The Girl in the Green Raincoat

by Laura Lippman

  Possibly a woman who didn’t know she had been taking antibiotics.

  “Who was the primary on the Epstein investigation, the carjacking?”

  “Harold Lenhardt. Still a cop, but out in the county now. He left a year or two after this happened.”

  A nursery rhyme played in Tess’s head: When I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Only in her version, it became: When I was going to St. Ives, I met a man who lost three wives.

  Three makes a trend, as she’d learned in her newspaper days, and if Carole Epstein was dead, it was a hard trend to ignore. Being married to Don Epstein carried a shockingly high mortality rate.

  But of the three, the one indisputable homicide was the first Mrs. Epstein. She would start there.

  Sergeant Harold Lenhardt sounded friendly when she finally tracked him down by phone. He remained friendly for about thirty seconds, when Tess explained why she had called.

  “I don’t talk about that.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

  “Lawsuit?” There was no gag order on the homicide, as far as Tess knew, just on the settlement involving the second wife’s death.

  “I don’t allow myself to talk about it,” he amended.

  “But—”

  “Look, I just don’t.”

  “But—”

  “You’re not the first reporter to call. You won’t be the last.”

  “I’m not a reporter. I’m a private investigator. Don Epstein’s first wife was murdered. His second wife died in a hospital. Now his third wife is missing, and he’s pretending she’s not.”

  “A third wife? He’s got a third wife now?”

  “Did. As I said, he seems remarkably unperturbed by the fact that she left on a business trip and has yet to come home.”

  “Damn,” he said. Then: “Excuse me.”

  “I’ve heard worse. I’ve said much worse.”

  “Me, too. But I try to watch myself in front of ladies.”

  Tess didn’t think she had ever been called a lady before. She was torn between being charmed and wanting to demonstrate her own prodigious talent for cursing.

  “Couldn’t we just have a conversation?”

  “Epstein tried to sue me for slander. It didn’t go anywhere—you can’t sue a detective for doing his job—but he’s had me on notice for years. He sued the paper for libel at the time, too. Got thrown out on summary judgment, but he’s a litigious”—a pause, as he caught himself on the verge of a much harsher noun—“SOB.”

  “No one has to know we spoke,” Tess said.

  “You mentioned three wives. Do you know about Danielle? ”

  “Danielle?”

  A heavy sigh, the beginning of another burst or profanity quickly swallowed. “She was his girlfriend, between wives one and two. And yeah, she’s dead, too, which is on my conscience, because I couldn’t nail the”—another pause—“SOB. Now you tell me there’s two more on the ledger because I couldn’t close. Damn. Sorry. Okay, we’ll talk.”

  Chapter 5

  Tess had never had particularly excitable hormones. Cranky as a child—she had earned her sometimes nickname of Testy—she mellowed with age. Even the demons of PMS didn’t notably alter her moods. But pregnancy was different. And, perhaps because she was forced to sit still, the energy that was supposed to be forming her so-far-missing maternal instincts was beginning to manifest itself in odd and unexpected ways. Mood swings? Try mood teeter-totters, mood elevators, mood escalators, mood rockets. Add a daily dose of Oprah and Judge Judy to the mix and she was truly unpredictable.

  Take, for example, the crush she developed on Sergeant Harold Lenhardt the moment he walked through her door. He was stocky, at least twenty years older than she—which made him almost twenty-five years older than Crow—and had nothing in common with any man to whom she had been drawn before. Yet she liked him instantaneously, and even tried flirting with him, after a fashion.

  It was, she decided, all about eye contact. Harold Lenhardt locked eyes with a woman as if there were no other person in the world to whom he would rather speak. She found herself babbling to him—oversharing, as the current phrase had it—telling him in great detail how she had come to sit here, watching the woman she now knew to be Carole Esptein.

  “It doesn’t make sense that she would abandon a dog on whom she clearly doted.” Dempsey’s toenails clattered against the bars. “Even a dog as insane as this one has turned out to be.”

