Cold Day in Hell

by Richard Hawke

  Megan glanced out her small kitchen window at the wedge of a river view her place afforded. The call was for heavy evening rain-a classic April dousing-but nothing had started yet. The low clouds gathered over the river were gray and milky, belly-lit from Manhattan ’s excessive wattage. Across the Hudson, a series of silent lightning flashes was illuminating the scant skyline of Hoboken. Staccato blasts making it look as if the small city were suffering through a bombardment.

  MEGAN OPENED a bottle of pinot grigio and poured half a glass. As early as a month ago, she would have poured a second glass and set it on the coffee table in front of where Helen usually sat. Megan had had no clue she was in possession of such a maudlin streak, but life is about discovery, isn’t it? Sweet Helen. Megan went into the living room and looked at the framed photo on the bookshelf. It was the last photo that had been taken. Helen holding forth in this same room on New Year’s Eve, waving her champagne glass as she presented her laundry list of resolutions, angling for “the perfect year.” After Helen’s murder at the hands of Albert Stenborg, Megan had put the picture in the frame and tried out dozens of different locations around the apartment. None had satisfied her, and she had seriously considered taking it to the photo shop on Greenwich and having them make multiple copies so she could display Helen’s infectious laugh throughout the apartment. The shrink the department was sending her to didn’t think that was such a good idea. Megan had made the mistake-she thought of it as a mistake-of telling the shrink about her practice of pouring the extra glass of wine and placing it where Helen usually sat. The shrink hadn’t thought that was a good idea, either.

  Today would have been Helen’s birthday. Tonight. Now. Josh had promised to come directly from the airport, even though Megan had insisted she’d be fine. But he’d called several hours ago from the tarmac in Memphis. His phone breaking up. Heavy rains. Delays. Not sure. Will call back.

  The rain began during Megan’s second glass of wine. This time a full glass. The book on Cynthia Blair’s murder was on the coffee table. Woefully thin for a ten-day-old murder. Cynthia Blair had last been seen alive at approximately four-thirty on the afternoon of April 15 by the Korean woman where Cynthia took her laundry to be done. Cynthia had returned to her apartment with two bundles of folded laundry in a Crate & Barrel shopping bag; she’d opened one of the bundles, rifling through it while leaving the other untouched. Details. Megan had ordered a chemical check on the clothes that Cynthia Blair was wearing when she was murdered, to determine which piece of newly laundered clothing she had opted to don before heading out later in the evening. Was it the pants? The blouse? The underwear? Socks? Or-least likely-was it the scarf that had been used to tie off her windpipe for the several minutes required to guarantee her death? It had proved to be the blue-and-white-striped underwear. Conclusion to be drawn? Nothing. Zero. Or at least nothing that Megan could come up with. She felt dulled, as though her instincts were numb. Her mind felt clumsy, and she wished Joe Gallo had never assigned her this homicide. Cynthia Blair was now a week in her grave, and her murder book was still thin.

  And Brian McKinney was an asshole.

  “I hear your vic put on fresh panties before she died,” McKinney had needled that morning, pressing his hands on her desk as if keeping it from floating off. “Good work, Meg. Have you tracked down where she bought said panties? Might crack this whole case open in no time.”

  They say that everybody has somebody who loves them, but to Megan this merely meant that in McKinney ’s case, somebody was loving an asshole. She knew at least some of the reasons he was such a jerk to her. But he was such a jerk, she figured there had to be even more reasons than just the obvious ones. This time he had gone too far. Megan had been tipped off. Tomorrow’s Post was going to have a scoop under Jimmy Puck’s byline. Unnamed sources confirm that Ms. Blair was in her third month of pregnancy at the time of her murder.

  Great. Just fine. One more cat out of the bag. Rusty bucket. Leaky bag. Oh, what the hell. Megan finished her wine and poured another glass. She supposed she should be grateful for getting a full ten days into her investigation with the information of Cynthia Blair’s pregnancy remaining under wraps. Cynthia Blair wasn’t McKinney ’s case, he didn’t have anything to lose in handing a goodie like Cynthia’s hitherto unreported pregnancy over to Jimmy Stupid Name Fat Butt Puck. Megan knew that the smirk would be firmly in place on McKinney ’s face when she walked into the station the next morning. And she knew what Joe Gallo would tell her: Don’t take it personally.

