Heiress On Fire

by Kellie McCourt

  I opened the next file: Harry.

  ‘Oh dear God!’ I yelped. There was a full body shot, side on, of Harry. He was naked. It was not pretty. I suspected liposuction and a tummy tuck would feature in his future.

  Mother snorted in disbelief. ‘He’s not six foot two.’ Clearly, she was not disturbed by the nudity.

  I leant across the desk for a closer inspection, immediately realised my mistake and pulled back, shielding my eyes.

  I attempted to scroll down with my eyes closed. ‘How can you tell? He looked like he was standing against a white wall.’

  ‘Sweetheart, I’ve been a professional model since Duran Duran were boys and George Michael was in the closet, bless his soul. I know six two.’

  I opened one eye and looked again. I had scrolled to the ‘after’ picture. ‘Wow!’ I said involuntarily. This man had been transformed. His fat was gone, in its place some mild, but still-present muscles. There was almost no visible scarring. It was exceptional work.

  Mother leant into the screen. ‘He’s taller here. He could be six two.’

  ‘What? No,’ I said, leaning in too, my right hand held up against the computer screen blocking his privates, which I could have sworn also appeared, at an extremely—very—cursory glance, bigger. ‘It’s not possible that he’s taller.’

  ‘Unless you’re a Chinese Olympic swimmer,’ she said, eyes wide with knowing conspiracy. ‘Or Russian.’

  I shook my head at her, but … although it was difficult to tell with nothing but white in the background, Harry did appear taller. I scrolled back to the ‘before’ picture. Shorter, fatter and generally less fortunate.

  ‘Open the next one,’ she said, pointing at the ‘X’ in the top right-hand corner of the screen to close the page.

  I pulled up the next folder: David.

  David had gone from a pale, freckled, relatively young man with only half a head of wiry red hair, to a tanned, buff cutie with a full head of thick, perfectly tousled strawberry blond locks. He was in the prime of his life. The tufts of wiry red hair that had been climbing his back, neck and shoulders in the ‘before’ photograph were gone in the ‘after’ photo.

  ‘Laser,’ Mother and I chimed in unison.

  David had also had a large amount of completely legitimate lip fillers. Legitimate because as evidenced in the ‘before’ photo he had begun life with no lips at all. Although it was hard to tell from the way he was smiling exactly what had been done, it appeared he had also had cosmetic dental work of some kind. His front teeth looked different. His face was definitely improved by the overall changes.

  I had never known anyone to give their hair plugs a Brazilian Blowout. It was an extreme measure. The kind only a perfectionist and artist would think to make. A perfectionist and artist like Richard. Dr ‘The Bomb’ as Halle had called him.

  David, unlike Harry, looked true to his five foot ten statistic. To me at least.

  ‘I think he’s a little taller too,’ Mother said, glancing sideways at me. ‘Just a little.’ She was a height savant.

  Rex and Mathew were similar. Drastic makeovers. Not just plastic surgery on their eyes, cheeks, noses and chins, but their whole body. The hair on their face, torso and head had changed too. Their skin texture and colours had also been altered. Rex lost his tattoos and was several shades darker. Mathew was no longer bald or super tanned. He had also grown significantly in height and width—downstairs. I had been married to a plastic surgeon; I knew what injectables could do. I kept this to myself.

  And then there was Henry. I recognised the ‘before’ photo instantly. This man’s name was not Henry. It was Leonardo Ferrari. Leonardo was a flamboyant art dealer and private art gallery curator who split his time between Florence and Milan. I had met him on multiple occasions while living in Italy. Leonardo was suave, highly educated, and by all accounts completely in lust with every beautiful woman who crossed his path.

  Between maintaining homes and lifestyles in Florence and Milan, and his lavish taste in luxurious women, Leonardo’s endeavours had been expensive and time-consuming.

  A fortnight before Richard and I were due to be married in Monaco, Leonardo Ferrari had made front page news. He and nineteen pieces from the Renaissance gallery he curated in Florence, including works by Pisanello, Caroto, Bellini, Rubens, Hans de Jode, Giotto and even Botticelli, went missing. Several of the almost-priceless paintings were so well known and recognisable investigators and the media speculated the theft had been commissioned by a private collector. Someone willing to view them in secret for all eternity.

