Cold Day in Hell

by Richard Hawke

  KELLY COLE WAS REPORTING from the dark snowy steps of the courthouse. Even though there was no logical reason for it, the news department still felt that the courthouse steps were the appropriate backdrop for the story about the fracturing Marshall Fox jury and Judge Deveraux’s refusal to accept a deadlock. The other breaking story, the discovery of the body of Robin Burrell in her uptown apartment, was tag-teaming with the jury story. Margo and I were watching the news on TV.

  “Kelly Cole told me no one pays attention to her syntax.”

  Margo’s hand froze halfway to her open mouth. The popcorn remained poised for the toss. “Her what?”

  “Her syntax.”

  “When did she tell you this?”

  “At the courthouse. We were shooting the breeze before Deveraux cleared the room. May I add, it was a very light breeze.”

  Margo’s wrist snapped. As she chewed the popcorn, her eyes traveled several times between me and the television. “She’s pretty.”

  I shrugged. “If you like them blond and curvy.”

  “Well…” Munch-munch. “She has lovely syntax.”

  We were in Margo’s living room, keeping the couch company. I was also keeping a short glass of whiskey company, dipping into it like a crow at a birdbath, making it last. The bowl of popcorn was on Margo’s lap, and she had her arms wrapped around it like she might sing it a lullaby later. The spines of Margo’s several thousand books stared back at us from the solid wall of bookshelves, along with the television set, which Margo had rolled over from its usual resting place in the corner of the room. The dimmer was on low. The snow outside the window was still sifting down like an ever-falling veil. But the reportage of murders and contentious jurors pretty much killed the mood.

  “It looks like they’re not going to mention it,” Margo said.

  The coverage had switched from the courthouse steps back to the scene outside Robin Burrell’s building. The reporter on the scene wasn’t saying anything different from what he had said at the top of the newscast. An anonymous call to 911 at around 8:40 had led police to the scene, where they had discovered the murdered body of Robin Burrell lying on the floor in her front room. All that police were saying was that the woman’s death “did not appear to be accidental.” No mention was made of the cuffing of the victim’s feet, or the trail of blood stretching from the blood-soaked bedroom to the front room, or the mirror shard that had been jammed into her throat. But what Margo was referring to specifically was the fact that no one was reporting that the body of Robin Burrell had been arranged in the same fashion as the bodies of the two women for whose murders Marshall Fox, America ’s favorite television bedtime companion for the past three years, was being tried. Not so much the handcuffs, which had appeared on only one of Fox’s alleged victims. And not the mirrored glass, which was unique to the Burrell killing. But the hand placed over the heart. Fox’s signature sign-off. In the case of the first victim, a ballpoint pen had been used, a crude but effective enough means to hold the hand in place. Ten days later, the killer had upgraded to the hammer and nail.

  “They’re not telling because the police haven’t let it out,” I said.

  “Except they told you.”

  “That’s because I know the secret handshake.”

  “Besides which, you’re not likely to stand up in front of a television camera and start blabbing.”

  “Only if they tickle me in the right spots.”

  “Hey. How long have I known you, and I still don’t know the right spots.”

  “But I applaud the tenacity of your efforts.”

  Before coming upstairs to Margo’s, I’d gotten the lowdown from homicide detective Joseph Gallo, of Manhattan ’s Twentieth Precinct. Gallo was normally a cool customer, a regular Mr. Ice. But this one had rattled him. His face had been pale and grim as he briefly sketched out the scene for me. He was especially grim when he told me about the hand being nailed over the heart. He’d fixed me with a look I’m not used to seeing on Joe Gallo’s face. Little bit of dread, little bit of fear.

  “We might not have him. I’d have bet my father’s farm it was Fox. I swear I could see those two dead women in his eyes. But Jesus, Fritz. It might actually not be him. After all this. This thing here is a pure carbon copy. The freak who did those women might still be out there. I don’t even want to think about it.”

  I declined Margo’s gesture to refresh my drink. She fixed me with her frankest look. “You are staying the night.” If there was a question mark attached to her words, it was completely silent. I confirmed that I was staying. “That’s good,” she said. “You won’t think less of me if I confess that I’m a bit spooked?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Good. I’ll go put on my bedroom eyes.”

  Which she did, though I didn’t get to see them much. It’s not that there wasn’t sufficient ambient light in the bedroom; it was that the ambient light was still pulsing blue and red from across the street, and Margo’s eyes remained clenched shut the entire time. An hour later, as she lay curled asleep under her quilt, I was out of the bed and leaning on the windowsill, looking across the street through the snow into the apartment on the first floor. The huge Christmas tree remained lit. A peculiar sensation was going through me as-I couldn’t help myself-I imagined Robin Burrell’s destroyed body lying lifeless in her front room. It was a sensation I’ve experienced numerous times. An occupational hazard. It’s a chill that runs through me. A sensation of cold dread, as if the temperature of my blood has suddenly dropped by a good thirty degrees or more and is going to remain there. The feeling is one of my blood being replaced by a maliciously cold silk, threatening to freeze me up. I know what does it. It’s broken bodies. It’s the rupture of violence and then a heart gone abruptly as still as a stone. Dead still. It jolts me more than I think I sometimes know. It’s life made inconsequential. And I hate it.

