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

life that would be right for you. I thought I could. I thought: If I have a good and beautiful wife and nice kids and a comfortable house, I’ll be at peace.

That’s all I ever wanted. But I’ve got too much damage, and too many needs. Putting a white picket fence around me won’t make me into a whole person.”

“What will?”

“She will.”

“Why?” Lynne asked.

And I finally answered: “Because…we have fun.”

Carbone had me beeped three times in two minutes. I pulled off at a too-cute lobster restaurant and used the pay phone.

“What’s so urgent, Ray?”

“Robby’s got her nailed.”

“Her?” Lindsay. He’d say Lindsay.

“Bonnie.”

I knew I couldn’t sound the way I felt: crazy with terror.

I had to sound solid, sensible, the tough, experienced cop weary of Kid Robby’s asshole antics. “Jesus, is he still pulling stupid shit? I’ve been killing myself. I’ve got great stuff on Lindsay. We’ve got to start concentrating our resources—”

“Steve, listen to me. He went back to Sy’s house late yesterday. To that area underneath the porch where we found the footprints from the thongs.”

372 / SUSAN ISAACS

“And?”

“He found another dark hair.”

“Stop it!”

“Like the ones on the pillow, Steve. It was caught in one of those crisscrosses of the latticework that covers the crawl space under the porch. She must have leaned against it for a minute. He drove it up to the lab in Westchester personally this morning. He’s waiting for the test results, but you know and I know: It’s got to be Bonnie. Now we’ve got her in bed with him and at the exact location where the shot came from.”

She lied, I thought. I stared at the phone, at its idiot instruction card for placing phone calls. That I’d believed Bonnie’s explanations wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that I could go back to the house, kick furniture, throw things, pound walls, roar at her, You goddamn lying bitch, and she’d touch my arm, look me straight in the eye and say, Stephen, I wasn’t there. I swear to you I wasn’t there. Then how did your hair get there? She’d say, Someone put it there.

That detective who’s after me. You said he was out to get me, and he is. I’d say, You expect me to believe that, bitch?

And she’d say, Yes, I do.

And against all reason, I would.

“Ray,” I said, “you’re not having any trouble with this?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t think there’s a chance that Robby got a little too enthusiastic?”

“Come off it. He wouldn’t go that far. You know he wouldn’t plant evidence. Face facts. Face what she is.” For a second it got so quiet I could hear water bubbling in the lobster tanks. “Steve? You there?”

“I’m here.”

“What are you going to do now?”

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“What do you think I should do?” I asked.

“Go find her.”

I happened to glance down toward the shelf in that dingy corner by the pay phone, with its ancient American Express application forms curled from the humidity, and the ashtray with someone’s fat, ugly cigar ash. And all of a sudden, in that stinky, dreary corner, I got a gift—a flash of memory from that night five years before.

We’d finished eating and moved into the living room. It was sunset, and Bonnie left the lights off so we could see the horizon, royal blue, deep orange. Then she lit a couple of candles and we sat back in the flickering light. She told me how she’d come to love the South Fork, the vast and beautiful sky, the ocean, the marshes, the birds—she said she was one of those creeps who clomped around with boots and binocu-lars—but that she missed the mountains. Not just for fishing, hiking, skiing. Growing up in Utah, she’d look out the window in school, bike to the store to pick up a quart of milk for her mother, lie in her bed staring at the stars—and the mountains were always there.

“You sound a little homesick,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You ever think of going back?”

“None of my family’s there anymore. It would just be me and the mountains and the Mormons.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I wish I could go home,” she said, very quietly.

And I whispered: “I’ll teach you to love it here, Bonnie.”

I threw in another quarter and called my pal in the D.A.’s office, Sally-Jo Watkins. From the name, you’d expect one of those exhausted Appalachian women 374 / SUSAN ISAACS

with fourteen children you see on Malnutrition U.S.A. documentaries. But Sally-Jo was strictly Canarsie and unexhausted.

She came from a very old but extremely undistinguished Brooklyn family. She always walked double-time and barked rather than talked. She was a career prosecutor, Chief Assistant D.A. for Suffolk County.

“What do you want? I’m busy. This about the Spencer case? Ralph’s doing that. Talk to Ralph.”

“I have to talk to you.”

“Why? We got channels here, same as you guys. I’m drowning in a sea of motions, Brady, you stupid, insensitive mick cop moron. Whatever you want, I can’t do it. Call Ralph.”

“He’s too inflexible. I can’t talk to him.”

“Well, I can’t talk to you.”

“Sally-Jo, I saved your ass at least three times when you were in the Homicide Bureau. You fucking owe me.”

“I bought you a steak dinner. Remember? When you got sprung from the bin? I had to wait till you dried out, otherwise it would have cost me a year’s salary, the way you drank.”

“Yeah, well, I put at least twenty thousand calories of cheeseburgers into you over the years, so let’s say you still owe me the equivalent of one more extremely large lunch.”

“Shoot, schmuck. And shoot fast.”

“Hypothetically, say I did everything right: preserved a crime scene till after the autopsy, had my men go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. No rain, no high winds.

Nothing to dirty the samples we took, nothing to make our job difficult. Ideal conditions.”

“Keep going.”

“Not much stuff except some circumstantial evidence good for making a DNA case. Hair. The vic-MAGIC HOUR / 375

tim’s lover’s hair in the bed