Cold Day in Hell

by Richard Hawke

  She and Jeffrey shared a look. “Go on,” Jeffrey said. “Tell him.”

  Allison turned back to me. “It’s nothing. Yes. Some people do get upset. Of course they do. Who wouldn’t? Like I said, these last cuts came right around Christmas. Which I argued against, by the way. Plus, the job market really stinks right now.”

  “You’re reluctant to give me a name, is that it?”

  She looked like she was ready to cry. Jeffrey squeezed her hand tighter and answered for her. “There’s an implied confidentiality in the work Ally does.”

  I ignored him. “Ms. Jennings, were you also reluctant to give this name to the police last night?”

  “I could lose my job if one of our former employees brings a lawsuit. I’m sure this guy isn’t the one who left that message. It makes no sense. The last thing I need is him finding out I sicced the police on him.”

  “Okay. Let’s put him aside for a minute. I assume you also interview people for new positions. Have there been any job candidates in the past six months or so who struck you as peculiar?”

  “Peculiar?”

  “Excessive in some fashion. Too eager. Too friendly. Too boastful. Too secure or too insecure. Someone who behaved like he had the job in the bag when in fact he didn’t.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes to which?”

  “Yes to everything you just said. That’s what you get in my position, all the types you just listed.”

  “Let’s concentrate on the ones who didn’t get the job.”

  “That’s the majority. One position, scores of candidates.”

  “I’m looking for a man, someone who stands out. Maybe he wasn’t necessarily aggressive. Something off in the body language. Or he had an odd way of putting things. Did any of the candidates come on to you? Even subtly?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “I’m just fishing. If someone unhinged thought he’d made a personal connection with you and then he didn’t get the job. In his eyes, you rejected him not only for the job but also personally. Does anyone like that come to mind?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m sorry.”

  I was getting nowhere. But most times that’s how you have to play the game. You rack up the miles on fruitless roads. I tried a new tack. “Back to the people you had to let go. Did any of them ever say to you that losing their job was going to make things difficult for them or their family?”

  “I guess so. It really depends. The ones who are single, they have a little less to worry about, and most-”

  I had a thought. “Hold on. Clear your mind for a second. Stop looking for a man. Think of the women. Specifically the married women. I’m not expecting you to know the circumstances of everyone’s private life, but I’m sure sometimes you get a sense. Does any woman stand out who seemed upset over how her husband was going to take the news? Maybe someone who mentioned that her husband was recently laid off himself or was out looking for work or maybe just made a large investment? A house. Or the kids’ tuition. Someone who worried that she was really going to be strapped by losing her job? Did anyone seem uncommonly scared?”

  Jeffrey spoke up. “You mean like a woman who was afraid her husband was going to yell at her or even beat her up for losing her job?”

  “Exactly. That’s one example. The violent spouse. Does anything like that come to mind, Allison?”

  “Possibly.” She nibbled lightly on her lower lip before continuing. “There was a woman during the pre-Christmas layoffs who said exactly what you just said. But people say stuff all the time. I mean, it’s a figure of speech.”

  “What’s a figure of speech?”

  “‘My husband is going to kill me.’”

  I took out my notebook and slid it across the table. I handed her a pen. “It’s time for names, Allison. I want this one, and I want the man you mentioned who got angry when you fired him. This is no time for you to be protecting anyone. Do you remember the names?” She nodded. I reached across the table and tapped my finger on the notebook. “Write them.”

  She scribbled down a pair of names. “I’m not going in to work today. I’m just too freaked out. But if you’d like, I can call my assistant and have her pull the files on these two.”

  “That’ll be good. I know where your building is. Tell her I’ll stop by later this afternoon.” Allison produced a business card and handed it to me. I tucked it into my notebook and thanked her for her time.

  Jeffrey accompanied me to the front door. He looked like he could use some air.

  “I don’t get it. Why would somebody want to kill Allison? Do you really think it’s got something to do with her job?”

  “I plan to find that out.”

  “I’m afraid to leave her side.”

