The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [15]
“That was Danielle, the one you mentioned on the phone?”
He nodded. “Danielle. She was so pretty . . .” Again, that strange flush of jealousy. Did Lenhardt think Tess was pretty? Could anyone think she was pretty in this state?
“The thing is—I was working her really hard, the month before the accident. I thought she knew something. She was his bookkeeper. And one thing I noticed, whenever I talked to her, is that she would be very adamant about when they started dating. ‘You know, we didn’t start dating until the winter, in January.’ Every time, that came up. So I said to her one day: ‘Yeah, you didn’t start dating until three months after his wife was killed, but before she was killed, were you screwing around?’ That rattled her, I think.”
“Did she ever admit they were having an affair?”
“No, she never did. But she knew something. And when she died—well, I thought it was my fault, that I should have been more insistent, gotten her to see the kind of guy she was dating. She had had a tough life. Parents dead in a car accident when she was barely in her twenties, left to raise her kid sister, almost ten years younger than she was. Other than her involvement with Epstein, she seemed like a really good person.”
He fingered the quilt. “Geese in Flight,” he said. “Nice.” Then, at Tess’s surprised look: “My wife, she’s into stuff like this, although she’s younger than me, by a bit. Used to be a nurse. That’s who cops meet—nurses, state’s attorneys, other cops. Waitresses. Everyone says I’m punching way above my weight class with her. She’s gorgeous. But, hey, I needed to sweeten the genetic pot for my kids, you know?”
Tess’s hormones sighed, thwarted.
“Did you know your wife was the one, the moment you met her?” she asked. “Or did it creep up on you?” Her relationship with Crow fell in the latter camp, and she couldn’t help thinking there was something special about the thunderbolt school of love.
“I knew she was good-looking, the moment I saw her. That’s hard to miss. But, as I said, she’s younger. And I had been married before, screwed that up. I didn’t believe in second chances. I kept looking for the catch. She was pretty, she was good company. Why was she available? Why did she want to go with me? Eventually, I decided to stop questioning my good luck and just grab it. We’ve been together eighteen years now.”
Tess had lost the thread of what Lenhardt was saying. She couldn’t get over the fact that Don Epstein’s girlfriend had sat in a room with this man and not told him everything. She knew she would have told him whatever he wanted to know. She wanted, in fact, to confess all her transgressions to him—the time she sneaked out in her father’s car and smashed the tail light, the marijuana she smoked as recently as four months ago—before she knew she was pregnant—the various laws she had bent and even broken in her own line of work.
Then she got it. This wasn’t all hormonal. Lenhardt was a good murder police, a good one, in or out of the box. On some level, he was always in the box, always working it, inspiring people to confide in him. It was a habit he couldn’t break. The 7-Eleven cashier probably tried to tell him her life story when he bought a cup of coffee.
“Do you have children?”
“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