Killer Look

THIRTY

“What did you mean by that?” I asked Mike.

Once Lily pulled herself together, she left the room to freshen up.

“Just what I said, Coop. You can’t tell me the two crimes aren’t connected.”

“I’m with you on that.”

“Maybe the killer is different in each case, but this is a family affair-either way, it’s a father and his daughter who were murdered, whether for personal or business reasons. And as long as the killer, or killers, if Lily is not involved, think that she is a likely suspect-for financial gain and a bigger piece of the will-then she isn’t going to be in danger,” Mike said. “That’s because the killer is likely figuring that Lily might take the fall.”

“Phew. That’s an ugly thought.”

“But a real one.”

“Different killers?” I asked.

“I’m keeping an open mind. I’m willing to consider-I’m just saying consider-that Tanya Root was looking for something from Wolf Savage. Something that he wasn’t willing or able to do.”

“Give her money,” Mercer said.

“Could be that. Could be she wanted into the family business, which also meant money. We won’t know that until we find out more about her.”

“But it makes you think she could have gotten in the old man’s way,” Mercer said, “at a very inopportune moment.”

“Right. His day in the sun, with both the Costume Institute exhibition and the Met fashion show. The last thing he needed was someone threatening to upend his life.”

“Enough to kill her?” I asked.

“I doubt this was a hands-on job, Coop. But if Wolf Savage was desperate, he had the means to make someone disappear.”

“If that’s your theory, then someone else killed him,” Mercer said. “That’s your ‘different killers’ scenario.”

“But then you’ve got Reed and Hal and Lily,” Mike said, “all three of them in precarious positions vis-à-vis Wolf. Now there are three people who each have a motive to get rid of Tanya, if she was pressuring him to change his will in her favor. And the same three people who have reasons to do him in, too.”

Mike was pacing around the room. He stopped at the door, which was closed. Taped to it was a list-enlarged, bolded, and in all caps. He began reading aloud.

RUNWAY PERFORMANCE RULES-WOLF SAYS:

NO SMILING

NO DANCING

NO EYE CONTACT WITH AUDIENCE

NO FAST MOVEMENTS

NO SLOW MOVEMENTS

DO NOT BE STIFF

DO NOT BE CASUAL

BE NEUTRAL

BE CALM

BE STOICAL

STOP AT THE END OF RUNWAY FOR THE CAMERA

DO NOT LOOK AT THE CAMERA

“Is this what I think it is?” Mike asked.

“Yes,” I said, looking over his shoulder at the list that contained at least twenty additional instructions. “Runway rules for his models.”

“That’s a crazy lot of rules for those broads. Makes me think-”

Mike’s thought was interrupted as the door opened, striking him in the shoulder. Hal Savage barged in.

“We’re trying to run a business here,” he said as Mike stepped back. “What is it now? Why don’t you people call and make appointments?”

“Actually, I tried to find you yesterday afternoon,” Mike said. “Didn’t your secretary tell you?”

“That was yesterday,” Hal said. “Can you put this off for a week? Give us time to honor my brother on Monday?”

“Some of what we need to know will wait. I’m sure you must be grateful we got in your way at the morgue,” Mike said.

“Grateful?” Hal said, missing the obvious sarcasm in Mike’s tone. “The one I’m grateful to is Lily. Murder was never part of the picture, in my mind. I owe her a lot for alerting you people to the possibility.”

“Would you have twenty minutes for us right now? Then we’ll get out of your hair,” Mike said. “Why don’t we go down to your office? There’s more room, and we don’t need Lily to be in on this.”

“We can get this done here,” Hal said, crossing his arms and standing his ground.

“Twenty minutes. C’mon. There are things you wouldn’t want me to go into in front of Lily,” Mike said. “Things about the business. Kwan Enterprises and-well, her husband, David.”

“Okay, okay. I’m throwing you out after that,” he said, tapping on his watch face.

We followed him down the corridor, our small parade attracting the attention of all the worker bees in their glass-enclosed hives. In the short space of the last two days, the Wolf Savage sign on the door had been replaced with Hal’s nameplate.

The room was now cluttered with racks of clothes-some of them appeared to be the new line ready to launch-and some looked like vintage WolfWear. They were probably arrayed for the final selection for Monday night’s show.

Mercer, Mike, and I sat down across from Hal Savage.

“I’m shocked,” he said, sitting down and holding his fingers against his forehead. “Did I say that yet? I’m just shocked by the medical examiner’s news.”

There was nothing about the man that sounded sincere. It was as though he realized he had missed a stage cue to express to us the impact of yesterday’s news.

“What shocked you?” Mike asked.

“That Wolf was murdered, of course. I’m reeling from that. I’ll do anything to help you find the killer.”

“I’m counting on you for that,” Mike said. “How about the rest of the story? Any surprises there?”

He looked up and put his hands down. “The dead girl? Tanya Root?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew about Tanya. I’ve known about her since she was born,” Hal said. “I didn’t realize she was back in my brother’s life. I swear it. I was sure he’d paid her off to disappear years ago.”

“Tell me the story.”

Hal Savage glanced in my direction.

“She’s heard it all,” Mike said. “Go on.”

“My brother had a problem his whole life. The kind of guy who couldn’t keep it in his pants,” Hal said. “Reed’s mother-that was a marriage that was expected of him by the family. By the time the boy was conceived, Wolf was on the prowl. She found out about it and cut him off. Never let him back in their bedroom.”

