Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

The car was drifting slowly past the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rosemary shifted in her seat. She wasn’t in the mood to maybe catch a glimpse of the top of Cleopatra’s Needle.

“Marshall is scared shitless,” Rosemary said. “He’s convinced they’re going to ship him out to Rikers and offer him up as a sacrifice to men with tattoos on their teeth.”

“I thought they only sacrificed virgins.”

Rosemary took a beat. “Not funny, Gloria.”

The line crackled. “I’m sorry, honey. Of course it isn’t. This whole damn thing is just so surreal.”

“Tell me.”

“He’s going to be fine, Rose. It’s a huge cosmic mistake. Marshall has been targeted. We know that. Alan said just this morning it wouldn’t surprise him to find out it was all a plot by one of the rival networks.”

“Your husband has a paranoid mind.”

“My husband is in tears over what’s happening to your husband. Seriously, Rose. Alan broke down this morning at breakfast. You know we’re going to fight this thing with everything we’ve got.”

“I know, I know.”

“How are you holding up?”

Rosemary took a final drag on her cigarette and prodded the butt out the window. The smoke eased past her lips like dry ice. “I have thick skin. With all the crap Marshall’s pulled this past year? It’s probably alligator tough by now.”

“There’s a lot of sympathy for you out there. You stood by your man. You’re a beautiful victim of Marshall’s silly irresponsibility. That plays well.”

Plays well . Is everything a goddamn angle for these people? Get real, Rosemary thought. She laughed out loud. Gloria Ross wouldn’t know real if it hit her in the face. Alan, either. Their careers depended on fiction and fantasy, the mere appearance of truth.

Gloria asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

“We’re going to get you out to the house when we’re back east,” Gloria said. “You’re free to go out to the Island anytime. You know that, right? I don’t think you’ll want to stay in the city the next several days.”

“I’m staying. This is where my man is, remember?” Rosemary flicked another cigarette from her pack. “I’ve got to stand by him.”

“You sound bitter, dear.”

Rosemary sighed. “I’m fine.” She squinted out the window at the Plaza. The Plaza was where she and Marshall had first made love. She smiled despite herself. Son of a bitch kept his boots on the entire time. His big ear-to-ear grin, too. Miss Boggs. Miss Boggs…

“I’m fine,” Rosemary said again. “Thanks for calling, Gloria. If I talk to Marshall, I’ll tell him you were asking after him.”

“Do. Please do that. And Alan, too. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

“So long, dear.”

Rosemary thumbed the off button. She instructed her driver to take her home. The press wasn’t going to fold their tents and leave. Her building was going to be under siege for the duration of the mess. She’d have to think of something, but for now she wanted to be home.

She pulled out a compact and touched up quickly. She knew her role. And she knew the power of her best assets.

ROSEMARY WOULD WATCH the footage on television later in the evening. CNN was running the clip over and over. The Town Car pulling to a stop. The driver getting out and opening the back door. Rosemary stepping out, holding her coat collar tight at the neck and calmly facing the onslaught of cameras and microphones. As always, she looked beyond exquisite, her sea-green eyes registering a deep sadness as well as a deep resolve.

“I want to say that the people we should all be thinking about at this moment are the families of the victims. These are the people whose pain can only be increasing the longer this goes on and the murderer of these two women remains at large. My husband is innocent. The pain that Marshall and I are suffering is temporary. It will pass. We’re not the story here. We’re the distraction from the story.”

Rosemary aimed the remote and fired. The image vanished with a light sizzle . She was sitting up in her bed. The sleeping pills she had taken a half hour earlier had not yet kicked in. She took a sip of her warm Scotch. As she was setting the glass back down, the door buzzer went off.

Two short, one long.

Rosemary got out of bed and pulled on her white robe. Her Zsa Zsa, as Marshall always called it. She glanced at her mirror as the buzzer rang a second time. Same pattern. She pushed at her hair and gave her cheeks a quick slap, then went to the front door, peered through the peephole and pulled the door open.

Her visitor was leaning against the doorjamb. The smile was too large, the eyes in partial dilation. “You in bed already?”

“It’s been a tiring day,” Rosemary said. “Perhaps you’ve heard, my husband is spending the night in jail.”

“I caught that.”

“I assume you came up through the garage?”

“Do I look stupid?”

“What you look is stoned.” Rosemary stepped back from the door and let her visitor in. She asked, “Don’t you think you’re being a bit ballsy?”

“I thought you might be lonely.”

“I took some sleeping pills.” Rosemary closed the door. “I plan to be zonked out in ten minutes, tops.”

“I can show myself out after.”

“This is ballsy.”

Her visitor followed her as she retraced her steps to the bedroom. Rosemary stopped a few feet before the foot of the bed. Now that she had gotten out of bed and moved around, she was aware that the sleeping pills had kicked in. Her brain felt cloudy. In a nice-feeling way, though her feet weren’t feeling the floor.

She unknotted the sash and shrugged the robe off her shoulders. It fell to the carpet with a satin whisper. God, Rosemary thought vaguely, how cheap a move is that? She stepped away from the bunched robe, climbed onto the bed and crawled to the pillows. I’m a jungle cat, she thought. As she settled in, closing her eyes, she heard a laugh. It took her a fuzzy moment to realize it had come from her.

Her visitor was standing at the foot of the bed, working at the buttons of his shirt. “What’s so funny?”

Rosemary decided her eyes were too heavy to open. She felt as if her head were still sinking into the pillows. Deeper and deeper. Everything’s funny, she thought. All of it. It’s all one big cosmic joke. She felt the mattress shift and sensed a darkness moving down on top of her. An unshaved jaw scraped along her cheek.

Big joke. Great big joke.

ROBIN BURRELL SAT FROZEN in front of her television set. The only movement she had made the last hour and a half was with her arm, pointing the remote at the television and punching the button to change the channel. There was nothing new. Every clip she had seen now more than a dozen times. Marshall then; Marshall this morning; Cleopatra’s Needle and a white sheet covering a dead body; Marshall pacing aimlessly on the set of his show, aching over his former producer’s murder; a fuzzy snapshot of a petite buxom blonde in a bikini; Cleopatra’s Needle again. All of it. Ad nauseam. Over and over.

Robin didn’t blink.

She wasn’t answering her phone. Eighteen messages had racked up on the machine. Michelle. Edward Anger. Denise from work. Reporters. She had nothing to say. For three months, she had felt like she was on a delicious drug. What normally mattered had no longer mattered. What people thought had been of no real concern. Robin had slipped more easily into fantasyland than she ever would have imagined possible and had remained there until things turned ugly and Fox snapped his fingers and the fantasy ended.

Near midnight, Robin set down the remote. She rose from the couch and shuffled to the bathroom, barely lifting her feet. She turned on the shower and got out of her clothes. Stepping into the spray, she paused and looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the wall opposite the showerhead. For just an instant, a form superimposed itself on her reflection, which, in the steam coming up from the hot water, was already beginning to grow blurry.