The Girl in the Green Raincoat

Chapter 4

Of course he married someone else he already knew, Tess,” Dorie Starnes said. “That’s what men do. Most men can’t function alone.”

“Still, it’s eerie, especially now that his second wife has disappeared-”

“Ah, but you’re wrong on that.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’ll explain in all in due time. You don’t rush a master. You’ve made nice progress, with your laptop and your phone, but it’s nothing compared to what I can do with a couple of hours of computer time.”

When had Dorie Starnes, once an ignored and scorned IT grunt at the local newspaper, learned to speak with such emphatic authority-and on all subjects, yet, not just computers? But Tess knew, for she had been a part of Dorie’s transformation. When they met five years ago, Dorie had no sense of her own power. Tess had shown her how much she knew, how much potential she had, giving her the confidence to open her own research firm, now a thriving concern. Despite that, Tess didn’t even get a discount on Dorie’s not inconsiderable hourly rate. All she got were “bumping rights”-priority over Dorie’s other customers, without having to pay rush rates. Normally, that was all Tess needed, given that she could pass the cost on to her clients. But who was her client in this matter, who would reimburse her? The insane Italian greyhound was clearly indigent; Carole Massinger Esptein was missing-only not according to her husband. She would have to pay for Dorie’s services out of her own pocket. Sorry, Fifi. That’s a few dollars less for the college fund.

“Annette Epstein had been married to Don Epstein for almost five years when she died,” Dorie began, reading from her laptop. She would have preferred a PowerPoint presentation, no doubt, but Tess’s sun porch wasn’t set up for that.

“What was the cause?”

“Pneumonia was listed as the official cause, although that was actually a complication that resulted after her hospitalization. She died in an Anne Arundel hospital about eighteen months ago. Her husband sued, charging wrongful death. Hospital settled out of court.”

“For how much?”

Dorie shook her head. A short, top-heavy woman, she always reminded Tess of a robin, with her rounded front and tousled hair. In fact, just looking at her made Tess want to burst into the opening of “My Funny Valentine,” the prologue that so few people knew, in which the gentleman’s blank countenance was compared to a bird’s. But there was nothing vacant about Dorie’s brow. Like Mrs. Blossom, Dorie was another person the world tended to underestimate. Tess was surrounded by such people, she realized. She was one, in fact, a broad-shouldered jockette. Strangers would have trusted her with a lacrosse stick, but not much else.

“I’m not that good,” Dorrie said. “Out-of-court settlements are sealed, and this one included a gag order. If Esptein shared the details, the hospital could reclaim its payment. But let’s play connect the dots. Epstein filed the lawsuit just before the deadline ran out. Settlement was reached in April of this year and he closed on the house on Blythewood in July. For cash-$1.2 million.”

“Couldn’t part of the payment come from equity in his previous home? That house was appraised at four million.”

“He owned the previous house only four years, and the sale price was only slightly above the price he paid. Figure in closing costs, and it was a zero-sum game for him. And according to documents he filed in the lawsuit, in which he was trying to demonstrate actual costs related to his wife’s death, he said he tapped into equity to cover her hospital bills.”

“No insurance?”

Dorie smiled. “No health insurance. He neglected to add her to the plan he carries through his job, and the insurance company was fighting him every step of the way over that bureaucratic oversight. Yet he didn’t overlook the life insurance. The hospital’s lawyers included that in their findings. His lawyer countered by putting in a claim for the wife’s personal property, including a $20,000 engagement ring they say was stolen in the hospital. He eventually got $500,000, so part of that could have gone to pay for the house on Blythewood.”

Tess clicked back to the photo of the happy couple on their wedding day, studied the ring, an Art Deco monstrosity bordered by a darker stone.

“It’s big,” she said. “Does that make it worth twenty thousand?”

“If the hospital didn’t challenge him, he can claim any amount he wanted.”

Tess yearned to study these files herself, to pore over every detail. It would be dull, tedious work, but she might see something that Dorie had missed. Dorie was essentially a human search engine. She worked from known parameters, finding only what she was asked to find.

