Cold Day in Hell (40 page)

Or the garage.

I retraced my steps at a dead run. Rosemary Fox was still on her fanny at the bottom of the staircase. Her robe had fallen open. She looked like a serious lush.

I ran out the front door and around to the driveway. As I did, I heard the sound of a car engine revving inside the garage. I knelt down on the snow at the edge of the driveway and readied myself. The garage door slid open, and for a moment, nothing. Then a cream Cadillac leaped forward. Holding my breath, I tracked and got off the shot, hitting the front right tire. The Caddy swerved toward me and straightened as it passed. I pivoted, locking my arms in place, and fired twice, the second shot hitting the right rear tire. The car skidded on the snow, sliding sideways into a standing lawn lamp.

I was up and running. Ross was gunning the engine, but the rear of the car slid slushily back and forth in the snowy driveway. I grabbed hold of the driver’s door handle and tugged, but the door was locked. I could see Ross through the smoked glass. It took two hits with the butt of my pistol to shatter the glass. Ross was reaching for his rifle, which was on the seat next to him. My pistol barrel went snugly against his left temple, as if the two pieces were made to fit.

“Let it go.”

He hesitated.

I didn’t.

I reared back and landed the gun butt sharply just above his left eye. His head lolled forward. I groped for the door lock on the driver’s armrest and pushed it, then I pulled back out of the window, yanked open the door and dragged Ross by the collar out onto the snow.

“Where’s Lamb?” When he didn’t answer, I gave him another taste of my gun butt. “Where is she?”

Blood was running into his eyes. He blinked it away and looked at me as if I were some sort of curious artifact. I dropped the gun and took a double grip on his coat.

“
Where the hell is she
?” My throat would hurt later from the strain.

He ran a tongue across his lips. “Dead in the water. How should I know?”

FOR A BRIEF INSTANT, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Two dark slick bodies, one of them stretched out flat on its back, the second one hunched over the other, looking for all the world like it was feeding on it. It was dark, but then I pieced it together. I was in the boathouse. In front of me were Megan and Tracy Jacobs. Megan was frantically performing mouth-to-mouth on the actress. Blowing into her mouth, pumping her hands on the woman’s chest. Blowing, pumping…She looked up at me. Her face was a shock mask. Her teeth were chattering so loudly I could hear them.

“Help.” Her voice was a plaintive croak. I pulled off my coat and wrapped it around her. She shook her head violently. “Her.”

Megan turned her head and vomited water onto the dock. I knelt down next to Tracy Jacobs. Even in the dark boathouse, the paleness of her face showed like a dull moon. I took over the mouth-to-mouth, spitting brackish salt water from my mouth every other breath. I pressed my hands to her sternum and pushed.

“She’s alive,” Megan said weakly behind me. “There’s a heartbeat.”

I kept at it, and after what was probably only a very long minute, the body under me spasmed. Her back arched involuntarily, and a rush of black water gushed out of her mouth. Her coughs were otherworldly. They were followed by a groan that built slowly but steadily, tightening until it reached a piercing siren shriek.

MEGAN COULD WALK. She followed me as I carried Tracy Jacobs across the large yard into the house. Tracy’s face and head were horribly beaten. I didn’t see the extent of it until I set her down on Ross’s living room couch. Rosemary Fox was seated in an armchair, looking dreamily amused.

Megan instructed her to go into the kitchen and boil some water. When the woman hesitated, Megan barked, “Now!”

Rosemary Fox rose from the chair and floated out of the room.

I asked, “Boil water?”

Megan was lightly touching one of Tracy Jacobs’s head wounds. She shrugged. “I just wanted her out of the fucking room.”

I had called 911 from my cell phone at the boathouse. Megan’s lips were blue, and her breathing was beginning to speed up. I took her cheeks between my hands and rubbed vigorously. Then I took her hands—they were ice—and rubbed them as well.

“Hold on,” I said. I ran up the stairs and found the master bedroom. There was a down quilt on the bed. In a second bedroom, I snared a blanket, then returned to the living room and wrapped the quilt around Megan. I placed the blanket over Tracy Jacobs. The actress’s eyes opened briefly. She blinked and looked right through me; then her eyes closed again.

