The Girl in the Green Raincoat

by Laura Lippman

  “Why hasn’t she come back?” Tess fretted, incapable of keeping her eyes away from the park, much less keeping her mind from this topic.

  “If the dog ran away, she doesn’t have a dog to walk.”

  “But she would have come through, looking for the dog, right? And if the dog ended up running home, as Crow insists, then they would be out walking again, right? Something happened, Whitney. Has there been anything on the news about a missing woman, about some strange incident in North Baltimore?”

  “For the tenth time—no, Tess.”

  “I haven’t asked you ten times.”

  “But you’ve been bugging Crow all day. He told me. Read a book.” Whitney looked through the stack. “Your Aunt Kitty’s as eclectic as ever, I see. The only commonality I divine here is that most of the books are big and fat.”

  “Like me,” Tess said, bitter at her body’s betrayal. It wasn’t just her blood pressure and the baby mound that seemed designed to give her permanent indigestion. Her feet were so swollen she couldn’t wear anything but slippers or an old pair of Uggs, and she fit into those only after Crow sliced open the seams.

  “Here’s a skinny one—The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey.”

  “A comfort read, I’ve read it a dozen times.” And, like its main character, she was determined to solve a mystery from her sickbed. “Look, why can’t you and Crow just go around, canvass the neighborhood, see if anyone knows the dog or the woman?”

  “Tess—”

  “I’m worried,” she said, putting on a pout, although she knew she didn’t do it well. “When I worry, my blood pressure starts to rise.”

  Whitney wasn’t fooled, Tess could tell that much. But she was a loyal person, one inclined to indulge the whims of a confined friend.

  “We’ll do that tomorrow,” Whitney said. “It’s Sunday, people will be home. Maybe we’ll find ‘missing’ posters for the dog, which would ease your mind. But, really, Tess, why can’t you become obsessed with online poker or Scrabulous, like a normal person?”

  “As if you would be friends with a normal person.”

  True to Whitney’s word, Whitney and Crow set off the next afternoon to see if anyone in the neighborhood had lost an Italian greyhound. It was the kind of late fall day that Whitney loved—not crisp and golden. That was predictable, banal. No, this day was overcast, with the scent of fires in the air, the leaves beginning to thin. Winter was coming, and Whitney liked winter, along with its attendant sports, although it was rare now to have a cold snap long enough to freeze the stock pond where she had learned to skate. Last year had been completely snow-free, without a single day to go cross-country skiing. Whitney had a well-trained mind and she knew her anecdotal experiences were proof of nothing, but she believed in climate change and worried that things might be far more dire than anyone realized. How did someone bring a child onto this fragile planet, when it might not even exist in a few decades? She could not decide if Tess was incredibly brave or incredibly stupid.

  Of course, some people do go both ways, as the scarecrow liked to say.

  Crow said: “I thought we would start about three blocks north of here, working up Woodlawn, down Hawthorne, then up Keswick, going to every other house, doing evens up and odds down.”

  “Why every other?”

  “People are going to know if they have a neighbor on the block with a miniature greyhound. We’ll cover more houses this way.”

  “We’d cover more still if we split up.”

  “I considered that,” Crow said. “But you know what, Whitney? We never talk, you and me. It’s never just the two of us.”

  “True.” And that’s the natural order of things, Whitney wanted to say. She liked Crow, approved of him as Tess’s partner. She was always happy to be in the company of both. But Crow wasn’t her friend, he was her friend’s . . . boyfriend? Baby daddy? God, she hoped they would get married, if only to simplify the issue of nomenclature.

  “Besides I have something kind of serious I want to talk to you about.”

  Whitney thought that the primary advantage of not being in a relationship was never hearing those dreaded words. “Let’s start here,” she said. “On this block of Hawthorne.”

