Blonde Ice

by R. G. Belsky

  I checked my voicemail. Sure enough, there was a series of calls from Susan that I’d missed—along with other people trying to reach me about the story.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to really check all my messages.”

  “I know you’re riding high on this story right now, but you need to stop and think about the fact that you could very well be in danger too. Look what happened to Hammacher. And this Melissa Ross woman has some kind of weird obsession with you. She writes to you about the murders. She calls you about them. Why you?”

  I’d thought about that too. I didn’t really have an answer. “It could be just a chance thing,” I said. “She wanted a reporter and picked me at random.”

  “I’m worried about you, Gil. She kills men. She’s fixated on you for some reason. The most logical extension of that is that at some point she comes after you as a target.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” I said. “The only way she can get to a man is by using sex as a lure. That’s how she gets to her victims. I know what Melissa Ross looks like. So I’m not going to fall for her sexual lures no matter how pretty she is. Besides, I’ve already fallen for a pretty woman’s sexual lures. Yours.”

  Susan didn’t laugh. I had to admit I was a bit flattered by her concern for my well-being. It showed she really did care. But what she was saying did make me uncomfortable too, because I knew she was right. There was some reason that Melissa Ross began coming to me to get media attention for her murders. I needed to find out what that was. And maybe I should be more worried about it too.

  “Tim Hammacher knew all about Melissa Ross,” Susan said to me now. “He knew how dangerous she was. And he knew what she looked like. So why would he get in the same car with her? It doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes men just can’t help themselves though, I suppose. Maybe that’s what happened to him. Maybe he still got turned on by her, still wanted to go to bed with her—even though he knew how dangerous she could be. Maybe his sexual urges overcame his common sense.”

  She was talking about Tim Hammacher, but it kinda felt like she might be talking about me and some of the mistakes I had made in the past too.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE murder of Tim Hammacher—a top city hall official, a seemingly happily married family man and a pillar of his ­community—was a shocking development even for hardened New Yorkers who liked to brag about how they’d seen it all and how tough they were and that nothing really ever got to them.

  Every man in New York, whether he admitted it or not, now had to wonder if he could somehow wind up being the next victim of the woman the entire media had dubbed “Blonde Ice.”

  And every woman in New York had to wonder when she kissed her husband goodbye in the morning whether or not she would ever see him alive again.

  The search for Melissa Ross was centered on New York City. It made sense that she was still close. She had to have been somewhere near New York City recently, of course, to have carried out the murders of Walter Issacs, Rick Faris, and Tim Hammacher. But she could also be hiding out somewhere else, then returning to New York for the murders—and fleeing again after she had carried them out.

  So bulletins were also sent out across the nation. Melissa Ross had no passport, so it didn’t seem as if she would be able to flee to another country. Still, special attention was given to the borders of Canada and Mexico in case she tried to cross one or the other.

  Tips and leads poured in from the public. There always were plenty of those in a high-profile case like this. Except they all turned out to be dead ends.

  Like the guy in Queens who claimed a blonde woman—who he was certain was Melissa Ross—had tried to pick him up in a Kew Gardens bar and lure him back to a motel room. When he said no and told her he knew who she was and what she really wanted to do to him, she ran out of the bar. Cops descended on the bar, talking to everyone who had been there. They finally pieced together the true account of what had happened to the guy. It turned out he had been drinking quite a bit, hitting on women in the bar—and he tried to strike up a conversation with the blonde he mentioned. She fled, all right. But not because she was Melissa Ross and he’d figured that out. She ran away because he was acting so strange and scary when she turned down his advances, claiming she was really out to kill him. When the police finally did find the blonde woman, it was quickly apparent she wasn’t Melissa Ross. She wasn’t bad-looking, but she was no drop-dead blonde fox either. You’d have had to drink a lot of beers to think she looked like Melissa Ross. Which is apparently what the Queens guy had done that night.

  Then there was the West Side woman who saw an attractive blonde woman forcing a handcuffed man into the trunk of a car. The blonde then drove away, but the woman on the street got the license plate number of the car she was driving. The police took the woman’s account very seriously. She was a prominent attorney, a partner in a firm on Park Avenue. No drunk in a bar. She saw what she saw, and she was adamant about it to police. It turned out that the incident had happened, just the way the woman described it. An attractive blonde female did indeed force a handcuffed man into the trunk of her car. But it wasn’t real. It was all part of an elaborate sex game. When the cops tracked down the license plate number, they found that it belonged to a pretty blonde, all right. Except it wasn’t Melissa Ross. She was a professional dominatrix. She said the man had paid her to stage the kidnapping—and to hold him hostage for a few hours. She said lots of men like that role-play scenario, and that she’d done it many times before. Picking men up off the street, restraining them with handcuffs or rope, then pretending to torture the captive. She got paid as much as several thousand dollars to do this, she said, sometimes for a daylong “kidnapping.”

