Over His Dead Body Read online

  She was puzzled by the warmth with which he was speaking and squeezing her. But he was an old friend, as well as their doctor. Why not? He was talking more, and she tried to listen.

  "It could happen, you know. And you have a power of attorney, right? You need that."

  "Is it that serious?" Cassie whispered.

  "I don't want to alarm you. But yes, it's that serious. You know I'll always be there for you, Cassie. But you're going to have to make the decisions now. I'll be frank with you. Mitch may have a partial recovery, but not for a long time. You're a strong and beautiful woman. And you never know. This may all be for the best." He stared into her bruised face and squeezed her hands one last time. "Go home now. I'll see you back here in the morning."

  It was ten-thirty on a Friday night. Cassie was reeling with the things Mark had told her. She didn't know what to think about it. Mitch was so stubborn. He'd come home because he was sick? He'd never breathed a word about it to her. He was being audited? He'd never breathed a word about that, either. She needed a painkiller badly. She was deeply hurt that he'd been hiding these things from her, but no matter what had been in his mind about it, she couldn't imagine why an old friend like Mark Cohen could think a disaster like this could possibly be for the best. She was still thinking about it when she found Marsha and pried her away from the neurologist. The two of them located Teddy in the lobby talking to a zaftig nurse with orange hair. For the first time in years, his face, too, was full of hope.

  CHAPTER 7

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, when Teddy pulled into the driveway of the family house , he still had that happy grin on his face. Cassie went right inside through the garage. Teddy started to follow her, then saw the Volvo station wagon in its usual spot in the driveway. Marsha watched him stop and circle it curiously. "What's the matter, bro?" she asked.

  He came into the garage where the Mercedes and Porche sat companionably side by side, then circled both of them with a dawning comprehension. "Mom wasn't in a car crash," he said.

  "Of course she was. Don't make a big thing of it." Marsha draped an arm around his shoulder. "Look, idiot. We're going to have to stick together now. Dad isn't going to get better."

  Teddy was a big boy, twenty-three and a half, but he looked about ten now, stricken by two felled parents in one day. "How do you know? Daddy's real tough. Maybe he'll get better."

  "Tom said he's pretty much brain-dead. We're going to have to close ranks and help Mom," Marsha said.

  Teddy shrugged off the diagnosis. "Well, Lorraine told me they do wonders with stroke victims these days. I'm not writing him off."

  "You didn't see him, Teddy. He's nonresponsive. He's in a deep coma. Face it, he's not coming out of this."

  "Well, you don't know him. He's a tough guy. He's not toppling."

  "You didn't see him," Marsha repeated. "It was awful…" She shook her head. "I almost felt sorry for him."

  Teddy snorted derisively. "Well, I'm sure you'll get over it."

  Marsha gave him a sharp look. "What is that supposed to mean? Who's Lorraine?"

  Teddy's mood suddenly lifted. "Isn't she great? She's the nurse I was talking to. She gave me her number and everything. She told me to call anytime. She never sleeps."

  "What is she, a hooker?"

  "Bitch," Teddy spat at her.

  "Teddy, you're disgusting. Your father had a stroke and you're flirting with nurses." Marsha turned her back on him.

  "Well, who the fuck is Tom?" he mimicked her.

  "Tom is Daddy's doctor. I was talking to his doctor! Don't you have any brains at all?"

  "He looked like a little runt to me," Teddy muttered.

  "You're such a jerk," Marsha replied loftily.

  The door to the house opened. "What's the matter with you two? I could hear you arguing all the way in the living room," Cassie cried. The sequined scarf was gone, and her garish yellow hair stood out in the halo of light from the kitchen.

  "Why hurt each other like that?"

  Teddy stared at her, as if he hadn't seen her bad dye job before. "Mom, you dyed your hair."

  "Yes, I did," she said quietly.

  "I bet you had your face lifted, too. Oh God, it's gross!"

  Marsha let her breath out explosively. "What a jerk! Teddy! How can you be so mean?"

  "She had her face lifted. What did she do that for? It looks terrible."

  "Teddy!" Marsha screamed loud enough to rouse the entire neighborhood. She was known for being something of a hysteric.

