The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [13]
“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.”
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