The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [11]
“For how much?”
Dorie shook her head. A short, top-heavy woman, she always reminded Tess of a robin, with her rounded front and tousled hair. In fact, just looking at her made Tess want to burst into the opening of “My Funny Valentine,” the prologue that so few people knew, in which the gentleman’s blank countenance was compared to a bird’s. But there was nothing vacant about Dorie’s brow. Like Mrs. Blossom, Dorie was another person the world tended to underestimate. Tess was surrounded by such people, she realized. She was one, in fact, a broad-shouldered jockette. Strangers would have trusted her with a lacrosse stick, but not much else.
“I’m not that good,” Dorrie said. “Out-of-court settlements are sealed, and this one included a gag order. If Esptein shared the details, the hospital could reclaim its payment. But let’s play connect the dots. Epstein filed the lawsuit just before the deadline ran out. Settlement was reached in April of this year and he closed on the house on Blythewood in July. For cash—$1.2 million.”
“Couldn’t part of the payment come from equity in his previous home? That house was appraised at four million.”
“He owned the previous house only four years, and the sale price was only slightly above the price he paid. Figure in closing costs, and it was a zero-sum game for him. And according to documents he filed in the lawsuit, in which he was trying to demonstrate actual costs related to his wife’s death, he said he tapped into equity to cover her hospital bills.”
“No insurance?”
Dorie smiled. “No health insurance. He neglected to add her to the plan he carries through his job, and the insurance company was fighting him every step of the way over that bureaucratic oversight. Yet he didn’t overlook the life insurance. The hospital’s lawyers included that in their findings. His lawyer countered by putting in a claim for the wife’s personal property, including a $20,000 engagement ring they say was stolen in the hospital. He eventually got $500,000, so part of that could have gone to pay for the house on Blythewood.”
Tess clicked back to the photo of the happy couple on their wedding day, studied the ring, an Art Deco monstrosity bordered by a darker stone.
“It’s big,” she said. “Does that make it worth twenty thousand?”
“If the hospital didn’t challenge him, he can claim any amount he wanted.”
Tess yearned to study these files herself, to pore over every detail. It would be dull, tedious work, but she might see something that Dorie had missed. Dorie was essentially a human search engine. She worked from known parameters, finding only what she was asked to find.
“You said the pneumonia was a complication subsequent to her admission. Why was she in the hospital?”
“She had been in and out of the hospital for idiopathic fever and nausea for much of the previous year. The last time around, she developed a staph infection and pneumonia.”
“Idiot fever?”
“Idiopathic. No known cause. She was a bit of a medical mystery, as the hospital freely admits. Don Epstein’s lawyer argued that it was the hospital’s fault, because she must have contacted staph while hospitalized, and that made her more vulnerable to pneumonia. There’s a lot of stuff in the filings about her use of antibiotics. He swore she didn’t, the hospital contends she did and concealed it. In the end, they settled.”
The fact of a settlement proved nothing. The hospital might have settled because it was cheaper, in the long run. Don Epstein might have settled because he knew he didn’t have a good case. Whatever grief he felt over his wife, he seemed to have assuaged it quickly, with a new house and a new wife.
But then—widowers were considered desirable, and Carole Massinger had been a friend, close enough to attend his wedding. Tess had known other widowers who found new loves within a year of their wives’ deaths. Dorie was right: Most men sucked at being alone.
Then again, Tess didn’t know a single widower whose new wife had gone into the woods one day and never been seen again. And, thanks to Mrs. Blossom, she