Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

Gloria was off in Los Angeles, so Ross had no tracks to cover on that front. Getting Nikki Rossman into his car proved even easier than he’d guessed. He’d merely had to give her his credentials and tell her that he needed desperately to talk with her about Marshall. The attack took place just north of Central Park. Ross pulled to a stop near the Duke Ellington statue on 110th Street and produced a hammer. Three swift blows and Nikki Rossman was crumpled against the passenger door. Ross drove into the park, pulling off the road into a cove of trees just north of Cleopatra’s Needle. The forty seconds required to transfer Nikki’s body from the car to the base of the monument was the riskiest part of the endeavor, but Ross took the gamble and won. Using a hunting knife he would later discard, he opened up the young woman’s throat. Then he nailed her hand to her chest. Four-inch nail. Driven all the way to its head.

When Fox wasn’t arrested the very next day, Ross went ballistic.

TRACY JACOBS UNDERWENT emergency surgery at Eastern Long Island Hospital and was then transferred to Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery. My small concussion was nothing compared with the damage Alan Ross had inflicted on the actress. It was deemed highly unlikely that the doctors’ facial reconstruction efforts would eliminate all evidence of the severe beating. Word emerged almost immediately from the entertainment industry that a replacement actress for Tracy Jacobs’s role in Century City was being actively pursued.

Investigators going over Ross’s cavernous office at the network turned up what Joe Gallo referred to jokingly as “a little Nixony thing.” Ross’s office was wired to record all conversations that took place there. There were wireless microphones located at key spots throughout the office. A sound technician at the network confirmed that Ross had been a fanatic about recording every single encounter that took place in his office. This included his phone calls. All the recordings were downloaded onto Ross’s computer. Rodrigo and his IT team went to work. My chat with Ross surfaced, but Gallo wasn’t overly interested in that. He was interested in retrieving Alan Ross’s interview with Tracy Jacobs when she allegedly threatened to go to the police with her allegations of Marshall Fox’s abusive and violent tendencies. He was even more curious to hear the recordings of Tracy’s audition for Century City and Ross subsequently offering the role to her. It was no real surprise that neither of these recordings appeared to exist.

Gallo called Gloria Ross in several times and roughed her up in his gentlemanly way. She was generally cooperative. She admitted to having heeded her husband’s “urgent request” that she sign Tracy Jacobs to an Argosy contract, only half believing his story that the actress was a recent lover of Fox’s who was threatening to raise a very public stink in the media about the entertainer. To the extent that she bought her husband’s willingness to cave in to such a craven extortion scheme, Gloria had chalked it up to the pressures that Ross was under concerning Fox’s growing difficulties. During an extended period of questioning, Gallo managed to extract from Mrs. Ross her suspicions that her husband had harbored “excessively proprietary feelings” toward Marshall Fox’s producer, Cynthia Blair. When Gallo pressed her concerning any thoughts she might have had on her husband’s possible role in Cynthia’s murder, Gloria had demurred, if only slightly: “I didn’t go there. That’s all I’m going to say.”

A WEEK AFTER the final surgery, Tracy Jacobs was moved to a rehabilitation center located in Briarcliff, under five miles from Alan and Gloria Ross’s Westchester home. Gallo took the short trip north out of the city to speak to the woman. Despite the doctors’ warnings that Tracy’s memory could be compromised, the actress’s recollection of the events “that changed my life” proved intact. She told Gallo that she had indeed met with Alan Ross in his office and voiced her concerns about Marshall Fox. She told Gallo that Ross had treated her with exceptional respect and, after hearing her concerns, had pleaded gently but firmly with her not to go to the police. “As a personal favor to me” was the phrase he had used, she said, over and over again. Eventually, he had steered the conversation away from the topic and over to her career-such as it was-and had floated the offer of the audition as well as the possibility of having Tracy talk with his wife about representation. Tracy told Gallo that she’d found it peculiar that her audition the following day took place in Ross’s office and with no one else present except Ross himself. He’d set up a video camera on a tripod and given her a short script to read. He made her read the script nearly two dozen times, each time asking that she read every word with a different emphasis than she had used in the previous run-through. At one point, she said, Ross seemed to become frustrated and demanded that she read the script one word at a time. No sentences, simply word after word, as a means, he said, of getting her to loosen up.

She thought she’d blown the audition. The following evening she was on her way to Los Angeles.

Tracy had kept her copy of the audition script, and she was able to tell Gallo where it could be found in her apartment in West Hollywood. Gallo immediately contacted the LAPD, and within hours, the single page was faxed to New York.

Joe showed it to me in his office.

I want you to listen to me and I don’t want any interruptions. Kevin Daly can’t be trusted. He was having an affair with Missy Welch and I know that he is the one who got her pregnant. If he knows what’s good for himself, he’ll go to the police and tell them about Missy. If he doesn’t, I’ll do it. And I mean it. Don’t think I won’t.

“Scintillating,” I said.

Gallo asked, “Do you see what I see?”

I nodded. “Ross already had the tape of Tracy’s visit from the day before. She’d have been throwing Fox’s name around, accusing him of being the violent punk he really is. Ross sends her off with the promise of a so-called audition, then he cooks up this piece of crap and has her come back in and read it a dozen different ways. All sorts of inflections.”

“Exactly. Do a nifty splice job with bits from the day before, and he’s got her on tape saying whatever he wants.”

I looked down at the fax again. “‘Marshall Fox was having an affair with Cynthia Blair. He’s the one who got her pregnant. If he doesn’t tell the police, I’ll tell them myself, blah, blah, blah.’”

Joe nodded. “When Megan and I went up to Fox’s apartment, he and Ross and Riddick all said they wanted to get Fox’s affair with Cynthia on record themselves rather than have us hear it from this other source. This source that Fox thought was credible.”

“Except Tracy never knew.”

“That’s right.”

I held up the fax. “So which is it? Is our man Ross brilliant or pathetic?”

“We got Fox’s and Riddick’s phone records and checked all the calls that came in the week Tracy’s threat showed up. We found a pair of calls made to both of them within several minutes of each other, from the same public telephone five blocks from Alan Ross’s office. Tracy Jacobs wasn’t in New York at the time of the calls, so we checked all calls that came in to Fox and Riddick from the Los Angeles area as well. They’ve all been signed off as legit calls from known associates. Nothing from Tracy.”

“Thorough bastard, aren’t you? I’d sure hate to work for you.”

“I’ll remember that if you ever come crawling.”

“If I’m crawling, Joe, you won’t want me.”

NOT FORTY MINUTES BEFORE talking his way into Robin Burrell’s apartment and killing her, Alan Ross had been making nice with me in Samuel Deveraux’s courtroom. It took some work for the thought not to depress me. Cool, calm bastard. DNA evidence placed Alan Ross inside Robin’s apartment. Besides the hair samples from Ross located in Robin’s apartment, skin tissue samples removed from beneath her fingernails provided a match with Ross, as did a spot of blood lifted from the large mirror shard that Robin’s killer had thrust into her neck. The small sample of blood was located on the portion of the shard that the killer would have gripped while working the glass into place. Since there were no unaccounted-for fingerprints taken from Robin’s apartment, the assumption was that Ross had worn gloves but that either a finger or a thumb had gotten torn on the glass and the thumb or finger beneath had been nicked. A claw hammer retrieved from Ross’s garage also yielded blood samples that were traced not only to Robin Burrell but to Nicole Rossman as well.