  I looked back at Allison. She was staring a hole into her hands. I turned back to Jeffrey. “If I were you, that’s exactly what I’d do. I’d be on her like glue.”

  17

  PETER ELLIOTT STUCK his thumbs in his maroon suspenders and put his feet up on his desk. I settled into a brown leather chair that smelled faintly like a new shoe. “All you need is a stogie in your mouth, counselor.”

  Peter laughed. “Shelly hates it when I smoke cigars.”

  “Shelly is a civilized woman.”

  “No argument there. So you met with Ms. Jennings?”

  I gave him a rundown. He listened without interrupting, consulting the ceiling as I spoke. When I was finished, he brought his feet back down to terra firma and drummed his fingers on the desk.

  “Okay. Those sound like lukewarm leads.”

  “That’s how I see it, too. But they should be tracked down.”

  “Give them to the police. It’s the Fox connection we want.”

  “That’s a zero,” I said.

  “Anything to the Jennings woman looking like Robin Burrell?”

  “I didn’t see it,” I said. “I mean, she looks more like her than you or I do. Though maybe you’ve got dishy legs. I’ve never had the privilege.”

  “Ms. Burrell did have a nice set of sticks, didn’t she?”

  “She was not an unattractive woman.”

  Peter scoffed, “Come on, Fritz. The woman was gorgeous.”

  “But no sexual predator.”

  The attorney held up a hand. “Please. If I never hear that term again, I’ll be grateful. You’ve got to give Riddick credit for that one. He really pounded it into the jury. Basic brainwashing 101. What was I supposed to do, go up there and ask the witness to explain to the jury that she wasn’t a sexual predator? That just keeps the damn term floating out there longer.”

  “You weren’t exactly painting Robin Burrell as a nun.”

  “It’s an ugly business. We had to bring out the extent of Fox’s sexual deviance. That was key. The man liked it rough. He liked his toys. Especially his handcuffs. Burrell was our best witness to Fox’s fun and games. I’m not saying I enjoyed dragging her through the mud.”

  “ America enjoyed it.”

  “Yeah, well. America enjoys all sorts of things.”

  Nikki Rossman, the second victim, had been found with one end of a pair of handcuffs fastened around her left wrist. Under Peter Elliott’s questioning, Robin had revealed that early in her five-month affair with Fox, she had relented to his urgings that the two indulge in various bondage games, particularly the ones including the use of handcuffs. The testimony had been damning to Fox. What Peter hadn’t anticipated was that Fox’s defense team would take up the challenge and attempt to portray Robin as the aggressor, the one who had encouraged country boy Fox to loosen up and try some new things. Unfortunately, their cause was bolstered when they invited to the stand a man who testified about “some pretty inventive sex” with Robin Burrell back when the two were undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. The man described several episodes that had involved his binding Robin’s ankles and wrists with knotted socks and securing them so she was essentially immobile during the ensuing sex. Worse
for the prosecution, he had insisted on the stand that the idea of the bondage had not generated from him but from Robin. Peter Elliott objected to the testimony and tried to get it struck from the record, but the judge had allowed it. From that point on, Fox’s defense team never missed an opportunity to portray Robin as not only a willing and eager partner to the colorful sex she and Fox had indulged in, but as the initiator. The notion took hold, and soon enough, Robin’s image in the media rarely appeared without at least a passing allusion to her spirited sexual history. Riddick had also managed to dredge up the fact that while she was an undergraduate, Robin had become pregnant not once but twice, each time terminating the pregnancy. Judge Deveraux did order this irrelevant factoid stricken from the record, but even so, Robin’s stability as a witness for the prosecution had taken its hits.

  The buzzer on Peter’s phone buzzed. The call was short.

  “That was Lewis,” Peter said, hanging up. “He’d like us to come into his office.”