  Cassie pushed the button to close the garage door and waved them inside. "Stop, Marsha. It doesn't matter. The only thing I care about is peace."

  "What are you mad at me for? I'm the good one," Marsha complained.

  "I'm not mad at anybody." Cassie threw up her hands and disappeared into the house.

  "Watch out, the shit's hitting the fan," Teddy warned.

  Marsha spun around and caught his arm. "What's going on, Teddy?"

  "I don't want to go into it," he said.

  "Give, asshole. What's going on?"

  He shook his head. "Uh-uh. I'm sick of your calling me an asshole."

  "Oh Jesus! You're something." Marsha followed her mother into the house and slammed the door. She found Cassie in the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table, shredding a used paper napkin.

  "Mom, are you okay?"

  "No, I'm not. Why do you two have to fight like that? I heard every word you said. I'm demoralized with this."

  "Oh we're just playing. Don't let it get to you, Mom." Marsha touched her mother's awful hair.

  "It is getting to me. Everybody's fallen apart and it's all because of that face-lift. What was I thinking?"

  "The face-lift had nothing to do with it. Daddy had high blood pressure. Tom told me he was a walking time bomb."

  Teddy barged in. "What's for dinner? I'm starved."

  The two women ignored him.

  "No, no, Marsha. I know it was the shock. Daddy likes things natural," Cassie said.

  Teddy laughed. "Natural, oh sure."

  Marsha turned on him. "What do you know about anything?"

  "Daddy couldn't stand women who had plastic surgery. He said you could always tell a mile away."

  Cassie groaned. Why oh why had she done it?

  Teddy snorted and opened the refrigerator.

  "Teddy!" Marsha cried. "Stop that."

  "What did I do? I'm hungry… Jesus, Jell-O! Soup! Cottage cheese! What happened to food?" he complained.

  "Shh Teddy, we have to talk seriously about this. Mom, does Daddy have a living will?"

  "I have no idea. He never tells me anything. I didn't even know he had high blood pressure." Cassie touched her cheek and didn't feel a thing.

  "Well, where's his will? The document will be with that." Marsha spoke briskly. She was back in social work mode.

  "Diet Coke, anyone?" Teddy offered.

  Ignored again.

  "I don't know where his will is. Call Parker, he'll know," Cassie said.

  "Why don't I call out for a pizza, then," Teddy suggested.

  "I'm trying to get something accomplished here," Marsha told him sharply. "Let's focus on the problem."

  "Well, we have to eat," he replied reasonably enough.

  "Can't you see Mom can't eat pizza? Where is your head, Teddy? Daddy had a stroke; Mom can't eat pizza. This doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out. Order something else."

  "Marsha, why can't he have pizza?" Cassie asked.

  "You always indulge him," Marsha grumbled.

  Cassie gave her daughter an angry look. "Let's not get caught up in this ridiculous bickering, okay?"

  "Don't make me feel guilty. I'm just trying to-"

  "Thanks, Mommy, you're a peach. What do you want on it, everything?" Teddy interrupted happily as he dove for the phone.

  "I'd rather die on the spot than eat that poison. Mom, what about the health insurance policy?"

  "And don't forget the life insurance," Teddy threw i
n when Domino's put him on hold.

  "How can you talk about money when your father's in intensive care?" Cassie was shocked at the very mention of life insurance. She couldn't believe the way her children were behaving. And she had no idea where the documents were. Her ignorance made her feel like an absolute jerk, just as helpless and infantile in the situation as her children were.

  "This isn't about money," Marsha said. "This is about caring for him. We have to know what he wanted…"

  "I'm sure he'd want to linger," Teddy said.

  "Teddy! Mom!" Marsha was boiling over.

  "Honey, calm down. We'll sort it out."

  "Fine, let's sort it out now. Where's the will?"

  "Gee, I don't even know if he has a will. Your daddy never talked about things like that. Could I have a cup of tea, please, sweetheart?"

  "What do you mean, you didn't talk about it? Didn't you plan for your future?" Marsha was shocked.

  Cassie clicked her tongue. "Of course, he worked for the future. He wanted to be in the top ten, you know that. He just didn't want to burden me with the dust of life, sweetheart."

  "What's the dust of life, everything?"

