Killer Look (4 page)

“You can do better than this,” I said. “Something more interesting must have happened while I've been in PTSD land. Give me some of the real dope.”

“Why is it always all about you, Coop?” Mike said, leaning back against the smooth leather surface of the booth encircling our table. “Why can't the four of us just chill for the evening?”

This time I had reason to think it was about me. I couldn't shake the feeling that everything in my life had been turned upside down—maybe never to be righted—just a few short weeks ago.

I pushed the salad around my dinner plate, like a six-year-old playing with her food.

“I'm going to go home tonight,” I said. “To my own apartment.”

Vickee flashed a quizzical look in Mike's direction. “Why don't you—?”

“I think that's a great idea,” Mike said.

“Mind your business, Vickee,” Mercer said. “Home is where Alex should be, actually. It's where she lives, for God's sake. And there are two doormen on duty 'round the clock.”

I was testing Mike, but he didn't seem to mind the pushback at all.

I lived in a pricey high-rise close to Park Avenue in the seventies. The trust fund my father had set up for my brothers and me, after he and another doctor he partnered with invented a tiny plastic device used in practically all open-heart surgical procedures, allowed me a lifestyle that public service couldn't support. The Cooper-Hoffman valve had sent me through Wellesley and the University of Virginia School of Law, and made it possible for me to do the work that I found so deeply rewarding.

Mike's cell phone vibrated, and he stood up at the side of the booth to take the call. He turned his back to us, listened for close to a minute, then talked for twice as long before rejoining our table.

Mercer and Vickee knew better than to ask him what the call was about. I, on the other hand, felt no need for boundaries at this particular moment.

“Tanya Root?” I asked.

“Since when have I been a one-case wonder, Coop?” Mike asked. “All quiet on that front.”

“None of you are talking about your other work. Rape, murder, the load of cases you've been handling. You all obviously think it will upset me.”

Mercer and Vickee shifted in their seats, deferring to Mike's judgment.

“It was Lieutenant Peterson, kid. Picking what's left of my brain.”

“On what?” I asked, leaning in toward him.

“A suicide in the south.”

Mike's command was Manhattan North Homicide, which picked up all the murder cases north of Fifty-Ninth Street, to the tip of Manhattan bordered by the Harlem River. The Manhattan South Squad covered the southern half of the island. Both were elite units made up of skilled detectives—mostly men, even at this point in time—who combined classic investigative talents with evolving forensic techniques.

I sat back. The NYPD was required to respond to suicide scenes. They were, after all, unnatural deaths.

“Why you?” I asked. I wanted Mike to come home with me. He hadn't yet said that he would, so the last thing I needed was a case to take him away.

“It's a helium inhalation suicide,” he said. “Hotshot businessman in his hotel room.”

“They're growing in the ‘right to die' movement, aren't they?” Mercer said.

“Yeah. We've had two of them in the north this year, and one was mine. The south lieutenant called Peterson to see if we had any pointers for the scene investigation.”

“You're going too fast for me, guys,” I said. “What's growing? What's the manner of death?”

“Exit bag over the head, Coop,” Mike said. “Asphyxiation by
gas.”

Mike drove me home after dinner. He stopped the car in the porte cochere that ran in front of my building like a driveway.

Vinny and Oscar were the doormen on duty. Vinny was at the passenger's side door as soon as he saw Mike pull in. He opened it for me and waited while I turned back to Mike.

“Coming up?” I swallowed hard—pride too—as I asked the question.

“I've got an early morning. You try to get some real sleep,” he said, flashing his trademark grin to reassure me that things between us were okay. “Tomorrow night, for sure. After all, you'll be blonder by then.”

I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Don't give up on me yet, okay? I'm coming back, I promise.”

Vinny walked me inside, where Oscar had already pushed the button for the twentieth floor. There were security cameras in the elevators, and I knew they would be watching me all the way up.

I turned my key in the lock and pushed open the door. I'd left
the lights on when I went out for dinner, preferring to come home to familiar things that I could see.

It was only nine thirty. I poured a sensible amount of Dewar's and took it into the bathroom with me to sip while I soaked in a hot whirlpool tub.

I climbed into bed with a stack of magazines, ignored the doctor's advice about taking Ativan with my liquor, and started flipping through pages till sometime close to three
A.M
., when the drugs overcame my insomnia and I fell soundly asleep.

