Cold Day in Hell

by Richard Hawke

  ROSEMARY FOX EYED the scrum of reporters and cameramen gathered on the sidewalk outside her building, and she instructed her driver to keep driving.

  “Anywhere. Just get away from here.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Rosemary lit a cigarette and cracked the tinted window half an inch. She stared dully at the passing buildings. Marshall was sitting in a jail cell this very minute. Unbelievable. Totally fucking unbelievable. At least Zachary had promised that Marshall would be issued his own cell. Fine. But he had also promised a discreet and orderly arrangement for Marshall to turn himself in that morning, and instead, that blond cookie had slapped handcuffs on Marshall and dragged him through the front lobby of the building like a common criminal. Infuriating. The poor boy. Rosemary had never seen such a look of helplessness on her husband’s face. All his cocksure silliness and charm had drained away at the sight of the handcuffs coming off that girl cop’s belt. She’d said something to him in a low voice, but Rosemary had missed it. In the insanity of the next several hours, she’d forgotten to ask Marshall what it was the little girl Kojak had said to him.

  The phone mounted on the door chirped. Rosemary eyed the caller ID. Gloria Ross. Rosemary wasn’t sure she wanted to talk with Gloria right now. It was one thing if either of them had to be out on the coast the day Marshall was being arrested. That was the job. New York and L.A. But Alan was out there, too. He’d flown out suddenly two days before. How convenient, an entire country separating the Rosses from their soiled prodigy.

  Maybe I’m just being harsh, Rosemary thought. I mean, really. What could Alan have done if he’d been in the East? Hold Marshall’s hand? He could make Marshall famous, he’d proved that, but he couldn’t make him invulnerable. Marshall had been an idiot. He’d knocked up his producer, and then he’d let himself get involved with that flat-backed, round-heeled, half-pint Barbie-doll tramp on the Internet. You plays your games, you takes your chances. Big. Stupid. Cowboy.

  Rosemary lifted the phone.

  Gloria sounded flustered. “Rose. I’m so glad I got you. Where are you, honey?”

  “Hello, Gloria. I’m holed up in the backseat of the Town Car. I’m getting a tour of Manhattan. How’s the coast?”

  Gloria Ross answered, “Dry, sunny, stale and full of phonies. Listen, honey, Alan is going to be back in the city tomorrow afternoon. He’s tied up in meetings all day. He’s over in Century City as we speak. He told me to tell you he’s thinking of you. How’s Marshall doing?”

  The car was drifting slowly past the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rosemary shifted in her seat. She wasn’t in the mood to maybe catch a glimpse of the top of Cleopatra’s Needle.

  “Marshall is scared shitless,” Rosemary said. “He’s convinced they’re going to ship him out to Rikers and offer him up as a sacrifice to men with tattoos on their teeth.”

  “I thought they only sacrificed virgins.”

  Rosemary took a beat. “Not funny, Gloria.”

  The line crackled. “I’m sorry, honey. Of course it isn’t. This whole damn thing is just so surreal.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He’s going to be fine, Rose. It’s a huge cosmic mistake. Marshall has been targeted. We know that. Alan said just this morning it wouldn’t surprise him to find out it was all a plot by one of the rival networks.”

  “Your husband has a paranoid mind.”

  “My husband is in tears over what’s happening to your husband. Seriously, Rose. Alan broke down this morning at breakfast. You know we’re going to fight this thing with everything we’ve got.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  Rosemary took a final drag on her cigarette and prodded the butt out the window. The smoke eased past her lips like dry ice. “I have thick skin. With all the crap Marshall’s pulled this past year? It’s probably alligator tough by now.”

  “There’s a lot of sympathy for you out there. You stood by your man. You’re a beautiful victim of Marshall’s silly irresponsibility. That plays well.”

  Plays well. Is everything a goddamn angle for these people? Get real, Rosemary thought. She laughed out loud. Gloria Ross wouldn’t know real if it hit her in the face. Alan, either. Their careers depended on fiction and fantasy, the mere appearance of truth.