  "Marsha, that's not nice!" Cassie put her head down on the table.

  "He didn't talk about anything, and you put your head in the sand. Same old, same old."

  "Amen," said Teddy.

  Marsha sighed and put the kettle on. Crushed, Cassie watched her daughter move around the kitchen, putting together the cups, the teapot, the milk, amazed that she seemed to know how to do it. When the pizza arrived, Teddy paid for it himself, then sat at the kitchen table, eating it thoughtfully. Despite her contempt for it, Marsha also ate the pizza. Cassie, however, couldn't eat a thing.

  "Poor Mitch." She kept thinking of his blank face and all those tubes going into him. Poor Mitch. How he had loved the good things of life. He would absolutely hate seeing his children resort to the humble pizza. He'd hate being a vegetable.

  Marsha finished her pizza. "Come on, Mom. I'll clean this up. You need to lie down."

  "I am tired," she admitted, and let Marsha take her upstairs and help her get ready for bed. It wasn't so easy. Cassie had to sleep sitting up, bolstered against the pillows so her head would be above her chest and the blood wouldn't collect in her face. All week she'd kept waking herself up to be sure she didn't relax too much and fall over. Plastic surgery was like giving birth the first time. No one had told you beforehand any of the things you needed to know. In this case the doctor had promised that she would look gorgeous and completely natural. He didn't tell her that to achieve this she'd have to be practically immobile for weeks to prevent scarring. Cassie was certainly scarred for life now. She'd been so humiliated by everyone looking at her in that ridiculous scarf. She lay back against the pillows, groaning, wishing she could put a bullet in her head.

  "Just close your eyes and get some sleep, Mom." Marsha covered her sore eyes with a plastic bag filled with crushed ice even though the time for cold packs was long gone.

  "Thank you, Marsha. You're a nice girl." The cold was comforting, but it didn't stop Cassie's seeing the same thing over and over. All the devastating moments: Mitch's unexpected return home. His angry conversation with Marsha in the kitchen. The way he'd looked when he walked through the bedroom door and his handsome face went purple at the sight of her in bed, a mess, wearing his beautiful aqua lace pajamas. The sweat that beaded his forehead. The color leeching out of his face. Just like in a movie, frame by frame, she watched it all again and again. She saw him teeter and fall. She saw his head crack against the corner of the bedside table. She saw his blood spilling out of the cut onto the boring beige carpet she'd never liked. Marsha left the room and returned a few moments later to give her a pill. Gratefully, she took it. In a little while she wasn't seeing anything anymore.

  Many hours later when it was still deep night outside, Cassie was startled back into consciousness. Sounds of people in the house alarmed her. She wasn't used to hearing anything but the wind and rain. Squirrels running on the roof. At first she thought Mitch had come home and was down in his den, doing his paperwork. Then with a start she remembered he was in the hospital. She realized the sounds were her kids. Teddy and Marsha were quartered in their old rooms that had never been remodeled from the days they'd lived there as children and teenagers. But they were not asleep. She could hear their voices drift up from downstairs. What were they doing down there?

  Cassie dragged herself out of bed, grabbed her old bathrobe, and padded downstairs to see what they were up to. When she came to the door of Mitch's office, she was horrified to see that they had invaded their father's territory. Mitch's computer was on. The locked filing cabinet was open, and her two children were deep in conversation surrounded by his sacred private papers.

  CHAPTER 8

  CASSIE STOOD IN THE HALL FOR SEVERAL MOMENTS trying to figure out what her childr en were doing in their father's office and why they were talking so loudly. She tried to yawn herself awake, but the yawn wouldn't come because she couldn't open her mouth wide enough to pop her ears. Once again she had the feeling that more than a few inches were missing from her neck and chin area, and a completely separate heart throbbed in her cheeks. Why did they have to wake her up with all their noise? Marsha's and Teddy's voices were so loud, they had disturbed her drugged sleep. Not only that, they had gone into their father's private space without his permission.

