by Leslie Glass
Mona's tone changed to curiosity. She couldn't help herself. "Let me see your face. You've had a lot of work done, Cassie."
"I was in a car accident," Cassie spat back.
"Well, good for you. I'm proud of you. Gee Cassie, all that liposuction under your chin. How much did they take, a quart?"
Cassie's eyes were hidden behind the shades, but Mona knew she'd made a hit. She shook her ponytail, holding on to her lead. "Don't think I'm not hurt by the way you're acting. After all I've done for your family. You know I've loved you like a sister. I wouldn't hurt you or Mitch for anything in the whole world. Or the kids." Mona said all this between gagging and coughing.
"Since when is stealing not hurting?" Cassie screamed.
"I need my inhaler, Cassie." Mona broke the inhaler impasse. "Fine. I'll die on the spot. And you will have two deaths on your conscience." She threw herself on the sofa, panted and gurgled. She gasped for air and choked.
"Two? Two?" Cassie screamed. "I've never hurt a single soul in all my life. I never shoplifted a Chiclet, stole somebody's man, never had any fun." She stamped her foot. "I should have. God knows I should have."
"What did you do to Mitch?" Mona cried.
"Nothing, he keeled over. All I did was watch."
"So you watched, how awful. Poor Mitch, all alone," Mona wailed.
"He's not alone. He's with me, and guess what? Every goddamned thing you bought is going back."
That was it. Mona had had it up to here. The maniac had to be stopped right now. Her lovely body was racked with great heaving, hawking coughs. She hacked up some more globs into Mitch's handkerchief. It was gross, but finally she hit pay dirt. A streak of blood.
"Cassie, listen please. I know you're upset, but listen carefully. I need to go to the emergency room. I need Adrenalin. Do you understand?"
"Pooh, everybody knows you're a big faker. Where's the stuff you bought?"
"I don't know what's happened to you, but you're going to find out you have made a very big mistake. You're wrong about everything. Don't have another death on your conscience. I need a hospital now. Are you going to be a murderer?"
Cassie paused, but only for a second. "Get in the car," she said angrily.
CHAPTER 23
MONA SUFFERED TERRIBLY in the car. She was flooded with fluid. It came out of he r nose and her eyes and clogged her lungs. Her lungs actually itched. Whoever heard of itching lungs? She knew she could die before she got to the emergency room. And right in the middle of this catastrophe, selfish Cassie would not give up her rage. Mona had never seen anything like Cassie on a rampage. She was really pissed off. It seemed to Mona that she was driving two miles an hour on purpose just so Mona would expire before they got to the hospital. Then she drove right by.
"You're crazy. What are you doing? You passed the hospital," Mona cried.
"I did?" Cassie said.
"Where are you going?"
"To the walk-in."
"The walk-in?" Mona was horrified. She didn't want a walk-in clinic. She wanted to go to North Fork, where Mitch was. "Why?"
"It's faster," Cassie replied, driving the Mercedes one mile an hour. She'd actually slowed down.
Mona made a few death rattles. "Please, Cassie. Take me to North Fork," she pleaded.
"It takes too long. All those people waiting with their headaches and broken arms. This will be faster." Cassie drove to the walk-in on Forest Avenue. When they got there, Cassie speeded up.
"Cassie, there's the walk-in."
"Okay, okay." Cassie slowed down and pulled into the parking lot. "You're here. You're not going to die, you faker. You never do. Get out."
Uh-oh. Mona realized she had a problem. She had only Cassandra Sales credit cards in her wallet. She could not use one of those in front of Cassie. She'd wanted to make a scene to document the danger to which Cassie in her evil jealousy had subjected her. But if she collapsed in the waiting room, Cassie might take over the situation, get her credit cards out of her purse and see them. For a second Mona was stymied. She always anticipated everything, but she hadn't anticipated this. She hadn't changed the cards when she came back from Paris.
Never mind. She stayed in the car, trying to catch her breath. "Leave me here," she said. "I'll go in alone."
"No, no, I want to go with you." Cassie got out of the car and came around to the passenger side.
