Cold Day in Hell

Synopsis

In the stew and dazzle of New York City, savvy, irreverent Fritz Malone — who Susan Isaacs called “the perfect balance of noir P.I. and decent guy” — is embroiled in a string of grisly murders that drags him behind the lurid headlines into the tangled affairs of some the city’s most beautiful people and their ugly truths. When two women linked with charismatic late-night TV personality Marshall Fox are found brutally slain in Central Park, Fox becomes the prime suspect and is charged with the murders. At the tabloid trial, one of Fox’s ex-lovers, Robin Burrell, is called to testify — and is instantly thrust into the media’s harsh spotlight. Shaken by a subsequent onslaught of hate mail, Robin goes to Fritz Malone for help. Malone has barely begun to investigate when Robin is found sadistically murdered in her Upper West Side brownstone, hands and feet shackled and a shard of mirror protruding from her neck. But it’s another gory detail that confounds both Malone and Megan Lamb, the troubled NYPD detective officially assigned to the case. Though Fox is in custody the third victim’s right hand has been placed over her heart and pinned with a four-inch nail, just as in the killings he’s accused of. Is this a copycat murder, or is the wrong man on trial? Teaming up with Detective Lamb, Malone delves deeper into Fox’s past, unpeeling the layers of the media darling’s secret life and developing an ever-increasing list of suspects for Robin’s murder. When yet another body turns up in Central Park, the message is clear: Get too close to Fox and get ready to die. And Malone is getting too close. In
Cold Day in Hell
, Richard Hawke has again given readers a tale about the dark side of the big city, a thriller that moves with breakneck speed toward a conclusion that is as shocking as it is unforgettable.

ON THE LAST DAY of her life, she took a yoga class. She wore what she always wore, a full-body black leotard and a too-tight faded gray T-shirt with a red crab on it, a no-particular-reason gift from her younger brother many years before. Normally, she wore a burgundy headband to keep her hair out of her face, but just the day before, she had instructed her hairstylist to “change everything,” and he had responded by giving her a short feathery cut, something she could hand-dry and hand-comb, something that would look good even when, technically, it was messy. Her yoga instructor had commented on it as she was rolling out her mat. He was a pole-thin Iranian with dark deep eyes. A slight man. As lithe and limber as a wet noodle, he was the fantasy at one level or another of at least three quarters of the female students in the class. Probably one or two of the males as well. He spoke with a rich British purr.

“I wouldn’t have thought you could be even more beautiful. This is so nice. Very nice.”

Her short bangs slipped away from the instructor’s flirting fingers, and a slight blush no larger than the size of a nickel dotted each cheek. As the instructor moved over to the wall and slid a CD into the boom box, she smoothed a corner of her mat with her toe, then raised her foot and tucked it against the inside of the opposite thigh, folding her palms together as she balanced perfectly on one leg, like a flamingo. She gave a little shake of her head, her new hair falling quicker than usual, then gently closed her eyes. The floodgates of serenity opened.

She had three hours to live.

THE BEST I FIGURE IT, I was on the witness stand at about that exact moment. Actually, I can be more specific. I was on the witness stand, yawning. I’d just checked my watch as the big yawn was building—quarter to four—then turned my attention from the watch face to the slender pale face of the defense attorney who was fidgeting in front of me. The yawn wasn’t entirely intended as commentary, although the sentiment was shared by any of the dozen or so people sitting in the stuffy windowless courtroom. The pale defense attorney shot a wounded look at the judge, who in turn did an admirable job of keeping a straight face as she doled out her reprimand.

“Mr. Malone, the court is aware that outside this room you lead a most fascinating life. But perhaps you’ll make a concerted effort to at least pretend that you have the same interest in the seriousness of these proceedings as the rest of us?”

Her rounding out the statement with the question mark was, I recognized, shortcut for,
Can you cut me a freaking break here, Fritz
?

I nodded. “Of course, Your Honor. My apologies to the court. I assure you, my yawning has nothing to do with these proceedings. I’ve been having some trouble with my sleep lately.”

The judge addressed the defense lawyer. “I’ve been having some trouble with my sleep as well, counselor. Perhaps we can start trimming the sails here?”

“But Your Honor—”

“Proceed, counselor. The oxygen in this room is finite. We’re wasting it.”

He proceeded. I sent my next yawn down to my feet. You can do that; it’s a trick you can perform so long as you’re ready. I turned my glassy eyes on the defense lawyer as he continued his attempts to take bites out of my testimony. It wasn’t going to work. My testimony was solid. I’d been hired back in the fall to set up a sting on an outfit that had been taking the notion of trademark infringement to a whole new level. The scammers had devised a method of sidelining as much as a quarter of legitimate orders earmarked for certain retail stores and replacing the merchandise—at bloated markups—with their own identical knockoffs. They then arranged for the return of the originals while hiding the return on the retailer’s end through timely hacking in to the retailer’s electronic bookkeeping. Legitimate stores all over the city had been unwittingly moving the knockoffs right alongside the real deals. It was only when rumors of the scam reached a certain level of management that I’d been contacted and asked to bring along my magnifying glass. It took me about a month to locate a coward among the scammers, but once I did, it was a fairly easy matter of putting the fear into him. His legs went jelly, I got from him what I needed, and I proceeded to set up the sting. My end of things was airtight, which was why the pasty-faced defense lawyer’s attempts to puncture my story were boring me to tears.

