Killer Look

by Linda Fairstein

  “I can’t do that,” she said.

  “It’s all right now. The body isn’t there.”

  “I don’t care. It’s still bad juju,” Josie said, shaking a finger in Mercer’s face.

  “This will only take a few minutes, Josie,” Mike said.

  “I didn’t work that room.”

  “But I’d like you to explain how they connect to each other and what your interaction was with Wanda—who found Mr. Savage—not only on Tuesday but other times before that.”

  “When Josie say the juju is no good, you won’t get me in there no way, mister.”

  Mike wanted to understand her adamant objection.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Josie,” he said. “You did a really good thing by telling the cops that you think someone was in here the other night, and by looking for the room key. You did a great thing.”

  She was trembling the way I did when I got nervous lately. I knew Mike hadn’t counted on any hotel voodoo getting in the way of his investigation. He tossed the conversation back to Mercer. “Help me with this, bro.”

  “Is it something religious, Josie?” Mercer asked.

  “Part that,” she said, taking backward steps toward the hall door. “But only part.”

  “Mr. Savage—well, you understand that he’s at the morgue now,” Mercer said. “Is the juju because you believe his spirit is still in this hotel, Josie?”

  “His people don’t believe the same as mine,” she said. “They maybe don’t know that his ti bon ange has to be put to rest.”

  “His good little angel,” Mercer said. “You believe in the Nine Nights, Josie? Haitian voodoo?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “I do.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but can you explain to me what that is?” I asked. “The little angel, I mean.”

  She clasped her big hands together and looked at me. “My people know the soul of a man—le ti bon ange—leaves the body, like when Mr. Wolf died. We gotta pray for nine nights, so his soul gets a good place to rest until after a year and a day, when body and soul get reunited.”

  “So these nine days are important?”

  “Very important, madame,” Josie said, pointing a finger at me. “If Mr. Wolf soul don’t get prayed over and saved, then he wanders the world.”

  “That’s better than having him hang out here,” Mike said, trying to encourage her to come with us.

  “No, no, no. Then if it don’t get taken care, his spirit brings misfortune to us,” she said, making a big circle in the air with her right arm. “To all of us.”

  “You want him here, on the tenth floor with you,” Mike asked, “or you don’t?”

  “Last place I want Mr. Wolf is here,” Josie said. “That’s why I won’t go in the room, ’case his soul waiting there to trick me.”

  “Can I help to calm you down?” I asked. “You said that’s only part of why you won’t go into Mr. Wolf’s room. We’ll help you if we can. What else is it?”

  “Ask Wanda that.”

  “She’s not Haitian,” Mike said, his impatience sounding in his voice. “I’ve met Wanda. She’s not afraid of any juju in that room.”

  “Mr. Wolf gonna bring me down with him. I can’t go in that room with you because maybe he left his spirit there to watch what I do,” Josie said, pausing before she added, “and because he didn’t never let me go into his room.”

  “That’s two different things,” I said. “Why didn’t he let you go into his room?”

  Josie looked me up and down, not disapprovingly, but as though she were exploring our differences. “Because he think I’m old and I’m fat.”

  I shouldn’t have been smiling when I told her that was a ridiculous idea.

  “Not an idea at all, madame,” she said. “It is exactly what Mr. Wolf told me.”

  “I apologize, Josie,” I said. “I wasn’t laughing about it. I can’t believe he talked like that.”

  It looked like we were going to get another side of Wolf Savage from some of the staff at the Silver Needle Hotel.

  “I had this hallway when I started cleaning here, before Mr. Wetherly assigned some of the rooms to Wanda,” she said, her eyes widening as she got more and more upset. “And he did that because Mr. Wolf complained about me.”

  “About your work?”

  “I do very good work. No complaints about my work,” Josie said. “He didn’t like me. He told me he liked young women, younger than me, and skinny ones. Mr. Wolf told the manager to keep me out of his room.”

  In this day and age of lawsuits brought for every kind of employment discrimination, I couldn’t imagine that Savage would open himself up as such an easy target.

