Killer Look

FORTY-FIVE

I was still in my stocking feet, shoes in hand, making my way back toward the large dressing area in the American Art wing.

I went the entire length of the Great Hall thinking about what it meant that Tiziana Bolt and Reed Savage had an intimate relationship. For how long had that been the case? Why had they concealed it? How did it play into the events of the last month?

I made the left turn to head to the dressing area. As I passed the top of the staircase that led down to the Costume Institute, Reed Savage was coming up. We practically collided with each other.

I lowered my head and kept walking, expecting he wouldn’t recognize me, except as the person who encountered him after his snort of cocaine.

“Alex Cooper? That’s you? You’ve got no damn business being here tonight, Ms. Cooper,” Reed said. “And trying to disguise yourself like that… what was that about? To catch me getting high? You’d have to arrest half the people here for that offense. What a joke.”

My free hand flew to my head. I was no longer disguised, but I had forgotten that in my scuffle with Tiz.

Reed stood in front of me, blocking my way. “You want to do something useful, let me have your phone.”

“I haven’t got one.”

“Did you spook Tiz? Is that why she’s not downstairs?” he said. “My phone’s in her bag and I need to call her.”

“There’s plenty of phones in the dressing area, I’m sure,” I said, trying to pass him by.

“You know where she is, don’t you? Have you turned her over to the cops?”

“Why?” I asked. Reed Savage was totally in my face. “For blow? She’s your provider, I guess. Tiz told me her drug history last week. I’m sure she’d have no problem finding coke for you.”

“Let’s go downstairs and have a talk.”

I wasn’t going back to the Costume Institute. No one else was there. I wanted to stay close to all the people-security included-who were still working the show.

“You want to say something to me, Reed, say it right here.”

He stepped to the left, toward the opening of the gallery with all the knights on guard. I went with him.

“Tell me what you did with Tiz,” he demanded.

“I know your father-or Velly, as Tiz called him-used to have quite an addiction to Oxy,” I said. “He went to all that trouble to commit himself to an inpatient facility to clean himself up. One time that I know of. Maybe other visits, too. We can check all that out.”

Reed was fuming now. He realized the information-and Tiz’s nickname for his father-could only have come from her.

“Then somebody goes and undoes it all,” I said. “I doubt that after working so hard to break the habit Wolf just fell back into it on his own. So I wondered, who was the temptress who could hook Wolf again on the drug? Who could reintroduce him to Oxy-the one substance that had been his weakness? Because that was an essential part of the plan, wasn’t it?”

I would keep talking to him, feeding him tidbits, until Mike got the word to come looking for me or Reed made a break for the front door, where security was in place. Maybe I’d prod him into a response.

He gritted his teeth and spoke each word as angrily as I expected he would. “There was no plan.”

“Sure there was,” I said. “Getting him high on his favorite drug-just like old times-and then, when he passed out on the bed, you put the exit bag over his head and gave him a whiff of helium. That’s all it would have taken, and you’d be rid of his control forever.”

Reed Savage slammed his fist into the wall, walking away from me into the darkened gallery. I looked behind me, but there was no sign of Mike yet.

“Painless. That’s what Tiz told me,” I said. “Really, Reed? You killed your own father, but tried to find a painless way to do it? He may have been a monster, but no more so than you.”

He was pacing the long room while I was standing still, as though making a case to a jury-a jury made up of life-size hollow coats of armor, the legacy of men who once found the need to dress themselves completely in steel.

“Then there’s the blouse,” I said. “The one that you gave to Wanda Beston to wear tonight. That stymied me for a bit, but then it became so obvious.”

“What was obvious?” Reed asked. He was pacing back toward me.

“Like one of those Hitchcock plots where the murderer kills someone with a leg of lamb, then cooks the lamb and feeds it to the detective. The evidence was gone.”

“What?” He was banging on glass cabinets and doing everything but throwing down his gauntlet to challenge one of the knights to a duel.

“Tiz Bolt was wearing that blouse the night you two killed your father,” I said.

It never hurt to try out the theory of the crime on the killer. So many of them are anxious to show how much smarter than you they are.

“So you found the best possible way to get rid of it. When your father struggled with Tiz,” I said, “which only goes to prove that murder is never painless, Reed, he ripped that button off the blouse.”

Reed Savage stood still, poised in the doorframe that led to the adjacent gallery. “You’ve got nothing,” he said.

“Not so, Reed. Because a piece of the button that was damaged in the struggle was found by the cops in the carpet of-”

“That proves nothing.”

“Let me finish, please.” I could see how rattled he was-the cocaine? The truth? The missing accomplice? It calmed me to see him shakier than I had just been. “The broken piece of the button was in the carpet of the room next to the one where your father was killed. You know, the one where you hid the hand truck with the helium canister while Tiz did her little dance of death with her old friend Velly.”

Reed had heard enough. He brushed past me and started out of the gallery toward the dressing area. “I need a fucking phone.”

I kept talking. The men in armor seemed spellbound.

“Didn’t Tiz tell you about the trail she left? Buying the replacement button last week to try to repair the blouse?”

It was all coming together in my own head. The hotel manager’s description of the two men-Reed, no doubt, and Tiz in her boyish way of concealing herself-who wheeled in the hand truck on the day of the murder. The woman in the button store who described the tall, slim young man in a baseball cap and ski jacket, sunglasses hiding his face, who was in the shop a couple of days before I bought the button. The young man who delivered the damaged leopard-print blouse to Wanda Beston at her job. It was actually Tiz, who in describing herself to me on Friday had talked about her perfect androgynous appearance. The look of a prepubescent boy-great for the runway, and even better for concealing her identity when it was convenient.

