Killer Look

TWENTY-SIX

“How are you going to keep yourself busy today, blondie?” Mike asked.

We had jogged the one-and-a-half-mile trail around the Jacqueline Onassis Reservoir-the Central Park landmark that had been renamed in the First Lady’s honor for her many contributions to the city.

“You are a tough taskmaster,” I said, wiping my neck with a towel as we walked back to the apartment. “Shopping. I think I’ll go shopping. Totally stress-free.”

“Next week, I’d like you to do a favor for me.”

“What kind of favor?”

“No, no, no. It doesn’t go like that,” Mike said. “Somebody who loves you asks you to do something for him, the answer is an unconditional yes.”

“Does it involve a case?”

“Nope.”

“I’d rather it did,” I said.

“Are you in or not?”

“What do you want? Just some vapid broad who jumps every time you tell her to?”

“Exactly what I’ve always wanted,” Mike said. “I seem to remember that’s how you responded to everything Luc used to ask.”

I slapped the back of his thighs with my towel. “Move on, buddy. Sure, I’ll give you an unconditional yes.”

“I’d like you to see my shrink-the one the department made me talk to when-”

“No! Not happening,” I shouted, breaking into a run to cross the avenue before the light changed.

During my days of captivity, Keith Scully had insisted that Mike meet with a psychiatrist. He’d been furious at first, thinking she’d been called in to deal with his anger management at the thought of my abduction. Instead, she had tried to find out as much as she could about me-from the man who was closest to me-to help find a reason for someone to have victimized me.

Mike caught up with me a block away.

“There’s nothing wrong with me that your beloved shrink can help, Mike,” I said. “I’m just thoroughly strung out. Can you deal with that?”

“Everything that happens triggers some kind of flashback for you.”

“She told you to expect that I’d have flashbacks. I told you the same thing-most of my victims have had them. It’s part of the process, Mike. I want it to stop as much as you do.”

“Then talk to her, Coop. Maybe she can help you with some of your anxiety.”

“I want you to help me. That’s what I want.”

“I’m doing everything I can for you. I can’t stop working and be with you twenty-four/seven.”

“Why not? We can go back up to the Vineyard and just stay there for a month or two. I promise you I can work through this.”

“I need a paycheck, babe. And I do what I do because I like it, because I’m good at it. I’d be a lousy nanny, I really would.”

I knew better than to tell him I could support us-a trustifarian is how he referred to spoiled rich kids-so I just walked beside him silently.

“You’re mad because I mouthed off to the district attorney,” I said.

“I would have punched him in his huge-beaked nose, babe. That doesn’t bother me at all,” Mike said. “Once. Will you just go talk to her one time?”

“It’s the drinking, then. You drink a whole lot more than I do.”

“I hold it better than you, too. And I don’t start quite as early in the day.”

“Once,” I said, jogging off ahead of Mike as I called back to him. “I’ll go talk to her once.”

He caught up with me and took me in his arms, kissing me on top of my head.

“You know how I hate public displays of affection,” I said, grinning back at him. “Give me the phone number and I’ll make an appointment with her for next week.”

“Made my day, Coop. I’ll let you take me to dinner anywhere you’d like to go. Now you’re being sensible.”

Mike showered and shaved, stayed with me for a second cup of coffee, then called his mother to ask her about the Final Jeopardy! question from the night before.

“Yes, Mom, I’m with Alex. This one’s for her?” he said into the phone. “The category is literature?”

“Tell her thank you for me,” I said. “Double or nothing.”

“No way,” Mike said before repeating his mother’s words. “The answer is: ‘This person is the author of a 1914 book of essays called Tender Buttons.’”

“Who’s Gertrude Stein?” I said.

“She’s right?” Mike asked his mother. “Too smart for my blood. The nuns didn’t let me read Gertrude Stein. Going to work now, Mom. See you on Sunday.”

Mike hung up and reached for the coffee mug. “So she wrote a book about buttons?”

“No. But she lived in Paris, and the expression has a couple of meanings in French. One is a name for tiny mushrooms and the other-”

“Why does everything with you come back to French?” he asked, playfully pulling on my jogging ponytail. “I’d rather watch an autopsy.”

“Well, today you get your wish, darling.”

I walked him to the door and kissed him goodbye, cleaned up and dressed, made a few calls to friends, and tried to think of ways to amuse myself.

I hadn’t been shopping in ages. Maybe it would cheer me up to buy a new scarf or pair of snow boots in anticipation of predictions for a stormy winter ahead.

My usual route to my favorite stores was walking down Third Avenue and cutting over to Madison somewhere in the sixties. I stopped at the cash machine, wandered into my local independent bookstore for a browse, and stopped to admire a cashmere sweater in the window of a new shop on Lexington.

I couldn’t get the case out of my mind, probably even more so because I had been ordered to stay out of it.

