“You’re a little late to get into the game, Alex,” she said, turning to size up my body.
“I’m serious, Tiz. Is it done?”
“The girls who work Victoria’s Secret catalogues and swimsuit covers, they might,” she said. “But high-fashion models? The runway? The more androgynous the better. Tall, thin, and flat-chested like me. If diet doesn’t get rid of the breasts, then reduction surgery will do it.”
I was thinking of how Tanya Root and her Brazilian implants might have fit into the picture of the Savitsky-Savage odyssey.
“Look at this,” she said. “Dammit.”
“What?”
“Just mumbling to myself.”
She had stopped in front of a figure dressed in a Chinese silk gown tight-fitted to the dummy, with golden-threaded birds and flowers embroidered onto a bright-red ground. The bottom was tapered and the neck was closed with a mandarin collar.
“See? This happens even when the garments are maintained under the most perfect circumstances,” Tiz said, adjusting the camera app on her phone to take a picture of something she noticed on the garment. “Mrs. Thurston Higgeldy-Piggeldy the Fourth or Fifth loaned this to us for the exhibition, and I thought we went over it with a fine-tooth comb. I was certain she stores her vintage stuff in the same cryogenic freezer with Ted Williams’s head, and that it was in pristine condition.”
“Looks pretty swell to me,” I said.
“The frigging frog is missing.”
“What?”
“You must know what a frog is.”
“Sure.” Frogs were the ornamental braiding for garment closures that consisted of a button and the loop through which it passes. “I just didn’t get what you were talking about at first.”
“This was supposed to be a key detail of the dress,” Tiz said. “One closure at the neck and four down the side of the piece. Hand-stitched frogging in the self-fabric, which cost an arm and a leg per yard.”
The large pearl button was in place, but the loop was frayed and hanging away from the button instead of around it.
“Can it be fixed?” I asked.
“This broad probably eats pizza with a knife and fork, and a napkin tucked in under her chin,” Tiz said, losing her cool. “Everything we took from her was just perfect, except this one spot, and nobody noticed it—not even me—till this moment.”
“You’ve got the weekend to have it repaired.”
“Find me the fabric, Alex. Think you can? It’s from 1998, Velly’s Chinese Wall line. I dare you to find another piece of it.”
“There’s a zipper maven and a lace store and a sequined trim shop,” I said, trying to calm her down. “Isn’t there a frog maker in the Garment District?”
“Sure I can find a frog maker. But it’s the damn material,” Tiz said, dropping to her knees and flipping the hem of the dress to see whether there was enough extra fabric to craft a new loop. “And we don’t dare snip an inch from this one without clearance from Her Ladyship.”
Tiz got back on her feet and typed in a message to herself, adding a photograph of the dress—its collar, hem, and mangled frog.
“Oh, Velly,” she said, talking to herself. “You’d take someone’s head off for missing that little froggy.”
I didn’t have much to lose by getting more personal at this point.
“I’ve just got to ask, Tiz—I mean, I hope you don’t think it’s out of line—but it sounds like you knew the man better than anyone else, at least in this last decade of his life.”
We were walking through the last room, with the life-size magazine covers of supermodels and the reproductions of headline stories featuring Wolf Savage.
“Probably as well as anyone. That’s true,” she said.
“You’re smart,” I said. “And you’re terrifically attractive. You’ve got a great sense of humor and a lot of style.”
“You want to know if I f—?”
I interrupted her. “Were you lovers?” I asked.
She laughed. “Not for his lack of trying, you understand. I’m just not into men who are as old as my dad.”
Lily had commented on her father’s infatuation with young women.
Tiz stopped in front of the photograph I had paused in front of earlier. It was the shot of Wolf leaving the Musée d’Orsay after his brilliant coup at the shows in Paris—a handsome man with a spectacular beauty on his arm.
“Do you know who she is?” Tiz asked.
“No.”
“Don’t you remember the name Samira?”
“I don’t.”
“One of those first-name-only supermodels. An Ethiopian girl who prowled the catwalk from the time she was seventeen like she was the only star in the galaxy.”
“Looking at this photograph, I can understand that.”
“Velly found her in a refugee camp on some bullshit humanitarian trip he made to Africa, after some kind of famine or plague. I can’t remember which one.”
“Why are you making fun of that?”
“The man made the trip for the publicity, Alex. Not because his heart was in the cause, but to have the cameras focused on him all the time,” Tiz said. “He saved Samira’s life, I’m sure, and then he launched her on a career most girls would sell their souls for.”
“He was her mentor, then? Like he tried to be with you?”
“Yes, he was her mentor, and yes, she sold her soul to him, too.”
“They had an affair?” I asked.
“Velly Savitsky liked his women young, and except when he was forced into an early marriage by his parents or stuck in rehab, in the heartland of white America with me, he preferred them dark-skinned,” Tiz said. “He had an affair with Samira, and then he ended her career by impregnating her.”
My head was spinning, wondering if Wolf Savage’s predilection for black women could lead us to his blood connection to Tanya Root. Before I could form a question, Tiz finished her story.