  But she wasn’t taking it personally. Not this time. It was Cynthia Blair’s parents Megan was thinking about. They’d be the ones taking it personally. Megan had been in Joe’s office when the Blairs had arrived directly from the airport, the two nearly drained of the ability to speak, imploring Joseph Gallo with tear-reddened eyes to end the bad dream right now and present their daughter to them, alive and vibrant. The Blairs took the news of their daughter’s pregnancy as if they had just been told she was composed entirely of green jelly beans. They couldn’t take it in, and they had made Gallo repeat the information three times. Four times, actually, though at that point Joe had turned the chore over to Megan. Maybe it would be better coming from a woman. Megan had felt her skin begin to crawl as she detected the Blairs latching on to her. She was only a year older than Cynthia, and at least to the naked eye, she was a competent, capable young woman in a high-stress environment in the overwhelming city of New York. Just like Cynthia. Only she was still alive. Megan thought that Mrs. Blair in particular was more than ready to go quietly unhinged, take Megan by the hand and tell her, “Pack your things, honey, we’re going home now.” Megan had led the questioning-pro forma, she knew it from the get-go-about Cynthia’s personal life, and did the Blairs have any indication from their daughter that she was seeing anyone in particular? Both Megan and Gallo knew that the questioning was a hollow exercise. People who knew Cynthia much better than the pale couple from Tucson and Cynthia’s close friends and recent work colleagues had all responded to similar questions and offered up nothing except that they’d all thought Cynthia Blair had been too ambitious to have a personal life. That was the general rap. Her life had been her career. Or vice versa. The Blairs offered nothing beyond their full-scale wonder, consternation, and inability to process how the both of them had entered into this surreal dream together and how in the world they would find a way out of it. Joe Gallo had promised them that the information about Cynthia’s pregnancy would remain private. “It’s part of the investigation. But beyond that, it’s nobody’s business but yours.”

  The Blairs had shared a look. It was Cynthia’s mother who voiced the thought. “I don’t guess it’s any of our business, either. Cindy didn’t seem to think so.”

  THE MEAT IN THE MARINADE remained on the kitchen counter. An intrepid cockroach, having traveled from its favored nesting area within the electrical outlet behind the refrigerator, up the side of the cabinet and across the large open plain of the countertop, lay on its back in the marinade, its infinitesimal feet kicking uselessly, the armor of its skin no protection against the saturating juices. It would be dead by midnight.

  The rain was falling steadily, a dim roar, a soft, ceaseless shoosh. Droplets bounced off the sill of Megan’s open window, hitting the side of the toaster oven in a fanlike splatter. Crumbs moved erratically in the growing puddle. A rumble of thunder, and the lights in the apartment flickered, then went off altogether, then flickered back on under a minute later. The clocks in the apartment-the clock radio in the kitchen and the bedside clock radio-kicked to their default, blinking 12:00…12:00…12:00…

  OUT AT THE HUDSON PIER, Megan was sitting on one of the stone benches, hugging her knees to her chest. Rain dripped off the brim of her NYPD baseball cap onto the backs of her small hands. She was drenched, wearing only a windbreaker and her thick gray sweats, her feet bone-cold in a pair of saturated Converse low-tops. Her head was bent forward, and she was singing softly into the dry space. She
hated the song. Insipid, stupid, ridiculous song. Devoid of all meaning, infantile, banal. Vaguely insulting, even. But the tune had her. She was helpless. It sucked the words out of her as if it were a parasite.

  Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you…

  20

  IT HAD BEEN one of those rumors that go around. In the age of instant communication, it spread like a galloping virus.

  Marshall Fox trolls the Internet.

