“What was their connection?”
“I assume you would have asked her that question, Mr. Chapman, or that she would have brought it up with you,” Wetherly said. “Her employment file is silent on the issue, except that Wolf Savage is listed on her original application as a reference.”
“Let’s get her back up here right now,” Mike said. “I dropped the ball on this one.”
“She’s gone for the evening, Detective. Her shift was over by the time you’d finished questioning her.”
“Where does she live?”
“Little Haiti,” Wetherly said. “In Crown Heights.”
“What time does she come in tomorrow morning?”
“She won’t be in for the next few days, Mr. Chapman. She wants some time off, actually,” Wetherly said. “Blames you for it, in fact.”
“Blames me? What the—”
“Josie said you tried to force her into the dead man’s room, Detective. That it was against her religious beliefs, and that you mocked her for that. I doubt you’ll be seeing Josie LaPorte again anytime soon.”
TWELVE
“Get a car out to Crown Heights, Loo,” Mike said to Peterson. He described Josie LaPorte and gave the lieutenant the address that was in her personnel file. “I’ll still be here at the hotel when the guys find her. Bring her back so I can finish what I started, and be sure to tell her we’ll meet in the manager’s office, not on the tenth floor.”
The person who had knocked on the door moments earlier was Wanda Beston, who entered as Charles Wetherly left.
She was a twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker who had worked at the hotel for about one year. She was petite and slim, with a pretty face and an engaging smile.
Mike’s experience with Josie led him to start at the basics with Wanda before getting to the previous morning’s discovery of the body.
She was a high-school graduate who had dropped out of community college and taken a job at the hotel to earn enough money to get her own apartment and go back to school by the time she was thirty.
Wanda had never met Wolf Savage before she started working at the hotel; never seen or been with him anywhere away from the Silver Needle; and kept her distance from Josie LaPorte, who was meddlesome, nosy, and accusatory.
Yes, Wanda had cleaned the Savage suite regularly and was aware that the man had frequently entertained women in his room overnight. No, she didn’t know the names of any of the women. No, he had never come on to her or done anything inappropriate in her presence. No, she wasn’t aware that he had any health issues.
Yes, she met one of his wives on several occasions, but had no idea whether the woman was number four or five. No, she had no idea whether he was a religious man, but the fact that she heard him swear on so many of his phone calls—added to the number of sexual partners she cleaned up after—led her to believe that he was not.
“Do you mind coming back into the suite with us, to describe exactly what you saw yesterday morning?”
“Whatever you need, Detective.”
Wanda was open and cooperative. Mike walked through the doors that led to the suite that Savage occupied. She didn’t hesitate to follow him in, and Mercer and I brought up the rear.
“This is the living room, as you can tell,” Wanda said. “It’s usually much neater than this, of course.”
The Crime Scene Unit detectives had traipsed through the room several times, lugging their equipment. Crime-scene tape was wrapped around several chairs and the sofa, which were all covered in the same chintz fabric.
“This is where Mr. Savage met with his designers sometimes, and the buyers from the out-of-town stores,” Wanda said. “He often kept a laptop on that desk, although he wasn’t very savvy about technical things. Sometimes he’d ask me to Google a company and then he’d forget I was working around him while he’d study the photographs.”
“I don’t remember seeing a laptop when I got here last night,” Mike said. “Did the cops take it with them?”
“I straightened up in here the other morning, before I opened the bedroom door,” Wanda said, holding her forefinger against her lips as she thought about the question. “I don’t recall seeing it. But then, sometimes he had one of the guys take it back to the office for him—you know, to upload new images from his own system. I just don’t remember anything clearly after I saw him on the bed.”
“I get that,” Mike said, making a note on his phone, which I’m sure was a reminder to follow up on the whereabouts of the laptop.
“Did his brother spend time with him here at the hotel?” I asked.
“Do you mean Mr. Hal?” Wanda said.
“Yes.”
“I guess I met him two or three times in the last year—always at meetings of four or five people—but I wouldn’t say that he spent any time here.”
“How about his son, Reed?”
“I’ve met him also. A few more times than Mr. Hal,” Wanda said. “I think the son lives in England. But he never stays here at the Silver Needle when he’s in town. He told me once that the Surrey was his favorite hotel, ’cause he preferred the Upper East Side to the Garment District.”
Mike was leading the way through the threshold to the lavishly appointed bedroom.
Before Wanda could step through, I asked, “How about his daughter? Have you ever met her?”
For the first time, I saw Wanda smile. “Yes, just after I started working here last year. In fact, I babysat for her several times when Mr. Savage and her mother went out. She’s an adorable little girl.”
“Babysat? I must be confused. I was talking about his grown daughter, Lily Savitsky.”
Wanda’s smile disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced. “No, I don’t know Lily, or anything about her. Perhaps I’m mistaken about the child,” she said. “I shouldn’t have spoken about them.”
Mike had turned in our direction to listen.
“We need to know everything you know, Wanda,” Mike said. “Please.”
