Cold Day in Hell by Richard Hawke Page B

falling snow. Her breath frosted around her face as she exhaled. “It’s the lawyer, that’s what it is. The loudmouth.”
    Gallo stepped closer to the body and bent over for a look. “Son of a bitch. That’s exactly who it is.”
    I edged closer to the edge of the boulder, careful not to tumble off the slippery edge as I got a better look at the uncharacteristically silent, cold body of Zachary Riddick.
     
10
     
    EXCEPT FOR THE CABBIE who drove Zachary Riddick to Central Park, the lawyer had last been seen alive at 12:20 on the day he was murdered. This was at the news conference, where Riddick had bellyached for a mistrial to be declared and for the immediate release of Marshall Fox from custody. He had been pure Riddick, decrying “the abysmal miscarriage of justice” and working up the sort of lather that Joan of Arc could have only dreamed of from one of her defenders. He also managed to slip in the phrase “my good friend Marshall Fox” or “my personal friend Marshall Fox” fourteen times, according to Jimmy Puck’s column in the
Post
. And as Joseph Gallo predicted, Riddick had produced a tape player and played the phone threat that had been recorded on Rosemary Fox’s answering machine.
    I’m coming, you whore. Can you taste the blood yet?
    The police did what they could to track Riddick’s whereabouts in the several hours between the end of the news conference and the discovery of his body in Central Park. Rosemary Fox reported speaking with him briefly on the phone some minutes after the conclusion of the news conference. Riddick had told her he would come by her apartment later in the afternoon to discuss where things stood. He did not disclose his plans for the intervening hours. One would presume lunch. But the contents of Riddick’s stomach, once his body was turned over to the medical examiner for the up-close-and-personal, showed nothing since the twin stack he had shoveled down at his local diner—where he was a regular—at approximately 7:45 that morning. One of the local stations went ahead and dug up the waitress who had served him, a moon-faced Ukrainian who informed the viewing audience, “He luks fine when he leaves here. You think, He vull be back tomorrow like always. Who can know he vull be kilt like that? I hud no idea.”
    The police had questioned everyone they could round up in Central Park in the immediate minutes after arriving on the scene. They showed photographs of Riddick. A few people said that they might have seen him, but the information provided no real insights into the murder. Riddick had entered the park from the southeast corner, dropped off by a taxi. The cabbie was tracked down. He had picked Riddick up at Church Street, a few blocks from the courthouse. On the ride uptown, the two shared an animated conversation on the subject of Marshall Fox’s guilt or innocence (the cabbie saw the new murder the same way Riddick did, proof that the real killer of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman was still out there); however, Riddick failed to reveal what his purpose was for heading into the park. The cabbie reported a good tip. He last saw his fare heading into the park via the walkway that runs by the zoo at approximately a quarter to one.
    Speculation centered on the possibility that Riddick was on his way to meet someone for lunch at the Boathouse Café—he’d been known to eat there on more than one occasion—but no one surfaced claiming to have been stood up by the lawyer for a lunch date.
    Essentially, Zachary Riddick took a cab to the park, briskly walked the quarter mile to the area of the Boathouse and saw his life end amid blood and snow and dead leaves on a nub of a hill overlooking Central Park Lake.
    The police weren’t saying much. I’d had to poke and prod just to pick up what little I knew.
     
     
    IT WAS DIFFICULT to go anywhere in Manhattan the next several days without getting caught up in a conversation about Marshall Fox and this new set of