  The buzz was that, like millions of his fellow citizens, Marshall Fox liked to cloak his identity and go out there and talk dirty. Very dirty. Entire sites had cropped up devoted to alleged “sightings,” lists of anonymous e-mail addresses that may or may not have been those of the popular late-night celebrity. Exchanges between the “willing” and the “alleged” were posted. Some of the postings had the ring of, if not truth, at least possibility. They sounded like Marshall Fox. They employed his jokes, his manner of speaking, key phrases that were associated with him. Of course, anyone with the ability to type and talent for mimicry could handle that. Most people knew well enough that it was largely considered a game. A celebrity impersonation. Cyberchat with a cyber wax figure. Cybersex with a personable fraud.

  For a while it had been all the rage. The term “Fox-Trotter” had been coined to refer to the Fox pretenders. Fox himself encouraged the fad. Several nights a week, he would fashion a comic bit around some of the more outrageous postings attributed to him. As he sifted through handfuls of e-mail messages, his eyebrows would rise in mock amazement, the mischievous grin stretching across his face.

  “So, apparently, I was in touch last night with an Ingrid and an Olga. Seems they were determined to tell me everything I wanted to know but was afraid to ask about Swedish meatballs.” He milked the laugh and brandished another of the messages. “Look. Here’s one from some fellow named Sven.” Then, in a falsetto voice and a butchered Swedish accent, “De-yer Mr. Fox. Whatever yew dew? Stey awey from Innnngrid and Oooolga?”

  NIKKI ROSSMAN LOVED the Internet. She had once heard it referred to as the portal to instant depravity, and she agreed completely. The Internet had opened up for Nikki an entirely new section of the day. Not really day but morning, though for Nikki, it was just an extension of the night before. Nikki lived in Tribeca, lower Manhattan, an area with no shortage of clubs and bars, and she loved to dance. She especially loved to get stoned and dance. She was an excellent dancer; her bones disappeared and she was all fluid movements, either fast and furious in all directions at once or slow, dreamy, undulating. She loved the glow of perspiration. She loved noise, the more deafening the music, the better. In a jam-packed club with the music pounding, a person can let loose with the sort of full-throttle screams and shrieks that at any other place in the city would give someone cause to snatch up the phone and punch 911. Nikki loved to shriek on the dance floor. It was a self-prescribed turn-on. She’d read something somewhere once about chakras; it hadn’t made sense to her except the part that said loosening one could clear the way for loosening the others. Nikki took to the dance floor with a hopped-up vengeance, whooping and shrieking at the top of her tiny lungs, and in time she could feel the release taking place deep below. It made her hungry for sex-not ever much of a problem in most of the clubs. There were places. Dark corners. Bathrooms. If the night was nearly played out anyway and the guy was cute, there was her place, his place, someplace to go for it. The only risk was that the sex might not hit the spot she wanted it to hit; after the music and the dancing and the chakra-shaking shrieking, the guy had better close the fucking deal, that’s all she could say. She even had a name for the kind of sex she wanted it to be. Cataclysmic. It could be hit-or-miss, she knew that. But baby, when it hit-when it was cataclysmic…

  A man she once met at the Cat Club had referred to her as “a tight little package.” Nikki loved that description. She thought of it every night as she readied herself to go out, worming her way into her panties, zipping up her baby-doll skirt. Tight little package. Open me first. She’d touch her wrists, the sides of her neck and her cleavage with any of the dozens of scents she lifted regularly from her job at Bloomie’s, imagining that the heat generated on the dance floor would activate the scent and send it out in all directions. Warm blood for the wolves.

  Great fun.

  Then along came the Internet. It was nothing cataclysmic; it couldn’t be. Hit the mute button and it was quiet as death. No pounding rhythms. No strobing lights. No pulsing sweat machines moving together around a cramped dance floor. It was a whole different thing. Tamer, no question about it. And a lot of the time, pathetically puerile.

