Cold Day in Hell

by Richard Hawke

  “That’s a joke.”

  Margo asked, “Do you really think it’s some kind of a cult? Four different killers? The idea makes my skin crawl.”

  “It’s merely a theory, dear.”

  I said, “I can tell you the police wouldn’t be too happy with your theory.”

  She gave her tiny smile again. “People do not kill in order to make the police happy.”

  The morning after the Wicca talk, Margo and I had another tussle. It started while I was shaving, though the seeds had been planted ten minutes earlier, right as Margo was stepping into the shower, when I had told her that I was planning to go to Robin Burrell’s memorial service that morning. I’d fudged somewhat. I was actually planning to attend Robin’s weekly Quaker meeting, not precisely her memorial service. A phone call to one of the Quaker elders in charge of the meeting had informed me that Robin’s death would be the unofficial agenda that Sunday morning. Margo had taken the information in deafening silence, pulling the shower curtain closed with a little extra something.

  I was running a razor down my cheek when Margo, in her robe and with a twisted towel piled high on her head, passed behind me on her way out of the bathroom.

  “Got to look good for your big date?”

  She moved into the apartment, tightening the sash on her robe. The bathroom was warm from her shower, but her exit left behind a chill nonetheless. I took a deep breath and squared off with my reflection. “Let it go.”

  Margo barked from the next room, “I heard that.”

  I should have counted to ten. Instead I barked back, “If you did, then you were eavesdropping. I wasn’t talking to you.”

  The face in the mirror shook its head sadly. Not good. Margo gave a response that I didn’t hear. But I caught its drift. She went on to the kitchen. I quickly finished up the shaving, rinsed off my face and followed her. She was running water into the kettle, staring a hole deep into the sink.

  “This isn’t like you,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  She cranked off the water. “Let me check. You are talking to me this time?”

  I made certain of an even tone. “I’m talking to you.”

  “Nice.” She set the kettle on the stove and kicked up the flame. It’s one of those stoves that makes a click-click-click when you’re activating the pilot light. Maybe it was just me, but I thought she let it click a few seconds longer than necessary. “This isn’t like you, either,” she said.

  “What isn’t? Attending funerals and memorial services for the victim is straight out of the handbook. You know that. If you don’t believe me, ask your old man.”

  “I’m aware of that.” She turned to face me. “But a victim is not necessarily a client. Do they say anything about that in the handbook? Or is your pretty little client writing you checks from beyond the grave?”

  I didn’t say anything. Margo knows a cheap shot when she hears one. She pulled the towel from her head and coiled it tightly in her arms. She might have been counting to ten.

  “Okay, let’s back up a second,” she said. “I know you feel bad about what happened to that woman. Of course you do. So do I. For Christ’s sake, so does anyone in America who is paying attention, which, as best I can tell, seems to be pretty much the whole damn country. But I’m sorry, Fritz, whether you spoke with her a few times or not, it’s none of your business. I’m sure you have this fantasy that you could have protected the beautiful maiden across the street, but that’s not how it played out. Some crazy psychopath got in there and slit her throat. But we have a police force in this city, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. They’re looking into it. That’s their job. Robin Burrell is their client. She’s their responsibility.”

  She unwrapped her arms and set the towel down on the counter. One of the edges was too near the stove flame, but I didn’t say anything.

  “What is it exactly that you don’t like about this?” I asked. “It’s not as if this is the first time I’ve taken up a case on my own. You know that.”

  “I do know that. Daddy used to do it, too, and it drove Mom nuts.”

  “I’m not your daddy. And you’re not-”

  I stopped myself. One of our relationship’s more tender spots was Margo’s fear that in being with me, she was on track to replicate her mother’s life. On its face, the concern was absurd. But it was an argument we had agreed not to enter into. Many times.

