Cold Day in Hell (13 page)

Read Cold Day in Hell Online

Authors: Richard Hawke

We got off at Fortieth Street in Sunnyside and walked the several blocks to Calvary Cemetery. Shirley crossed herself before entering, shooting me a look.

The recent snowfall had left the cemetery with a smooth white covering, broken by the thousands of chalky stones poking out of the ground like uneven teeth. We walked several hundred feet along the road before making our way over the snow to the simple stone that read: PATRICK MALONE. Shirley let out a gasp. “There it is.”

“It” was not the stone itself. She was referring to the small bouquet of daisies sitting atop the stone. I started forward, but Shirley put her hand on my chest. “Don’t walk.” She scoured the site. “Damn it all. There should be footprints.”

She was right. Assuming that the flowers had been left off earlier in the day—which was the anniversary of my uncle Patrick’s remains being identified, and the date agreed upon for the official registration of his death—there should have been footprints in the fresh snow. But there were none.

“He’s too clever,” Shirley hissed. “He knew the forecast and he got here early, damn his eyes.” She stepped forward and planted her lilies in the snow. Then she plucked the daisies from the tombstone, crossed herself and buried her face in the flowers.

A year before I was born, an undercover cop in the NYPD’s Organized Crime Task Force working to infiltrate the gangs in Hell’s Kitchen lost one of his informants, nineteen-year-old Patrick Malone. My mother’s twin brother. The undercover cop had worked diligently for months to flip Patrick, recognizing in the young tough a muted streak of humanity and tending it diligently, the way a good gardener tends his plants. What the cop failed to tend with equal care were safeguards to protect Patrick from his ruthless cronies should the facts behind the relationship ever come to light. Which is exactly what happened. The cop was found out, and ten days after Patrick’s disappearance, an extra-strength black trash bag washed up on the sand at Rockaway Beach in Brooklyn. Five days after that, Shirley Malone stood with her head bowed as the scant contents of the bag—no other bags were ever recovered—were lowered into a grave at Calvary Cemetery. My mother allegedly uncorked her first bottle of whiskey that same afternoon and managed to work her way halfway down the label before the cop came by to check on her and put a stop to it. It was a week after the funeral that the cop and Shirley began their affair. It would last all of four months. The cop was married. One child and another on the way. He wouldn’t find out until several months after breaking things off with Shirley that she was pregnant with me and planning to see it through. Her relationship with the bottle was moving along nicely by that point as well. After I was born, the cop made a point of keeping tabs on me and my mother when he could, dropping in on us now and again. Sometimes I was invited to leave the apartment for an hour while the two hashed things out. To some extent, despite his spotty presence in my life, my old man managed to mold me, if not directly as often as I’d have preferred then at least by dint of his considerable persona and the name he made for himself as he rose steadily up the ranks of the police department. I steered in the direction of the NYPD myself for a while—managed one year at John Jay—though I fell with a pronounced bounce from that particular path. Eventually, my father was named police commissioner for the city of New York. Commissioner Harlan Scott. But one summer afternoon four years into his post, he stepped down without notice or explanation and, five days after that, disappeared forever from the face of the earth. One would have had to be watching closely—which I was—to see that my mother’s relationship with the bottle moved to a deeper level after the old man’s disappearance. Even fifteen years later—eight years after Harlan Scott was officially declared dead—she never tires of reminding me how the important men in her life have a habit of disappearing.

The freaky thing about the daisies on my uncle’s grave was this: Harlan Scott had made it a point every year on the anniversary of Patrick Malone’s declared death to join my mother at her brother’s gravesite and leave off a clutch of daisies. In the fifteen years since his disappearance, every year without fail, the daisies had continued to appear. I knew it wasn’t my father. The lead weight in my stomach told me that he was every bit as dead as the uncle I’d never met. But my mother has another way of viewing matters. It’s not stretching the truth to say that she looks forward to the annual anguish of discovering the mysterious daisies on her brother’s tombstone. Even though she married (and, later, divorced), no other man on earth was going to take my father’s place in her emotions. The inexplicable daisies gave my mother the kind of false hope that fuels constant low-level heartache, a pain with which the small tough woman was, unfortunately, all too comfortable.