When I woke up it was almost eleven
A.M
. Mike had left me three voicemails, among others from friends. He had started his day witnessing the autopsy of a young mother caught in the crosshairs of a gang shooting in Washington Heights. From the morgue, he had stopped at the boutique hotel where the suicide had occurred, and the final call was his attempt to express his concern for me.

I slipped into my robe and walked to the front door to pick up the newspapers.

The
Post
was on top of the others. Its entire front page was devoted to the man who had chosen a stark hotel room in which to end his life. The photograph was a headshot of a face familiar to fashionistas and socialites, as well as to entrepreneurs who had followed—and tried to emulate—his rags-to-riches story.

Wolf Savage, the seventy-two-year-old clothing designer who had built an empire that rivaled those of Ralph Lauren and Oscar de la Renta, had carted two helium canisters to his hotel room, undressed himself, laid down on the bed, and put a plastic bag over his head.

Mike hadn't mentioned the name of the dead man to me. I was stunned. The well-known designer was the one who had broken away from his competitors months ago and announced he'd be holding his own fashion show—out of season—at the Metropolitan Museum.

LONE WOLF.
That was the headline that appeared over the picture of Savage, which was side-by-side with an image of the logo that branded his work and was recognized worldwide. WW—for WolfWear, with the head of the animal inserted in the space between the double letters—had become almost as ubiquitous as Lauren's polo pony.

I turned to the page-two story. “Billionaire businessman Wolf Savage, who was as well known for the string of wives he left behind as he was for his eponymous clothing brand, died alone yesterday in a suite at the Silver Needle Hotel. Estranged from his fifth wife, forty-one years his junior, Savage chose to end it all by himself in a rented room in the Garment District, instead of at one of his posh homes in Connecticut, Palm Beach, London, or Milan.”

I brewed a cup of coffee and sat down at my dining table. Wolf Savage was front page in the
Times
and
Journal
as well, where both the articles focused on the serious business accomplishments of the Brooklyn-born executive, who in four decades had transformed his small, inexpensive line of sportswear into an international trend-setting phenomenon. He was a couturier as admired in Paris as in New York, and a retrospective of his greatest work was being held at the Costume Institute in the Metropolitan Museum simultaneously to the fashion show Wolf had planned to move to the Temple of Dendur, also at the Met.

I dialed Mike's phone.

“About time you woke up, kid. Everything okay?”

“So far, so good,” I said. “I'm just reading the papers. Why didn't you tell me the suicide you were talking about was Wolf Savage?”

“What difference does that make, Coop? You know him?”

“I don't know him from Adam,” I said. “But sometimes I wear him.”

“You like that shit, with some beady-eyed animal crawling up the front of your clothes?”

“It's good stuff, WolfWear,” I said. “And this is a huge story. Anything unusual at the scene?”

“Same old, same old,” Mike said. “What time is your appointment at Elsa's?”

“Hair's at four. Mani-pedi at one.”

“That's the life, kid. You better get a move on.”

“How are you spending the rest of your day?” I asked.

“The girl who was autopsied this morning. We got some leads on the gang members who were involved. Going back uptown to check them out.”

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“It feels good to be back in the city,” I said. “And I really liked the message you left for me. You know, the last one.”

“Nice,” he said. “Nice on both fronts. You stay busy, Coop. I'll see you later.”

I skimmed the Wolf Savage stories. There hadn't been time for a full obit, but there were a bunch of features culled from clips about him over the years.

The Garment District—a rectangular patch of Manhattan that spreads from Fifth to Ninth Avenues, West Thirty-Fifth to West Forty-Second Street—had once been the heart of this entire country's clothing design and manufacturing industry. As technology and cheap foreign outsourcing picked away at this long, local supremacy, Wolf Savage—according to the
Times—
was one of the power players fighting to maintain the character of this historic one square mile of city real estate.

Sort of ironic, I thought, that he chose to end his life in a new hotel, the name of which paid homage to an essential tool of the trade—the Silver Needle—on West Thirty-Eighth Street, in the
very heart of what had been, for more than a century, the Garment District.

My phone pinged to announce an incoming text. It was Joan Stafford. “How about that Savage Soiree gown you wore to my wedding? Save it for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum. Value just went up.”

“Your WolfWestern suede jacket from last year when fringe was so hot? I should never have made fun of it,” I replied with both thumbs. “You can have your own room at the Met, Joanie.”

