Killer Look (21 page)

“That's the first thing you've said that I understand one hundred percent. Somebody killed your sister, and quite possibly your father, too, right?” Mike said. “Most likely their murders are connected. You should be scared.”

“That's rough, Mike,” I said, stepping between Mike and the desk. “Let's all take it down a notch.”

“You think I could be next, don't you?” Lily asked.

“Me?” Mike said. “I think you're safe, actually. You're safe for as long as you're a suspect in those two
murders.”

“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—WOL
F SAYS:

NO SMILING

NO
DANCING

NO EYE CONT
ACT WITH AUDIENCE

NO
FAST MOVEMENTS

NO S
LOW MOVEMENTS

DO NOT
BE STIFF

DO NOT BE
CASUAL

BE NEUTRAL

BE
CALM

BE STOICAL

STO
P AT THE END OF RUNW
AY FOR THE CAMERA

DO
NOT LOOK AT THE CAM
ERA

“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.”

“Sorry I've offended you, Ms. Cooper,” Hal Savage said.

“I'm not—”

“Your expression gives you away. Good thing Mr. Chapman's only got five minutes before I show him to the door.”

I wasn't as appalled by his words and manner as I was speeding ahead and connecting the dots. Josie, the housekeeper in the Silver Needle who had done a disappearing act on us, was completely into voodoo. Could that be a link to Tanya Root's mother? And Mercer had talked to Wolf's fourth wife. She was also a former model, living in New Orleans, who remembered that another ex-girlfriend of Wolf's lived there. This gave us two more leads to follow.

Mike was on the same page as I was. “There's this housekeeper at the hotel where your brother died. Her name is Josie. Do you know her at all?”

Hal thought about answering for a few seconds. “Josie? Yeah, she's still hanging around.”

“Your brother recommended her for the job at the Silver Needle,” Mike said. “What did she have on him?”

“You've really been digging in the dirt, Detective, haven't you?”

“You go where your victim leads you,” Mike said. “This one feels like I'm in mud right up to my nostrils. Suits pigs better than it suits me, frankly.”

Hal clasped his fingers at the back of his head. “Wolf might have liked you, Chapman. He liked attitude.”

“Haitian voodoo and Louisiana voodoo—what's the hook between them?” Mike asked abruptly.

“They're close enough,” Hal said, avoiding Mike's question. “Tanya's mother dropped the news on Wolf that she was having a baby. It was months after she left New York,” Hal said. “My brother sent her money and kept sending her money for years, until he got sick of sending her money.”

“What happened when he stopped?”

“Tanya showed up at the office one day. Seventeen years old, almost eighteen. Her mother put her on a bus all the way up here from New Orleans.”

“How'd that appearance go?” Mike asked.

“Not well, Detective. Scared the shit out of my brother, plain and simple.”

“What happened?”

“Tanya started out nice enough. Wolf told me they talked and talked for hours. After all,” Hal said, “none of this was the kid's fault.”

“What was Tanya like?” I asked. I was thinking, too, of her plastic surgery and whether she really could have been a model.

“I only met her twice. I'm getting to that part,” he said. “Wolf thought she was a decent kid. Poor thing looked like Wolf, not her mother. He might have put her on a runway if she could have made that work, but she had a build more like her father's than like a model.”

“Did she ask him for money?” Mike said.

“You bet. But he had to stop somewhere, so he kept putting her off. I know he got her a room in a hotel.”

“The Silver Needle?”

“That first time? I don't think it even existed then. And he didn't want her around here, in the Garment District.”

“Don't you remember where it was?” I asked. Maybe it was a place she came back to on later trips, and even the one that ended with her death.

“She wanted to be uptown. That's all that comes to me. She knew a guy who moved up here from New Orleans to play in a jazz club in Harlem. Gentrified Harlem. Tanya wanted to hang out with him. So Hal put her up for a few weeks—had her taken care of.”

That could focus our search. If the hotel she stayed in then was still in the same hands, it could fit with the location where Tanya's body was found in the East River.

“She claimed her mother was dying and that she needed a bundle of money to care for her,” Hal said. “The girl didn't want to stay in New York. So Wolf had his lawyer draw up papers. He told Tanya to come to our offices the day before she was leaving, and he'd give her a check to cover some of the medical expenses.”