  “We’ll talk to Mr. Wetherly about that,” Mike said. “Don’t you belong to a union? Couldn’t you fight that kind of prejudice?”

  “You seen Wanda?” Josie said, her eyes darting from my face to Mike’s to Mercer’s. “I didn’t tell anyone about it. Not my union rep, not my manager. Nobody. Mr. Wolf, he likes them like Wanda. Pretty girls and skinny, too. Besides, people call me crazy if I repeat what he says.”

  She was giving off a distinct vibe of crazy—something that struck close to home with me. I was beginning to think Mike couldn’t go to bat at the ME’s Office with Josie as his star witness. I wondered whether there was any truth to her story that the key card she had passed along had been found with the dirty laundry. Maybe it had opened the door to this room for Mercer because Josie, who had handed it to him, was using the newly issued card.

  “I haven’t met Wanda,” I said, “so why don’t you just stay right in this room and tell us what you saw yesterday, when you got to work?”

  “You gonna make trouble for me too?” Josie asked. “Your detective friend talked to Wanda. He seen her.”

  “Let’s get this straight, Josie,” Mike said. “You came to us. You said something to the cops when you got back to work this morning, right? Something you didn’t tell Mr. Wetherly yesterday. We just want to know what you saw.”

  Mercer and Mike kept coaxing her to open up until she finally spoke.

  “First thing I saw is tracks,” she said, walking toward the window, understanding that she was not supposed to touch any of the furniture in the room.

  “What kind of tracks?” I asked.

  “Tuesday—yesterday morning—I come in this room about eight fifteen. I started at this end of the hallway and check each room. They was empty and I just dusted around,” Josie said. “Then I see the track marks on the carpet, and I know I’m gonna get blamed because the Monday cleaning girl, she didn’t write about it in her report.”

  She leaned over and put her dark finger against the pale yellow wool of the carpet.

  “Grease,” Josie said. “That’s grease.”

  Mike leaned down and separated the carpet fibers with his gloved hand. “What about it?”

  “You roll things in from off the streets and it bring grease on the wheels,” she said.

  “Could be somebody’s luggage,” Mike said, “with wheels on it. They pick up grease from the pavement and from rolling around the airport.”

  “I was in this room every day last week,” Josie said, crossing her arms as though she were holding up her ample chest. “No guests. No occupancy. No grease.”

  “Then the weekend housekeeper was here?” I asked.

  “Yes. But her report was the same as mine. She have to tell me,” Josie said, “if she turned over the bed linens or find any kind of stain that she couldn’t remove.”

  “You’re saying someone came in here Monday night or Tuesday morning,” I said.

  “And you want us to think it was with the hand truck that carried—well, that brought the rack of dresses in?” Mike said.

  “I just think someone was in this room and made those tracks,” Josie said. “Too big to be from suitcases.”

  She didn’t seem to know anything about the helium canisters that had been found on the cart in the dead man’s room, so I didn’
t intend to mention them. “The tracks weren’t darker than this when you first saw them, were they?” I asked instead, crouching down to look.

  “Certainly they were,” she said defiantly. “Before I knew the man was dead, I cleaned them best I could. Is my job to do that.”

  I looked up at Mike and frowned. That was a lost opportunity to get an image of the treads from the rubber wheels, which most likely were from the hand truck that brought in the gas that killed Wolf Savage.

  “Not to worry, Coop,” Mike said. “The truck is still here.”

  He would be able to check the condition of the wheels. He walked into the room that connected this one to the Savage suite. I’m sure he was examining the floor for any signs that the truck crossed through that way.

  “Cleaned the floor of that room, too, Mr. Detective,” Josie called out after him. “Same spots.”

  Mercer and I followed Mike into the adjoining room, which looked completely undisturbed.

  “Thanks, Ms. LaPorte,” Mike said. “You get some rest now, okay?”

  She nodded to him and backed out of the room.

  “So there’s no video of the hand truck coming into the hotel?” Mercer asked.