It pinged again. I laughed to myself, thinking of all our shopping expeditions together and what other Wolf creations hung in our closets. But this time the texter was Laura Wilkie, my longtime secretary.

“I hope all is well, Alex. Just wondering—a young woman called a few minutes ago. Says she went to high school with you. Lily, from your swim team in Harrison. She seems desperate to talk to you. May I give her the Vineyard number?”

So Laura didn't know I was back in town. That was a good thing. Maybe the level of gossip about me had settled down. I racked my brain to pull up a mental image of Lily. I thought of a scrawny brunette with sad eyes, a year behind my grade, who did backstroke on the relay team I anchored with freestyle.

“All good with me, Laura. Miss you. Miss everyone. Best to give Lily my cell, thanks. Talk to you soon.”

“Can't wait to have you back,” Laura texted. “Will do.”

In less than a minute, my phone rang. “Hello,” I said. “This is Alex Cooper.”

“Alex? It's Lily Savitsky. I didn't know whether you'd remember me, so thanks for taking my call.”

“Not a problem,” I said. “Harrison High. The Dolphins. You did an awesome backstroke.”

It was a pretty common occurrence, actually, for people from
my past to reach out to me, because my career was such a public one. Friends of friends who'd been sexually abused, relatives of relatives who needed a therapist or a divorce lawyer, acquaintances of folks I'd met only once or twice who wanted free legal advice. I was used to these calls.

“Yeah. I guess it's been twenty years,” Lily said. “Look, I know you're out of town, but I have a pretty urgent situation, Alex. I'm hoping you can put me in the right hands.”

“I can try, Lily,” I said. “What's it about?”

“I don't know where you're traveling and what kind of news you get, but it's the lead story here in the city that a designer named Wolf Savage killed himself yesterday.”

My back stiffened. “I've seen the papers, Lily. It's the top story everywhere.”

“Then I need your help,” she said. “The police and the medical examiner won't listen to me.”

“Go on.”

“Wolf Savage was my father,” Lily said. “He didn't kill himself, Alex. I'll bet everything I have that he was murdered.”

I told Lily that I was actually back in Manhattan and could meet her in forty-five minutes at PJ Bernstein Deli, a short distance from my apartment. Two months earlier I would have offered to make Lily Savitsky comfortable in my home, but my trust level had eroded. The guys at PJ's had known me forever, and aside from the great food, they'd be looking out for me if she were anything other than a grieving daughter.

I showered and dressed in jeans and a cashmere turtleneck. After I canceled my hair and nail appointments, I threw on a ski jacket and walked out of my building, up to the corner.

As hard as I tried to conjure memories of Lily, all I came up with was her flutter kick, her shyness, and large brown eyes like those of a spaniel that had been left alone for too many hours every day.

Her mother was tall, like mine, and carpooled to most of the swim meets, like mine, evincing a keen interest in Lily's accomplishments. I couldn't remember ever seeing her father. I think I had worried about my teammate then because I thought her
father was either a total deadbeat—missing in action—or dead. Thinking back, I must have figured it's what gave Lily such a sad look.

If I had ever connected her with Wolf Savage in those days, the memories had been buried in the intervening years.

I sat in the rear of the restaurant and positioned myself so that I could see Lily when she came through the door. She was easy to spot—still lanky, with dark-brown hair that capped her thin face and surrounded it with ringlets. I waved at her and she came toward me, pulling out the chair opposite me.

“I'm so very sorry for your loss, Lily,” I said. “I simply had no idea that Wolf Savage was related to—”

“You had no reason to know, Alex. I never talked about him to anyone but my mother. I carried such a sense of shame about being abandoned. He left us—he left my mother and me—when I was six.”

The waitress came over to take our order.

Lily said she wasn't hungry while I asked for a Diet Coke.

“You've got to eat something,” I said, trying out the lines people had used on me the last few weeks. “You'll need the strength.”

“Just some tea, please,” she said. “And maybe a bowl of your soup of the day.”

“Make that two,” I said.

“Look, Alex, I know this isn't exactly your line of work, but you're the only person in law enforcement I know.”

“If there's any way I can help, you can be sure that I will.”

“Where do you want me to start?” Lily asked.

“Give me a quick update,” I said. “What are you doing these days? Have you had any relationship with your father recently, and especially what makes you think this isn't a—well, his own doing?”

