Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

“We might not have him. I’d have bet my father’s farm it was Fox. I swear I could see those two dead women in his eyes. But Jesus, Fritz. It might actually not be him. After all this. This thing here is a pure carbon copy. The freak who did those women might still be out there. I don’t even want to think about it.”

I declined Margo’s gesture to refresh my drink. She fixed me with her frankest look. “You are staying the night.” If there was a question mark attached to her words, it was completely silent. I confirmed that I was staying. “That’s good,” she said. “You won’t think less of me if I confess that I’m a bit spooked?”

“Not at all.”

“Good. I’ll go put on my bedroom eyes.”

Which she did, though I didn’t get to see them much. It’s not that there wasn’t sufficient ambient light in the bedroom; it was that the ambient light was still pulsing blue and red from across the street, and Margo’s eyes remained clenched shut the entire time. An hour later, as she lay curled asleep under her quilt, I was out of the bed and leaning on the windowsill, looking across the street through the snow into the apartment on the first floor. The huge Christmas tree remained lit. A peculiar sensation was going through me as-I couldn’t help myself-I imagined Robin Burrell’s destroyed body lying lifeless in her front room. It was a sensation I’ve experienced numerous times. An occupational hazard. It’s a chill that runs through me. A sensation of cold dread, as if the temperature of my blood has suddenly dropped by a good thirty degrees or more and is going to remain there. The feeling is one of my blood being replaced by a maliciously cold silk, threatening to freeze me up. I know what does it. It’s broken bodies. It’s the rupture of violence and then a heart gone abruptly as still as a stone. Dead still. It jolts me more than I think I sometimes know. It’s life made inconsequential. And I hate it.

As I stood at Margo’s window, I had a particularly unsettling feeling. A similar dread had visited me just a week previous, after I spent an hour talking with Robin Burrell in her apartment. The apartment had been uncommonly warm, and Robin had asked me if I could reach around her as-yet-undecorated Christmas tree and shove open the large windows for her. Which I did. That wasn’t when the chill took me. It happened afterward, when I was standing at Margo’s bedroom window-just like this, elbows on the windowsill, frown on the face-watching as Robin perched precariously on a footstool, mindfully stringing the small white lights on her gigantic tree. The chill had come when she glanced up from the tree and caught me watching her.

ROBIN BURRELL WAS an extremely organized person. She had divided the letters and the printed-out e-mails into three categories and set them in separate piles on her dining table.

“These are the general ones,” she had told me, indicating the largest of the piles. “They’re pretty much ‘you go, girl’ letters. A lot of them are very sweet. ‘Keep your chin up. Don’t let them get you down. We’re behind you.’ That kind of thing.”

I picked up a letter from the pile. It was from Karen from Texas. That’s how the author of the letter had signed it. It was written on holiday stationery, a sheet of cream-colored paper bordered with red silhouettes of reindeer. Karen’s handwriting was round and precise. She made her O’s large and, in words with two of them in a row, strung them together so they looked like the eyes of an owl. Karen might have been eleven or eighty, it was impossible to tell.

Dear Robin,

On TV you look very brave. I’m sorry the lawyers are being so mean to you but I guess that is their job. I thought I should tell you that when you look right into the camera you look like you regret everything that happened from the bottom of your heart. I am including you in my prayers. God bless you.

Karen from Texas

“Most of the ones in that pile are from women,” Robin said. “Though with some of the e-mails, if they don’t sign their names, it’s sometimes hard to tell from the e-mail address.”

The other two piles had interested me more. There were fewer letters in these piles. Mostly, they were e-mails that Robin had printed out. One of the piles contained messages from men who wanted to either meet Robin, date her, introduce her to their family, marry her, or take her far, far away from New York. This last category included a proposed thirty-day hike in New Zealand.

“That one actually made me think twice,” Robin said. “Thirty days in New Zealand sounds like a paradise to me right about now.”

“What do you think of Gary?” I held up a photograph of a thirtyish man wearing a red baseball cap and posing alongside a six-foot-tall Minnie Mouse. Gary ’s was a marriage proposal. He wrote that he lived in the Finger Lakes district of central New York State, owned a house and a small boat, and had a contact at one of the local wineries, so he could get “the good stuff” at below cost.

“It says here he’s single and never been married. What’s a grown man with no kids doing down in Disney World getting his picture taken with Minnie Mouse?”

“Please don’t make fun of him,” Robin said. “I’m guessing he’s a very lonely person. That’s what a lot of these seem to be from.”

“Which piles are the kinky ones in?”

“I put those in with the hate mail.” She tapped a finger on the remaining pile. “Listen, I can’t thank you enough for doing this. Are you sure you don’t want any tea or something? A drink?”

“I’m fine.”

“I feel bad imposing myself on you this way.”

“You’re not imposing. Don’t mention it.”

She picked the top sheet off the third pile. “A lot of these are just stupid horny stuff. Still, it’s creepy, being on the receiving end. But some of the others get really nasty. I just figured either way, nasty or stupid, they’ve come from people I wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley, so I bunched them all in as hate mail.”

She scanned the paper in her hand, and tears came to her eyes. She handed it to me. Her voice was choked. “Why is this happening?”

THE POST HIT THE STREETS before dawn with its lurid photograph on the front page, showing Robin lying dead beneath the Christmas tree. It wasn’t evident from the angle of the photo that her body had been arranged to resemble the two murder victims in the Fox case, but it didn’t really make any difference. The leaks had begun. Leaks and rumors. A tabloid can run marathons on leaks and rumors alone. The Post suggested, and the talking heads parroted the suggestion, that Robin Burrell had not been murdered by a copycat killer but that Marshall Fox was innocent after all of the two murders for which he had just been tried and that the original killer was again on the march. Women, lock your doors .

The morning talk shows couldn’t get enough of the murder of Marshall Fox’s former lover. The same faces that had been choking the studios of Court TV and Larry King Live for the months leading up to and during the trial were all risen and shined to weigh in on this latest development. I caught a few minutes of Alan Ross expressing his deep regret for Robin Burrell and her loved ones while at the same time clearly thrilled to be making the case for Fox’s innocence in the earlier murders. I mentioned to Margo that I’d run into Ross in the courtroom and that he’d passed along his greetings.

“’ow is old ’enry ’iggins anyway?” she asked, butchering her own pretty face with god-awful contortions. She was less than thrilled when I suggested she retire her cockney.