Killer Look

FORTY-SIX

Security gave us an empty office not far from the dressing area. Mike and Mercer spent half an hour calming me while the show wrapped up on the runway.

The public rooms cleared pretty quickly, and most of the guests who had enjoyed the fashions on display in the Dendur wing moved downstairs to the Costume Institute without learning that Reed Savage and I had come within inches of taking each other’s lives.

Mike got a sweatshirt from one of the hairdressers and leggings from a model, and I slipped into the restroom to change.

Mercer brought David Kingsley into the office first. David admitted that once Wolf Savage rebuffed his efforts to insert Lily into the business, David researched the whereabouts of Tanya Root. Her new surname had come from a short-lived marriage.

Tanya had been supporting herself by prostitution. The breast implants that ultimately identified her were an effort she hoped would increase her business, not an attempt at a modeling career. David had learned about Tanya’s old hex on her father during his conversations with Wolf. He had the financial resources to hunt her down and was able to convince her that he could help get her fingers-and Lily’s as well-on some of their father’s fortune.

Lily was ignorant of David’s plans, first hatched three years earlier, during their separation, and put in play after their child, named for Wolf, was born.

David talked to us because he was desperate to separate himself from a murder charge.

He’d been told that Reed was in police custody at the hospital-which would be obvious to Reed when he woke up from the anesthesia given to him for his surgery-and that every effort was being made to find Tiz Bolt, because Mike and Mercer believed that she and Reed had killed Wolf Savage together. She would never make her way onto a plane in the morning.

Mike would run down everything in the days that followed, but for the moment he wanted to know the broad strokes that had set two killings in motion.

David Kingsley folded his arms on the empty desk in front of him, put his head down on them, and cried for three or four minutes. That was all the time Mike was going to give him.

“Tell it to us first,” he said. “It makes it that much easier when you spill it all out to your wife later on.”

David picked up his head. He appeared to be too emotionally exhausted to argue with Mike.

“I’m the one who encouraged Tanya to make another run at her father,” David said. “Lily didn’t know. She didn’t know anything about it. I figured that my new relationship with Wolf would bring him to rely on me to handle Tanya this time around.”

“Why you?” Mike asked.

“A couple of times at lunch-days when Wolf was drinking martinis and opening up to me-he told me the stories about Tanya,” David said. “Things had changed between him and Hal-for the worse-so I convinced myself that if Wolf needed help with anything that had to do with family, he’d lean on me from that point on.”

“Why not on Reed? Why were you so confident that Wolf wouldn’t bring his own son in?”

“I miscalculated, I guess,” David said. “I was right here in town, and Reed was always an ocean away. Recently, Wolf had been on Reed’s back because he’d failed to take the company global.”

That part of the story fit well with what we already knew. Reed had admitted it when we had our first one-on-one with him.

David Kingsley was rubbing his eyes. “Maybe Wolf didn’t like me any better than he liked his kids, but he was really into my success in business,” he said, and then, with hesitation, he added a line: “That’s what I was banking on. That and the fact that he was so vocal about calling Reed a loser.”

“And let Reed know that, too,” I said.

“You bet he did. Wolf let everyone know it.”

“So you were not only going to prop up your father-in-law’s company,” Mike said. “You also wanted to be the family fixer. Ingratiate yourself-and Lily-with the old man.”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Even at the cost of Reed’s relationship with his father.”

David looked up at Mike. “You could say that, too, Detective.”

“What happened when Tanya got in touch with her father?” I asked. “Did she show up at the offices, like before?”

“I wasn’t intending on her going that far,” David said. “It just started with some phone calls. I mean, Tanya didn’t need much prompting. She’s much more unstable than I thought.”

“You set her in motion?” Mike said.

“Yeah, but then I lost control. Just lost her,” he said. “Wolf never let me in on it-that’s what’s so ironic. He must have dumped the assignment on Reed after all, since he was already the king of hopeless causes.”

“Did Reed know you wanted a piece of the action?” Mike said. “The family money?”

“Sure. Sure he did. Just my being around made him angry, especially since Wolf played us one against the other. Very much the Savage style.”

“That assignment to make Tanya go away gave Reed a chance to get back in his father’s favor,” I said, “by ridding him of Tanya and her bad juju.”

