Killer Look (10 page)

Hal Savage took a swing at Mike—an awkward older man's jab—missing his jaw by inches and landing on the bookshelf next to my head. Two of the WolfWear crystal trophies crashed to the floor at Mike's feet, shattering into thousands of tiny
pieces.

“What was wrong with that?” Mike asked. “The guy's Oriental.”

“Rugs are Oriental,” I said. “People are Asian. And the Savitsky stuff is uncalled-for. You're so damn rude is what's wrong with that.”

Political correctness was not Mike Chapman's strong suit. I had cleaned up after several bloody noses and bandaged many scrapes over the years, all attacks provoked by Mike's unfiltered mouth.

“When I was growing up there were only three detectives I idolized,” Mike said. “My old man, Philip Marlowe, and Charlie Chan. So don't get down on me about being PC, okay? I learned a lot from that Ch—”

“Do not say Chinaman, okay? Just hold your tongue, Detective.”

The assistant had ushered us back down the hallway to Reed Savage's office. He asked us to wait so that he could explain the situation to us.

Reed took only a minute to get to us, closing the door behind
him and taking his place behind his desk, inviting us to sit across from him.

“You want to hit Replay, Detective Chapman?” Reed said. “You want to separate me out from my uncle?”

“Your call.”

“My name is Reed. Reed Savage. Legally changed to that after my mother died and my father took me to live with him.”

“And his third wife.”

“My stepmother.”

“Is she still alive?” I asked.

“Yes, she lives outside of London—half an hour from my place in town,” he said. “Very reclusive, but my father took good care of her when they split.”

“Does she have any involvement in the business?”

“Nothing to do with it. Never did.”

“Back to you,” Mike said.

“My mother was Wolf's first wife. Short-lived marriage, and as you heard today, she died young,” Reed said. “I'm forty-one years old. Divorced, no kids. I'm the VP for the international branch of WolfWear. I live in London and keep an apartment here, in Tribeca. What else do you need to know?”

“I want background about your father,” Mike said. “More reliable than what we got at the morgue, and we can come back to that. But I want to start with what's going on in that room down the hall right now. Who's the guy threatening to take something to the media, and what's he taking?”

Reed's secretary opened the door, walked in, and handed several telephone messages to him. “I told Ms. Wintour you'd get right back to her,” she said, referring to the all-powerful queen of the fashion world. “She has some ideas for the show next week, and some issues to resolve about seating.”

“Hold everything till we're done in here. I can't be interrupted.”

The young woman pivoted on her stilettos, looking down to her nose to see what Mike might have brought to the table that was so important, and left the room.

“You mind if I call you Reed?” Mike asked. “Too many Savages here to deal with.”

“Of course. That's how we all refer to each other. First names.”

“Who's the screamer? The Asian gent.”

Reed looked at the slips of paper rather than at either of us.

“We're not the press, Reed. If there's something you'd like us to hold in confidence,” I said, “we're good at that.”

“You don't seem to believe my father killed himself.”

“Give us a reason. How sick was he?”

“Heartsick, Ms. Cooper.”

“What? Another romance?”

“No, no, no,” Reed said, cracking a smile. “It's the business that was my father's real baby. He was sick to death about what's been going on with the company. This can be off the record, right?”

“You ready to confess to committing a crime?” Mike asked. “Otherwise, I have no reason to go public with what you've got to say.”

Reed Savage loosened his tie and leaned back. “The man you're asking about is George Kwan. You've probably heard of him.”

I looked at Mike and we both shook our heads in the negative.

“No? Kwan Enterprises? George's father was one of the first Chinese billionaires, entirely self-made.”

“How did he make his money?” I asked, wondering if it was in some illegal market, like the opium trade that had once flourished in the Far East.

“George Senior runs the business. He's quite brilliant, actually,” Reed said. “He customized and designed supply-chain solutions for the world's most successful retailers.”

“You're losing me,” Mike said. “Break it down.”