  I went on, “You know what I’m saying. There’s someone running around this city slicing people’s throats. And too damn close to home to suit my tastes. I know the police are investigating. They’re doing their thing. And Joe Gallo’s a good cop. He’ll probably nail the guy. But another set of eyes never hurt. For Christ’s sake, Margo, this is what I do. What do you want, for me to take up bridge?”

  The kettle began to whimper. Margo shut off the flame and picked it up. “I don’t like being jealous,” she said flatly. “It’s one of the most pathetic emotions.”

  “There’s nothing to be jealous of. What do you-”

  The kettle went down with a rattle. Her eyes were hard black pebbles. “You were quiet about her! You didn’t tell me that you went over there more than once. You tried to hide that from me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Oh, bullshit, Fritz. It is true, and you know it. You never really said to me what it was you two talked about.”

  “Not true. She showed me her letters and the e-mails she’d gotten. I told you that.”

  “That takes two visits? You brought that stuff up here after the first time you saw her.”

  “Perhaps you can remind me of the last time you came home from one of your interviews and recited everything back to me word for word.”

  “This is different.”

  “Why is it different?”

  “Because she lived right across the street. Because she was a beautiful woman.”

  “This city is lousy with beautiful women. Present company very much included.”

  Margo fingered the ends of her wet hair. “Right. My name is Medusa, it’s nice to meet you.” She fetched her favorite teacup from the drying rack and set it on the counter. “Listen, Fritz, I’m not going to let you charm your way free of this. I’ve already said I’m jealous, and that’s embarrassing enough. We both know I’m not normally the jealous type. So I’m asking myself, what is it? Maybe it’s just that she was on TV all those weeks and she was all that people were talking about. The woman had an affair with Marshall Fox, for Christ’s sake. A very vivid affair, I might add. Thanks to that stupid trial, I practically know more about that woman’s sex life than I know about my own.”

  “I’m here to remind you whenever-”

  “Shut up. All I’m saying is that every horny hound in America must’ve had that woman in their dreams, and the next thing I know, you’re dropping by to lend her a shoulder to cry on and being just a bit too blasé about it.”

  “What was I supposed to do, run up here and-”

  “Let me finish.” She very nearly stomped her foot. It had been a long time since I’d seen her this upset. She took a sharp breath. “I watched you sitting at that window the other night. What can I tell you, Fritz, girls don’t like that. I can’t know what you’re feeling when you go to that place. You go very far away. No Margos allowed. Nobody allowed, as best I can tell. I hate it. And now it’s Sunday morning, and you’re going off to the dead girl’s funeral or whatever you want to call it. And I know you. You’re going to get into her head. That’s how you do what you do. I know you. You’re going to get into her head and you’re going to get into her life and you’re going to get into her ugly, stupid death. And I just wish this one time that you wouldn’t.”

  She snatched up the kettle again and began pouring water into her cup.

  “You forgot the teabag,” I said gently.

  With lightning speed, she rattled the kettle to the stove, snatched up the teacup, and smashed it against the side of the sink. She was left holding the broken cup handle, attached t
o nothing. She threw that into the sink as well.

  “You should just go. Really. Go. This is all now officially very stupid. Just go to your stupid funeral. Do whatever it is you need to do. Just do me a fucking favor, will you, and don’t come home dead.”

  11

  THE FRIENDS MEETING that Robin had attended was at the old Quaker meetinghouse on the edge of Stuyvesant Park, off East Fifteenth Street. Technically, the park wasn’t named for Peter Stuyvesant, early Manhattan ’s first director general, but for his wife, Judith. It would have rankled old Pete to see anything other than a Dutch Reformed church built on land that was originally part of the Stuyvesant homestead, but the Quakers had wisely waited until 189 years after the Dutchman’s death before building their house of worship, so they were spared the pugnacious peg leg’s fabled wrath.

