The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [26]
Whitney allowed their advances, letting first this one and that one approach. After sizing them up for the better part of an hour, she settled on the most determined clerk, a plump-cheeked little beauty who didn’t seem to hear the word “No.” Although young, she was quite the breezy pro.
“How long have you worked here?” she asked, examining a Marc Jacobs bag known as the “Patchwork Gennifer.” The “Gennifer” was unforgivable, the $1,500 price tag unfathomable.
“Three years,” the saleswoman said, substituting a slightly less flamboyant Burberry bag, which Whitney could almost imagine carrying—if the decimal point moved one column to the left. Give the woman props: She was like the mother of a young child, quick to distract her charge from an unpleasant sensation by substituting another. Don’t want the lolly? Here’s a binky.
“So you knew Carole Epstein?” A blank look, another quick bag substitution. Kate Spade this time. Warmer, Whitney thought. Warmer.
“Perhaps you knew her as Carole Massinger?”
“Oh, yeah,” the woman said, and there was some kind of emotion to it, but Whitney wasn’t sure she could identify it. “Kiki. Did she use to wait on you? Because she is gone.”
It was unclear if the woman knew just how gone Carole was. But she must. Although the story had lost its momentum, it dominated the local media for a week or so.
“How does Carole become Kiki?”
A shrug, another bag sliding down Whitney’s arm, another bag sliding up. Dooney & Bourke. “I don’t know. She asked to be called Kiki one day. No skin off my—do you like metallics?”
“No,” Whitney said. “Was she a friend?”
“I liked her, but, you know.”
Whitney chose to translate this sentiment as: We worked together, we were friendly, I wasn’t her bridesmaid. Bridesmaids! Carole might have been Don Epstein’s third wife, but he was her first husband. Had she gone whole hog on the wedding? That could lead to friends, distant family. Whitney made a note to ask Tess if the marriage license indicated a proper church wedding or a courthouse quickie.
“Have you been in touch with her since she left—” Whitney stole a look at the woman’s name tag. “—Denise?”
“She came in once.” Denise held up a Gucci bag, covered with the signature design of interlocking G’s. Whitney shook her head. If a designer wanted to advertise on her body, he could pay for the privilege. “After she got married. She looked at a lot of bags, but she didn’t buy anything. I think she was enjoying being on the other side of the counter.”
“Did she ever talk about her fiancé before they got married, when you were still working together?”
“Yeah.” Denise surrendered, stopped pulling out things to show Whitney. “She said—wait, it was funny what she said, I remember that much. She said . . . ‘I’ve had my sights on him for a long time.’ ”
“What did she mean by that?”
Denise shrugged. “I thought she meant he was rich, her ticket out.”
“She didn’t mention that she had known him a long time, or that he had once dated her sister?”
“No, I would have remembered that. Or at least the sister part. When she came back in here that one time, she was kinda depressed. Really well dressed, in this amazing coat—”
“A green raincoat?” Whitney had heard Tess describe Carole Esptein often enough to imagine the woman herself, although she had never seen her, except in that one odd photo captured from the Internet. She thought it must be the only photo of Carole, for it was the one all the television shows used when they interviewed Epstein.
“Yes, exactly. She was trying to match a purse to it, in fact. A big purse, which surprised me, because this was last spring—remember how cool and rainy it was—and the trend was going toward small. Carole was usually on top of that kind of stuff,