I thought that Lily's description of her life and her reasons for thinking the responding detectives—and even Mike—had
missed something at the death scene would help me measure her stability.

“I'm still in Harrison, Alex,” Lily said, referring to the affluent neighborhood in Westchester County where my family had moved when I was ten, after my father's invention, the Cooper-Hoffman valve, had become such a game changer in the medical community. “Married a guy I met in grad school. Got my MBA at Columbia. Had three kids in pretty quick order, so I've never used my degree.”

“Your husband?” I asked, opening my iPad to take some notes.

“Really good guy. David Kingsley. He's a partner at a private equity firm in Greenwich,” Lily said. “Is it true you've never been married, Alex? And no kids? In twelfth grade, I would have pegged you as a future full-on soccer mom, not a hard-ass prosecutor.”

“Life's full of surprises, Lily,” I said, thinking that was more civilized than replying,
None of your business
. “Let's concentrate on you right now. Tell me the personal side of your history with your father.”

“Condensed version, right?”

“For now, right. All I'm after is how to help you get in the right hands, if I can do that.”

“Of course,” she said, thanking the waitress for the hot tea as she set our drinks in front of us. “So my mother was the second Mrs. Savitsky. Once my father moved to Europe and changed his name, my mother refused to speak about him to almost anyone. I actually never knew there had been a first Mrs. Savitsky until I was about eight years old. That one was from the Brooklyn Savitsky era.”

“Sorry?”

“My father was born in Brooklyn, Alex. My grandparents emigrated from Russia in the late '30s. I never knew either of them.
My grandmother had two miscarriages before my father was born.”

“Was he an only child?” I wanted a full sense of the family dynamic before I bought into Lily's suspicions.

“No, there's a younger brother, too. My uncle Hersh—well, Hal—who runs the business end of things for my dad.”

“Is he a Savage or a Savitsky?” I asked.

“My father stayed Savitsky till the business started to take off. Then he got rid of my mother, and after that, his name. Hal wanted to take the ride with him, so they became the Savage brothers. It was such an embarrassment to my mother and to me.”

“How about wife number one?”

“She died. Early on. That's when I found out I had an older brother, Reed.”

I gave up my iPad for a paper napkin. This one called for a diagram of the family tree.

“He wasn't part of my life until the last few years,” Lily said. “Born Reed Savitsky, but he goes by Reed Savage. He's forty-one now, four years older than I am. When his mom died, he went to London to live with my father and his third bride. Little Lord Savage, to the manner born.”

“What does he do now?”

“He's in charge of the international part of my father's operation.”

“Do you have any part of the business interest in the company?”

“How I wish I did. It's really the reason I went to graduate school. I thought I could get beyond the estrangement from my father by showing him how much I wanted to play a role in his life.”

“Sounds like a great idea.”

“Worked my ass off in B-school after college, but got the double-whammy from my uncle and half-brother.”

“How so?”

“They planted the seed in my father's mind that I was only after a share of his fortune.”

The waitress put bowls in front of each of us and I waited while Lily blew on the steaming-hot soup.

“I mean, there was a bit of truth in that, Alex. I would have loved to have worked my way into the business empire—worked for it, not just enjoyed a sense of entitlement—but I wanted a father out of this whole thing, too. He was adored by everyone around him, according to the social columns I read day in and day out. I wanted a taste of that.”

I understood that part completely. I couldn't imagine life without the love and support of parents I adored and respected.

“So your uncle Hal and Reed are pretty tight with each other?”

“Best I can tell.”

“Have you spoken with either of them since your—since yesterday's news?”

“Yes,” Lily said, nodding at me. “I had dinner with Hal last night. He's always had a soft spot for me, for my kids.”

“And Reed?”

“He was flying in from Heathrow. Chartered a plane when he got the news yesterday afternoon. I'm supposed to meet with both of them shortly,” Lily said. “That's why it was so urgent that I see you.”

“So your relationship with your father,” I said. “It's obviously complicated and we'll get to all that if it's necessary—if I can be helpful here. Recently, was there contact?”

“Yes, things had been getting much better between us lately.”

“Why do you think that's so?”

“It's a combination of factors, I guess. My husband, who's a prince of a guy, went to see my dad without telling me. He thinks he's the one who talked Wolf into getting to know his
grandchildren—as well as me—and having them as a sort of a living legacy for him. My view? I think it helped that David makes a really good living. I'm sure my father checked out his background and financials, and was beginning to understand that we aren't gold diggers. Maybe it's a little bit of both.”

