Cold Day in Hell (7 page)

Slowly at first, but gathering momentum soon enough, the eyes of the country began to take a second look at the devastated Marshall Fox.

I LEFT GALLO’S OFFICE and walked to the copy shop on Broadway where the photocopies I’d had made of Robin Burrell’s notes and e-mails were waiting for me in a paper bag behind the counter. I picked up a copy of the
Times
and took the subway to Forty-second Street and hoofed it over to the Keppler Building, where I keep my office.

Miss Dashpebble was out. That’s my nonexistent secretary/receptionist. Being nonexistent, she’s always out, but that never seems to stop me from noting her absence. When Margo and I want to take a break from behaving intelligently, we’ll sometimes amuse ourselves with whimsies concerning the latest Dashpebble escapade. Quite the life this gal leads—no wonder she can’t find the time to lick my stamps and answer my phones.

I went into my office and set my feet up on the desk. There was nothing in the
Times
about Robin’s murder that I didn’t already know. Marshall Fox’s lawyers—particularly Zachary Riddick—were saying to anyone who would listen that the Robin Burrell killing proved their client was innocent of the murders of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman. They claimed that Robin’s murder proved the original killer was still at large. Riddick was calling for Fox’s immediate release from prison. He was caterwauling for Sam Deveraux to declare a mistrial. In addition, he wanted a televised apology from the United States district attorney’s office. God knows what else the grandstander wanted. Maybe a key to the city for the poor persecuted Mr. Fox?

I threw the paper on the floor. Newspapers don’t throw well. I was dissatisfied. Some people actually enjoy being grumpy and out of sorts, but I’m not one of them. Being out of sorts only makes me more out of sorts.

I picked up the phone to call Margo, then set it back down. A quick replay of our morning’s tiff didn’t suggest any new tack. I could understand Margo’s jumpiness about a gruesome murder taking place directly across the street from her building. No question about it. I think the problem we’d had was that Robin Burrell’s murder had also unnerved me—though in a different fashion—and it didn’t seem that Margo was willing to grant me the latitude to be spooked by it. Charlie Burke and I have chewed this fat numerous times, and we concede that there are times when you just don’t bring your work home with you. Or maybe the better way to put it is that you
do
bring it home (how the hell are you going to leave it behind?), but what you don’t do is share it. “You have to suck it up,” Charlie says. “You keep your problems to yourself. My wife is my wife, she’s not my shrink.” Half of me thinks he’s right about it. And honestly? The other half of me doesn’t have a clue.

I swung my chair about to look out the window. The sky above the calliope of tall buildings was steel gray. Twenty-three floors below, the snowy rectangle of Bryant Park looked like a large white slab, like a behemoth gravestone fallen on its face. As I watched, two bundled figures entered the park on the west side and began making their way east, hand in hand, cutting through the precise middle of the park. Halfway across, the figures dropped onto the snow, on their backs, and began flapping their arms and legs.

I turned back to my desk and sorted through the photocopies of Robin’s “fan mail.” I skimmed through and divided them into two piles as I went: Passive and Aggressive. Basic psychology suggested that more likely than not, most of the writers in the “aggressive” pile were essentially cowards, mean-spirited worms who got off on sending crude, nasty notes to an attractive woman who had been dragged through the mud on national television. The tone of many suggested Marshall Fox fans who were enraged over Robin’s testimony and by the seamier side of their hero that had been extracted from her on the stand. There was the standard string of
Fuck you, bitch, cunt
that one would expect, as well as aggressively colorful suggestions concerning anatomical actions that Robin might want to consider performing on herself or have conducted on her person by second and even third parties. What can I say? It’s a human subset that has always existed, and although it was certainly possible that the writer of one of these notes could have decided to act on his or her misogynist hostility by viciously butchering Robin Burrell in her home, my sensors weren’t alerting me to any clear candidates.

I took longer with the second pile. Where I could distinguish between male and female, I did, and I set the female ones to the side. This left me with a collection of men who had admired Robin Burrell sufficiently to take the time to grab pen or keyboard and reach out to her. No doubt there were some authentic souls of compassion represented in this group. I’m not so cynical that I won’t allow for the existence of the truly good-hearted. Maybe even the majority of the various marriage proposals and offers of companionship had been put forth with the purest of intentions. We can only hope that the world still holds more angels than devils. But if there was a true freak lurking in the e-mails and letters, my sense was that he wouldn’t be in the overtly hostile missives, the aggressives. He was going to be here, lurking among the sweethearts.

