Cold Day in Hell

by Richard Hawke

  Megan instructed her to go into the kitchen and boil some water. When the woman hesitated, Megan barked, “Now!”

  Rosemary Fox rose from the chair and floated out of the room.

  I asked, “Boil water?”

  Megan was lightly touching one of Tracy Jacobs’s head wounds. She shrugged. “I just wanted her out of the fucking room.”

  I had called 911 from my cell phone at the boathouse. Megan’s lips were blue, and her breathing was beginning to speed up. I took her cheeks between my hands and rubbed vigorously. Then I took her hands-they were ice-and rubbed them as well.

  “Hold on,” I said. I ran up the stairs and found the master bedroom. There was a down quilt on the bed. In a second bedroom, I snared a blanket, then returned to the living room and wrapped the quilt around Megan. I placed the blanket over Tracy Jacobs. The actress’s eyes opened briefly. She blinked and looked right through me; then her eyes closed again.

  Rosemary Fox came in from the kitchen. “The water’s boiling.”

  “Make some coffee, Mrs. Fox,” I said.

  She asked, “Who are you?”

  “I’m the person asking you politely to please make some coffee. Very strong.”

  “I would like to know what is going on here. Where’s Alan? Who are you? Who’s that girl?”

  I stepped over to her. As I approached, she took a step backward. She also managed a haughty look, even with that nasty bruise. She crossed her arms defensively on her chest.

  “My name is Malone,” I said. “That young woman on the couch is Tracy Jacobs. Your friend Alan tried to kill her. What I want from you is some help, in the form of a pot of hot coffee. Can you handle that, Mrs. Fox?”

  “You’re a bit of a shit, aren’t you.”

  “On a good day, sure. By the way, I met your friend Danny. Bit of a shit himself, isn’t he?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Do you want milk?”

  Back in the living room, Megan was shivering within her quilt. She had pulled a chair up to the couch and was sitting in it, stroking Tracy Jacobs’s cheek. She looked up as I entered the room.

  “Where is Ross, by the way?”

  “I’ve got him locked away.”

  “Locked away? Where?”

  “He’s in the trunk of his car.”

  “Outside?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Kind of cold out there, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Megan laughed. Too hard, it turned out. Her shoulders began to shake, and her breath got away from her. The transition to tears was seamless. Her smile curdled, and she pulled the quilt tight around her neck. Her eyes grew large and frightened as the tears flooded down her cheeks. I took a step toward her, but she shook her head. “No.”

  She doubled over in the chair and began sobbing. I came forward anyway and touched her lightly on the top of her head. You’d have thought I pushed a button. She came forward out of the chair, out of the quilt, and wrapped her thin arms around me, pressing her face into my chest, crying unashamedly. Hanging on for dear life.

  55

  AFTER STRANGLING Cynthia Blair and leaving her body at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle, and at the last minute hitting upon the inspiration of driving a pen into her chest so as to secure her hand over her heart, Alan Ross had assumed that the authorities would immediately turn their attentions to Marshall Fox. Naturally, Fox had been questioned, but the police had been interested primarily in obtaining background information concerning Cynthia. Not once had their questions suggested any suspicion of Fox.

  Although Marshall Fox had trusted Ross possibly more than anyone else he knew, his affair with Cynthia was one aspect of his personal life that he had chosen not to share with his trusted friend. Ross was privy to most of Fox’s numerous dalliances, more so than he cared to be. Marshall liked to brag. Ross had known about Nicole Rossman, although not by name. Fox had been unable to keep from boasting about some of the outrageous things he had been doing with the malleable doll-woman he had met online. In the days following Cynthia’s murder, as it became clear to Ross that the police were not including Fox on their list of top suspects, the television executive had formulated a plan. Under the guise of concern for Marshall Fox’s mental state, Ross arranged with Fox’s driver to be kept informed on the entertainer’s doings and his whereabouts. And so it was that when Nicole Rossman emerged from Fox’s building at three in the morning ten days after Cynthia Blair’s murder, she was met by none other than Alan Ross of KBS Television.