  If I thought the fragrance of Peter’s office chair suggested a new shoe, state’s attorney Lewis Gottlieb’s entire office positively reeked of a tannery. Gottlieb was acting as lead prosecutor in the Marshall Fox trial. For a man nearing his seventy-fifth birthday, he was still in impressively good physical condition, tall and unstooped, rumored to jog three miles every morning before taking the train down to the city from Westchester. It had been widely rumored that Gottlieb was on the cusp of announcing his plans for retirement just before the indictment of Marshall Fox on multiple counts of murder and that Peter had been instrumental in convincing his mentor to stay on and crown his career with what would no doubt be recorded as one of the more notorious prosecutions of the Manhattan criminal court system. Word along the grapevine was that Gottlieb was apoplectic at the possibility of losing such a white-hot spectacle of a case as the Marshall Fox prosecution. The notion was unimaginable, the sort of wrong note that a person like Lewis Gottlieb quite simply would not tolerate.

  Peter had admitted to me on our way down the plushly carpeted corridor to Gottlieb’s office that the esteemed attorney was especially nervous about the jury’s increasing fractiousness.

  “A hung jury is the least of his worries. Lewis has Deveraux’s promise-off the record-that he’ll do everything humanly possible to get everything through to a conclusion on this go-around. It’s not the mistrial that’s got Lewis worked up, it’s the prospect that the jury will actually let Fox go free. If things were to go that way…I don’t even want to think about it.”

  Lewis Gottlieb was cordial with me but cool. The lawyer rose from behind his imperial desk and gave me his large freckled hand to shake. “Mr. Malone. I understand you are back on board.”

  “So I’m told.”

  As I took a seat, Gottlieb addressed his younger colleague. “What does he know?”

  “Fritz knows nothing,” Peter said. I thought I detected a slight smirk, but I might have been mistaken. Gottlieb stared at me for several seconds.

  “The foreperson,” he said at last.

  “Nancy Spicer. What about her?”

  Gottlieb steepled his large hands and lowered his chin onto them. “You vetted her for us.”

  “I vetted all of them. What about her?”

  Gottlieb raised a frosty eyebrow. The watery brown eyes moved to Peter, who cleared his throat. “Mrs. Spicer had a nervous breakdown. I don’t mean since she’s been on the jury, though she’s cruising in that direction. This was six years ago. She lost it completely, Fritz. Took a real dive. She spent thirty days in an institution.”

  I let out a low whistle. “We don’t like that.”

  Lewis Gottlieb agreed, “We don’t, Mr. Malone. We don’t like it in the slightest.”

  I asked, “Does the defense know?”

  Peter answered, “Not yet.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “It’s complicated,” Gottlieb said. “And not relevant. We can go into that later.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what else to say. I ran everyone down as best I could. Something like that should have been flapping in the wind. It should have hit me in the face.”

  “Spicer’s husband had it suppressed,” Peter said. “You would have had to dig for it.”

  “That’s what you were paying me-”

  Gottlieb interrupted, “That’s not important right now. You’re not in here for a scolding.” He looked again at Peter and nodded.

  “Lewis doesn’t like the husband,” Peter said. “Bruce Spicer.”

  I remembered Spicer. Vaguely. He worked as a clerk in a hardware store on Third Avenue. I remembered swinging by and talking to him in his cherry-red vest. The vest had made more of an impression on me than the man. “What don’t you like about him?”

  Gottlieb answered, “He’s born-again. A Bible thumper.”

  “A born-again Christian,” I said. “Is that really a basis to not like someone? I mean, in a professional sense?”

  “I’m not anti-Christian,” Gottlieb said flatly, lowering his hands to his desk. “What I’m saying is that the man is unstable.”

  “I thought it was the wife who was unstable.”

  “Both of them, Mr. Malone. Our jury foreperson has been institutionalized and treated with depression medications, and her husband has thrown a handful of chicken livers at a doctor who was on his way into the office.” He sat back in his chair and folded his arms on his chest. In case I had fallen asleep during any part of the last ten seconds, he repeated, “Chicken livers.”

  Peter spoke up. “Bruce Spicer was arrested six years ago as part of a group of anti-abortion protesters outside a clinic that performs abortions. In Livingston, New Jersey. Same year as his wife’s breakdown. Big year for the Spicers. Spicer’s arrest has been expunged from the record. It was part of a plea arrangement.”

