Cold Day in Hell

by Richard Hawke

  MEGAN MOVED right past her car. She waited until she was a block away from the hospital before she pulled out her phone. It wasn’t as if she was afraid that Rosemary Fox could hear through walls; what Megan needed was the trudge up York through the snow to think things through. Before she could punch in the number, her phone went off. It was Joe Gallo.

  “Got him!”

  “Who? Got who?”

  “Who do you think? Spicer. You’ll never guess where we grabbed him. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. He managed to spend the night there, then went off into the wrong restroom this morning. A nun came into the women’s room, and there he was in one of the stalls, screaming fire and brimstone over his phone to Jimmy Puck. The nun fetched a pair of cops from out in front of the church. We just got him in the box a few minutes ago. He says he doesn’t want a lawyer. I’m putting him on a low boil until you can get back here. What’s up on your end, anyway? Do we know who beat up Mrs. Fox?”

  “She didn’t give a name.”

  “Didn’t give a name? What does that mean? She has a name but she wouldn’t give it?”

  Megan chose her words carefully. “She’s in shock, Joe. And she’s very bullheaded. When a woman like that wants to clam up, she clams up.”

  “Okay. You can fill me in later. I need you back up here. Spicer’s already blowing off like Vesuvius. If he killed Burrell and Riddick, I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble coaxing it out of him. This is a man who is proud to be angry.”

  Megan clicked off the call and pocketed the phone. Bruce Spicer was in police custody. A man with a motive-several of them, in fact, however perverse they seemed. Megan knew she should be hightailing it back to the car and hitting the cherry lights and getting back uptown as quickly as possible. This was the moment of the kill.

  Except it wasn’t. Megan closed her eyes and tilted her head back to face the falling snow. Her lips parted slightly as she took the flakes with her tongue.

  It’s not him. It’s not Bruce Spicer.

  She knew it in her heart. In her gut. Yes, the man had made the threatening phone calls. Unquestionably, the very existence of Robin Burrell and the other women he had phoned-or attempted to phone-had inflamed him to no end. And he had desperately wanted his wife off the jury. The man was eminently capable of causing havoc, no question about it. But it wasn’t him. And Megan knew she was right. The person who had gone on a killing rampage was the man Rosemary Fox was protecting. What was worse-much worse, Megan realized-was that a horrible mistake had been made. And she had made it.

  Marshall Fox wasn’t guilty, either. It was this man. Rosemary Fox’s lover. It was Rosemary herself.

  “Oh my God.”

  Megan’s hands shook as she pulled out her phone and punched in a number. It answered after two rings.

  “Malone.”

  Megan almost hung up. There was the right way to do this. By the book. Megan knew better. This was hardly the time to go cowboy.

  Screw it.

  “Fritz, it’s Megan Lamb. Listen. I’ve got a question for you. I don’t have much time here.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  A yellow snowplow was moving north along York, the diagonal snow flashing in the truck’s amber beam. The blade rutted roughly along the pavement with an angry animal sound. Seeing the cascade of salt stones coming her way, Megan turned her back to the street and huddled in to the phone.

  “Any chance I can convince you to break the law a little?”

  39

  “THIS IS MRS. FOX,” Margo snapped into the phone. “Who is this?”

  “This is Luis, Mrs. Fox. Are you okay?”

  Margo threw me a wink. “Luis, listen to me. The police are going to be coming by sometime in the next hour. I want you to let them into the apartment, do you understand?”

  “Are you all right, Mrs. Fox? Is-”

  “Luis. Just do what I ask. Please.”

  “Well, yes, ma’am. But I-”

  “Thank you, Luis.” Margo hung up the phone. “So, do I make a grade-A bitch or what?”

  I stepped over to the couch, knotting my tie. “Amazing.” Margo adjusted it for me. I shrugged into my coat and slid my thumb along the brim of my hat. “Well?”

  “Are you honestly going with the fedora, too? This isn’t 1930.”

  “It’s snowing. People wear hats in the snow.”

  “Good thing you’re prettier than Humphrey Bogart. That’s all I think of when I see a fedora. Sorry, but I think it’s overkill.”

