The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [35]
“Yes,” he said, composed and measured. He must have hired a media coach, Tess thought. There was no sign of the defensive man that Mrs. Blossom had met. “Yes, I can blame people, and our tabloid culture, with its unquenchable thirst for other people’s tragedies.”
Definitely a media coach, maybe a high-powered PR firm. There was no way Don Epstein had put that sentence together spontaneously.
“I lost my first wife to a killer who was never caught. My second wife died while in a hospital, but I’m not allowed to discuss the circumstances. A woman who worked for me, a woman I was dating, died in an accident. Can you imagine what that’s been like for me?”
“Can you imagine,” Tess asked the television, “what that was like for them?”
“I’m cutting you off,” Crow said. He was unhappy with her, especially since the photo of Dempsey continued to be broadcast with Tess so clearly visible. She thought she should be the one who was upset, given that she had a shiny moon-face to match her planet of a stomach. But Crow had taken Sergeant Lenhardt’s warnings to heart. This was a dangerous man. It was better not to provoke him. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out who had pushed Ethel Zimmerman toward the limelight.
“You and your land of counterpane, playing games,” Crow had said. Tess didn’t know that a reference to Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses could be so bitter and accusatory.
“I think of myself as Boo Radley, watching quietly, at the ready to avenge.”
“You look more like Scout, trapped in her ham costume.”
Crow had never said anything so cruel before, but his words were the least of her worries. For while Crow insisted that Lloyd take the ring back from May, it had been placed in a safe deposit box. There was no talk of a ring for Tess, no discussion of marriage. She moped on her chaise longue, thinking about all the deadbeat dads she had followed over the years, all the divorces. When she was flush, and could pick and choose her jobs, divorce work was always the first thing she jettisoned. She preferred Dumpster diving in corporate espionage cases over divorce cases. The slime from the Dumpster came off in the shower.
“How do you envision our future?” she asked Crow now.
“You know I try not to,” he said. “People are happier if they live in the moment.”
“But you have to plan some things. Look at your job. You book bands months in advance. It’s not quite November and you’re already planning your Mardi Gras lineup.”
“True, but the competition for authentic New Orleans music is fierce that time of year—”
“So you can’t go through life without planning.”
“Excuse me, aren’t you the woman who won’t let anyone buy her a crib, or paint a room, until the baby is actually here?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“But?”
If a newscaster were in the room with them, the moment probably would have been described as a pregnant pause. An ironically pregnant pause.
Crow’s cell phone began buzzing and he glanced at the caller ID. “Lloyd,” he said. “Remember we’re having him, May, and May’s moms over tomorrow, to talk about this whole engagement thing.”
“But he gave the ring back,” Tess said. And you put it in a safe deposit box because you clearly don’t think you have any use for it.
“Getting the ring back was the easy part,” Crow said. “The feelings don’t just slide off.”
“I wonder if Don Epstein always used the same ring? It would have been morbid, I suppose, but what else would you do with them? What’s the etiquette? Maybe the ring is cursed. I’m surprised that Don Epstein hasn’t floated that theory.”
Tess opened her computer, began clicking away again. She looked for photos of Mary Epstein, several of which had run with the Beacon-Light’s recent overview of Epstein’s checkered marital history. “Look, I think it’s the same. Art Deco, some darker stone worked into the setting. Of course that ring was taken at the hospital. Unless Epstein was brazen enough to lie about that? I mean, if he’s killing them, he wouldn’t be above stealing—”
Crow sighed and carried her tray away.
Tess