The Tolling of Mercedes Bell: A Novel (43 page)

“What bodies?”

“The rich ones. The old rich ones.” He laughed and broke into a violent coughing fit, which forced him to close his eyes.

“Have you given any thought to Janine?” she asked calmly.

“I take care of her and she takes care of me.”

“I mean with regard to your illness and what arrangements will be made for her.”

“I’m not ill, am I?” His eyes flew open. They darted with horror from the bed rails to the IVs, bed tray, and the catheter bag over the side of the bed.

“What the hell is going on here?” he shrieked.

“Darling, you have pneumonia and you’re in the hospital.”

He looked frantically around the room.

“How long have you known this?” he demanded, heaving himself up on his elbows in a burst of strength.

“I brought you here a few days ago. You collapsed at home from lack of oxygen while Germaine was away.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I have. We have. You’ve been unconscious and you’re a little confused.”

He sank back into the pillow, pale now and struggling to breathe.

“I’m afraid I’m tiring you out,” she said.

“You did more than that, you bitch,” he said menacingly. “You’ve ruined everything. You kept them all away and you think I didn’t notice. Well, I did notice, and there’ll be no more of that.”

Paul stepped forward from behind the curtain, where he had been listening. He motioned to Mercedes to stay calm.

“Now Jack,” he said, “Is that any way to speak to Ms. Bell? She kept you company today and fed you lunch and took time away from her child and her job for you. My goodness, you’re forgetting your manners.”

Jack seemed puzzled by the sight of Paul materializing from thin air. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly.

“I think it’s time for medicine and a nap, don’t you?” Paul asked pleasantly. “There, there. We do get grumpy without our nap.”

Jack responded by slumping farther down into the bed.

Mercedes was frazzled. She gathered up her things and stared out the window. The fog was rolling in and would soon enshroud the trees below. Jack’s eyes were closed when she slipped out of the room. Paul followed her.

“Tomorrow he probably won’t remember anything he said to you today. At least, it’s unpredictable
what
he will remember,” Paul said. “Try not to take offense when he acts out like that. I know it’s hard on your nerves, but it’s the virus.”

“I suppose we should just be glad he’s regaining strength at this point.”

“Yes, that’s right. We almost lost him.”

“So tell me about the ‘periods of lucidity’ that Dr. Sinclair predicted. I need something to look forward to.”

“He may recover from the pneumonia entirely. Before another opportunistic infection occurs, he may seem almost normal. He’ll go through times when he’s a child and can’t even read, let alone remember who everyone is; but then he’ll also have times when his memory is intact and he will seem capable of making decisions. When he’s like that, you’ll be able to work with him to take care of business. You will have to manage his behavior as best you can. There’s no way to predict how long any particular phase will last. He’ll be all over the place in terms of personality changes.”

“I can’t believe this is our reality now.”

“That’s quite understandable. But try to be glad you have a little time. And it’s not too soon to start getting ready for him to come home.”

“
Now?
In this condition?” Panic flooded her. She’d thought Dr. Sinclair meant a few weeks from now.

“As soon as he’s stable, we’ll be discharging him.”

She clapped her hands over her ears. “But I can’t let Germaine see him like this.”

He tried to reassure her. “Children are more adaptable than we give them credit for.”

Her eyes flashed with anger. “Children should not have to adapt to things like this. My daughter has done nothing in her life to deserve this.”

“I understand. That’s a normal reaction, but it will pass. Everything will pass. These are all stages. Try not to get too far ahead of yourself. Just take it a day at a time.”

“And in the middle and in the end, and when I get sick too? How will it be then?”

“One day at a time, Ms. Bell.”

J
ohn Slayne’s office overlooked the lake, too, but unlike Darrel’s it was a maelstrom of paper, which lay in drifts on various pieces of furniture and on the floor around his desk. The man sat back in his green leather chair, doodling with a felt-tipped pen and cradling the telephone receiver in the crook of his meaty neck. He was talking to a criminal defense client, who was out on parole. Mostly the subject was baseball. The Oakland A’s were looking good, and John had season tickets. He was laughing heartily when Mercedes appeared in his doorway.

She had done very little work with Darrel’s partner, who was much loved by the staff for his irreverence and absence of pretense. He had a miniature basketball hoop positioned over his trash can, surrounded by many wads of paper that had missed their mark. Another wad sailed through the air in a high arc and swooshed into the trash. He was delighted by his success and motioned Mercedes to sit down as he hung up the phone.

“I wanted to ask your opinion about a couple things, if you have time,” she said.

“Fire away.” His friendly eyes smiled at her, and he resumed doodling.

“Here’s a hypothetical case: two people get married. Sometime after they marry the wife discovers that her husband has secretly taken out several large disability and term life insurance policies on himself. All the documents are kept in a locked drawer in an obscure place, along with his will, a trust, and other documents of that nature. She reads the policies and the copies of the applications that had been submitted for them. The total amount of disability insurance coverage is immense—enough to purchase a mansion—and the premiums are over a thousand dollars per month, although her husband isn’t even forty-five. There’s over half a million dollars of life insurance as well.”

John whistled at the figures and kept doodling.

“That’s not all. The applications contain certain inaccuracies, but they are too consistent to be accidental. The policies were all issued before the wedding date but after they became engaged. What would you make of that?”

“Sounds like premeditation to me. Someone was planning something. How is everyone’s health, in your hypothetical?”

“That’s just it. The husband has gotten very ill all of a sudden.”

“And who are the beneficiaries of the life insurance?”

“A family trust.”

