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

be an Oscar winner. He says, ‘Mikey, get your tuxedo cleaned for a year from March.’ That’s all I needed to know.”

“You didn’t hear anything about any problems with the movie?”

Mikey smiled. Well, the corners of his lips moved upward.

He crossed his arms and rested them on his belly. “What problems?”

“Problems like the movie was looking like a piece of shit.”

“Fuck you. I didn’t hear nothin’ like that.”

“Problems like the only way to save it was to get rid of Lindsay Keefe, which would have put the producers—that’s you—a few million deeper into the hole before they even began again.”

“Bullshit,” Mikey said.

“You were on the phone a lot with Sy Spencer last week.

What were you talking about?” Robby inquired.

Mikey looked at his lawyer, who seemed to be lost in wonder, beholding his shoelace. “You from Harvard!” he bellowed. “Look alive. My memory isn’t so good. I need a reminder. Maybe I happened to mention it to you. What was I talkin’ to Sy about last week? I think Sy and I might have been on the phone a couple of times, but for the life of me I can’t remember what we said.”

“I think you did mention that you had the most MAGIC HOUR / 171

general conversation with Mr. Spencer. Hello, how are you, how are things going—and he assured you all was well.”

“That’s right,” Mikey said. He rotated his head and looked Robby right in the eye. “All was well. And then—a fuckin’

bullet. Two fuckin’ bullets. I gotta tell you, a piece of me died when Sy went. We were like flesh and blood. When we were kids we’d follow his old man and my old man around through one of the processing plants, and while they talked about all the cheap shit they could stuff into one salami, Sy and me talked about…Life.”

“Life? ” I repeated.

“Yeah. Life. Like philosophy. Now I remember. We were talkin’ about philosophy last week, on the phone.” His lawyer put a restraining hand on Mikey’s huge, sausagelike thigh, but Mikey either didn’t feel it or was ignoring it. “There we were, two businessmen, but we’re such good friends we don’t talk business. We talk…Plato!”

“Where were you last Friday night, Mikey?” Robby asked.

“You mean what’s my alibi?”

“Mr. LoTriglio was at Rosie’s, a bar in the meat district,”

the lawyer said. “He is widely known there. A good many people saw him, and several engaged him in conversation.”

“Talking Plato?” I asked.

“No, you stupid asshole,” Mikey answered. “Talkin’ fuckin’

liverwurst.”

One of the guys I sometimes ran with, T.J., a marathoner, owned a couple of video stores on the South Fork. He was in love with my Jag, so I made a deal with him. Whenever I wanted to be inconspicuous, I could take one of his married-man cars—his Honda Accord or Plymouth Voyager—and leave my

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car in his garage. At a little after four in the afternoon, I parked the Voyager across from Bonnie’s house and waited.

Surveillance had always been a snap for me. I’d bring along a bottle of club soda, a Thermos of coffee, and a jar to pee in, sit back and enter into some kind of twilight state.

It was like being asleep with my eyes open; I could keep watch, but my mind was someplace else, and I’d be totally unaware of the passage of time. I’d know that I’d sat through a whole night when the sky turned red at sunrise.

But now I was itchy, looking at my watch every couple of minutes, as if to encourage it, wishing that I’d stopped at the luncheonette on the way over for a sundae because I felt like I needed a hit of chocolate. I was annoyed with myself that I hadn’t sent one of the younger guys to do this job.

Finally, though, it wasn’t that long a wait.

She came out at five o’clock, dressed for a run. The weird thing was, she was dressed exactly the way I would dress for running. Shorts and a T-shirt, wool crew socks, with a light sweatshirt tied around her waist, in case it got cool down by the ocean. She was carrying a red ball; Moose was barking with joy at her side. I slid down in the seat. She braced herself against her mailbox, stretched her calf muscles and then her quads. What a pair of legs! They looked like she’d been captain of the girls’ soccer team since nursery school. She and Moose started out at a nice clip, picking up more speed as they rounded the corner and headed down toward the beach.

Jesus, I thought, as they disappeared, I really am in love with that dog. Maybe because it was black, it reminded me of a Labrador we’d had at the farm when I was little, Inky, a dumb, sweet-natured bitch who treated me and Easton as if we were her puppies, watching us play, barking if we wandered off

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too far, growling at anybody who drove up to the house and approached us.

I pulled on a pair of the thin rubber gloves we used for crime-scene work, turned off my beeper and checked out the area. Clear. I crossed the street, studying the house. I could probably sneak in through a basement window; even if I had to break a pane, she might not notice for days. Or I might be able to jimmy open the back door. But, as I suspected, neither was necessary. Bonnie had left the front door unlocked.

Even if she ran like hell and just threw the ball once down at the beach, I had a clear twenty minutes. But I worked the upstairs first, in case I heard her and had to get out the back door.

Bingo! She used one of the bedrooms as an office, and there, under a big framed poster from the movie Cowgirl, beside a computer half-covered with stickum notes, in a messy, overstuffed folder marked “Pending,” was a Xeroxed real estate listing