  Gloria asked, “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We’re going to get you out to the house when we’re back east,” Gloria said. “You’re free to go out to the Island anytime. You know that, right? I don’t think you’ll want to stay in the city the next several days.”

  “I’m staying. This is where my man is, remember?” Rosemary flicked another cigarette from her pack. “I’ve got to stand by him.”

  “You sound bitter, dear.”

  Rosemary sighed. “I’m fine.” She squinted out the window at the Plaza. The Plaza was where she and Marshall had first made love. She smiled despite herself. Son of a bitch kept his boots on the entire time. His big ear-to-ear grin, too. Miss Boggs. Miss Boggs…

  “I’m fine,” Rosemary said again. “Thanks for calling, Gloria. If I talk to Marshall, I’ll tell him you were asking after him.”

  “Do. Please do that. And Alan, too. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “So long, dear.”

  Rosemary thumbed the off button. She instructed her driver to take her home. The press wasn’t going to fold their tents and leave. Her building was going to be under siege for the duration of the mess. She’d have to think of something, but for now she wanted to be home.

  She pulled out a compact and touched up quickly. She knew her role. And she knew the power of her best assets.

  ROSEMARY WOULD WATCH the footage on television later in the evening. CNN was running the clip over and over. The Town Car pulling to a stop. The driver getting out and opening the back door. Rosemary stepping out, holding her coat collar tight at the neck and calmly facing the onslaught of cameras and microphones. As always, she looked beyond exquisite, her sea-green eyes registering a deep sadness as well as a deep resolve.

  “I want to say that the people we should all be thinking about at this moment are the families of the victims. These are the people whose pain can only be increasing the longer this goes on and the murderer of these two women remains at large. My husband is innocent. The pain that Marshall and I are suffering is temporary. It will pass. We’re not the story here. We’re the distraction from the story.”

  Rosemary aimed the remote and fired. The image vanished with a light sizzle. She was sitting up in her bed. The sleeping pills she had taken a half hour earlier had not yet kicked in. She took a sip of her warm Scotch. As she was setting the glass back down, the door buzzer went off.

  Two short, one long.

  Rosemary got out of bed and pulled on her white robe. Her Zsa Zsa, as Marshall always called it. She glanced at her mirror as the buzzer rang a second time. Same pattern. She pushed at her hair and gave her cheeks a quick slap, then went to the front door, peered through the peephole and pulled the door open.

  Her visitor was leaning against the doorjamb. The smile was too large, the eyes in partial dilation. “You in bed already?”

  “It’s been a tiring day,” Rosemary said. “Perhaps you’ve heard, my husband is spending the night in jail.”

  “I caught that.”

  “I assume you came up through the garage?”

  “Do I look stupid?”

  “What you look is stoned.” Rosemary stepped back from the door and let her visitor in. She asked, “Don’t you think you’re being a bit ballsy?”

  “I thought you might be lonely.”

  “I took some sleeping pills.” Rosemary closed the door. “I plan to be zonked out in ten minutes, tops.”

  “I can show myself out after.”

  “This is ballsy.”

  Her visitor followed her as she retraced her steps to the bedroom. Rosemary stopped a few feet befor
e the foot of the bed. Now that she had gotten out of bed and moved around, she was aware that the sleeping pills had kicked in. Her brain felt cloudy. In a nice-feeling way, though her feet weren’t feeling the floor.

  She unknotted the sash and shrugged the robe off her shoulders. It fell to the carpet with a satin whisper. God, Rosemary thought vaguely, how cheap a move is that? She stepped away from the bunched robe, climbed onto the bed and crawled to the pillows. I’m a jungle cat, she thought. As she settled in, closing her eyes, she heard a laugh. It took her a fuzzy moment to realize it had come from her.

  Her visitor was standing at the foot of the bed, working at the buttons of his shirt. “What’s so funny?”

  Rosemary decided her eyes were too heavy to open. She felt as if her head were still sinking into the pillows. Deeper and deeper. Everything’s funny, she thought. All of it. It’s all one big cosmic joke. She felt the mattress shift and sensed a darkness moving down on top of her. An unshaved jaw scraped along her cheek.