“Samira’s spirit was broken when she lost all her modeling jobs because of the pregnancy. She went home to Africa, to her village, to have the baby,” Tiz said, letting her emotion show for the first time since we’d met hours earlier. “But she died there. Both Samira and her son died in childbirth.”
I had no words to speak.
“It’s one of the things that haunted Velly to the very end of his life.”
TWENTY-THREE
I tried to press Tiz Bolt for more information as we walked upstairs and through the grand hall to the museum exit.
She had never heard of Tanya Root, didn’t know of any woman in Velly’s orbit with that surname, and wouldn’t give up—if she knew—the names of any of the other women in his life.
Tiz was surprised that I wasn’t aware that the third, fourth, and fifth wives of Wolf Savage were black women.
“African American?” I asked.
“I would have said that, but none of them were American, Alex. I have no idea where they were from, but they were foreign.”
I thought of what the housekeeper who’d found the body had told Mike, Mercer, and me, about babysitting for a woman who’d come from abroad to stay in the suite several times, with a young child she’d assumed was his daughter.
“I have so many things I want to ask you,” I said, certain that Tiz Bolt would have every good reason to turn on me when she found out who I was.
“Another time for that,” she said, skipping down the last few steps to the sidewalk. “I’ve got a dinner date. Have to dress up and put on my face. Ciao, Alex.”
She waved goodbye and walked north on Fifth Avenue. It was dark, and I lost her in the bright headlights of the cars and buses as she crossed the street a block away.
I started to walk south, toward my apartment. I dialed Mike’s cell but it went straight to voicemail.
“It’s me. Call me as soon as you can,” I said. “I’m on my way home. I mean, I went home when you told me to, but I went back out. I walked up to the museum and I ran into this young woman who knew
Savage really well. You’ve got to call me. It was a total coincidence—well, almost a coincidence.”
I stayed on Fifth, using all my willpower to avoid any of the other avenues that were lined with restaurants and bars. Mike would be annoyed that I had worked an angle of his investigation alone—even though I had gotten an enviable load of information from Tiz. He didn’t need to find me intoxicated as well.
My nerves were jangly. Mike was probably still debriefing some of the family members about the contents of Wolf Savage’s will, and I was anxious to see how Lily had been treated. The evening’s breaking news was likely to lead with the fact that the famous designer’s death had been declared a homicide, and possibly even include his connection to another murder victim—Tanya Root. And I had just spent a couple of hours misleading a perfectly nice young woman about the reasons for my questions on the Met exhibition. I felt like I was unraveling all over again.
I thought about hailing a cab, but the cold fresh air was helping to clear my head. I went straight down the avenue, turning east on Seventieth Street, passing the Frick Collection building—once the family mansion—and the handsome wrought-iron gates that protected its serene gardens from passersby.
At the corner of Third Avenue, I stopped into PJ Bernstein Deli. I ordered salads and sandwiches for Mike and me in case he came home hungry later, and called Vickee Eaton while I waited on a stool at the counter. Her mailbox was full and not accepting messages.
I took a cup of hot coffee with me, collected the bag of food, and paid the bill.
I was on the short downhill to the driveway that led to the front door of my building. I put up my collar against the wind, balancing the coffee so it didn’t spill onto my hands.
A dog walker with three of my neighbors’ large pets was hugging the side of my apartment, cleaning up after the trio.
I was on the outer edge of the sidewalk, trying to avoid the mess.
The door of a large black SUV with tinted windows swung open and a man shouted my name. “Alex! Alexandra Cooper!”
The hot coffee sloshed around, scorching my hand as it came over the lip of the cardboard container. I dropped the cup and bag of food, trembling as I flashed back to the night of my abduction.
The car was the same make and model, but this time the voice was familiar to me. I started to run anyway, too startled to put the picture together.
A man stepped into my path and smiled at me. “You’d better turn around, Alex. The boss needs to talk to you.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The detective who had the bodyguard assignment for Paul Battaglia led me back to the SUV. The rear passenger door was open, and the district attorney slid over to allow me to get onto the seat beside him.
“Give us five minutes,” he said to the detective.
“Sure thing, boss.” He slammed the door shut and walked away from the car.
“Sorry to sneak up on you, Alex. The doorman told us you weren’t at home, so I figured I’d wait half an hour or so.”
I stared straight forward, at the headrest above the driver’s seat. I was struggling to catch my breath.
“Alex? Are you all right?”
“What’s your best guess, Paul?” I couldn’t look at him. “You couldn’t have given me a call? Waited for me in the comfort of my lobby? Or did you simply decide that the terrorist tactic of having someone sandbag me on the sidewalk close to home would be a pleasant reminder of my kidnapping?”
“Let’s not be too dramatic, Alexandra. It’s not as though you wouldn’t recognize my voice. I never thought I’d put a scare into you.”
“I scare pretty easily these days,” I said.
“Does that explain why you’re drinking so much?”
My head snapped toward him. “What’s your source for that crap, Paul?”
I used to have so much respect for him. I worked my tail off for him, day and night, trusting in both his judgment and integrity. I represented him in front of the community—at churches and synagogues, schools and precinct houses. Now I could barely recognize my own voice talking back to him.