  Gloria was off in Los Angeles, so Ross had no tracks to cover on that front. Getting Nikki Rossman into his car proved even easier than he’d guessed. He’d merely had to give her his credentials and tell her that he needed desperately to talk with her about Marshall. The attack took place just north of Central Park. Ross pulled to a stop near the Duke Ellington statue on 110th Street and produced a hammer. Three swift blows and Nikki Rossman was crumpled against the passenger door. Ross drove into the park, pulling off the road into a cove of trees just north of Cleopatra’s Needle. The forty seconds required to transfer Nikki’s body from the car to the base of the monument was the riskiest part of the endeavor, but Ross took the gamble and won. Using a hunting knife he would later discard, he opened up the young woman’s throat. Then he nailed her hand to her chest. Four-inch nail. Driven all the way to its head.

  When Fox wasn’t arrested the very next day, Ross went ballistic.

  TRACY JACOBS UNDERWENT emergency surgery at Eastern Long Island Hospital and was then transferred to Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery. My small concussion was nothing compared with the damage Alan Ross had inflicted on the actress. It was deemed highly unlikely that the doctors’ facial reconstruction efforts would eliminate all evidence of the severe beating. Word emerged almost immediately from the entertainment industry that a replacement actress for Tracy Jacobs’s role in Century City was being actively pursued.

  Investigators going over Ross’s cavernous office at the network turned up what Joe Gallo referred to jokingly as “a little Nixony thing.” Ross’s office was wired to record all conversations that took place there. There were wireless microphones located at key spots throughout the office. A sound technician at the network confirmed that Ross had been a fanatic about recording every single encounter that took place in his office. This included his phone calls. All the recordings were downloaded onto Ross’s computer. Rodrigo and his IT team went to work. My chat with Ross surfaced, but Gallo wasn’t overly interested in that. He was interested in retrieving Alan Ross’s interview with Tracy Jacobs when she allegedly threatened to go to the police with her allegations of Marshall Fox’s abusive and violent tendencies. He was even more curious to hear the recordings of Tracy’s audition for Century City and Ross subsequently offering the role to her. It was no real surprise that neither of these recordings appeared to exist.

  Gallo called Gloria Ross in several times and roughed her up in his gentlemanly way. She was generally cooperative. She admitted to having heeded her husband’s “urgent request” that she sign Tracy Jacobs to an Argosy contract, only half believing his story that the actress was a recent lover of Fox’s who was threatening to raise a very public stink in the media about the entertainer. To the extent that she bought her husband’s willingness to cave in to such a craven extortion scheme, Gloria had chalked it up to the pressures that Ross was under concerning Fox’s growing difficulties. During an extended period of questioning, Gallo managed to extract from Mrs. Ross her suspicions that her husband had harbored “excessively proprietary feelings” toward Marshall Fox’s producer, Cynthia Blair. When Gallo pressed her concerning any thoughts she might have had on her husband’s possible role in Cynthia’s murder, Gloria had demurred, if only slightly: “I didn’t go there. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  A WEEK AFTER the final surgery, Tracy Jacobs was moved to a rehabilitation center located in Briarcliff, under five miles from Alan and Gloria Ross’s Westchester hom
e. Gallo took the short trip north out of the city to speak to the woman. Despite the doctors’ warnings that Tracy’s memory could be compromised, the actress’s recollection of the events “that changed my life” proved intact. She told Gallo that she had indeed met with Alan Ross in his office and voiced her concerns about Marshall Fox. She told Gallo that Ross had treated her with exceptional respect and, after hearing her concerns, had pleaded gently but firmly with her not to go to the police. “As a personal favor to me” was the phrase he had used, she said, over and over again. Eventually, he had steered the conversation away from the topic and over to her career-such as it was-and had floated the offer of the audition as well as the possibility of having Tracy talk with his wife about representation. Tracy told Gallo that she’d found it peculiar that her audition the following day took place in Ross’s office and with no one else present except Ross himself. He’d set up a video camera on a tripod and given her a short script to read. He made her read the script nearly two dozen times, each time asking that she read every word with a different emphasis than she had used in the previous run-through. At one point, she said, Ross seemed to become frustrated and demanded that she read the script one word at a time. No sentences, simply word after word, as a means, he said, of getting her to loosen up.