  As I stood at Margo’s window, I had a particularly unsettling feeling. A similar dread had visited me just a week previous, after I spent an hour talking with Robin Burrell in her apartment. The apartment had been uncommonly warm, and Robin had asked me if I could reach around her as-yet-undecorated Christmas tree and shove open the large windows for her. Which I did. That wasn’t when the chill took me. It happened afterward, when I was standing at Margo’s bedroom window-just like this, elbows on the windowsill, frown on the face-watching as Robin perched precariously on a footstool, mindfully stringing the small white lights on her gigantic tree. The chill had come when she glanced up from the tree and caught me watching her.

  4

  ROBIN BURRELL WAS an extremely organized person. She had divided the letters and the printed-out e-mails into three categories and set them in separate piles on her dining table.

  “These are the general ones,” she had told me, indicating the largest of the piles. “They’re pretty much ‘you go, girl’ letters. A lot of them are very sweet. ‘Keep your chin up. Don’t let them get you down. We’re behind you.’ That kind of thing.”

  I picked up a letter from the pile. It was from Karen from Texas. That’s how the author of the letter had signed it. It was written on holiday stationery, a sheet of cream-colored paper bordered with red silhouettes of reindeer. Karen’s handwriting was round and precise. She made her O’s large and, in words with two of them in a row, strung them together so they looked like the eyes of an owl. Karen might have been eleven or eighty, it was impossible to tell.

  Dear Robin,

  On TV you look very brave. I’m sorry the lawyers are being so mean to you but I guess that is their job. I thought I should tell you that when you look right into the camera you look like you regret everything that happened from the bottom of your heart. I am including you in my prayers. God bless you.

  Karen from Texas

  “Most of the ones in that pile are from women,” Robin said. “Though with some of the e-mails, if they don’t sign their names, it’s sometimes hard to tell from the e-mail address.”

&nbs
p; The other two piles had interested me more. There were fewer letters in these piles. Mostly, they were e-mails that Robin had printed out. One of the piles contained messages from men who wanted to either meet Robin, date her, introduce her to their family, marry her, or take her far, far away from New York. This last category included a proposed thirty-day hike in New Zealand.

  “That one actually made me think twice,” Robin said. “Thirty days in New Zealand sounds like a paradise to me right about now.”

  “What do you think of Gary?” I held up a photograph of a thirtyish man wearing a red baseball cap and posing alongside a six-foot-tall Minnie Mouse. Gary ’s was a marriage proposal. He wrote that he lived in the Finger Lakes district of central New York State, owned a house and a small boat, and had a contact at one of the local wineries, so he could get “the good stuff” at below cost.

  “It says here he’s single and never been married. What’s a grown man with no kids doing down in Disney World getting his picture taken with Minnie Mouse?”

  “Please don’t make fun of him,” Robin said. “I’m guessing he’s a very lonely person. That’s what a lot of these seem to be from.”

  “Which piles are the kinky ones in?”

  “I put those in with the hate mail.” She tapped a finger on the remaining pile. “Listen, I can’t thank you enough for doing this. Are you sure you don’t want any tea or something? A drink?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I feel bad imposing myself on you this way.”

  “You’re not imposing. Don’t mention it.”

  She picked the top sheet off the third pile. “A lot of these are just stupid horny stuff. Still, it’s creepy, being on the receiving end. But some of the others get really nasty. I just figured either way, nasty or stupid, they’ve come from people I wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley, so I bunched them all in as hate mail.”

  She scanned the paper in her hand, and tears came to her eyes. She handed it to me. Her voice was choked. “Why is this happening?”

  5

  THE POST HIT THE STREETS before dawn with its lurid photograph on the front page, showing Robin lying dead beneath the Christmas tree. It wasn’t evident from the angle of the photo that her body had been arranged to resemble the two murder victims in the Fox case, but it didn’t really make any difference. The leaks had begun. Leaks and rumors. A tabloid can run marathons on leaks and rumors alone. The Post suggested, and the talking heads parroted the suggestion, that Robin Burrell had not been murdered by a copycat killer but that Marshall Fox was innocent after all of the two murders for which he had just been tried and that the original killer was again on the march. Women, lock your doors.

  The morning talk shows couldn’t get enough of the murder of Marshall Fox’s former lover. The same faces that had been choking the studios of Court TV and Larry King Live for the months leading up to and during the trial were all risen and shined to weigh in on this latest development. I caught a few minutes of Alan Ross expressing his deep regret for Robin Burrell and her loved ones while at the same time clearly thrilled to be making the case for Fox’s innocence in the earlier murders. I mentioned to Margo that I’d run into Ross in the courtroom and that he’d passed along his greetings.

  “’ow is old ’enry ’iggins anyway?” she asked, butchering her own pretty face with god-awful contortions. She was less than thrilled when I suggested she retire her cockney.

