NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be

aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold

and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the
publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

the millionaire’s wife

Copyright © 2012 by Cathy Scott.

All rights reserved.

For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.

ISBN: 978- 0-312-59435- 0

Printed in the United States of America

St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / April 2012

St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 CHAPTER 1
A Cool Manhattan Morning

A light rain fell over Manhattan on a weekday morning like

any other. But life can change on a dime, and that’s exactly
what happened as middle-aged business tycoon George Kogan
hurried back to his ultra-chic Upper East Side apartment
with a bag of groceries on each arm in anticipation of break-
fasting at home with his young lover. The late morning of
Tuesday, October 23, 1990, turned out to be anything but a
typical day in the city.
On the busy sidewalk, George, who’d recently celebrated
his forty-ninth birthday, turned the corner onto East Sixty-
ninth Street and headed toward his mid-block building, be-
tween Second and Third. As he hurried down the tree-lined
street, he didn’t notice anything unusual other than the cool
morning temperature. He continued walking toward the can-
opied entrance to the co-op where he’d lived for the last two
years with Mary-Louise Hawkins, a twenty-eight-year-old
rising star in the public relations world. Across the street, car-
penters noisily worked on the new Trump Palace high-rise
apartment building. A few blocks away, Central Park was alive
with pedestrians, bicyclists, and joggers as they coursed
through the park’s major arteries to their destinations in
New York City, where the drone of urban traffic awaited them.
George enjoyed walking the neighborhood. He’d lose himself
2 CATHY SCOTT

in the bustling sights and sounds of the city. And this day was
no different.
Walking from the neighborhood Food Emporium, he
looked forward to spending the late morning with Mary-
Louise. Quiet breakfasts were how their relationship had
moved from platonic to romantic, and they especially appre-
ciated those moments. Plus, George was anxious to prepare
for an afternoon meeting with his son, William, who was
acting as mediator to nail down an agreeable divorce settle-
ment with George’s estranged wife, Barbara, and bring to a
conclusion the marriage that in essence had ended two years
earlier.
As George headed home that morning, William telephoned
his father’s apartment to confirm their afternoon appoint-
ment. Mary-Louise told him she’d have George return the
call when he arrived home from the store. George was opti-
mistic about the settlement and finally getting the lengthy
divorce behind him, so he and Mary-Louise could move on
with their life together. Also uppermost in George’s mind
was settling the divorce to help repair the damaged relation-
ship he’d had with William, who had sided with his mother
after his parents’ separation.
As George continued his walk home, the usual cast of char-
acters were out and about—nannies pushing babies in strollers,
residents leaving their high-rises to walk their dogs, business
people hurrying to the subway entrance just steps away.
George, distracted with the nagging thought of the afternoon
meeting, quickened his pace when his limestone building
came into view.
He lived in the heart of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, once
called the Silk Stocking District, so named for the attire worn
by the rich people who had once lived there. Long gone was
the 19th-century farmland, as well as the market and garden
districts that had peppered the area. Left were skyscrapers,
rows of stylish town houses, mansions, and the occasional
walk-up apartment building.
For a millionaire antiques and art dealer who had once
had interests in a casino and several properties in Puerto
 T H E MI L L IO N A IR E ’S W IF E 3

Rico and New York, George lived a surprisingly modest life

on New York’s well-to-do Upper East Side—broadly defined
as the area from Fifty-ninth to Ninety-sixth Streets, east of
Central Park. His living quarters with Mary-Louise Hawkins
were definitely nice, although small, with just one bedroom
and a marbled-bath washroom. And while the apartment
had a prestigious address with the coveted 10021 zip code in
a luxurious high-rise complex, it was not quite up to the elite
level of Fifth Avenue, which serves as the symbol of wealthy
New York, where George once lived with his now-estranged
wife Barbara. Still, he admired the high-end building that
housed his current apartment.
The Upper East Side has a legacy of outstanding eclectic
architecture, including George’s pre-war apartment. The fa-
çade of his co-op, a mix of limestone and beige brick, created
a grand entrance with its surround and above-the-door stone
molding, with tall arched relief details and shallow columns
on either side and carved renaissance-style capitals. Above
that was a heavy, stately ornamental stone molding. The
variety of styles added a touch of grace and grandeur from
a bygone era. As a connoisseur of fine antiques, George ap-
preciated the artistry that went into the face of the building
and enjoyed walking through the double-glass doorway,
framed in oak, with its etched Art Deco design. What George
could not know was that he would never again walk through
that entryway, and the anticipated meeting with his son and
his soon-to-be ex-wife to finalize the divorce was not to be.
What happened next, he never saw coming.
As he neared the entrance to his Sixty-ninth Street apart-
ment, his face flushed from the damp morning air, what he
heard next was startling. It sounded like an explosion, most
probably coming from the construction site across the street.
“What the—?” George cried out a nanosecond later, when
it dawned on him what the noise really was. It was the distinct
sound of gunfire.
No, no, no! he said to himself, and then, Mary-Louise!
The force of the bullets entering George’s back thrust
him into a forward dive and catapulted him into the air; he
4 CATHY SCOTT

