The Girl in the Green Raincoat

by Laura Lippman

  She called out to Ethel “not the Merm” Zimmerman, her mind fixated on the ring she had never seen. It was probably ornate, not to her taste. Or small, better suited to someone petite. That was it, right? The ring didn’t suit her, but she still suited the man. Right? Right?

  Chapter 10

  Perhaps it was inevitable that Tess Monaghan’s favorite girlhood book was Harriet the Spy. As a grown-up Harriet, she had not been able to avail herself of many of Harriet’s techniques—there were few dumbwaiters in Baltimore into which she could crawl, and a utility belt simply called too much attention to the wearer—but it was Harriet who taught her to love black-and-white composition books. And she had liked Harriet’s practice of trying to figure out what people looked like based on simply hearing their voices. After speaking to Ethel Zimmerman on the phone, she decided the wispy-voiced lady would be quite frail, perhaps dependent on a walker, and given to an old-fashioned sense of propriety in dress. A hat, even gloves.

  Ah, well—not even Harriet batted 1.000 in this particular game. Ethel Zimmerman, a very peppy seventy-something, all but bounded into Tess’s sickroom, arrayed in a bright blue tracksuit and white Pumas. She was wearing a hat of sorts—a powder-blue visor stamped with the name of an Atlantic City casino.

  “Do you gamble?” Tess asked this vision in peacock blue, stalling while she tried to find her mental footing. She had prepared for a meeting with someone who would need to be coddled. This woman looked like she could arm wrestle Tess and win, even back in her pre-pregnancy days.

  “Do I . . . ?” She touched the brim of her visor. “Oh, no. Yard sale. Fifty cents. They wanted a dollar.” She plucked the sleeve of her tracksuit. “This still had the tags on it. Fifty-five dollars, if you can believe it. I got it for seven on eBay.”

  “And the shoes?”

  “Shoes are tough,” Mrs. Zimmerman admitted in her thin whisper. “I go to DSW, places like that. I won’t wear used shoes. Or underwear. I’m fussy that way.”

  She said this with pride, as if this principle made her unusual, even finicky.

  “Is there something wrong?” Mrs. Zimmerman asked.

  “Oh, no, it’s just that—you’re so much . . . bouncier than I expected. On the phone you sounded . . .” There was simply no euphemism for old and frail, so Tess let the sentence go.

  “Cancer of the larynx,” she said with amazing cheer. “My husband left while I was still in the hospital. Best thing that ever happened to me, that partial laryngectomy, because otherwise I might not have had a Ralphectomy, and that’s what needed cut out of my life.”

  Wow, Tess thought. And people think oversharing is a phenomenon limited to the young.

  “So you knew Carole,” Ethel said, drawing up a chair. “And she asked you to get in touch with me?”

  “Sort of,” Tess said. “It’s complicated. First—if you don’t mind—could you tell me how well you knew her, if you kept in touch with her through the years?”

  “I’ve known her all her life. Her sister, too. Our neighborhood may not be a fancy one, but it was stable. Her older sister was good friends with my sons. Carole was younger, one of those change-of-life babies, we called them then, back when people didn’t wait, and start trying to have babies at forty.” She gave Tess’s belly a significant look.

  “I’m thirty-five,” Tess said faintly, wondering if she should add: And it was an accident! My boyfriend has super sperm! It defeated a diaphragm and spermicide. This is a zygote of destiny.

  “Carole’s sister, she was like a daughter to me, and my sons felt the same way about the Massingers. They wore a path between the two houses, coming and going. Carole was so much younger, she was more like a grandchild. We all doted on her, but it only made her sweeter. In fact, she was the best behaved of the lot. People talk about spoiling children as if they are plants that get overwatered and rot at the root. It’s actually hard to pay too much attention to a child. A lot of what people call spoiling is ignoring, substituting things for time. These Game Boys, these iPods, all these computers and gadgets—they let the parents off the hook, don’t they? There’s a difference between buying a child everything under the sun and spending time with them. I stayed home with my boys, and you couldn’t ask for nicer kids.”

  Tess couldn’t help inferring a judgment. “My husband and I have the kind of jobs that will allow us to share child care.”

  Husband? Had she called Crow her husband just to avoid more unsolicited advice from Mrs. Zimmerman? She felt a little stab of what she decided to call heartburn.

  Mrs. Zimmerman snorted. “Sure, if you say so. Good luck with that.”

  “My mother worked,” Tess said. “At the National Security Agency.”

  At least Ethel Zimmerman knew better than to criticize a Baltimore girl’s mother. “So did Glenda Massinger. Out of necessity—they always had trouble making ends meet, the Massingers. That’s another reason I was so close to the girls. They would come to my house after school. First Danielle, then Carole, ten years later. Oh, Glenda and Duane worked hard, for all it got them. They died in a car accident.”

  “Yes, I had heard that.”

  “And Danielle was left alone with her sister, barely thirteen at the time. She put her own dreams on hold, got a decent job, made sure that Carole wanted for little. Put her social life on hold, too, until Carole was in high school. That’s when Don Epstein first started coming around.”

