Sly Fox

by Jeanine Pirro

  His mouth was warm and radiating with love. He undid my pants buckle and unzipped me. With my corduroys off, I leaned back in my white bikini underpants. He stood and I admired his beautiful chest and shoulders as he undid his jeans, slid them to the ground—no underwear! God was he hot.

  I fell to my back and he slid my panties off. He kissed my foot, then my inner thigh. I pulled him up on me and looked into his eyes. He told me that he loved me and I knew he meant it. In an instant, everything was smooth, slow, and deep. I was building and he read my excitement. He moved deeper and faster as I wrapped my legs around him.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  “Now?”

  “Yes, please now, now, now!” He exploded inside me and we both gasped in pleasure.

  After, we continued to hold and kiss each other, completely unaware of time. He left me briefly only to toss more wood into the fireplace and pull a heavy blanket over us. He ran his tongue over my breast and moved his hand across my hips.

  “What about dinner?” I asked.

  “Fuck it,” he said. We made love again and drifted off to sleep. Dinner would wait.

  I loved being with Bob that Christmas Eve. And there was no doubt in my mind that Bob loved me. I let out a sigh and walked to the backyard where I opened the door to Wilbur’s pen. With an excited squeal, he waddled toward the house.

  13

  On a friday, three weeks after she’d been attacked, Mary Margaret was discharged and I drove to Canfield Avenue to check on her. The flat-roofed apartment building that her mother owned had a dingy yellow-brick facade. Hitchins’s name was still taped to one of the four mailboxes hanging near the entryway. Another belonged to Mrs. Latham, the snoopy tenant who lived next door on the second floor. I’d telephoned Mrs. Finn before leaving my office and she’d told me that her daughter would be recuperating with her, so I pushed a buzzer next to APT. 1 on a ground-floor unit and waited. Rebecca cracked the door a few inches. She had one of those hotel-type chains, but if she thought that flimsy contraption would keep out someone as violent as Hitchins, she was wrong.

  “Come in,” she said, smiling. “Mary Margaret is resting but I’ll get her.”

  She left me standing in a dimly lit living room with badly faded wallpaper decorated with red and white roses the size of pumpkins and the stench of stale cigarettes. The white shades on the two front windows were closed. Beneath my feet was a well-worn Oriental rug with smudges left from fallen ashes. Mrs. Finn had a tan Naugahyde couch and two vinyl easy chairs positioned around the rug’s edges. All of the furniture faced a console television that had a rabbit-ear antenna poking up from behind it and family photographs displayed on its veneer top. The largest was a wedding shot of a much younger Rebecca and her beaming late husband, Harry. I didn’t notice anything unusual about her apartment until I looked into the kitchen and saw a barber’s chair anchored to the tile floor where most renters would have placed a breakfast table.

  Hanging from the chair’s arm was a long gray strap used to sharpen straight razors. I suddenly felt nauseated. It wasn’t the musty air. It was a memory.

  “You girls are going to be punished,” Father George McCleary said as he slapped a razor strap against the open palm of his pudgy left hand. “Don’t you realize God watches you every moment? He writes your names in his book of good deeds and bad deeds and today you’re in the bad book.”

  I was only ten, a skinny girl in a plaid skirt and green blazer, the school uniform at Saints Peter and Paul in Elmira. My two best friends, Amy Johnson and Susan O’Brien, were standing next to me at attention. A few minutes earlier we’d been giggling inside a school bathroom using a match to light a cigarette that Amy had pinched from her father’s pack of unfiltered Camels. Amy assured us that she had smoked before, but when she inhaled, she began coughing so loudly that she’d drawn the attention of Sister Sarah McGill, the hallway monitor. Amy was in the midst of passing the cigarette to me when Sister Sarah burst in, confiscated the cigarette, and marched us to Father McCleary’s office.

  I knew Father McCleary was a chain-smoker. I’d seen him puffing away. But that didn’t stop him from giving us a stern lecture about smoking at school. All the while, he waved a twenty-inch-long razor strap, which he used for spankings, in front of our wide eyes. Without warning, he slapped the strap down onto his desktop, causing a loud WHACK. I jumped. Susan burst into tears and Amy soon joined her. Father McCleary appeared satisfied until he noticed there were no tears streaming from my eyes.