  She thought she’d blown the audition. The following evening she was on her way to Los Angeles.

  Tracy had kept her copy of the audition script, and she was able to tell Gallo where it could be found in her apartment in West Hollywood. Gallo immediately contacted the LAPD, and within hours, the single page was faxed to New York.

  Joe showed it to me in his office.

  I want you to listen to me and I don’t want any interruptions. Kevin Daly can’t be trusted. He was having an affair with Missy Welch and I know that he is the one who got her pregnant. If he knows what’s good for himself, he’ll go to the police and tell them about Missy. If he doesn’t, I’ll do it. And I mean it. Don’t think I won’t.

  “Scintillating,” I said.

  Gallo asked, “Do you see what I see?”

  I nodded. “Ross already had the tape of Tracy’s visit from the day before. She’d have been throwing Fox’s name around, accusing him of being the violent punk he really is. Ross sends her off with the promise of a so-called audition, then he cooks up this piece of crap and has her come back in and read it a dozen different ways. All sorts of inflections.”

  “Exactly. Do a nifty splice job with bits from the day before, and he’s got her on tape saying whatever he wants.”

  I looked down at the fax again. “‘Marshall Fox was having an affair with Cynthia Blair. He’s the one who got her pregnant. If he doesn’t tell the police, I’ll tell them myself, blah, blah, blah.’”

  Joe nodded. “When Megan and I went up to Fox’s apartment, he and Ross and Riddick all said they wanted to get Fox’s affair with Cynthia on record themselves rather than have us hear it from this other source. This source that Fox thought was credible.”

  “Except Tracy never knew.”

  “That’s right.”

  I held up the fax. “So which is it? Is our man Ross brilliant or pathetic?”

  “We got Fox’s and Riddick’s phone records and checked all the calls that came in the week Tracy’s threat showed up. We found a pair of calls made to both of them within several minutes of each other, from the same public telephone five blocks from Alan Ross’s office. Tracy Jacobs wasn’t in New York at the time of the calls, so we checked all calls that came in to Fox and Riddick from the Los Angeles area as well. They’ve all been signed off as legit calls from known associates. Nothing from Tracy.”

  “Thorough bastard, aren’t you? I’d sure hate to work for you.”

  “I’ll remember that if you ever come crawling.”

  “If I’m crawling, Joe, you won’t want me.”

  NOT FORTY MINUTES BEFORE talking his way into Robin Burrell’s apartment and killing her, Alan Ross had been making nice with me in Samuel Deveraux’s courtroom. It took some work for the thought not to depress me. Cool, calm bastard. DNA evidence placed Alan Ross inside Robin’s apartment. Besides the hair samples from Ross located in Robin’s apartment, skin tissue samples removed from beneath her fingernails provided a match with Ross, as did a spot of blood lifted from the large mirror shard that Robin’s killer had thrust into her neck. The small sample of blood was located on the portion of the shard that the killer would have gripped while working the glass into place. Since there were no unaccounted-for fingerprints taken from Robin’s apartment, the assumption was that Ross had worn gloves but that either a finger or a thumb had gotten torn on the glass and the thumb or finger beneath had been nicked. A claw hammer retrieved from Ross’s garage also yielded blood samples that were traced not only to Robin Burrell but to Nicole Rossman as well.

  The case against Alan Ross strapped on rockets.

  MEGAN AND I TOOK the Metro North train up to see Tracy Jacobs. A golf-ball-sized lump remained under her left eye, which itself sagged somewhat and wasn’t opening completely. Her jaw was wired in place, and a temporary latex piece had been affixed to her lower gums in lieu of the teeth that were no longer there. She was having problems with the right side of her body; the leg in particular wanted to behave more like a noodle than a leg.