  ‘That,’ I said pointing to the screen, ‘is Leonardo Ferrari.’

  ‘No!’ she gasped in disbelief.

  I was surprised she knew him; then again, she had been a jet-setting supermodel with a penchant for playboys and he had been a womanising playboy with a penchant for supermodels.

  She squinted at the screen. ‘Is it? Are you sure Indie?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said confidently. ‘Positive.’

  She looked again. ‘I suppose it could be. It’s been twenty years since I saw him last.’

  ‘And that,’ I said pointing to the ‘after’ photograph, ‘is Henry the raspberry eater from Magic Models.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ she stifled a giggle, ‘that makes sense. Leo always did have a thing for painting canvases with fresh fruit and beautiful women. Together.’

  I blocked that image from my mind and pressed on. ‘It looks like he has a thing for all fruits.’

  While Leonardo had been permanently yacht-tanned and playboy lean, Henry was relatively pale and tubby.

  She put her face closer still to the screen. ‘Not to be unkind, but if that is Leo he did rather let himself go.’

  ‘It is like liposuction in reverse,’ I said. We looked at each other and giggled.

  ‘I didn’t know the machine worked in the opposite direction!’ she laughed.

  ‘Maybe Richard just didn’t like him!’ I said.

  ‘Or worse, maybe Michelle didn’t like him!’

  I stifled another guilty laugh. ‘Poor man.’

  ‘He might be portly but he’s not poor,’ she said, sobering up. ‘Those paintings must have been worth millions.’

  ‘Over $50 million,’ I said, recalling the newspaper reports, well the article in Vanity Fair, which may have run alongside Colin Farrell’s celebrity portrait.

  I stopped laughing. ‘Did Richard do this?’ I said, pointing to Leonardo and the screen, suddenly feeling serious.

  ‘It’s very good work,’ she said, dragging a critical eye over Henry’s ‘after’ photo, ‘so I would have to say, yes. I may not have warmed to him personally, but he was an excellent surgeon.’

  ‘You didn’t like Richard?’ I was astonished.

  She shook her head sadly. ‘No sweetheart, I’m sorry, I really didn’t.’ She raised one eyebrow and looked coyly from the screen to me. ‘He wasn’t good enough for you. It wasn’t good enough for you.’

  ‘Why on earth not? He was solid. Smart. Steady. Wealthy. Stable.’ I was flabbergasted. ‘You cannot hold his lack of pedigree against him?’

  ‘No, no. It wasn’t that at all,’ she said, patting my hand with her perfectly shaped fingers. ‘No darling, he was dull. Boring. Closed.’

  If it turned out that giving extreme plastic surgery makeovers to fugitive Italian art thieves and being involved with dead sex workers addicted to plastic surgery were a few of the things going on behind Richard’s closed doors, it was little wonder he was so closed. Still this revelation from Mother was a shock.

  I put my head in one hand and pointed at the screen with the other. ‘Do you think he did this?’

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘He seemed like a perfectly dull Bran Muffin, but he might have been a scoundrel.’

  I knew she was right. Not just that poor Richard was boring, but that all of these men had gone under his scalpel. I recognised the noses, the chins, the cheeks, the mouths. Rex had a young Johnny Depp’s nose. Mathew had the
chin of a Hemsworth. Henry had Brad Pitt’s mouth. Which no doubt made him (and possibly Josephine) very happy.

  I did not mean to, I was trying so hard, but somehow a hot tear managed to escape from my eye. I hit myself in the head with my palm. ‘Do not cry, Indigo!’ I chastised myself.

  ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry honey,’ Mother said as she gathered me in her lanky arms. ‘He wasn’t that uninteresting. In fact,’ she said, gesturing around our current location, ‘it turns out he was quite interesting. And, he was a very good surgeon. An artist in his own right.’

  ‘It is not that,’ I said, and it really was not just that she did not like him. It was that I did not know that she did not like him.

  And I had no idea he had an interesting side.

  And once again, worst of all, even my super-safe choice had turned out to be treacherous. I should have married Leonardo DiCaprio. He was a serial womaniser but everyone knew he was a serial womaniser, and his yacht had a pool and a waterfall.