  “Wasn’t he married then?”

  Mrs. Zimmerman nodded, lips pursed.

  “I tried not to judge,” she said. Tess found that hard to believe. “He was her boss, she said they had to work overtime some nights, and I turned a blind eye. The thing is, Danielle was younger and older than her years. Responsible about money. Stupid about men.”

  “You didn’t like Don Epstein?”

  Ethel Zimmerman considered this. “No, no—I can’t say that. He was courteous, did nice things for Danielle, treated her well. Oh, the presents he started to give her once they started dating officially. Jewelry, fancy clothes. She was dazzled. Too dazzled. I was worried he was toying with her, that he would move on to somebody else more . . . like him.”

  “More like him?”

  “Rich, well-to-do. They tend to stick to their own, rich people.” Mrs. Zimmerman studied Tess. “Your husband”—she managed to make it sound as if she didn’t believe there was one, but perhaps, Tess thought, that was her own hormone-fueled paranoia—“does he have a similar background to yours?”

  Tess had never even considered this “We’re both only children . . .” But that was the only overlap she could see. Crow’s parents had ancestors, the kind of families who had arrived in the colonies from England—not on the Mayflower, but not far behind. His father was an academic, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia, his mother a sculptor. He had grown up in a bookish, indulgent household, encouraged to speak his mind and follow his bliss.

  Her parents, smart as they were, didn’t even have college diplomas, and “bliss” was not part of their vocabulary.

  “A man can’t be happy if he marries below his station,” Mrs. Zimmerman warned darkly, as if she could read Tess’s mind. “Ralph and I may not have gone the distance, but we made a good run at it. But if you start off unequal, it never balances out. That’s what I told Danielle, all those years ago. He was rich, he lived high. She’d never be a good fit.”

  Tess wondered if Danielle had sought Mrs. Zimmerman’s counsel on love and marriage. It probably didn’t matter. Tess hadn’t, and yet here she was, getting her ear chewed off a mere ten minutes after meeting the woman.

  “But Don Epstein’s money came mainly from his first wife,” Tess said. “The check-cashing businesses belonged to her late father, although Epstein built them up.”

  “And you see how that ended.”

  Tess was beginning to see why Ralph might have bolted.

  “There were conflicting reports, around the time of Danielle’s death, that she and Don were engaged. He
said no, but her sister seemed to believe he had proposed.”

  “I think Danielle might have told Carole that to save face, given how long they had been dating by then.”

  “Did you find her death suspicious?”

  “Suspicious? Goodness, no. Sad, yes, but not suspicious. Some families are just a magnet for tragedy. I should have noticed that her car hadn’t moved for days, but it was Easter time and I was running around.”

  “Were you surprised when Carole married him?”

  “Actually I didn’t know anything about it until I turned on the six o’clock news and found out she had left him, taking most of his money. That was quite the shock.”

  “You weren’t in touch then? When did you last speak?”

  Mrs. Zimmerman’s face clouded over. “We had a little falling out, I’m sorry to say. You see, she didn’t finish school, dropped out a month shy of graduation. True, she had lost Danielle the year before and it was a vicious shock. But I told her Danielle would have wanted her to finish, that she had made sacrifices so Carole would have a college degree.”

  “She stopped speaking to you because you said she should stay in college?” Lifelong quarrels had been based on smaller things, as Tess knew, but it still seemed sad to her. Mrs. Zimmerman might be a know-it-all busybody, but Carole Massinger could have used a buttinsky in her life. That seemed to be another part of Don Epstein’s pattern: He preferred women who were alone in the world. She had yet to find anything about his second wife, Annette, and Mary had only her father, who died soon after her marriage.

  “Carole could be quite . . . willful. She said she needed to start over, with new memories. She sold the house—got a nice sum for it, too, although she didn’t sell anywhere near the height of the market. She sold everything in it. She said the memories were choking her. She was going to use the capital to start a gift-basket business. She did make a good muffin, I have to say. But I’m not sure that’s enough to make it in the gift-basket business. Carole was a little impractical.”

  “She was choking on memories, yet she took up with her sister’s ex-boyfriend.”

  “Not straight off,” Mrs. Zimmerman pointed out. “I think she fell into the habit of leaning on Don. They went to a grief counseling group together—that’s where Carole met Annette, and the three of them began palling around. She didn’t have anyone else. And he, unlike me, didn’t try to tell Carole not to do what she had her heart set on doing.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Just an assumption. As I said, we quarreled. It’s not so odd, that she would want to marry him, or he would want to marry her. She looks like Danielle. Prettier actually, because she has a real spunky quality. Danielle never got in the habit of standing up for herself.”

  “So she marries this man whose first wife gets murdered, whose second wife dies in a hospital, whose girlfriend has a freak fall—”

  “You shouldn’t have such morbid thoughts,” Mrs. Zimmerman said. “Your baby will be born warped.”

