Leslie Glass - Over His Dead Body

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.

CASSIE OPENED HER EYES to the smell of coffee. "Oh no," she groaned. She'd hoped she was dead.

"How are you doing?" Charlie Schwab's blue eyes were laughing at her.

She swallowed down a new wave of nausea. "I'm having a bad day," she murmured.

"I heard your husband died last night," Charlie said with some show of concern.

"Uh-huh. That sheriff tell you?" Cassie considered standing up.

Schwab nodded. "I'm sorry for your loss."

"Well, thanks. That cop thinks I killed him. Where is he, searching the garbage for poisoned hypodermic needles?"

Schwab laughed suddenly. "You're a funny girl."

"Oh really?" Cassie snorted. She touched the little bump on her forehead where she'd gone into the door.

"Looks like you tied one on last night."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Strong odor of alcohol. You know, you sweat it out of your pores. Unmistakable, believe me, I know."

"Ugh." Humiliated, Cassie dragged herself to her knees, then to her feet. The coffee cup and saucer he'd handed her rattled dangerously in her hand. Charlie grabbed the cup out of her hand.

"Where's that cop?" She peered around, looking for him.

"Oh, he left."

"He left? Really?" Cassie brightened.

"Well, I told him he could go, I'd take over from here."

"You? Take over from here?" The ridiculous feeling of always knowing less than everybody else overcame Cassie. She stumbled over to a kitchen chair and sat down with her back to the ascending sun. The radiance of morning killed. "Oh God, I can't take this."

"You okay there?" Schwab asked.

"No." Cassie put her cheek down on the table and tried breathing slowly enough to make the room stand still.

"Go on, drink up." Schwab put the cup down in front of her.

"There isn't any," she mumbled.

"No, I made some more. How about some aspirin? Where is it?"

"In the drawer there somewhere." She waved her hand vaguely. "One of those drawers."

He found the bottle of Bufferin, tossed out two, and handed them over.