Cold Day in Hell (6 page)

Joe Gallo finished reading the e-mail. He set it faceup on his desk, squaring it perfectly. “Suspect number one.” He made a rueful face. “So begins the glamorous side of law enforcement.”

I’VE NEVER BEEN SITTING on top of the world myself, so I don’t honestly know what that’s like. For that matter, who can say that having the number-one-rated late-night show in the midnight slot and getting mountains of money thrown at you truly qualifies as “sitting on top of the world,” but that was the tag that
Time
magazine had given Marshall Fox when they’d put his grinning mug on their cover just three months before the murdered bodies of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman surfaced in Central Park a little over a week apart. Fox’s emergence on the entertainment scene three years earlier, almost literally from nowhere (“South Dakota isn’t nowhere,” Fox joked during the first week of his show, “we prefer to think of ourselves as just south of nowhere”), and his blurringly fast trajectory to stardom had made the high school dropout and former ranch hand a household name almost overnight. Fox’s particular combination of easy charm, faint naughtiness and at times downright reproachful wit struck an immediate chord with viewers. The
Time
story called it “a near-fluke-ish alchemy.”

One has to conjure the incongruous image of a cowboy Lenny Bruce wandering in from the heartland. Like Bruce, Mr. Fox is not one to mince his words, a trait that also lands him in the grand American populist tradition of Will Rogers or Mark Twain. But ask any female fan of Marshall Fox if she thinks either of those two venerable sagebrush sages had even a fraction of the edge or especially the sex appeal of this new kid on the block, and you’re likely as not to hear a resounding “As if!”

Within months of its debut,
Midnight with Marshall Fox
was a ratings gold mine for the network. The diamond-blue eyes and the slightly damaged nose peered out from newsstands all over the country. The guy was hot goods. Even Margo, who is not one to be easily starstruck, contracted a case of Fox fever and stayed up past pumpkin time to get her dose of the man. When Fox took up with socialite beauty and celebrity heartbreaker Rosemary Boggs within a year of landing in New York and the two tied the knot a mere three months later, they were given the sort of ink once reserved for royal couples. The media could not get enough of them.
Vanity Fair
reportedly paid the Foxes over a million dollars to pose as scantily clad modern-day Antony and Cleopatra (
Cowboy & Cleopatra
) for the cover of their magazine, snakes and all. Rosemary was rumored to have balked at the idea and made the photo shoot a living hell. Regardless, the results pumped sales to the top of the publication’s all-time figures, and when Fox convinced his wife to come on the show the week after the magazine hit the stands—complete with snakes and the peekaboo gold toga—the show’s already boffo ratings likewise flew right off the charts. The Foxes were a force, the new bionic couple. About as “it” as “it” gets.

Not quite two years into the marriage, the cracks began to appear. Rumors of fights. Whispers of drugs. Suggestions of a serious wandering-eye problem on the part of Fox. During an extended European vacation for the lady of the house, speculation grew that Fox was ready to pull up stakes and make his way back to the heartland. Finally, the trial separation, accompanied by the almost immediate parade of women looping their arm through that of the late-night entertainer. High-profile carousing. High jinks. The unexplained police presence at three A.M. outside Fox’s rented bungalow at Chateau Marmont. An unlicensed handgun setting off alarms at JFK. The incident with the shattered glass table and the bleeding Peruvian supermodel—reportedly seven stitches across the nineteen-year-old’s shoulder blade.

And then April.

The murders.

Blood in Central Park.

The week of Fox’s indictment and jailing for the slayings of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman,
Time
splashed the single word TUMBLED across their cover photograph of the late-night celebrity dressed in an orange jumpsuit and shackled like Houdini, wrists to waist, ankle to ankle. An ill-timed programming decision the night of the arrest had resulted in the re-airing of Rosemary Fox’s appearance on her husband’s show. Two minutes into the segment, just as one of the snakes was coiling its way down her arm and onto Marshall Fox’s desk, television sets across the country abruptly went black. Some accounts—surely apocryphal but too delicious not to report—had the sound of Rosemary Fox’s furious shriek traveling the full distance from the couple’s Park Avenue penthouse all the way across Central Park to the West Side. Not likely. Even so, an actual witness to the scene of Rosemary’s incensed phone call to Alan Ross at the network did report the base of her telephone cracking as she slammed the receiver down over and over again.