From this second pile, I extracted the letters that included names and return addresses as well as the e-mails that readily identified their sender. This reduced the number of so-called passive correspondents to twenty-seven. Now all I had to do was bring in a medium who could let her hands hover over the two piles then pick out the killer. Hell, I’ve got the easiest job in the world.

I abandoned the piles and unlocked my lower desk drawer and took out my Beretta 92. I broke down the gun and gave it a cleaning on a piece of cloth that I keep for that purpose. The smell of copper solvent is a poor man’s intoxicant, but I’m not making any excuses. I think clearly when my hands are occupied with small habitual tasks. I could have as easily taken apart and put back together one of those wooden cube puzzles you can still pick up for a buck in Chinatown (I had one in my desk drawer as well, though not under lock and key), but in the end I’d have the same wooden cube I started with. At least this way, when I was done, my “personal assistant” was newly cleaned and shiny.

I put the gun back into the drawer and locked it. I draped the oily chamois I’d used to clean the gun over Nipper, which is the name of the RCA Victor fox terrier that sits cock-headed in front of the large gold gramophone horn. I’ve got a life-size antique of the dog and record player in the corner of my office. A client gave it to me once in lieu of making good on his bill, telling me it was worth considerably more than he owed me. Like a considerable fool, I’d let him get away with it.

I locked up the office and headed over to Grand Central, to the food circus downstairs, where I grabbed a couple of slices from Two Boots, after which I spent a few minutes holding up a wall in Vanderbilt Hall, taking in the dim cavernous room and eyeballing the people moving every which way across the marble floor. It doesn’t take much to entertain me. On the news just a few days earlier, I had learned that there was a stretch of now-unused train tracks well below the level where I was standing that had been used in the thirties and early forties to bring Franklin Roosevelt into the city from his home up in Hyde Park. And not just Roosevelt but his car and driver as well. The tracks led right to a specially built freight elevator so the car could be loaded in and brought up to street level; that way the president could make a discreet exit onto Park Avenue, all a part of keeping the public unaware of his inability to move freely without the aid of crutches or a solid elbow nearby. I thought of Charlie. Ten years earlier, a bullet half the size of a thumbnail had nullified his ability to ever walk again. End of story. No secret train tracks and fancy arrangements. Charlie was parked in his wheelchair out in Queens, restless and resigned.

More snow was threatening as I headed back up Forty-second Street. The gunmetal sky had darkened considerably. I popped into the coffee shop at Coliseum Books and picked up what I still call a medium-size cup of coffee. I have no clue what they call it. The baristas were talking about the Robin Burrell murder. The one serving me—a tall skinny kid with buckshots of acne scars on his cheeks—cracked a joke about it. The kind of crap you hear from people these days, especially kids. His coworker took him on.

“You better not be saying that. Someone come cut up your throat, how you gonna like it?”

The kid handed me my change. He was still chuckling at his own joke. “That be all?”

I felt the lecture rising in my throat, but I swallowed it. What was I going to do, grab this kid by the collar and slap him around like the original Mr. Heavy? For Christ’s sake, I was only here to buy a cup of joe.

I took my mysterious-size coffee over to Bryant Park, and even though the temperature was hovering near the freezing mark, I fished a newspaper from a trash bin to clear the snow from one of the slatted park chairs and sat down at a metal table. I had the snow-glazed park to myself, no one else in the immediate vicinity being quite so idiotic as yours truly. I recognized that the kid joking behind the counter had affected my heart rate. I could feel the hinges of my jaw holding tight. I looked out over the empty park, trying to spot the snow angels I knew were out there somewhere.

No luck. No angels.

I hugged the cardboard cup with both hands and watched the mist of my breath mingling with the steam coming off the brew. They formed their own sifting cloud, and with the peculiar mood I was in, I went easily into the blur.

ROBIN BURRELL HAD FELT that she needed to justify to me her former involvement with the likes of Marshall Fox. She didn’t need to do anything of the kind, not from my side, anyway, but I guess she’d needed to do it for herself. It was on my second visit to her apartment that she told me the story. A little wine, a little cheese, a little cautionary tale.