  They threaded their way through some of the nicer blocks of Roland Park, very nice blocks indeed. This, Whitney thought, was the model that the suburbs should imitate. The houses were large, but not overly so, and there was a careless, rambling quality to many of them, as if they had grown over the years to accommodate growing families. Most were shingled, a maintenance headache to be sure, but they blended with the landscape instead of fighting it. A Sunday afternoon walk in Roland Park, with glimpses into foyers where boots and shoes were lined up at the foot of gleaming oak stairs, could almost make one yearn for a family. Almost.

  But of those people they found at home, no one knew of a greyhound and its green-coated owner. It was almost five and the light was fading when they began moving south.

  “Executive decision,” Crow said. “Let’s amend Tess’s plan and work toward the business district, where people are more likely to post signs for missing dogs.”

  Whitney hadn’t realized that Crow ever ignored Tess’s orders. She liked him better for it. “Let’s.”

  The houses here were smaller, the places where the workers had lived while building the grander homes of Roland Park. At a modest duplex on Schenley Road, a harried-looking woman opened her door a crack, just enough for Whitney to see a house in chaos, with three small children running around in the small living room, not one of them fully clothed.

  “You’re looking for a greyhound?” she repeated. “A little one? Wait here.”

  Within minutes she was back at the door with a dog that fit Tess’s description—silvery gray, green collar and leash still attached. The coat was clearly custom-made. Doggie couture, how decadent. Whitney’s family might have been wealthy, but they weren’t given to flash.

  “I found this one rooting in my garbage yesterday. I was going to advertise, but you can take her, seeing as how you know who the owner is and all.”

  “We don’t—” Crow began.

  “You take her,” the woman repeated, placing the dog in Crow’s arms, where it writhed and snapped. “My children wanted to keep her, but I know that’s not right, even if she doesn’t have a tag on that fancy collar, or an ID on the little coat. You take her. ’Bye!”

  “No, Mommy!” a girl’s voice shrieked. “Don’t give Scooby away!” Other voices joined in and the scene quickly escalated to a three-ring tantrum, with children throwing their bodies around the living room in heaving despair.

  “Please,” the woman hissed, “take the dog.”

  Whitney thought she heard the woman mutter “And God help you.” The poor thing definitely seemed overwhelmed. But surely that was because of her children?

  “Mission accomplished!” she said to Crow. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

  “Maybe later,” he said, with a backward glance at the house. The children’s piteous screams were still quite audible. “Let’s go settle the matter of Tess’s ’satiable curiosity.”

  “She’s always been a little like the elephant in Kipling,” Whitney conceded. “And now she sort of looks like him.”

  “Well, it’s clear why the dog was abandoned,” Crow said a day later as he cleaned up yet another mess made by the Italian greyhound. Esskay and Miata looked on in disgust.

  “Abandonment is one theory,” Tess said. “But let’s not rule out the possibility that this dog killed her owner and buried the body in the park.”

  In the twenty-four hours since they took possession of the greyhound, it had: relieved itself in the house six times, attempted to steal food from Esskay and Miata, chewed on one of Tess’s Uggs, and all but consumed the paperback of The Daughter of Time. It had also snarled at Crow and tried to bite him when he attempted to separate the dog from the Ugg. They had borrowed a crate from a neighbor, but getting the dog into the crate
was no small feat, and once in, he would soil it, flying in the face of everything Tess thought she knew about dogs.

  “A rescue group might be able to put us in touch with local breeders, and breeders could tell us if they’ve recently placed a dog in the area,” Crow said as he abandoned all pretense of luring the dog into the crate and muscled him in, only to have it nip at his arms and face. “It’s worth a try.”

  “So is exorcism,” Tess said.

  Even as she spoke, her well-trained thumbs had found a local rescue group for Italian greyhounds on her iPhone’s Web connection and a single tap dialed the phone number. The rescue group coordinator gave her a list of East Coast breeders, while warning darkly that this problem child sounded like the work of someone unscrupulous, a puppy mill that wouldn’t be among her contacts. But after four phone calls—and four earnest lectures on the special needs of Italian greyhounds and how different they were from their larger racing cousins—Tess found an upstate New York breeder who had placed a dog in Baltimore several weeks ago.