THE WORD ON CYNTHIA BLAIR was that the ambitious thirty-two-year-old was strung about as tight as a person can be strung while managing to function. Some of it was simply Cynthia—she’d always been the classic type A—but a lot of it was her job. Cynthia had been fast-tracking her way up the KBS ladder from the word go, impressing her bosses with her ability to transform her entry-level “shut up and fetch coffee” position into one where she could and did make a real contribution. She had the hunger. More importantly, she had the talent. The network knew it had a comer. When the plan was devised to bring in the charming cowboy and give him his own show, Cynthia had lobbied successfully to be the risky show’s producer and had launched into the enterprise with the full force of her tigerlike energy. It was hair-pulling work. In order to siphon off some of the stress from her work, Cynthia would steal away from the office whenever possible and put herself through various tortures at a nearby health club. The cords on either side of her slender neck stood out like hard cables as she strained against machines set to resistances that were patently inappropriate for the woman’s trim 112-pound body. But Cynthia Blair liked to push limits. She attacked the StairMaster as if she were charging to the top of a burning building to rescue a stranded child. She performed military-style sit-ups until she was on the verge of puking. She put serious fear into some of her kickboxing partners. It was her style, what she needed in order to contend with her natural tendency to engage with life at a highly pitched intensity.

When she couldn’t make it to the health club, she sometimes emptied the contents of her stomach into the toilet across the hall from her office.

Over the course of the Marshall Fox trial, the nature of Fox’s working relationship with Cynthia was dissected in great detail, the consensus being that the contrary bullheadedness of the two personalities had contributed to an atmosphere in the offices that could range anywhere from slightly ginger to all-out war zone; at the same time, some damned good television was born of the star and his tenacious producer squaring off. For a show that was essentially about laughter, the success of
Midnight with Marshall Fox
was revealed to followers of the trial to be in many ways dependent on the good stuff extracted from blow and counterblow.

“This is how Marshall works,” Alan Ross had testified. He had explained that, contrary to the impression of most television personalities, Marshall Fox was not at all interested in surrounding himself with yes-men. That wasn’t the world he’d grown up in. “With Marshall, it’s not something so basic as being friendly. He likes to spar. It’s all about provoking and being provoked. That’s just how he is. Those jokes and quips you hear every night? Trust me, some poor soul on the staff has to suffer deeply before Marshall signs off on them. His best work comes from knocking heads with someone. He’s a digger. He likes to rattle around in places people would just as soon keep private. That’s where the really good stuff is. Marshall has an instinct for that. It’s why the show has been such a success. You laugh your brains out while you’re watching, but you’re also nervous. He’s brilliant, the way he goes about it.”

Ross went on to say that Cynthia Blair had been the perfect producer for someone like Fox. He described her “solid backbone” and her unwillingness to cave in gracefully to her boss’s bullying. Instinctively, she knew that Marshall thrived on “the fight.”

“Personally, I thought that Cynthia moving on from the show was inevitable. Working with someone like Marshall is exhausting. Believe me, I know. I’ve been there. No question the dynamic between the two was creating some great television, but ultimately there’s going to be a burnout factor. Even with someone as driven as Cynthia was. At least that’s my view. Marshall was a definite challenge to Cynthia, but she’d mastered it. Marshall and I even had some discussions about it. He agreed with me that Cynthia was ready for something new to sink her teeth into. She was definitely going places.”