  “He’s not insane,” Lenhardt said. “No bad dogs, right? Just bad people.” And before she could object, he opened the crate and coaxed Dempsey out. The dog immediately wet the floor, and Lenhardt went to the kitchen and found cleaning supplies. Even so, his manner with the dog was firm, but gentle, and Dempsey responded, albeit in an odd way: He walked over to the porcelain chamber pot, the gift from Tess’s aunt, and continued urinating there.

  “He’s a little too spirited for you in your current, uh, condition,” Lenhardt said. “But he’s trainable.”

  “He may have been the last person—well, not person, but mammal—to see Carole Epstein alive, I fear.”

  “Yeah, about that.” He drew a chair close to Tess’s chaise longue, the better to make his signature eye contact. “I checked. She hasn’t been reported missing. You can’t make a man say his wife is missing, you know. He says she’s on a business trip, who’s going to contradict him? You need to find a family member, or a friend to start agitating.”

  “My suspicions aren’t enough?”

  “They could be, but what you’ve told me is kinda flimsy. Besides, this is not a man to anger. He’s insanely litigious, a real SOB. Do not get in his crosshairs. The guy tried to sue me for slander. When that failed, he tried to get my neighbors to sue me over property lines. He’ll come at people any way he can, once he’s angry. He likes to win, at any cost.”

  “Do you think he murdered his first wife?”

  Lenhardt looked around, as if he couldn’t be certain that they were alone. “First, let me tell you how paranoid I am about this guy. I didn’t come here until I did a lot of checking on you. A lot. I thought he might be playing me, trying to set me up. And, you know, he lives on just the other side of that hill from you. But you checked out, so I’m here. And I think you’re right to be worried about his third wife. But this is not a guy you tangle with lightly.”

  “Did you suspect him right away?”

  Dempsey came over to Lenhardt and presented his snout, nosing at the sergeant’s hand until he got the point and began scratching him behind the ears. Tess’s hormones hissed with jealousy.

  “Yeah. Here’s the weird thing. He kept insisting that the kid who ’jacked him was white. Which in that neighborhood is a little farfetched, statistically. Oh, it could have been some suburban kid, come down to cop, but why would that kid need to steal a car, and why would he dump it nearby? I felt like, after the stuff that happened with Charles Stuart and Susan Smith—she was just a few months before—Epstein was trying to be a PC faker. But he stuck to the story—scrawny white kid, in a hooded sweatshirt, ran in front of his car, flagged him down. He stopped because he thought the kid was in trouble. He got out, was shot in the leg. Missus gets out of the car, she gets shot in the head, twice. Kid drives the car maybe four blocks, dumps it.”

  “So if it’s not an accident—he has an accomplice.”

  “Right. At first, I thought it was the woman he started dating a few months later. But she died two years later. Accident at home. Tripped over her own cat, fell down the stairs.”

  “That was Danielle, the one you mentioned on the phone?”

  He nodded. “Danielle. She was so pretty . . .” Again, that strange flush of jealousy. Did Lenhardt think Tess was pretty? Could anyone think she was pretty in this state?

  “The thing is—I was working her really hard, the month before the accident. I thought she knew something. She was his bookkeeper. And one thing I noticed, whenever I talk
ed to her, is that she would be very adamant about when they started dating. ‘You know, we didn’t start dating until the winter, in January.’ Every time, that came up. So I said to her one day: ‘Yeah, you didn’t start dating until three months after his wife was killed, but before she was killed, were you screwing around?’ That rattled her, I think.”

  “Did she ever admit they were having an affair?”

  “No, she never did. But she knew something. And when she died—well, I thought it was my fault, that I should have been more insistent, gotten her to see the kind of guy she was dating. She had had a tough life. Parents dead in a car accident when she was barely in her twenties, left to raise her kid sister, almost ten years younger than she was. Other than her involvement with Epstein, she seemed like a really good person.”

  He fingered the quilt. “Geese in Flight,” he said. “Nice.” Then, at Tess’s surprised look: “My wife, she’s into stuff like this, although she’s younger than me, by a bit. Used to be a nurse. That’s who cops meet—nurses, state’s attorneys, other cops. Waitresses. Everyone says I’m punching way above my weight class with her. She’s gorgeous. But, hey, I needed to sweeten the genetic pot for my kids, you know?”