landed in a skid on the rain-soaked concrete. He was face

down just yards from his apartment lobby. Seconds felt like
minutes.
Coins, bills, and groceries— a carton of eggs, a slab of
cheese, a bottle of milk, pieces of fresh fruit—tumbled to the
ground, along with George.
Sprawled on the sidewalk next to the wall, with his arms
stretched out in front of him amidst the scattered groceries
and money, George lifted his head and cried out, “Help
me!”
The gunman stood a few feet from George. Out of the
corner of his eye, the shooter, who showed no emotion, saw
someone move. He quickly turned his attention from George
toward a woman stepping out of a car parked at the curb. The
two locked eyes, and then the assailant, with a cold, deter-
mined confidence, turned and hurried away on foot. He looked
down and returned the black revolver, still in his left hand, to
his waistband, hiding it under his jacket. Then he hurried up
the sidewalk.
The shooter fled the scene as quickly as he had entered it.
He headed a half-block west on East Sixty-ninth Street to
Third Avenue before rounding the corner, turning right, and
disappearing into a stream of pedestrians on the crowded side-
walk as he headed north. When the gunman was a safe dis-
tance away, he stepped toward the next pay phone he came
across and placed a local call.
“It’s done,” the assassin said into the receiver. He hung
up the phone and again disappeared into the morning pedes-
trian traffic.
Back at Sixty-ninth, lying flat on the concrete, his face
ashen and his body alarmingly still, George called out once
more. He tried to get up, but it felt as if an irresistible force
held him down. He tried shifting his weight, but that didn’t
work either. Immobilized except for his head and neck, George
Kogan rested the side of his face on the cold, wet sidewalk.
He felt the light wind against his forehead.
Dark water stains below the air conditioners at each apart-
ment window in George’s building marred the exterior
 T H E MI L L IO N A IR E ’S W IF E 5

marble walls and portions of the concrete sidewalk below,

where George lay bleeding.
He was alone. But not for long.
He tried once again to lift his head when he heard footsteps
approach. Bystanders stood over him. He was confused. Just
then, George heard a familiar voice.
“George! What is it? What happened? Why are you—”
trailed Moses Crespo’s voice as he viewed with horror the
gunshot wounds on George’s back and the blood seeping
through his red T-shirt. Moses, who worked as a door atten-
dant at Kogan’s building, knelt next to George, stretched out
on the damp concrete. He asked what had happened.
“I’ve been shot,” George said.
To Moses, George seemed calm. Almost too calm. He was
in obvious shock.
“Who did this?” Moses asked.
“I don’t—I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone.”
“Relax. Don’t worry, George. I’ll be right back,” Moses
said, adding, “Is there anything else?”
“Can you get Mary-Louise? I want—I want to speak to
her,” George told him.
“Okay,” Moses said, then, “You will be all right. We are
going to get help.”
“I’m dying,” George said as Moses hurried away, fi rst
to call 911 and then to summon George’s girlfriend, Mary-
Louise Hawkins.
Within a few long minutes, Mary-Louise walked through
the lobby door expecting, per Moses’ request, to talk to
George. Instead, she found her boyfriend lying on the damp
sidewalk in a pool of blood. As she stood under the canopy
taking in the scene a few feet away from her, Mary-Louise
became unglued. “She went hysterical, screaming and jump-
ing,” Moses said. “People had to restrain her.” That awful
sight, George lying helpless, was what would stay with Mary-
Louise, plus the fact that she and George did not get to say
good-bye to each other. In the short time that had elapsed
since Moses found him, her boyfriend of two years was already
slipping in and out of unconsciousness.
6 CATHY SCOTT

Moses would be the last person to speak with George

Kogan. At that moment, Moses’s mind was racing. He did not
know what to think. He remembered George, a few months
earlier, asking him not to accept any deliveries for him and
not to confirm with anyone that he lived in the building.
Moses also wracked his brain trying to figure out why he
had not heard the shots. Even though he had been in the
lobby at the time of the shooting, he had not heard the gun-
fire. He had not known anything was amiss until a few min-
utes later, when a housekeeper ran to the door and, frightened
by the gruesome scene playing out on the sidewalk, pounded
on it to be let in. Then Moses realized why he hadn’t imme-
diately noticed the shots: Across the street, at 200 East Sixty-
ninth Street, construction workers pounded away, literally,
on the Trump Palace, a luxury condominium complex that,
at fifty-five stories, was the tallest building at the time in Up-
per Manhattan. Each weekday during construction, workers
used air-powered nail guns to build the high-rise.
But the pop, pop, pop Moses thought was from the con-
struction site was in reality the sound of gunfire as an execu-
tioner opened fire on George Kogan’s back.