Rosemary Fox came in from the kitchen. “The water’s boiling.”

“Make some coffee, Mrs. Fox,” I said.

She asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m the person asking you politely to please make some coffee. Very strong.”

“I would like to know what is going on here. Where’s Alan? Who are you? Who’s that girl?”

I stepped over to her. As I approached, she took a step backward. She also managed a haughty look, even with that nasty bruise. She crossed her arms defensively on her chest.

“My name is Malone,” I said. “That young woman on the couch is Tracy Jacobs. Your friend Alan tried to kill her. What I want from you is some help, in the form of a pot of hot coffee. Can you handle that, Mrs. Fox?”

“You’re a bit of a shit, aren’t you.”

“On a good day, sure. By the way, I met your friend Danny. Bit of a shit himself, isn’t he?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Do you want milk?”

Back in the living room, Megan was shivering within her quilt. She had pulled a chair up to the couch and was sitting in it, stroking Tracy Jacobs’s cheek. She looked up as I entered the room.

“Where
is
Ross, by the way?”

“I’ve got him locked away.”

“Locked away? Where?”

“He’s in the trunk of his car.”

“Outside?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Kind of cold out there, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

Megan laughed. Too hard, it turned out. Her shoulders began to shake, and her breath got away from her. The transition to tears was seamless. Her smile curdled, and she pulled the quilt tight around her neck. Her eyes grew large and frightened as the tears flooded down her cheeks. I took a step toward her, but she shook her head. “No.”

She doubled over in the chair and began sobbing. I came forward anyway and touched her lightly on the top of her head. You’d have thought I pushed a button. She came forward out of the chair, out of the quilt, and wrapped her thin arms around me, pressing her face into my chest, crying unashamedly. Hanging on for dear life.

AFTER STRANGLING Cynthia Blair and leaving her body at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle, and at the last minute hitting upon the inspiration of driving a pen into her chest so as to secure her hand over her heart, Alan Ross had assumed that the authorities would immediately turn their attentions to Marshall Fox. Naturally, Fox had been questioned, but the police had been interested primarily in obtaining background information concerning Cynthia. Not once had their questions suggested any suspicion of Fox.

Although Marshall Fox had trusted Ross possibly more than anyone else he knew, his affair with Cynthia was one aspect of his personal life that he had chosen not to share with his trusted friend. Ross was privy to most of Fox’s numerous dalliances, more so than he cared to be. Marshall liked to brag. Ross had known about Nicole Rossman, although not by name. Fox had been unable to keep from boasting about some of the outrageous things he had been doing with the malleable doll-woman he had met online. In the days following Cynthia’s murder, as it became clear to Ross that the police were not including Fox on their list of top suspects, the television executive had formulated a plan. Under the guise of concern for Marshall Fox’s mental state, Ross arranged with Fox’s driver to be kept informed on the entertainer’s doings and his whereabouts. And so it was that when Nicole Rossman emerged from Fox’s building at three in the morning ten days after Cynthia Blair’s murder, she was met by none other than Alan Ross of KBS Television.

Gloria was off in Los Angeles, so Ross had no tracks to cover on that front. Getting Nikki Rossman into his car proved even easier than he’d guessed. He’d merely had to give her his credentials and tell her that he needed desperately to talk with her about Marshall. The attack took place just north of Central Park. Ross pulled to a stop near the Duke Ellington statue on 110th Street and produced a hammer. Three swift blows and Nikki Rossman was crumpled against the passenger door. Ross drove into the park, pulling off the road into a cove of trees just north of Cleopatra’s Needle. The forty seconds required to transfer Nikki’s body from the car to the base of the monument was the riskiest part of the endeavor, but Ross took the gamble and won. Using a hunting knife he would later discard, he opened up the young woman’s throat. Then he nailed her hand to her chest. Four-inch nail. Driven all the way to its head.

When Fox wasn’t arrested the very next day, Ross went ballistic.

TRACY JACOBS UNDERWENT emergency surgery at Eastern Long Island Hospital and was then transferred to Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery. My small concussion was nothing compared with the damage Alan Ross had inflicted on the actress. It was deemed highly unlikely that the doctors’ facial reconstruction efforts would eliminate all evidence of the severe beating. Word emerged almost immediately from the entertainment industry that a replacement actress for Tracy Jacobs’s role in
Century City
was being actively pursued.