"Please Cassie, you're scaring me."
"Oh yeah? Well, keep away from my husband. He deserves to die in peace." She opened the door.
"I don't know what's happened to you," Mona sputtered.
"Figure it out, Mona. I found out what you did to me." For a second Mona thought Cassie was actually going to hit her. She cringed in the car seat.
"Get out." Mona's show of fear caused Cassie to stand aside.
Mona crawled out of the car.
"Go get your Adrenalin," Cassie told her. "I'd be very surprised if you really need it."
Mona dragged herself into the horrid walk-in. She felt triumphant. Cassie drove away, but she was still the weakling. Cassie had responded to the cues and spared her rival. Therefore, Cassie was the one defeated. Mona hated her. As soon as she was inside the building, she found her inhaler. She took it out of her purse and used it. Inhalers were magic. They really were. Her inhaler cleared her bronchial tubes in seconds. She coughed up the dangerous phlegm and spit it out. Her lungs cleared. By the time the nurse called her name, she was feeling a lot better. She didn't think she needed to see the doctor after all. But she was careful to have the visit documented by the receptionist just for the record anyway.
A nice old gentleman who'd recently been widowed drove her home. All the way he told her about his high blood pressure. Then, just before he let her off where she directed, several doors down from where she lived, he asked her out for a date.
CHAPTER 24
CHARLIE SCHWAB DROVE HOME to his regular Monday night tennis date with Taj Rau, the proud owner of five blue Lincoln Town Cars in the APlus Car Service. Only ten years in America and already a total success in his world, Taj had taken up tennis-the better to nag his nine-year-old daughter, Sonia, whom he fully expected to be the next Venus Williams as soon as she could serve into the right box. Charlie was bolstering Taj's own lessons with a weekly hitting session that included vicious volley, lob to the moon, quadrant splitting, slice and spin. Working on the finer points of the game, however, was a waste of time since Rau lacked any hand-eye coordination whatsoever.
Mostly Charlie was supporting his neighbor's dream to be a real American in possession of a sport, sports equipment, clothes, and a club of his own, with all the outrageous monthly expenses the endeavor necessitated. Every bill was a joy to him. Every weakness on the part of his U.S. government agent neighbor thrilled him even more. He nagged Charlie about his beat-up car almost as much as he nagged Sonia about her tennis and Taj Jr. about the awful music he played so loud, it made him want to cry, and the oversized pants that were falling off his skinny rear end.
Charlie's old Buick was coughing again. For the last week the muffler had been attached to the underside of the car in a complicated way that involved a piece of laundry rope provided by his father, Ogden. But now the laundry rope had come loose, and the muffler was sparking along on the highway to a chorus of honking from other drivers to let him know about it. As if he didn't know about it. His car was a sore point with everyone. Disgruntled taxpayers were always doing things to it, and he couldn't get the Service to compensate him for the damages. Still, as long as the car got bashed and he didn't, he was cool. A car was just the means to get around.
But it was not the car or the ridiculous tennis game that was on Charlie's mind right now. He was in a state of obsessional seething over the events of the day. In almost equal measures, Charlie loved his job, prided himself on his work as a top snooper, and was dogged by the profound humiliation of knowing that his private life was a flop. On the occupation front, all the news was good. He was productive and, as
long as he didn't step on anyone's toes, he had job security.
He was such a fine detective, in fact, that the Brooklyn District Director, Mel Arrighi, was always telling him he should transfer to the special agent branch and top the ranks there. As a special agent, he'd have a lot more power in the field. He'd have bigger cases, mob related, drug related. He'd get more juice. He'd be on the road all the time. That was a plus. And life would be exciting. That was another plus. Special agents who worked for the Treasury and the Justice Departments had almost unlimited power stalking their prey, much more power than FBI agents.