“You said the pneumonia was a complication subsequent to her admission. Why was she in the hospital?”

“She had been in and out of the hospital for idiopathic fever and nausea for much of the previous year. The last time around, she developed a staph infection and pneumonia.”

“Idiot fever?”

“Idiopathic. No known cause. She was a bit of a medical mystery, as the hospital freely admits. Don Epstein’s lawyer argued that it was the hospital’s fault, because she must have contacted staph while hospitalized, and that made her more vulnerable to pneumonia. There’s a lot of stuff in the filings about her use of antibiotics. He swore she didn’t, the hospital contends she did and concealed it. In the end, they settled.”

The fact of a settlement proved nothing. The hospital might have settled because it was cheaper, in the long run. Don Epstein might have settled because he knew he didn’t have a good case. Whatever grief he felt over his wife, he seemed to have assuaged it quickly, with a new house and a new wife.

But then-widowers were considered desirable, and Carole Massinger had been a friend, close enough to attend his wedding. Tess had known other widowers who found new loves within a year of their wives’ deaths. Dorie was right: Most men sucked at being alone.

Then again, Tess didn’t know a single widower whose new wife had gone into the woods one day and never been seen again. And, thanks to Mrs. Blossom, she knew that Carole Epstein had yet to put in an appearance at the house on Blythe-wood Lane. She herself had called the home number several times, using a cell phone whose number was shielded from caller ID. She either got the machine, with a young woman’s voice-light and silvery as Gatsby’s Daisy-promising to get back to her, or the real-life Don Epstein who said Carole was out of town and, no, he didn’t know when she would be back, and just who was calling, anyway? So far, Tess had called as a member of Carole Epstein’s book club, curious to find out if she had read The Kite Runner yet. (No, she didn’t know if Carole Epstein was even in a book club, but she wagered that Don Epstein didn’t, either.) She had called as a saleswoman, eager to tell Carole about new arrivals at a local boutique; a woman who bought matching raincoats for herself and her Italian greyhound clearly cared about the latest shipment of Marc Jacobs. And she had called as the breeder, checking up on little-well, what did you name the dog, Mr. Epstein?

“She calls it Dempsey,” he had said.

“After the boxer?” she’d asked him.

“After the actor, the one on that doctor show, that all the women think is so cute.”

“And is Dempsey settling in-”

“It’s my wife’s dog. You’ll have to talk to her.”

“Certainly. When will she be in?”

“She’s away on business. I expect her next week.”

He was unwavering on this fact: Carole was away on business. He expected her next week. The thing was, he had been saying this for two weeks now.

Now, Tess asked Dorie: “Did you find out anything else about the first Mrs. Epstein?”

Her smile was triumphant. “Oh, indeed. You would have, too, if the Beacon-Light online archives went back just a little further. You see, Annette wasn’t the first Mrs. Epstein, she was the second. You’re actually looking for the third Mrs. Epstein. And the first Mrs. Epstein was a straight-up homicide victim.”

Now that was quite a rabbit to pull from one’s hat. No wonder Dorie had been preening so.

The photocopied newspaper clippings that Dorie produced reminded Tess just how many times the Beacon-Light had redesigned itself over the past fifteen years, paying more attention to its fonts and columns than it ever did to its local reporting. These clips were evidence of its more sober, serious past, when the front page held up to eight stories. In 1994, the date on the photocopied clip, most of the articles were national and international, as befit a newspaper that took itself oh-so-seriously.

But there was always room on the front page for the deadly carjacking of a couple from Greenspring Valley-code for “rich, white”-when they took an ill-advised shortcut coming home from the theater and found themselves on Greenmount Avenue-again, locals would recognize this as shorthand for “poor, black”-and someone attempted to steal their Mercedes just outside the gates of the cemetery that held John Wilkes Booth. The inclusion of that stray detail baffled Tess, but the reporter seemed to think it was relevant because the couple had attended a performance of Assassins at the Morris Mechanic Theater. Tess was surprised the writer hadn’t tried to make some rhetorical hay out of the Greenmount/Greenspring dichotomy.

