Cold Day in Hell

by Richard Hawke

  “I’m taking the letters to Joe Gallo. I have to do that.”

  “But you said you were going to copy them first.”

  “That’s right.”

  “If you need something to read, I’ve got a zillion books right here.”

  I went into the bedroom and grabbed my coat off the chair. I fetched a PBS tote bag from the closet and went into the living room and collected Robin Burrell’s letters and e-mails and put them in the tote. When I popped into the kitchen to say goodbye, Margo was still at the table, holding her coffee cup up near her chin once more.

  “Did you see her a second time, Fritz?”

  I took a beat. “Would it actually matter if I had?”

  Even though she was already stock-still, I got the impression that she froze just a tad more. Maybe it was her eyes.

  “Not the answer I wanted to hear.”

  I hoisted the tote bag onto my shoulder. “Yes,” I said. “I did. She needed to talk again. We got together a second time.”

  Margo took a sip of her coffee. Her eyes narrowed like a cat’s. “I know.”

  HOMICIDE DETECTIVE JOSEPH GALLO had never met a mirror he didn’t like. I know that’s an old saw, but its cut is nonetheless true. If Gallo ran his hand down his silk tie once in the twenty minutes we spoke together in his office, he did it a hundred times. Gallo’s face was handsome the way Dracula’s face is handsome. Good bones, seductive black eyes set in deep sockets. There are no fewer than three dapper television detectives Gallo has been overheard claiming to be the model for. The thing is, he might be right. Central casting could do a hell of a lot worse than Joseph Gallo.

  The detective was on the phone. As he signaled me to take a seat, he rolled his eyes at whomever it was he had on the line. The sleeves of his pale blue shirt were folded back to his forearms in perfect rectangles. His top button was loose, and his tie was artfully askew. A copy of the Post was on his desk. Facedown.

  “Of course I’m looking into it. What do you think? I want to know that just as much…Right. Exactly…No, I’ve got a man on it…Yes, he’s a good man.” A minute later, he hung up. His hard jaw was askew. “Ask me what I think of the First Amendment. No, don’t bother. I’ll tell you. I think it’s not worth the toilet paper it’s printed on.”

  “Don’t let yourself get quoted on that.”

  “If I weren’t sworn to uphold the law, I’d kill somebody over at the Post.”

  “The photo?”

  “The frippin’ photo, you’d better believe it. There’s nothing I can do to stop them from printing what amounts to pornography, as far as I’m concerned. They’ve got their lovely First Amendment. But do you know something? That picture was taken nearly forty minutes before the 911 was called in. We had the call traced, naturally. It was a pay phone at that diner next to the Post. We got the waitress to ID the photographer. The whole time this jerk is en route from the murder scene, Jimmy Puck is mucking around outside Burrell’s building, getting the lay of the land. I don’t know why people even read that weasel. The woman could have been in there bleeding to death.”

  I placed the tote bag on top of the Post. “She did bleed to death.”

  “You know what I mean. Look, I know she must’ve died within minutes. Her throat opened up like that. But those schmucks didn’t know that. All they’re thinking about is beating the other guy. Getting to press lickety-split with their goddamn photo. Their almighty scoop. That’s what your First Amendment does. It lets you screw up your priorities.”

  “A cop with a beef about the press,” I said. “I’m shocked, shocked.”

  Gallo looked ready to take a bite out of me then relaxed. A hand drifted to his hair and gave it a pat. “Right. Sure. What’s new on the planet three? Sometimes a guy’s just got to bitch.”

  “It’s a free country,” I said. “Amendments and all.”

  He eyed the tote bag. “Okay, now, run it by me again how it was you got your nose into this. I have to say I wasn’t paying a lot of attention last night.”

  “Sure. You know Cafe La Fortuna? It’s down near the end of Robin Burrell’s block.”

  “Sure. They’ve got that photo in the window of John Lennon and Yoko Ono hanging out in their back garden.”

  “Right. Well, I go there pretty often.”

  “I don’t recall seeing any pictures of you in the window.”

  “I’m not the guy who wrote ‘Sexy Sadie.’”

