Cold Day in Hell (2 page)

Robin came home from yoga class and plugged in the tree’s all-white lights. In the kitchen, she sliced one of the oranges into quarters and ate them standing at the counter. She set the cheese on a wooden tray, along with a small knife and one of the apples. She brought this into the living room.

In the bathroom she stripped off her yoga clothes, tossing them into a corner, then got into the shower. As she stood under the hot jets, she would have seen her own body reflected in the mirror mounted on the wall opposite the showerhead. This was one of the details that the Gentleman Jew (as Robin had dubbed the lead prosecutor) had skillfully managed to prod from her on the witness stand: at her lover’s request, she had purchased the mirror and mounted it on the shower wall.

He liked to watch.

After her shower, Robin probably hand-dried her hair, then pulled on a pair of jeans and a green V-neck sweater. She put on some music. Ravel’s
Bolero
. I have a friend who can’t listen to
Bolero
without climbing the walls. He describes his problem as “aural claustrophobia.” The slow relentless build drives him nuts. I sort of know what he means. After Robin put on the
Bolero
, she lit two new tapers (she dug out the old nubs and tossed them in the trash), three block candles, and four tea candles in holiday holders. There’s no telling precisely when she turned on her television or when she checked her answering machine. What is known is that the
Bolero
went on around ten past six. The basement neighbor recalled hearing it beginning its build as he left to meet his boyfriend and some friends for drinks on Columbus.

THE CORONER PUT Robin Burrell’s death at anywhere from six-thirty to eight, eight being roughly when the stringer for the
Post
leaned precariously over the railing from the top steps of Robin’s stoop and saw her mutilated half-naked body lying in its grotesque twist beneath her Christmas tree. No fool this guy. He snapped the picture, called his contact at the
Post
, the columnist Jimmy Puck, and waited until Puck had roared uptown to the scene before heading with his camera down to the diner next to the
Post
’s offices and phoning the police from there.

It was around that same time, across the park, that Rosemary Fox’s maid accidentally dropped a garlic press on her boss’s phone machine and heard the same gravelly-voiced message—word for word—that the police would soon be retrieving from Robin Burrell’s machine.

“I’m coming, you whore. Can you taste the blood yet?”

THERE HAD BEEN an all-out fistfight in the jury room. My cop friend—his name was Eddie Harris, like the jazz guy—had gotten me into Courtroom 512 to witness the fallout. Harris was a member of the arrest team that had taken Marshall Fox into custody the previous spring. He’d gotten his fifteen minutes of fame on the stand in late November, describing for the jury—as well as for the gazillion viewers tuning in—the cooperative demeanor Fox had displayed when the police arrived at his East Side penthouse with their warrant. Fox had known they were coming. At that point, half of America had known they were coming. Harris described how Fox had invited the officers in for coffee and donuts.

“
Donuts
?” the assistant prosecuting attorney had asked, practically contorting his eyebrow into a calculated question mark. “Sergeant, did you think the defendant was mocking you and your fellow officers? Did you feel that Mr. Fox was making light of what was a very serious situation?”

The officer shrugged. “It’s what he does. He’s a comedian.”

“But did you think that his crack about the donuts was particularly funny? I mean, under the circumstances?”

Harris’s response had been the leading sound bite of the day.

“You mean the cops-and-donuts thing? I’m no expert, but that’s pretty old material, isn’t it? I’d have expected something a little better, a big-deal guy like that.”

Harris cut me loose once we’d gotten inside the courtroom. The place was packed. First and foremost were the ladies and gentlemen of the media, doing the usual spot-on parody of themselves. A high-profile murder trial is, for lack of a better analogy, like an irresistible gigantic piñata, and for the two and a half months of this one, the reporters, columnists, on-air legal specialists, and news-talk hyenas had been giddily landing blows pretty much around the clock, each angling to be the one in the public eye when something colorful and provocative spilled out. Members of the media far outnumbered those attending the trial for more personal reasons—friends and families of the two victims, for example.

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.

The two attorneys bounced slightly on their toes as they conferred with the judge. At the defendant’s table, Marshall Fox’s mood seemed inappropriately spry, considering the circumstances. He was bantering with his various attorneys, at least one of whom, it was generally acknowledged, had been included on the team for the sole purpose of providing the defendant with a fawning sycophant, a ready-made audience for the entertainer’s fabled need for attention. His name was Zachary Riddick, and he was known in courthouse circles—and beyond, for that matter—as a headline grabber, one of those self-satisfied bottom-feeders in the profession who’ve determined that being provocative and noisy can go a long way toward covering over a basic lack of legal expertise or skill. He had boyish good looks—a trifle too boyish, in Margo’s view—and had learned how to get his name on some of the various A-lists around town, popping up at celebrity bashes or high-profile fund-raisers, usually with a fresh piece of arm candy. Riddick and Fox had been acquainted even before Fox’s arrest, and when rumors began growing of Marshall Fox’s imminent arrest in the two Central Park murders, Riddick had bobbed immediately to the surface, offering vigorous denouncements of the district attorney, the New York City Police Department, Marshall Fox’s competition in the late-night wars, you name it. Professionally speaking, his presence on Fox’s defense team was considered a joke. But as I say, it seemed to amuse Marshall Fox to have him around.