  I was so tired of throwing up I just coughed a couple of times, skipped the next step and drifted off in Mother’s arms. It was my seventeenth birthday all over again.

  As I faded, I could hear Searing in my head: We’ve received information from an anonymous federal source alleging your husband was involved in some illegal surgeries in several of his overseas clinics. Or at least that his clinics were somehow involved …

  Well Miss Jones, the type of people who have plastic and reconstructive surgeries off-book tend not to be very nice people.

  Was he right?

  CHAPTER 23

  BACK DOOR

  As chance would have it, or perhaps it was by design, the bank had a very handy side door which led to a distinctly less grand (and less taupe) back alley exit. No sky-high granite pillars. No fatally happy leprechaun. Just a long shadowy alley, empty save for a row of horse-sized garbage bins and the smell of something rotten. I was conscious by the time one of the thick-necked security guards plopped me into the Land Rover, but I chose to keep my eyes firmly shut until we reached the outskirts of Double Bay.

  While Mother rushed off to find Patricia to have her make me something with carbohydrates in it, I marched straight to the pool house to pack.

  It took four minutes. One advantage to having virtually no possessions. I was stuffing a silk nightgown into a small, no-name black duffle bag I found inside the walk-in wardrobe, when Esmerelda sauntered into the room eating an icy yellow Frosty Fruit.

  ‘Dude,’ she said between licks, ‘going somewhere?’

  ‘Yes. The Phi Phi Islands,’ I said, and stuffed the USB from the safety deposit box into the side pocket of the black duffle bag.

  ‘Is that in Queensland?’ she asked.

  ‘God help me. No Esmerelda, the Phi Phi Islands are in Thailand,’ I said, visions of white sandy beaches, clear blue waters and soft tropical breezes wafting through my head.

  ‘Cool,’ she said. ‘Are you gonna like need a personal shopper in Thailand?’

  I looked at her with what I hoped was an expression of derision and shock. ‘Who on earth does not need a personal shopper in Thailand?’

  Or anywhere in South-East Asia for that matter?

  She ignored my insinuating expression and insulting tone, and settled into the chair by the window with her icy pole. ‘Don’t I like, need a passport to go overseas?’

  Grandmother had a private jet that was at my disposal, and the authorities at private landing strips in Asia could be persuaded in US dollars, and ‘lost’ passports could be re-issued while overseas, so the answer to that question was flexible.

  ‘Yes. And no,’ I said hedging. ‘Have you got a passport? A valid passport?’

  ‘Nope,’ she said, mouth full of crushed frozen pineapple, placing her feet on the table and crossing her ankles.

  ‘Well then, no. You will not need one. Yet. I do not have one either. Well, I had one, but it got burnt. We will get new ones.’

  Now that was something I could have put in my safe. My passport. Which reminded me, there was $50,000 in cash from my rescued safe. I took the cash out of the dresser drawer and stuffed it into the duffle bag.

  ‘Get your feet off my table,’ I said to her.

  She shrugged, moved her feet from the table onto the chair opposite and continued eating the Frosty Fruit.

  I continued emptying my sparse wardrobe until I reached the final item: a short-sleeved, knee-length black Chanel peplum dress with a houndstooth mesh yoke. It was a funeral dress. The dress I was supposed to wear to Richard’s funeral tomorrow.

  Esmerelda’s crunching suddenly became very loud and exceptionally annoying.

  I stood frozen, staring at the dress. It had a matching Chanel coat, perfect knee-length etched houndstooth hem, long-sleeved with three buttons at the wrist, made from the lightest Sea Island cotton, idea for a summer funeral. Below it was a shoebox containing a pair of ultra-dull, square-heeled, squat pumps, perfect for walking over graveyard grass. If the leather Dolce & Gabbana pumps were not such an important part of the funeral outfit they would really have been a terrible waste of a talented cordwainer’s time.

  ‘You gonna go?’ she said licking the last of the frozen treat off the wooden stick, pointing at the funeral dress.

  ‘I desperately want to go,’ I said.

  ‘Dude. Really? Okay cool, so we go to the funeral, give the brother his watches and then we like, take off.’

  ‘That is not what I meant,’ I said.

  ‘Totally worth a shot,’ she said and put her feet back on the table.