  “Hey. John Lennon didn’t become John Lennon by writing ‘Sexy Sadie.’”

  “What I’m saying is that I pop into the place fairly often. I was there a couple weeks ago, and Mrs. Carella came over to me. Mrs. Carella is the owner. She came over to me and pointed out a woman who was sitting in the back.”

  “Let me guess.”

  “You guess Yoko and I’m leaving.”

  “Robin Burrell.”

  “Correct. I recognized her from TV. You’d have to live in a darker cave than mine not to know that face. It wasn’t so surprising to see her. I knew she lived right across the street from Margo.”

  “Ever talk to her before?”

  “Before La Fortuna? No. But Mrs. Carella said that’s exactly what I should do. I should go talk to her. She said Robin had come in earlier and taken the table in the back and started to cry. I’ll tell you something, you don’t cry around Mrs. Carella without her swooping in. She got Robin to tell her what the problem was. It was all this mail and e-mails from these creeps all over the place. She was spooked. Mrs. Carella knows what I do for a living, she thought maybe I could help. She’s like an Italian yenta. Except with the Sicilian accent. ‘Fritz, meet Robin. Robin, meet Fritz. You two sit here and share some biscotti and get to know each other.’”

  “Sounds lovely. So is that what happened? Did you get to know her?”

  I shrugged. “I heard her story. You know what they say about private eyes.”

  “‘It’s not the eyes, it’s the ears.’”

  “Exactly. I listened. Robin was scared. She was depressed. She was blaming herself for the entire mess. You know how it is. If she hadn’t gotten involved with Fox in the first place. Blah blah. All the usual stuff.”

  “So you placed a manly hand on hers and told her not to blame the victim.”

  “I kept my manly hands to myself.”

  “Ms. Burrell was a pretty woman.”

  “You noticed that, eh? They sure do hire the best around here.”

  Gallo indicated the tote bag. “What’s your gut tell you, Fritz? Is the killer in there?”

  “Could be. None of them scream, ‘Lock your door, little girl, I’m on my way!’ She told me there had been some calls, too. As soon as her name and picture started getting bounced around in the press. Eventually, she got an unlisted number.”

  Gallo perked up at the mention of nasty phone calls. “Were any of the phone calls explicitly threatening?”

  “She said mostly they were just jerks being jerks.”

  “But no death threats.”

  “None she shared with me.”

  “Any repeats? Same guy over and over?”

  “She didn’t say. She got the unlisted number pretty quickly, and that ended it.”

  “Not quite,” the detective said. “Here. Let me play something for you.”

  There was a miniature cassette player on the desk. I hadn’t noticed it. Gallo centered it, pushed the rewind button then hit play. There were several static-filled seconds, and then came a gravelly male voice.

  “I’m coming, you whore. Can you taste the blood yet?”

  Gallo hit the stop button. “How would you like to come home to that? This was left on Robin Burrell’s answering machine last night. Apparently the unlisted thing didn’t faze this guy.”

  “It’s not so hard to get a number if you really want it.”

  “Definitely not. Now, here’s your scoop of the day-and you heard it here first. That message? What you just heard? An identical message was left last night on the machine of one Rosemar
y Fox.”

  “Mrs. Marshall Fox herself?”

  Gallo nodded expansively. “I’m not saying this is necessarily the creep who got to Robin Burrell last night, but it does give you that funny feeling.”

  “What kind of feeling does it give Rosemary Fox?”

  “I’m trying to throw a dozen men around her, but she’s balking. The Foxes aren’t what you call benevolent friends of the New York City police at this particular point in time. They’ve got that loudmouth lawyer of theirs saying Fox will hire his own people to protect his family, thank you very much.”

  “Riddick?”

  “Right. Zack the hack. We’d like to keep all this quiet. I mean, these phone threats. But you know how Riddick operates. He’s called a press conference for noon today. How much do you want to bet he’s going to have a cassette player of his own with him?”

  “It doesn’t help his client to advertise death threats made to his wife,” I said.

  “You think he cares about that? It helps him. Who the hell do you think is Zachary Riddick’s biggest client?”

