we could with what we knew, we sat and stared at them. For hours.
‘Like, we might totally need Bailly,’ Esmerelda said, emptying the crumbs out of the final bag of chips into her mouth then fishing around for the last red snake in the lolly packet.
‘No, we do not,’ I said, sipping on a sparkling water, eyeing the boards. I had switched from wine at about 2 pm, when the whiteboards began to collide. ‘We can do this.’
Esmerelda shook her head, stood up and walked to the first board. ‘Rich dude with fancy shave and nails somehow ends up dressed like a homeless dude in your nanna’s yard.’
‘Check,’ I said, surreptitiously stealing several yellow jelly snakes from Esmerelda’s lolly packet.
‘Dude is like, totally Max.’ She eyeballed me.
He almost certainly was. However, I didn’t want to be the one to tell Dame Elizabeth that the man she had fallen for, a man who had apparently fallen for her too, was dead. Murdered.
In a freakish coincidence, Esmeralda’s phone rang. She slipped it out of her pocket and looked at the screen. It was Dame Elizabeth. Esmerelda shook her head and tried to hand the phone to me. This was bad. Esmerelda hated me touching her beloved phone. I pushed the phone back to her.
‘You’re the assistant! Answering phones is quite literally your job!’
‘Nuh-uh. What if I’m like in the bathroom?’
‘But you’re not in the bathroom!’
‘But, like, I could be in the bathroom.’
‘If you don’t answer that call, I can guarantee that both Dame Elizabeth and my grandmother will appear here, in person, within forty-eight hours. It is a mathematical certainty.’
We both stared at the ringing handset. Surely bad news over the phone was far better than in person? Esmerelda gingerly touched the phone’s screen, but she was too late. We stood staring as the missed call screen morphed into the dreaded ‘ping’ of voicemail.
Dame Elizabeth sounded shaken. Max had missed the ballet last night. She had repeatedly called his mobile phone and received no answer. Could we possibly locate a photograph of the man in the lilies (presumably so she could check it was not Max). The tone in her voice said she suspected it might be him.
Thirty seconds later, Esmerelda’s phone pinged with a photo text message from Dame Elizabeth. It was a candid photograph of her with Max. They were sitting together in the back row of a theatre, mid-conversation. They wore unquestionably joyful expressions, seemingly unaware they were being included in a wider photo of the group in front of them. I wondered where Dame Elizabeth had acquired the photograph.
Max Weller was clearly visible. He was the man in the lilies, UP Rose Bay 0909 Winters.
‘Is it?’ Esmerelda said to me, motioning to the photo.
I nodded.
‘Bugger,’ she said, tucking the phone back in her pocket.
And then the screaming began.
CHAPTER 16
I’VE GOT YOUR REDBACK
The thing about wearing high heels day in, day out is that you become accustomed to them. I ran on instinct and nothing else (apart from my black satin Manolos), neck and neck with Esmerelda up the garden path, past the blur of outdoor facilities, through the back door of the main house and up the stairs, following Patricia’s screams, my black and white, graphic etched, somewhat sequined, silk lurex Armani jacket and pants making a perfectly good substitute for a running tracksuit.
I dashed down the wide hallway to the left of the backstairs and collided with Patricia who was running hysterically full tilt down the hallway. She bounced off me and landed on her bottom. She scrambled wildly to her feet, grabbing at door handles and side tables, trying to leverage herself to her feet. She was in such a state that she couldn’t get herself off the ground and began crawling on her hands and knees in a desperate attempt to escape.
Esmerelda must have been full of adrenaline; she picked Patricia up by her armpits and set her on a chair. But Patricia would not stay. She immediately attempted to get to her feet again and flee.
‘It’s coming!’ she screamed over and over, trying to get out of the hallway. ‘From your room!’
That could only be Esmerelda’s room. I had never been a child in this particular home.
Esmerelda strode up the hallway, head peering forward. She looked around for a weapon, quickly extracting the pipe section of a yellow Dyson vacuum cleaner that had been left in the hallway. She peered at the last door on the left, pipe in hand. ‘Like, the door’s closed.’
Patricia was white. ‘It doesn’t matter! It might get under the door! They might get under the door.’
Now I was frightened. Was Patricia being attacked or haunted? I looked her over. Her clothes were not torn. That was an unimaginable relief.
‘Did someone try to rob you?’ I asked her, concerned. ‘Is something missing? Are they still here?’
‘No! Yes! No! Yes!’
Well, that was super helpful.
‘There’s—in there. In there!’ she said, pointing down the hall.
‘Yes, Patricia, okay. There’s something in there. What is it?’
Esmerelda was closing in on the bedroom door, holding the metal tubing like a cricketer or a baseball player ready to bat. She adjusted her grip on the pipe.
Patricia breathed deeply, and stepped backwards onto the staircase, gripping the timber handrail, squatting to take shelter behind the glass plate balustrade. ‘Snakes! There’s snakes! In Esmerelda’s underwear drawer!’
Was that a metaphor?
‘Seriously?’ Esmerelda and I echoed.