  “Dani Fox, step forward, turn around, bend over, and touch your toes.”

  I didn’t move. “My mother and father don’t believe in spanking,” I declared.

  Father McCleary squinted over the half-glasses perched on his nose. “Is that so, young lady. Well, your parents aren’t here, are they? Now you do as you were told or you’ll get a double dose for being insolent.”

  With a chorus of sobs coming from my pals, I took one step forward and turned around as ordered. I was now looking directly into my terrified friends’ faces.

  “Grab your ankles.”

  I bent forward and took hold of my white socks.

  He swung the strap quickly and with such force that I fell forward onto the wooden floor. There wasn’t time to soften my fall with my arms. As I began pushing myself up, I realized my underwear was wet and my face burned with embarrassment. But I did not cry.

  “You want another?” he asked.

  “No, Father,” I said softly as I took my spot next to my friends.

  He raised the strap over his head as if he were going to swing it again and took a step toward the three of us. Susan and Amy shrieked and covered their faces with their hands.

  “Let this be a lesson to the three of you!”

  He lowered the strap. “I am calling your parents and I will strongly suggest they punish you when you get home.”

  That was the first and the last time that anyone had ever struck me. Obviously, that incident didn’t compare to what Mary Margaret had endured. Yet it was burned into my memory and I could still feel the humiliation, helplessness, and anger of that moment when I had no control and another person hurt me.

  Mary Margaret shuffled into the apartment living room wearing a terry cloth pale blue bathrobe. She still had bandages covering her face, and because her mouth was wired shut, she couldn’t speak loudly. Mrs. Finn walked behind her as she inched forward and settled into one of the easy chairs.

  “I saw you looking at Harry’s barber chair,” Mrs. Finn said. “He used to cut hair at night here. My Harry, if there was a way to earn an extra buck, he was on it. Our families were Irish, but he had a bit of Scotch in him, too, and I don’t mean the liquor.”

  She laughed, took a seat on the sofa next to me, and fired up a cigarette.

  I asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” Mary Margaret replied.

  “My mother made you some baklava,” I said, handing Mrs. Finn a paper plate covered with wax paper. “Have you ever had it?”

  Neither had.

  “It’s a sticky pastry. It goes great with coffee.”

  “I’m sure we will enjoy it, dear, please thank her,” Mrs. Finn said, taking the plate into the kitchen. “Of course, Mary Margaret can’t eat solid food yet.”

  I felt myself blushing. I’d not thought of that.

  “Has Rudy Hitchins tried to contact you—either by phone or coming here?”

  “No,” Mary Margaret said. “We heard he’s living with that whore.”

  “Gloria Lucinda,” Mrs. Finn volunteered, returning from the kitchen. “But don’t you worry. He’ll soon be doing to her what he did to my baby girl. Then she’ll see what kind of bastard he is.”

  We spoke about Hitchins for several moments and then I got to the point of my visit. “You were understandably angry and upset while you were in the hospital. Now that you’re home, I need to know if you are having any second thoughts about moving forward with this case.”

  Ma
ry Margaret shook her head.

  “When will that bastard be put on trial?” Mrs. Finn asked. “When can we get him locked up again, this time for good?”

  I gave them a rudimentary outline of how the process worked and explained that Judge Morano had put the case on his docket five months from now.

  “Five months is expedited?” Mary Margaret asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s about when she’s having her baby,” Mrs. Finn said.

  “I want jurors to see you pregnant in court,” I said.

  “That’s smart,” Mrs. Finn replied.

  “How’s the pregnancy going?”

  “I wish I’d miscarry. I already hate it.”

  “Them’s just your emotions, honey,” Mrs. Finn said. “Hormones. You’re tired.”

  I took that as a cue to leave. “I’d better go.”

  Mary Margaret asked, “You told me about your boyfriend. Bob, right? How’s that going?”

