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

for her house. It was dated August 4, so she’d decided to put it on the market while there were still summer people around to come, look and oooh: “Oh, Ian, the exposed beams!” Had she taken up with Sy yet? Was she selling it because she was already having dreams of a grand house by the ocean, a screening room, charge accounts, a wedding ring? Or was the real estate listing pre-Sy? Had she been at the end of her rope? I jotted down the broker’s number.

I had to work fast—and neat. Neat wasn’t too much of a problem since Bonnie’s papers were just this side of chaotic.

Still, this was not exactly what you could call a legal search, so I couldn’t risk leaving any trace.

I went through her bedroom too, finding, mainly, that she kept the local library in business, that although her tangle of bras were what you’d expect

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from a female jock, utilitarian and uninspiring, her panties weren’t: little string bikinis, black, red. I was starting to imagine her, but I cut myself off. Time. Also, there was something about being in her bedroom, its peacefulness, with its tied-back white lace curtains, plain four-poster bed and old-fashioned dresser with a white doilylike thing on top of it, that made me uneasy. I wanted out of there. I was half out the door, on my way downstairs, when I turned back to check out her closet.

Bingo again! Inside the toe of a pair of boots—one of those places women inevitably hide their valuable stuff—I found it: a wad of cash rolled up in a rubber band. Eight hundred and eighty dollars. More than she had in her savings account.

Big bucks for a poor girl like Bonnie.

Change from a thousand.

C H A P T E R N I N E

What was so terrible? Sex, even with someone as fabulous as Lynne, can become routine. So big deal: you superimpose another woman over your dearly beloved and suddenly a predictable quickie becomes the Fuck That Shook the World. It can happen, especially if a guy’s pattern has always been to step out a lot. Is that so bad? There is no betrayal. Nobody gets hurt.

But it wasn’t just that one brief late-night fantasy. My whole life—not just the case—was starting to focus on Bonnie. Like when I’d gone to the bank to speak to Rochelle, I stopped at the cashier’s for a couple of rolls of quarters. More than a couple: enough to hit every pay phone on the South Fork. And so once or twice—all right, three or four times—a day I’d drop in a quarter just to hear Bonnie say “Hello.”

Once, when I heard the tightness in her throat (she must have known it would be another hang-up, because who the hell else would call her?), I stood by the phone outside the East Hampton post office and got this terrible lump in my own throat; I wanted to cry for her.

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Maybe I was so overcome with pity because an hour earlier I’d been looking over all the records we’d pulled on her, and discovered on the printout from Motor Vehicles that besides being five foot nine inches, which was not exactly a feminine asset, she was forty-five years old. Forty fucking five! I did the math three times. I couldn’t believe it. But what kind of sense did it make for me to be getting all choked up with pity for a put-upon, middle-aged loser if I was the schmuck standing out in the rain, praying she’d give me another “hello” before she slammed down the phone?

Listen, I told myself, this is definitely one of those sexual obsession things. But instead of ignoring it, or figuring it out, I kept borrowing T.J.’s cars, so Bonnie wouldn’t spot my Jag. I drove by her house on the way to work and on the way home. Sometimes in between. All I had to do was spot a shadow passing by an upstairs window, or catch the flutter of a white curtain, and I would feel God’s grace upon me.

One time, Moose was lying on the front lawn, giving her front paw a manicure with her big pink tongue, and I had this dizzying, blood-to-the-head flush of joy.

And when I’d searched her house, I’d looked in her garage right before I left and saw an old Jeep Wrangler. It made me so incredibly, stupidly happy that Bonnie drove a four-wheel-drive recreational vehicle.

But I felt the same degree of happiness when I found the wad of cash in her boot. I thought: Fantastic! I’ve really nailed the bitch.

So when Carbone and the lieutenant, a guy named Jack Byrne, who was so shy or weird that he whispered instead of talked, called me in and said, Listen, here are a couple of people to see in the city. The first wife and Sy’s divorce lawyer. You’ll have to go, not Robby. We need someone with a little finesse-MAGIC HOUR / 177

…Well, I should have been relieved. Here it was: a chance to get the hell off the South Fork, shake off the fixation, stop the Bonnie mania, cut the shit.

Except as I drove west on the Long Island Expressway, all I could think about was her dark, shiny, sweet-smelling hair.

I wanted to stroke it back off her forehead, play with it, wrap it around my finger after we finished making love. But also, I wanted to see it inside a small plastic envelope: Government Exhibit D.

Goddamn, I wanted to take T.J.’s minivan, park it down the street and watch her house all day, catch a glimpse of her. I didn’t want to work. And I definitely didn’t want to go to Manhattan.

Imagine a cartoon of a snooty, stick-up-the-ass rich WASP.

That’s what Felice Tompkins Spencer Vanderventer looked like, except in 3-D. Yes, she’d heard her first husband had been murdered. Sorry.

Not really sorry or terribly sorry; she didn’t gush.

Everything about Felice was