  Megan did most of the talking. For the most part, she steered the conversation in neutral directions. Tracy’s family. Her recent trip to Paris. What it felt like to kiss Matt Damon during his recent guest appearance on Century City. I silently awarded Megan a daytime Emmy for her performance during that line of questioning. She actually behaved as if she really gave a damn.

  We spoke with Tracy in the facility’s solarium, overlooking a sloping ten-acre lawn at the edge of which sat a half-frozen pond populated by black ducks. Tracy cried a few times during the visit. Thankfully, she had no memory of the beating she had taken at the hands of Alan Ross. Her final memory of the afternoon was of Ross’s car pulling into his garage. For her own peace of mind, she had not been informed of Ross dumping her bound body into the water. She had no clue of Megan’s role in her rescue. In the hour and a half we spent with her, Tracy thanked me half a dozen times for saving her life. A strong look from Megan the first time Tracy gushed this way had warned me off from setting the record straight. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t my call.

  Before we left, we picked up a key piece of information. Three days before leaving New York for Paris, Tracy had bumped into Zachary Riddick at a DreamWorks party in midtown. She told us she had been unprepared for the reaction she’d received. Riddick lit in to her for the calls he said she’d placed both to him and to Marshall Fox, allegedly threatening to go to the police with her story about Fox’s relationship with Cynthia Blair. Of course, Tracy had never made those calls, and she went to great pains to convince Riddick that she had no idea what he was talking about. She swore that Danny Lyles had never breathed a word to her about Fox and Cynthia Blair. Tracy told us that Riddick had seemed baffled, then troubled, by her insistence that she in no way had placed the calls. She did tell him that she had raised her concerns about Fox with Lyles and that the driver had contacted Alan Ross. She related her meetings with Alan Ross, going on at some length about what a wonderful man Ross had been to take her under his wing the way he had.

  “I thought Alan was a god,” Tracy said to us, gazing off toward the pond. “He was a god, and I was one of his very favorite angels.” She turned her broken face to us. The tears in her left eye seemed unable to fall. “How could he despise me so? What did I do?”

  As we were leaving, Tracy’s mother and brother appeared, and I had to go through the whole hero thing again. Megan drifted off and looked out the window as I collected the praise.

  “You know your humble act gets old fast,” I said to her on the ride back to the train station.

  She fixed me with a look I hadn’t been ready for. “I’ve had the spotlight. I detest it.”

  On the train back to the
city, Megan and I put the scenario together. Riddick must have smelled a rat. In buying Tracy Jacobs’s story that she had not placed threatening phone calls to him and to Fox, the lawyer must have begun to suspect who was actually pulling the strings. He must have contacted Ross and aired his suspicions. Or if not, he must at least have put some hard questions to Ross.

  “Ross couldn’t afford to have Riddick poking into this,” Megan said as the train raced past Valhalla. “Riddick was Fox’s lawyer. His job was to get his client cleared of these charges.”

  I agreed. Zachary Riddick spelled trouble for Ross. “But why Robin?” I asked. The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I knew the answer. Megan did, too.

  “Misdirection.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Ross targets yet another of Fox’s former lovers and arranges her killing to look just like Cynthia’s and Nikki’s. And who should know better than Ross how to do that? The result? Uproar and confusion. Big headlines. Is Fox innocent after all, or is there a copycatter coming out of the woodwork?”

  “And the next day Riddick gets it. Ross must have arranged to meet him at the Boathouse Café and then somehow lured him into the Ramble.”

  “But no nail in the heart,” Megan said.

  “No time. That one was a risky kill. But it was still in Central Park, and it included the throat slashing. And Riddick was closely associated with Fox, so Ross could bet that the killing would be lumped in with Robin’s murder. Any questions of a relatively sane motive-like covering his own ass-weren’t likely to be raised. Which they weren’t.”

  “Why did Ross try to hire you?” Megan asked. “Do you really think it was his way of keeping tabs on how we were doing?”

  “He’s an admitted control freak. And manipulator. This is a guy who likes to have all the angles covered.”

  Megan turned to watch the cemetery at Hawthorne racing by. A small crowd was gathered near the top of the hill. Two seconds, then gone.