Mrs. Epstein had been shot in the head, while Mr. Epstein had been shot in the leg. The assailant was described as a “young man in baggy pants.”

“Sound familiar now?” Dorie asked.

“I would have been in college,” Tess said. “And I hate to admit it, but when I was in college on the Eastern Shore, I wouldn’t have paid attention to a murder back in Baltimore. In fact, I would have considered these people old.” Don and Mary Epstein were thirty-nine at the time.

“No, not this particular case. The scenario. Because it sure sounded familiar to Baltimore cops back then. It was six years after Charles Stuart, up in Boston. Wife killed, guy injured, but so severely that no one could believe he did it to himself. Epstein almost bled to death because the bullet hit the femoral artery. But Epstein runs a chain of check-cashing stores, stores he inherited from his first wife’s dad, as it happens. He probably never studied anatomy.”

“So he was a suspect?”

“Never officially, but you’ll see in the clips how cagey the police are, how careful they are not to inflame things. For one-the race of the suspect isn’t specified. No one was ever charged and the car was found about a mile away, abandoned, and while they took a lot of fingerprints, the only hits they got were on Epstein and his wife.”

One man, three wives. Two dead, one missing. One killed in a homicide, one dead after a mysterious illness lands her in a hospital, which claims that it could have taken better care of her if they had been informed of her excessive use of antibiotics. But why would the second Mrs. Epstein have withheld this information? The media had been almost hysterical over staph infections at the time. Who would fail to disclose her use of antibiotics, knowing she was at risk for MSRA?

Possibly a woman who didn’t know she had been taking antibiotics.

“Who was the primary on the Epstein investigation, the carjacking?”

“Harold Lenhardt. Still a cop, but out in the county now. He left a year or two after this happened.”

A nursery rhyme played in Tess’s head: When I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Only in her version, it became: When I was going to St. Ives, I met a man who lost three wives.

Three makes a trend, as she’d learned in her newspaper days, and if Carole Epstein was dead, it was a hard trend to ignore. Being married to Don Epstein carried a shockingly high mortality rate.

But of the three, the one indisputable homicide was the first Mrs. Epstein. She would start there.

Sergeant Harold Lenhardt sounded friendly when she finally tracked him down by phone. He remained friendly for about thirty seconds, when Tess explained why she had called.

“I don’t talk about that.”

“But-”

“I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

“Lawsuit?” There was no gag order on the homicide, as far as Tess knew, just on the settlement involving the second wife’s death.

“I don’t allow myself to talk about it,” he amended.

“But-”

“Look, I just don’t.”

“But-”

“You’re not the first reporter to call. You won’t be the last.”

“I’m not a reporter. I’m a private investigator. Don Epstein’s first wife was murdered. His second wife died in a hospital. Now his third wife is missing, and he’s pretending she’s not.”

“A third wife? He’s got a third wife now?”

“Did. As I said, he seems remarkably unperturbed by the fact that she left on a business trip and has yet to come home.”

“Damn,” he said. Then: “Excuse me.”

“I’ve heard worse. I’ve said much worse.”

“Me, too. But I try to watch myself in front of ladies.”

Tess didn’t think she had ever been called a lady before. She was torn between being charmed and wanting to demonstrate her own prodigious talent for cursing.

“Couldn’t we just have a conversation?”

“Epstein tried to sue me for slander. It didn’t go anywhere-you can’t sue a detective for doing his job-but he’s had me on notice for years. He sued the paper for libel at the time, too. Got thrown out on summary judgment, but he’s a litigious”-a pause, as he caught himself on the verge of a much harsher noun-“SOB.”

“No one has to know we spoke,” Tess said.

“You mentioned three wives. Do you know about Danielle? ”

“Danielle?”

A heavy sigh, the beginning of another burst or profanity quickly swallowed. “She was his girlfriend, between wives one and two. And yeah, she’s dead, too, which is on my conscience, because I couldn’t nail the”-another pause-“SOB. Now you tell me there’s two more on the ledger because I couldn’t close. Damn. Sorry. Okay, we’ll talk.”