Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

I’d say I was just outside the courtroom talking to a cop friend of mine around the time Robin took off from the yoga place. He was telling me that there had been some sort of ruckus with the Marshall Fox jury and that Judge Deveraux was calling in several armies of lawyers. That explained the tsunami of reporters and cameras hurtling toward Courtroom 512.

A FINE POWDERY SNOWFALL had begun by the time Robin left the yoga studio and started for her home. Her apartment was seven blocks away, on Seventy-first, half a block from Central Park. She stopped at an ATM on Seventy-seventh, then at Fairway, where she picked up a half-dozen oranges, a half-dozen kiwis, two green apples, a wedge of Manchego cheese and a box of Throat Coat tea.

A few blocks later, on Amsterdam, she stopped at a Korean market and scored a package of tissues, some throat lozenges and a dozen packets of a product called Emergen-C. The clerk was watching a tiny black-and-white television on the counter next to the cash register. The fluffy five o’clock news was being overridden with live courthouse coverage of the latest development in the months-long drama of the Marshall Fox trial. The clerk took the twenty that Robin offered and made change. As he counted the bills into her hand, he looked up at her face.

“You her.” His eyes lit up, and he indicated the television excitedly with his chin. “You her !”

Several other people in the shop turned their heads. Robin Burrell took the change and hurriedly left the shop. She reached her building-a five-story brownstone-several minutes later and let herself in. Hers was a floor-through on the first floor. She’d lived there for six years, the lucky legal holder of a rent-controlled lease. The entire east wall of the apartment was exposed brick. The kitchen was in the rear, overlooking a small patch of backyard that Robin shared with the gay couple in the basement apartment. Her bedroom was a narrow windowless room just off the kitchen, accessible by a heavy sliding wooden door that rumbled noisily on its rollers. She often referred to it jokingly as “the crypt.” Some joke. The front room was the largest room in the apartment, with high ceilings, a large marble non-working fireplace, and a curved front wall featuring nine-foot-high bay windows. Normally, Robin kept her curtains pulled when she was home, especially the past several months. However, the week before Christmas, she had purchased a monstrously large Douglas fir and, with the help of one of her downstairs neighbors, set it up in front of the bay windows. It filled the entire space. She told her friend Michelle that decorating the oversize tree was therapeutic. For two generations, Robin’s family had owned and operated a Christmas-tree farm just outside New Hope, until her father’s unexpected death the previous summer had forced them to sell the property. This had been Robin’s first ever Christmas without a homegrown tree. According to Michelle, Robin had felt particularly close to the street-bought tree, saying that she’d bonded with it, orphan to orphan. The tree was nearly as wide as it was tall, and because of this, it blocked from view anything and everything that took place in Robin’s front room.

Robin came home from yoga class and plugged in the tree’s all-white lights. In the kitchen, she sliced one of the oranges into quarters and ate them standing at the counter. She set the cheese on a wooden tray, along with a small knife and one of the apples. She brought this into the living room.

In the bathroom she stripped off her yoga clothes, tossing them into a corner, then got into the shower. As she stood under the hot jets, she would have seen her own body reflected in the mirror mounted on the wall opposite the showerhead. This was one of the details that the Gentleman Jew (as Robin had dubbed the lead prosecutor) had skillfully managed to prod from her on the witness stand: at her lover’s request, she had purchased the mirror and mounted it on the shower wall.

He liked to watch.

After her shower, Robin probably hand-dried her hair, then pulled on a pair of jeans and a green V-neck sweater. She put on some music. Ravel’s Bolero . I have a friend who can’t listen to Bolero without climbing the walls. He describes his problem as “aural claustrophobia.” The slow relentless build drives him nuts. I sort of know what he means. After Robin put on the Bolero , she lit two new tapers (she dug out the old nubs and tossed them in the trash), three block candles, and four tea candles in holiday holders. There’s no telling precisely when she turned on her television or when she checked her answering machine. What is known is that the Bolero went on around ten past six. The basement neighbor recalled hearing it beginning its build as he left to meet his boyfriend and some friends for drinks on Columbus.

THE CORONER PUT Robin Burrell’s death at anywhere from six-thirty to eight, eight being roughly when the stringer for the Post leaned precariously over the railing from the top steps of Robin’s stoop and saw her mutilated half-naked body lying in its grotesque twist beneath her Christmas tree. No fool this guy. He snapped the picture, called his contact at the Post , the columnist Jimmy Puck, and waited until Puck had roared uptown to the scene before heading with his camera down to the diner next to the Post ’s offices and phoning the police from there.

It was around that same time, across the park, that Rosemary Fox’s maid accidentally dropped a garlic press on her boss’s phone machine and heard the same gravelly-voiced message-word for word-that the police would soon be retrieving from Robin Burrell’s machine.

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

THERE HAD BEEN an all-out fistfight in the jury room. My cop friend-his name was Eddie Harris, like the jazz guy-had gotten me into Courtroom 512 to witness the fallout. Harris was a member of the arrest team that had taken Marshall Fox into custody the previous spring. He’d gotten his fifteen minutes of fame on the stand in late November, describing for the jury-as well as for the gazillion viewers tuning in-the cooperative demeanor Fox had displayed when the police arrived at his East Side penthouse with their warrant. Fox had known they were coming. At that point, half of America had known they were coming. Harris described how Fox had invited the officers in for coffee and donuts.

“ Donuts ?” the assistant prosecuting attorney had asked, practically contorting his eyebrow into a calculated question mark. “Sergeant, did you think the defendant was mocking you and your fellow officers? Did you feel that Mr. Fox was making light of what was a very serious situation?”

The officer shrugged. “It’s what he does. He’s a comedian.”

“But did you think that his crack about the donuts was particularly funny? I mean, under the circumstances?”

Harris’s response had been the leading sound bite of the day.

“You mean the cops-and-donuts thing? I’m no expert, but that’s pretty old material, isn’t it? I’d have expected something a little better, a big-deal guy like that.”

Harris cut me loose once we’d gotten inside the courtroom. The place was packed. First and foremost were the ladies and gentlemen of the media, doing the usual spot-on parody of themselves. A high-profile murder trial is, for lack of a better analogy, like an irresistible gigantic piñata, and for the two and a half months of this one, the reporters, columnists, on-air legal specialists, and news-talk hyenas had been giddily landing blows pretty much around the clock, each angling to be the one in the public eye when something colorful and provocative spilled out. Members of the media far outnumbered those attending the trial for more personal reasons-friends and families of the two victims, for example.