  The meeting room was a large rectangle capable of holding several hundred people. It was arranged with rows of pews facing the center of the room. A photograph of Robin Burrell was taped in the middle of one of the front pews. The photograph was black and white, a solemn posed shot dominated by Robin’s dark eyes. Painful to look at, difficult to turn away from. I took a seat in the pew opposite. As others came into the meetinghouse and took their seats, they folded their hands on their laps and closed their eyes for several minutes. At some point I attempted to follow suit-when in Rome -but an afterimage of Robin’s face from the photograph sizzled in the darkness, and I opened my eyes.

  Quaker meetings are as much about silence as they are about talk. Maybe more about silence. At no signal that I could discern, the gentle shuffling and settling in were dispensed with and a stillness settled over the room. The meeting had commenced. There were close to a hundred people attending. Some remained with their eyes closed, but just as many sat with eyes open, gazing down at the floor or off into the middle distance.

  After maybe ten minutes of the silence, a man rose to his feet. I placed him in his mid-thirties, with tortoiseshell glasses, a clipped brown mustache and a plaid sweater vest. His hands were clasped in front of him, and he rotated his head slowly as he spoke, taking in the room. The voice was soothing, smooth as butter.

  “I’m struck by the affection for Robin that I am feeling here this morning. The enormous…affection.” Here he paused to make eye contact. Slowly. Methodically. Person by person. He continued, “I’m struck with the thought that under different circumstances, if another of us had passed on, Robin would have been here this morning, participating. Robin’s affection, her sense of concern, her caring, they would all be here in the air, just as our thoughts and concerns for her are now passing among us. I’m struck by that thought. What I’m struck by is not so much Robin’s absence but her presence. It’s in this way that I feel Robin is still very much with us. We think of her, as we are all doing this morning, and she is alive to us. The affection and the concern that Robin showed for all of us while she was still among us-that’s what I still feel. That Robin hasn’t died. And I suppose I’m hoping that in some way, maybe in this way, through us, Robin can continue to live on.”

  He scanned the room again then sat back down and bowed his head. Seated next to him was a young Asian American woman with tears flowing freely down her cheeks. A minute later, a large, fleshy, red-haired woman got to her feet and cleared her throat. “Robin used to always ask me how Pepper was doing. Some of you know Pepper got hit by a taxi in August. You can still tell when I take him out for his walks. His hips aren’t right anymore. He walks funny. It was the best they could do at the hospital. I mean the animal hospital. Anyway, um, Robin, she always asked about him. It was real…It was nice of her.”

  She began to blush, and she sat back down. Only a few seconds passed before another person stood up and muttered a few sentences about God knowing more than we do. Others followed. Most of the messages were brief. A thought. An aphorism. A prayer. One middle-aged man stood up and started to tell a story about him and Robin rushing around the neighborhood getting donuts before one of the meetings. There didn’t seem any real point to the story, and midway through it, the man’s voice cracked and he sat back down.

  A long silence followed, and I found myself-as I’m sure others were doing-staring once more at the photograph taped onto the pew. I didn’t want it to happen, but as I sat looking at the picture, the crime-scene photographs I’d seen in Joe Gallo’s office-the cruel, garish, mindless damage-shimmered into focus in my head, interfering with the simple solemn face in front of me. Sometimes I hate my job.

  At the conclusion of the meeting, a coffee-and-pastries reception was held in a small gymnasium in the adjoining building. The red-haired woman who had spoken about her dog was standing behind one of the folding tables, feeding pastries onto several plastic trays. As I took one of the Styrofoam cups of coffee, she gave me a sugary smile.

  “Hello. I don’t know you. Are you new to meeting?”

  “I’m…Yes. This is my first time.”

  “First time at all or first time here?”

  “First time at all.”

  She asked, “Were you a friend of Robin’s? We expected some of her friends might show up this morning.”

  “I knew her, yes,” I said.

  She shook her head sadly. “Isn’t it awful? I just can’t believe she’s gone.”

  An elderly couple angled in for some pastries, and I moved over to give them room.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Did you know Robin well?”