  How important was going to this funeral? I mean really? There was no body. How were they going to bury him? Wait. How were we going to bury him?

  ‘How are we going to bury him?’ I asked Esmerelda, realising for the first time that I had left all the funeral arrangements up to her. ‘There is no body!’

  ‘Not totally true. There’s some tiny bits, remember?’ she said stretching herself like a cat in the rectangle of sun streaming through the window. ‘We’re gonna cremate him.’

  I just about died. I would like to have died. Perhaps I could exchange positions with Richard.

  ‘You cannot be serious!’ I exclaimed, but before the words were even out of my mouth, I knew she was. ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘It’s totally way cheaper this way,’ she said practically.

  I threw my arms open in exasperation. ‘Does it look like cost is my main concern?’

  ‘I dunno. You still live at home with your mum,’ she said. Before I had the chance to rebuke her further she added, ‘Plus, it can’t hurt him. Dude, he was already ashy, I mean there are a few teeth and bones and stuff, but it was mainly ashes.’

  ‘You looked?’ I exclaimed, something catching in my throat.

  ‘Are you friggin’ bananas? Dude, I didn’t look! The funeral home lady told me. She said the cops kept some, and they—’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said in astonishment. ‘The police kept some of the remains?’

  She stood, and for one fearful moment I thought she was going to attempt to embrace me. Instead she walked past me, down the hall and into what I suspected was the kitchen. I could hear the rattle of freezer doors and icy pole wrappers. Definitely the kitchen. I hoped there was a Golden Gaytime in there.

  She walked back into the room and handed me a Frosty Fruit. No Golden Gaytime for me. Shocking.

  ‘Dude,’ she said, unwrapping her Frosty Fruit, ‘most cops are idiots. The ones who aren’t idiots are crafty little fuckers, I mean, dudes. Crafty dudes. And Burns isn’t an idiot. Plus Searing’s superhot, so I don’t think that’s helping you either.’

  And she sat back on the chair, feet up, and began working on what I suspected was about her tenth frozen pop for the day.

  I had no idea what she meant.

  ‘And?’ I said. ‘What has that got to do with Richard’s remains?’

  It was time for her to give me a disdainful look. ‘Dude! They’re keeping his shit because t
hey need evidence to build a case.’ She pronounced evidence like ‘eve-ee-den-ss’.

  That jet plane was looking better and better all the time.

  ‘Your Frosty Fruit is melting,’ she said, pointing at me with her own half-eaten one.

  I was having a hard time moving. Somehow I had temporarily managed to block the whole police problem out.

  ‘Dude, look, don’t stress. Like you actually didn’t do it and we also got all that stuff from Magic Models. Plus, you’re like, super rich. Plus like, you’re the friggin’ Heiress on Fire.’

  These things were true. I began working on my icy pole.

  She sucked on her tropical pop. ‘I wouldn’t run before the funeral though. They’d definitely know something was off if you didn’t show. Maybe after would be like more subtle. Like, they might not even know you were gone for a week or so. You’d be in shock or mourning or some shit after the funeral.’

  I will be in shock after I cremate a husband who has already been blown up and cremated.

  I sighed. She could be right about the timeframes. Although there was something wrong in the world when Esmerelda was right.

  ‘If we could just find Bob the Builder,’ I said, more to myself than anything, as I hung the black Chanel funeral outfit back up in the pool house wardrobe.

  ‘Dude. I totally found Bob the Builder,’ Esmerelda said casually.

  I froze and swivelled in place to face her. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I found him,’ she said licking melted juice off her fingers.

  I stared at her. It was 4.30 in the afternoon. At 11 o’clock this morning Searing told us Bob the Builder was in hiding and untouchable. I was going to have to give Esmerelda a promotion or bonus. Or better yet, a pair of heels. Then again, at 11 o’clock this morning I had not known that my dead husband was giving extreme makeovers to international fugitives. I certainly deserved a new pair of heels. And a handbag. And perhaps some decorative kitchen appliances.

  ‘How on earth did you manage that?’ I asked staring at her.

  ‘I followed Searing,’ she said smiling. ‘Dude, he sounded so pissed this morning about the feds taking Bob. I thought he might go looking for him. And, like, he totally did!’