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

the slight stink of degeneration. That odor of decay had always been there, but it was elusive, except when I sat on the living room couch long enough. There, at the heart of the house, it could not be ignored.

But if I was just passing through—which, during the years after my father left, was how I thought of myself, a low-class transient who happened to have the last name Brady—I’d smell, instead of underlying decay, the tangy carnation scent of the room spray my mother had boosted from Saks, the stuff they used to smog dressing rooms after ladies with gamy underarms tried on Better Dresses.

On the rare occasions I visited after I’d moved out, I must have made an unconscious shift and begun breathing through my mouth, because I stopped noticing the smell. But as I led Bonnie to the staircase, I got a killer whiff of Mildew Plus.

I was embarrassed. I hoped that someday I could really unload, tell her my history, but for now I hoped 411

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she’d think well of my background. I didn’t want her to notice the stink of my family’s house, or the dry, blackened edges of the rips in the gray stairway runner. I wanted her to believe we were poor but nice, not that we were poor and so bitter we couldn’t bestow any kindness on our surroundings.

When we got to the second or third step, she finally turned and faced me. “Maybe I’d better wait downstairs.” I didn’t bother to answer. What the hell could I do? Offer her a seat on the Odorama couch? That way, when I heard my mother come home from work, I’d have to run downstairs in time to say, Mom, this is Bonnie Spencer, the Jew whose ex-husband was murdered in Southampton, and my mother could say, Oh, yes, that was the old Munsey place. Paine Munsey.

He’s in sugar. They’re up in Little Compton now. They couldn’t bear the new element, so they sold.

I put my hand on the small of her back. “It won’t take long.” I propelled her a little harder, and she continued up the stairs. I loved the chance to touch her.

But it was more than wanting her with me. It made sense to let Bonnie hear what my brother had to say before I let her go. She was so smart; maybe she could pick up some small, free-floating fact that could be added to the equation and, finally, make it balance. Sure, Easton had been in the city the whole day of the murder, but there might be a snatch of a phone conversation, a note, a memo—some indication of hostility—he’d absorbed subliminally the day before.

Could he have picked up even a single word—like “rifle,”

“shoot,” “pool,” “insurance” or “Lindsay”—soon after the “if lightning struck” conversation at dailies?

I thought: What if one of those words had some-MAGIC HOUR / 413

thing to do with Bonnie? All of a sudden, on the last of those shadowy steps, I felt what I’d always felt as a kid. Not a memory, or déjà vu. The feeling itself—empty, and so sad.

I knew she couldn’t have done it.

But what if she had? Well, then I would be what I was before. Nothing. My life offered only two compensations: baseball and work. But neither the Yankees nor the Suffolk County Police Department was set up to do the big job, save lost souls. And all the drugs I had tried—beer, pot, peyote, hash, yellows, women, ’ludes, LSD, booze, heroin, more women, more booze, Lynne—in the end had given me no peace either; they’d just taken the edge off for a little while.

Only Bonnie Spencer had made me believe that, truly, I might be redeemed.

What if I was wrong about her? What could my future be? I could drink again, and die. Or I could become one of those old retired cops, clutching a felt hat in my hands, keeping busy shuffling between daily Mass at Queen of the Most Holy Rosary and AA meetings, until death came.

But I knew she didn’t do it.

When I guided Bonnie into Easton’s room, he wasn’t the only one who was surprised. Bonnie was. Surprised, angered.

Easton had stolen Sy Spencer’s ties! Her hands became fists; she could have decked him. There they were—blue ties with tiny stirrups, green with minuscule anchors, red with itty-bitty French flags—laid out on the bed, ready to be packed for Easton’s trip to California to meet with Philip Scholes, the director, about his new job. There was no doubt that they were Sy’s: Easton could never have afforded them, plus I’d seen dozens of them on special hooks on a section of Sy’s giant remote-control revolving clothes rack the night of the murder,

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when I did a walk-through of the house. And—Bonnie’s face was so grim—there were Sy’s sweaters, too, on that bed!

Cotton knits and cashmeres meant to be fashionably baggy on a little guy like Sy, sweaters that would just, barely, fit Easton. Her expression declared: Arrest this man!

And Easton’s expression? Furious, sure, at another of my tiptoed instrusions. He stood legs apart, arms crossed over his chest, maintaining his dignity despite the fact that all he was wearing was one of those shortie shaving robes, and a particularly hideous one. But he was also confused: I know who this woman with Steve is, but I can’t place her. And embarrassed too, as all three of us stared at over a thousand bucks’ worth of accessories from the wardrobe of the ultra-suave (and ultra-dead) Seymour Ira Spencer.

I suppose my expression was something less than sunny, reflecting my disgust at my brother’s pennyante thievery. I could just see him, hanging around, waiting for us to take down the crime-scene tape and go home, so he could do a search-and-destroy through Sy’s closets under the guise of Setting Things in Order. My guess was that if I looked through Easton’s drawers, I’d find cuff links, or one of those mini-VCRs, a