  “None by the time the detectives started checking video,” Mike said. “The twenty-four-hour loop had recorded over Monday’s comings and goings. Besides, it’s a common occurrence. The manufacturers send garments over here every day for buyers and the sales force to vet.”

  “Savage didn’t bring it himself, then?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Mike said. “The first responders told me all deliveries like this come through the service entrance on the side of the building.”

  “So that’s on tomorrow’s list,” Mercer said. “Find the dude who brought the truck over from Seventh Avenue.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be making a real nuisance of myself at WolfWear. Hal’s probably busy circling the wagons so nobody gives anything up to the cops, and it’s unlikely that anyone lets me stick my nose in the books while I’m there either,” Mike said. “Get off your knees, Coop. What the hell are you doing down there?”

  “I saw a glint of something on the carpet.”

  “C’mon, kid. Let’s find out if Josie has credibility with anyone else in the joint,” Mike said. “Breaking news, babe. Grease don’t glint.”

  I ran my fingers over the short nubby wool until a tiny metal object scratched my thumb. I pried the gold-toned circular piece, a bit larger than a nailhead, out of the carpet hairs and held it up.

  “When you’re looking for the hand-truck dudes tomorrow, make sure one of them has gold buttons—tiny ones—on his suit or shirt,” I said.

  “What have you got?” Mike said, stepping in my direction.

  “It’s a tiny piece of gilded metal. The kind of detail item that decorates a piece of women’s clothing,” I said. “Looks like a tiny gold button to me.”

  ELEVEN

  Mike interviewed three other employees after Josie. They were from the saw-nothing, heard-nothing, knew-nothing school of witnesses. They had black holes where their memories should have lived.

  Charles Wetherly came back upstairs to see how things were going. It wasn’t that he was interested in our well-being, but hopeful that we would let him know whatever it was that we were finding out.

  “Tell me about Josie,” Mike said.

  “Nothing special to tell. She’s been here longer than I have,” he said.

  “But she wasn’t allowed to deal with Wolf Savage? To clean his room?”

  “Nonsense. Did she tell you that?”

  “Well, that’s not her assignment, was it?”

  “Frankly, Mr. Chapman, Mr. Savage was put off by her ramblings,” Wetherly said. “He thought Josie was a bit unhinged.”

  “In what way?”

  Charles Wetherly could barely conceal his annoyance. He didn’t want to give any more information to us—having no idea the direction in which we were going—but rather wanted us to tell him what was going on.

  “I think it’s fair to say that Josie has some idiosyncrasies, Detective. She talks to herself a lot, she makes up stories—”

  “You calling her a liar?” Mike asked.

  “Not my choice of words at all,” Wetherly said. “She’s not malicious. She just likes to tell tales.”

  Not what any of us wanted to hear. How could we trust the story about finding the key card to the room, or any of her other observations?

  “Her ramblings,” Mercer said, “are you talking generally or about her religious beliefs?”

  “We all know Josie takes her voodoo very seriously. I think that was very off-putting to Mr. Savage. All the talk about spirits, with the occasional zombie thrown in.”

  “Zombie?” I asked.

  “I’m surprised Josie didn’t tell you herself,” Wetherly said. “She hounds the rest of the staff with her views.”

  “Try me,” Mike said.

  “When one dies an unnatural death, like a suicide—”

  “Or a murder …”

  “Yes, Detective, or a murder—then his or her soul is vulnerable to the voodoo priests, who control them. Josie calls them the undead,” the manager said, as though wishing to wash out his mouth when he said the words. “Or zombies.”

  “So zombies and Wolf Savage?” I asked.

  “He was a businessman, Ms. Cooper. He surrounded himself with professionals, all first-caliber,” Wetherly said. “Savage didn’t brook fools or incompetence or, for the most part, people who disrespected him.”

  “Are you talking about Josie?”

  “For one, yes.”

  “How did she disrespect him?”