“He left her for Lily’s mother?”

“Yes. He was making a good living, although why he pretended he could be monogamous was beyond me. I liked Lily’s mother,” he said, shaking his head. “I have a real fondness for my niece, too. But Wolf was out of there while she was still a toddler. He never treated the kid right.”

“You had no way to influence that?” I asked. “I mean, you’re the CFO. It sounds like Lily had great credentials, with her business-school degree, to work with both of you. You didn’t ever go to bat for her, did you?”

“My brother didn’t want to hear about it,” he said, waving his hand at me. “She’s here now, isn’t she? What’s the complaint?”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “Why is she here now? What’s that about?”

“Mending fences, maybe. Making up for my brother’s sins.”

“You okay with Lily’s husband?”

“David?” Hal said. “Ambitious kid. But not a problem for me.”

“Who’s your vote for now?” Mike asked. “I mean, if the company needs a bailout. George Kwan, or David Kingsley and his firm?”

“You’re wasting precious minutes, Detective. I’m walking a tightrope this week,” Hal said. “Give me a while to sort this out. David put up the money for the show. That was Wolf’s idea. Now I’m left with my brother’s bad decisions and Kwan Enterprises breathing down my neck. I can’t answer you on that one today.”

“I think we sidetracked you from Tanya Root,” Mercer said. “Go back to her.”

“Sure. Sure, I will,” Hal said. “Wolf married a third time, to the woman who raised Reed. It was during the period when he lived in London, trying to get his business started in Europe. Nice lady. She put up with a lot. He parked Reed over there with her, and came back to New York.

“This was the right business for a guy who’s basically a hound, Detective,” Hal went on. “I hope you’ll excuse me, Ms. Cooper.”

I nodded at him.

“It’s one thing to work in Brooklyn making black hats for Hasidic men. Kind of limits your exposure to temptation. But once my brother got onto Seventh Avenue, he was like a kid in a candy store.”

“Women?”

“Young women, especially. Models, wannabe models, designers, design students. He had an eye for the girls, and with his third wife and kid tucked away across the ocean, he indulged himself. Good-looking ladies, drugs like you wouldn’t believe-and then-boom! The megasuccess that provided the money to enjoy it all.”

“Is that when he met Tanya’s mother?”

“I can’t tell you that exactly,” Hal said. “I’d figure Tanya to be around thirty years old. Go far enough back in the newspaper archives and there are probably photographs of Wolf with her mother.”

“Was she a model?”

“For a nanosecond. Yeah.”

“African?”

“Here’s the thing, Detective. For whatever reason, Wolf was usually attracted to women of color.” Hal was looking over at Mercer now, as though seeking his approval. “Whatever it was, he’s one of the people most responsible for putting black women on the high-fashion runway. Sure, a few of the big-name designers did it with supermodels like Iman and Beverly Johnson, but Wolf started more young women of color in their careers than any ten hotshots you can name.”

“But he was taking advantage of them at the same time?” I asked.

Hal Savage didn’t pretend to hide his annoyance with me. “You call that taking advantage of them? He wasn’t forcing any of them to do things they weren’t willing to do. Everybody benefitted from it, seems to me.”

Sexist? Racist? A throwback to another cultural norm? Hal Savage seemed to be all those things. I thought of bringing up the sad story of Samira-the Ethiopian woman Wolf had impregnated-who died in childbirth with his baby. How many like her were there?

Mercer reached over and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Anyway, to answer your question, Tanya’s mother was about twenty when she came to New York. I don’t remember what her name was-it was all the vogue to do the one-word name thing at the time. My brother was crazy about her. Treated her real good. She screwed it up by becoming pregnant.”

“Sorry,” I said, holding my temper in check, “but I was always under the impression you needed a guy to help with that.”

“You’ve got a sharp tongue, sweetheart.”

I put that in the memory bank right next to the men who called me “dear.”

“That was it with Wolf,” Hal said. “He wasn’t a good father to his first two kids. What made these women think it would make a difference with them, I’ll never know. At least this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I talked him into having a vasectomy.”

Hal chuckled over his own amusement at that thought.

“What about Coco?” I asked. “The child of the woman who stayed in the hotel with him a few times.”

Hal leaned forward and wagged a finger at me. “That, Ms. Cooper, is a perfectly good question. You want to know who was taken advantage of? My brother, that’s who. That wasn’t his child, but the damn bitch tried to shake him down by claiming she was. Put the poor kid in the middle of it. She’d had an affair with him, like way too many women did-and then wanted to squeeze him for a payoff.”

“He didn’t pay?” Mike asked.

“As a result of the vasectomy, Wolf was shooting blanks, Detective. You know the same DNA that connected him to Tanya? Wolf had the mother and kid Ms. Cooper is talking about come stay with him in the Silver Needle Hotel so he could get the child’s DNA-off a soda bottle, no less-to prove he wasn’t the father,” Hal said, wiping his hands against each other, as though he was brushing away crumbs. “He shipped them off, back to wherever they came from. End of story.”

“Is that how he got rid of Tanya’s mother?” I asked, repeating his ice-cold expression. “‘Shipped her off’?”

“That’s how he tried,” Hal Savage said. “He gave her a fistful of cash and a one-way ticket to New Orleans. He never expected to see her pretty face again. I’m sure when he unloaded that one, he never imagined she was pregnant. Wolf wanted no more part of that woman, and no more part of her crazy Louisiana voodoo.”