But Charlie couldn't do it. He had to stay close to home for Ogden. He hopped around the tristate area with no problem, but treks to God-knew-where every single week would be too stressful for his father. Charles Schwab was one of 120,000 employees of the IRS. As a revenue agent, he was part of the main snooping body in the federal tax force. Revenue agents carried out routine audits and tax examinations. When they suspected tax evasion or fraud, they worked with special agents and the CID to build the cases that the Justice Department would prosecute. His was a safe path for a careful person who had sustained a couple of losses so great that even an accountant such as he could not calculate the damage.
Charlie's special skills involved the alchemy of turning disappeared assets into found ones. Over the years he'd learned the ten thousand ways that people shaded the truth, used their stories like sleds in the snow, slid all over the place, hid their assets, schemed, played with the numbers. He knew how honest people shielded their money from taxes in relatively innocent ways, and how dishonest people schemed to cheat the old U.S.A. any way they could. At work, digging through mountains of paper, he felt like a detective. When he was out in the field he wore a hat and thought of himself as a Columbo. He took pride in his juice "finds." He was a doggedly persistent man, untrusting, unyielding, obsessional about the details.
He loved playing tennis, but only two times a week. He cooked imaginative meals four times a week for his father, went out two times, and one night a week he hung out at the bars in Bay View. His car had gone completely to hell. He was bored, he was lonely, but his world was safe. He worked mostly with accountants, usually men. A few were women, but they were not good-looking. Likewise, the large force of female revenue agents were not generally hired for their looks or personality. His supervisor, Gayle Katz, had never married and cared only about her cat. Charlie rarely had the opportunity to see, much less get to know, any of the high-profile women whose lives he examined through their documents. Even when he evaluated women's houses or yachts, their assets of all kinds, they themselves were in the background, shadowy and inaccessible. When they came on to him, it was always to cover something up.
Although Charlie fantasized about excitement every day of his life, longing for something more that he couldn't really name, he actually counted on the status quo. He didn't want to fall in love and risk his life like last time. Years ago he'd married young to an unremarkable girl of ordinary attractions he'd thought he loved well enough to last a lifetime. Her name was Ingrid, and he'd never in a million years thought she would leave him. They'd had a baby. The baby died when it was two weeks old. Soon after that, Ingrid left him for a podiatrist she'd consulted a year earlier about her bunions. Ingrid's sudden departure raised a doubt in Charlie's mind that the baby he'd anticipated with such excitement and loved with all his heart had really been his. After both mother and child were gone, it was too late to investigate. Charlie went on to investigate other puzzles.
His personal tragedy occurred so long ago that torment had long since been replaced with cynicism about the opposite sex. Just as really bad dental experiences leave behind perpetual anxiety about all practitioners in the field, Charlie's experience with Ingrid left him skittish about women. His name and occupation were an added catastrophe. It was always the same thing: When women thought he was the financial giant, they threw themselves at him. Literally. The bodies flew at him the way Mona's had when she'd tripped on nothing and tried to fall into his arms, breathing hard with mint-freshened breath.
Then everything changed the second they found out he was not the "real" Charles Schwab. As soon as he told them he was a revenue agent with the IRS, he suddenly became the "fake" Charles Schwab, less than a nothing, a poisonous toad. A dangerous enemy. But this had not always been the case. Once the "real" Charles Schwab had been an unknown and the "fake" Charles Schwab had been young and handsome. And it was not completely true that Charlie was a total loser now. He just felt like one. The Beech Avenue strip of bars in Long Beach was near Kennedy Airport and the place where the stewardesses came for R and R. He dabbled with them easily enough, especially since the next flight out was only a few hours, or a day, away. He didn't like to stick with anybody longer than that, couldn't really stand prolonged encounters. He liked the getting-to-know-you part. But he became nervous when anyone tried to stake a claim on him. He didn't think he'd ever meet someone he really liked.
Charlie was still smoldering and obsessing about his humiliating experiences with the strange duo of Cassie Sales and Mona Whitman. He drove east toward his house in Long Beach. He didn't know what was up with the two women, but something definitely was. Cassie had looked crazy to him even before Mona had tipped him off. With the sunglasses and the scarf on her head at eight in the morning? Come on. And the story about the stroke? Please. Cassie was a borderline personality like Livia in The Sopranos.