  “There was a young model, a Russian girl,” Wetherly said. “Quite beautiful. She did some work for Mr. Savage, which nailed him the cover of Vogue two years ago. She was staying here at the time, down the hall in one of Josie’s rooms. Then she was let go from WolfWear, but was lucky to land on her feet, for Vera Wang no less.”

  “And she fell out of a ninth-story window in her apartment in the Financial District,” I said. “Front-page news.”

  “Sure,” Mike said. “Manhattan South had the investigation. No signs of foul play, if I’m right. They ruled it a suicide.”

  “Then you know the story,” Wetherly said.

  “Wait,” I said. “Was Savage involved in that in any way? Seeing her? Angry with her?”

  “Not at all,” Wetherly said. “He had no concern for the girl once he stopped using her. The last person to see her alive was her boyfriend, but the police cleared him. All of us who knew her followed the case quite closely, as you might imagine.”

  “And Josie?”

  “Josie was very fond of the girl, so naturally, when she had such a tragic end to her life, Josie told everyone who’d become acquainted with the model while she stayed here that she was—I know, it sounds like one of those ridiculous TV shows—that she was undead. A zombie.”

  “And Wolf Savage didn’t like that,” Mike said.

  “Josie has this thing—she says it’s the moral code of Haitian voodoo, but that’s not my expertise, Detective—that greed and dishonor are the two great sins. Unfortunately, she felt the need to stop Mr. Savage in the hallway one day and accuse him of both.”

  “Ballsy move, for a housekeeper,” Mike said. “The greed I can understand if the rumors of his net worth are true. Dishonor?”

  “I’ve told you, I don’t like being the source of this kind of thing, but in this instance it was reported at the time on Page Six,” Wetherly said. “The Russian girl.”

  “What? Savage had an affair with her?”

  “I have no personal knowledge of that. It was Josie’s theory, and it was certainly true that Mr. Savage sort of discarded the young woman rather precipitously.”

  “So she accused him of turning the girl into a zombie?” Mercer asked.

  “Yes, she did. And she convinced everyone that the dead girl’s spirit was trapped on the tenth-floor hallway, because of the
way Mr. Savage dishonored her.”

  Mike shook his head. “Is it true that he once complained about Josie’s physical appearance?”

  Wetherly looked puzzled. “I’m not sure he ever took notice of that. What do you mean?”

  “Well, that she was fat, or she was old. That he wanted a more attractive type to service his room.”

  “That, Detective, sounds just like Josie trying to stir things up. She thrives on that, and she’s extremely jealous of Wanda, who covers the main suite. Wolf Savage never had that kind of conversation with me. I wouldn’t stand for that anyway,” Wetherly said. “For a male guest to be so interested in his housekeeper that he comments on her body or looks? I’d remember that distinctly. The last thing I’m looking for at the Silver Needle is a Dominique Strauss-Kahn sort of situation.”

  “So here’s what I don’t get, Mr. Wetherly,” I said. I didn’t know what to make of Josie at this point. “Savage was one of your best customers, right? I mean he ensured you full payment on all these rooms, year-round. How come he didn’t demand that an employee who talked to him so rudely that way be fired?”

  “That, Ms. Cooper, is a secret that died with Wolf Savage, I’m afraid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  There was a knock on the door that startled both of us.

  “I actually told Mr. Savage that I would get rid of Josie. That I would place her at another hotel, if the union wouldn’t let me dismiss her,” Wetherly said. “He was furious with me for suggesting it. He told me he was willing to tolerate all the hocus-pocus of her voodoo, all her in-his-face gibberish, and that I was to leave her alone.”

  “But why?” I asked. “Didn’t you ask him why?”

  “Do you ask the district attorney ‘why?’ when he directs you to do something?”

  I’d tried it once not too long ago and the results were disastrous. “No, sir,” I said.

  “Josie had some kind of hold on Wolf Savage,” Wetherly said. “Ask her about that, not me. It was he who had the hotel hire her—before I came along.”

  “You mean, Wolf Savage knew Josie before she started working here?” Mike asked.

  “He’s responsible for getting her this job.”