  “Can’t you stop him? Tampering with evidence? Something like that?”

  “We can bust his chops. But believe me, if he wants this tape out there, he’ll get it out there.”

  “So what do you think you’re dealing with here?”

  Gallo aimed his palms at the ceiling. “You know what? You’ll have to get back to me on that.”

  I asked to hear the message again. Gallo hit the rewind button then replayed the message. The voice was clearly being disguised. It was menacing, but in what sounded to me like a calculating way. I asked, “What time was this left? Does Robin’s machine have a time stamp on it?”

  “It was left at six-forty-one.”

  “That’s just around the time Deveraux was biting the heads off the jury.”

  Gallo picked up a stack of black-and-white photographs from the desk and started leafing through them. “We found no signs of a forced entry.”

  “So Robin either knew her attacker,” I said, “or, more to the point, knew him and trusted him enough to let him in. Or else she got this message and showed unfathomably stupid judgment in opening the door to the first stranger who came along.”

  “Exactly. We’re working on both scenarios.”

  “Robin Burrell was not an unfathomably stupid person,” I said.

  “I’m sure she wasn’t.”

  He tossed one of the photographs on the desk. I picked it up. It was a close-up of a tray holding a piece of cheese still in its cellophane along with a knife and an apple. Gallo went on, “We’ve traced Ms. Burrell from a yoga class she took over on Broadway. On the way home, she buys cheese and fruit. She also buys throat lozenges and Kleenex and other stuff for a cold. Her yoga instructor confirmed that she was sneezing and sniffling in class.”

  “It’s cold season,” I said.

  “If you’re popping lozenges and drinking Throat Coat tea, I don’t see that you’re eating cheese. Especially set out all nice on a tray like that. She was expecting someone.”

  “In that case, why does stupid scenario number two have legs? You’re saying it wasn’t a stranger.”

  “Because I don’t want to rule out something that might still hold up. You don’t toss out a scenario just because it might be a little stupid. Think about it. What’s one way to get inside someone’s apartment without forcing your way in?”

  I got it. “Be there when they’re opening the door.”

  “Right. Leave a message that will scare the hell out of them. A woman in her apartment alone? You get a message like that on your phone, especially on an unlisted number? That’s got to spook her. She’s not going to feel too good just sitting there. So you leave the message and be there waiting when she comes running out the door.”

  “Right into your arms.”

  Gallo nodded. “Or merge the two stories, if you want. It’s someone she knew who made the call, disguising his voice, and he stood there waiting. Either way, he flushed her out. He got her to open the door.”

  “If it’ll make you feel any better, I can sort out the cheese mystery for you.”

  “Sure, Fritz. Sort away.”

  “The person she was expecting was me.”

  Gallo blinked. “You. What are you telling me? You had a date with Robin Burrell the night she was killed?”

  “Don’t go smearing me with that brush, Joe. I didn’t have a date. She wanted to talk some more about all the nutsy stuff that had been going on lately. I was testifying on that pirating case, and we’d arranged that I’d swing by when I got out.”

  Gallo rested his chin on his fingertips and studied me. “Margo know about this date?”

  “I just told you, it wasn’t a date.”

  “This little cheese party, then?”

  “Is that question relevant to your investigation?”

  “So the answer is, she didn’t. What’s going on here, Fritz?”

  “Nothing’s going on. I make a living out of other people’s problems. Robin Burrell had some problems.”

  “Was she your client?”

  “Now you’re sounding like Margo.”

  “Oh. So you’ve had this conversation with Ms. Burke?”

  “A similar one.”

  “And she’s okay with your breaking cheese with the pretty lady across the street?”

  “Joe, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re prying.”

  “You don’t know any better.”

  “Okay. Margo’s nose is out of joint. I’m doing what I can to put it back in place.”

  “We’ve established that Robin Burrell was a pretty woman.”

  “From where I sit, Margo’s no side of burnt toast. Robin Burrell was upset. If I was able to calm her down some, that’s not a crime. Check your codes. Have you got one for ‘unlawful assisting of damsel in distress’?”