She had lowered her eyes. “It’s so long ago at this point. I was new to the hotel, and this very attractive woman—about my age—was in the suite with her child, who must have been five or six. She introduced herself as Mrs. Savage—that’s all I can tell you.”
Both Lily and the news reports mentioned the five failed marriages of Wolf Savage, but the only child in the papers was Reed Savage—not even a mention yet of Lily. We had some research to do, for sure, although the reading of the will might solve some of those issues for us.
“How many times did you meet her?” I asked.
“Three, maybe four. And there were two evenings that Mr. Wetherly allowed me to stay on with the child while Mr. Savage took his wife—well, that woman—to dinner.”
“What else do you remember about the child? Do you know where she and her mother lived?”
“Somewhere out of the country,” Wanda said. “Because the child had never been to New York before—or to the States—and she was so enthusiastic about seeing everything in the city. I know that her name was Coco. That stood out to me, too.”
“Coco?” Mike said, sidetracked from his purpose for this conversation.
“Yes, her mother told me she’d been named for Coco Chanel.”
“What do they call that, Coop? Fashion-forward, right? Coco Savitsky? Coco Savage?” Mike said, moving to the center of the bedroom. “I love a guy who can reinvent himself. Me? I’ll be walking a beat for the rest of my life.”
The king-size bed had been stripped of its four-hundred-thread-count linens, which had accompanied Wolf Savage on his trip to the morgue. They would be analyzed for bloodstains, bodily fluids, and trace evidence of any kind, even if the ME ruled the death a suicide.
Wanda Beston took a few steps into the room, keeping her calm. “Mr. Savage—well, his body—was the first thing I saw when I walked in here,” she said. “I was expecting the room to be empty. Sometimes his guests were late to get up, but he was always out of the hotel to his office pretty early.”
She paused for a few seconds.
“As soon as I opened the door, I could see him on the bed, with that awful plastic bag over his head. I ran toward him—that was just a natural instinct—to pull it off, but when I reached his side, it was obviously way too late to help him.”
“What did you do?” Mike asked.
“I’m not sure I know what I did, I was so shocked to see him like that—his color and all. I’ve never seen a dead person before, outside of a funeral home.”
When the mortician-magicians, as Mike liked to call them, were finished, the body in the casket bore little resemblance to the corpse of someone who’d met an unnatural death.
“Our chief of security told me I screamed really loud. I mean, loud enough that guests in the room below called him before I even picked up the phone to dial the desk,” Wanda said. “But I don’t remember screaming at all.”
“That’s not unusual,” I said, piling my emotions on top of hers, “when you experience something so traumatic.”
“Did you touch anything, Wanda?” Mike asked. “Did you touch the mask, or the gas canister?”
She pursed her lips and tried to think. “His arm—Mr. Savage’s right arm—was hanging off the side of the bed. I reached for it, to see if there was a pulse. I know that for sure because I remember how cold it was to the touch.”
I turned away while Mike asked her more questions about the feel of the arm and hand. He was interested in rigor and whether he could time the death against Wanda’s arrival on the scene.
“Was it unusual to see a hand truck in the suite?” Mercer asked.
“Not at all. The racks full of clothes would be hauled over here by young employees at every hour of the day and night,” she said. “Sometimes just for Mr. Savage’s approval, and sometimes for meetings he held here with other people.”
“They must make a mess for you, coming through the streets, tracking all that dirt and debris?”
“I get paid to clean up other folks’ messes, Detective.” Wanda smiled at Mercer as she answered him. “Two things were different about this though.”
“What?”
“The clothing racks are always kept in the living room,” she said. “There was no need to bring them in here. They’re just samples for people to look at. Nothing at all to do with the man’s personal life.”
“What else?” Mercer said.
“There’s a piece of canvas tarp that we keep in the closet in that room. The guys that move the hand trucks over get let in by one of the bellmen—that is, unless Mr. Savage himself has given them the key—and one of them spreads out the tarp so all the trash from Seventh Avenue doesn’t roll out on this nice yellow carpet.”
“Makes sense,” Mercer said as Mike tried to retrace the tire treads out of the bedroom, to see which way they went.
“The note?” Mike said, reentering the bedroom. “Are you the one who found that?”
“No, sir. I just ran straight for the phone and asked the operator to connect me to the front desk. I couldn’t even think which extension that was.”
“When you cleaned the bathroom, Wanda,” I said, “you must have seen his toiletries all the time?”
“Yes, Miss Cooper. The police officers took everything with them after they photographed the room, though. I’m supposed to be interviewed at their offices tomorrow. Routine, they told me, because I was too upset to be useful when they first met me.”
“The local precinct or the homicide detectives?” Mike asked.
“The precinct, sir. No one said anything about a homicide. Are you—?” Wanda’s eyes widened and she froze in place.
“No need to panic all over again. We always investigate suicides,” Mike said. “I think what Alex wanted to know is whether you saw any medications that Mr. Savage kept in his room. Pill bottles? Liquids?”
“Nothing like that, Detective,” she said, shaking her head. “That man always looked healthy as an ox. He had more energy than anyone I’ve ever met. Real positive energy.”