  “We’re both still busy. I didn’t get to see him over the weekend. But we’re fine.”

  “Listen, honey, absence don’t make the heart grow fonder,” Mrs. Finn said. “It makes men look at other women.”

  “Mother,” Mary Margaret said, “she told me about Bob in the hospital. They’ve been together since high school. He’s her first love. It’s romantic.”

  “It should be,” said Mrs. Finn. “You take my Harry. It was sparks from the moment I saw him. I’m not ashamed to say we gave our bed a good pounding.”

  “Mother, please!”

  “There’s no shame in it. We’re all girls here. Many a night we’d sit in this room, having coffee and a smoke afterward, and he’d say, ‘Rebecca, you’re the sugar in my cup.’ Now that’s how it’s supposed to be. I told Mary Margaret that. But no, she never listened. She took up with that no-good Rudy Hitchins. And look what happened.”

  Mary Margaret gave her mother an angry look as I stood and moved toward the door.

  14

  I was sleeping so soundly when the telephone rang that I thought it was part of my dream. Fumbling for the receiver, I said, “Hello?” The light on the nightstand clock showed it was just after four a.m.

  “This is Dispatcher Henderson at the Elmsford P.D.,” a male voice announced. “I’m trying to reach Danny Fox.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you get him on the line?”

  “I’m Dani Fox.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. But I need to talk to Mr. Fox. A Detective O’Brien told me to notify Assistant D.A. Danny Fox. Is he available?”

  “There is no Mr. Fox. The only male in this house is a pot-bellied pig and he’s not talking right now. What’s O’Brien want?”

  “Urr, ah, um, well, we’ve got an emergency west of Elmsford near the interstate and I was told by O’Brien to get Danny Fox out there ASAP. Here’s directions.” I grabbed some dark chocolate on the way out the door.

  It was only a five-minute drive to Elmsford at this predawn hour, but it took another ten minutes to find the rural road that the dispatcher had described. I’d traveled about a mile down it when I came upon an Elmsford police car blocking my path.

  “Sorry, lady, but you’ve got to turn around,” he said. “There’s a crime scene up ahead and it’s going to be a while before this road opens again.”

  “I’m from the D.A.’s office.”

  “Sure you are.”

  I fished out my credentials.

  “I didn’t know they had girl prosecutors in Westchester,” he said. “You’ll find the detectives up the road.”

  A few minutes later, I arrived at a spot where three cars were parked side by side across the road with their headlights on. Their beams cast a spotlight on four men standing in front of them. I didn’t see O’Brien.

  “I’m Assistant District Attorney Dani—”

  “We know who you are,” one of them said gruffly. “O’Brien’s in the woods. He wants you out there.” He nodded to his right but didn’t offer any additional information.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Go see for yourself,” he snapped, handing me a flashlight. “About a hundred yards through the trees.”

  I took his flashlight and walked into the pines that edged both sides of the road. The ground was flat and soft here because it was covered with pine needles. The trees shot up as if they were a giant fence. I shined the flashlight to my left and then swung it to my right. Every damn tree looked the same. I stopped and listened, but didn’t hear anything except my own rushed breathing. Was I lost? I had no idea where I was going, but I continued forward, fighting a growing sense of alarm.

  I moved quietly across the needles. I continued going straight, and in another five minutes, I heard voices, and in another twenty feet, I emerged into a clearing where I could see beams from other flashlights. I shined my light toward them and spotted O’Brien along with three other figures about thirty yards in front of me. One of the men was Carl, the detective who’d beaten Hitchins on the sidewalk outside O’Toole’s. They reacted to my flashlight by shining their lights at me, temporarily blinding me.

  Unlike the barren ground in the woods, the clearing was covered with knee-high grass that was swaying in a morning breeze. I heard O’Brien tell someone to “walk away, Detective Jones” and then I heard another man utter a profanity. I realized it was Carl who was now breaking away from the threesome.

  “What’s going on?” I asked when I reached O’Brien. I shined my flash-light at his face and he glanced down, pointing his beam into the tall grass at his feet.

