Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

The courtroom was buzzing.

Peter Elliott, the assistant prosecuting attorney, was standing at the prosecution table, stretching his back. I managed to catch his eye, and he acknowledged me with a head bob. I’d done some work for Peter in the summer, before the trial got officially under way. Background checks on some of the potential jurors; no real heavy lifting. Kicking over trash cans and looking for rats. Nobody is ever a hundred percent happy with all twelve members of a jury, but Peter had been philosophical about the seven women and five men who had eventually landed on the Fox jury, allowing that he could have imagined much worse. Over the course of the lengthy trial, he had cause to reconsider that opinion. The warning signals had sounded softly at first-grumbles, evident bad chemistry between some of the jurors, notes of complaint and irritation passed along to the judge-the real problems beginning once the defense rested and the case had been handed over to the jury. There were plenty of obvious factors to account for frazzled nerves in the twelve people whose lives had been yanked away from them for nearly two months already. But Peter blamed the Christmas break for the most serious unraveling. When the trial started, nobody had anticipated the proceedings moving past November and certainly not continuing into the holiday season. The jury had been sequestered since the beginning of the trial, but of course the judge made arrangements for time with family in the days surrounding Christmas. It was Peter’s feeling that the days of freedom had done real damage to the fabric of the jury’s exhaustive deliberations rather than releasing some of the pressure. He surmised that the break had only served to sharpen the anger of the more impatient members of the panel. Judging from the rumors that were swirling around Courtroom 512, it seemed that maybe Peter’s fears were correct.

I gave myself up to the natural tides and, after a few jostling minutes, was gently bumped up against the real live version of a woman I was more accustomed to seeing in a plastic box with a square hole cut into the front. Her name was Kelly Cole. A palomino blonde with large chocolate eyes, she was tapping the nonbusiness end of a pen against her slender lips and frowning down at her reporter’s notebook. The little squiggle between her eyebrows was the sole blemish on her milk-smooth face. I pointed it out to her.

“Baby’s first frown line,” I said. “So cute.”

The tapping pen halted. The line evaporated. “Well. Fritz Malone. Can it really be? What brings you here? I wouldn’t have thought celebrity trials were your kind of thing.”

“They’re not. I was down the hall putting the screws to some pirates. The riptide brought me in.” I indicated her notebook. “Looking for your lead?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Though I don’t know why I think it makes any damn difference. Do you think the viewers pay one iota of attention to my syntax?”

I rejected a lame joke about the alluring reporter’s syntax and instead asked, “So what do Ms. Cole’s sources tell her about what’s going on here?”

She gave me a “nice try, buster” look. “Who says Ms. Cole has those kind of sources?”

“The kind of sources that leak good dirt on our airtight jury? I don’t know, I guess I just consider you more wily than the average bear.”

“Well, the defense is itching for a mistrial here, but everyone knows that. That’s hardly a secret. A contentious jury is their best chance, and this one seems to be a powder keg these days.”

“Eddie Harris told me there’d been a fight.”

“That’s the word on the street.”

“You really don’t have the details?”

She shrugged. “We can speculate. Either the truck driver is finally fed up with the schoolteacher or the actress-waitress is tired of being hit on by the guy who owns the bar. That’s how my scorecard looks.”

“What about the foreperson?” I asked.

“Foreperson. Honestly. A person could choke on PC shit like that.”

I pressed. “I’ve heard some rumors.”

“That Madame Foreperson tried to get herself removed? Could be. According to the people who’re keeping score, she’s seemed the most fragile of the bunch.” The reporter pulled something from her blazer pocket and flipped it open. For a second I thought it was a cell phone, but it turned out to be a compact mirror. She checked out the goods, taking a scrape with her fingernail at the edge of her lipstick.

I asked, “So what’s the office pool saying?”

“On Fox?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, the cowboy’s going down for it, no question about it.”

“No question? Mr. Simpson managed to squirm off the hook.”

She slipped the mirror back into her pocket. “Mr. Simpson was an anomaly. There’s no race card here. Besides, that’s Hollywood. We do things differently in New York. We tear down the mighty for breakfast.”

She sounded more than a little eager for a verdict of guilty, and I told her so. “You’re drooling, Ms. Cole.”

Something deep in her eyes pulsed. “I’m entitled to my opinion. So long as I don’t broadcast it.”

“And your opinion is that he did it.”

“ Them . The bastard killed both of them. Any idiot can see that.”

The door to the jury room had just opened, and twelve of Marshall Fox’s alleged peers began the shuffle-march into the jury box.

I noted, “All it takes is one idiot.”

“Would you like to put up a wager?”

“Not with you, sweetheart. Not with your inside information.”

If eyes were bricks, I’d have had my head staved in. Her milky skin went red. “Screw you! That is so fucking yesterday, I can’t believe you’re even saying that.”

I raised my hands. “Whoa. You’re right. I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

“You’re damn right it’s stupid! Give me a break already.” She gave her head a toss. How she knew it would make her hair fall perfectly into place was beyond me. “You’ll excuse me. I’ve got to go earn my measly nickel.”

With that, another of Marshall Fox’s former girlfriends moved off, bumping and grinding her way through the crowd to get to the media corral.

THE CORONER DETERMINED that the blows to Robin Burrell’s head, powerful though they were, weren’t what killed her. For certain they stunned her, but chances were-unfortunately-that they didn’t even make her lose consciousness. Her attacker handcuffed her ankles together and, with a second pair of handcuffs, bent one of Robin’s arms behind her back and cuffed her wrist to the chain of the first pair of cuffs. Robin was extremely limber-freshly so-and she probably bent backward easier than most.

It was shards from the broken shower mirror that he used to cut her. He also used them to cut the jeans partway off. The largest shard was the one that killed her. It was surmised that the killer must have seen to it when he smashed the mirror that he came away with at least one large, jagged piece. This was the one found protruding from Robin Burrell’s neck. The reflecting side was facing her.

Just in case she had wanted to watch.

JUDGE DEVERAUX SUMMONED the two lead attorneys to the bench. Each attorney was trailed by several lackeys, but the judge made a backhanded motion dismissing them. This talk was for the big boys only. Peter Elliott made a play to remain included, but his boss, Lewis Gottlieb-the Gentleman Jew-placed a hand on his shoulder and dismissed him.

Generally speaking, Sam Deveraux had been receiving high marks for his handling of the Fox trial. Physically, he was an imposing figure: a six-foot-three, 240-some-odd-pound, fifty-seven-year-old African American with a large expressive face and a voice whose rich resonant rumble seemed capable at times of causing the walls around him to tremble. It was definitely capable of causing the people around him to tremble, as had been evident throughout the trial whenever the judge employed his mountainous energy to bring the histrionic or the shrill or the incendiary back into line. In a trial featuring no shortage of bona fide celebrities, both on the witness stand and in the audience, Sam Deveraux had emerged as the freshest and most impressive personality of the lot.