“Okay, detective. Kwan Enterprises is an investment holding company that's headquartered in Hong Kong. It started as a trading business a century ago, when porcelain and jade and silk—oh, yeah, and fireworks, another great gift to us—were the products being exported from that part of the world to the US and Europe.”

“That worked until the sixties,” I said, “when the UN enforced a trade embargo on China.”

“Right. A lot of Asian companies went under, but the Kwan family managed to roll with the changing times. They shifted their interest to the apparel industry more than twenty years ago, when American manufacturers began to outsource the production of their goods to India and China, because of the cheap labor.”

“Marking the decline of the Garment District,” I said.

“Yeah, and my father—Wolf—really hated that. He tried to resist it for a very long time, but the need to compete made it inevitable.”

“Enter the Kwans,” Mike said.

“Exactly. They figured out that there was big money in overseeing the whole broad picture,” Reed said. “Think of the biggest name in fashion that you can, and assume you've got a CEO who's been the magician, mostly interested in creating the look that will seduce his audience.”

I guessed that was supposed to be Wolf Savage.

“You don't want to spend time or resources scouring the world for cheap labor, people you can't communicate with and can't watch every day in their workplace. Well, the Kwan model is to find the factories throughout Asia for the big designers and take away all the headache-inducing micromanagement. They hire the
workers, oversee the quality control and compliance issues, procure the raw materials, then contract with the vendor base to produce and deliver the finished products. The whole point of them is to keep the lowest price possible for the manufacture of each product. That's what a trading group does. They've sort of taken over the whole fashion industry.”

“But the street—I mean, literally Seventh Avenue and those little shops on all the side streets,” Mike said, “still looks pretty much the same, even though we hear it's a struggle to keep the work, keep the unique nature of this place. What goes on around here?”

“One of the reasons this district works,” Reed said, “is that people in our business still use it all the time. We may produce garments overseas—no more Made in America tags on the clothes, no more insistence by our First Ladies that they only wear USA goods—but some things are just essential to this trade.”

“Like what?” Mike asked.

“Suppose I need a prototype for a high-end garment we've got in production,” Reed says. “The Bergdorf Goodman buyer wants to see it tomorrow. Not next week, but tomorrow. FedEx can't get it to me overnight from the interior ass-end of China. But you've got a concentration of people here, right within this one square mile, with the most specialized skills imaginable that have been passed down from generation to generation and do this work better than anyone in the world.”

Reed stood up and reached for a dress that was draped across the shelf behind him. He seemed to be passionate about his work—or his father's fortune.

“See this zipper? How it starts in the center of the garment and zigzags around and down the side, all the way to the hem? Can you imagine how hard this is to produce, and what it would cost to do in large quantities here?” he asked. “But we've got a zipper guy.
There's a store on Thirty-Seventh Street and all they do is zippers.”

“Zippers?” Mike said. “You're telling me some dude makes a living just doing zippers?”

“Nothing else. Plastic ones, metal ones, solid gold if you wanted that. Up and down, sideways, curled around your waist. My man will have that dress made up before the close of the day, while everyone in the factory in China is sound asleep.

“You want a belt covered in fake leopard skin or a ruffled collar trimmed with lace? Wolf had a belt guy around the corner and a store that sells lace—black, white, purple, pink, chartreuse—but only lace. That's why everyone in the industry keeps a toehold here. There's no place like this district in the entire world.”

“Go back to George Kwan,” Mike said. “What was his relationship with Wolf like?”

Reed folded the dress and put it back on the shelf. “Difficult. In a word, difficult.”

“Why's that?”

“Wolf is—was—a very independent man. Fiercely so. He liked to do everything on his own terms. So he watched with great trepidation as Kwan Enterprises began to take a bite out of all the competition.”

“What do you mean by a bite?” I asked.