I wondered whether Lily knew if she was in her father's will, and what the effect of suicide would be on all the sharks circling the body.

“It helped, of course,” she said as we both took a few swallows of the soup, “that Wolf had split from wife number five last year. She really hated me.”

“Why so?”

“I guess it got back to her that I was peeved that my father had broken the rule.”

“What rule?” I asked. I had to admit that it felt good to put something nourishing in my stomach.

Lily cracked a smile. “Supposed to be that rich old guys have a formula: They shouldn't marry women younger than their kids,” she said. “It's meant to be half the guy's age plus seven, as a minimum. So my father was sixty-eight when he married the bitch, and she was twenty-eight.”

I jotted down the math.

“I was thirty-four at the time. Sort of ‘ouch!' to have a stepmother so young.”

“I bet it was,” I said. “And wives three, four, and five—where are they today?”

“It's a bit like Henry the Eighth, though a little out of order,” Lily said. “Died, divorced, beheaded, div—”

“Beheaded? Was number three killed?”

“She might as well have been, according to Uncle Hal. Just hung out to dry.”

“Look, Lily, I guess the most important question is why you
think you knew your father well enough to claim he didn't want to end his own life?”

She pushed the soup bowl away.

“Wolf Savage was at the top of his game, Alex,” she said, ticking off reasons on her fingers. “For the last year he's been in negotiations to sell his business to some billionaire who wanted him to stay in charge—continue to be the front man and face of the company, to keep dazzling the fashion world—but to have this fantastic backer with a huge infusion of cash. Then my father came up with this ingenious idea to launch his own solo show—break apart from the eighty or so mash-ups that Fashion Week in New York has become.”

The phenomenon that was the city's Fashion Week was staged two times a year—in February and September. Wolf Savage's radical plan to split from that tradition had made major headlines throughout the summer.

“It's a very controversial idea,” I said, “from what I've read in the papers.”

“Part inspiration, and part a consequence of my father's big falling-out with the powers that be who run the September week.”

“I didn't know about that.”

“It was overshadowed by the bigger news. The Costume Institute at the Met is installing its first WolfWear retrospective to coincide with the show—can you imagine that? Wolf Savage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? He was at an all-time high about it—heart and soul.”

She paused for a couple of seconds.

“Maybe he was ill, Lily. Maybe there was something wrong with him that he didn't tell you about,” I said.

“Oh, there was a lot wrong with him, Alex. I'm the first one to say that. But he was healthy as a horse, unless there's something called Viagra poisoning,” she said. “Wolf was the kind of man who
would never put a bag over his head if he suffered from that. He preferred to brag about his conquests, even to me, as unhealthy as that is.”

So this was a young woman who had gone from being the abandoned daughter of one of the world's most prominent self-made entrepreneurs, to one of the players jockeying for his fortune. She was already setting up her brother as a villain in what was undoubtedly a family feud, and maybe even her uncle, too. This conversation was giving me a headache.

“Look, Lily. I've got some good friends in the Homicide Squad, but I'd have to tell them that you've got more than just a recent hunch that Wolf Savage was too content with his life to end it himself.”

She made a fist around her soup spoon and banged the end of it on the table. “This man, Alex Cooper, was my father.”

“I know that, but—”

“Maybe I didn't have the relationship with him that you had with your dad as a kid—and by the way? You seem to have reaped the rewards of your father's smarts, haven't you?” she said rather snidely. “That's not what this is about.”

I understood the strain she was under, but how could she possibly pretend to know whether Savage had been despondent at all, or whether the details of his sexual entanglements had brought him low?

“I apologize, Lily, if I seemed insensitive. Let me call one of the guys and see if he can sit down with you one day this week.”

“‘One day this week'?” she said, mimicking me. “I told you there was an urgency to this.”

“Okay,” I said, knowing the last thing Mike would want today was me sticking my nose into anything he had a role in. “I'll phone right now. Are you available tonight, when he's done with his shift?”

“At three o'clock today, just a couple of hours from now, Reed and Hal have a meeting with the chief medical examiner,” she said, pounding the spoon's handle onto the tabletop again. “You want urgency, Alex? They want my father's body released to them this afternoon for burial. They want it released without an
autopsy.”