  “Do I look cop enough for you?”

  “A uniform would clinch it.”

  “A uniform would clinch me jail time.”

  She shrugged. “This’ll do fine.”

  I TOOK A CAB across the park. The cabbie had his opinions about the snow, but I tuned them out, and by the time we were passing the Boathouse, he’d stopped sharing them with me. I had other matters to mull.

  Megan Lamb had laid out her case quickly but succinctly. She’d emphasized that it was only a theory, but the pitch of her argument betrayed the conservative note. What if Rosemary Fox already had a lover of her own at the time her estranged husband was shagging everyone who came down the pike? What if the two of them had cooked up a scheme that not only generated some pretty audacious revenge on Rosemary’s part-the elimination of two of Fox’s lovers-but also succeeded in focusing the police investigation on Fox himself?

  Megan hadn’t had time to embellish her theory or to poke and prod it to see where all the weak spots were. But she’d sounded convinced.

  “Robin Burrell. There’s lover number three. I don’t know where Riddick fits in. Maybe he was becoming suspicious of Rosemary. Or maybe he was coming on to her and she set her goon on him. The point is, I need to find out the identity of Rosemary’s lover. This guy did a real number on her this morning, and for whatever reason, she’s willing to give him a pass. As my mother used to say, that don’t stink good.”

  The cab came out of the park, and I directed the driver to drop me a block from Rosemary’s building. No need to let the doorman see “Captain Nicholas Finn” of the NYPD getting out of a taxicab instead of a department vehicle. Nick Finn had been a friend of mine in the days when I was attending John Jay College with an eye toward following my old man’s footsteps into the police force. Nick’s death had coincided with my abandoning those plans, and not a few people think it’s somewhat perverse that he lives on in a drawer full of falsified documents that I keep in my desk at the office.

  The doorman barely glanced at my shiny badge when I presented it to him.

  “I wanted to call the police when I see Mrs. Fox like that. But I don’t dare. She said she is fine, but she looks like she was hit by a bus. I got her a taxi, like she asks, but she-”

  I interrupted him. “Luis, I need you to let me into Mrs. Fox’s apartment. If you’d like to call the station and speak with her first-”

  The man shook his head rapidly. “No, no. It’s okay. I spoke with her already. I’ll let you in.”

  Nicholas Finn slipped his badge into the pocket of his trench coat. Heeding Margo’s advice, he’d passed on the fedora.

  I SAW THE BLOODSTAINS on the carpet the moment I entered the bedroom. A greenish robe was bunched nearby. I crossed to the robe and knelt down to examine it. In front of me was an accordion wall made completely of mirrors. A clothes closet. Its reflection included me and the door to the bathroom, which was open behind me. As I picked up the robe, there was a shifting of the light, and in the reflection I saw a figure-a man-stepping into the bathroom doorway. The reflection froze and so did I, but only for a split second.

  “Who the-?”

  He didn’t finish his own question but instead took two speedy steps into the room and shoved me with all his strength just as I was twisting around to face him. I tumbled up against the mirrored wall. The man was out the bedroom door by the time I had scrambled to my feet. As I raced into the front room, he was snatching a down jacket off the couch. He turned. He charged
me. I’d been reaching for my gun but yanked my hand free to ward off the attack. The guy barreled into me and sent me reeling backward. I slammed into a small table, toppling a brass lamp and an ashtray. The man veered toward the front door. I grabbed the table and whipped it sideways at him. It hit him behind the knees, and he stumbled to the floor.

  “Fuck!”

  I grabbed hold of the lamp as if it were a baseball bat and gave it a sharp tug. The plug came out of the wall, the wire arcing in the air like an animal’s tail. As the man started to his feet, I charged forward and took my swing, aiming for the fences. Unfortunately, he saw the swing coming and lurched to the side so that the lamp took him on the shoulders and not the head. He wheeled around, and his fist caught me just below my ear. There was muscle behind the hit. As he came at me for another blow, I brought the lamp up and smacked it against his ear, then released it and got off a double set of hard jabs. I felt his nose collapse under the second one. As he staggered backward, I came after him, landing a pair of punches to his throat. He made a hollow swing that I easily avoided, and before he could get off another, I raised my foot as high as I could and slammed it down on his left knee. He howled. I whipped my gun from my holster, and as the man collapsed to the floor, I staggered backward, safely out of his reach.