“George Kwan—the son—started small. His first investment was the buyout of one of the older shoe brands in Europe, a French company that just couldn't compete in the marketplace any longer,” Reed said. “Then he set his sights on a Belgian leather-goods business—gloves and small purses. Things like that. In just the last three years, he's begun to hit on fashion houses in Paris, Milan, and here at home. Names you would undoubtedly know, Ms. Cooper, judging from the pieces you're wearing today.”

“Hitting on them how?” Mike asked.

“Kwan Enterprises delivers a hundred million units of consumer products every day,” Reed said. “Can you even conceive of that kind of operation? Then, after the products are made, they control distribution centers, transport, and every other management service.”

“Wolf didn't want any part of that, I guess,” I said. “But what kind of leverage does George Kwan have to go after the big-name fashion houses?”

“The volume of their company's growth made them unstoppable,” Reed said. “It gave them a bargaining power so enormous, pressuring suppliers to lower costs, that they just shrugged off all opposition to their modus operandi.”

“What didn't your father like about them, besides giving up control of his empire to someone else?”

“Obviously, the Kwan model depressed wages for workers in all their facilities,” Reed said. “He didn't like the idea of slave labor, of a manner of doing business with governments that weren't in the habit of enforcing regulations.”

I thought immediately of Wanda Beston, the housekeeper who told us about the Garment District's start.

“And then there were the great risks because of safety violations inherent in the Kwan model. You might recall the two great tragedies in Bangladesh.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, “but I don't.”

“Both were in garment factories,” Reed said. “In Tazreen, one of the Kwan manufacturing centers went up in flames when fabric and yarn caught fire. There were iron grilles that prevented the workers from escaping the inferno, and more than a hundred of them died.”

I thought also of my history lessons about the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in Manhattan, in which 146 workers—mostly young girls, immigrants—were trapped inside at
their sewing machines, dozens of them leaping to their deaths when escape paths were blocked. It prompted many of the reforms that made the Garment District safer.

“Rana Plaza was a few years after Tazreen. The factory managers ignored complaints about cracks in the building's structure,” Reed said. “When the entire concrete structure collapsed days later, more than one thousand workers were killed.”

“Those numbers, the number of human lives,” I said, “is just staggering. Wolf had good reason to want to keep arm's length from that kind of operation.”

“Now you've heard from the soft-touch member of my team, Reed,” Mike said. “Given that recent history of negligent oversight by the Kwans, I don't even begin to get why your father was having any conversation with them.”

Reed looked away.

“C'mon. What's Georgie got on him that you don't want the media to know?”

“The WolfWear brand was started more than thirty years ago, Detective. As of today, it remains one of the very last wholly independent fashion houses in this country.”

“It's iconic,” I said.

Reed acknowledged me with a nod. “My father hit the big-time with his off-the-rack clothing within ten years of starting out. His ready-to-wear line.”

“I assume all clothes come ready to wear,” Mike said. “Open the box, put on the dress, and bingo, you're ready to step out the door.”

Mercer was right. I could be useful to Mike in this world. I let Reed Savage explain his business.

“Until a hundred years ago, Detective, women's fashion was really ornate,” Reed said. “It depended on a precise fit to the body of each client. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the
industry was revolutionized by modern manufacturing. Clothing was made for a range of standard sizes, meant to be worn without significant individual alteration. It became more affordable to women of all classes and income because it was mass-produced. Ready-to-wear is what we mean by clothes the customer can take right off the rack.”

“Okay, so Wolf wanted to keep his independence,” Mike said. “I get that. What's the problem?”

Reed Savage pushed back from his desk and walked over to the window. “My father thinks—thought—that I was the problem. Or at least part of it.”

Mike cocked his head. “Couldn't have thought too ill of you if he put you in charge of the international side of things.”

“George Kwan sniffed out the weakness before Wolf figured out what it was,” Reed said, staring out at the top of the Empire State Building, just a few blocks away. “We'd always been a strong brand, a unique identity, but we'd reached a point where we weren't growing at all. Kwan told my father the problem was me.”