  Still, it was there, and it was constant. A portal to instant depravity. Four A.M. Ears buzzing. Chakras only partially satisfied. Turning the key and coming into her apartment alone. Nikki found it uncanny, all these freaks sitting out there God knows where, ready at the click of a mouse to climb into her virtual pants. What a riot! Thousands of them. Unseen by the human eye, cyberspace literally crawling with spunk-that was the only way she could put it. What a freak show. She loved it. Yes, you had to wade your way through the lamebrains-or, as her friend Tina called them, “numb nuts”-but like with anything else, a little practice, a little savvy, you could find what worked for you. They were there, the dudes with the moves. Or maybe some of them were chicks in disguise, but what did she really care? You weren’t going to get any safer sex than this. It was a lark, a harmless way to spend some tawdry minutes before climbing into bed alone and kissing the world good night. And some of these guys were good. Nikki liked to think that she was good, too, that she could give as good as she got. Like in the so-called real world. Lord only knows if 90 percent of the people she chatted up would have registered as big fat zeros on her radar if she’d run across them in person. But in her apartment, lit only by the white glow of her computer screen, what difference did it make? None. Nikki’s prompt was always the same: I’m typing with one finger. Tell me what to do with the other nine.

  Very silly. Very immature. But get a clever respondent on the line, someone who had the touch, so to speak, and it wasn’t a bad way to top off the evening before brushing the teeth and giving a quick run of the cold cream.

  And sometimes, of course, she took it offline.

  NIKKI HAD CHECKED OUT some of the so-called Marshall Fox sites. She never for a minute felt that she was actually in touch with the real Marshall Fox, but still, it was fun. Some of the pretenders were exceedingly creative and funny, and not a few showed an impressive flair for the erotic, which Nikki enjoyed.

  One morning she had been online with two of the fakers. One of the fakers was far superior to the other. He had the stuff. He wasn’t quite as clever as the real Marshall Fox, but come on, that guy had a whole bank of writers feeding him lines. But this guy was doing all right. He was pretty funny.

  The other one? She wished he’d go away. She wondered if he might not be a twelve-year-old kid just getting his rocks off. Her friend Tina actually enjoyed fooling around with young boys online, but Nikki thought it was creepy. She wasn’t into that kind of thing. This guy had just sent her a typo-ridden posting including a long-winded joke that Nikki had already read online the week before. It was about a talking dog and a beauty pageant contestant and…it was stupid. She wished the other fake Marshall Fox would send something. It had been ten minutes since he had sent her anything. He’d probably gotten offline. That’s where I should be, Nikki told herself. Her elbow hit the mouse as she twisted in her chair to see if dawn’s early light was beginning to show. Not yet. Thank God.

  Nikki scanned the talking-dog joke. Her orange fingernails clattered on her keyboard.

  Dogs know when I have just had sex.

  What the hell. She hit send. A minute later, a message appeared on her screen. It wasn’t from the kid, or whatever he was. It was from the other fake Marshall Fox. The good one. Nikki realized what she must have done. When her elbow hit the mouse, she must have clicked back to the other guy’s last message.


  Lucky dogs.

  She typed, I’m glad you think so.

  The screen was still for nearly a minute. Nikki thought maybe she had lost him. Then:

  I want to be a lucky dog.

  Nikki giggled out loud as she typed back: The lucky dog who knows I have just had sex or the lucky dog who just had it with me? Oh God. I’ve got to stop this and get some sleep. She hit send.

  The answer came back immediately.

  Both.

  THE CYBER-FLIRTATION HAD gone on for close to two months. He adopted a new identity, just for her. Lucky Dog. For him, Nikki dropped Love Bar and countered with Bitch. He wrote back that she was clever.

  Why, I bet you can even do tricks.

  He also preferred four in the morning for his online dalliances. He wrote that he was always awake at that hour and enjoyed corresponding with her while the rest of the world slept. Nikki deduced from the comment that he must be located somewhere on the East Coast. When she put the question to him, he responded: I’m Marshall Fox, remember? Where else would I be writing from?

  Right. Of course.

  They got into a rhythm. At four on the nose, Nikki would shoot out a one-word command.

  Speak.

  Within seconds came the response.

  Woof.

  And off they went. Lucky Dog was a riot. So long as they were just bantering back and forth, he kept his postings short. He knew how to make her laugh. He was quick. He picked up on little things she’d mentioned and shot them back to her with his particular skew. They could have been talking in a bar. More than once she found herself wishing that they were.