Killer Look

FOUR

Mike drove me home after dinner. He stopped the car in the porte cochere that ran in front of my building like a driveway.

Vinny and Oscar were the doormen on duty. Vinny was at the passenger’s side door as soon as he saw Mike pull in. He opened it for me and waited while I turned back to Mike.

“Coming up?” I swallowed hard-pride too-as I asked the question.

“I’ve got an early morning. You try to get some real sleep,” he said, flashing his trademark grin to reassure me that things between us were okay. “Tomorrow night, for sure. After all, you’ll be blonder by then.”

I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Don’t give up on me yet, okay? I’m coming back, I promise.”

Vinny walked me inside, where Oscar had already pushed the button for the twentieth floor. There were security cameras in the elevators, and I knew they would be watching me all the way up.

I turned my key in the lock and pushed open the door. I’d left the lights on when I went out for dinner, preferring to come home to familiar things that I could see.

It was only nine thirty. I poured a sensible amount of Dewar’s and took it into the bathroom with me to sip while I soaked in a hot whirlpool tub.

I climbed into bed with a stack of magazines, ignored the doctor’s advice about taking Ativan with my liquor, and started flipping through pages till sometime close to three A.M., when the drugs overcame my insomnia and I fell soundly asleep.

When I woke up it was almost eleven A.M. Mike had left me three voicemails, among others from friends. He had started his day witnessing the autopsy of a young mother caught in the crosshairs of a gang shooting in Washington Heights. From the morgue, he had stopped at the boutique hotel where the suicide had occurred, and the final call was his attempt to express his concern for me.

I slipped into my robe and walked to the front door to pick up the newspapers.

The Post was on top of the others. Its entire front page was devoted to the man who had chosen a stark hotel room in which to end his life. The photograph was a headshot of a face familiar to fashionistas and socialites, as well as to entrepreneurs who had followed-and tried to emulate-his rags-to-riches story.

Wolf Savage, the seventy-two-year-old clothing designer who had built an empire that rivaled those of Ralph Lauren and Oscar de la Renta, had carted two helium canisters to his hotel room, undressed himself, laid down on the bed, and put a plastic bag over his head.

Mike hadn’t mentioned the name of the dead man to me. I was stunned. The well-known designer was the one who had broken away from his competitors months ago and announced he’d be holding his own fashion show-out of season-at the Metropolitan Museum.

LONE WOLF. That was the headline that appeared over the picture of Savage, which was side-by-side with an image of the logo that branded his work and was recognized worldwide. WW-for WolfWear, with the head of the animal inserted in the space between the double letters-had become almost as ubiquitous as Lauren’s polo pony.

I turned to the page-two story. “Billionaire businessman Wolf Savage, who was as well known for the string of wives he left behind as he was for his eponymous clothing brand, died alone yesterday in a suite at the Silver Needle Hotel. Estranged from his fifth wife, forty-one years his junior, Savage chose to end it all by himself in a rented room in the Garment District, instead of at one of his posh homes in Connecticut, Palm Beach, London, or Milan.”

I brewed a cup of coffee and sat down at my dining table. Wolf Savage was front page in the Times and Journal as well, where both the articles focused on the serious business accomplishments of the Brooklyn-born executive, who in four decades had transformed his small, inexpensive line of sportswear into an international trend-setting phenomenon. He was a couturier as admired in Paris as in New York, and a retrospective of his greatest work was being held at the Costume Institute in the Metropolitan Museum simultaneously to the fashion show Wolf had planned to move to the Temple of Dendur, also at the Met.

I dialed Mike’s phone.

“About time you woke up, kid. Everything okay?”

“So far, so good,” I said. “I’m just reading the papers. Why didn’t you tell me the suicide you were talking about was Wolf Savage?”

“What difference does that make, Coop? You know him?”

“I don’t know him from Adam,” I said. “But sometimes I wear him.”

