Over His Dead Body

CHAPTER 41

THE GRAY-HAIRED OFFICER FROM THE POLICE DEPARTMENT who came to question Cassie e arly the next morning was a paunchy man in a uniform that may have fit him five or ten years ago but wasn't looking so good on him now. She kept thinking that if Mitch were alive to see it, he would be disdainful of the man's chest and tummy tugging at his shirt buttons, getting in the way of all his cop paraphernalia so that if he had to pull his gun on her he probably wouldn't be able to reach it. Deputy Sheriff Lou Archer sat on the stiff, Federal-style sofa in Cassie's living room, cradling his belly and smelling of cigarettes, coffee, and Dunkin' Donuts. It was nine in the morning, and he'd been in the house since eight. Cassie tried not to look at his gun and notebook and handcuffs because they made her hands shake.

Outside, the sun had come up on another magnificent summer day. The fifth of July. The pool sparkled. The brilliantly colored lilies and roses perfumed the air. Cassie was all alone in the house, and everything that could be wrong with the world was wrong with the world.

"Tell me once again in your own words what happened last night, Mrs. Sales," the deputy commanded. Then he licked the tip of his pen as if a different answer would be forthcoming on this, his fourth, foray into the subject.

Cassie faced him in the wing chair, hanging on to the arms as if she were on a turbulent flight thirty thousand feet over a bottomless ocean. She'd been staggering from room to room since around six-thirtyA.M., when Teddy and Lorraine woke her from her profound, alcohol-induced sleep to tell her that her husband had died in his sleep.

For the last thirty-six days she had been up and down on a roller coaster of feelings about her husband and herself, about her stolen identity, about sickness and health, children and death. Now her eyes were red-veined and puffy. They just didn't want to stay open for any more reality. Her head throbbed continuously. After all the effort that had been made to save him, Mitch had died in his sleep. She couldn't take it in herself, much less form an appropriate response to a detective's interrogation. She had her first paralyzing hangover in a quarter of a century and could hardly form a coherent sentence.

Three times Cassie had tried to explain that her husband had been released from the hospital late yesterday afternoon after spending a month in intensive care recovering from a stroke. His condition had been so precarious then that he'd returned home in an ambulance and was immediately put to bed by his nurse, Lorraine Forchette. During the night, between one of the regular fifteen-minute checks Miss Forchette made on him, he must have suffered another stroke and died in his sleep. It was a family tragedy, but nothing more sinister than that.

The deputy sheriff, however, didn't see it that way. He wanted to know why she'd brought her husband home in such vulnerable condition. Cassie peered at him blearily. She thought that was a pretty good question, but didn't want to get into the issue of managed care.

Then he wanted to know why a professional nurse hadn't been hired to look after him; and here, Cassie had to take issue.

"Lorraine Forchette is a professional nurse. She works at North Fork Hospital," she protested.

The clincher came on the fourth go-round. Cassie heard it through a fog. Deputy Archer wanted to know why a physician hadn't signed the death certificate before the body was removed to a funeral home instead of afterward. Some legal question or other that Cassie didn't know anything about. She'd had nothing to do with it. Her hands started shaking. For reasons as yet unexplained, when his father died, Teddy had called Mark Cohen and Martini's Funeral Home instead of waking her and calling 911 as he should have. Cassie had no idea why.

Since Mark immediately concluded on the phone that Mitch's was a natural death, the funeral home had sent a hearse to take his remains away. From what Cassie gathered from the sheriff, this was a shady and illegal thing to do.

"Martini's came in the middle of the night?" the detective demanded yet again.

"No, it was morning. You can call and ask Mr. Martini himself."

"Did you arrange this yourself?"

Cassie shook her head. Teddy had done it. She guessed he'd thought the body was spooky and wanted it out of the house. In any case, when Teddy and Lorraine finally got her awake, she couldn't sit up much less understand what they were talking about. So, it turned out that the remains of the man who'd been her husband for twenty-six years were removed before she knew he'd died. The whole thing gave her a terrible feeling. Terrible. She'd been left out of Mitch's life and now she was left out of his death.

Teddy had stood by her bed and informed her that he was the man of the family now, and he'd take care of everything from now on. But all she'd been able to do was hang over the side of the bed and gag. If she hadn't felt so miserable, she might have reacted with the rage she felt now. Who was Teddy to decide he was the man of the family when she'd told him weeks ago that she was the man of the family? Cassie wasn't sure yet if Teddy was a fucking incompetent who mismanaged every damn thing he touched, or if something sinister had happened and Mona had somehow gotten to him and triumphed over everyone. What if Mitch was actually alive and winking at all of them over on Duck Pond Road? She stared at the detective, wondering what she could do to make him go away so she could lie down.

"I understand you were drinking heavily," he said, referring to his notes.

Cassie squinted at the white specks on the sheriff's broad shoulders and chest and realized it was not doughnut sugar as she'd thought at first. Waves of nausea crashed over her like the tide coming in on a rocky shore. Oceans. Now all her thoughts were of oceans. She wanted to go down to the sea again, and see those waves just one more time before she died.

"I wouldn't say I was drinking heavily. I had a glass of wine," she said slowly. Or two.

"Celebrating?" the sheriff said with a voice that was heavy on the irony.

Cassie blinked raw sandpapery eyes. Her sick feeling of hangover was quickly escalating into hysteria. She didn't want to weep in front of the policeman who was sounding very much as if he suspected that she or Teddy, or Teddy's awful nurse girlfriend, had put a pillow over her husband's head so they could collect his life insurance and live happily ever after in the Cayman Islands with his tax shelter.

