Chapter 9 - Forensic Dissection
Three days later, the gates of 4820 Greenway Drive were locked with heavy steel chains wrapped around the ornamental iron.
A bright yellow banner was stretched across the entrance: **NOTICE OF FORECLOSURE AND JUDICIAL SALE - BY ORDER OF THE MIAMI-DADE COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT.**
A fleet of unmarked white moving vans was parked along the curb. Professional art handlers in white cotton gloves were carrying out seventeenth-century oil paintings, antique silver plate, and cases of vintage Bordeaux, cataloging each item under the watchful eye of a court-appointed receiver.
Priscilla Cobb stood on the sidewalk, wrapped in a trench coat that had lost two of its buttons. Her hair, unwashed and unstyled for three days, was whipped across her face by the humid afternoon wind.
Beside her sat three large cardboard boxes containing her personal clothing—the only property the court had deemed exempt from the emergency asset seizure.
A sleek black Maybach pulled up to the curb.
The rear window slid down silently.
Priscilla lunged toward the car, her hands clawing at the door handle, but Hector stepped out of the front passenger seat, his massive frame blocking her path with the solidity of a granite seawall.
“Step back, Mrs. Cobb,” Hector said quietly.
Inside the darkened interior of the car sat Lexi. She lowered her sunglasses, looking out at the ruined matriarch of Coral Gables.
“Lexi!” Priscilla cried, tears finally breaking through her crust of vanity, running down her hollow, un-powdered cheeks. “Lexi, look at me! Look what you’ve done to us! This is our family home! My grandfather laid the foundation stones! You can’t take this! Where am I supposed to live? What am I supposed to eat?”
Lexi looked at the grand Mediterranean revival house—the house where she had been forced to eat in the breakfast nook while Priscilla hosted her blue-blood cousins in the formal dining room.
“The house didn't belong to your grandfather, Priscilla,” Lexi said, her voice carrying clear through the open window. “He lost it in the crash of 1974. Marcus Vance bought the primary mortgage forty years ago as a private favor to keep your family from sleeping on the street. My father gave your husband an interest-free lease for thirty years because he felt sorry for your father.”
Priscilla’s eyes went wide, her jaw dropping. “No… that’s a lie… that’s a lie…”
“The lease expired the day I married Ronald,” Lexi said. “I renewed it myself under C-Cole Global. I paid the taxes. I paid for the new roof three summers ago. I paid the gardening staff who kept these hedges trimmed. You never owned this home, Priscilla. You were a squatter who mistook a family’s mercy for your own birthright.”
Lexi reached into a leather portfolio on the seat beside her and pulled out a small, printed check. She handed it out the window to Hector, who passed it to Priscilla.
Priscilla snatched it with shaking fingers.
It was a cashier’s check made out to Priscilla Cobb for the amount of four thousand two hundred dollars.
“What is this?” Priscilla sobbed, staring at the numbers. “What am I supposed to do with four thousand dollars? My monthly prescriptions cost more than this!”
“That is the exact balance remaining from your first wedding gift to me,” Lexi replied, her voice steady and unyielding. “A set of silver-plated butter knives that you claimed were family heirlooms, but which you had purchased at an estate liquidation for three hundred dollars. I had them appraised. I added interest calculated at the standard federal rate.”
Lexi leaned back into the shadows of the Maybach.
“There is an efficiency apartment rented in your name near Hialeah. The first three months have been paid. After that, your state pension should be sufficient to cover the groceries, provided you shop with coupons. Just like the middle-class families you spent forty years mocking.”
“You monster!” Priscilla shrieked, tearing the check in half and hurling the pieces at the car window. “You ruined my son! You took his life!”
“Ronald took his own life the moment he decided that greed was a substitute for character,” Lexi said.
The window slid up smoothly, sealing out the heat, the dust, and the shrieks of a woman who had finally run out of other people’s lives to burn.
“Drive,” Lexi said to the chauffeur.
May you like
The Maybach pulled away from the curb, leaving the ruined matriarch of the Cobb dynasty standing on the sidewalk amidst her cardboard boxes, watching the only home she had ever known be carried away in the back of an unmarked truck.
***
