The Girl in the Green Raincoat (5 page)

But there was always room on the front page for the deadly carjacking of a couple from Greenspring Valley—code for “rich, white”—when they took an ill-advised shortcut coming home from the theater and found themselves on Greenmount Avenue—again, locals would recognize this as shorthand for “poor, black”—and someone attempted to steal their Mercedes just outside the gates of the cemetery that held John Wilkes Booth. The inclusion of that stray detail baffled Tess, but the reporter seemed to think it was relevant because the couple had attended a performance of
Assassins
at the Morris Mechanic Theater. Tess was surprised the writer hadn’t tried to make some rhetorical hay out of the Greenmount/Greenspring dichotomy.

Mrs. Epstein had been shot in the head, while Mr. Epstein had been shot in the leg. The assailant was described as a “young man in baggy pants.”

“Sound familiar now?” Dorie asked.

“I would have been in college,” Tess said. “And I hate to admit it, but when I was in college on the Eastern Shore, I wouldn’t have paid attention to a murder back in Baltimore. In fact, I would have considered these people
old
.” Don and Mary Epstein were thirty-nine at the time.

“No, not this particular case. The scenario. Because it sure sounded familiar to Baltimore cops back then. It was six years after Charles Stuart, up in Boston. Wife killed, guy injured, but so severely that no one could believe he did it to himself. Epstein almost bled to death because the bullet hit the femoral artery. But Epstein runs a chain of check-cashing stores, stores he inherited from his first wife’s dad, as it happens. He probably never studied anatomy.”

“So he was a suspect?”

“Never officially, but you’ll see in the clips how cagey the police are, how careful they are not to inflame things. For one—the race of the suspect isn’t specified. No one was ever charged and the car was found about a mile away, abandoned, and while they took a lot of fingerprints, the only hits they got were on Epstein and his wife.”

One man, three wives. Two dead, one missing. One killed in a homicide, one dead after a mysterious illness lands her in a hospital, which claims that it could have taken better care of her if they had been informed of her excessive use of antibiotics. But why would the second Mrs. Epstein have withheld this information? The media had been almost hysterical over staph infections at the time. Who would fail to disclose her use of antibiotics, knowing she was at risk for MSRA?

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.”

T
ess 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 talked 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?”