“I don’t need a source, Alex. I can smell it on your breath.”
“Over the stink of that cigar? I doubt it very much.”
He put the Cohiba back in his mouth and continued to talk around it. “I thought you were on the Vineyard. Stabilizing yourself to get back to your desk.”
“I’m on leave, Paul. I’m not required to keep a GPS in my pocket.”
“You’ve turned on me, Alex. I need to know what that’s about.”
I put my hand on my chest, hoping to stop it from heaving.
“Sooner or later we’re going to have to talk about this,” he said. “Before you come back to work.”
“Plenty of time to go, then. As you can see, I’m not at my best.” I was lightly patting the raw skin of my left hand.
“You’re not possibly feeling I didn’t do enough for you during your ordeal? My wife thinks that perhaps—”
“What your wife thinks is of so little interest to me that I’d put it back in the bottle, Paul,” I said. “In fact, you were the first person—though many have followed—to suggest to me that your wife is a fool.”
Battaglia’s wife—who considered herself to be an artist, though she couldn’t paint her way out of a paper bag—had embarrassed him recently by writing an article for some blog. She described having intercourse with him in the bathroom of his hospital suite when he was inpatient for a gallstone procedure. It was too much information for all of my colleagues, and few could call up the image of the dignified barrister after the piece went viral in the office computer system.
“Some thoughts are best kept to yourself, Alex.”
“Then leave your wife out of our conversation.” She was despised by his secretary and was an object of ridicule to the legal staff. I knew he wouldn’t do much to defend her.
For so long, I had admired his professional ideals, despite rumors of his sordid personal life. Paul Battaglia had a reputation for sleeping his way through half of the journalists who had covered his rise to political power thirty years ago, and others who curried favor with him by stroking his private parts.
“I don’t like the way you’re talking to me,” Battaglia said, cracking the window to tip the ashes off his cigar.
“For once, you might be the one between a rock and a hard place, boss. The worst you can do—that is, the worst thing for you—would be to fire me. You’re the one who created this monster—you’ve put me in the media spotlight so many times that now I’d get a huge audience to listen to my version of the story,” I said. “Best-case scenario is that when I’m ready to have this conversation with you, you have the answers to calm me down again.”
“I must have been crazy to give you so much latitude, Alex,” he said, the cigar firmly planted between his front teeth. “There are even rumors you might make a primary run against me next year.”
We were side by side, but neither turned to face the other.
“Are you afraid to comment on that one, Alex?”
“You know I have no interest in politics,” I said. “I have one passion, and it’s my work with crime victims—women and children. That’s what drives me, Paul. I think you know that.” I paused. “Oh, and then there’s the awful risk of STDs in your job, isn’t there?”
“What are you talking about?” Battaglia asked, trying to control his vicious temper. He was the king of petty-revenge points. He’d find a way to carry the heaviest grudge for as many years as it took to think of a payback.
“You want to talk rumors? It’s all over town you got a sexually transmitted disease from Reverend Hal Shipley. That you bent over to please him one time too many and he—”
“You’ve lost your mind, Alex. Next time I talk to you, you’d better clean up—”
“Next time you talk to me, please give me enough notice to have a lawyer with me, Paul,” I said. “I know why you didn’t call me to ask whether you could drop by. ’Ca
use then there’d be a phone record of the call. And you waited outside the lobby so not even the doorman could say we were together.”
“So this is all about Hal Shipley, is it?”
“No, no, no. This is all about you, Mr. District Attorney. I saw the letter you sent to Shipley, telling him you could make the case I was working on go away,” I said. “I saw it with my own eyes. I hadn’t even met the victim yet or determined her credibility, but you were sending her up the river.”
The smoke seemed to be coming out of his mouth, where he’d clenched his cigar into place. I was sure it was also coming out of his ears.
“You can make whatever deal you want with the devil,” I said. “But just leave me out of your planning.”
Battaglia opened the car door on his right and yelled the detective’s name. The man came dashing back to the SUV and opened the driver’s door. “Yeah, boss?”
“Alex has to go. Let’s get out of here.”
I opened the door and started to get out of the car.
“By the way, Alex, the ME called me this afternoon. She’s declaring the Wolf Savage death a homicide,” Battaglia said. “There’s a presser at One Police Plaza right now.”
That explained why Mike hadn’t returned my call.
“Dr. Parker told me you made a cameo appearance at the morgue, Alex. I was actually coming by to talk with you about that,” the district attorney said, tossing his cigar over my head. “Better to cut out that extracurricular activity while you’re still nursing your wounds.”
“Or what, Paul?” I asked. “Or what?”
“It’s just an expression of my concern for your well-being.” Paul Battaglia said, ready to drop me and move on. “Don’t think of it for a minute as a threat.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The experience of being held by captors for days had made me hypervigilant since the rescue. Despite my exhaustion, hunger, and unhappiness, I heard Mike’s key turn in the lock at ten fifteen.
I ran to the door to greet him with a short terry robe wrapped around me.
“Man on the hall,” Mercer said, coming in behind Mike.
“Twofers? How lucky am I,” I said. “Give me a minute.”
Killer Look Page 17
