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

put her faith in the System. She’d be walking into a hellhole. Jail to her was movies about exploited women with pitiful stories and one twisted prison matron. To her, ugliness was a set designer’s vision. She didn’t know the lunatic screams, the rage, the violence, the stink. Her crack addicts were on NBC News; she had no idea.

“Now, you told me you were going to be very busy today, solving the case. How far did you get?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

I took her hand. She pulled it away. I’d forgotten I hadn’t mentioned that I loved her, or that I wasn’t marrying Lynne, so I reached out for her again. But she stood up and went over to my leather recliner. There was a pad and pen on the table next to it, and as she sat back, she picked up the pad, held it to her heart as if it were the ultimate mash note. “I read too many mysteries, see too many detective movies,”

she explained. “When I thought about the whole case, everything you told me, I wound up suspecting Victor Santana and Mrs. Robertson.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake?”

“Because he was jealous of Sy and knew Sy thought he was weak—and if Lindsay was going to be fired, he’d be next.”

“And Marian Robertson?”

“Who knows? Because Sy went strolling into the kitchen once too often and lifted a lid off a pot and MAGIC HOUR / 379

stuck his pinkie into her béarnaise sauce and sniffed it and put a dab on his tongue and suggested a soupçon more chervil.”

“Too bad you’re over the hill. You’d be some great cop.”

“You’re not impressed by my deductive powers?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think you’d be. That’s why I gave up looking at the big picture—because I keep trying to turn it into a movie.

I decided to concentrate on Sy. Analyze my last few days with him, factor in everything you told me.”

“Go ahead.”

She pushed back so the recliner was practically horizontal.

She glanced from me to the pad and back again. “Think of Sy’s behavior. What was out of character for him?”

“Not concentrating when he was humping you.”

“Let’s just call it distracted behavior,” she suggested.

“Distracted behavior. Third-rate fucking. Whatever you want.”

“It was second-rate,” she said. “With you it was third-rate.”

“No. You never had it so good. You know it. Admit it.”

“Nope. Anyway, Sy was distracted. That could have meant something big was happening—or about to happen. Now, what else?” I thought she was going to answer her own question, but she was waiting for me.

I thought about it. What in the last few days of Sy Spencer’s life had in any way been atypical? Love. “He’d fallen in love with Lindsay,” I began. “And she hurt him. All of a sudden, the ultimate victimizer was a victim. It must have come as a real blow to him.”

“Right. And so what was going on? Under the best 380 / SUSAN ISAACS

of circumstances, Sy was a vengeful man if someone crossed him. And here was the object of his affection or obsession, his love, cheating on him. He was going to get even.”

“But ultimately, he couldn’t get even.” I told her what Eddie Pomerantz had said, that because of money, Sy would wind up keeping her on the picture.

Bonnie’s eyes got huge. “That’s even better!” She jumped out of the recliner, came right over to me. “Think!” she ordered.

“Think about what?”

“Vengeance is one thing. That’s what I was concentrating on. But how could he get vengeance and money?”

I bolted up. “Jesus! The completion insurance!”

Bonnie grabbed onto my jacket sleeve. “If lightning struck Lindsay, he’d get his money, he’d get his new actress.”

“And he’d get his revenge,” I said slowly. “Okay, but let’s slow down. The theory’s good, but the truth of the matter is, Lindsay wasn’t struck by lightning. Sy was. How does that figure?”

“Stephen, ask yourself: Who was killed? Sy?”

“Of course Sy.”

“Or someone in a white, hooded bathrobe who was standing at the edge of the pool, the way Lindsay Keefe did when she came home from the set and did her laps?”

“Someone small,” I said.

And Bonnie said: “Yup. Small, just like Sy.”

C H A P T E R N I N E T E E N

Bonnie was all juiced up, talking too fast, bopping in a U-shaped path around the bed, stopping each time at the shaded window to bounce on the balls of her bare feet and peek out. She was not at her best, excited in a confined space.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ve got to figure out if this really is a possibility, and then—”

“Stop. I’m running this show, not you. I’m the lead detective. You’re zero.”

“Be quiet. I know what I’m doing.” She perched on the dresser and swung her leg back and forth fast, like a pendu-lum running amok.

“With all due respect, you may be semi-smart, but when it comes to police procedure you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, and we don’t have time to debate hierarchy, so I’m in charge.” She put her fingers up to her mouth, as though hiding a yawn induced by being too, too bored by such childish jockeying for position. “Don’t give me that yawn crap, Bonnie.”

“I’m not giving you yawn crap.”

“Now think; don’t just shoot off your mouth. In 381

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the time you knew him, did Sy ever make threats against anyone, or wish a person dead in a way that made you fear for their lives? Beyond the ‘I hope he dies’ we talked about.”

She swung her leg some more and finally shook her head.

“But that’s not to say he wasn’t spiteful. He had his hate list.

If thirty years after the fact he could hurt someone who called him Peewee in junior high school, he definitely would. But he didn’t think of revenge in terms of death. He didn’t want to cause physical pain; he wanted to inflict maximum emotional pain on anyone who ever got in his way.”

I added another