Magic Hour, Susan Isaacs [life changing books txt] 📗

rifle. But not from the house. Unless you were deliberately leaning over the porch rail, looking right down at the spot where lawn met lattice, someone with a

.22 could probably crouch in the shadowy safety of the grand old house and you’d never see him.

“This could be major important!” Robby announced, nodding his head in agreement with himself. His sprayed hair didn’t move.

But despite his excitement, I wasn’t ready to have an or-gasm over the footprints; good investigators shouldn’t come too fast. I wanted to rule out all other possible explanations for the footprints before I wasted two days on a major thong hunt.

“See if you can get someone to check out the gar-32 / SUSAN ISAACS

deners,” I said to Robby. “Find out if any of them wore thongs. Also, take a look in Sy’s closet. I didn’t notice any in there when I did my walk-through, and I don’t think he’d do anything like wear them, but this could have been the summer that guys like him decided K Mart was très amusing or some shit, and he’d have bought fifty pairs.” I thought for a second. “Except maybe not a size ten or eleven. He was a little guy: little hands, little feet, probably little—”

I stopped before I even started. It was no fun being imma-ture and dirty around Robby. His idea of humor was Polack knock-knock jokes. His concept of sex talk was to confide that he and Freckled Cleavage had gone on a marriage en-counter weekend. “Anything else?” I asked him.

Robby grinned (boyishly) and fiddled with a cuff of his sports jacket, a shiny blue thing that had a half-belt stitched around the waist in back. He dressed as though he made an annual haberdashery pilgrimage to suburban Peoria. “There were hairs. In one of the guest bedrooms, although there weren’t any guests.”

“Were they all from Sy?”

“There was one pubic hair, probably his. Four head, someone leaning back against one of those wicker headboards. The hairs got caught.”

“Any with roots?” With the new DNA typing, you can get a genetic make on someone from any cell with a nucleus.

But to test hair, you need the follicle cells that cling to the root, and although you can sometimes make do with one, it helps if you have a clump of ten or twelve hairs.

“Complete roots on two of the head hairs from the headboard. They were not Sy Spencer’s hairs, because they were black or very dark brown, and longish. He had short gray—”

“Yeah, I saw.”

I’d also gotten a fast look at Lindsay Keefe when MAGIC HOUR / 33

her agent had half escorted, half hauled her out of the car, and she’d been what I’d remembered from movies. Blond.

In fact, the blondest.

“That’s all you found?” I asked him.

“Come on,” he said. He was so goddamn chipper. “You know how long it takes to get anything resembling an opinion from ID.”

“So while you were inside with Carbone you didn’t happen to ask if there were any live-in people who might have had a quickie in the bedroom? Maids, valets—that kind of thing?”

“Relax. Where are you going? To a fire? I was just about to ask about servants, but I thought I’d fill you in first.”

Robby paused. It had been three minutes since he’d displayed any disarming boyishness, so I got a lopsided smile. “Look, we both know this is a major case, Steve. I want the brownie points on this one—and so should you. If we can close this neat and fast, it could mean big things.”

When you work with a bunch of cops, or any group of people, there are always some who are going to irritate you.

Either with lousy character traits, like laziness, dishonesty, sloppiness, or just with irritating personal habits like teeth sucking, cuticle nibbling or superfluous grinning. But Robby wasn’t awful. He wasn’t hateful. Sometimes, like when he was talking sports, especially hockey, he could actually be interesting; nobody knew as much about the Islanders’ offensive strategy as he did. And so what if behind all the smiles he was a self-righteous dick? I just steered clear of him.

But what I couldn’t steer clear of was the fact that I thought he was a bad cop. And he thought he was Suffolk County’s anointed Good Guy. Days, even weeks, before the assistant D.A.s felt they had a case,

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Robby would be pushing to arrest, because he knew who the bad guy was. And he was going to get him.

The smiles and the crullers he handed out to cops disappeared for suspects; most of his interrogations turned into finger-jabbing accusations. Sure, he could intimidate some kid into spilling his guts. But he’d alienate suspects other detectives had softened up, and instead of agreeing to a videotaped confession, they’d be screaming for a lawyer.

One time, my best friend on the squad, Marty McCormack, and I had a young guy whose new wife had disappeared. I knew—Christ, everybody knew—that he’d killed her and dumped the body. But how could we find out where? We played it as if this guy was the anguished husband; Marty kept him looking for his wife, thinking of possibilities where she could be. I kept him talking. One night, we stepped out for a bowl of chili and asked Robby just to come into the interrogation room and baby-sit. In the half hour we were gone, he came on tough. Hostile. Aggressive. He knew this was a bad guy. Who didn’t? But he almost ruined it.

And I’d lost it when I found out, banging walls, calling him a stupid piece of shit in the squad room. “You almost fucking blew it!” I yelled. He’d said, “Just cut it out, Steve,”

and even managed a boyish shake of the head that said: Jeez, that Brady and his darn ole temper.

It wasn’t that I hated him. We were just oil/water, fish/fowl, day/night. And so without making a big deal over it, we’d pretty much arranged our