“Mr. Malone…” He grasped his hands behind his back and took a few stiff-legged steps, as if his knees were no longer working. “As you well know, my client has a completely different recollection of the events you have laid out for us this afternoon….”

I glanced up at the bench. The judge was sending a yawn down to her feet, I’m convinced.

THE WOMAN’S NAME WAS Robin Burrell. She was twenty-seven years old. Five-eight, 128 pounds. Chestnut-brown eyes, chestnut-brown hair. There was a farm-girl freshness to the face, a few pale freckles on the bridge of her nose. She had been raised a Quaker just outside of New Hope, Pennsylvania, and she still attended meetings every Sunday morning at the Quaker meetinghouse on East Fifteenth Street. I would be told that the Sunday before she died, Robin stood up to address the circle at her meeting, made a halting start as she fought to make eye contact with her fellow worshippers, then dropped back into her chair as sobbing tears overtook her. Support from the Friends had been unstinting. Everyone knew that things had been brutally rough for Robin, especially the past several months. And not just the Friends. Everyone in the damn country knew it.

By all reports, Robin was graceful and limber on her final day, though she was apparently suffering a small cold. The class was advanced vinyasa, which Margo tells me is for fairly committed practitioners. Margo herself sticks with hatha yoga, which isn’t all that slouchy, either, as far as I’m the judge. I’ve let myself into her apartment more than once and been confronted with a Margoesque pretzel in the middle of the floor.

Robin Burrell had set up her mat next to the large plate-glass window that serves as an entire wall of this particular yoga studio. The studio is above a hardware store on upper Broadway. The day after Robin died, I spent some time sitting on a bench outside a Ben & Jerry’s across the street from the hardware store and got a sense of how visible the yoga students were near the large window. A tall, striking woman like Robin Burrell, balancing sideways on a yoga block while moving her long legs like a nutcracker…it’s a show that could have given a curious passerby reason to pause.

“She was one of my most devoted students,” the Iranian instructor would tell me. “When I tell the class to hold a pose, Robin would become like a sculpture. She made exquisite lines. Quite extraordinary.”

Robin made her exquisite lines in the large window for an hour, then left class thirty minutes early, rolling her mat into a tight tube and mouthing, “Gotta go. Sorry,” to her instructor, who at the time was heels over head against the front wall, looking like a frozen salamander.

The fellow at the front desk reported that Robin didn’t slip into the small changing room but instead simply pulled on a pair of UGGs and shrugged into a large navy coat that came all the way down to her boot tops. Her ten-class membership had expired with that class, but she told the guy at the desk that she was in a hurry and she’d reup on her next visit. She pulled a copper-colored wool cap from her pocket and tugged it down over her new haircut.

I’d say I was just outside the courtroom talking to a cop friend of mine around the time Robin took off from the yoga place. He was telling me that there had been some sort of ruckus with the Marshall Fox jury and that Judge Deveraux was calling in several armies of lawyers. That explained the tsunami of reporters and cameras hurtling toward Courtroom 512.

A FINE POWDERY SNOWFALL had begun by the time Robin left the yoga studio and started for her home. Her apartment was seven blocks away, on Seventy-first, half a block from Central Park. She stopped at an ATM on Seventy-seventh, then at Fairway, where she picked up a half-dozen oranges, a half-dozen kiwis, two green apples, a wedge of Manchego cheese and a box of Throat Coat tea.

A few blocks later, on Amsterdam, she stopped at a Korean market and scored a package of tissues, some throat lozenges and a dozen packets of a product called Emergen-C. The clerk was watching a tiny black-and-white television on the counter next to the cash register. The fluffy five o’clock news was being overridden with live courthouse coverage of the latest development in the months-long drama of the Marshall Fox trial. The clerk took the twenty that Robin offered and made change. As he counted the bills into her hand, he looked up at her face.

“You her.” His eyes lit up, and he indicated the television excitedly with his chin. “You
her
!”

Several other people in the shop turned their heads. Robin Burrell took the change and hurriedly left the shop. She reached her building—a five-story brownstone—several minutes later and let herself in. Hers was a floor-through on the first floor. She’d lived there for six years, the lucky legal holder of a rent-controlled lease. The entire east wall of the apartment was exposed brick. The kitchen was in the rear, overlooking a small patch of backyard that Robin shared with the gay couple in the basement apartment. Her bedroom was a narrow windowless room just off the kitchen, accessible by a heavy sliding wooden door that rumbled noisily on its rollers. She often referred to it jokingly as “the crypt.” Some joke. The front room was the largest room in the apartment, with high ceilings, a large marble non-working fireplace, and a curved front wall featuring nine-foot-high bay windows. Normally, Robin kept her curtains pulled when she was home, especially the past several months. However, the week before Christmas, she had purchased a monstrously large Douglas fir and, with the help of one of her downstairs neighbors, set it up in front of the bay windows. It filled the entire space. She told her friend Michelle that decorating the oversize tree was therapeutic. For two generations, Robin’s family had owned and operated a Christmas-tree farm just outside New Hope, until her father’s unexpected death the previous summer had forced them to sell the property. This had been Robin’s first ever Christmas without a homegrown tree. According to Michelle, Robin had felt particularly close to the street-bought tree, saying that she’d bonded with it, orphan to orphan. The tree was nearly as wide as it was tall, and because of this, it blocked from view anything and everything that took place in Robin’s front room.