  Tess’s hormones sighed, thwarted.

  “Did you know your wife was the one, the moment you met her?” she asked. “Or did it creep up on you?” Her relationship with Crow fell in the latter camp, and she couldn’t help thinking there was something special about the thunderbolt school of love.

  “I knew she was good-looking, the moment I saw her. That’s hard to miss. But, as I said, she’s younger. And I had been married before, screwed that up. I didn’t believe in second chances. I kept looking for the catch. She was pretty, she was good company. Why was she available? Why did she want to go with me? Eventually, I decided to stop questioning my good luck and just grab it. We’ve been together eighteen years now.”

  Tess had lost the thread of what Lenhardt was saying. She couldn’t get over the fact that Don Epstein’s girlfriend had sat in a room with this man and not told him everything. She knew she would have told him whatever he wanted to know. She wanted, in fact, to confess all her transgressions to him—the time she sneaked out in her father’s car and smashed the tail light, the marijuana she smoked as recently as four months ago—before she knew she was pregnant—the various laws she had bent and even broken in her own line of work.

  Then she got it. This wasn’t all hormonal. Lenhardt was a good murder police, a good one, in or out of the box. On some level, he was always in the box, always working it, inspiring people to confide in him. It was a habit he couldn’t break. The 7-Eleven cashier probably tried to tell him her life story when he bought a cup of coffee.

  “Do you have children?”

  “A boy and a girl,” he said. “And a girl from my first marriage.”

  “Do your kids tell you everything?”

  “The boy does. The girl—the girl could glide through Guantanamo and never crack. My older girl—she hasn’t talked to me for almost twenty years.”

  “I’m having a girl.”

  “My condolences.” He smiled. “Seriously, you’ll love it. Parenthood, I mean. I’m not calling your child an ‘it.’ ”

  “Promise I’ll love it?”

  “I do, in fact. I promise that you’ll love it, you’ll hate it, that it will be your greatest joy. And show you a new level of fear, too. I just hope it won’t be your greatest sorrow as well. Me, I’ve known both.”

  He got up to leave. “Find a family member or a friend, someone who will take this to the police. You know her maiden name, by any chance?”

  “Yes, it’s . . .” She flipped through the pages she had been collecting. “. . . Massinger.”

  A queer look crossed Lenhardt’s face. “Are you sure?”

  “It’s on her marriage certificate.”

  “Because that was Danielle’s last name, too.”

  Danielle Messinger had died—accidentally, according to the autopsy—after tripping over her cat. Her sister, Carole, twenty at the time, was in her junior year at Salisbury State. In fact, it was Carole’s panicky call that had prompted a neighbor to check on Danielle, who had not answered her phone on Easter Sunday. Danielle had been dead for several days, presumably falling on Good Friday, with no chance of resurrection.

  Why hadn’t her boss—and boyfriend—been similarly worried? She had the four-day weekend off, Don Epstein told police. Danielle said she had plans. No, he didn’t know what they were. She had been kind of secretive lately, moody and distracted. Truth was, they had a fight Wednesday night and she had been giving him the silent treatment. He didn’t attend the funeral, but then—there was no funeral to attend. Danielle Messinger’s sister had returned to Severna Park, taken charge of her sister’s remains and had her cremated.

  That was as much as Lenhardt could tell Tess, after she showed him the photo of Carole with Don Epstein and his second wife, toasting them at their wedding.

  “Did she know him then?” Tess asked. “I mean back then, when her sister died.”

  “Knew of him, as I recall, but mainly in the context of her sister’s boss. She was in college when they started dating. She did say they were engaged, which was news to me. And to Epstein, who denied it, and the fact was, there was no ring on her finger, no proof. That said, I always thought Epstein was keen to marry Danielle, if only for spousal immunity. She knew something. She had agreed to meet with me the following week.”