Most of Fox’s associates who testified took pains to stress that the “combat” between Cynthia and her boss had always been strictly professional, just the way the two of them chose to do business. Lawyers for the prosecution hammered away hard at this point but were unable to solicit a statement from anyone that, in fact, Fox and Cynthia Blair had not liked each other. Even so, nobody who testified attempted to pretend that the termination of the professional relationship hadn’t been particularly nasty. Or sudden. Around two o’clock on the afternoon of March 22, shouting and yelling—much more than usual—had been heard coming from behind Marshall Fox’s closed office door. Two voices. Marshall Fox and Cynthia Blair. No one who heard the muffled battle was able to identify the precise point of the argument, although the single most agreed-upon quote heard distinctly by those testifying was: “Liar! You fucking,
fucking
, two-faced liar!” It was Cynthia Blair, not Fox, who hurled that one, and she had said it over and over again. Eventually, Cynthia emerged from Fox’s office and stormed into hers, which adjoined her boss’s. There was a loud crash and the sound of broken glass, followed by a steady pounding sound that went on for about a minute. This was followed by several tense minutes of silence, after which the producer’s door flew open and Cynthia stomped to the elevator clutching a cardboard box under one arm. She stood at the elevator, glaring up at the ceiling, slamming her hand against the down button over and over and over until the elevator arrived and the door slid open. Cynthia swore harshly under her breath as she got on the elevator, though no one’s testimony squared on the specifics of what she said.

The pounding that was heard coming from Cynthia’s office had resulted in a large hole that was found in the Sheetrock wall—the wall she shared with Fox—that looked as if she had attempted to launch a cannonball through the wall and catch her boss at his desk. The cannonball turned out to be Cynthia Blair’s Emmy Award (the crashing sound had been the glass of the small display case across from Cynthia’s desk), which was fished out from the hollow area within the wall, along with the framed photograph of a smiling Marshall Fox embracing Cynthia (who was embracing her Emmy) that had previously held the place of honor in the display case, next to the award. The glass of the frame was broken, spiderwebbing out from a point directly in the center of Marshall Fox’s face. As one of the secretaries testified, “It looked like she’d punched him out.”

Three weeks later, an early-morning dog walker in Central Park came across the clothed body of a young woman lying at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle, the stone Egyptian obelisk rising from a small hill behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A red scarf that was later identified as belonging to the victim was knotted around her throat, and her face was covered with tiny puncture wounds from what proved to be a ballpoint pen, the very pen that had been used to fix the victim’s hand in place over her heart.

The body of Cynthia Blair was discovered on April 16. What with the grisly nature of the murder and the location of the body, the story led the local newscasts. Once the woman’s identity was released a day later, the story strapped on rockets. Overnight, Cynthia Blair achieved star status. Her angular visage saturated the airwaves. The attractive, hardworking, go-get-’em “woman behind the man” story got immediate traction. From the offices of
Midnight with Marshall Fox
, a statement was released offering condolences to Cynthia Blair’s family, along with the announcement of a $500,000 award for the capture and conviction of Cynthia’s murderer, half of which was being put up personally by Marshall Fox. The show went on immediate hiatus. It resumed a week later—several days after Cynthia Blair’s celebrity-heavy funeral—with a program that felt like the
Titanic
the day after. Fox had wept openly several times. The plug was pulled on a video tribute to the show’s former producer partway through, it was so distressing. Midway through the program, the band performed a dirge that seemed interminable, during which Marshall Fox wandered between his desk and various parts of the stage like a man in a haunted dream.

Margo had insisted on watching. I’d lobbied for whiskey and a couple of games of pool at Dive 75, but Margo won the toss. She’s a freelance writer, and her beat requires her to keep an ear to the ground concerning all things cultural, fluffy and otherwise. So I watched the show with her, both fascinated and disgusted by the chutzpah of Marshall Fox and his people for dragging America through such a moribund hour of television.

High marks to Margo for prescience. At one point during the grim proceedings, she turned to me on the couch and said, “So what do you think? Did Fox do it?”

“Do what? Kill his producer?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not serious, are you?”

She did a head-bob thing that she does, her eyes going up to a corner of the ceiling. “I don’t know. Not really, I guess. Maybe.”

At that point, a week after Cynthia Blair’s murder, the police had not released the detail of the dead woman’s hand having been affixed to her breast with the ballpoint pen. That all changed three days later—a Sunday—when a second body turned up in the park. Unlike Cynthia Blair, this one showed signs of rape, or at any rate sexual activity, in the hours prior to death. And whereas the cause of death in the case of Cynthia Blair had been strangulation, the second victim had received several severe blows to the head and then had her neck opened up. Blood everywhere. In addition, a pair of handcuffs dangled from the left wrist. As with Blair, this new body had been deposited at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle. Most telling to the police, its right hand had also been affixed over the heart, this time with a four-inch nail. Only this time, that last detail leaked out.