The Girl in the Green Raincoat

Chapter 8

Giving away money was not as much fun as it used to be, Whitney Talbot decided, sitting at her desk and frowning at her in-box.

The job had been a blast when she started, four years ago. Who wouldn’t like being Lady Largesse, as she had thought of herself, dispensing cash to worthy people and their causes. Plus, she was the boss, a role to which she was temperamentally suited. Really, it was amazing she had ever managed to work for anyone. At the family foundation, the only person to whom Whitney answered was her mother, and she had bent that poor woman to her will long ago. She was the chief, the gatekeeper to millions, someone who funded solutions-and yet she found herself in a perpetually bad mood as of late.

Part of the problem was a paradox inherent in philanthropy. When the economy tanked, the demands grew, even as the principal shrank. The guilt engendered by the exponentially multiplying “Nos!” squeezed satisfaction from a now scarce crop of yesses. Just today a woman had pitched an interesting idea about trying to help the city’s poorest households use the local farmers markets. The earnest young woman had thought about her plan, deciding it wasn’t enough to provide transportation and ensure that more stands took WIC vouchers and food stamps. Poor women from East and West Baltimore needed to be taught how to prepare the foods they were likely to find, how to let the seasons guide what they put on the table, a big adjustment for rich and poor in today’s instant-gratification world.

“Once they learn to eat things like squash, eggplant, and kale, that will create support for our next phase, mass community gardens in which they raised their own vegetables,” the woman said.

“Kale?” Whitney had echoed, wrinkling her nose.

“It’s your bowels’ best friend.”

“I don’t think that’s the way we want to sell this,” Whitney said. She took stock of her applicant. The woman was wearing a fitted suit, one that must have been custom-tailored to provide such a perfect fit, and quite striking shoes-oxfords with killer heels. Her résumé showed an interesting combination of ivory tower academic work and hands-on restaurant experience. Yet Whitney didn’t like her.

Sandwiches arrived and the woman regarded hers skeptically, pulling apart the bread and even sniffing the mayonnaise.

“I never eat tomatoes this late in October,” she said. “They’re almost certainly shipped from Florida, or Mexico. And are you sure this bread is whole grain? The term is used quite loosely, I’ve found.”

Whitney decided then not to take the project to her board. It was a good idea, but the woman’s attitude was all wrong. For the people she was trying to serve, a slice of tomato, whatever its origins, would be an improvement over lake trout, chicken boxes, and fries. Kale, eggplant-those would be a hard sell. Even whole wheat bread was viewed with distaste and suspicion in Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods. Whitney had spent enough time in local soup kitchens to familiarize herself with the kitchens’ day-to-day needs, and she knew that most diners refused to touch even the heel of a loaf of white bread. This self-important young woman was too rigid to achieve what she wanted. Sorry, kettle, she wanted to say, this pot thinks you have the right plan, but the wrong temperament.

Instead, she rushed through the lunch and told her she would be in touch, then spent the better part of an hour on the phone with an emergency homeless shelter that always seemed to be reeling from crisis to crisis. “You have to develop some kind of long-term financial plan,” Whitney urged, not for the first time, playing ant to the director’s harried grasshopper. “Every year, donations drop off in summer, and every autumn you act surprised. I’m sorry that your hot-water heater broke, but we’re not a checking account. We want to develop programs, not fund capital expenses.”

The director-portrayed in the local media as a saint who cared nothing for herself-cursed Whitney with admirable creativity, managing to invoke her mother, skin tone, and even the contours of her rear end, which did run to flatness. Ah well, one nice thing about cell phones was that they couldn’t be slammed down, merely closed with a click.

Truth was, this was a better day than most. The real problem was that she was bored. And she wasn’t a very good sport about being bored, which might explain why she had attended two colleges, then raced through three jobs before settling in at the foundation, barely in her thirties at the time. She had so loved being Lady Largesse. She didn’t think such things ever got old. But they did. Everything did.

Hmmmm, perhaps that was Don Epstein’s problem as well. Beautiful woman after beautiful woman. Only his wives didn’t get old, come to think of it. Not a one had made it past forty so far.

She had to admit, Tess seemed to be onto something, even if the rest of the world had moved on, unable to sustain interest when the other celery-green shoe failed to drop. As Sherlock Holmes had said to Watson, to lose one wife was tragic, two was careless, and three-well, Holmes hadn’t had a word for that, as Whitney recalled. Of course, she was Watson to Tess’s Holmes, if not as fatuously admiring of her friend. Besides, this Watson had a little more mobility than her Holmes just now, and a few ideas of her own about how to track down someone who might kick up a fuss over the missing Carole Epstein. That was what they needed, right? Someone who was willing to make some noise.