  Gottlieb said, “Mr. Malone doesn’t need to know the details. The point is, Bruce Spicer is a lunatic. And his wife wants off the jury.”

  Peter added, “In a big way.”

  “Along with eleven of her peers, from what I understand,” I said.

  Gottlieb waved his hand dismissively. “Our twelve peers good and true can go hang themselves from the Brooklyn Bridge when this is all over, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t give a damn about them. The point is, I want this to be over before they do it. Now, Mrs. Spicer wants out, but Sam Deveraux isn’t having it. The lemmings would all try to follow. I’m letting Sam take care of that. What we have here, Mr. Malone, is a related but separate issue that concerns us all on a more profound level.” He paused. “Peter? I will let you do the honors.”

  Peter took a breath. “Lewis wants us to consider that Bruce Spicer is responsible for the murders of Robin Burrell and Zack Riddick.”

  “Spicer?”

  “It’s just a theory. But you remember that whole big fuss when Zack brought up Robin Burrell’s abortions. It sounds far-fetched, I know. But think of it for a minute. Nancy Spicer’s been in there bawling her eyes out to get off the jury. Bruce Spicer is no big fan of people who get abortions; he’s got a history of being very much an in-your-face person when it comes to that issue. Hard to call this a motive for murder, but hang in there. We’ve also got Zachary. Riddick’s playboy reputation isn’t exactly the kind of thing that endears the born-agains. What Lewis is saying is you’ve got a situation here where a person like Bruce Spicer could have been looking for some creative ways to get this trial tanked, free his wife, and rid the earth of at least two infidels.”

  “Infidels?”

  “I’m just saying Lewis wants us to take a strong look at this. Face it, someone is killing these people. Someone is royally pissed off. Where the hell do we start?”

  I pulled out my notebook. Gottlieb demanded, “What have you got there?”

  “A list of people I want to talk to in connection with Robin Burrell and Riddick.”

  Gottlieb aimed a fat finger in my direction. “Put Bruce Spicer at the top of that list. Do you hear me? Chi
cken-liver-tossing son of a bitch. Go after him first. Born-again bastards like that should choke on their own intestines, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got no goddamn time for those people. Him. You go get him.”

  PETER ACCOMPANIED ME downstairs. There were several other people in the elevator with us, so we didn’t say anything. The moment we were outside, Peter spoke urgently.

  “This is tricky territory, Fritz. Very tricky. I’m sure you understand that. We’ve got a real balancing act to figure out here. Lewis has said categorically that we are not taking his theory to the police. It’s not the most ethical call, but that can’t be helped. It’s a matter of containment. We don’t want word getting out about Nancy Spicer’s mental health problem or about her husband having been arrested. Nancy shouldn’t be on the jury-that alone would provide the defense with some serious artillery to push for a mistrial-so we don’t want them to know. But here’s the other thing. If Bruce Spicer gets approached by the police or, for that matter, by you, he could blow the whistle himself. If he simply lets the papers know that he is under suspicion of any kind for these murders, it all explodes in our face. Husband of the foreperson? There’s nothing even Sam Deveraux would be able to do at that point. The trial would be officially out of hand. Everything would collapse.”

  “But if Spicer actually is the killer, he’s not going to go blabbing to the press.”

  “We have no idea what he would do. Maybe it’s a catch-22 and maybe it isn’t. The point is, there’s nothing but risk involved no matter which way you look at it. It’s certainly possible that Spicer isn’t the killer. I admit, it’s a wild hunch. Then again, Lewis Gottlieb didn’t become Lewis Gottlieb with bad hunches. That old man’s got an awesome track record.” Peter glanced around, as if afraid that someone might be listening in. “Look, I know Lewis tried to whip you into action just now. And I’m not necessarily countermanding his orders. But if you’ve developed any leads on these murders that you really like, it wouldn’t bother me if you run after them first. I’m not officially chasing you off Spicer. Like I said, Lewis has a phenomenal instinct.”