“She did what?” Reed asked.

“Tried to replace the broken button so the blouse could take its place in this exhibition downstairs, as planned. One of Wolf Savage’s classics. But the damage to the fabric the night the button was ripped off made that exercise useless,” I said. “So how better to get it out of the company offices, out from under the detective’s nose, than to give it to poor Wanda? To suggest, in case anyone was thinking it, that she might have been the killer.”

“Wanda is the one who found the body,” Reed said, raising his voice. “How do you know what was going on between Wanda and my father? Maybe she’s the one who struggled with him?”

“Stay with me, Reed. It’s you who gave her the blouse-after the fact,” I said. “After your father was dead. I’ve got Tiz so deep into this that she’ll flip in a heartbeat.”

He tried to size me up for five seconds then turned his back on me.

“You don’t really think you’re getting on that morning flight to London, do you?” I asked. “Not before we find out how you and Tiz killed Tanya?”

Now his rage was in full bloom. “I wasn’t even in the country when Tanya was killed. It’s Lily’s husband who lured that greedy bitch up here, so they could join forces to blackmail my father into changing his will. I wasn’t anywhere near Manhattan.”

“We can prove that you were here, Reed. I’ve got the detectives working on that right now,” I said.

I was thinking as fast as I could. Of course the airline ticket was in the Savitsky name, because Reed didn’t believe we’d ever think to check the passenger manifest for that one. He’d be long gone by the time Mike showed up to interview him again.

“It’s called dual citizenship, Reed. You’ve got an American passport in your birth name, and a British one when you turned full-on Savage, growing up in London,” I said. “Isn’t that right? You flew over here-under the radar, using your Savitsky ID-when you thought it was necessary, or just convenient, to dispose of Tanya Root. To hire some boys from the ’hood to club her over the head and dump her in the East River.”

He lunged toward me, missing me only by inches because I jumped back, right against the gallery wall.

I was tired of waiting for Mike Chapman to show up. I yelled “Police!” as loud as I could.

But I also kept baiting Reed Savage. “Did you watch them do it to Tanya? Kill her, I mean?” I asked. “I know you’re a devotee of painless, but it wasn’t too painless for Tanya, cracking her head open, was it? And so much easier to pay for her murder with drugs than with cash.”

He charged at me again and pinned me to the wall of the gallery with one of his elbows pressed across my chest.

I squirmed to get myself free. “Tiz is talking to the police now, Reed. Don’t bother to call her, because she’s giving it all up to the Homicide Squad. You’ll go right to voicemail, and it will be the cops who download the message.”

He was going for my neck with both hands, but I grabbed his shoulders and pushed back hard. My feet slid on the floor and we both fell, taking down one of the knights with us.

I thought the crash of the armored figure would set off all the alarms in the museum, but the two of us were still alone fighting in the dark. The music from the sound system must have drowned out my repeated screams.

“You’re dead,” Reed Savage said to me, up on one knee, his hand on my chest-probably trying to decide whether he was better off getting out of the museum or silencing me while he had the chance.

“Chapman!” I screamed. “Murder!”

Reed Savage covered my mouth with his other hand, straining to keep it shut while I rolled back and forth on the floor, trying to catch his fingers between my teeth.

The fallen knight was beside me-the cold steel of his chest plate digging into my ribs as Reed tried to wedge me into a corner.

Something on the floor was glimmering. It wasn’t my stocking, but it was next to my leg, long and shiny.

I screamed Mike’s name again. Reed couldn’t keep my mouth completely covered, so the sound was muffled but fierce. He grabbed at the two long strands of pearls that were doubled around my neck, pulling them tight under my chin to choke me while holding his clenched fist against my throat, blocking my airway.

I coughed and gagged, and my thrashing caused the strings of the necklace to break apart. Mrs. Stafford’s pearls bounced and rolled across the gallery floor like dozens of BBs exploding from the barrel of a gun.

Reed was looking around for something-something to hit me with, I thought. He rose up on one leg, his other knee deep in my stomach.

He spotted the antique helmet lying next to my head and tried to pry it loose from the stand that had anchored it to the rest of the body armor. I closed my eyes at the thought of it smashing into my face.

Reed needed both hands to wrest the helmet from whatever museum display device held it in place. He worked it and worked it, despite my twists and turns, till he got it free.

The long weapon with the sharp steel point that glittered on the floor in the dark room was beside me, close enough for me to reach. It too had been knocked loose by its fall.

I grabbed it by its shaft with my right hand and slid the handle back beside me so that the blade of it was just below my shoulder.

As Reed Savage hoisted the helmet above his head, aimed directly at my face, I lifted the bone handle of the deadly weapon three or four inches off the ground-as high as I had the strength to raise it while on my back-and thrust it forward.

I speared him in the fleshy portion of his thigh with every ounce of energy I had left.

The blade pierced Reed’s leg. He fell over, off my body and onto the floor. His screams filled all the galleries around us, bringing half the museum’s security team running to my side within seconds.

One of the cops called 911 to get an ambulance on the scene, while four others lifted the howling Savage son and carried him toward the front of the museum, unable to remove the thick blade without ripping open his leg.

A part of me was actually glad that the man who had killed his own sister and father was in so much pain.

I sat up, shattered and stunned, waiting for Mike Chapman. All I wanted was for him to take me home.