Some of the details of the investigation continued to nag at me, and I kept going back over them again and again. One of them, which I was reminded of when I thought of the greasy tire tracks in the rooms adjacent to Wolf Savage’s suite, was the gold-tone button I had found in the nappy carpet. I opened my phone to look at the photograph I had taken of it before handing it to Mike to voucher.

I didn’t need to satisfy my curiosity by going to the Garment District and risking a scolding. The most unusual little shop I could think of was on East Sixty-Second Street, right on the path to my favorite shoe salon. My visit was triggered by Mike’s call to his mother. The store had been a Manhattan institution since the ’60s. It was called Tender Buttons.

It took me only ten minutes to reach my destination, a narrow brownstone building, recognizable as I approached it by the giant-sized gold button-a trade sign-that was suspended from the balcony above the shop entrance.

There were two saleswomen and one other customer there when I entered. The walls on both sides of the room, from front to back, were covered floor to ceiling with very small boxes. Each box held a different size and style of button-literally hundreds of thousands of them-from antique to modern designs. It was like a library of buttons, and all I needed was someone to tell me whether the one I had picked up from the carpet in the Silver Needle Hotel was in their card catalog.

I approached one of the saleswomen and told her my name, asking for her assistance in matching a button off a garment.

“All I can do is try,” she said, smiling at me as she put on her reading glasses. “If there’s anything distinctive about it, we may be able to help. May I see it, please?”

“Great. I have a photo of it on my cell.”

I pulled it up to show her. She took my phone and spread the image with her fingers to enlarge it.

“To start with,” she said, “it’s gold-toned. That gets us down from the hundreds to the tens of thousands, doesn’t it?”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“Just to give you an idea, Ms. Cooper, we have four hundred different styles of buttons for men’s blazers. We have seventeenth-century silver buttons that come from uniforms of British soldiers and coins of the realm. I can show you a little box of fossilized ivory buttons, if that’s what you’re looking for-so, yes, anything that tightens the search is a good thing.”

The woman picked up a jeweler’s loupe to study the image. “Is there any way you can bring this actual piece in?” she asked. “It appears to be broken off on one edge at the top, and again almost in half. It’s always so much easier to see if I have the actual object.”

“Maybe next week,” I said, hoping there would be a way to convince Mike to un-voucher the small piece of metal. “I can try to get it next week.”

“I can’t tell if it’s real gold-like fourteen or eighteen karat-which would put it in an even smaller category. But it would also make it less likely to break in half.

“Okay. Yes, it almost looks like I’ve got half a heart here. That the whole button once was the shape of a small heart. Do you notice what I’m talking about?” she said, extending the photo and loupe to me. “There’s a sharp edge on this piece, where something snapped off. Two places, actually.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “You see these things every day, and I’m just a shopper. Is there anything else you can tell me about it?”

She took the items back from me and studied the photograph again. “There’s an indentation in the middle of this remaining side. It’s possible there was once a stone-like a semiprecious stone or even a fake sparkle.”

“That’s interesting. I can see the indentation. I just didn’t know what to make of it.”

“Are you trying to match this to a particular garment, Ms. Cooper?”

“Yes. I’m not very into this kind of thing, but I’m trying to do a favor for a friend.”

“Nice of you to do,” she said. “Let me ask my coworker if she’s seen anything like it.”

There was a series of antique wooden tables down the center of the shop. The other customer had left, seemingly content with a six-piece set of miniature enameled playing cards-buttons for a shirt for her husband’s poker tournament.

“What do you think?” my saleswoman asked her colleague. “Half a heart? Have you seen anything like this?”

“Well, it’s not a heart at all,” the second woman said.

“That’s the power of suggestion,” I said. “We both agreed it looked like one.”

“In fact, I’ve seen one like it just a couple of days ago. We might have two more of them, if you’re looking to complete an outfit,” she said, striding with great confidence toward a ladder on a track against the wall.

“You have seen this?” I said. “You might have another?”

“Do you know the designer, young lady? It’s off a vintage piece.”

“My friend told me it’s Savage. Wolf Savage. That man who just died,” I said.

“More likely was killed, if you see today’s paper,” the first saleswoman said. “It’s a pity.”

“Vintage Savage,” the second woman said, climbing up the ladder to the top step, just below the ceiling. She pulled a small cardboard box out from its place and balanced it with one hand as she carefully stepped down. “You may be too young to remember some of the fashions from 1991, but it was all about animal prints on the runway that year.”

“I wasn’t that into clothes so much as a teenager,” I said, more interested in why she had been asked about the same button just two days ago. Why, and by whom?

“It was the fashion industry’s response to the anti-fur activists,” she said, holding up the photo of the broken button against the actual piece that was taped to the front end of the box. The word “WolfWild” was printed under the button logo. “Leopard-print dresses. Zebras. Giraffes. The fashion shows looked like a day at the zoo. I’m surprised some of them didn’t eat each other alive.”

“Is that the button?” I asked. “The exact one?”