She dialed the foundation’s sole full-time employee, the much put-upon Marjorie.

“Marjorie-” she began in a wheedling tone.

“Don’t give me anything else, I can barely keep up with what I’ve got,” Marjorie snapped. At the foundation for twenty years, she had come to think of its funds as her money, with Whitney a cheeky interloper.

“Just one little thing. I’d like a quick background check on one of the women who visited me today, Carole Epstein.”

“I know your calendar and I watch the news. This isn’t foundation business.”

“It could be. We’ve worked with abused women, have we not?”

Marjorie sighed. “Do you have her Social?”

“No, but I have her last two addresses.” Quickly, she plugged Don Epstein into Switchboard.com, where his information still carried the Gibson Island address. She read that aloud, adding the Blythewood one from memory. “It’s her work history I really want. Try the name Carole Massinger as well. That’s her maiden name.”

The world was full of loners, as Whitney well knew, being one herself. But it was hard for even a loner to get through life without acquiring a friend or two. Proximity was an interesting phenomenon. Put two people close together, over time, and they would form a bond. She and Tess had become lifelong friends through the random lottery of the housing system at Washington College. Carole Epstein must have held a real job at some point. Her sister had died a decade ago; Carole was married to Don Epstein for less than eighteen months. She hadn’t been supporting herself as a handbag designer for all that time.

As it turned out, she had spent at least part of the time selling handbags at Nordstrom, according to Marjorie, quitting only a few months before she married Epstein.

“I’m going to the mall,” Whitney announced. “Foundation business.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” Marjorie groused. “Bring me a smoothie, if you remember. After all, I don’t get to bolting out on a whim.”

Whitney was the kind of person who attracted sales ladies. Funny, as she was actually rather cheap, in the WASP tradition, and would never dream of paying the prices demanded by today’s handbags. Three hundred dollars, five hundred dollars. A thousand dollars! In Baltimore, yet. She got her handbags for free, raiding her mother’s closet and grabbing the least froufrou items. On her last foray, she had taken a Hermès Bolide, and the sharp-eyed saleswomen in Nordstrom circled her hungrily, sure that a woman who carried such a purse was juicy quarry indeed.

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, you know? But she didn’t buy anything, anyway. She seemed really down. And when I asked her how married life was, she said it wasn’t what she expected.”

“How so?”

“I don’t remember specifics. I just thought it was the usual letdown. All my girlfriends go through it.”

It was a good explanation, as good as any for a young bride’s down mood on a rainy spring day, and Denise did seem to have a feel for people. Or women. Unlike Freud, she wasn’t puzzled about what women wanted. They wanted handbags, and maybe shoes to match. If Whitney were a real shopper, Denise probably could have found the right bag for her. She had been getting closer, stylewise, with each guess.

Whitney put the timeline together in her head. Carole Massinger had known Don Epstein for at least fifteen years, and stayed close enough to him to attend his second wedding. But their romantic relationship had been relatively brief-assuming it hadn’t begun as an affair. Who had set their sights on whom? Could it be that Carole Massinger was the first person to glimpse the Bluebeard in Don Epstein, that she had always suspected him in her sister’s death and resolved to avenge it somehow? Could she have married him just to get the goods on him? A wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband, but she can volunteer to do so. Had Carole Massinger rummaged through the rooms of Don Epstein’s house, literally and figuratively, defied his orders and found the equivalent of a locked room, in which all his secrets were revealed? Had her foray into Stony Run Park that day been the modern-day equivalent of a call to Sister Ann, summoning help?

“Thank you for your time today,” she told Denise.

“You’re not going to buy anything, are you?” She sighed. “Frankly, if I had a Hermès like that one, I don’t think I’d buy anything, either. If I had a Hermès like that, I think I’d just walk around naked in my house with it, take it to bed with me.”

Whitney wondered if purse fetishism was yet another new sexual perversion gaining ground through the power of the Internet.

“I do have a friend who’s going to need a diaper bag,” she said. “Problem is, she’s not the diaper bag sort. In fact, she needs kind of a combination diaper bag/briefcase, with pockets for two cell phones, her gun, and maybe a set of lock picks.”

“I have just the thing,” Denise said, not the least bit fazed by the mention of a gun. She truly was a pro.