The Girl in the Green Raincoat

Chapter 6

How can I miss you if you won’t go away, Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks once asked. Similarly, Tess was finding out that it’s hard to be a missing person if no one will admit to missing you. Yet, try as she might, she couldn’t find anyone-a friend, a relative, a co-worker-who could make a credible complaint about the disappearance of Carole Epstein. There appeared to be no one in her life except Don Epstein. Oh, Tess had enough drag to get the cops to make a duty call, to question Epstein without revealing the source of the inquiry. But Epstein produced e-mails from his wife and even text messages. Easily faked, as far as Tess was concerned-if he had done away with Carole Epstein, he would have her phone and could send the text messages himself. And many spouses had access to each other’s e-mail.

But unless someone close to Carole insisted she had been the victim of foul play, there was little else that police could do. She was on a business trip. Her husband said she was a handbag designer, just getting started, and she was visiting small stores that she hoped would carry her designs. Dempsey appeared to be the only one to notice her absence-how else to explain his strange behavior? Otherwise, no one cared.

“It’s all very existential,” Whitney agreed. “If a wife falls down in the forest, does she make a sound? I wonder how many days I could be gone without anyone noticing.”

“You live with your parents.”

“On their property, not in their house,” Whitney said. “I could fall in the bathtub and be there for days. Days! Squirrels would come down the fireplace and start nibbling at my body. Did you tell the police about Mr. Epstein’s incredibly bad luck with the fair sex?”

“Yes, and they didn’t write me off as a complete kook. That’s why they were willing to talk to him at all. But that’s as far as they’ll go right now. There’s no public pressure, no media attention whatsoever.”

“Why would someone marry her sister’s older boyfriend? That’s kind of icky.”

Tess had a theory. But then, at this point there was little about the Epsteins that she had not thought through. The girl in the green raincoat filled her imagination. In a sense, she now spent more time in the company of Carole Epstein than with anyone else. Unless one counted Dempsey.

“It does happen-a loved one is lost, and a new relationship forms between the two people who grieved over that person. After all, it’s been almost fifteen years ago Danielle Messinger died, and Carole was only twenty at the time. He even had another wife in between, and Carole apparently socialized with them as a couple. As a friend, she might have offered him moral support after Annette’s death, and that turned to love.”

“Romantic,” Whitney said. “Perfectly innocuous. Do you happen to believe it?”

“I might-if it weren’t for this dog.”

Whitney stretched out on the floor, and Dempsey, who had taken to sleeping at Tess’s feet, jumped down and inspected her, then began to growl. Tess remembered Lenhardt’s crash course and asserted herself as the alpha dog. “No, Dempsey.” The dog shot her an irritated look, but returned to his spot on the bed. He was getting better, but the other dogs still loathed him and had to spend their days locked in the bedroom.

“There’s one thing that doesn’t fit,” Whitney said. “This friendless, isolated woman in your scenario? You said she was always on her cell phone when she walked her dog. Who, pray tell, was she talking to?”

Tess conjured up the image of what she had seen-Carole Epstein in her green raincoat, hand cupped to her ear, always in conversation. Tess had judged her for that, just a little. That initial judgment seemed unfair now, as initial judgments often tend to be.

“Maybe her husband had her on a figurative leash, and required that she check in,” she said.

“She had a lover,” Whitney said. “A lover or a confidante. If Don Epstein is the monster you think he is, any kind of confidante would have unnerved him. The mere fact of a secret relationship, even a nonsexual one, would have bothered him.”

“Especially if she had information that could connect him to a homicide. I think she knew something, Whitney, and that’s why she had to disappear.”

Whitney paged through Tess’s file. Tess always kept her work in an orderly fashion, but this file, entered into the black-and-white Roaring Springs composition books that Tess had always favored, was a masterpiece of color-coding and charting. She had a lot of time on her hands, after all.

“Nice car,” Whitney said, stopping on the page with all the MVA data on the Epsteins. “And you know what? I think LoJack was being offered as a sweetener on that model for a while. I got a flyer from the dealer. As if I would spend that kind of money on a car.”