  “Me? Not really. I mean, not outside of meeting or anything. There was one time Robin and I did end up at the same brunch afterward. But, you know. By coincidence.”

  I indicated the people milling about. “What about some of the other people? She must have had some close friends here?”

  The woman smiled again. “We’re all close Friends.”

  I got her meaning. “Right. Of course. I don’t mean strictly in the Quaker sense.”

  Other people were coming in for the sweets and coffee. I was still blocking access, so I slipped around behind the table. The red-haired woman handed me a box of pastries. “You just volunteered. I’m Martha, by the way.”

  “Fritz.”

  I laid out the pastries on one of the plastic trays just as a large lumpish man came by. He moved like a lava flow, nabbing three pastries at once and continuing on without a word. “Lots of people here were very fond of Robin,” Martha continued. “I guess you could tell that. The community really rallied around her when all that horrible trial stuff began happening. Except we didn’t see a lot of Robin during most of that. She wasn’t going out much, it was too big a hassle for her. The way she was being hounded. But we’d get word how she was doing from Edward.”

  “Edward?”

  “He’s the elder who spoke about Robin in meeting.”

  “The guy with the mustache?”

  “Yes.”

  I scanned the crowd and found the man in question standing in conversation with the Asian American woman who’d been crying off and on during the meeting. Another man was standing just behind them, leaning against the wall with his thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his faded jeans, as if hoping to be mistaken for James Dean. He was about my height and build, with longish stringy blond hair, a narrow nose and a noticeably small mouth. There was a slightly rodentlike quality to his face, and he appeared to be following the conversation closely, though I couldn’t tell if he was part of it or merely eavesdropping. The man named Edward was impassioned, punctuating his words by slapping the back of one hand down into the other, over and over.

  “You say he’s an elder?” I asked Martha. “Obviously you’re not talking about his age. Does that mean he’s a muckety-muck in the Quaker hierarchy?”

  She laughed. “I guess you could put it that way. Edward is one of our leaders. We call them elders.”

  “And you’re saying that he stayed in touch with Robin while she was going through her difficulties?”

  “We’re a community. We’re a family. That’s part of the ro
le of the elders, to be available to members of the family who are in distress.”

  “Does Edward have a last name?”

  “Well, of course he does. It’s Anger.” I gave her a look. “No, I’m serious. That’s his name.”

  “Ed Anger?”

  “Edward Anger. You say it enough times, it sounds completely normal.”

  I looked over again at Edward Anger. He’d taken the young woman’s hands between his. “Who’s the woman?”

  “Oh, that’s Michelle,” Martha said. “Michelle Poole. She’s a friend of Robin’s.”

  Edward Anger released the woman’s hands and steered himself into the crowd. I turned to Martha. “Permission to unvolunteer.”

  She gave me a peculiar look, then laughed. “Oh. Sure. Thank you for helping. It was nice meeting you, Fritz.”

  “Same.” I swung around from behind the table and made my way across the room. The rat-faced James Dean was on his way to the food table. Our shoulders bumped by accident, but only one of us murmured, “Sorry.” Not him.

  I stepped over to Robin’s friend. “Michelle?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hi. My name is Fritz,” I said. “I understand you were a friend of Robin’s.”

  Her face could have been a piece of porcelain. Not a blemish to be found. Her jet-black hair was cut in one of those forever-mussed styles-in Michelle’s case, an “I might look like I just rolled out of bed but don’t I look great” look. Her eyes were quite large, particularly for a person of Asian extraction, her mouth was small, her cheeks liable to cause riots among women of weaker bones. She was wearing a stylishly ripped T-shirt, one side way down off the shoulder, over a black leotard and a pair of faded blue jeans that might as well have been wrapped around two pipes as a pair of human legs.

  She eyed me with caution. “Yes.”

  “I was wondering if we could talk.”

  The caution melded into clear suspicion. “About Robin?”