“And who is the beneficiary of the trust?”

“A child.”

“And is the hypothetical illness contagious?”

“Yes.”

“Seems pretty clear what’s going on here. He must have known before the wedding, maybe even before the proposal, that he was going to get sick, and he planned the whole thing.”

“Is there no other explanation?”

“There could be, but not one that immediately jumps to mind. I’ve never known anyone who had multiple disability insurance policies. Why would you, unless you knew you were going to need it? Furthermore, the companies would want to know about each other.”

“Suppose he grew up in a situation where there was insufficient insurance and the result was the financial ruin of the family? Is it possible he would be a bit paranoid about his finances, and go overboard to protect his own family?”

“For a thousand dollars a month? It’s excessive. You’d have to have an impressive monthly income to justify it. Is this person rich?”

“Comfortable, certainly.”

“I’d have to ask why there had not been full disclosure to the spouse, if there wasn’t something to hide. I’d be interested in his medical history, the representations on the insurance applications, the sources of income for the premiums. In fact, the whole thing stinks—hypothetically speaking.”

“What if there were a test for the type of illness afflicting the husband, and that test had been taken prior to marriage by both of them, and the results were negative?”

“According to whom? Did they take the test together and receive the results together?”

“Separately.”

“So they reported the results to each other, but didn’t actually see the test results or speak to each other’s doctors?”

Mercedes shifted in her seat and looked uneasily at Slayne. “Something like that,” she said.

He shook his head. “Somebody lied. That’s what my gut tells me anyway.” He patted his sizable paunch. “As you can see, this gut has a lot to say.”

“What would you advise a client who made such a discovery?”

“What is the state of her health at this point?”

“Fine.”

“I would encourage her to protect herself, investigate further, and get some distance from the situation, for safety’s sake. I would want her to take a cold, hard look at the facts, once the facts were known, and be prepared to act. And of course I would use every means at my disposal to help her get the facts and advise her on her legal rights.”

“What about the ailing spouse?”

“That’s another kettle of fish. The degree and nature of the disability would obviously affect a lot of things. My client could use that to her advantage, particularly if she has his power of attorney.”

“I see.”

Another wad of paper sailed into the air and swished through the hoop. John Slayne raised his arms in a victory salute. “Two for two.”

“I’d better leave while you’re ahead. Thanks for your time.”

“Happy to help,” he said with a smile.

He watched her leave and kept his eyes on her until she disappeared from sight. There was no longer a smile on John Slayne’s face.

H
IS WORDS HIT HER FORCEFULLY
as she walked around the lake. Her misgivings about the insurance had been overshadowed by the chaos of Jack’s rapid decline. She had avoided facing the nagging questions, but her intuition would not let her rest.

She’d managed to come to grips with Jack’s bisexuality, after a fashion. It had become a convenient excuse upon which she could hang his actions. She had no objections to homosexuality per se. People were wired the way they were wired. Motherhood had taught her that. Children came into the world whole and unique.

Jack had obviously been gifted with brains and physical beauty, and he was no shrinking violet in spite of his childhood traumas. He
had been a man hungry for adventure, eager to experience the rich tapestry of life, and with the resources to do so.

It was his withholding of facts that unsettled her, along with the vast quantity of insurance. She could no longer ignore the implications. Premeditation, John had said. She had to find out when Jack had learned he was HIV positive. She walked and walked, scarcely aware of her surroundings. Had his love been entirely feigned? Surely not.

She recalled their conversation when he’d been drafting the trust. It was to protect and provide for Germaine when they both had gone. At the time she had thought only of his magnanimity, even in noting how testy he’d been. They were also planning the wedding then. She had chalked up his grouchiness to a groom’s jitters and having too much to do in too little time.

But why had he been in such a rush to marry? He said he’d waited all his life to find her, to find happiness, and didn’t want to wait a moment longer. Perhaps he
couldn’t
wait a moment longer.

Doubt consumed her. If only she could talk to him about it! But he was in no condition for that. When she’d left him that morning, his cadaverous, towering figure had stood over them, drooling. His eyes had leapt from Mercedes and Germaine to the nurse, unsure of who they were, of where he was. He badly needed grooming, he could barely control his bodily functions, and he was too large, even in his weakened state, to be managed like the helpless person he was fast becoming.

Geneva, the home-care nurse, had calmly led him by the arm into the living room, where she helped him onto the couch. She had made him comfortable with kind words, and administered his medicine. He’d become teary-eyed, frightened, and shaky. He was tethered to the oxygen tank by yards of plastic tubing, like an animal on a leash. He resisted food. The medicine’s harsh side effects
seemed to ravage him as much as the virus that now controlled his mind. He lived in a twilight of confusion and nightmare, his identity shattered by a fragmented memory, his past kept from him behind a partition in his own brain. From time to time, the doctor had assured Mercedes, the partition would lift. He would reappear, unaware of the madness from which he had emerged. Once again he would be interested in the world, capable of making some limited decisions or actions. But even then he was not to be trusted with responsibilities or adult judgments—and certainly not with the keys to a car.

When she’d left the house, he was vomiting violently into a bowl held by Geneva. That was a frequent occurrence, and perilous in its own right. All his bodily fluids were potentially lethal. Geneva had taught her how to clean up after him, to wear plastic gloves, to protect her eyes from splattering vomit when she dumped it into the toilet, to scrub his dishes and flatware, to segregate household linens that might be subject to his bodily excretions. He was a walking contaminant, a creature that bore little resemblance to the man they had known a few short weeks before.