“So?”

“God, you’re slow. Is the baby keeping oxygen from getting to your brain? If Carole’s driving to boutiques up and down the eastern seaboard, as her husband insists, then LoJack will confirm his story. But if she’s disappeared, then she’s not driving her car, and it’s parked somewhere. Get Martin Tull, your cop friend, to engage the device.”

It wasn’t quite as easy as Whitney made it sound, but Detective Tull eventually found the dealership and convinced it to track the car. Carole Epstein’s green BMW was discovered in the parking garage at Baltimore Penn Station. The electronic ticket in the well between the front seats established that it had been there since the evening of the day that Tess saw her last. Her keys had been left in the ignition of the unlocked car, dangling from a Gucci key chain that should have been temptation enough unto itself. Impossible to say why the keys hadn’t been taken, but it was easy to establish why the car hadn’t been-the alternator was on the fritz.

Police returned to the home of Don Epstein that night, local television crews not far behind. In an impromptu press conference on his lawn, a red-eyed Epstein announced: “She left me. I just learned today that she’s stolen thousands of dollars from me. The e-mails, the texts-I have to assume they were all cover, so she could continue cleaning out our joint accounts. She left me and covered her tracks, just to get a head start on bleeding me dry.”

Tess, watching from her chaise longue, threw her hands up in frustration. Crow got out the blood-pressure cuff.

“He’s telling the truth about the accounts,” Martin Tull said. “She did it electronically, transferring money to an Internet-based bank, then moving that money to an account we can’t find, probably offshore.”

“It was a joint account,” Tess said. “He could have done it.”

“If he did, he didn’t use his home computer. The ISP doesn’t match.”

“Doesn’t match his home computer, but how do you know he doesn’t have a secret laptop? He runs a check-cashing business, Martin. He probably knows a few tricks about how to move money around.”

Tull was a murder police, one of the best. But he also was a friend, and Tess was beginning to realize he was here in that role, indulging the hysterical pregnant woman.

“She could have taken light rail to BWI,” he said. “She’s probably got a whole second identity, which is why her credit cards and ATM have been dormant.”

“And he could have a conspirator,” she insisted. “Based on history, he already has his next wife lined up. Cherchez la femme, Martin. He gets rid of them when he tires of them, probably to avoid alimony. If Carole Epstein managed to siphon all that money out of their joint accounts, then she’s the first one to walk away with a nickel. The rest all walked away dead, if you will. And what about the car at Penn Station, the keys? He could have left it there, gone home on the number sixty-one bus.”

“Look, we’re not saying he’s in the clear,” Tull said. “Not at all. And we would like Mrs. Epstein to show up, explain a few things. Then again, she has a very plausible reason not to come forward, right? If the guy’s right, she’s on an island somewhere.”

It would be a good revenge plot of sorts, Tess thought, if Carole Epstein believed that Don had killed her sister yet couldn’t prove it. But would she settle for money? Would that begin to approximate justice? No, Tess believed this woman had bigger fish to fry.

“She left her dog behind,” Tess said. “Knowing Don Epstein as she does, she never would have left Dempsey in his care.”

“She let go of her dog’s leash, assuming it would find a good home when she made a run for it,” Tull said. “And it has.”

Dempsey looked up, as if aware that he was the topic of conversation, then went back to gnawing on his own haunch. The dog had an amazing repertoire of neurotic tics. He chewed his own legs, worried his lower lip, scratched himself raw in places.

“The vet says he has emotional issues,” Tess said. “Sort of like those adolescent girls that cut themselves.”

“Yeah,” Tull said, “who wouldn’t take that dog along on her new life?”

He had a point.

“Look,” he added. “I agree this all stinks. And we’ve put out the word that we’d like to hear from her-and not by e-mail or text message. But what else can we do? There’s no evidence of foul play on his part.”

“Does he have an alibi for the day she disappeared?”