  As she struggled for a clear thought, Cassie realized that she'd never seen the room from this perspective. Even when Mitch had been home, the door was always closed. He'd kept it locked so not even the cleaning lady who came once a week could get in. The desk where he'd worked was deep and wide. The filing cabinets spread across one wall. Mitch had stored his personal papers here since the early days of their marriage. He'd felt it was safe here. Safe from his secretary, from his managers, his sales force, from whomever it was he didn't trust at the warehouse. He'd been consolidating with other small distributors for years, taking them over, buying them out, trying to get a bigger piece of developing wineries abroad and also the growing American producers' pie.

  This was an important point that he'd impressed upon her. American family-owned wineries in forty-three states had grown from 377 to over 1,770, a 430 percent increase since Mitch had started his business in the late 1960s. This was a fact he liked to tell her to let her know how important he'd become in the scheme of things. In the same time frame, while the number of producers had grown, the number of distributors had decreased from 10,900 to just over 2,800. He was very proud of that. His piece of the action was getting bigger. Since laws in the United States prevented direct sales from vintners to consumers and, in many states, the sale of wine in grocery and convenience stores, the distributor's role of choosing which wines to represent, and how to sell them to the consumers through liquor stores and restaurants, was a key one. Distributors like Mitch were desperate to preserve those antibootlegging laws and keep their lock on the market. Cassie was sure much sensitive material was in those filing cabinets.

  Now seeing her children eagerly engaged in studying what she herself had never dared to open filled her with a mixture of horror and awe. She hugged her old bathrobe around her excitedly, the hearts in her cheeks and chest beating like mad. Here, finally, was a good reason to find out how much money Mitch had amassed in the bank accounts from which he alone paid the bills, how much life insurance he had, how much there was in the pension fund.

  From the way Mitch had talked about his operations, she suspected millions, more than $10 million, maybe as much as twenty, because he was very tight with money. Everyone else they knew had traded up their houses and lives at least once in their twenty-five-year-plus marriages. Mitch was much richer than any of them, but they alone hadn't moved up. He was always telling her he was putting all his earnings into the company, to grow it bigger and bigger. He'd gotten into trading Bordeaux futures. The future was what he was banking on. In the future, they'd b
e very rich. He'd promised.

  Cassie's robe was medium-weight cotton with a raised pattern like turn-of-the-century bedspreads in summer cottages. She'd had it so long, the hem and cuffs were frayed. The bathrobe was comfortable, a little like the ignorance of not knowing how rich they were. She'd always suspected Mitch was hoarding. There was no reason to be so cheap, and now her heart raced with the thrill of acing the control freak and finding out they could afford anything in the world they wanted, after all.

  "Hi," she said after a minute. "I must have nodded off for a few minutes. Any word from the hospital?"

  "No. Go back to bed, Mom. It's only five o'clock." Marsha spoke sharply.

  "I don't want to go back to bed. I'm wide awake. What are you doing?" Cassie was quite pleased that it was they and not she who'd betrayed Mitch's trust and started the digging.

  "We wanted to check on the health insurance," Teddy said, avoiding her eyes.

  "We have plenty of health insurance, right?" Suddenly she got a chilly feeling. Neither of her children would look at her. "What's the matter? Is something wrong?" she asked.

  "Yes, plenty is wrong. Mom, since when did you become a compulsive shopper?" Marsha demanded.

  "What? You know I'm not a compulsive shopper." Cassie laughed out loud.

  Marsha gave her a scathing look. "Uh-huh. Right. So where's all the stuff you bought?"

  "What stuff?" Cassie stared at her.

  "Tiffany, $65,000 in March, nearly three months ago? What's that? East Hills Jaguar. You leased a $53,000 car back in January? ABC Carpet and Home, $154,000 for curtains and bedding, are you crazy? Where's the Jaguar, Mom? Where are the curtains? What did you think you were doing?"

  "Marsha, don't be silly. You know I don't have a Jaguar."

  "Here's your name on the car insurance. Here's your name on the MasterCard. You have an $89,596 balance due at Bergdorf Goodman, for clothes and shoes and accessories, for God's sake. What about that?" Marsha shook a sheaf of receipts at her.

  Bergdorf Goodman? Cassie put a hand to her head. She was dreaming. She was having a bad dream. She knew that pill Marsha had given her was a bad thing. Better to wrestle around sitting up all night than to have dreams like this. She shook her head and turned around to go back upstairs, get out of this dream.