“She showed up, of course,” Mike said.

“Yeah. That's when I met her. Tanya—I don't remember her last name, but it wasn't Root at the time. Wolf wanted me to witness the meeting, since he didn't trust anyone else with the family secret.”

“Did she take the check?”

Hal laughed. “She wanted the check but she balked when it came to signing the document.”

“Why?” Mike said. “What was it?”

“It was a release that neither she nor her mother would ever get another nickel from Wolf Savage after she turned eighteen.”

“But wasn't her mother dying?” I asked. It seemed like an awfully cold plan to me.

“I'm sure Wolf hired a private dick to find out about that. I really don't think it was the truth. I seem to recall it was all about the kid and what she wanted from him.”

“What did Tanya do?” Mike said.

“She tore the check in half,” Hal said. “Cursed at both of us in some creole patois and stormed out of the offices.”

“That was the end of it?” Mike said.

“Hardly. Tanya called my brother the next morning. She asked if she could come by at the end of the day to apologize. She was willing to sign the release and take the check. I can't remember the amount, but it was at least twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“How'd that go?”

“I waited with Wolf till almost eight o'clock. I cut a new check and we started all over again,” Hal said. “Tanya? Came in sweet as could be. Signed the release, pocketed the check—and then she went berserk. I mean you've-never-seen-anything-like-it berserk.”

He was on his feet, waving his arms around.

“Here comes the voodoo,” Mercer said.

“Right in this very office. The two of us—grown men—we were shaking in our boots, like we were made of jelly. A hex, Detective. Have you ever had anyone put a hex on you?”

“Not lately,” Mike said.

“Tanya had a bag with her. Like a cheap plastic tote that she sat on top of Wolf's desk. Here,” he said pointing. “Right here.”

We all pushed our chairs back while he moved around, imitating her movements as he told his story. “Then she pulled a hammer out of the tote, just an ordinary claw hammer, and she started whacking at the bag, cursing the whole time. Pounding at whatever was in the bag—we had no idea—until she pulverized it.”

He stopped to catch his breath. “I tried to pick up the phone
to call security in the lobby of the building, but she reached out and smashed the phone. She nearly nailed my hand to the desktop with the hammer.”

“Chicken bones,” Mercer said. “Tanya was giving you the Bones of Anger hex.”

Hal Savage pointed at Mercer. “How'd you know? How'd you know about it?”

“My wife has family in Baton Rouge. Let's leave it at that,” Mercer said. “You want your hex to be potent, you make sure you've got dry chicken bones, and then you just work yourself up into a frenzy of anger and hatred.”

“I hope your people aren't as insane as this one was,” Hal said.

He took his imaginary tote bag and started circling the room, pretending to be sprinkling the contents of the bag all around on the floor.

He was chanting at the same time, trying to remember words from all those years ago. “Bones of anger,” he said, “and something about bones to dust. ‘With these bones your soul I crush, make my enemy turn to dust.'”

He walked back to the desk. “I picked up Tanya's hammer and ran out to my office. I figured my brother could handle the kid and the broken chicken bones. That's when I called security,” Hal said. “Then I remembered about Josie.”

“Josie LaPorte?” I asked. “The housekeeper at the Silver Needle?”

“Exactly. Only back then, she was on the janitorial staff of this building. Worked the night shift, cleaning offices. She used to make Wolf crazy, mumbling all kinds of things that had to do with voodoo and hexes and spells. I told security to find her—wherever she was and whatever she was doing—and get her to our offices stat.”

“Tanya was still there when security arrived?” Mike said.

“There was enough chicken dust in that tote bag to keep her busy sprinkling it all over the place for another hour,” Hal said. “Fortunately, security came and, shall we say, restrained her. Wolf didn't want her locked up. We never called your department. He just wanted her on the first morning bus back home. He paid Josie to sit with her all night in one of the offices. That's when he bonded with Josie.”

“It didn't matter that Haitian voodoo and Louisiana voodoo aren't the same?”

“Trust me, those two communicated just fine. Josie went with the two security guards in the morning to the Port Authority Bus Terminal to see Tanya off—with her twenty-five-thousand-dollar check.”

“So she knows that Tanya was Wolf's daughter,” I said.