“We don’t like to disappoint, young lady,” she said, removing a pristine piece of metal from a tiny plastic envelope. “You see, you were mistaken when you two called it a heart. Tried to fool me.”

“I see it now,” the first saleswoman said.

They each had their heads leaned in over the button.

“What makes it unique,” the second woman said, “is that it was a variation on the usual WolfWear button. And we like unique in our shop. We remember unique.”

“May I see too?” I asked.

“In his lower-price collections,” the button maven said, “Mr. Savage used plastic buttons. Ordinary white or black, or color-coordinated to the outfit.”

“But in his couture?”

“You want couture? I’ll show you buttons with diamonds or buttons carved from ancient pieces of lapis. They’re French, all of them. Rarer than hens’ teeth, and we sell them for a fortune. But that’s real couture, Ms. Cooper. House of Worth and Chanel and the like.”

“And the Savage line?”

“Well,” the woman in control of the button said, “American couture. Nothing like the Europeans. Savage didn’t do buttons with real gems or anything that grand.”

“But you said this one is distinctive,” I said.

“In all his higher-priced collections-call them couture if you insist-his buttons were always made in the shape of the animal’s head, like his logo. He worked that feature into all his clothing, which in my view cheapened a high-fashion statement.”

“How foolish of me not to recognize it. It’s not half a heart, it’s half of the wolf’s face.”

“Sort of like a Rorschach test, isn’t it? Half a face and that notch where the little ear chipped off, too,” she said to me. “Anyway, the animal’s eyes were always made of plastic in Savage pieces. That’s what’s missing from that small hole in the metal. A plastic eye that matched the color of the design-red, blue, green. And an ear.”

The first saleswoman spoke up again. “Yes, the missing ear threw me off, too. That’s why I thought it might have been a heart. This little critter must have been in some kind of fight, and he was certainly the loser.”

Perhaps there had been a fight-a struggle in Wolf’s hotel room.

I thought of Hal Savage’s cufflinks with the ruby-red eyes. “What color eye does this button have?” I asked, reaching for it.

“Black eyes, Ms. Cooper,” the second saleswoman said. “All the animal prints had some black in their designs-leopards, zebras, tigers. So Mr. Savage used black plastic-it was supposed to look like crystal-for the eyes on this one collection. And he had a series of reverse buttons made, too.”

“Reverse?”

“Yes, if the cuffs of the silk blouses had gold-tone buttons on the cuffs, with black eyes, Savage sprung for black onyx buttons for the opening of the garment, with little gold dots for eyes.”

She reached into the cardboard box and came out with the black onyx buttons. “Big splurge for WolfWear,” she joked.

“I’d certainly like to take two of these gold ones, that match my broken button,” I said. “And two of the onyx, please.”

“The metal ones with black eyes are forty dollars each.”

“Forty? They’re useless old buttons.”

She laughed. “You’re the second one in this week. Must be a rush on old Mr. Savage because of the show at the Costume Institute.”

“So you’ve gone and raised the price on me, haven’t you?” I said, laughing along with her.

“Just a bit. You can have them for thirty. But the onyx are seventy-five dollars apiece. I can’t do any better for you on those.”

“Very, very tender buttons, indeed.”

I gave the woman my credit card and waited while she wrapped the onyx fastenings in a little cloth bag, separate from the metal ones.

“Tell me, who’s my competition?” I asked. “Who else has a broken button on her wild animal? My friend might be wearing her blouse next week.”

“She won’t want to see herself coming and going, will she?”

“Certainly not. Maybe your other customer-the woman who bought the other button-she works at the Savage company?”

“Your first mistake is it’s not a ‘she,’ Ms. Cooper. I sold the button-just one of the gold-tone ones-to a man. A very polite man who came in the other day.”

“A man? Did he say why he wanted it?”

“A sale is a sale. I don’t ask questions. And he paid cash for it, so I can’t even help you with a credit-card receipt.”

“Older than I am?” I asked, thinking of Hal Savage.

“More or less your age. Could be younger.”

“Can you describe him at all?”

“Nice-looking fellow. He was wearing a navy-blue jacket-sort of a ski jacket-with the collar up against the weather. Sunglasses and a baseball cap snug on his head. Nothing unusual, but then I couldn’t see much of him.”

Reed Savage? Or someone else who worked for the company?

“Do you happen to know what day it was?”

She thought for a minute. “I was off yesterday. Let me see. It must have been Wednesday morning. First thing, shortly after the shop opened.”

I don’t think Reed Savage had even arrived from London then. But it was certainly after Wolf Savage had died.

“You should know the same man also bought a dozen gold military-style buttons from the Ralph Lauren collection of that same year,” she said. “Could be a collector, Ms. Cooper. You just never know.”

“I guess it could be as simple an explanation as that.” I didn’t believe it for a minute.

“I mean, it’s not like that little piece of metal-with an ear, without an ear-it’s not like it’s going to help Wolf Savage one iota now that he’s dead.”