After several silent minutes, we left the gravesite. As she always did, my mother paused just outside the cemetery. She slowly scanned the buildings running both ways in front of us. One year she’d brought binoculars. But generally, the tactic was to remain visible for a minute or two, in case someone was watching. The windows of the buildings stared back blankly. Hundreds of opaque empty eyes.

Shirley wanted a drink. I’m not my mother’s keeper, so we ducked into a place called the Lounge. Dark. Stale. I could swear the same elbows were on the bar as the year before, and the year before that. We took a table next to a silent pinball machine, and I fetched an old-fashioned for the lady and for myself an Irish coffee, heavy on the Irish.

Several months after Commissioner Harlan Scott disappeared, I’d gotten a referral to Charlie Burke, private investigator out of Queens, and procured his services to snoop around and see what he could find. I’d never trusted the official investigation. It’s easy to make enemies when you’re a cop on the rise, especially once you’ve reached the top. Easy target. Fair game. Charlie managed to shine his light on any number of characters who might have been happy to assist in the obliteration of Harlan Scott, but ultimately nothing rock-solid. Along the way, I picked up my PI license and put myself under Charlie’s tutelage. It was a better fit for me. Attempting to follow in the old man’s footsteps had been downright quaint of me, or just plain stupid. I’m better suited for contract work or just being nosy on my own. Charlie declared that I had the raw material already in place, it was just a matter of fine-tuning, picking up some of the tricks and the bumps and bruises of experience. He also did a smart thing. Or, if not smart, extremely shrewd; the equivalent of attaching an endless belt of ammunition to a weapon. He sat me down one evening at his local, a bar not that far from the Lounge. I remember his every word.

“Your old man. What do we know? I’ll tell you. We know one of two things. He either disappeared because he wanted to, and he’s got no intention of being found except on his own terms, or he was taken out. Forget the first one, it’s the less likely. That second one? Listen. Somebody bad killed your father. Someone with the poison in their blood. My advice to you is that when you take on a case, it doesn’t matter what kind it is, you keep in mind that what you’re looking to do is nail someone with the poison in their blood. Doesn’t matter if it’s only a little poison. Embezzler, guy cheating on his wife, insurance scammers, doesn’t matter. It comes from the same source as the creep who took your old man away from you. They’re cousins, all these schmucks.
That’s
what you go after. Every time. It’s their blood you’re sniffing for, Fritz. Poison blood. Get it off the street. Every time. You want to do right by your old man? There’s your ticket.”

When I reminded Shirley that she wasn’t allowed to smoke in the bar, she quietly cursed the mayor. She dropped the celery-green pack back into her purse.

“I noticed where the girl lived who got her throat slashed the other night,” Shirley said. “That’s little missy’s front yard, isn’t it?”

“She goes by the name of Margo.”

“I figured you knew who I was talking about.”

“The murder happened right across the street.”

“Did she know her?”

“Did Margo know her?”

“I know it’s not fashionable to know your neighbors in this city, but stranger things have happened.”

“She didn’t know her,” I said.

“If I were an associate of this Marshall Fox character, I’d be leaving on the next train. You know who did this, don’t you?”


You
do?”

“Of course I do. Not the specifics, but it was a fan. A demented fan. An obsessed fan. Someone’s trying to make it look like the original killer is still out there, like Marshall Fox is completely innocent of those two murders last year. He wants to sow the seeds of doubt in the jury’s mind so that they don’t come in with a guilty verdict. Everyone knows this is the world’s stupidest jury and they can’t make up their minds even when it’s as clear as a bell. You wait, you’ll see. Some nutcase with pictures of Marshall Fox plastered all over his walls. That’s your killer.”

“And the reason for these particular victims?”

“Friends of Fox. Like those first two. They’re just trying to go with the pattern.”

“The pattern was women with whom Fox had been involved,” I pointed out. “Zachary Riddick is a square peg.”

“Did I say the killer was brilliant? The lawyer probably just got under his skin and he decided to do Riddick in while he was at it. I’m not the police. I don’t have all the answers.”