  A bloody Mary Margaret was sprawled naked in the grass.

  “One shot in her head,” O’Brien said. “Another directly into her heart. Her clothes are over there.” He swung his light to his right where her terry cloth bathrobe and her flannel pajamas had been tossed.

  I felt horrible. The last dead person I’d seen was my father. Complications from cancer had killed him and ravaged his once-strong body. But he’d looked peaceful dressed in his best suit in his casket at his funeral, as if he were sleeping. Mary Margaret’s empty eyes stared blankly ahead. Her face was frozen in a groan with her mouth gaping open. Her lips were twisted in a grotesque position. I’d seen plenty of autopsy photos of murder victims, but this was so much more real. This was someone I knew. Someone whom I had just been speaking to a few hours earlier. I had to turn my head to catch a breath of air.

  “Hitchins must have brought her here,” O’Brien said. “Forced her to strip, probably to humiliate her or maybe make her beg for her life. Maybe he just wanted a last fuck. Who knows? I figure he got them after they’d gone to bed.”

  “Them?”

  “He killed Mrs. Finn, too. We got officers at the apartment. They found her in her bedroom with her throat slit. He must have broken in, killed her, and then surprised Mary Margaret and brought her out here.”

  My revulsion turned into anger. Daughter and mother murdered.

  “The baby?”

  “No heartbeat.”

  I turned my face back toward him, then peered down again at Mary Margaret’s nude corpse. Three lives ended at Rudy Hitchins’s hands.

  “Why’d he have to do this?” I asked.

  “You’re the big expert,” O’Brien replied mockingly. “Power. Control. What did all those Ivy League experts tell you about men like him?”

  Before I could respond, a voice coming from behind O’Brien said, “It’s your fault.” Detective Jones was returning.

  “I told you to walk away,” O’Brien said.

  “She needs to hear it. We could’ve put that son of a bitch in prison but she had to do it her way.”

  “Bullshit,” O’Brien said. “The guy was a walking time bomb. It was only a matter of time.”

  “You keep telling yourself that,” Jones replied, directing his comments more at me than O’Brien. “If it helps you sleep at night, you believe it. But take a good, hard look at what he did to her. ’Cause no matter what your friend here says, in my book, la
dy, you and that fucking judge who turned him loose are as much responsible as Hitchins is.”

  I said, “You’re blaming me? I’m the one who wanted to put him in jail. Or is it because I refused to prosecute him on trumped-up charges? You called me here to make me feel guilty?”

  “We called you because you always follow the rules,” Jones said snidely. It was standard procedure for an assistant district attorney to be called to the scene of every homicide. Because I worked in the appeals bureau, however, I wasn’t on the list and had never been called before.

  “Mary Margaret was your case,” O’Brien said.

  Jones added, “We called you because she was your responsibility.”

  “What about you? I thought you had someone watching Hitchins.”

  “They thought he was with his girlfriend,” Jones said.

  “Enough of the blame game,” O’Brien said. “Pisani is personally coming out here. This case is too big for you now.”

  I could feel my face turning red. But he was right. This was a triple homicide and Pisani would be all over it. He wouldn’t want me as a partner. Still, I would ask. I owed Mary Margaret, her mother, and her unborn child that much. I’d promised to put Hitchins in jail.

  “I was talking to Mary Margaret and her mom a few hours ago,” I said. “In their apartment.”

  “Then you’re damn lucky he didn’t nab you, too,” O’Brien said. “You could still be a target. It would be best if you stayed out of sight this weekend until we get Hitchins. Is there somewhere safe you can go?”

  Safe? I wasn’t sure if he was worried about Hitchins coming after me or Jones and his buddies from O’Toole’s.

  “I’m not hiding. I want to talk to Whitaker about this case.”

  “It would be better,” O’Brien said, “if you just went somewhere and let this situation play itself out a little. By Monday, the dust will settle, and if we’re lucky, Rudy Hitchins will no longer be a problem.”

  From his tone, it didn’t sound as if he was talking about an arrest.