  “Stay down!”

  My arms were aching, and the last thing they wanted to do was be held straight out. But I wanted him to see the gun, and I wanted him to see that it was aimed right at his bloody face. “Stay down,” I said again as he made a halfhearted move to get up. He stopped. Blood from his damaged nose fell to the tiled floor.

  “I can’t…breathe,” he said in a choked voice, then began coughing.

  “You can breathe.” I lowered my arms halfway, still keeping my aim. “Lie down on the floor.”

  He didn’t move, so I stepped over and swept my leg under one of his arms, taking out his support. He landed on his chin and then complied, lying out flat on the ground. I moved around behind him and pressed the barrel of the gun against the back of his head. “Give me your hands.”

  He obeyed, bringing around his large paws to rest at his lower back. Using the cord from the table lamp, I bound his wrists, yanking the knots as tight as I could. I requisitioned a second lamp and used its cord to secure his ankles. It was crude but sufficient. I dragged an upholstered chair over and upended it on top of him, not unlike a turtle shell. Then I went into the kitchen and splashed my face with water, gulping several mouthfuls in the process. I ran a glassful of water and fetched a tea towel from a magnetic hook on the refrigerator door and went back into the front room. The man hadn’t budged. I wet a corner of the tea towel and knelt down and dabbed at the blood on the man’s nose. He stared at me sullenly, saying nothing. He was wheezing a bit-his mouth was dropped open like a gulping fish-but he was breathing.

  I returned to the kitchen, fetched a fresh glass, and filled it, this time for me. I went back out and pulled the chair off him and slipped his wallet out of his pants pocket, then helped him squirm up to a seated position on the floor, leaning against the wall. There was a driver’s license in the wallet. It told me that his name was Danny Lyles and that he lived in Long Island City, not far from Charlie Burke’s neighborhood. I told him not to get any ideas as I went through his other pockets. I found an electronic pass card and two key rings. In the down coat that Lyles had taken his detour into the front room to grab, I found a vial of pills and a baggie of pot. Thick. No stems, no seeds.

  “Are you familiar with the Rockefeller drug laws, Danny? A stash like this can ruin your day.”

  He wasn’t impressed. From the looks of things-especially his nose-his day was already ruined. I kicked an ottoman over to where the man sat wheezing on the floor, and took a seat. I took a long, satisfying sip of the water.

  “Okay. I’m ready.”

  40

  DANNY LYLES WAS Marshall Fox’s former driver. Also his bodyguard. Not a towering sort but plenty of muscle. A free-weights guy. He’d held the position for a little over a year, a year he described to me as one of the wildest of his life. In addition to being Fox’s driver and protector, Lyles had also been his occasional night-crawling buddy. Lyles described himself as “a party hound” but admitted that he held a backseat to Marshall Fox in that department.

  “Marshall was dangerous hungry, man. You’ve got no idea.”

  Roughly a month before Cynthia Blair’s murder, Lyles had taken on additional duties, though in a completely unofficial and secret capacity. He became Rosemary Fox’s lover. Lyles told me that he’d had no illusions the evening when Rosemary first came on to him. He knew what she was all about. After a separation of eight months, Fox had recently started making overtures to his wife; he wanted Rosemary to take him back, to give the marriage another go. Rosemary had Marshall on the hook and she knew it. Lyles said that he’d gotten a phone call from Rosemary asking that he come by the apartment. He did, and she sat him down on the living room couch and demanded that Lyles fill her in on all of her husband’s escapades over the months of their separation. Lyles balked at first. He played the loyalty card. But Rosemary trumped it easily. She possessed her own set of cards, and she knew exactly how to lay them out to her own best advantage.

  “Right behind you, man. Right there on the couch. She’s one superior pain in the ass, no question about it. But I’m telling you, you’ve never met anyone’s got the goods like that, I swear.”

  Lyles admitted to me that he had known all about Fox’s affair with Cynthia Blair. He was pretty certain he’d been the only one who did know.

