The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [14]
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