Her drink was finished, and she wanted another one. I’d cut her off after two and then hope we’d have to wait in the cold air awhile for the elevated subway. I replenished my mug while I was at it. Cold gray Sunday would have been perfect in front of a toasty fire with little missy. My day was feeling like the booby prize.

“Except for roses and black-eyed Susans, daisies were about the only flower your father could identify. You knew that, right?”

Of course I knew that. She pointed it out to me every year. She picked up her glass and took a noisy sip.

“He was devastated about what happened to Patrick. He took the blame. Thing is, your uncle had too big a soft spot. He ran with all those crazies, but his heart wasn’t in it. Not really. He was a good boy. Harlan spotted that. You’ve never seen a man so miserable with remorse. I should have hated him. I should have ripped his eyes out. He killed my brother. Sweet Patrick.” She picked up her glass again and held it near her chin.

“I’ve been trying to be furious with your father from the day they found Patrick. What happened between us made no sense. I should be furious. And you know…I might be. I don’t care what you think, Fritz. He’s out there. Your father is alive and he’s out there and he’s letting you and me know it. He’s either stark raving mad or he’s scared half to death or he just has his reasons. Or all of the above. But one day I’m going to catch that bastard laying his little daisies on my brother’s grave. You’ve never really seen me furious. You think you have, but you haven’t. You’d better be there when it happens. Your father’s going to need you there to protect him.”

She sniffed back a tear and raised her glass. “Patrick Malone.”

I tapped her glass with my mug. “Patrick Malone.”

She stared at me as she downed her drink. Never took her eyes off me. “You look just like him, you know,” she said.

Of course I knew. She told me so every year. And she didn’t mean my uncle Patrick, either.

 

14

 

THE TUESDAY AFTER the Hamptons weekend, Robin swore to herself that she was not remaining home after work simply because she had told Marshall Fox that she had the night free. Michelle had called up suggesting that the two meet up in the Union Square area for drinks, but Robin had begged off, claiming she was tired and looking for an early night.

“It’s not Fox, is it?” Michelle said. “He hasn’t actually called you, has he?”

Michelle didn’t believe for a minute that Marshall Fox had been serious. Robin agreed with her. He’d been drinking, she reminded herself, plus God knows what else. Robin couldn’t claim to be up on all the drugs of the moment, but she had seen enough bizarre behavior during the Hamptons party to know that there had been more consumed than just the cocktails she’d spent all night circulating. She had already played over and over in her mind her encounters with Fox and determined that she’d been taken in—almost taken in—by the celebrity’s prodigious charm and his serial flirting. It’s absurd, she told herself. The man goes out with supermodels and Hollywood actresses. I was the
hired help
. Get a grip.

In fact, Fox hadn’t called. Not the Sunday after the party, not Monday, and not Tuesday. Of course he hadn’t. It was absurd. For all Robin knew, Fox had patched things up with Kelly Cole, and the two of them had shared a good laugh about the crazy martini-throwing incident, and that was that. Robin had stayed up and watched his show Monday night just to see—she told herself—if Fox made any mention of the event in the Hamptons. He didn’t, though he had made a joke that sounded to Robin like it might have been an oblique reference to the striking blond newswoman and the drink-throwing incident. But maybe not. Robin had caught sight of herself in the mirror on the wall next to the television set and told herself to snap out of it already.

To her regret, Robin had talked about the party at work, letting slip the fact that Marshall Fox had flirted with her and had sort of asked her out. Denise from Graphics was a huge Marshall Fox fan.

“Has he called yet?” The question came on what seemed to be a half-hourly basis. On Tuesday Denise was nearly beside herself. “Has he called? You
are
checking your machine, aren’t you?” Denise had even offered to check Robin’s home answering machine for her. “Look. When he does call, you do
not
erase that message. I’m serious. I swear, I’ll pay you to let me record it. You have to promise me. Oh my God. Marshall
Fox
.”

But he hadn’t called. By two o’clock, Robin had made a particular point about not calling home anymore to check her machine. At the end of the day, Denise had demanded that Robin call one more time.

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