  Another time armed cops burst into the Brooklyn home of a woman who a telephone tipster had positively identified as Melissa Ross. It wasn’t her though. It was the tipster’s ex-wife, and he was tired of sending her alimony payments. If she went to jail for a while until it all got sorted out, he figured, he could slide on a payment or two he owed her. Instead, he wound up going to jail himself for filing a false police report.

  There were many more dead ends like this. Everything was checked and re-checked though. No stone was left unturned. In the end, it all led to nothing. They hadn’t gotten a sniff of Melissa Ross. She was still out there somewhere. Planning her next move. And, until the police found her, all they could do was wait to see what that might be.

  * * *

  Like every other journalist in town, I became consumed by the story and the hunt for Melissa Ross. Waiting for her to be caught. And until that happened, I was desperately trying to come up with angles and story ideas to sate the public hunger for more tidbits about the Blonde Ice killings.

  The obvious approach for a newspaper or a TV station or a website was to go to places where singles or cheating husbands might go to meet women—and then interview people there about how worried they were.

  The only thing was many of these bars and clubs catering to single men and the pickup crowd were almost empty now. Some of them even closed their doors until the killer was caught. No one was eager to pick up strange women in singles spots right now. Husbands were staying home with their wives. Single guys with their girlfriends. Not all of them, of course. But more and more as the murders occurred.

  I talked to one bar owner who said that Melissa Ross had probably done more to save marriages in the past few weeks than all of the marriage counselors in the city put together.

  Another night I did a remote for Live from New York from the midtown bar where Rick Faris had met Melissa Ross on that fateful night that he was murdered.

  There were a few women there, only a handful of men—and no one was really that interested in talking to people they didn’t know.

  “A few weeks ago, this bar was filled with singles,” I said on air. “Hot-looking women, well-dressed men—all of them looking to find the right partners. Or, in other words, looki
ng to find the right person to spend the night with. But now the people who do show up here have a much more important goal. Their goal is to make sure they get through the night alive.”

  For blonde women, the killings had presented a problem. Blondes used to be a hot commodity. Now men were leery of them, for obvious reasons. There were reports that some blondes were even starting to dye their hair or wear dark-haired wigs to avoid any comparisons with the “Blonde Ice” killer.

  “Not a good time to be a blonde,” one woman said when I interviewed her in a hair salon as she made sure all the blonde traces were gone. “I used to like being a blonde. Men always looked at me. Well, they look at me now, but in a different way. Yeah, I’ll probably go back to being a blonde again when this is all over. But right now . . . hell, it’s tough being a blonde in this city.”

  Old-timers said it was reminiscent of the Summer of Sam, those hot months in 1977 when Son of Sam had hunted young women sitting in parked cars on lovers’ lanes across the city.

  There had been pure panic back then. Young people afraid to go out at night. Women dying their hair blonde or wearing blonde wigs because Sam had seemed to target dark-haired women in his attacks. An entire city feared that summer that they’d be Sam’s next target.

  Until now, Son of Sam had been the most famous serial killer in New York history, and that summer would live on in infamy. But it was happening all over again. With a different kind of killer—one maybe even scarier than a crazy postal worker who killed random women for no reason.

  The New York tabloids—especially the audacious New York Post—had even resurrected one of the most memorable headlines from the Summer of Sam in their coverage of the Blonde Ice murders.

  On the day after Tim Hammacher’s body was discovered, the Post’s Page One headline said simply:

  NO ONE IS SAFE!

  CHAPTER 23

  VICTORIA Issacs called after Hammacher’s murder and said she wanted to see me. She gave me a place to meet. The location was a Starbucks on Houston Street in what used to be known as Alphabet City. It was a long way from her Sutton Place townhouse. And not just geographically.

  The Starbucks had some outdoor tables, and we sat at one of them. It was early June now and the temperature had hit eighty for the first time this spring, giving us a taste of the New York City summer ahead. She was wearing a beige sundress and open-toed brown sandals, and carrying a straw handbag. I had on a lightweight summer blazer, a T-shirt, and jeans. People walked by us on the street in shorts, tank tops, and—in one case—what looked like a bathing suit.

  “I love New York in June, how about you?” I said, humming a few bars of the old Frank Sinatra song.

  She smiled and looked around. There was a trendy restaurant on one side of the Starbucks and a big supermarket on the other. Farther down the street, I saw nail salons, cell phone stores, and a CVS.

  “This is where I started,” she said. “Right here on Houston Street. Everything’s so different now. I used to stand on that corner over there all night. Waiting for someone to stop and give me some business. This place was a bodega then. My pimp lived in an apartment on the top floor. There was an adult bookstore, a pawnshop, and a dive bar which was really just a place to buy and sell drugs. Yep, this was where I worked back then.”

  “Hence the nickname Houston.”

  “Funny thing about that. You know how everyone in New York City pronounces the name of the street as ‘How-sten.’ Not ‘Houston,’ like the city. So I started out pronouncing my nickname like the city street too. But no one else did. They just called me Houston like the one in Texas. Eventually I started using that pronunciation too. Christ, I can’t believe I still remember stuff like that.”