  Big joke. Great big joke.

  ROBIN BURRELL SAT FROZEN in front of her television set. The only movement she had made the last hour and a half was with her arm, pointing the remote at the television and punching the button to change the channel. There was nothing new. Every clip she had seen now more than a dozen times. Marshall then; Marshall this morning; Cleopatra’s Needle and a white sheet covering a dead body; Marshall pacing aimlessly on the set of his show, aching over his former producer’s murder; a fuzzy snapshot of a petite buxom blonde in a bikini; Cleopatra’s Needle again. All of it. Ad nauseam. Over and over.

  Robin didn’t blink.

  She wasn’t answering her phone. Eighteen messages had racked up on the machine. Michelle. Edward Anger. Denise from work. Reporters. She had nothing to say. For three months, she had felt like she was on a delicious drug. What normally mattered had no longer mattered. What people thought had been of no real concern. Robin had slipped more easily into fantasyland than she ever would have imagined possible and had remained there until things turned ugly and Fox snapped his fingers and the fantasy ended.

  Near midnight, Robin set down the remote. She rose from the couch and shuffled to the bathroom, barely lifting her feet. She turned on the shower and got out of her clothes. Stepping into the spray, she paused and looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the wall opposite the showerhead. For just an instant, a form superimposed itself on her reflection, which, in the steam coming up from the hot water, was already beginning to grow blurry.

  She spun around. There was no one there. Not this time. Robin crossed her arms across her chest and stepped into the stream of water. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back. And cried.

  Part 3

  27

  A VOICE.

  “I think I see something.”

  I thought I did, too. To be more specific, a voidlike awareness thought so, too. There was no I. The void was comprised of black splinters in a black space. Fission lines. Cracks in blackness. But not inert. They were in frantic motion, ripping trails across the blackness like the crescent tails of dying stars. Reverberating at the edges of the void was the suggestion of things familiar. Familiar and also vital. But out there. Inside out. Awareness sizzled faintly off along the horizons, far from where it belonged.

  “I thought his eyes were opening. I guess it was just a flicker.”

  More cracks were appearing in the void, multiplying in a blur. Cracks within cracks. The voice fell away, like a receding surf, and then a faint signal sounded. A primitive beacon, orderly and welcome. A dull red pulse.

  Beep…beep…beep…beep…

  WHITE FLUORESCENCE OVERCAME me. It came on like the first intake of air after you’ve held your breath longer than you thought possible. I thought it would drown me. I was saturated with strobing light as I blinked my way through the adjustment.

  I was horizontal. For a brief moment I thought I was floating. I felt dangerously buoyant. Then my eyes narrowed and forms dissolved into place.

  Margo.

  She was seated in a chair by a window off the foot of a bed-my bed-reading an issue of Vanity Fair. There was a look of intense concentration on her face; she was essentially scowling at the page. In my mind’s eye, a gilded frame dropped around her, the peripheral details all going fuzzy, and she was a portrait leaning up against a wall. I simply wanted to look. I had a craving to savor. But a moment later, she licked a finger, turned a page, looked up.

  “Jesus Christ!” Already dropping the magazine, she rushed out of the frame. Her pale face filled my vision. “You shit. You big old goddamn son-of-a-bitch shit!”

  There were tears on her cheeks. Her hand fumbled for something near my ear. I turned my head to see. A plastic button. Margo’s thumb was bloodless white on the button. A woman entered the room, a cartoon moving swiftly. A nurse. Breasts like soft mountains.

  “What is it?”

  “He’s awake.”

  The nurse surged forward. I thought she was going to fall on top of me. “Hello, Mr. Malone.” She gave me a piano-keys smile to focus on as Margo bobbed on her horizon. The nurse held up an object in front of her nose. “What am I holding?”

  I felt my eyes crossing as I focused on the object. It was a pen. Blue. Ballpoint. Paper Mate. Behind the nurse, Margo was scrutinizing me with her scowl.

