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

“Shit. All right, if I get finished by ten, ten-thirty, can I pick you up and take you over to my place?”

Just as Lynne was saying, “Okay, but not too late a night, because I have a huge pile of test results for next year’s kids I have to go through,” a Southamp-MAGIC HOUR / 113

ton Village cop appeared at the door with a surprise guest: Gregory J. Canfield.

Gregory gaped at the room, slack-jawed, trying to register everything, as if the decor—including the brown-stained hot plate of the Mr. Coffee machine and me with my feet up—was going to be the subject of his final in Advance Set Design at NYU film school. Now that there was no corpse to upset his delicate balance, he was Mr. Movie Man.

I said, “People. Speak to you later,” to Lynne and “Thanks”

to the cop who’d shown Gregory in. Then I hung up, swung my feet off the Xerox machine and told Gregory to sit. But he barely got through the door when he stopped short. You could see his mind moving in for a close-up; he stood before the bulletin board, staring at a yellowing FBI Most Wanted list, at hand-printed signs offering Doberman-mix puppies, an ’81 Datsun 280 ZX and a model 12 Winchester pump-action shotgun, probably wishing someone else from NYU

was there to share this Moment of Authenticity.

“Okay, now you know what lower middle class looks like, Gregory. Time to sit down.” He did. “You’re here to help me. Right?”

He nodded. He looked slightly less repulsive than the day before, mainly because instead of baggy shorts, he was wearing baggy slacks. His skeletal white legs, with their bulbous kneecaps, were covered. “I remembered what I couldn’t remember last night.”

“Great,” I replied. I waited. He was staring at my holster, which was clipped onto my belt. “You remembered something?”

“You asked me if there were any threats made to Sy Spencer.”

“And?”

“I don’t know if you’d classify this as a threat. I 114 / SUSAN ISAACS

mean, a genuine threat.” Gregory hesitated. Now he was gazing at me with the same passionate intensity he’d directed at the bulletin board. He’d obviously decided I was the star of this movie. He flushed. He fidgeted. He beamed at me. I was his True Detective.

“Listen, Gregory, anything you think is even remotely threatening—a dirty look—is something I want to hear about.”

“Did you know Sy had an ex-wife who lives in Bridgehampton?”

My heart gave a thump. I sat up, alert. Damn it, I’d been right. There was something about her. “Bonnie Spencer,” I said. His face fell. “Hey, if by this time I didn’t know Sy had an ex in the neighborhood, what the hell kind of detective would I be?” Gregory still looked like he was debating whether or not to be clinically depressed. “Now come on.

You’re my key man in this investigation. Okay, I gave you a name: Bonnie Spencer. But now it’s your job to fill me in.”

“Well, Sy married her right at the beginning of his career as producer. She’d written the scenario…That’s another term for screenplay. It’s more common in Britain. In any case, she’d written a movie called Cowgirl in the late seventies.

Unpretentious film. Her credit was Bonnie Bernstein.”

That big Utah jockette didn’t strike me as a Bernstein.

“Had she ever been married before Sy?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, go on.”

It’s funny; as he was talking, I realized that Bonnie had been on my mind since I’d left her that morning. I couldn’t shake the images I had of her. One was the real Bonnie as I’d seen her. The other one was even more vivid, and unconnected with reality; she was in some sort of sleeveless thing, a dress or a tank top, that bared part of her broad shoulders.

I could see

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her arms and shoulders: strong, smooth, with the sheen of a deep tan. Incredibly silky skin. It was really, well, an exciting image—and a strange one, because the bare-shouldered Bonnie in my mind’s eye was so incredibly desirable, and really had nothing to do with the big girl in the big T-shirt I’d interviewed.

“The marriage broke up,” Gregory reported, “and she went into total eclipse as a writer.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know.”

Maybe, I thought, Bonnie Spencer reminded me of someone else, some large, bewitching girl out of my past.

That made sense. But my house was no more than four miles from hers; I could have passed her one summer evening on one of my runs and focused in on her best few square inches.

Or maybe I’d given her a half second of consideration in my bar-hopping days, before moving on to someone better. Who the hell knew? In all those years of drinking—especially toward the end—there were black holes in my memory. We could have met at a cocktail lounge and discussed Truth and Beauty all night, and it would be a total blank.

“From what I’ve heard,” Gregory went on, “Bonnie is pretty much of a zero. Her only real significance is that she used to be married to Sy. But even then, I probably wouldn’t have heard about her if she hadn’t come to the set.”

Right. Bonnie had mentioned she’d dropped in to see Sy.

“What happened?”

Gregory rubbed his palms together as though he was heating them up for a passionate prayer. “One of the other P.A.s came running over to me, saying Sy’s ex-wife was there and what should he do. But he couldn’t do anything, because she was right there behind him. She’d followed him. To see her, she’s

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this very plain Jane type, but you could understand how she must have learned a thing or two from Sy, because before I could say a word or go get one of the assistant directors, she walked right past me and knocked on the trailer door. I said,

‘Excuse me, miss, but that trailer is private. I’ll have to ask you to please wait over by the craft services table.’