Killer Look by Linda Fairstein Read Free Book Online Page A

Wolf had split from wife number five last year. She really hated me.”
    â€œWhy so?”
    â€œI guess it got back to her that I was peeved that my father had broken the rule.”
    â€œWhat rule?” I asked. I had to admit that it felt good to put something nourishing in my stomach.
    Lily cracked a smile. “Supposed to be that rich old guys have a formula: They shouldn’t marry women younger than their kids,” she said. “It’s meant to be half the guy’s age plus seven, as a minimum. So my father was sixty-eight when he married the bitch, and she was twenty-eight.”
    I jotted down the math.
    â€œI was thirty-four at the time. Sort of ‘ouch!’ to have a stepmother so young.”
    â€œI bet it was,” I said. “And wives three, four, and five—where are they today?”
    â€œIt’s a bit like Henry the Eighth, though a little out of order,” Lily said. “Died, divorced, beheaded, div—”
    â€œBeheaded? Was number three killed?”
    â€œShe might as well have been, according to Uncle Hal. Just hung out to dry.”
    â€œLook, Lily, I guess the most important question is why youthink you knew your father well enough to claim he didn’t want to end his own life?”
    She pushed the soup bowl away.
    â€œWolf Savage was at the top of his game, Alex,” she said, ticking off reasons on her fingers. “For the last year he’s been in negotiations to sell his business to some billionaire who wanted him to stay in charge—continue to be the front man and face of the company, to keep dazzling the fashion world—but to have this fantastic backer with a huge infusion of cash. Then my father came up with this ingenious idea to launch his own solo show—break apart from the eighty or so mash-ups that Fashion Week in New York has become.”
    The phenomenon that was the city’s Fashion Week was staged two times a year—in February and September. Wolf Savage’s radical plan to split from that tradition had made major headlines throughout the summer.
    â€œIt’s a very controversial idea,” I said, “from what I’ve read in the papers.”
    â€œPart inspiration, and part a consequence of my father’s big falling-out with the powers that be who run the September week.”
    â€œI didn’t know about that.”
    â€œIt was overshadowed by the bigger news. The Costume Institute at the Met is installing its first WolfWear retrospective to coincide with the show—can you imagine that? Wolf Savage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? He was at an all-time high about it—heart and soul.”
    She paused for a couple of seconds.
    â€œMaybe he was ill, Lily. Maybe there was something wrong with him that he didn’t tell you about,” I said.
    â€œOh, there was a lot wrong with him, Alex. I’m the first one to say that. But he was healthy as a horse, unless there’s something called Viagra poisoning,” she said. “Wolf was the kind of man whowould never put a bag over his head if he suffered from that. He preferred to brag about his conquests, even to me, as unhealthy as that is.”
    So this was a young woman who had gone from being the abandoned daughter of one of the world’s most prominent self-made entrepreneurs, to one of the players jockeying for his fortune. She was already setting up her brother as a villain in what was undoubtedly a family feud, and maybe even her uncle, too. This conversation was giving me a headache.
    â€œLook, Lily. I’ve got some good friends in the Homicide Squad, but I’d have to tell them that you’ve got more than just a recent hunch that Wolf Savage was too content with his life to end it himself.”
    She made a fist around her soup spoon and banged the end of it on the table. “This man, Alex Cooper, was my father.”
    â€œI know that, but—”
    â€œMaybe I didn’t