Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

“You weren’t exactly painting Robin Burrell as a nun.”

“It’s an ugly business. We had to bring out the extent of Fox’s sexual deviance. That was key. The man liked it rough. He liked his toys. Especially his handcuffs. Burrell was our best witness to Fox’s fun and games. I’m not saying I enjoyed dragging her through the mud.”

“ America enjoyed it.”

“Yeah, well. America enjoys all sorts of things.”

Nikki Rossman, the second victim, had been found with one end of a pair of handcuffs fastened around her left wrist. Under Peter Elliott’s questioning, Robin had revealed that early in her five-month affair with Fox, she had relented to his urgings that the two indulge in various bondage games, particularly the ones including the use of handcuffs. The testimony had been damning to Fox. What Peter hadn’t anticipated was that Fox’s defense team would take up the challenge and attempt to portray Robin as the aggressor, the one who had encouraged country boy Fox to loosen up and try some new things. Unfortunately, their cause was bolstered when they invited to the stand a man who testified about “some pretty inventive sex” with Robin Burrell back when the two were undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. The man described several episodes that had involved his binding Robin’s ankles and wrists with knotted socks and securing them so she was essentially immobile during the ensuing sex. Worse for the prosecution, he had insisted on the stand that the idea of the bondage had not generated from him but from Robin. Peter Elliott objected to the testimony and tried to get it struck from the record, but the judge had allowed it. From that point on, Fox’s defense team never missed an opportunity to portray Robin as not only a willing and eager partner to the colorful sex she and Fox had indulged in, but as the initiator. The notion took hold, and soon enough, Robin’s image in the media rarely appeared without at least a passing allusion to her spirited sexual history. Riddick had also managed to dredge up the fact that while she was an undergraduate, Robin had become pregnant not once but twice, each time terminating the pregnancy. Judge Deveraux did order this irrelevant factoid stricken from the record, but even so, Robin’s stability as a witness for the prosecution had taken its hits.

The buzzer on Peter’s phone buzzed. The call was short.

“That was Lewis,” Peter said, hanging up. “He’d like us to come into his office.”

If I thought the fragrance of Peter’s office chair suggested a new shoe, state’s attorney Lewis Gottlieb’s entire office positively reeked of a tannery. Gottlieb was acting as lead prosecutor in the Marshall Fox trial. For a man nearing his seventy-fifth birthday, he was still in impressively good physical condition, tall and unstooped, rumored to jog three miles every morning before taking the train down to the city from Westchester. It had been widely rumored that Gottlieb was on the cusp of announcing his plans for retirement just before the indictment of Marshall Fox on multiple counts of murder and that Peter had been instrumental in convincing his mentor to stay on and crown his career with what would no doubt be recorded as one of the more notorious prosecutions of the Manhattan criminal court system. Word along the grapevine was that Gottlieb was apoplectic at the possibility of losing such a white-hot spectacle of a case as the Marshall Fox prosecution. The notion was unimaginable, the sort of wrong note that a person like Lewis Gottlieb quite simply would not tolerate.

Peter had admitted to me on our way down the plushly carpeted corridor to Gottlieb’s office that the esteemed attorney was especially nervous about the jury’s increasing fractiousness.

“A hung jury is the least of his worries. Lewis has Deveraux’s promise-off the record-that he’ll do everything humanly possible to get everything through to a conclusion on this go-around. It’s not the mistrial that’s got Lewis worked up, it’s the prospect that the jury will actually let Fox go free. If things were to go that way…I don’t even want to think about it.”

Lewis Gottlieb was cordial with me but cool. The lawyer rose from behind his imperial desk and gave me his large freckled hand to shake. “Mr. Malone. I understand you are back on board.”

“So I’m told.”

As I took a seat, Gottlieb addressed his younger colleague. “What does he know?”

“Fritz knows nothing,” Peter said. I thought I detected a slight smirk, but I might have been mistaken. Gottlieb stared at me for several seconds.

“The foreperson,” he said at last.

“Nancy Spicer. What about her?”

Gottlieb steepled his large hands and lowered his chin onto them. “You vetted her for us.”

“I vetted all of them. What about her?”

Gottlieb raised a frosty eyebrow. The watery brown eyes moved to Peter, who cleared his throat. “Mrs. Spicer had a nervous breakdown. I don’t mean since she’s been on the jury, though she’s cruising in that direction. This was six years ago. She lost it completely, Fritz. Took a real dive. She spent thirty days in an institution.”

I let out a low whistle. “We don’t like that.”

Lewis Gottlieb agreed, “We don’t, Mr. Malone. We don’t like it in the slightest.”

I asked, “Does the defense know?”

Peter answered, “Not yet.”

“How did you find out?”

“It’s complicated,” Gottlieb said. “And not relevant. We can go into that later.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not sure what else to say. I ran everyone down as best I could. Something like that should have been flapping in the wind. It should have hit me in the face.”

“Spicer’s husband had it suppressed,” Peter said. “You would have had to dig for it.”

“That’s what you were paying me-”

Gottlieb interrupted, “That’s not important right now. You’re not in here for a scolding.” He looked again at Peter and nodded.

“Lewis doesn’t like the husband,” Peter said. “Bruce Spicer.”

I remembered Spicer. Vaguely. He worked as a clerk in a hardware store on Third Avenue. I remembered swinging by and talking to him in his cherry-red vest. The vest had made more of an impression on me than the man. “What don’t you like about him?”

Gottlieb answered, “He’s born-again. A Bible thumper.”

“A born-again Christian,” I said. “Is that really a basis to not like someone? I mean, in a professional sense?”

“I’m not anti-Christian,” Gottlieb said flatly, lowering his hands to his desk. “What I’m saying is that the man is unstable.”

“I thought it was the wife who was unstable.”

“Both of them, Mr. Malone. Our jury foreperson has been institutionalized and treated with depression medications, and her husband has thrown a handful of chicken livers at a doctor who was on his way into the office.” He sat back in his chair and folded his arms on his chest. In case I had fallen asleep during any part of the last ten seconds, he repeated, “Chicken livers.”

Peter spoke up. “Bruce Spicer was arrested six years ago as part of a group of anti-abortion protesters outside a clinic that performs abortions. In Livingston, New Jersey. Same year as his wife’s breakdown. Big year for the Spicers. Spicer’s arrest has been expunged from the record. It was part of a plea arrangement.”

Gottlieb said, “Mr. Malone doesn’t need to know the details. The point is, Bruce Spicer is a lunatic. And his wife wants off the jury.”

Peter added, “In a big way.”

“Along with eleven of her peers, from what I understand,” I said.

Gottlieb waved his hand dismissively. “Our twelve peers good and true can go hang themselves from the Brooklyn Bridge when this is all over, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t give a damn about them. The point is, I want this to be over before they do it. Now, Mrs. Spicer wants out, but Sam Deveraux isn’t having it. The lemmings would all try to follow. I’m letting Sam take care of that. What we have here, Mr. Malone, is a related but separate issue that concerns us all on a more profound level.” He paused. “Peter? I will let you do the honors.”