  Dusk had fallen by now, the dogs and their walkers had come and gone. Tess had encouraged Lenhardt to pour himself a drink, and tried not to be too envious of the Jameson to which he helped himself. She didn’t even like Jameson, but the fact that she couldn’t have it made it all too desirable.

  “Okay, but—” The door opened. Tess had to leave it unlocked when she expected visitors, not to mention the delivery of her meals. It was her supper, brought tonight by Crow’s acolyte, Lloyd Jupiter. Once a street kid, all jangly nerves and bravado, he had found a vocation and sense of direction at Crow’s alma mater, the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he was studying film on scholarship. He also was dating a stunningly beautiful Chinese girl, one adopted at age two and raised by two mommies. All of this—an Asian girl, her gay parents, school—represented so much growth for Lloyd that Tess was almost wistful for the brash, skeptical teenager he had been not that long ago. It was a relief of sorts to see the face he made as he entered with the carryout from Dukem, the Ethiopian restaurant. Lloyd remained closed off to all culinary experiences outside of cheeseburgers, chicken boxes, and pizza.

  “You could not pay me to eat this—” He stopped short when he saw Lenhardt. “Why is there a police here? Did you find that crazy dog’s owner?”

  Lloyd, also picking up the slack in the dog-walking department, had been bitten by Dempsey and now wanted nothing to do with him. He took Esskay and Miata out happily, but refused to walk Dempsey.

  “Sergeant Harold Lenhardt. He is a cop, but he’s also a miracle worker with dogs. Look how calm Dempsey is.”

  Dempsey, nestled against the mountain that was Tess’s belly, bared his teeth at Lloyd and growled.

  “Dog’s a flat-out racist,” Lloyd said.

  “He hates everyone,” Tess points out.

  “Hates everyone. Bit me.”

  Lloyd began to arrange the food on Tess’s bed tray, and she was careful to mask her amazement. Gushing over Lloyd’s transformation tended to make him revert to his most thuggish, surly behavior. Left alone, without comment, he increasingly did the right thing in the right way. She had no idea why a curriculum of watching films and attempting to make them would produce such a change in a person. May, who had been assigned to tutor Lloyd when he struggled with the required English class, probably deserved some credit too. Tess watched him matter-of-factly taking out the blood pressure cuff and fastening it to her arm.

  “Maybe you should consider medical school.”

  He snorted as if t
his were a joke on Tess’s part, as if he didn’t realize that he had come so far that medical school would not be that much of a reach. He wrote down her pressure in the pad that Crow kept by the bed, then went to the kitchen to get her a glass of water.

  “Corner kid,” Lenhardt said, in the same diagnostic tone in which Lloyd had pronounced him police.

  “Was,” Tess said. “Not anymore.”

  “It’s hard,” Lenhardt said, “for people to change.”

  “Yet they do, sometimes. Maybe Don Epstein changed, and Carole really is on a business trip. Maybe he’s just a really unlucky guy.”

  “Maybe,” Lenhardt said.

  “Maybe he’s just snakebit.”

  “Maybe,” Lenhardt said, “and maybe, if I eat enough barbecued spare ribs at the Corner Stable, a pig will fly out of my butt.”

  Chapter 6

  How can I miss you if you won’t go away, Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks once asked. Similarly, Tess was finding out that it’s hard to be a missing person if no one will admit to missing you. Yet, try as she might, she couldn’t find anyone—a friend, a relative, a co-worker—who could make a credible complaint about the disappearance of Carole Epstein. There appeared to be no one in her life except Don Epstein. Oh, Tess had enough drag to get the cops to make a duty call, to question Epstein without revealing the source of the inquiry. But Epstein produced e-mails from his wife and even text messages. Easily faked, as far as Tess was concerned—if he had done away with Carole Epstein, he would have her phone and could send the text messages himself. And many spouses had access to each other’s e-mail.

  But unless someone close to Carole insisted she had been the victim of foul play, there was little else that police could do. She was on a business trip. Her husband said she was a handbag designer, just getting started, and she was visiting small stores that she hoped would carry her designs. Dempsey appeared to be the only one to notice her absence—how else to explain his strange behavior? Otherwise, no one cared.