“You like that shit, with some beady-eyed animal crawling up the front of your clothes?”

“It’s good stuff, WolfWear,” I said. “And this is a huge story. Anything unusual at the scene?”

“Same old, same old,” Mike said. “What time is your appointment at Elsa’s?”

“Hair’s at four. Mani-pedi at one.”

“That’s the life, kid. You better get a move on.”

“How are you spending the rest of your day?” I asked.

“The girl who was autopsied this morning. We got some leads on the gang members who were involved. Going back uptown to check them out.”

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“It feels good to be back in the city,” I said. “And I really liked the message you left for me. You know, the last one.”

“Nice,” he said. “Nice on both fronts. You stay busy, Coop. I’ll see you later.”

I skimmed the Wolf Savage stories. There hadn’t been time for a full obit, but there were a bunch of features culled from clips about him over the years.

The Garment District-a rectangular patch of Manhattan that spreads from Fifth to Ninth Avenues, West Thirty-Fifth to West Forty-Second Street-had once been the heart of this entire country’s clothing design and manufacturing industry. As technology and cheap foreign outsourcing picked away at this long, local supremacy, Wolf Savage-according to the Times-was one of the power players fighting to maintain the character of this historic one square mile of city real estate.

Sort of ironic, I thought, that he chose to end his life in a new hotel, the name of which paid homage to an essential tool of the trade-the Silver Needle-on West Thirty-Eighth Street, in the very heart of what had been, for more than a century, the Garment District.

My phone pinged to announce an incoming text. It was Joan Stafford. “How about that Savage Soiree gown you wore to my wedding? Save it for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum. Value just went up.”

“Your WolfWestern suede jacket from last year when fringe was so hot? I should never have made fun of it,” I replied with both thumbs. “You can have your own room at the Met, Joanie.”

It pinged again. I laughed to myself, thinking of all our shopping expeditions together and what other Wolf creations hung in our closets. But this time the texter was Laura Wilkie, my longtime secretary.

“I hope all is well, Alex. Just wondering-a young woman called a few minutes ago. Says she went to high school with you. Lily, from your swim team in Harrison. She seems desperate to talk to you. May I give her the Vineyard number?”

So Laura didn’t know I was back in town. That was a good thing. Maybe the level of gossip about me had settled down. I racked my brain to pull up a mental image of Lily. I thought of a scrawny brunette with sad eyes, a year behind my grade, who did backstroke on the relay team I anchored with freestyle.

“All good with me, Laura. Miss you. Miss everyone. Best to give Lily my cell, thanks. Talk to you soon.”

“Can’t wait to have you back,” Laura texted. “Will do.”

In less than a minute, my phone rang. “Hello,” I said. “This is Alex Cooper.”

“Alex? It’s Lily Savitsky. I didn’t know whether you’d remember me, so thanks for taking my call.”

“Not a problem,” I said. “Harrison High. The Dolphins. You did an awesome backstroke.”

It was a pretty common occurrence, actually, for people from my past to reach out to me, because my career was such a public one. Friends of friends who’d been sexually abused, relatives of relatives who needed a therapist or a divorce lawyer, acquaintances of folks I’d met only once or twice who wanted free legal advice. I was used to these calls.

“Yeah. I guess it’s been twenty years,” Lily said. “Look, I know you’re out of town, but I have a pretty urgent situation, Alex. I’m hoping you can put me in the right hands.”

“I can try, Lily,” I said. “What’s it about?”

“I don’t know where you’re traveling and what kind of news you get, but it’s the lead story here in the city that a designer named Wolf Savage killed himself yesterday.”

My back stiffened. “I’ve seen the papers, Lily. It’s the top story everywhere.”

“Then I need your help,” she said. “The police and the medical examiner won’t listen to me.”

“Go on.”

“Wolf Savage was my father,” Lily said. “He didn’t kill himself, Alex. I’ll bet everything I have that he was murdered.”