Cold Day in Hell

by Richard Hawke

  Not quite two years into the marriage, the cracks began to appear. Rumors of fights. Whispers of drugs. Suggestions of a serious wandering-eye problem on the part of Fox. During an extended European vacation for the lady of the house, speculation grew that Fox was ready to pull up stakes and make his way back to the heartland. Finally, the trial separation, accompanied by the almost immediate parade of women looping their arm through that of the late-night entertainer. High-profile carousing. High jinks. The unexplained police presence at three A.M. outside Fox’s rented bungalow at Chateau Marmont. An unlicensed handgun setting off alarms at JFK. The incident with the shattered glass table and the bleeding Peruvian supermodel-reportedly seven stitches across the nineteen-year-old’s shoulder blade.

  And then April.

  The murders.

  Blood in Central Park.

  The week of Fox’s indictment and jailing for the slayings of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman, Time splashed the single word TUMBLED across their cover photograph of the late-night celebrity dressed in an orange jumpsuit and shackled like Houdini, wrists to waist, ankle to ankle. An ill-timed programming decision the night of the arrest had resulted in the re-airing of Rosemary Fox’s appearance on her husband’s show. Two minutes into the segment, just as one of the snakes was coiling its way down her arm and onto Marshall Fox’s desk, television sets across the country abruptly went black. Some accounts-surely apocryphal but too delicious not to report-had the sound of Rosemary Fox’s furious shriek traveling the full distance from the couple’s Park Avenue penthouse all the way across Central Park to the West Side. Not likely. Even so, an actual witness to the scene of Rosemary’s incensed phone call to Alan Ross at the network did report the base of her telephone cracking as she slammed the receiver down over and over again.

  THE WORD ON CYNTHIA BLAIR was that the ambitious thirty-two-year-old was strung about as tight as a person can be strung while managing to function. Some of it was simply Cynthia-she’d always been the classic type A-but a lot of it was her job. Cynthia had been fast-tracking her way up the KBS ladder from the word go, impressing her bosses with her ability to transform her entry-level “shut up and fetch coffee” position into one where she could and did make a real contribution. She had the hunger. More importantly, she had the talent. The network knew it had a comer. When the plan was devised to bring in the charming cowboy and give him his own show, Cynthia had lobbied successfully to be the risky show’s producer and had launched into the enterprise with the full force of her tigerlike energy. It was hair-pulling work. In order to siphon off some of the stress from her work, Cynthia would steal away from the office whenever possible and put herself through various tortures at a nearby health club. The cords on either side of her slender neck stood out like hard cables as she strained against machines set to resistances that were patently inappropriate for the woman’s trim 112-pound body. But Cynthia Blair liked to push limits. She attacked the StairMaster as if she were charging to the top of a burning building to rescue a stranded child. She performed military-style sit-ups until she was on the verge of puking. She put serious fear into some of her kickboxing partners. It was her style, what she needed in order to contend with her natural tendency to engage with life at a highly pitched intensity.

  When she couldn’t make it to the health club, she sometimes emptied the contents of her stomach into the toilet across the hall from her office.

  Over the course of the Marshall Fox trial, the nature of Fox’s working relationship with Cynthia was dissected in great detail, the consensus being that the contrary bullheadedness of the two personalities had contributed to an atmosphere in the offices that could range anywhere from slightly ginger to all-out war zone; at the same time, some damned good television was born of the star and his tenacious producer squaring off. For a show that was essentially about laughter, the success of Midnight with Marshall Fox was revealed to followers of the trial to be in many ways dependent on the good stuff extracted from blow and counterblow.

  “This is how Marshall works,” Alan Ross had testified. He had explained that, contrary to the impression of most television personalities, Marshall Fox was not at all interested in surrounding himself with yes-men. That wasn’t the world he’d grown up in. “With Marshall, it’s not something so basic as being friendly. He likes to spar. It’s all about provoking and being provoked. That’s just how he is. Those jokes and quips you hear every night? Trust me, some poor soul on the staff has to suffer deeply before Marshall signs off on them. His best work comes from knocking heads with someone. He’s a digger. He likes to rattle around in places people would just as soon keep private. That’s where the really good stuff is. Marshall has an instinct for that. It’s why the show has been such a success. You laugh your brains out while you’re watching, but you’re also nervous. He’s brilliant, the way he goes about it.”

  Ross went on to say that Cynthia Blair had been the perfect producer for someone like Fox. He described her “solid backbone” and her unwillingness to cave in gracefully to her boss’s bullying. Instinctively, she knew that Marshall thrived on “the fight.”

  “Personally, I thought that Cynthia moving on from the show was inevitable. Working with someone like Marshall is exhausting. Believe me, I know. I’ve been there. No question the dynamic between the two was creating some great television, but ultimately there’s going to be a burnout factor. Even with someone as driven as Cynthia was. At least that’s my view. Marshall was a definite challenge to Cynthia, but she’d mastered it. Marshall and I even had some discussions about it. He agreed with me that Cynthia was ready for something new to sink her teeth into. She was definitely going places.”