  “Okay. None of my business. But I wish you’d told me about this last night.”

  “Cops scare me,” I said.

  Gallo picked up one of the crime-scene photos and shook his head sadly at it. He dropped the photograph back on his desk, leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers carefully against the back of his head.

  “The guy did a real chop job on your cheese friend. We’re looking at one sick, angry bastard here. And when word gets out that Ms. Burrell was found with her hand mutilated against her chest like those other two…” Gallo let the sentence hang.

  “Any more thoughts on whether it’s a copycat or if this guy actually did the Central Parkers?”

  “The answer to both those questions is maybe. But I sure as hell hope it’s the first one.” He indicated the tote bag. “I wish you could tell me he’s in there.”

  “Sorry, Joe.”

  Gallo came forward in his chair and plucked one of the e-mails from the bag. As he read it, I took a few of the other photographs and flipped through them. It was a reckless thing to do. I knew there was likely to be at least one of them that could get under my skin. There was. The wiseass crime-scene photographer had fashioned what he’d probably thought was an art shot. The photograph was taken looking down from the crown of Robin’s head as she lay on the floor. Her hairline, her eyebrows and her nose were in the foreground, slightly blurred. The focus of the shot was on the mirror fragment protruding from Robin’s neck, just above her collarbone. The photographer had angled the shot to capture the reflection of a portion of Robin’s face. This wasn’t exactly the last memory of the woman’s deep hazel eyes that I’d have preferred to hold.

  Joe Gallo finished reading the e-mail. He set it faceup on his desk, squaring it perfectly. “Suspect number one.” He made a rueful face. “So begins the glamorous side of law enforcement.”

  6

  I’VE NEVER BEEN SITTING on top of the world myself, so I don’t honestly know what that’s like. For that matter, who can say that having the number-one-rated late-night show in the midnight slot and getting mountains of money thrown at you truly qualif
ies as “sitting on top of the world,” but that was the tag that Time magazine had given Marshall Fox when they’d put his grinning mug on their cover just three months before the murdered bodies of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman surfaced in Central Park a little over a week apart. Fox’s emergence on the entertainment scene three years earlier, almost literally from nowhere (“South Dakota isn’t nowhere,” Fox joked during the first week of his show, “we prefer to think of ourselves as just south of nowhere”), and his blurringly fast trajectory to stardom had made the high school dropout and former ranch hand a household name almost overnight. Fox’s particular combination of easy charm, faint naughtiness and at times downright reproachful wit struck an immediate chord with viewers. The Time story called it “a near-fluke-ish alchemy.”

  One has to conjure the incongruous image of a cowboy Lenny Bruce wandering in from the heartland. Like Bruce, Mr. Fox is not one to mince his words, a trait that also lands him in the grand American populist tradition of Will Rogers or Mark Twain. But ask any female fan of Marshall Fox if she thinks either of those two venerable sagebrush sages had even a fraction of the edge or especially the sex appeal of this new kid on the block, and you’re likely as not to hear a resounding “As if!”

  Within months of its debut, Midnight with Marshall Fox was a ratings gold mine for the network. The diamond-blue eyes and the slightly damaged nose peered out from newsstands all over the country. The guy was hot goods. Even Margo, who is not one to be easily starstruck, contracted a case of Fox fever and stayed up past pumpkin time to get her dose of the man. When Fox took up with socialite beauty and celebrity heartbreaker Rosemary Boggs within a year of landing in New York and the two tied the knot a mere three months later, they were given the sort of ink once reserved for royal couples. The media could not get enough of them. Vanity Fair reportedly paid the Foxes over a million dollars to pose as scantily clad modern-day Antony and Cleopatra (Cowboy & Cleopatra) for the cover of their magazine, snakes and all. Rosemary was rumored to have balked at the idea and made the photo shoot a living hell. Regardless, the results pumped sales to the top of the publication’s all-time figures, and when Fox convinced his wife to come on the show the week after the magazine hit the stands-complete with snakes and the peekaboo gold toga-the show’s already boffo ratings likewise flew right off the charts. The Foxes were a force, the new bionic couple. About as “it” as “it” gets.