Laura Lippman - By A Spider's Thread

TESS STOPPED OFF AT THE HAMPDEN POST OFFICE BEFORE her late-breakfast meeting with Nancy Porter, sending three certified letters to the Mail Boxes Etc. store that Lana had visited. Each one contained a card with a typed message, one for Lana and two for Natalie, addressed to both Rubin and Peters: I know what you're doing. Call me . She used her second cell-phone number, the one that couldn't be traced to her. But just getting either of the Natalie letters accepted at the address would be a key piece of information.

The morning was bright and breezy, and Nancy Porter had taken one of the two porch tables at the Golden West, a restaurant carved out of a row house on Thirty-sixth Street, aka the Avenue. Long the main business artery in the working-class neighborhood of Hampden, the Avenue had become hip in spite of itself, bringing in the usual mix of cafes, galleries, and shops. Tess's personal favorite was Ma Petite Shoe, an establishment that sold only chocolate and shoes. That pretty much met all her needs, although most of the shoes tended to be on the girly side.

"I'm glad you were okay with meeting here," Nancy said, rising to shake Tess's hand. "I'm on a low-carb diet, and they have the best huevos rancheros, which almost make up for the fact that I can't have the tortillas."

Tess sized up the detective. She appeared a year or two younger than Tess and only a few pounds heavier, although those pounds were packed on a shorter, finer-boned frame. Men probably didn't mind Nancy's weight as much as she did. She had an all-American-girl cuteness, and the wedding band on her left hand would seem to indicate she didn't lack for companionship.

"Well, we're the perfect dining companions, then," Tess said.

"You're doing low carb, too?"

"No, but I love huevos rancheros, and I'll happily eat your tortillas along with mine."

Nancy favored her with a crooked grin. "I hate women like you. You can probably eat anything you want and not worry about it."

"Oh, I could worry about it, but what's the point? I accept my height and shoe size, my eye color and my hair color. I might as well live in the body I was born with, too."

"You can change your hair and your eyes, though."

"Would you?" Tess challenged the blue-eyed blonde.

Nancy laughed, shaking her head. "Gretchen said you were funny. Said you'd talk my ear off about nonessential stuff, too, but she swears you're a good investigator when you aren't being all philosophical."

"You talked to Gretchen?"

The blue eyes in that baby face had a knowing spark. "Oh, yeah, as soon as I hung with you. Woke her up, too. Sorry, but there was no way I was going to take your word for anything. I've gotten burned a time or two, talking to people I shouldn't. For all I knew, you were a reporter. In fact, Gretchen said you used to be."

"I've been a private investigator almost as long as I worked as a reporter." Tess paused, surprised by her own stat. She double-checked her arithmetic. Three years at the Star before it folded, now going on three years as a licensed PI. "And I wasn't much of a reporter. I was so far down the fourth-estate food chain that I was plankton."

"If you say so. Anyway, Gretchen vouched for you, and she's as tough on people as I am. So here I am. What can I tell you?"

"Did you work the Rubin case?"

"There is no Rubin case, as far as the department is concerned. And I hope he's not trying to say there is. Family Crimes checked it very thoroughly. His wife walked out, taking their kids. No sign of foul play. And until he gets a custody order, which he says he doesn't want to do, no laws broken."

"That's pretty much how he tells it. But I was curious about the fact that her credit cards have been dormant since she left. Isn't that suggestive of foul play? How can she be on the run without any money?"

"Didn't he tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

Another knowing smile. Nancy might be younger than Tess, but she had more experience listening to people's lies.

"Mark Rubin kept his wife on a short, tight leash when it came to money. She had credit cards for everything she needed, and an ATM-Visa card, but he didn't let her have more than a hundred dollars in cash. Plus, he made her account for her cash day by day. Withdrawals, too. At the end of the month, he went over everything again, item by item."

"I don't get it. That would make her more likely to use the credit cards, right?"

"Not if she doesn't want him to know where she is. So she figured out a way to get around his system, get enough cash to hit the road."

"How?"

"Oh, she's shrewd. Rubin withdrew his cash for the week every Monday, and he seldom went to the machine again before the week was out. So she figured she had five days before he would notice that the balances were off. All she had to do was lie to him, not show him the slips at night. Starting the Monday before she left, she went to the ATM every day and withdrew five hundred dollars. That gave her twenty-five hundred."

"Decent seed money, but it won't take you far, not with three kids."

"She wasn't done. She bought some high-end electronics on one of the credit cards, stuff that Rubin can't find in his house. Probably sold it for twenty cents on the dollar through a friend, or a fence. We figure she got at least another thousand pulling that scam. And then, the day before she left, she deposited a check for twenty-five hundred dollars, to cover what she had taken. I guess she was worried he could come after her for theft, even though it was a joint account."

"Where'd she get the check?"

"It was a personal check signed by Lana Wishnia."

"She's a manicurist. Where does a manicurist get twenty-five hundred bucks to lend?"

Nancy nodded approvingly. "You are good. Rubin didn't know about her at all, and he thinks Natalie was just her client, but I think different. Lana told detectives the check was to repay some loans Natalie gave her over the years. My hunch is that Lana Wishnia was the fence, but it's legal, right? No law against buying electronics and selling them cheap."

"Why didn't Natalie just write herself a big check on the joint account, wipe out the whole thing?"

Nancy cocked an eyebrow, a trick that Tess had never mastered. "Because the bank had instructions to call Mr. Rubin if Natalie wrote a check for cash for any amount over five hundred dollars."

"Did anyone ask Rubin about his, um, strict household bookkeeping?"

"Absolutely. You see behavior that controlling, and you have to wonder-how else is this guy controlling his wife? Detectives checked 911 logs to see if the Rubin residence was known for calling in domestics. It came up clean, but in that community that's not unusual."

"What do you mean, 'that community'?" Tess's tone was sharp, her Irish roots forgotten. She was suddenly 100 percent Weinstein, and the girl on the other side of the table was just another bigoted shiksa. Never mind that Tess herself had basically asked Rubin when he stopped beating his wife. That was different.

"Look, I was posted to Northwest in the city before I came to the county. I know that the Orthodox like to take care of their problems when possible, whether it's the elderly or drugs or domestic abuse."

"All communities should do as good a job of caring for their own," Tess said, still feeling self-righteous.

"No question. But the downside to keeping problems all in the family is that there's no paper trail when a situation gets out of hand. If you don't get the batterers in the system when they start, then sometimes you can't clamp down on them when their behavior becomes truly life-threatening."

"I don't see Mark Rubin as an abuser."

"Neither do I. But I can be definite on this point because we looked into it. We also checked to see if there had been any accusations of sex abuse, if the school had noticed anything in the oldest kid's behavior. Look, we even had to consider if Mark Rubin was some criminal mastermind who'd murdered his whole family, then played the part of the grieving husband. The fact that he hired you is only further proof that he's in the clear."