Actually, her own disorganized musings had spewed up the same crazy idea, only with Teddy as the perpetrator instead of herself. But why would he do such a terrible thing-to save her from a life of misery? She didn't think he cared enough. To help Mona get rich? She shook her throbbing head. Teddy wouldn't! Even extremely paranoid and terrified, Cassie didn't want to believe he'd murder his own father. She couldn't help it, she started lying.

"I was glad my husband was home. We were together as a family again. Could we finish this some other time?" she asked weakly.

She didn't know what to do. If she called Parker Higgins, Mona would know. If Mona knew, she'd use the sudden death to discredit and threaten, even prosecute, her. She was frightened. The whole thing did look somewhat suspicious, even to her. Cassie held back her tears. And there was no one to corroborate her story or make the detective go away, because this was the moment her idiot son and his dangerous girlfriend had chosen to take off for Martini's to identify Mitch's body so he could be cremated on the spot. Wasn't that… strange?

They'd taken the Porsche to the funeral home, and Cassie guessed that after picking out an expensive urn, they would probably stop at the International House of Pancakes for a hearty breakfast on the way home. She was so scared.

Deputy Archer sighed deeply. "We're treating this as a suspicious death," he told her.

She chewed on her bottom lip. "But why? My husband was a very sick man. It's been touch and go for more than a month. His doctor can tell you that. No one expected him to live this long. And it hasn't been a quality month." She shut her mouth. What was she saying?

"Still, we're going to have to investigate. Autopsy the body. The whole nine yards." Archer shrugged apologetically.

Cassie gasped. "Autopsy? Why?"

"To determine if he suffered another stroke, as you allege, or if something else happened to him."

"I'm not alleging anything. Why are you taking it like this?" Cassie looked around wildly. Help, where was help?

The detective shrugged again as though unwilling to put into his own words the kinds of things people did to hurry things along when their relatives were terminally ill and the stakes were high. He closed his notebook and assessed her affect. Was she upset? Was she a grieving widow?

"Are you going to give us lie detector tests?" Cassie asked miserably. How would Teddy and Lorraine do on that?

"Oh, well, we'll have to see about that, won't we?"

Cassie felt as if she were trapped in a sea cave with the tide coming in. Would an autopsy show if someone had put a pillow over Mitch's head, if her own son was a murderer? What would Mark say about this? He'd signed the death certificate. What would Parker say? He was the family lawyer. She tried to remember if she'd told the fat cop that Mitch's remains would be ashes by noon. She wondered if it was against the law to say nothing about that now. She could always pretend later that she didn't know. She couldn't control her terror. The front doorbell rang, and she jumped a foot.

"Someone's at the door," Archer said.

Cassie swallowed a mouthful of saliva. I'm going to heave, she thought. I'm going to barf on the spot. She'd seen all this on TV a hundred times. The bell rang again. She studiously ignored it. She was convinced that outside her door were the cameras, the reporters waiting to tell the story that she was O. J. Simpson, Susan Smith, the Ramseys, Amy Fisher, Jean Harris, right here in quiet Manhasset.

If she opened that door, her bloated, bleary face would appear on every channel. The images would be on the five o'clock news and the six o'clock news. At six-thirty, they'd be on the national news. She knew just how the story would play. Cassie Sales, wife of prominent wine importer, who'd bankrupted the family with her excessive spending, early this morning had boldly murdered her invalid husband to prevent him from leaving her for his mistress-the surgical wonder Mona Whitman, his partner in their thriving business. Just like Jean Harris, she'd be a dead duck.

Mona's final check and mate.

Cassie wanted to vomit. The doorbell rang a third time. Finally Archer got up to see who was out there, then shocked her by opening the door.

"Hey, Schwab, right on schedule. You boys certainly don't let any grass grow under your feet. Come on in while the juice is hot." He lowered his voice, but Cassie had no trouble hearing what he said next.

"As far as I know, only the body's gotten out of here. But the death occurred sometime in the earlyA.M., and we weren't notified until eight this morning. That gave them a few hours to clean the place out. It's pretty late in the day. Who knows what you'll come up with now-"

"Jeez, the old man is dead? This is news to me." Charles Schwab came into the front hall.

Cassie put a hand to her mouth and bailed out of the wing chair, plunging without a parachute. She staggered into the powder room and dropped to her knees in front of the toilet. "Oh God. Take me now," she moaned. "Just take me into that good night. I'm ready to go."

But God must have been busy with other things. The sound of her vomiting traveled to the living room, where the sheriff and the revenue agent stood talking about sting operations. Seven minutes later, when Cassie staggered out of the bathroom feeling a little better, the living room was empty. She heard some banging around in the kitchen and stumbled into the dining room, where she immediately bumbled into one of the filing cabinets she and Teddy had stuffed in there just yesterday. She gasped. All of Mitch's records, right in plain view with Charlie in the house. Terror clutched at her again.

Various branches of the government were crawling all over the place, and she had no idea what to do or how to stop them. As she tried to scramble out of the maze and get into the kitchen, her hip caught the edge of Mitch's desk.

"Ow." She rubbed the spot and kept moving. When she reached the other side of the dining room, her foot caught on a computer wire. She fell through the swinging door and crashed into the open overhead door of a kitchen cabinet. The flat front of the door hit her in the forehead and stopped her cold.

"Oh God." Her legs turned to rubber and collapsed under her. She hit the floor and closed her eyes.