As for the latter, he could still see her soft, tanned inner thighs, almost feel her breasts close to his chest. And smell her perfume. She must have managed to touch him somewhere. The perfume was clinging to his jacket. It made him want to laugh. She was sexy like an Italian, bringing out the big guns for him as if he could be swayed by anything she had to offer. Her little patter about compliances didn't fool him one bit. Something was up at that place. He had an insider's eye view, and his own. The warehouse was too big even for the volume of sales on their returns. Any lamebrain auditor who had a chance to see the place would pick up the fact that they were moving more product than they reported. Obviously, Mitchell Sales hadn't been expecting visitors. But why should he? Only about 1 percent of tax returns got audited, and of those usually the audit was limited to a single transaction, and the query on behalf of the service was done, mercifully, by mail.
Charlie kept thinking about the curvaceous Mona Whitman and the way she'd said, "IRS agents are toads." It annoyed him, it really did.
If she'd done anything wrong, he'd hang her out to dry; crazy Cassie, too. He was distracted by the sight of young Taj out in front of the only yellow house on the street on an all-white-house street. He was washing one of the three robin's egg blue limos parked along the curb. The music pounding out of his boom box sounded like Spanish rap again. He'd done something new to his hair. One side was gone. The other was green. Along this portion of Lake Avenue the air was filled with the pungent aromas of Indian cooking. And Ogden was on the lawn, jumping up and down.
"You okay, you okay. Taking it easy. Taking it easy." Taj Sr., wearing a white warm-up suit with red and blue chevrons on the legs, was chattering excitedly and banging the old man on the back, desperate to get down just a little lower whatever he'd given Ogden to eat that had caught in his faulty esophagus.
"Ah, Charlie home," Taj screamed.
Ogden's face cleared and he stopped jumping. "Hi, son," he called. He loped into the street between two limos to meet Charlie at the car. Just then, Taj Jr., engrossed in the joy of the moment and the beat of the music, let out a whoop. He twirled around with the spurting hose as his microphone and dance partner and sprayed the old man in the chest. Revenue Agent Charlie Schwab was home.
CHAPTER 25
THE ART OF WAR was on Mona's mind when she got home from the walk-in. She was no t afraid for herself. She was terrified for Mitch. Anyone who reacted to rejection in such an insane fashion as Cassie did was more dangerous than she'd ever imagined. Mona was breathing freely, but she was s
cared enough of Cassie to decamp. Mitch had been right when he'd told her Cassie was a toxic person. Even before Mona had opened her front door, she'd known she had to get out of there. Cassie turned out to be more than just a toxic, passive-aggressive, secret ball breaker. Cassie was a genuine killer. No wonder Mitch had been apprehensive about leaving her.
Cassie's driving Mona around for all of fifteen minutes while Mona faked an asthma attack was a nonevent compared with her murdering her vulnerable husband on life support in the hospital just because he wanted to leave her. Mona would not let Cassie hurt either one of them. She unlocked her front door, glanced quickly around in case Cassie had returned, then raced upstairs for her makeup case. She found it in the bathroom still packed for the trip to Paris. She stowed it in the car. Then Mona raced upstairs again and foraged around in the closet long enough to locate two pairs of Hermès alligator pumps and two alligator purses in red and purple. Mona believed she didn't care about things. She was a frugal person. Even as she stowed away the expensive accessories, she told herself she'd give up everything she had with the snap of her fingers to save her honey. She grabbed the few bills that had accumulated since Friday and left the junk mail on the table. That was it. She was traveling light, hurrying to save her man.
Three minutes from start to finish, she double-locked the front door, checked the street for Cassie and the Mercedes, dove into her car, and took off. She was still wearing the work shirt and black pants she had donned for Cassie, but she had another outfit for the hospital at her new house. She headed down the hill to Roslyn Harbor, then turned onto Northern Boulevard, heading east toward Matinecock. At Wheatley Plaza, Mona turned north again on Glen Cove Road and drove past all the new stores that proved Glen Cove was coming up in the world.