Killer Look

by Linda Fairstein

  “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.

  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 miscalculat
ed, 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 fatherin-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.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  “Take me home,” I said to Mike when we’d finished talking to David Kingsley and Mercer escorted him out of the small office.

  “You wanted to come to this party. I’m afraid you’re here till the bitter end.”

  “Please, Mike. I don’t have the heart for this.”

  “Commissioner Scully’s on his way, babe,” he said, taking me in his arms. “He’s going to do a presser on the museum steps at midnight. You can’t go anywhere before then.”

  “I don’t want to see Scully. Don’t—”

  “Hush. Come with me,” Mike said. “It’s all quiet in Dendur now. Mercer’s gone to find a waiter to meet us over there. Let’s have a drink.”

  We started to walk through the hallways, the now-quiet galleries, toward the Dendur wing.

  “I’ve got to go back for Mrs. Stafford’s pearls, Mike,” I said. “Even
though they’re her fakes.”

  “Mrs. Stafford’s pearls aren’t real?”

  “Her fakes are worth more than most people’s real necklaces,” I said. “I was almost relieved when they rolled all over the floor. Real pearls have silk knots between every single bead so they can’t break away like these did. She wasn’t kidding when she told me they were her travel jewels—imitations of her great ones.”

  “Not to worry, Coop. There are two janitors and four cops on their hands and knees chasing after the Stafford pearls. You can spend the next month stringing them back together—knots or no knots,” Mike said. “It’ll be the perfect therapy for you.”

  “I should be picking them up myself.”

  “No, you should be telling me what the hell got into you today. How come I didn’t even make you in the crowd?”

  “You’re slipping, Detective. I thought you’d know me anywhere.”

  We walked into the Dendur wing together. The cleanup crew had already removed the hundreds of folding chairs and stacked them outside the entrance. The spotlights had been shut off and the music had stopped.

  The space was still and serene, a waxing moon hanging above the glass roof, illuminating the ancient temple and the shallow pool of water that surrounds it. It remained the most magnificent room in Manhattan.

  I walked to the edge of the reflecting pool, stepped out of my purloined sandals, and sat down on the edge. I pulled up my leggings and put my feet in the water. My calves ached, but then so did all of me.

  Mercer came in, too, followed by one of the waiters. The young man was carrying a silver tray, with a glass of scotch for me and drinks for both Mike and Mercer.

  Mike rolled up the legs of his tuxedo pants, took off his shoes and socks, and sat down beside me.

  “Don’t get the tux wet,” I said, leaning my head against his shoulder.

  “It’s rented, babe. I can go for a swim if I want.”

  Mercer stood over us, passing out the drinks from the waiter’s tray.

  “You won’t be mad at me if I have a nightcap?” I asked Mike.

  “You can have anything you want tonight.”