Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

I took longer with the second pile. Where I could distinguish between male and female, I did, and I set the female ones to the side. This left me with a collection of men who had admired Robin Burrell sufficiently to take the time to grab pen or keyboard and reach out to her. No doubt there were some authentic souls of compassion represented in this group. I’m not so cynical that I won’t allow for the existence of the truly good-hearted. Maybe even the majority of the various marriage proposals and offers of companionship had been put forth with the purest of intentions. We can only hope that the world still holds more angels than devils. But if there was a true freak lurking in the e-mails and letters, my sense was that he wouldn’t be in the overtly hostile missives, the aggressives. He was going to be here, lurking among the sweethearts.

From this second pile, I extracted the letters that included names and return addresses as well as the e-mails that readily identified their sender. This reduced the number of so-called passive correspondents to twenty-seven. Now all I had to do was bring in a medium who could let her hands hover over the two piles then pick out the killer. Hell, I’ve got the easiest job in the world.

I abandoned the piles and unlocked my lower desk drawer and took out my Beretta 92. I broke down the gun and gave it a cleaning on a piece of cloth that I keep for that purpose. The smell of copper solvent is a poor man’s intoxicant, but I’m not making any excuses. I think clearly when my hands are occupied with small habitual tasks. I could have as easily taken apart and put back together one of those wooden cube puzzles you can still pick up for a buck in Chinatown (I had one in my desk drawer as well, though not under lock and key), but in the end I’d have the same wooden cube I started with. At least this way, when I was done, my “personal assistant” was newly cleaned and shiny.

I put the gun back into the drawer and locked it. I draped the oily chamois I’d used to clean the gun over Nipper, which is the name of the RCA Victor fox terrier that sits cock-headed in front of the large gold gramophone horn. I’ve got a life-size antique of the dog and record player in the corner of my office. A client gave it to me once in lieu of making good on his bill, telling me it was worth considerably more than he owed me. Like a considerable fool, I’d let him get away with it.

I locked up the office and headed over to Grand Central, to the food circus downstairs, where I grabbed a couple of slices from Two Boots, after which I spent a few minutes holding up a wall in Vanderbilt Hall, taking in the dim cavernous room and eyeballing the people moving every which way across the marble floor. It doesn’t take much to entertain me. On the news just a few days earlier, I had learned that there was a stretch of now-unused train tracks well below the level where I was standing that had been used in the thirties and early forties to bring Franklin Roosevelt into the city from his home up in Hyde Park. And not just Roosevelt but his car and driver as well. The tracks led right to a specially built freight elevator so the car could be loaded in and brought up to street level; that way the president could make a discreet exit onto Park Avenue, all a part of keeping the public unaware of his inability to move freely without the aid of crutches or a solid elbow nearby. I thought of Charlie. Ten years earlier, a bullet half the size of a thumbnail had nullified his ability to ever walk again. End of story. No secret train tracks and fancy arrangements. Charlie was parked in his wheelchair out in Queens, restless and resigned.

More snow was threatening as I headed back up Forty-second Street. The gunmetal sky had darkened considerably. I popped into the coffee shop at Coliseum Books and picked up what I still call a medium-size cup of coffee. I have no clue what they call it. The baristas were talking about the Robin Burrell murder. The one serving me-a tall skinny kid with buckshots of acne scars on his cheeks-cracked a joke about it. The kind of crap you hear from people these days, especially kids. His coworker took him on.

“You better not be saying that. Someone come cut up your throat, how you gonna like it?”

The kid handed me my change. He was still chuckling at his own joke. “That be all?”

I felt the lecture rising in my throat, but I swallowed it. What was I going to do, grab this kid by the collar and slap him around like the original Mr. Heavy? For Christ’s sake, I was only here to buy a cup of joe.

I took my mysterious-size coffee over to Bryant Park, and even though the temperature was hovering near the freezing mark, I fished a newspaper from a trash bin to clear the snow from one of the slatted park chairs and sat down at a metal table. I had the snow-glazed park to myself, no one else in the immediate vicinity being quite so idiotic as yours truly. I recognized that the kid joking behind the counter had affected my heart rate. I could feel the hinges of my jaw holding tight. I looked out over the empty park, trying to spot the snow angels I knew were out there somewhere.

No luck. No angels.

I hugged the cardboard cup with both hands and watched the mist of my breath mingling with the steam coming off the brew. They formed their own sifting cloud, and with the peculiar mood I was in, I went easily into the blur.

ROBIN BURRELL HAD FELT that she needed to justify to me her former involvement with the likes of Marshall Fox. She didn’t need to do anything of the kind, not from my side, anyway, but I guess she’d needed to do it for herself. It was on my second visit to her apartment that she told me the story. A little wine, a little cheese, a little cautionary tale.

Robin met Marshall Fox the night that Kelly Cole threw the contents of her martini into his face and instructed him to get the hell out of her life. The incident took place on a warm summer evening on a large tiled patio overlooking the yachts of Long Island ’s South Fork. The party was being thrown by Alan Ross and his wife, Gloria, the end-of-summer bacchanalia that the couple threw every September at their sumptuous estate in East Hampton. The Rosses’ annual bash regularly featured among its guests the cream of the entertainment industry’s A-list. Actors. Actresses. Movie and television directors. Supermodels. Writers. Studio heads. The hot bodies. A collection of the shakers and movers and so-called beautiful people kibitzing under the Chinese lanterns, toasting one another in the cool marble salons and occasionally fornicating in the comfortably refurbished boathouse at the edge of the property. Gloria Ross’s talent agency, Argosy, represented nearly half of the party’s attendees, while most who were not on the Argosy client list yearned for inclusion. The affair was unofficially referred to as “the audition,” it being well known in the industry that key calls went out from the Argosy offices both in New York and Los Angeles in the days following the Rosses’ annual party. Other agencies braced for the inevitable raids on their client list. Simply knowing that one of their hot actors or actresses or directors had attended the infamous East Hampton affair was enough to rattle the bladder of the related agent. Gloria Ross’s industry nickname was “the Comanche,” for the ruthlessness of her raiding parties. It was a nickname that brought the head of Argosy no end of delight. She often referred to her new acquisitions as her scalps.

Marshall Fox was an Argosy client, though Gloria Ross had hardly needed to steal him away from anyone. When Alan and Gloria Ross first came across the brash young wrangler and tour guide during a vacation in the Black Hills, the only organization with any claim on Marshall Fox was Moose River Guest Ranch, where Fox was employed. The story became showbiz legend. Captivated by the wit and easy sex appeal of their talkative guide, the Rosses had devised a plan midway through their weeklong trail ride and proposed it to the cowboy at week’s end. Beaming like a brand-new father, Alan Ross had clapped a hand on Fox’s shoulder. “I’ve been angling all my life to say something this corny. Kid, how’d you like to be a fucking star?”