The Girl in the Green Raincoat (6 page)

“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 this 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.”

H
ow 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.

“It’s all very existential,” Whitney agreed. “If a wife falls down in the forest, does she make a sound? I wonder how many days I could be gone without anyone noticing.”

“You live with your parents.”

“On their property, not in their house,” Whitney said. “I could fall in the bathtub and be there for days. Days! Squirrels would come down the fireplace and start nibbling at my body. Did you tell the police about Mr. Epstein’s incredibly bad luck with the fair sex?”

“Yes, and they didn’t write me off as a complete kook. That’s why they were willing to talk to him at all. But that’s as far as they’ll go right now. There’s no public pressure, no media attention whatsoever.”

“Why would someone marry her sister’s older boyfriend? That’s kind of icky.”

Tess had a theory. But then, at this point there was little about the Epsteins that she had not thought through. The girl in the green raincoat filled her imagination. In a sense, she now spent more time in the company of Carole Epstein than with anyone else. Unless one counted Dempsey.

“It does happen—a loved one is lost, and a new relationship forms between the two people who grieved over that person. After all, it’s been almost fifteen years ago Danielle Messinger died, and Carole was only twenty at the time. He even had another wife in between, and Carole apparently socialized with them as a couple. As a friend, she might have offered him moral support after Annette’s death, and that turned to love.”

“Romantic,” Whitney said. “Perfectly innocuous. Do you happen to believe it?”

“I might—if it weren’t for this dog.”

Whitney stretched out on the floor, and Dempsey, who had taken to sleeping at Tess’s feet, jumped down and inspected her, then began to growl. Tess remembered Lenhardt’s crash course and asserted herself as the alpha dog. “No, Dempsey.” The dog shot her an irritated look, but returned to his spot on the bed. He was getting better, but the other dogs still loathed him and had to spend their days locked in the bedroom.

“There’s one thing that doesn’t fit,” Whitney said. “This friendless, isolated woman in your scenario? You said she was always on her cell phone when she walked her dog. Who, pray tell, was she talking to?”

Tess conjured up the image of what she had seen—Carole Epstein in her green raincoat, hand cupped to her ear, always in conversation. Tess had judged her for that, just a little. That initial judgment seemed unfair now, as initial judgments often tend to be.

“Maybe her husband had her on a figurative leash, and required that she check in,” she said.

“She had a lover,” Whitney said. “A lover or a confidante. If Don Epstein is the monster you think he is, any kind of confidante would have unnerved him. The mere fact of a secret relationship, even a nonsexual one, would have bothered him.”

“Especially if she had information that could connect him to a homicide. I think she knew something, Whitney, and that’s why she had to disappear.”

Whitney paged through Tess’s file. Tess always kept her work in an orderly fashion, but this file, entered into the black-and-white Roaring Springs composition books that Tess had always favored, was a masterpiece of color-coding and charting. She had a lot of time on her hands, after all.

“Nice car,” Whitney said, stopping on the page with all the MVA data on the Epsteins. “And you know what? I think LoJack was being offered as a sweetener on that model for a while. I got a flyer from the dealer. As if I would spend that kind of money on a car.”

“So?”

“God, you’re slow. Is the baby keeping oxygen from getting to your brain? If Carole’s driving to boutiques up and down the eastern seaboard, as her husband insists, then LoJack will confirm his story. But if she’s disappeared, then she’s not driving her car, and it’s parked somewhere. Get Martin Tull, your cop friend, to engage the device.”

It wasn’t quite as easy as Whitney made it sound, but Detective Tull eventually found the dealership and convinced it to track the car. Carole Epstein’s green BMW was discovered in the parking garage at Baltimore Penn Station. The electronic ticket in the well between the front seats established that it had been there since the evening of the day that Tess saw her last. Her keys had been left in the ignition of the unlocked car, dangling from a Gucci key chain that should have been temptation enough unto itself. Impossible to say why the keys hadn’t been taken, but it was easy to establish why the car hadn’t been—the alternator was on the fritz.

Police returned to the home of Don Epstein that night, local television crews not far behind. In an impromptu press conference on his lawn, a red-eyed Epstein announced: “She left me. I just learned today that she’s stolen thousands of dollars from me. The e-mails, the texts—I have to assume they were all cover, so she could continue cleaning out our joint accounts. She left me and covered her tracks, just to get a head start on bleeding me dry.”

Tess, watching from her chaise longue, threw her hands up in frustration. Crow got out the blood-pressure cuff.

“He’s telling the truth about the accounts,” Martin Tull said. “She did it electronically, transferring money to an Internet-based bank, then moving that money to an account we can’t find, probably offshore.”

“It was a joint account,” Tess said. “He could have done it.”

“If he did, he didn’t use his home computer. The ISP doesn’t match.”

“Doesn’t match his
home
computer, but how do you know he doesn’t have a secret laptop? He runs a check-cashing business, Martin. He probably knows a few tricks about how to move money around.”

Tull was a murder police, one of the best. But he also was a friend, and Tess was beginning to realize he was here in that role, indulging the hysterical pregnant woman.

“She could have taken light rail to BWI,” he said. “She’s probably got a whole second identity, which is why her credit cards and ATM have been dormant.”

“And he could have a conspirator,” she insisted. “Based on history, he already has his next wife lined up. Cherchez la femme, Martin. He gets rid of them when he tires of them, probably to avoid alimony. If Carole Epstein managed to siphon all that money out of their joint accounts, then she’s the first one to walk away with a nickel. The rest all walked away dead, if you will. And what about the car at Penn Station, the keys?
He
could have left it there, gone home on the number sixty-one bus.”