The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [1]
The first warning bell, in hindsight, had been the ease with which she’d sat through five hours of surveillance without a twinge of discomfort. Normally, the ability to last hours before her bladder asserting herself would be a cause for celebration in Tess Monaghan’s world. Although many manufacturers had tried, there was no perfect solution for what she called the feminine relief problem. Men had more options, especially if they weren’t shy. Since becoming a private investigator six years ago, she had trained herself to be extremely stoic, and often blessed her father for those early years, when his insistence on making good time on family trips taught a young Tess to sync her body to the family’s ancient station wagon’s need for fuel. Edging into her third trimester, she discovered that pregnancy inevitably took its toll on her stalwart bladder, making surveillance problematic. Which was a problem, for surveillance was the bread-and-butter mainstay of Keys Investigations. That and Dumpster-diving, which she had reluctantly put on hold since she learned she was pregnant.
However, pregnancy turned out to be an excellent cover for surveillance. Women looked at her belly, not her face. Men looked away from her. Especially the one man she was determined to catch on her iPhone’s camera, a deadbeat dad named Jordan Baum. A house painter, he maintained via his attorney that he had taken a bad fall on a job, sustaining the impossible-to-disprove “soft tissue damage.” His baby mama believed that Jordan was a cheater twice over, working off the books for a contractor who preferred to pay in cash, allowing Jordan to shortchange her and the government.
But Jordan Baum was cagey enough not to take jobs that placed him in public view. Over the week that Tess had been watching him, he’d hobbled in and out of a major rehab near the Canton waterfront, and while it was suspicious for an out-of-work painter to keep visiting a house-under-renovation, it wasn’t proof of anything. Stymied, she arranged for an attractive blonde to cross his path, a blonde who would prove much unluckier to Jordan Baum than any black cat.
On the appointed day, Whitney hid around the corner from the work site until alerted by text message that Jordan was making his faux laborious way toward the building. Whitney sailed out, arms piled high with stacks of paper. Tess had asked only that she drop them, but Whitney literally threw herself into the role, sprawling at Jordan’s feet, screaming in horror as her papers scattered, faking an injury to her knee. Gallant Jordan ran about—sometimes limping, sometimes not—gathered the papers, and helped Whitney to her feet. She insisted on buying him coffee at a nearby diner. All the while, Tess was snapping photos of the miraculously healed Jordan. These would be enough to make him kick in what he owed his ex. The IRS could hire its own private investigator to get their piece.
“But once a cheater, always a cheater,” Tess told Whitney over a celebratory late lunch at Matthew’s Pizza. “He’ll pay for a while, then fall behind again. Without a regular check to garnish, it’s impossible to make him stay current.”
“Did you know he has four kids by three different women?” Whitney asked. “He actually took their photos out of his wallet and said, ‘I make beautiful babies.’ Is that a new seduction technique, advertising one’s bona fides as a baby daddy? I mean, I know I lead a relatively sheltered life, but—what’s wrong, Tess?”
Tess had finally registered the strange absence of her bladder’s demands. The realization was quickly followed by a pressing presence—intense cramps, then a stretch of violent vomiting, first in the restaurant’s tiny ladies’ room, then on the sidewalk, then the gutter, and finally down the side of Whitney’s Suburban as Whitney rushed her to Johns Hopkins. “It’s seen worse,” Whitney said when Tess apologized between retching episodes. “My mom’s corgis are prone to diarrhea.”
The tale unspooled in the E.R., where the doctors