“Yeah. She even promised my brother she could reverse the hex. Something with a magic mirror and black salt and a photograph of Tanya. I didn't stick around for that ceremony, but Josie did it.”

“What did she get in exchange?” Mike asked.

“Night janitorial jobs in commercial offices? They're the worst. Cleaning up after everybody's crap, including all the stinking food that's left around. Plus, it's when the roaches and the mice come out to play. You don't want to be here at two
A.M
. Trust me. All Josie wanted was a housekeeping job in a fancy hotel. Daytime preferred. That's what she asked my brother to help her with, and he did. It was like going from being Cinderella to the Duchess of Windsor. First at some boutique hotel nearby that went out of business a few years ago, and then Wolf got her placed at the Silver Needle—working on his floor—which was empty most of the time anyway.”

“Did they stay in touch?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Hal said. “Every time my brother heard from
Tanya, he asked Josie for help. I'd say there was an eight-year period when all was quiet. Then two or three years ago, Tanya started to call again.”

“Did she ever show up here, in the office?”

“No. At least, not that I know of. The first I learned she was anywhere near New York was from the medical examiner. If she was breathing down my brother's neck, he didn't tell me about it.”

“So Josie's the one to ask,” I said. “If Tanya was bothering him.”

“That's a good idea,” Hal said. “Josie was always telling Wolf that one of Tanya's revenge spells—that's what she calls those hexes—that one of those spells was going to bring him down. Be the end of him.”

“No wonder Josie wouldn't go into the room where he died,” Mercer said.

“No surprise there. She always thought evil spirits surrounded Wolf, despite her best efforts to cleanse him of them, because of what Tanya did. Josie would be a million miles away if she thought Tanya had anything to do with his death.”

We had to find Josie LaPorte. Two murders were enough.

“Now, gentlemen and Ms. Cooper, maybe you can find a way to occupy the rest of your day and leave me and my team in peace,” Hal said, standing up and walking toward the door.

We all stood up, too.

“A couple more things,” Mike said. “I'm going, but—”

“You're worse than Columbo,” Hal said, throwing up his arms. “You've got two questions left, which means that one of them's a trick to make me confess to murder. I've seen every one of those TV shows. You think I'm a clown?”

He was mocking Mike now, never a good tactic.

“It would save us a hell of a lot of time if you confess, I'll give you that,” Mike said. “Did your brother ever change his name? I mean go to court to have it legally changed?”

“Were you listening to me when we were with Dr. Parker the other day, Detective? I'm Herschel Savitsky, like I told her. You got me, Chapman. Was that supposed to be a tough one for me? And my brother was born and died a Savitsky, just like I told the doc. Is that the best you can do?”

“I'll try my other one,” Mike said. “Where's the money, Mr. Savage? You're the company's CFO, why don't you tell me what happened to all the money?”

Hal Savage didn't like that question. “Like I said, get a dirty old trench coat and you can give Columbo a run for his money.”

“It's not a trick question,” Mike said. “I'm just trying to figure out who ran your brother's empire into the ground. Were you asleep at the wheel?”

Hal held up his left hand and began counting on each finger with his right hand. “My brother spent a fortune on the ladies, Detective, in case you hadn't figured that one out yet. Then there was a period of his drug addiction. A very long, difficult period. If you didn't know about it, I'm sure some snitch will bring it up. Cocaine and prescription drugs. He was running through money like sand through a sieve. What was I going to do? Let him kill himself that way?”

“No—but . . .”

“Look, the company gave him an expense account—at my direction—to cover all the food and wine he spent on broads. Then we paid for his rehab, 'cause we'd probably been covering the allowance for his drugs, too. And do you have any idea how many lawsuits I had to settle for sexual harassment over the years?” he said, raising his voice louder and louder. “Do you understand how many millions went out the door to keep the stories about Wolf's harassment of women in the business from getting out? There's a guy around the corner who makes zippers for the industry. Understand that?”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “Your nephew told us about him.”

“Only zippers. That's all the guy does. Well, even he couldn't make one that locked tight enough to keep my brother's penis in his pants. Do the math, Detective. Just try and do the math.”

Mike walked into the hallway. “I get it, Mr. Savage. First you blamed Reed for the missing corporate funds. Now you pile it on the dead man himself, putting the company he created in financial jeopardy.”

“Damn right. It sure as hell isn't
my
doing.”