  Most of Fox’s associates who testified took pains to stress that the “combat” between Cynthia and her boss had always been strictly professional, just the way the two of them chose to do business. Lawyers for the prosecution hammered away hard at this point but were unable to solicit a statement from anyone that, in fact, Fox and Cynthia Blair had not liked each other. Even so, nobody who testified attempted to pretend that the termination of the professional relationship hadn’t been particularly nasty. Or sudden. Around two o’clock on the afternoon of March 22, shouting and yelling-much more than usual-had been heard coming from behind Marshall Fox’s closed office door. Two voices. Marshall Fox and Cynthia Blair. No one who heard the muffled battle was able to identify the precise point of the argument, although the single most agreed-upon quote heard distinctly by those testifying was: “Liar! You fucking, fucking, two-faced liar!” It was Cynthia Blair, not Fox, who hurled that one, and she had said it over and over again. Eventually, Cynthia emerged from Fox’s office and stormed into hers, which adjoined her boss’s. There was a loud crash and the sound of broken glass, followed by a steady pounding sound that went on for about a minute. This was followed by several tense minutes of silence, after which the producer’s door flew open and Cynthia stomped to the elevator clutching a cardboard box under one arm. She stood at the elevator, glaring up at the ceiling, slamming her hand against the down button over and over and over until the elevator arrived and the door slid open. Cynthia swore harshly under her breath as she got on the elevator, though no one’s testimony squared on the specifics of what she said.

  The pounding that was heard coming from Cynthia’s office had resulted in a large hole that was found in the Sheetrock wall-the wall she shared with Fox-that looked as if she had attempted to launch a cannonball through the wall and catch her boss at his desk. The cannonball turned out to be Cynthia Blair’s Emmy Award (the crashing sound had been the glass of the small display case across from Cynthia’s desk), which was fished out from the hollow area within the wall, along with the framed photograph of a smiling Marshall Fox embracing Cynthia (who was embracing her Emmy) that had previously held the place of honor in the display case, next to the award. The glass of the frame was broken, spiderwebbing out from a point directly in the center of Marshall Fox’s face. As one of the secretaries testifie
d, “It looked like she’d punched him out.”

  Three weeks later, an early-morning dog walker in Central Park came across the clothed body of a young woman lying at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle, the stone Egyptian obelisk rising from a small hill behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A red scarf that was later identified as belonging to the victim was knotted around her throat, and her face was covered with tiny puncture wounds from what proved to be a ballpoint pen, the very pen that had been used to fix the victim’s hand in place over her heart.

  The body of Cynthia Blair was discovered on April 16. What with the grisly nature of the murder and the location of the body, the story led the local newscasts. Once the woman’s identity was released a day later, the story strapped on rockets. Overnight, Cynthia Blair achieved star status. Her angular visage saturated the airwaves. The attractive, hardworking, go-get-’em “woman behind the man” story got immediate traction. From the offices of Midnight with Marshall Fox, a statement was released offering condolences to Cynthia Blair’s family, along with the announcement of a $500,000 award for the capture and conviction of Cynthia’s murderer, half of which was being put up personally by Marshall Fox. The show went on immediate hiatus. It resumed a week later-several days after Cynthia Blair’s celebrity-heavy funeral-with a program that felt like the Titanic the day after. Fox had wept openly several times. The plug was pulled on a video tribute to the show’s former producer partway through, it was so distressing. Midway through the program, the band performed a dirge that seemed interminable, during which Marshall Fox wandered between his desk and various parts of the stage like a man in a haunted dream.

  Margo had insisted on watching. I’d lobbied for whiskey and a couple of games of pool at Dive 75, but Margo won the toss. She’s a freelance writer, and her beat requires her to keep an ear to the ground concerning all things cultural, fluffy and otherwise. So I watched the show with her, both fascinated and disgusted by the chutzpah of Marshall Fox and his people for dragging America through such a moribund hour of television.

  High marks to Margo for prescience. At one point during the grim proceedings, she turned to me on the couch and said, “So what do you think? Did Fox do it?”

  “Do what? Kill his producer?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not serious, are you?”

  She did a head-bob thing that she does, her eyes going up to a corner of the ceiling. “I don’t know. Not really, I guess. Maybe.”

  At that point, a week after Cynthia Blair’s murder, the police had not released the detail of the dead woman’s hand having been affixed to her breast with the ballpoint pen. That all changed three days later-a Sunday-when a second body turned up in the park. Unlike Cynthia Blair, this one showed signs of rape, or at any rate sexual activity, in the hours prior to death. And whereas the cause of death in the case of Cynthia Blair had been strangulation, the second victim had received several severe blows to the head and then had her neck opened up. Blood everywhere. In addition, a pair of handcuffs dangled from the left wrist. As with Blair, this new body had been deposited at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle. Most telling to the police, its right hand had also been affixed over the heart, this time with a four-inch nail. Only this time, that last detail leaked out.

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

  7

  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 h
ad 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.