Robin met Marshall Fox the night that Kelly Cole threw the contents of her martini into his face and instructed him to get the hell out of her life. The incident took place on a warm summer evening on a large tiled patio overlooking the yachts of Long Island’s South Fork. The party was being thrown by Alan Ross and his wife, Gloria, the end-of-summer bacchanalia that the couple threw every September at their sumptuous estate in East Hampton. The Rosses’ annual bash regularly featured among its guests the cream of the entertainment industry’s A-list. Actors. Actresses. Movie and television directors. Supermodels. Writers. Studio heads. The hot bodies. A collection of the shakers and movers and so-called beautiful people kibitzing under the Chinese lanterns, toasting one another in the cool marble salons and occasionally fornicating in the comfortably refurbished boathouse at the edge of the property. Gloria Ross’s talent agency, Argosy, represented nearly half of the party’s attendees, while most who were not on the Argosy client list yearned for inclusion. The affair was unofficially referred to as “the audition,” it being well known in the industry that key calls went out from the Argosy offices both in New York and Los Angeles in the days following the Rosses’ annual party. Other agencies braced for the inevitable raids on their client list. Simply knowing that one of their hot actors or actresses or directors had attended the infamous East Hampton affair was enough to rattle the bladder of the related agent. Gloria Ross’s industry nickname was “the Comanche,” for the ruthlessness of her raiding parties. It was a nickname that brought the head of Argosy no end of delight. She often referred to her new acquisitions as her scalps.

Marshall Fox was an Argosy client, though Gloria Ross had hardly needed to steal him away from anyone. When Alan and Gloria Ross first came across the brash young wrangler and tour guide during a vacation in the Black Hills, the only organization with any claim on Marshall Fox was Moose River Guest Ranch, where Fox was employed. The story became showbiz legend. Captivated by the wit and easy sex appeal of their talkative guide, the Rosses had devised a plan midway through their weeklong trail ride and proposed it to the cowboy at week’s end. Beaming like a brand-new father, Alan Ross had clapped a hand on Fox’s shoulder. “I’ve been angling all my life to say something this corny. Kid, how’d you like to be a fucking star?”

ROBIN HADN’T ATTENDED the Rosses’ party as a guest. She was part of the hired help. An acquaintance who ran a catering business had called her at the last minute in a panic: “How would you like to spend the weekend in the Hamptons?” Two of the caterer’s helpers had gone AWOL, and the woman was scrambling to fill their places.

Robin had been forced to make a real effort not to gape. Celebrities seemed to pour out of the woodwork. Brad. Nicole. Justin. She thought she might weep at the sight of Meryl Streep—a personal favorite—whose simple elegance and wicked little laugh were beyond captivating. Robin trolled the party with a drinks tray, dispensing champagne and martinis. She spotted Marshall Fox soon after he arrived at the party. The popular talk-show host was accompanied by a striking blonde, Kelly Cole, the reporter from Channel 7 News. In her plunging silk blouse and capri pants, Kelly Cole looked anything but the earnest reporter clutching the microphone in front of City Hall. As for Fox, he was sporting a radiant tan fresh from a week in Maui and was—no surprise—the life of the party, charming all comers, passing his celebrated banter around for all to sample. Robin admitted that she had always considered the entertainer deadly handsome. “Disturbingly appealing,” as she would later say on the witness stand. The infectious and exceedingly mischievous smile. The slightly damaged nose. The alert blue eyes. Fox’s lean, muscular frame moved easily in bone-white slacks and a simple gray V-neck sweater. Under a vigorous cross-examination, Robin would confess to having difficulty taking her eyes off the entertainer as he moved about the party.

At the time, Marshall Fox had been several months into his well-publicized estrangement from his wife, Rosemary, an estrangement that had already seen a number of high-octane if short-lived affairs with women of notorious beauty. The word on Fox was that he was a decidedly passionate and skilled lover. “
Voracious
,” came the grinning report from a particular Hollywood actress who was not known for suffering klutzes in her bed. Interviewed on one of the entertainment tabloid shows, the actress had looked directly into the camera and pronounced, “Let’s just say this is one hungry cowboy and leave it at that, okay?”