David threw up his hands. “That’s where it went dark for me,” he said. “Tanya dropped me once I met with her briefly and gave her some cash-too much cash. We talked to each other a few times, I told her I’d back her if she wanted to get more money out of Wolf. But then, a couple of weeks later, it was quiet. Way too quiet.”

“What did you think?” I asked.

This was the most heartless group of people I’d encountered in ages.

“Well, just that she went back home. Took my money and left town,” David said. “She was gone, and Wolf never opened his mouth to me about her. You have to believe me when I say I never thought she’d wind up dead. Never. This idea of mine was just about getting Lily and my kids-and even Tanya-money that I thought was rightfully theirs.”

Greed. Two people murdered. Two suspects, one already in custody. David’s role would also be examined and reexamined in the days that followed.

David fell on his sword-the imagery seemed to fit the setting tonight-and admitted that throughout the period before and after Tanya arrived in town, he had been pressuring Wolf Savage to change his will.

“Did Reed know about that too?” Mike asked.

A motive for murder couldn’t be clearer.

“He did,” David said. “He even called me out on it.”

“Before Wolf died?”

David put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. “Yes, two or three weeks before.”

“Did you actually get anywhere with Wolf and a new will?” I asked. “Anywhere beyond the testamentary letters?”

David wouldn’t pick up his head. “Does that make me guilty of something?”

“I think everything you had to do with Wolf Savage and the family makes you guilty of more things than I can enumerate for you right now, but most of them can’t be prosecuted in a court of law.” I was short with him, sick of his self-serving whine. “I want to know if there’s another will.”

“Just an interim one,” he said. “I got him to see my lawyer, but-but Wolf never had time to sign it. Time, or maybe interest in signing it. Look, are you charging me with anything?”

“Too close to call, like they say in politics. First thing we got on our plates is Reed,” Mike said. “They’re taking a splinter out of his thigh right now, but then I get to cuff him and take him away.”

I bit my lip. It would have been the first time I’d laughed all night. A steel “splinter” embedded in the killer’s thigh.

“Tiziana Bolt. What do you know about Tiz?” I asked David.

“Everything I know I learned way too late.”

“Like what?”

It was as though David Kingsley was getting a load off his chest. “That Wolf had developed a habit, back in rehab, of putting his hands on her-all over her-and that recently he’d done it one time too many.”

“She told you that?”

“No. Wolf admitted it to me. He was complaining about her attitude recently. He was miserable about the fact that she had hooked up with Reed,” David said. “Wolf was actually worried she was conniving with Reed to help him hold on to his share of the family fortune.”

“But he kept her on the payroll anyway?” I asked.

David looked up at me. “She had put so much into the show, and into the exhibit at the Costume Institute. Wolf was going to get past this long week and then hang Tiz out to dry.”

Whether or not Reed talked in the next few days-to explain his relationship with Tiz in more detail, which he thought he’d kept secret from everyone at the company, to describe what had brought him to have Tanya killed, and to admit that he and Tiz had conspired to kill Wolf Savage and stage a suicide-Mike and Mercer were already planning ways to advance the case. There would be phone records, texts and emails, then airline tickets, hotel records, and witnesses to track down.

WolfWear and the entire Savage empire were at risk. The business was not likely to survive this week, despite the evening’s dramatic launch.

Someone-perhaps a special prosecutor-would be assigned to see if there was any significance to the connection between District Attorney Paul Battaglia and George Kwan. Whether Kwan had any role in the decline of the Savage businesses would be an issue, too.

Hal Savage, the life of the party in the Costume Institute downstairs at the very moment we were meeting, was going to be the subject of a fraud investigation at the DA’s Office. It seemed to me that he had not played any role in the murder of his brother, despite their falling-out over the financial state of the business, but too much money had disappeared, and the search to find it would start on his desk.

WolfWear, which had appeared to be such a worldwide success for so long, was teetering on the brink of failure. I had no doubt Battaglia’s white-collar-crime team would be scouring the books and bank records to find the paper trail of its dwindling proceeds. The company seemed to be close to declaring bankruptcy, and this telescoping set of scandals was likely to topple the entire global enterprise-the lifelong dream of Velvel Savitsky.