  “An elephant,” I said. My voice sounded harsh and unfamiliar.

  The nurse blinked with confusion. “I’m holding an elephant?” She looked over at Margo, who was no longer scowling.

  “He’s fine.”

  28

  I’D GONE UNDER the ice. Witnesses saw me hit (the one who called 911 said I hit headfirst, the other thought I landed on the small of my back), and for a short period of time, I had remained on its surface, motionless. When I finally did move, it wasn’t to prop myself up on my elbows and shake it off. Quite the opposite. Both witnesses agreed that it was my feet that went first. They slid down into the crack that my body had made when I’d landed. The widening crack. My feet lolled into the water, then, as if a voracious aquatic creature were reeling me in, I slid cleanly off the splintering ice and disappeared into the black water without a splash. Only a thin smear of blood on the ice gave any suggestion that I had been there at all.

  The wound that Ratface and his kitchen knife had given my side required seven stitches. Fortunately, nothing vital had been pierced. Another set of stitches had been required to close up the nasty gash on the back of my head, where I’d hit the ice. This was where the doctors were placing concern. My head. They were worried about brain swelling, a concern that had prompted Margo to blurt, “God, that’s all we need.”

  Perversely, the several minutes I had spent partially under the ice were to thank for my head injury not being quite as threatening as it otherwise might have been. The East River had performed first aid on me, the bracing water freezing the swelling in its tracks. However, it had also taken the opportunity to fill my lungs with a gallon or so of its chilly swill. But that was the least of my problems. Mainly, it was the concussion that preoccupied the doctors. I was given a list of symptoms I needed to be on the lookout for. Trouble remembering things, disorientation, difficulty making decisions, headaches, irritability.

  My doctor insisted that I remain in the hospital through the day and overnight for observation. I wanted to wrestle him on the matter, but he refused. My memory seemed to have holes in it. My mother and my half sister, Elizabeth, came by to see me, but I have no recollection of what we spoke about. Joe Gallo’s face appeared at my bedside, but when it vanished, so, too, did my memory of our conversation. I got calls from Peter Elliott and Michelle Poole and Megan Lamb, but General Margo refused to let me take them. Kelly Cole put in a call as well. Margo jotted her number on the back of one of my business cards and stuck it in my wallet for me.

  “I don’t think you’re up for that kind of syntax right now.”

  I felt remarkably better the next morning and was dressed and ready to go by
the time the doctor came to check on me. He aimed a penlight in my eyes and had me follow his finger as he waved it like a symphony conductor; then he told me I was to rest, not drive a car, keep off alcohol for at least a week and also to refrain from sex. Margo was seated on the large windowsill, posing with her hands on her knees. “Thanks, Doc. You’re a pal.”

  I lost the argument with Margo about staying at my place while I convalesced. Truth was, I put no real heart into my end of the argument. Neither Margo nor I had touched on the subject of our recent sword crossings. My injuries had forced a truce, and I was just as happy to keep the issue unspoken. Margo took me from the hospital to a tiny country-food-themed restaurant near Gramercy Park, where I ate a double helping of eggs and sausage and home fries. After breakfast, we went to Margo’s, where I picked up the phone, set it back down, then crawled onto the couch and slept until eight that night. Margo shoveled some pesto pasta into me. I showered, got into bed, made a lame pass at Margo when she joined me, then went out with the light.

  I can’t say I felt like a million bucks in the morning. More like enough for a down payment on a small dump somewhere unpopular. But that would do. Margo dutifully retrieved a three-day-old copy of the Post that she’d been holding on to for me. “If your head was a hundred percent, you’d have asked for this already.”

  She flipped the paper open to page five. There was a short article about my unscheduled trip into the East River. Accompanying the article was a police sketch of my alleged attacker. If he looked like anyone, he looked like Thurman Munson, the beloved Yankees catcher who was killed midseason in a plane crash a quarter century ago.

  “This looks like Thurman Munson,” I said to Margo. “The guy who attacked me didn’t look like this. You look more like him than this does.”