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

Bonnie had wanted to call Gideon to reassure him that she was all right, and I’d wanted to call him before he decided her absence had something to do with me. I could picture him gazing at his phone, wondering, Is it possible?

Could this Brady be one of those congenial psychopaths, someone who smiles, chats and tortures? Slowly, he would lift the receiver, call Homicide, demand Shea, tell him I’d once slept with Bonnie and I might be obsessed. Dangerous.

But I couldn’t risk a call from my house. Someone on the squad—Robby—could already have put an illegal tap on Gideon’s phone, hoping she’d call him. So before I went to Pomerantz’s, I stopped at one of those self-serve gas sta-tions/snack food stores, called something like Thrif-T Gas, a place where only locals went, since to New Yorkers, concepts like fuel supplied by a company not traded on the New York Stock Exchange, thrift, and sour-cream-and-onion-flavored corn chips were too degrading to the human spirit to even consider. The place was on one of the more obscure north roads. I used the pay phone.

Gideon’s boyfriend answered. He had one of those 360

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powerful, honeyed, southern Do-you-believe-in-Jesus-Christ-as-yo’-Savior? voices. When I said I was calling about Bonnie Spencer, Gideon got on right away.

“Your friend Bonnie is fine,” I said, disguising my voice so it sounded like a cross between Casey Stengel and a frog.

“She just didn’t think it was time to get arrested yet.”

Gideon didn’t bother to ask who I was. He knew. “I’m concerned about her,” he said slowly. “I would feel better if I knew—”

“—that she’s okay? She said to tell you Gary Cooper was at his most beautiful in The Westerner.” I couldn’t believe that I’d agreed to deliver such a goddamn stupid message.

“End of conversation. She’ll call you tonight.”

An orange shirt, with its itsy-bitsy polo player, stretched across Eddie Pomerantz’s belly, while a pair of half-glasses dangled from a darker-orange cord. The shirt hung over a pair of khaki bermuda shorts.

We were standing in his living room; the entire back wall was glass. The house itself stood on top of a bluff overlooking the bright, white-capped water and bobbing sailboats of Northwest Harbor. It was an incredible, expensive view.

“I went through this whole thing with you the night Sy got killed,” he said. “Remember? We’d been discussing a picture of Lindsay that turned up in USA Today that she hadn’t approved.” To show me he was keeping his temper, he filled up his cheeks with air and let it leak out. I was trying not to lose my cool, even though he was lying through his shiny false teeth. “I had to cancel a breakfast meeting because of this,” he complained. “I don’t know what you want from me.” He looked down at the giant face of his gold-and-stainless-steel watch.

I took out my stainless-steel handcuffs and swung 362 / SUSAN ISAACS

them before his eyes. “I don’t want anything from you, Mr.

Pomerantz. I’m here to arrest you. Section four ninety-two of the New York State Penal Code.” I made that up. “Imped-ing a criminal investigation. And section eleven thirty-eight, Sub A: Aiding and abetting—”

I didn’t have to finish. He tottered backward to a long couch and dropped onto it. He seemed mesmerized by the swinging cuffs. I put them back in my pocket. He wheezed:

“If I tell you something now that’s different than what I told you last week…” His mouth kept working, but he couldn’t finish his sentence.

I didn’t want him to drop dead of a coronary. Seeing him in daylight, I realized he was well into his seventies. My guess was, if I’d caught him when he was younger, he would have been tough enough to give me a hard time. But he was old, tired, probably not in the best of health. I felt kind of bad for scaring him. “If you cooperate, nothing will happen.”

“I’ll cooperate.” The couch was covered in something like sailcloth, broad red and white stripes; his orange shirt looked particularly hideous against it.

“Tell me about the phone call,” I said. “Did you call Sy or did he call you?”

“I called him.”

“What about?”

“He was having trouble with some aspects of Lindsay’s performance.”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to jerk me off, Mr.

Pomerantz.”

“Sy was going to California to take meetings with other actresses to discuss Lindsay’s role. He seemed to be willing to throw three weeks of film into the garbage and reshoot with a new star.”

“And what were you trying to do?”

“Trying to stop him.”

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“Any success?”

“I don’t know. He wanted Lindsay out. He seemed to have made up his mind.” Pomerantz fiddled with his eyeglass cord.

“I was working on getting him to at least agree to call me after he met with the others, for one last talk. That’s when he was shot.”

“Two shots?”

“Yes.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes. I know what a gunshot sounds like. I was in the army. Battle of the Bulge.” I nodded, respectfully. “Wounded.

You should’ve seen me then. A skinny kid. Three quarters of an inch lower, it would have gone straight through my heart. So I know from guns. And I heard two shots.”

“You do a lot of your business on the phone?”

“Sure. Most of it.”

“You must have a good ear.”

“A great ear.”

“If someone was having an off day, or had a sudden change of mood, you could pick that up?”

Pomerantz understood what I was saying. “Yes. And there was nothing that made me think Sy saw anyone—with or without a rifle. Or that he felt something was wrong. But wasn’t he shot from behind?”

“Yeah, but if the killer was someone he knew, he might have spotted him out of the corner of his eye, acknowledged him in some way and then turned away. What I’m looking for is a ‘Hi, Joe’ or ‘Hello, Mary’ that you might have picked up early in the conversation.”

“Nothing like that,” Pomerantz said.

“No pause at any point? No sudden intake of