Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

The case against Alan Ross strapped on rockets.

MEGAN AND I TOOK the Metro North train up to see Tracy Jacobs. A golf-ball-sized lump remained under her left eye, which itself sagged somewhat and wasn’t opening completely. Her jaw was wired in place, and a temporary latex piece had been affixed to her lower gums in lieu of the teeth that were no longer there. She was having problems with the right side of her body; the leg in particular wanted to behave more like a noodle than a leg.

Megan did most of the talking. For the most part, she steered the conversation in neutral directions. Tracy’s family. Her recent trip to Paris. What it felt like to kiss Matt Damon during his recent guest appearance on Century City . I silently awarded Megan a daytime Emmy for her performance during that line of questioning. She actually behaved as if she really gave a damn.

We spoke with Tracy in the facility’s solarium, overlooking a sloping ten-acre lawn at the edge of which sat a half-frozen pond populated by black ducks. Tracy cried a few times during the visit. Thankfully, she had no memory of the beating she had taken at the hands of Alan Ross. Her final memory of the afternoon was of Ross’s car pulling into his garage. For her own peace of mind, she had not been informed of Ross dumping her bound body into the water. She had no clue of Megan’s role in her rescue. In the hour and a half we spent with her, Tracy thanked me half a dozen times for saving her life. A strong look from Megan the first time Tracy gushed this way had warned me off from setting the record straight. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t my call.

Before we left, we picked up a key piece of information. Three days before leaving New York for Paris, Tracy had bumped into Zachary Riddick at a DreamWorks party in midtown. She told us she had been unprepared for the reaction she’d received. Riddick lit in to her for the calls he said she’d placed both to him and to Marshall Fox, allegedly threatening to go to the police with her story about Fox’s relationship with Cynthia Blair. Of course, Tracy had never made those calls, and she went to great pains to convince Riddick that she had no idea what he was talking about. She swore that Danny Lyles had never breathed a word to her about Fox and Cynthia Blair. Tracy told us that Riddick had seemed baffled, then troubled, by her insistence that she in no way had placed the calls. She did tell him that she had raised her concerns about Fox with Lyles and that the driver had contacted Alan Ross. She related her meetings with Alan Ross, going on at some length about what a wonderful man Ross had been to take her under his wing the way he had.

“I thought Alan was a god,” Tracy said to us, gazing off toward the pond. “He was a god, and I was one of his very favorite angels.” She turned her broken face to us. The tears in her left eye seemed unable to fall. “How could he despise me so? What did I do?”

As we were leaving, Tracy’s mother and brother appeared, and I had to go through the whole hero thing again. Megan drifted off and looked out the window as I collected the praise.

“You know your humble act gets old fast,” I said to her on the ride back to the train station.

She fixed me with a look I hadn’t been ready for. “I’ve had the spotlight. I detest it.”

On the train back to the city, Megan and I put the scenario together. Riddick must have smelled a rat. In buying Tracy Jacobs’s story that she had not placed threatening phone calls to him and to Fox, the lawyer must have begun to suspect who was actually pulling the strings. He must have contacted Ross and aired his suspicions. Or if not, he must at least have put some hard questions to Ross.

“Ross couldn’t afford to have Riddick poking into this,” Megan said as the train raced past Valhalla. “Riddick was Fox’s lawyer. His job was to get his client cleared of these charges.”

I agreed. Zachary Riddick spelled trouble for Ross. “But why Robin?” I asked. The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I knew the answer. Megan did, too.

“Misdirection.”

“Precisely.”

“Ross targets yet another of Fox’s former lovers and arranges her killing to look just like Cynthia’s and Nikki’s. And who should know better than Ross how to do that? The result? Uproar and confusion. Big headlines. Is Fox innocent after all, or is there a copycatter coming out of the woodwork?”

“And the next day Riddick gets it. Ross must have arranged to meet him at the Boathouse Café and then somehow lured him into the Ramble.”

“But no nail in the heart,” Megan said.

“No time. That one was a risky kill. But it was still in Central Park, and it included the throat slashing. And Riddick was closely associated with Fox, so Ross could bet that the killing would be lumped in with Robin’s murder. Any questions of a relatively sane motive-like covering his own ass-weren’t likely to be raised. Which they weren’t.”

“Why did Ross try to hire you?” Megan asked. “Do you really think it was his way of keeping tabs on how we were doing?”

“He’s an admitted control freak. And manipulator. This is a guy who likes to have all the angles covered.”

Megan turned to watch the cemetery at Hawthorne racing by. A small crowd was gathered near the top of the hill. Two seconds, then gone.

She turned from the window. Her skin was ghastly pale. “So Robin Burrell’s murder was a control freak’s ploy to camouflage his motive for killing Riddick.”

“Essentially, yes.”

She leaned her head against the glass and muttered something under her breath. I missed it.

“What?”

“I said I should have killed him.” She continued staring out the window. “I mean that, Fritz. With all my heart. I should have blown him into the water.”

WHEN WE REACHED Grand Central, Megan and I went for a drink at the Oyster Bar. She fiddled with a white wine. I took two fingers of Maker’s and then two more. I might have been happy with a whole fistful. The Oyster Bar is a good place for this kind of drinking. You feel like you’re at the bottom of a deep cavern, sealed off from the outside world. For all you know, the outside world might be gone. Up in smoke. Vaporized in a single white flash. The only woes and problems left in the entire world might be the silly ones you’re nursing in the underground bar along with your silly drink. If you think about it, there ought to be a sense of hope embedded in a notion like that. I suppose on some days there is.

Megan switched to water after her glass of wine. We didn’t talk much. We watched a couple at the bar having an argument. Corporate types, boxed neatly into their suits. He seemed to be taunting her, and she seemed to be taking the bait. I was tempted to go over and tell them both to quit it, which was when I realized it was time to let the rest of the ice in my drink melt away.

“You should go see your girl,” Megan finally said. “If I had a girl, that’s what I’d do.” She looked up toward the ceiling. “I don’t know about you, but my head’s swimming with questions I know full well I’m not going to find any good answers to.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Big ones. Stupid ones. The mankind kind.”

I skidded my glass on the table. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“I’m not asking you to. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

I tossed some bills on the table. The corporate couple had stopped arguing and were playing kissy-face as we passed them on our way out. There’s mankind for you.

Out on the street, the light was fading fast, nearly gone. Forty-second Street was slipping into its black-and-white mode. Collections of silhouettes swam both ways across the street. Taxis, taxis, taxis…nothing but taxis. God knows which twenty of them were honking.