Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

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 testified, “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.

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.