  “It was a sweet dog,” he insisted, “normal as pie.” He gave Tess the name and number of a local man who lived on Blythewood Road, which lay east of the park and therefore just outside Tess’s search grid. It was a grand street, one of the nicest in all of North Baltimore, the kind of place where dogs might wear designer raincoats. She was pleased at how neatly everything was falling into place. Perhaps she could do her job from bed after all.

  “May I speak to Don Epstein?” Tess asked when a man answered the phone.

  “You got him.”

  “My name is Tess Monaghan and we have what I believe is your dog, a miniature greyhound who was found on Schenley Avenue just two days ago.”

  “Really?”

  His response struck Tess as odd. He seemed surprised, yet suspicious, too. Shouldn’t he know his dog was missing? Shouldn’t he care?

  “Yes, and my boyfriend would be happy to bring it back to you—”

  “No, thanks.”

  Now it was Tess’s turn to be surprised. And suspicious. “But—”

  “Look, I’ll give you a reward for your time and effort. But I don’t want that dog. It’s hell on wheels. I think the breeder lied through his teeth when he unloaded that monster on me.”

  Yet the rescue group coordinator had told her that this particular breeder had a stellar reputation.

  “What about your”—she took a guess—“wife?”

  “What about her?” Brusque, curt.

  “She’s the one I saw walking the dog, down in the park. I assume it’s her dog?”

  “Yeah, well, she won’t miss it, either. I’ll put a check in the mail, but don’t even think of bringing that dog back here. I want nothing to do with it.”

  He hung up. Without, Tess couldn’t help noticing, taking down details that would allow him to make good on the offer of a check. A deadbeat doggie dad. A first for her, but she didn’t see how it would be that different from making the more common kind live up to his responsibilities.

  Chapter 3

  Mr. Epstein?”

  The woman who stood on the front steps of Don Epstein’s home looked ridiculous. She should. She worked hard enough at it. She wore a fuchsia trench coat, unbuttoned to reveal the riotous flower print of her dress, flower prints being an unavoidable signature look for a woman named Mrs. Blossom. Her shoes were hot pink, high-top Reeboks, circa 1985. She had unearthed a cache of these lumpy wonders at a flea market, a virtual Reebok rainbow—pink, orange, red, yellow, white. She cared for her Reeboks as if they were custom-made Italian pumps, massaging them with special cream, buffing the toes, even stuffing them with tissue paper at night. The shoes might not flatter her sturdy calves, but they were kind to her feet. And as the late Mr. Blossom liked to say: “Without your feet, where would you stand on anything?”

  Besides, Don Epstein wouldn’t be the first person to dismiss Felicia Blossom on a glance. Tess Monaghan herself had thought Mrs. Blossom a bit dull when they first met, and now Mrs. Blossom was bucking for an equity share in Keys Investigations. She was sorry, of course, for the reason behind this opportunity. After all, that child was going to be Mrs. Blossom’s almost grandbaby, her consolation prize for living so far from her biological grandchildren, now in Arizona. But she was glad for the chance to show Tess the range and breadth of her talents.

  “Whatever you’re selling, we’re not interested,” her quarry said. He might have slammed the door if Mrs. Blossom had not planted one pink, padded foot on the threshold.

  “I’m from BARCs, the city animal shelter.” She flashed a business card, designed and printed by Crow a mere hour ago. “We want to discuss your fiduciary responsibilities for the dog you abandoned.”

  Tess had argued that fiduciary was too grandiose, perhaps inaccurate, but Mrs. Blossom decided it was just right for a self-important civil servant. In fact, she had approached this whole venture as a Method actor might, thinking long and hard about her “character.” Her alter ego lived in Northeast Baltimore, in one of those small but charming bungalows. She had seven grandchildren. Her husband was on disability; the household needed her paycheck.

  “Excuse me?”

  “As costs rise and public funding falls, we’ve taken a page out of the Department of Social Services playbook and decided to seek renumeration from pet parents who dump their offspring into the system. That’s the only way we can avoid resorting to almost immediate euthanasia.”

  “Kill the mutt,” Epstein said. “I don’t care.”