“He says he was stuck in traffic on the Beltway. But there was a lot of publicity about an overturned tractor-trailer on the outer loop that afternoon, so he could be making it up. Thing is, hard as it is for him to prove he was there, we can’t disprove it.”

“He never uses the same method twice,” Tess said. “A carjacking, a fall, a mysterious infection that could have been avoided if the hospital knew the patient was taking antibiotics. He’s got a good imagination.”

“Yeah, well,” Tull said. “He’s not the only one.”

Don Epstein was on television but just a local show. Even the cable networks that seemed devoted to covering missing white women 24/7 didn’t care about Epstein. It was the runaway bride story, played out before it even started: missing/faker/skank. At least this one reporter, one of the few enterprising investigative reporters on local television, was skeptical of him. So much bad luck, for one man. Did he feel cursed? Had he considered forswearing the company of women, given how badly it seemed to end for him, every time? Was he sure that his wife hadn’t been the victim of foul play, that the computer transfers of money had been done by someone else with access to her laptop?

Yet Don Epstein preened, happy in the spotlight, indifferent to the subtext. Yes, he had been unlucky in love, he told the reporter. He did wonder if he was cursed, if he should take himself out of the dating pool. Even as he was speaking, a woman e-mailed the studio and the reporter read her comment on air: “I’d take a chance on you, Don. Call me!”

Tess could not fathom this. Why would anyone want Don Epstein under any circumstances? What did he have to offer any woman? Money, yes-although he had less than he once had, if one believed that Carole Epstein had absconded with almost half his savings. Still, it was a substantial fortune. He wasn’t bad-looking, if one’s taste ran to the overly virile and hirsute. Still, there was the fact of three wives, one girlfriend, all dead. Well, three dead and one missing. Were women really this desperate?

She had recently read an article that applied gaming theory to the eternal topic of why there were so many great single women. Again, as all such articles did, it concluded that women should just settle. Yet she couldn’t recall anything that advised men to settle. They were the ones encouraged to hold out for everything, and to trade up to a new, flashier model.

“I know our age difference doesn’t matter to you now,” she said to Crow that evening, “but don’t you think you’ll find it a drag to be married to a, say, fifty-year-old when you’re forty-four?”

“I am going to take the television away,” Crow said. “Between Oprah and Judge Judy, you are just loaded for bear by the time I come home.”

“I wonder if they’re still checking Carole Epstein’s credit cards.”

“I’m sure they are.” It was becoming Crow’s weary refrain.

“And her debit card, too. What other marks do we leave in this world? How else can we be traced?”

“Try to settle down, Tess.”

But “settle down” reminded her of settling, period, and she was furious again. Dissatisfied by conversation with Crow, she decided to talk to her daughter, who seemed to be kicking her feet rhythmically, as antsy about confinement as Dempsey.

Don’t ever settle, Fifi. Don’t get married just because it’s still marketed as the ultimate achievement for women.

On the other hand, learn to value men for something other than their paychecks. Your father was a bookstore clerk and an underemployed musician when we started dating. Now he’s a partner in a restaurant/bar with good music every weekend. He still doesn’t make much money, though. I support us. Or did, before you put the kibosh on everything. Do you realize how much your college fund will miss these extra weeks of work I’ve had to sacrifice? Do you know about compound interest yet? Look, in today’s economy, you need to start putting stuff away in the womb.

Yet the economy was good for private detectives. More small businesses suspected theft among their employees. Insurance fraud was rampant. Even with Mrs. Blossom as a partner, she was doing fine.

Don Epstein-Don Epstein, on the other hand, owned check-cashing stores. Check-cashing stores that had belonged to his first wife’s father, but became his exclusively when she died. She wondered if these stores thrived in the current economy, or if they had a lot of defaults. She wondered if Carole Epstein had life insurance. She wondered how long someone had to go missing before you could collect on life insurance. She wondered-

But perhaps she had worn herself out, or her future daughter had decided enough was enough and Mom needed to go down for a nap. She fell asleep at the disgracefully early hour of 9:00 p.m. Snapshot of your future, as Whitney might have said. Except for the ten hours of sleep that followed.