  “So what prompted this trip down memory lane?”

  “I just wanted to see it again.”

  “To see where you’d come from?”

  “I guess. And maybe to figure out where I was going next too.”

  I took a sip of my coffee. She was drinking iced coffee, but I still took mine hot, no matter what the weather. I don’t like iced coffee. I like regular hot coffee. I pondered the possible reasons for that while I waited for her to tell me exactly why she wanted to see me. It took a while.

  “I spent a year working here on the street, until I managed to move up in the business,” she said. “To get away from the pimps and the drug dealers and the psychos who wanted me to do all kinds of sick stuff after I got into their cars. But I did get off the street. And you know the rest. I worked my way up to being Houston, the queen of the call girls. Big apartment on Park Avenue, wined and dined at the best restaurants, and more money than I’d ever dreamed of having in my life. I was—as you put it in that article you wrote about me back then—a legend. Houston, the legend. There’s something to be said for being a legend in any field. To being the best at what you do for a living. Even if it’s being the best goddamned whore that money can buy.”

  A family was eating breakfast at a table next to us. There was a young girl of about eight with her mother and father. Victoria Issacs looked at them sadly and then back at me.

  “My two little girls are still with Walter’s parents,” she said. “They say I’m an unfit mother because of my past as Houston and have gone to court to get a temporary restraining order against me that would give them custody. They also claim that the mortgage and deed for the townhouse are in their names because they put up the money for Walter to buy it. They want to evict me from there too. Meanwhile, none of my friends will return my phone calls, I’ve been suspended from the art museum board that I served on, and our country club on Long Island revoked my membership. None of these people from my new life—the life I worked so hard to build—want anything to do with me anymore. And so here I am back on Houston Street again, where it all started.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  She shrugged.

  “I’ll be okay. I made it out of here, didn’t I? I can do it again. I can build a new life for myself one more time despite all this. I guess that’s why I came down here today. To remember what it was like to be Houston. She was a tough lady that Houston. I need to be tough again too. I need to re-channel a bit of that Houston personality.”

  I drank some more coffee and waited. This was all interesting, but I figured she had something else on her mind.

  “I slept with a lot of people when I was Houston. In the beginning, on the street, the majority of them were creeps. But later, when I moved to Park Avenue and raised my rates by a lot, well . . . the quality of the clientele went up too. Some of them were still creeps, no matter how much money they had, but most of them were pretty nice. They just wanted to spend some time outside their real life, to have a fantasy relationship for an hour, or a night with a woman like me. Or at least like the woman I was back then.

  “There were bankers and lawyers and Wall Street investors and even some politicians. The public would have been shocked if they’d ever heard about the secret sex lives of some of these high-profile people that paid me money as Houston. But I never betrayed that confidence. Those people came to me knowing I was discreet and would always respect their confidentiality, which I did. Believe it or not, we hookers have rules and standards of integrity that we live by too, or at least I did. Just like a doctor or a lawyer. Or even a journalist like you.”

  She smiled at me.

  “But there were a few times, after I got married and left the business, that I ran into some of my former clients. At charity events, awards banquets, museum openings. Most of them didn’t recognize me because I looked and dressed and acted so much differently as Victoria Issacs than I did as Houston. I always avoided any contact with them.

  “Except for one time. It was a big concert in Central Park—hosted by the mayor—and one of my ex-clients was there. He was a very powerful, influential man now, and I was pretty important too in my new life. He recognized me right off. And he made a pass at me. I refused. He made another pass and then another. Finally, I
said yes. Walter wasn’t there with me that night, so we went back to the old client’s apartment after the concert and made love.

  “I saw him a number of times after that. He always paid me for the meetings, just like he had when I was Houston. That somehow made me feel less guilty about cheating on Walter, I guess. It was just a job to make some money. But, to be perfectly truthful, it made me feel good too that a man still wanted to pay to have sex with me. It was fun being Houston again, even for just a little while.

  “But eventually I ended it. I wanted to make my marriage to Walter work, and I couldn’t do that if I was still acting like Houston. So I became Mrs. Walter Issacs all the time—a pillar of the community. That’s what everyone knew me as. Until you came along.”

  I still wasn’t sure where she was going with all this.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” I asked.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how the Houston stuff fits into all this. Just like you have. What is the connection? I still don’t know. But something else has happened now. Another connection I don’t understand. But it has to mean something. I didn’t have anyone else to talk to about it. That’s why I asked to meet with you.”

  “What kind of connection? To Houston?”

  “Yes.”

  “And to the murders?”

  She nodded.

  “It involves someone you know.”

  “Know how?”

  “He’s been on the front page of your newspaper.”

  I thought about it.

  “Are we talking about Tim Hammacher?” I asked.

  She shook her head no.

  “His boss.”

  “Bob Wylie?”

  “Yes, Wylie was the man I was telling you about. He used to be a customer of mine.”

  CHAPTER 24

  I WENT back to the News, drank a lot more coffee at my desk, and tried to figure out what I had here.