  As I clicked robotically from station to station, I knew that Joseph Gallo could not be enjoying his morning coffee. I felt a little bad-but only a little-that I had lied to Gallo the night before. When I’d told one of the cops on the scene outside Robin Burrell’s building that I needed to speak with the detective in charge, it was primarily a preemptive move. I wanted to explain why it was that a competent check of the various fingerprints that were no doubt being lifted inside Robin’s apartment at that very moment was going to include the name of Fritz Malone in the results. I’d explained to Gallo that Robin Burrell had asked me into her home a few weeks before to take a look at the mail she’d been receiving as a result of her televised participation in the Fox trial. I told him that I had taken some of the letters and the printed-out e-mails out of the apartment, to give them some additional study. The e-mails weren’t so important-the police would be able to retrieve those from Robin’s computer-but I had the only copies of the letters.

  My lie had been in telling Gallo that the letters were in Queens, at Charlie Burke’s house. Charlie is my friend, my former boss, my former partner, Margo’s father, all of the above. I told Gallo that I’d taken the letters and e-mails out to Charlie’s so that he could go over them with me. If the homicide chief had known that they were actually right across the street at Margo’s, he’d have had me fetch them right away. Gallo made me promise to bring the letters into precinct headquarters first thing in the morning.

  I showered and broke a bagel with Miss Margo. She was still glued to the tube. I was feeling heavy and sluggish, and I guess it showed.

  “Do you want to go back to bed?” Margo asked. “That is one of the advantages of being self-employed, you know.”

  “It can also be one of the downfalls.” The TV was driving me nuts. It usually does. A photograph of Robin Burrell came on. I aimed the remote and clicked the set off, tossing the remote on the coffee table.

  Margo frowned. “Hey.”

  “Sorry, sweetheart, were they saying something new?” I hadn’t intended the note of sarcasm that leached in.

  Margo smirked. “If it’s going to be another scintillating lecture about the media, please hold on while I get my notebook. I wouldn’t want to miss something.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’ll say. You’re dragging around here like you’ve got a hairball you can’t cough up. Maybe you should go back to bed and get up on the right side. What’s going on?”

  “I should have told her to get out of town for a while.”

  Margo’s eyes narrowed. She lifted her coffee cup with both hands, floating it under her chin. “Oh. I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I see a little blame-gaming, that’s what.”

  “She was concerned.”

  “Of course she was concerned. There is a world of wackos out there, and she was exposed to God only knows how many of them. That doesn’t mean if one of them got to her it was your fault.”

  “I know that.”

  “You don’t look like you know that.”

  “I could have told her to be more careful.”

  “Stop it right there.” Her cup rattled to the table. “Look at me. Robin Burrell did not hire you. Okay? She was not one of your clients. She was not your responsibility. Capisce? She was a neighbor to whom you were nice enough to lend an ear and take a look at some of her screwy fan mail.”

  “One of her screwy fans, as you put it, might have slit her throat and trussed her like a calf and run a nail through her heart.”

  “Maybe so. And thanks for the graphic reminder while we’re at it. But maybe not. There may be a hundred other answers to who did it, you don’t know. You do know what my dad says about jumping to conclusions.”

  I did know. Charlie Burke was a walking, talking rule book of investigation techniques and pointers. Back when he was whipping me into shape, I wanted to strangle him sometimes, the way he peppered me with his aphorisms.

  “The Sayings of Chairman Daddy,” I grumbled.

  Margo’s voice lowered. “We can turn this thing nasty if you’d like.”

  “Now who’s getting up on the wrong side of the bed?”

  “Hey, I’m trying to help you here.” She gestured toward the window. “You spent an hour in the woman’s apartment. You came over here with a pile of the woman’s mail. Maybe you even went and talked to her a second time, I don’t know. And now she’s dead. You have no connection with that whatsoever. You were the good guy. I don’t happen to think you have a single thing to regret.”

  “I regret that sh
e’s dead.”

  I regretted something else, too. Immediately. I regretted saying what I’d just said in the particular heavy tone I’d said it in. I was sluggish. I wasn’t picking up on Margo’s cues quickly enough. Maybe you even went and talked to her a second time. Margo crossed her arms then instantly uncrossed them. Suddenly, they were awkward appendages.

  “You’d better get that stuff off to your cop.”

  I shook my head slowly. “Not on this note.”

  She leveled her look at me. “I saw you standing at the window last night. You thought I was asleep.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about whether you were asleep or not.”

  “Oh. Well. Thank you.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m going to apologize. But I’m not sure for what.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Look, a woman who asked me for some help was murdered right across the damn street. I know it’s not my responsibility, but sue me, I feel bad about it. I woke up and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I went to the window and took turns feeling sorry for the dead woman and feeling sorry for myself. I can’t justify the pity party, but there it is. I think that’s pretty much the whole picture.”

  She let my words hang in the air. “I accept your apology.”

  “You forced my apology.”

  “I know I did. I accept it anyway.”

  I looked at my watch. “This is pretty early for daytime drama, don’t you think? It’s been swell fighting with you, lady, but I’ve got to be going.”

  Margo’s voice was without inflection. “You’re going to get involved with this thing, aren’t you?”