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

love, let us be true to one another,’” or “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’”—and for that second, you could see there had once been something between them.

“You never let me come into your house,” Germy said quietly, as we walked back onto the terrace. “You always had an excuse. The painters. Your mother was expecting company.”

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“We didn’t have any money. I couldn’t have even offered you a soda. And the place was falling apart. You lived here, in all this richness, and this was just your summer house.”

We fell silent for a minute because, although we had often discussed Roger Maris’s troubles, we had never spoken about our own; we had no idea where to take the conversation next. I got up, walked to the edge of the terrace and, for a minute, watched the brilliant red-and-white sail of a Wind-surfer skim across Mecox Bay. I turned back to Germy. “Remember your Sunfish? You got it for your sixteenth birthday.”

He nodded. “You let me sail it, and I took it out so far I was sure I was going to die or get in deep shit with the coast guard. I remember I was more afraid of the coast guard than of death.”

“That was when you were starting to get pretty wild. I remember the next summer, before college. You were drinking too much, even for a rebellious kid. I started…not to feel comfortable with you.”

“I know.”

“You were bragging about breaking into houses over the winter, trashing them—for fun.” He looked straight at me.

“Were you just bullshitting?”

“No. And it wasn’t just a little vandalism. I’d gone bad, Germ. I was stealing. Color TVs, stereos. Sold most of the stuff to a fence over in Central Islip. I pissed the money away.

Booze. Records. A leather jacket. Except one time I went to Yankee Stadium. Got a terrific seat, right near first. This was going to be my perfect day. But we lost. A shitty game.”

“When was that?”

“July of ’66.”

“A shitty year,” Germy recalled. “We finished last.”

“I remember. The first of many shitty years. For me. The Yankees got better. I didn’t. Not for a long time.” I separated my thumb and index finger by

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maybe an eighth of an inch. “This much,” I explained. “I missed being dead or in the slammer by this much.”

“That must be scary.”

“Yeah, it was.” I thought for a second. “Still is.”

C H A P T E R F I V E

By the time I finished with Germy, it was after three o’clock. And it was a Saturday afternoon and the set of Starry Night was closed down. So I had the movie people come to me in our temporary headquarters in the Southampton Village P.D. I’d gotten use of the Xerox/coffee machine room for interviews—with the understanding that I could be interrupted in the event of a catastrophic copying crisis.

The room was no more or less ugly than any other small, windowless, fluorescent-lighted, metal-and-green-leatherette-chaired government-bureaucracy utility room. Its stale air was perfumed with prehistoric coffee grounds and the fumes of copier fluid, its floor decorated with the pink and white and blue confetti of torn-off ends of Sweet ’n Lows, Equals and sugar packets, as well as with a dusting of white powder that was not a controlled substance but nondairy coffee lightener. It was no different from any other room where cops work: a place that was habitable yet degrading to the human spirit at the same time.

Victor Santana, the short-haired, thickly mustached, spiffy dude of a director who sat across from 97

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me, was willing himself to rise above his surroundings. He was doing a damn good job. He did not seem to belong in the room. In fact, he did not seem to belong anywhere except in a three-star restaurant, a four-star movie or a five-star hotel.

The guy was one suave package: a white shirt with a dark red tie, pale-gray slacks and a charcoal sports jacket made of some priceless fabric so exclusive a guy like me would never have heard of it.

Santana’s name was Hispanic, and he was a pretty intense beige, but his accent wasn’t Spanish. He sounded as if he was trying to have been educated at Oxford. It didn’t quite work; his diction, like his sideburns, was a little too clipped.

My guess was he wouldn’t deny his heritage, but neither would he cry “Caramba! ” to an offer to be grand marshal of the Puerto Rican Day parade.

He came off as urbane, the sort of guy James Bond would banter with at a chemin de fer table, whatever the hell chemin de fer is. But despite his civil smiles and even his I’m-so-ac-commodating dark-eyed glints, I knew I was getting nowhere fast. He seemed to be spouting the same essential script as Lindsay: Starry Night was great; Lindsay was a great actress; Sy Spencer had been a great producer. “Making a film,” he was explaining, veddy Britishly, each consonant a pearl, “is a collaborative process. I cannot tell you what a joy it was—artistically and personally—to work with Sy and Lindsay.”

So I said: “Mr. Santana, please cut the shit. We know for a fact that you and Lindsay Keefe were having an affair.”

His torso twitched, as if I had, for an instant, electrified his chair. “That is absolutely untrue!” he declared. He pronounced the word “ab-so-lyutely.”

“We have witnesses.” Of course, all we had was a secondhand report of a rocking trailer. But it was MAGIC HOUR / 99

worth a shot. “Witnesses who can testify to you and Ms.

Keefe—in your trailer.” Suddenly he appeared to be studying the veins in his hand. After a second, though, I realized he wasn’t into veins; he was communing with his wedding ring.

Santana was in his mid-thirties and had had a couple of successes. Maybe he was calculating how much each lurch of the trailer would cost him if his marriage blew up.