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

I put my hand on her back and guided her to her chair, then sat down across the desk from her. “Off the record. I want to know if you have a depositor named Bonnie Spencer—”

Rochelle cut me off. “Big no-no. You know I’m an honest woman. I can’t even give you a name. I’ll verify it with our lawyers, but I’m sure you have to give me a subpoena. Then, if she does have an account, I’ll have to call—”

“All I want to know is if she has an account here. No details. Please. A personal favor, Rochelle. It’s not like I’m some jerk you don’t know.”

“No, you’re a jerk I do know.” She exhaled slowly. Then she swiveled around in her chair, faced the computer terminal on her desk and put her hands on the keyboard. Her giant diamond ring, courtesy of Mr. Schnell, who’d bought the bank to get her attention, sparkled; her long red nails clicked as she typed. “Yes, she’s a depositor.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Tell me how much is in her account.”

“No. You’re a cop. Comply with the law. And don’t think you’re going to charm it out of me. I’ve already told you more than I should. Not one more thing. Just go to the D.A.

and get a subpoena.”

“But, Rochelle, with all that Bank Privacy Act shit, that means you’re going to have to notify her that there’s been an inquiry by a law enforcement agency.”

“Is that so terrible?”

“Yeah. Just hear me out. It’s terrible because Bonnie Spencer is a genuinely nice lady and I don’t 150 / SUSAN ISAACS

want her to get hurt in this investigation. Her ex-husband—”

“Oh, that Spencer!”

“Yeah, well, the powers that be are getting a little antsy, and it would help if I could just find out—fast, without waiting for a subpoena and notification—that she really is as okay as she seems to be, that no big money was going in or out of her account. I’d like to see her name out of this.

You know what I mean? This woman’s a real sweetheart.

She had nothing to do with a homicide. She had nothing to do with him. All I need are some numbers to back me up, so we can cross off her name. Time’s a factor here. I don’t want to risk some gung-ho first-year detective calling her employer and saying, ‘I’m from Suffolk County Homicide and I’m checking up on Bonnie Spencer.’ Please, Rochelle.

Help me help her.”

Rochelle’s nails went click-click again. “She has a hundred and five in her checking account. There’s regular activity, so I guess we’re her banker.” Click. “Six hundred thirty-four in a savings account, that last month had a balance of a little over seven hundred.” Click-click. “And her Visa card…she hardly ever uses it.”

I pointed to the computer screen. “What does all that tell you?”

“That her ex-husband was very behind on his alimony payments.”

“She wasn’t getting alimony.”

“In that case, she’s just plain poor.”

The only thing appealing about Bonnie’s next-door neighbor, Wendy Morrell, was her name; it conjured up a dewy virgin gamboling in a field of clover. In fact, in the morning light, Wendy looked less like Snow White and more like the witchy stepmother—in an olive-green jumpsuit. She had a face full of those

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air bubble things that grow under the skin. There was one large one on her left cheek, and I found my finger reaching up toward my own cheek, maybe trying to perform a symbolic bubblectomy; I put my hand down at my side.

“I mean, naturally I’ve been reading everything there is to read about the murder,” she said, “but in a million years it would never have occurred to me that Bonnie Spencer had any connection with Sy Spencer.”

Wendy Morrell was probably in her early thirties. Manhattan thin, a body that if seen in the Third World would evoke pity but that probably commanded admiration in the city.

Under the wide gold bracelet on her forearm, you could see the outline of her radius and ulna. Wendy’s hair was cut in that chopped-off style that only guys just out of basic training (or very, very beautiful women) should wear.

We stood by the front door of her modern house. She had not invited me in. Maybe she was an elitist bitch. Maybe she was embarrassed; houses like hers, million-dollar exercises in solid geometry, had, overnight, become Out on the South Fork. They’d been replaced by postmodern whiz-bangs, country houses so enormous that they seemed to have been built for a race of giants instead of the periodontists and pocketbook designers who lived in them. Wendy had planted herself smack in the middle of her doorway, as though afraid I’d elbow her aside in an attempt to see how rich people lived—or, if I was hip, to get a look at her hopelessly outdated high-tech kitchen and snicker at it.

“That those two Spencers lived on the same planet was a miracle,” she went on. “I mean, I don’t mean to denigrate her, but it’s such a contradiction of style: elegance versus gaucheness. You know? Look, she goes running. I’m the last person in the world to be a

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spokesperson for jogging suits. Am I going to make a case for pastel sweatpants and matching zip-ups? I know this may not mean a lot to you, but if she’s got a house in the Hamptons, not Kalamazoo or wherever she comes from, she should manage to have a little pride in her appearance, not wear clothes that look like she raided the boys’ locker room at the end of the school year. I mean, some sense of appropriateness must have rubbed off from Sy.”

“You knew him?”

“Well, we were never formally introduced. But you know what they say: there are basically three hundred people in the world.” She suddenly realized she was talking to a member of the four billion minus three