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

“Best way to be.”

“The incident I’m investigating—”

“I know what kind of an incident. They told me you were on the Homicide Squad. You need a whole department out there on Long Island just for homicide, huh?”

“Yeah. The victim was Bonnie’s ex-husband. He was shot with a .22. The perpetrator was a good shot. I’d like to rule out Bonnie.”

“What are you asking me?”

“I’m asking you whether you have any idea if she could shoot a .22.”

“I don’t know.”

“Your best guess.”

“My best guess is, a girl like Bonnie—a tomboy kind of girl—whose family owned a sporting goods store and whose dad was probably the damn finest shot in Ogden…I used to go up to Wyoming with him and a couple other fellas, hunting elk. Well, she was the apple of her father’s eye.

Possible he or one of her brothers taught her to shoot a .22.”

“Thank you.”

“Well now, you expect me to say she couldn’t have done it, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you did.”

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“Well, I won’t say it. She left Ogden. Went to Hollywood, then New York. Can’t issue any guarantees under those conditions, right?”

“Right.”

“But just between you and me, Detective Brady? You may be from Noooo Yorrrk and think you’re pretty wily, saying you’re trying to rule out Bonnie Bernstein. Sounds to me like you’ve got it in your head that she shot her former husband.

With malice aforethought. Maybe.” He took a long and very slow breath. “But if the girl you suspect is anything like the nice, smiley girl in my boy Eddie’s Mutual, you know what I think? I think you got yourself one lousy theory. You get me? I think you’re pissing into the wind.”

Robby Kurz placed his bet: “Fat Mikey LoTriglio. Okay, never convicted of anything, but his name has been linked with two mob hits. All he has to do is raise his fat finger, and someone dies.”

“No way,” I said. “Bonnie Spencer. Motive. Opportunity.”

Ray Carbone added his twenty to ours. “Who’s left?

Lindsay Keefe? All right. She may have felt cornered, her job, her reputation on the line. And she probably has a la-cuna of the superego. It would be too much like a movie if she did it, but I’ll go with her anyway.”

Charlie Sanchez was about to retire and didn’t care enough anymore to join the pool. He wrote down our bets, folded the money and slipped it into the pocket of his beloved suede vest.

The interrogation room we were in at Headquarters was better than a naked light bulb and a chair, but it wouldn’t win any awards for design excellence. Headquarters itself had originally been a county social services agency, and in the heart of the soft green

162 / SUSAN ISAACS

and brown fields of Yaphank, the building rose up, uncom-promisingly ugly. Inside, it was full of gray asphalt tile and orange plastic furniture—just to remind the meek that while they might be in line to inherit the earth, their actual lives were shit and likely to remain that way.

Four of us sat around the fake-wood table. Charlie, who’d been with the department for twenty years and was within weeks of becoming head of security for a shopping center in Bay Shore, stroked the vest his girlfriend had given him for his forty-second birthday. He wore it inside and outside, even in ninety-five-degree heat. He loved the vest almost as much as he loved his girlfriend. (His wife had given him a snow-blower for his birthday, probably in response to the electric pencil sharpener he’d given her for hers.)

“We got a missing-one-thousand-bucks situation,” Charlie began. He’d been doing background on Sy. “Here’s what I found out. At fourteen minutes past eight on Friday morning, Sy was at the cash machine at the Marine Midland Bank over in Southampton.”

“His secretary in New York said he told her he’d be getting cash for his trip to L.A.,” Ray added.

Charlie went on: “Sy had one of those preferred-customer cards, so he could withdraw up to a thou. Well, that’s what he withdrew. Did any of you guys come across a thousand bucks?”

Robby shook his head. “No. There was”—Robby checked his notebook—“a hundred and forty-seven bucks in his wallet.”

I closed my eyes, concentrated. Then I said: “Hey! Hold on! Listen to this timetable. Sy went to the bank at eight-fourteen. He got to the set in East Hampton eight thirty-five, eight-forty, which is about what it takes from Southampton to East Hampton if you don’t make any stops. When he got there, he stayed pretty much in his trailer, talking to people.

Right?

MAGIC HOUR / 163

That Gregory kid was around a lot, and we talked to everyone else who talked to Sy. Did anyone say anything about any cash changing hands? No. The people he was seeing were mainly technical—a special effects guy who was doing a fire and some gunshots, Nick Monteleone and his makeup lady. Spent a few minutes with Lindsay, but she was being fitted for a dress, so a seamstress and the costume design lady were there the whole time. He wasn’t talking to union guys or local cops or politicians—people he might pay off.

You with me?” Robby and Ray nodded. Charlie caressed his vest some more. “Okay, assuming he didn’t slip anyone a wad of cash, he leaves the set about eleven-fifteen with a thousand bucks in his pocket. Doesn’t stop at Bonnie’s this time. Instead, he seems to have gone straight home; he was there at ten of twelve. We have the cook’s word on that, because he asked for a green salad and bread for lunch, ASAP.”

“That’s lunch?” Charlie shook his head. “Can you believe it? A guy has a cook all to himself and he says, ‘Give me a salad.’ New York faggots, I swear to Christ. Makes me sick.”

“What does all this add up to, Steve?” Ray demanded.

“It adds up to that after he got home, Sy saw only one person besides the cook: