Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

I’m coming, you whore. Can you taste the blood yet?

The police did what they could to track Riddick’s whereabouts in the several hours between the end of the news conference and the discovery of his body in Central Park. Rosemary Fox reported speaking with him briefly on the phone some minutes after the conclusion of the news conference. Riddick had told her he would come by her apartment later in the afternoon to discuss where things stood. He did not disclose his plans for the intervening hours. One would presume lunch. But the contents of Riddick’s stomach, once his body was turned over to the medical examiner for the up-close-and-personal, showed nothing since the twin stack he had shoveled down at his local diner-where he was a regular-at approximately 7:45 that morning. One of the local stations went ahead and dug up the waitress who had served him, a moon-faced Ukrainian who informed the viewing audience, “He luks fine when he leaves here. You think, He vull be back tomorrow like always. Who can know he vull be kilt like that? I hud no idea.”

The police had questioned everyone they could round up in Central Park in the immediate minutes after arriving on the scene. They showed photographs of Riddick. A few people said that they might have seen him, but the information provided no real insights into the murder. Riddick had entered the park from the southeast corner, dropped off by a taxi. The cabbie was tracked down. He had picked Riddick up at Church Street, a few blocks from the courthouse. On the ride uptown, the two shared an animated conversation on the subject of Marshall Fox’s guilt or innocence (the cabbie saw the new murder the same way Riddick did, proof that the real killer of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman was still out there); however, Riddick failed to reveal what his purpose was for heading into the park. The cabbie reported a good tip. He last saw his fare heading into the park via the walkway that runs by the zoo at approximately a quarter to one.

Speculation centered on the possibility that Riddick was on his way to meet someone for lunch at the Boathouse Café-he’d been known to eat there on more than one occasion-but no one surfaced claiming to have been stood up by the lawyer for a lunch date.

Essentially, Zachary Riddick took a cab to the park, briskly walked the quarter mile to the area of the Boathouse and saw his life end amid blood and snow and dead leaves on a nub of a hill overlooking Central Park Lake.

The police weren’t saying much. I’d had to poke and prod just to pick up what little I knew.

IT WAS DIFFICULT to go anywhere in Manhattan the next several days without getting caught up in a conversation about Marshall Fox and this new set of murders. In point of fact, it was difficult to get anywhere in Manhattan in general, unless you were going by subway. Eight additional inches of snow had fallen on the city in the space of twenty-four hours, slowing street traffic to a skidding crawl and leaving the curbs lined with large cloudlike mounds. After the snow stopped, the temperature had tumbled to record lows, locking the city in an arctic freeze. An elderly woman in Fort Apache froze to death in her unheated apartment. A visitor from Columbus, Ohio, lost a leg to a skidding taxi. In Sunset Park, two sisters aged six and nine died when snow leaching from the roof into their bedroom ceiling melted and dripped onto their space heater, igniting a fire that gutted the entire second floor of the house. The mayor put out a call for all nonessential businesses to remain closed. Stores were shuttered. School classes were canceled. Trash collection was suspended. In general terms, as much as a city of nine million restless inhabitants can ever truly grind to a halt, that’s what happened.

Two nights after Zachary Riddick’s murder, Margo and I attended a talk on Wicca given at the American Museum of Natural History. The museum is only several blocks from Margo’s place, but getting there was half the fun. Margo went down on her lovely can as we approached Columbus Avenue but then got the last laugh a minute later as my lunge for a lamppost failed to keep my feet beneath me and I slid to the ground like a cartoon drunk.

Margo had done a recent piece for The Village Voice on the woman giving the talk, so she was curious to hear the presentation. The woman was a Wiccan herself, though in civilian life, she ran a small advertising agency out of her apartment in Chelsea. You know what they say, scratch an ad exec, find a Wiccan. It turned out to be a good talk, much more engaging than I had expected, but even so, the buzz in the auditorium during the reception afterward barely included the word “Wicca.” The murders of Riddick and Robin Burrell had taken place a mere quarter mile from the museum, and their grip on the crowd was palpable. Even the Wiccan, when Margo introduced us and told her what I did for a living, shrugged off my compliment on her presentation and asked my opinion on Marshall Fox in light of these recent killings. The woman was in her sixties, overweight in a hippie-gone-willingly-to-seed way. She was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a gold breastplate necklace that shot off reflected light every time she moved. A thick graying braid nearly as stout as one of her arms snaked down her broad back.

“Innocent until proven guilty,” I said colorlessly.

“But your opinion. I’ll share mine. Mr. Fox is serving as a touchstone, if you will.”

“Touchstone.”

“I see these as ritual killings. Maybe not so much sacrifices. But more a ritualized and symbolic cleansing. Purifying.”

“You’ll excuse me, but I fail to see what is purifying about slitting innocent people’s throats.”

The Wiccan brought her fingers together as if in prayer. Her tiny smile was astonishingly smug. “Innocence is in the eye…or, should I say, the heart of the beholder. From the sphere the killer or killers are operating on, these subjects were clearly anything but innocent. In fact, they were probably considered a poison, or represented a poison, and so it was necessary to remove them from the world.”

I glanced at Margo again to see how she was taking this. She had slipped on her inscrutable mask. “So where does Marshall Fox fit into all this?”

“He’s the touchstone. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say the godhead.”

“I’m sure he’d be flattered to hear that.”

“Mr. Fox held a position of great significance for millions of people. Don’t forget your Simon and Garfunkel: ‘And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made.’ The television is our society’s alternative altar. A person such as Mr. Fox takes on the symbolic role of the deity.”

I said, “And religion makes some people go cuckoo.”

She nodded. “There is a history of excess and frenzy, yes.”

Excess and frenzy. I liked that. You could slap that headline on the morning paper each day of the year, and you’d never be wrong. I asked, “So you don’t think that Fox murdered those two women last year?”

The Wiccan pushed her glasses back up on her nose. “I don’t. I believe each killing was performed by a unique participant.”

Margo’s mask dropped. “You mean a different person for each killing? That’s four separate murderers.”

“That is correct.”

“My God. That’s crazy.”

“From the perspective of our sphere, absolutely. But you recall Charles Manson and the so-called Manson family? This was a group of people completely at peace with their actions. Ritualized killings. Purgings. Cleansings. Symbolic. Iconic. However you wish to term it.”

I blurted, “What was so iconic about Robin Burrell? Or any of them?”

“I could hardly say with any certainty. All were intimates of Mr. Fox. We know that much. Perhaps the killer or killers perceived that the victims had betrayed Mr. Fox or were a source of danger to him. Or that they were in some way corrupting him.”