I hated it when two units were cross-checking each other on an investigation. Mike would have to see what personal effects, and whether any were medications, the precinct cops had removed from the room. They wouldn’t want to be second-guessed by a homicide honcho about foul play once they had declared the death to be a straightforward suicide.
“Besides, Mr. Savage had everything to look forward to,” Wanda said. “Some huge company was going to buy WolfWear, he told me, and he was going to add to his fortune.”
I thought of Josie LaPorte and her concern about greed. Why did Wolf Savage need to increase his fortune?
“And he had this special show happening at the Metropolitan Museum next week,” she said, withdrawing a small envelope from her pocket and handing it to Mike. “He even gave me two tickets, so that I could take my mother to a big-time fashion show. You might as well have them back. Give them to Mr. Hal or Mr. Reed.”
Mike looked in my direction and nodded at me.
“There’s a question I’d like to ask you, Wanda,” I said, “and I’m happy to talk with you privately, if that’s easier.”
“I’m fine right here,” she said, eyeing me as though she were suspicious of my motives.
“Are you sure Mr. Savage never came on to you? Did anything physically inappropriate?”
“Miss Cooper, I answered that already,” Wanda said. “He didn’t give me these tickets because I’d done him any favors. He never tried anything with me, and he knows I’m not the kind of woman who was looking for business on the side. Is that clear?”
“I wasn’t suggesting that—”
“In fact, he offered me a job in the company,” she said, doing everything except wag a finger in my face. “He set up interviews for me, week after next, so that I could get work as a receptionist in the office, if Human Resources agreed to hire me.”
“I apologize to you, Miss Beston,” I said. “I’m glad he took an interest in you. That’s a really nice thing to hear.”
“He was a good man, Mr. Savage,” Wanda said. She was angry at me and I didn’t blame her. “He told me he wanted me out of this uniform, okay? Out of this maid’s uniform.”
“You talked to him often,” Mike said. “At least, that’s what it sounds like.”
“If he came back to the room while I was still working on it, yeah, I talked to him, Detective. And more important than that is the way he listened to me,” Wanda said. “In some ways I knew more about the Garment District than he did, and he liked to hear my point of view.”
“How does that go?” Mike asked.
“My mother worked as a seamstress for a clothing company right around the corner from here from the time she was fifteen, and her mother before that. Their people came up from South Carolina, in the first wave of the Great Migration.”
“That’s when mine came, too,” Mercer said. He was across the room, leaning against a large armoire, watching Wanda Beston. “From Mississippi, in our case. The move from the rural South—from the remains of plantations—to the urban North.”
“Mr. Savage didn’t know the first thing about that,” Wanda said. “He didn’t even know how this one square mile of New York City real estate got its start as the Garment District.”
“Alex here knows everything about the city’s history,” Mike said.
“No, I think Wanda’s got me beat this time.”
“How about you, Mr. Wallace? You ought to know.”
He shook his head. “You got me there, Wanda.”
“It’s one of the great ironies of history. By the 1850s, when the first sewing machines had been patented, this little patch of the city began to manufacture textiles for the whole country,” she said, staring straight at Mercer. “Your ancestors and mine? They were raising cotton and baling it to send up here—right around the corner to what became Seventh Avenue.
“And men like Wolf Savage,” Wanda went on, “made their money by producing the uniforms our people wore in the fields and
in the plantation houses and shipping them back south. What established this place as the center of the garment-producing world is the very clothing that marked our folks as slaves.”
Wanda Beston turned in a circle till she came face-to-face with Mike. “Who’s going to get me out of this uniform now?”
THIRTEEN
I walked Wanda Beston to the elevator and thanked her for coming in to help us. Mercer and Mike were sweeping the death suite one more time when I reentered the room.
The hand truck with a rack full of pastel summer sundresses from the WolfWear line were a bright spot in the cheerless room. The dresses had been pushed apart after the first photographs had been taken so that the two metal canisters that had been hidden below them could be removed and taken to the crime lab for analysis of their remains.
“That’s a sobering thought,” I said, closing the door behind me. “That clothing for the slave trade was what put the Garment District in business.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “I was ready to open my mouth and hazard a guess that it was Civil War soldiers’ uniforms that were the first mass-produced clothing. But Wanda had me beat with her nugget of history.”
“Where did they find the note that Wolf wrote?” I asked.
“Right there,” Mike said, “on the night table.”
“Anything else?” I asked. “Any signs of a struggle?”
“Nothing. Not a thing out of place.”
“Did you give any thought to whether it looked like someone had straightened up the room?” Mercer asked. “Like the scene was too staged?”
“Glad to know you remember your days in homicide, buddy. You think I’m still an amateur dick?”
Mike had come on the job three years after Mercer.
Mercer laughed. “You know how it is when you want to put your own hands on an investigation. Start with a total redo.”
“I bought into the suicide theory,” Mike said. “Everything fit.”
“We don’t know enough about the man himself,” I said. “We’ve got to talk to the people who knew him best, at the office. The family members have too much at stake to rely on their truth-telling, don’t you think?”
“We?” Mike said. “I’m still stuck on the ‘we’ bit, blondie.”
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