  “I drove the guy everywhere. I knew everything he did. I’ll tell you, when he found out she was pregnant, he got more drunk off his ass than I’d ever seen. The man was out of his gourd, he was so pissed off. It was all pretty trippy for me. Even though I’m shagging his old lady on the side, we’re still partying together. I mean, he was clueless. I was also seeing this other chick at the time. Tracy Jacobs. You’ve seen her. She’s all hot shit now on that show. Century City? She plays the clueless wife of that older guy? Perfect casting, man. Girl couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag, then she lands a plum role in a show like that. Anyway, one night right after Marshall’d found out about Cynthia and how she was planning to have the kid, he tagged along with me and Tracy. He ended up going way over the top. He was drinking like no tomorrow, popping uppers. The guy was a mess. This is all before Tracy’d gotten her show, by the way. She was nobody at this point to Marshall. Just another bad actress all goo-goo to be hanging out with Marshall Fox.”

  As Lyles described it, somewhere along the way, Marshall had started getting nasty with Tracy. At first he argued with everything that came out of her mouth, but soon he was trying to put the moves on her.

  “He’d do that sometimes, man. Show his mean side, then start trying to get in their pants. It kind of freaked Tracy out. Marshall got a real bug up his tail about Tracy, and I had to pull him off her before he hurt her. He’s got this ugly streak, man. You don’t want to see it. It all sort of cooled down, but the evening was pretty much tanked. Then when I was dropping her off at her place, Marshall suddenly got out of the car and went after her again. I’m telling you, though, it was the whole damn Cynthia thing. He just needed someone to take it out on. Anyway, I had to pull him off of her and shove him back in the car and all that crap. Tracy cut things off with me after that. That’s how it goes, I guess. Thing is, though, she ended up getting me fired. How’s that for fucking irony?”

  I went back into the kitchen and fetched more water. I tried Megan’s number but got no answer. Lyles was tugging against the lamp cord when I came back out.

  “How about you loosen this up, man. My circulation’s cut off.”

  “Go on with your story. If I like it, we’ll talk then.”

  He grumbled a bit but went on. Lyles said that several days after Cynthia Blair’s body had been discovered at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle, he got a call from Tracy Jacobs. She was extr
emely upset and talking about contacting the police to tell them about Marshall Fox’s violence.

  “The thing is, like I said, she didn’t know a thing about Marshall getting that girl pregnant. All she knew was that he’d scared the hell out of her that night we all went out. I got her to hold off on calling the cops. I lied and told her that Marshall had an alibi for the night Cynthia got killed. Thing was, he didn’t. Cynthia had actually been up to his place the night she was killed, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell that to Tracy. She said it was her duty to contact the police and all that shit, but I got her to agree to hold off for a day. I didn’t know what to do. Crazy as he was, Marshall didn’t kill that girl.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Some things you just know, and I know that. But all the crap he was going through, the last thing he needed was Tracy getting the cops all excited about him. So I called Mr. Ross.”

  “Alan Ross?”

  “Yeah. I guess you can say he’s Marshall’s boss.”

  “Why would you call him?”

  “Ross is the guy Marshall always goes to when he’s in any kind of a fix. He’s connected, he’s smart. He’s one of those take-charge guys. I just thought it made sense.”

  “And what did Ross say?”

  “He said he’d take care of things. Just like I knew he would. Cool as a cucumber, that guy. He got Tracy’s phone number from me and told me not to sweat it.”

  “And that was it?”

  “Hell no, that wasn’t it. The next thing I know, Marshall’s all over my ass. He’s ready to kill me. He’s saying Tracy called up him and his lawyer and threatened to tell the police not just about him and Cynthia but about her being pregnant with his kid. I swear to you, I never breathed a fucking word to anyone about any of that. Especially Tracy. Not even that the two were screwing each other. No way she got it from me. But Marshall was ready to take my head off. He fired me on the spot and said if he ever saw me again, he would kill me. Meanwhile, Tracy flies off to Los Angeles, and the next thing you know, she’s on Century goddamn City. It’s totally nuts. This whole fucking show business is nuts.”