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

that Victor Santana, the director, was renting a house that had a gun rack—and the owner confirmed a .22 was missing! Oh, no—not Santana. Lindsay! She knew Sy was going to California to replace her, and she just snapped. Can you believe, she went to a sporting goods store five minutes from the Starry Night set and bought ammo. She was wearing dark sunglasses—like the guy at the store had never seen a movie and wouldn’t recognize her! Listen, I tell Bonnie, I know it’s been hell for you. I’m sorry. And Bonnie says, Thank God, and she’s so grateful she puts her arms around me and I say, It’s okay, but then I rub my face against the softness of her skin and one thing leads to another and we’re inside, in her 188 / SUSAN ISAACS

bedroom, having incredible, sweaty sex that lasts the whole night.

The daydream lasted all the way to Southampton, to the point where I was crying out Bonnie, baby! and about to come for the fourth time, when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the turnoff to Lynne’s. That’s when I cooled down enough for my brain to start functioning again.

And it told me that no matter how many phony alibis he had, it wasn’t Mikey or Lindsay who killed Sy Spencer. In my heart I knew it was Bonnie.

It was confirmed. It was confirmed by Bonnie’s real estate agent that Bonnie had been expecting big things from Sy. I finally reached the agent at home. She answered her phone with a hearty “Hi! Regina!” She sounded like one of those fervently friendly divorcées, women abandoned by rich men, stuck on the South Fork, who con other women with rich husbands into houses so expensive that the husbands will feel fucked over and so, after an exorbitant season or two, leave, thus creating still more real estate agents.

She was saying: “I told Bonnie, ‘Hon, this is not a seller’s market. Hold on to your house. Wait.’” It was after nine at night, but the agent’s voice was still horribly hearty, although a little mushy around the edges, probably from two or three gimlets. “But she said she really needed the money and to try.”

“Did she say what she was going to do if she sold it?” I asked.

“Let me think.” I waited. “Something about going back to wherever it was she came from, even though I told her,

‘Bonnie, you can’t go home again.’ Right?”

“Any interest in the house?”

“One or two offers, but very low-ball, and she was MAGIC HOUR / 189

holding out for the asking price, which was very unrealistic, and believe me, I told her so.”

“And then?”

“I called to ask if I could come over and show the house to people, and all of a sudden she was saying, Sorry, I have guests. This happened two or three times. Well, finally I said, Bonnie, they’re not beating down the door to buy an upper-midrange listing, because you literally have hundreds of them from Quogue to Montauk, so the next time I call maybe you can take your guests to the beach or into town for a half hour. And then she laughed—she’s got a sense of humor—and said it wasn’t guests, it was a man. And the next day she called me to put the deal on hold, because things were really looking up. I asked her if that was French for man, and she said yes. Like, he was a very high-powered type, but he was still managing to see her every single day for the last few days, and so she wasn’t about to have people looking at the house with that kind of interest. So I said, Marriage-type interest? And she said she’d settle for someone’s hand to hold on New Year’s Eve. Sweet. Right?

But the thing of it was, she was staying put. To me, that meant she was thinking about more than a New Year’s Eve date; it had a certain ring of seriousness. You know? I remember, I kidded her and asked if her man had a friend, and we had a good laugh about two old dames like us—not really old, we’re in our forties—having a double wedding.”

So Bonnie had expected something from Sy. Well, why not? She was putting out plenty. That, too, confirmed: the DNA report was on Carbone’s desk first thing the next morning. The hair I had gotten off Bonnie’s head was a genetic match to the hair on the headboard in Sy’s guest room.

She had been in the house with Sy the afternoon of his murder.

Motive? Yeah. And now, definitively, opportunity.

C H A P T E R T E N

I’d gotten Bonnie out of the tub. She was wearing a blue-and-white-striped bathrobe, and the bottom of her ponytail was wet. Her wrists glowed from too-hot water. I guess she’d been trying to soak out the tension. Maybe she’d succeeded, although her eyes were puffy, probably from sleeplessness, possibly from crying. She had to know she was on our Hit Parade. Maybe she even knew she was Number One.

But she wasn’t doing any wounded-petunia number. She crossed her arms and stood up straight, an I’m-not-taking-any-shit stance. “I’d be grateful if you could come by during normal business hours,” she said. Her crossed arms pushed her breasts up. She saw me staring and, slowly, trying to look casual, lowered her arms and slipped her hands into her pockets. I pictured myself standing behind her, kissing her sweet-smelling hair, the nape of her neck, then slipping my hands into her pockets and feeling her.

It was one of those she-knows-that-I-know-that-she-knows moments. We both knew she wasn’t wearing anything under the robe. We both knew I was aware of it. And we both knew if I tugged at the sash, the

190

MAGIC HOUR / 191

robe would open. We’d do it standing up in that front hallway of her house because we were so wild for each other we couldn’t