  Don Epstein was playing out their scene exactly as Tess had envisioned, but it was dismaying nonetheless. Mrs. Blossom produced the jargon-laded “authorization form”—again, Tess’s idea, Crow’s execution—and indicated where he was to sign. He scrawled his name, not even bothering to read the presumptive death warrant.

  “And, of course, we’ll need your wife’s signature,” she said, pointing to a second line.

  “My wife’s?”

  “The people who brought us the dog supplied the breeder’s name, which is how we found you. He says you both signed the contract. Therefore, we need two signatures to proceed.”

  He was the kind of man who flushed when angry—not red, but a deep, eggplant purple. It would be a nice shade on a shoe, come to think of it, but it didn’t flatter a face. Don Epstein, with his dark hair and heavy beard, looked a little like a werewolf. Mr. Blossom, rest his soul, had been as sweet as the surname he had bestowed on her more than fifty years ago.

  “You can force me to pay for this mutt’s care, but I don’t have the authority to waive custody? That’s insane.”

  “All I need is your wife’s signature—”

  “She’s not here.”

  Tess had anticipated this answer, too.

  “Has she left for work? I can always visit her office.”

  “My wife is, um, self-employed.”

  “So she’s—”

  “Gone. On a business trip.”

  “When do you expect her back?”

  “I don’t. That is, I don’t know. She’s a, uh, free spirit. Comes and goes as she pleases.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  He slammed the door. A heavy wooden affair, perhaps it couldn’t help closing with such thudding finality. Mrs. Blossom didn’t know architecture, but the house suggested “Italian” to her, with its sand-colored stucco walls and red tiled roof. It sprawled over an enormous lawn, presumably tended by landscaping crews. Not to stereotype—after all, that’s what people were forever doing to her—but Mr. Epstein looked too blow-dried to be the gardening type. He had a fresh manicure and two gleaming rings. She would jot those details down later. Funny, her memory, which had been growing unreliable, was sharpening since she took this job. Tight, shiny maroon shirt, she added to her mental inventory. A gold bracelet, too, ID style.

  His taste in houses was better than his taste in jewelry. Even in today’s deflated market, this was a million-dol
lar home or better, and a million dollars bought a lot of house in Baltimore city.

  Instead of walking down the flagstone path to where her car sat at the curb, she wandered toward the garage as if confused. Confusion was an older woman’s prerogative, after all. The garage had small diamond-pane windows that allowed her to peer in. A three-car garage, it held only two vehicles—a BMW SUV and a low-slung Porsche that made her back hurt just looking at it. Imagine getting in and out of such a car. Mr. Epstein was only in his fifties, by her estimation, but he was a big man. She tried to memorize the license plates, a much trickier task. Luckily, one was a vanity tag, although she couldn’t sort out its meaning: mlcriss.

  “Mid-life crisis!” Tess hooted. “Interesting thing to announce to the world. But where’s the trophy wife that usually comes with the package?”

  “She’s on a business trip,” Mrs. Blossom said.

  “He says,” Tess scoffed. “What else did you get from your background checks?”

  Mrs. Blossom read from her notes: “He owns a chain of check-cashing businesses, with five franchises in Baltimore alone.”

  “Some of those guys are legit, but I bet he’s one of the scummy ones, preying on welfare recipients, making payday loans at exorbitant interest rates. How long has he been married?”

  “Six months ago, according to the license. First marriage for her—Carole Massinger Epstein—but not for him. License says he was widowed.”

  “Newspaper searches?”

  “Not much, but then—the Beacon-Light database online only goes back to 1995. He pops up in some stories about check-cashing owners worried about electronic benefits, and that’s that.”

  “And Carole?”

  “She’s younger, thirty-two to his fifty-three. But that’s all I’ve been able to find so far.”

  “What about the MVA?”

  “The two cars I saw are registered to him, although at an old address in Anne Arundel County. So he doesn’t update things, timely. But her car is newer, bought only three months ago, so it carries the Blythewood address. A BMW convertible, green, according to the registration.”