Investigators going over Ross’s cavernous office at the network turned up what Joe Gallo referred to jokingly as “a little Nixony thing.” Ross’s office was wired to record all conversations that took place there. There were wireless microphones located at key spots throughout the office. A sound technician at the network confirmed that Ross had been a fanatic about recording every single encounter that took place in his office. This included his phone calls. All the recordings were downloaded onto Ross’s computer. Rodrigo and his IT team went to work. My chat with Ross surfaced, but Gallo wasn’t overly interested in that. He was interested in retrieving Alan Ross’s interview with Tracy Jacobs when she allegedly threatened to go to the police with her allegations of Marshall Fox’s abusive and violent tendencies. He was even more curious to hear the recordings of Tracy’s audition for
Century City
and Ross subsequently offering the role to her. It was no real surprise that neither of these recordings appeared to exist.

Gallo called Gloria Ross in several times and roughed her up in his gentlemanly way. She was generally cooperative. She admitted to having heeded her husband’s “urgent request” that she sign Tracy Jacobs to an Argosy contract, only half believing his story that the actress was a recent lover of Fox’s who was threatening to raise a very public stink in the media about the entertainer. To the extent that she bought her husband’s willingness to cave in to such a craven extortion scheme, Gloria had chalked it up to the pressures that Ross was under concerning Fox’s growing difficulties. During an extended period of questioning, Gallo managed to extract from Mrs. Ross her suspicions that her husband had harbored “excessively proprietary feelings” toward Marshall Fox’s producer, Cynthia Blair. When Gallo pressed her concerning any thoughts she might have had on her husband’s possible role in Cynthia’s murder, Gloria had demurred, if only slightly: “I didn’t go there. That’s all I’m going to say.”

A WEEK AFTER the final surgery, Tracy Jacobs was moved to a rehabilitation center located in Briarcliff, under five miles from Alan and Gloria Ross’s Westchester home. Gallo took the short trip north out of the city to speak to the woman. Despite the doctors’ warnings that Tracy’s memory could be compromised, the actress’s recollection of the events “that changed my life” proved intact. She told Gallo that she had indeed met with Alan Ross in his office and voiced her concerns about Marshall Fox. She told Gallo that Ross had treated her with exceptional respect and, after hearing her concerns, had pleaded gently but firmly with her not to go to the police. “As a personal favor to me” was the phrase he had used, she said, over and over again. Eventually, he had steered the conversation away from the topic and over to her career—such as it was—and had floated the offer of the audition as well as the possibility of having Tracy talk with his wife about representation. Tracy told Gallo that she’d found it peculiar that her audition the following day took place in Ross’s office and with no one else present except Ross himself. He’d set up a video camera on a tripod and given her a short script to read. He made her read the script nearly two dozen times, each time asking that she read every word with a different emphasis than she had used in the previous run-through. At one point, she said, Ross seemed to become frustrated and demanded that she read the script one word at a time. No sentences, simply word after word, as a means, he said, of getting her to loosen up.

She thought she’d blown the audition. The following evening she was on her way to Los Angeles.

Tracy had kept her copy of the audition script, and she was able to tell Gallo where it could be found in her apartment in West Hollywood. Gallo immediately contacted the LAPD, and within hours, the single page was faxed to New York.

Joe showed it to me in his office.

I want you to listen to me and I don’t want any interruptions. Kevin Daly can’t be trusted. He was having an affair with Missy Welch and I know that he is the one who got her pregnant. If he knows what’s good for himself, he’ll go to the police and tell them about Missy. If he doesn’t, I’ll do it. And I mean it. Don’t think I won’t.

“Scintillating,” I said.

Gallo asked, “Do you see what I see?”

I nodded. “Ross already had the tape of Tracy’s visit from the day before. She’d have been throwing Fox’s name around, accusing him of being the violent punk he really is. Ross sends her off with the promise of a so-called audition, then he cooks up this piece of crap and has her come back in and read it a dozen different ways. All sorts of inflections.”