  It was hard, just then, not to order the woman out of the house. She was like some creepy old soothsayer, the very evil eye that Tess had been trying to ward off, and she had actually invited Mrs. Zimmerman into her home. But Tess stopped and thought before she spoke, a habit that she had spent a long time cultivating.

  “Yet you believe that Carole took his money and ran away, just because he says so?”

  Mrs. Zimmerman hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to believe that. But computers don’t lie, do they?”

  “They could be manipulated—especially by someone who owns a chain of check-cashing stores. What do you think, Mrs. Zimmerman, in your gut? Would the girl you knew have done this?”

  Mrs. Zimmerman thought. Thinking was not particularly kind to her face, grooved with age as it was. Cigarettes had not been kind to her. One could argue that life hadn’t been that kind to her, either. Her husband had left, she had been through surgery and probably chemo and speech therapy. The Massingers weren’t the only tragedy magnet on their block in Severna Park.

  “Carole never ran away from a fight in her life,” she said at last. “Like I said, she had spunk. Danielle was the weak one, rest her soul. She never stood up to anyone.”

  “And if she came to believe that Don hurt her sister?”

  “She would do whatever it took to bring him to justice.”

  “You should tell the police that. And the newspaper.”

  “The Beacon-Light? Why would they care what some old lady from Severna Park had to say?”

  “I think they’d like to talk to anyone who knew Carole, who can sketch a more human portrait of her. After all, her side of the story has never been told.”

  Tess didn’t wait for Mrs. Zimmerman to think about this, but quickly dialed the city editor at the Beacon-Light, her sole contact at the newspaper. The “Blight” had been roiled by economic pressures, reducing its staff by more than a third. But Kevin Feeney was a solid journalist, and Tess was delivering him an exclusive, an intimate of Carole Massinger’s willing to speak at length. There would be no simple “She was a quiet child” homilies from Mrs. Zimmerman. She would talk. And talk and talk and talk. Primed like a pump, she spoke to a reporter for so long that it was almost dusk by the time she hung up. The dog walkers were beginning to arrive in the park.

  “This is how Carole first came to my attention,” Tess said. “She and her dog wore matching coats.”

  “She always did like nice things. When she was thirteen—thirteen, mind you—she got it in her head that she wanted one of those bubble skirts that were so popular. And not just any bubble skirt, but a designer one like Madonna wore. Dulcie and Gabba-Gabba-Hay, I think.” It took Tess a moment to translate this to Dolce & Gabbana. “It cost something like four hundred dollars and she wanted to go into her savings account. Her parents talked her out of that, thank goodness. So much money for such an ugly thing.”

  “Yet now bubble skirts are back,” Tess said.

  “And Madonna never went away. It just goes to show,” Mrs. Zimmerman said. She stood, did a few quick deep knee-bends to loosen her joints, stiff after so many hours of sitting. Then she was off, leaving Tess to wonder: What did it go to show? The cyclical nature of fashion, the resilience of a pop star, or the eternal verity of young girls yearning for things they would regret?

  Chapter 11

  Ethel Zimmerman’s in-depth interview with the Beacon-Light brought results beyond Tess’s wildest dreams. The story was now hot enough for the national crowd. Ethel Zimmerman became the get of gets, holding out for not merely for the Today show, but Matt Lauer himself. Today even sent a crew to Tess’s home to get what they called B-roll of Dempsey, but Dempsey attempted to attack the young woman producer, and it was determined that a still photograph of the dog, held firmly in Tess’s arms, would suffice.

  The intensity of the media coverage turned the case into a bona fide red ball—stepped-up efforts to determine if Carole’s phone could be traced via the GPS device implanted in all cell phones, a sizable award offered by a local bank. From her sun porch, Tess watched men and cadaver dogs search the park.

  The one tangible result? Don Epstein, according to the Beacon-Light, began receiving literal sacks of mail, most of it from supportive women. Oh, there were some accusatory letters as well, and offers to pray for his mortal soul, but the bulk of the mail was from women angling to be wife number four.

  “Why do you think that it is?” an earnest reporter asked Epstein, arranging her features in that ubiquitous serious-yet-furrowless expression. Tess believed it must be taught in the nation’s broadcasting schools: Concerned Face 101.

  “Most women see that I’m the wounded party here. My wife left me. She took my money. They can search my house and the woods behind my house and all of Baltimore, and they’re never going to find her.”

  “But you must admit, Mr. Epstein—”

  “Call me Don.” Was he actually flirting?

  “You must admit th
at this all seems rather, well, ironic.” If Tess Monaghan weren’t seven months pregnant, she would have downed a shot, in honor of a drinking game she and Whitney had devised years ago: Whenever anyone misused the word “ironic,” slam back tequila. On a good night it was possible to get drunk fifteen minutes into the six o’clock news.

  “Your first two wives are dead. You had a girlfriend, between those two wives, and she died in a fall. That girlfriend happened to be the older sister of your third wife. Can you blame people for being suspicious?”

  “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.