Killer Look

by Linda Fairstein

  I sat up straight and lifted my glass.

  Mike clinked me first. “To Vlad! Here’s to Vlad the Impaler. Head of the house of Dracula.”

  Mercer tapped his glass against ours.

  “I did get a bite or two in on Reed’s hands, you know,” I said. “Maybe there’s something to the Dracula myth after all.”

  “You got Reed with a glaive, Coop.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a single-ended blade on the end of a pole,” Mike said. “First time I’ll ever have one as evidence. You shafted the bastard.”

  “He was trying to knock me out, Mike. Maybe worse.”

  “I’m not being critical. I’m a little bit in awe,” he said. “You nailed the sucker with the glaive of the bodyguard of the Duke of Mantua, 1580. That’s what it says right on the wall of the museum. It will make for a great piece of evidence at the trial.”

  The drink was as refreshing for my throat—and my spirits—as the cold water was on my legs. The setting was magical, even if the evening had almost been a catastrophe.

  “Keith Scully is going to be so mad at me,” I said.

  I was staring up at the moon, wishing I were thousands of miles away from the police commissioner and the district attorney.

  “The commissioner? On a night you solved two homicides? For now, he’ll be a prince, Coop. He won’t tell you what he really thinks for another week or two.”

  “Why? What did he say to you?” I asked. “What does Scully really think?”

  “That you’re back in the game, Coop. That we’ve got you back in the game.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Keith Scully didn’t need me standing on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with him when he announced the arrest of Reed Savage and asked for the public’s help in finding Tiziana Bolt. He was flanked by Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace.

  I watched from within the Great Hall. Scully’s announcement was short, because of the time of night, lack of notice, and need to put together a full package of facts. But it might have been the most elegant venue in which an NYPD press conference was ever held.

  Mike came back inside after the commissioner left. We waited while crews took down the bank of microphones and all the cameras were carted off in reporters’ vans.

  The last of the security guards were waiting for Mike and me to leave.

  Mike took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders. “Time to go, babe.”

  “Are you sure there are no photographers left out there?”

  “Just pigeons, so far as I can tell,” he said. “New York at night, Coop. Just pigeons and perps.”

  “One fewer of those,” I said, walking through the revolving door behind Mike and taking his hand to go down the steps.

  “We’ll go to my place. That way we’ll avoid anyone looking for you.”

  “Makes good sense.”

  We were halfway down before I heard footsteps. I picked up my head and saw a figure in a dark suit coming up the staircase, almost upon us.

  “Mike—” I said, tensing up and dropping his arm.

  “It’s okay, Coop. It’s your boss.”

  “Alex,” Paul Battaglia said, calling out my name. “Alex, we’ve got to talk.”

  “This isn’t the time, Mr. B,” Mike said. “I’m taking her home.”

  “Keith Scully told me you were still here, Alex. I need five minutes with you.”

  Battaglia was one step below me, practically face-to-face.

  “Not tonight, Paul,” I said.

  Not without my lawyer, I thought.

  I saw a man leaning out of the passenger window of a car that had stopped at the curb. He reached out his arm in our direction.

  I couldn’t see because of the dark that he had an object in his hand, and didn’t know it was a gun until he fired two shots.

  Paul Battaglia fell forward. I caught him as he collapsed in my arms.

  Mike ran down the museum staircase, but the car was already out of sight.

  I lowered myself onto the steps, holding Battaglia all the while, repeating his name over and over but getting no response.

  Blood pooled beneath us. I saw the hole in the back of his head.

  Mike was on his cell, yelling at the 911 dispatcher for an ambulance and backup.

  “It’s too late, Mike,” I said. “The district attorney is dead.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “I don’t design clothing,” Ralph Lauren once remarked. “I design dreams.”

  The business side of the fashion industry that is based on those creative dreams is now valued at close to four trillion dollars globally—about two percent of the world’s gross domestic product. The seasonal visions showcased in glossy magazines and on designers’ runways are elegant and chic, bold and original. They are meant to attract and entice women and men, to make us believe our lives could be altered if only we could own that particular look. And yet the process to get the products from the drawing board to the factory to the catwalk to the showroom to the retail outlet and into our closets is as tough to manage and to control as the most rough-and-tumble kind of enterprise.

  New York’s famed Garment District was long the capital of America’s fashion industry. A neighborhood that once produced ninety-five percent of our clothing now makes only three percent. But it has a riveting history and is still the heart of a business that thrives on the illusions of its great masters.

  My very dear friend Fern Mallis—a brilliant fashionista and former executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America—was one of my most important muses in this endeavor. I am grateful for her time spent with me, her unique insider’s view of Seventh Avenue and its inhabitants, and for her fabulous book, Fashion Lives: Fashion Icons.

  Jimmy West, formerly of the NYPD, has been a great friend and a lieutenant detective with unparalleled investigative skills. He gave me an unusual idea for a murder, for which only a crime writer—not a perp—can publicly acknowledge thanks.

  As much as I love style, all my information about the business came from well-researched and written news articles. The New York Times is a favorite resource—especially stories by Vanessa Friedman, Jean Appleton, Ralph Blumenthal, Ben Schott, and so many others; Kirstie Clements in The Guardian; Nicholas Coleridge in The Fashion Conspiracy; and regular reads in Women’s Wear Daily.

  Once again, my heroes are the women and men of the NYPD and the New York County District Attorney’s Office, always working on the side of the angels.

  Thanks always to my Dutton team: Ben Sevier, editor and publisher; Stephanie Kelly; Carrie Swetonic; Christine Ball; Emily Brock; and Andrea Santoro. And to all who work with me at Little, Brown UK.

  Laura Rossi Totten keeps me tweeting and Facebooking and linked in to the world of social media with grace and intelligence. Thankfully, she has Matt and Julia at her back.

  Esther Newberg at ICM—about whom I have not much more to add after thirty years—remains simply the best. Thanks, Zoe Sandler, for all you do for me.

  My family and friends are my greatest joy. I’ve said it before and it’s still true. Lisa and Alex, Suzy and Marc—and all the “Mighties”—this one is for you.

  Justin Feldman, Bobbie and Bones Fairstein, and Karen Cooper—you are all always with me.

  Michael Goldberg has my back, and more important, my heart. We are still swaying, which is a wonderfully happy thought whenever I am poised to pound the keyboard with Coop and Chapman.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LINDA FAIRSTEIN was chief of the Sex Crimes Unit of the district attorney’s office in Manhattan for more than two decades and is America’s foremost legal expert on sexual assault and domestic violence. Her Alexandra Cooper novels are international bestsellers and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She lives in Manhattan and on Martha’s Vineyard.

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