Killer Look

THIRTEEN

I walked Wanda Beston to the elevator and thanked her for coming in to help us. Mercer and Mike were sweeping the death suite one more time when I reentered the room.

The hand truck with a rack full of pastel summer sundresses from the WolfWear line were a bright spot in the cheerless room. The dresses had been pushed apart after the first photographs had been taken so that the two metal canisters that had been hidden below them could be removed and taken to the crime lab for analysis of their remains.

“That’s a sobering thought,” I said, closing the door behind me. “That clothing for the slave trade was what put the Garment District in business.”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “I was ready to open my mouth and hazard a guess that it was Civil War soldiers’ uniforms that were the first mass-produced clothing. But Wanda had me beat with her nugget of history.”

“Where did they find the note that Wolf wrote?” I asked.

“Right there,” Mike said, “on the night table.”

“Anything else?” I asked. “Any signs of a struggle?”

“Nothing. Not a thing out of place.”

“Did you give any thought to whether it looked like someone had straightened up the room?” Mercer asked. “Like the scene was too staged?”

“Glad to know you remember your days in homicide, buddy. You think I’m still an amateur dick?”

Mike had come on the job three years after Mercer.

Mercer laughed. “You know how it is when you want to put your own hands on an investigation. Start with a total redo.”

“I bought into the suicide theory,” Mike said. “Everything fit.”

“We don’t know enough about the man himself,” I said. “We’ve got to talk to the people who knew him best, at the office. The family members have too much at stake to rely on their truth-telling, don’t you think?”

“We?” Mike said. “I’m still stuck on the ‘we’ bit, blondie.”

Mike was opening dresser drawers and looking in the desk for anything he and the first responders might have missed.

“Isn’t it better to have my keen sartorial eye helping you on this case?” I said. “Especially since you seem to think that ‘home alone’ is bad for my health.”

“Consider today my favor to you,” Mike said, walking over the threshold to the living-room area. I followed him in.

“You owe it to me and the Harrison Dolphins, Detective. That’s what brought Lily Savitsky to your attention.”

“I’ve got a short window before Dr. Parker lets the dearly departed depart from the morgue. I got places to go, Coop. People to see.”

“What’s tomorrow?” Mercer asked.

“Starting my day bright and early at the Savage offices. Meet and greet with some of the staff. The CFO, Wolf’s executive assistant, the marketing guru,” Mike said. “Make sure the business part of the business was on solid ground.”

“You think you can trust Josie-the housekeeper who had the key to the other room?”

“Not from here to the corner. Not that she’s sinister, but because I can’t quite figure her out,” Mike said, checking his watch. “I’m waiting for the guys to pick her up, right? I’m more than curious about how Wolf came to be her reference for this job.”

Mike picked up the remote and turned on the television. He had a better sense of timing than anyone except Jack Reacher. He really didn’t need to wear a watch. He hit the Final Jeopardy! question on the mark, just like he did every weekday.

“Do you know the difference between ready-to-wear and haute couture?” I asked.

Mike ignored me.

“What’s an atelier, Detective? And how do they set the pecking order for seating at next week’s fashion show?”

“You have a distinctive advantage, kid. You learned your French on your back, in a bedroom on the Riviera.”

“Oooooh. Low blow, Mike,” I said. He was referring to a former lover of mine, whom he disliked intensely. Luc was a restaurateur in the South of France. “It’s not your language skills I was referring to. It’s the fact that there’s a lot about this business that you don’t know.”

“Here’s what I do know about: murder, Coop. Greed, jealousy, lust, revenge. That sort of covers the main motives. I don’t get a whiff of one of those in the next day and a half, it doesn’t matter what language the fashionistas speak and what the spring colors are.”

Alex Trebek had just revealed the screen to show that the category was EXPLORERS.

“Pony up the cash, you two,” Mike said.

The topic was perfect for both of them. Mike had majored in history, with an emphasis on all things military, from the breed of Napoleon’s warhorse to the number of ships that sailed in the Spanish Armada. Mercer’s father had been a Delta Airlines mechanic, complete with travel perks for his family. My dear friend had papered the walls of his childhood room with maps of the world and knew almost as much about the geography of places he had not been as those to which he had traveled.

“I’m good for it,” I said.

“The Final Jeopardy! answer is: HENRY HUDSON’S HALF MOON CREW MEMBER JOHN COLMAN WAS THE FIRST THIS IN 1609,” Trebek said, repeating the explorer’s name and the year of his arrival in New York Harbor.

“We’re on a roll, Mercer,” Mike said. “Double or nothing?”

“Double at least,” Mercer said. “I’m feeling lucky.”

“My historical knowledge isn’t entirely shabby,” I said. I hoped they couldn’t hear the tremor in my voice. The Hudson River, named for the great explorer, was ground zero for my all-too-recent period of captivity.

The first contestant was wrong. “Who was the first man to claim the land for the British?” Trebek said, reading from her slate. “No, madam. That would be wrong. Hudson was English, of course, but working for the Dutch East India Company when he sailed into the harbor.”

The second contestant shook his head. Like me, he had gotten no further than “What was the first-?”

Trebek laughed. “Well, you’re not even as close as a wrong answer, sir. Sorry you didn’t take a stab at it.”

The third contestant and current show champion didn’t even venture a guess.

“You guys think you know?” I said.

“Oldest cold case in our homicide files,” Mike said. “Who was the first murder victim in New York’s recorded history?”

“I’m surprised you don’t know that, Alex,” Mercer said. “They’ve been teaching it in the Academy for years. Applying modern forensics to a four-hundred-year-old case. Seems John Colman took an arrow to his throat.”

I clutched my neck with my hand.

“Local Indians were none too happy to see a boatload of white men with muskets,” Mike said, as Trebek confirmed that was the winning factoid.

Mike clicked off the remote just as his cell phone rang. He took the call, turning his back to Mercer and me, then pocketed it and faced us.

“How’s your voodoo, Coop?” he asked. “Can you cast a spell or do any black magic?”

“Not so good lately,” I said. “Why?”

“The cops from the Seven-Seven just called the lieutenant. They’ll sit in front of her building all night if that’s what it takes, but another tenant in Josie LaPorte’s house says she came in after work today and left twenty minutes later with a suitcase.”

“Maybe she’s tracking the spirit of Wolf Savage,” I said.

“We don’t even know what their connection is, or why he recommended her for this job.”

“And now,” Mercer said, “Josie LaPorte is in the wind.”