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

silver Olds Cutlass, which was actually gray, and me—to take Bonnie to Headquarters for a blood test. I couldn’t force myself to go along for the ride; I didn’t have the guts to watch Bonnie being driven to her own funeral. As soon as we passed the two-block-long run of stores that was downtown Bridgehampton, I cut north off the main street and tore along the back MAGIC HOUR / 219

roads until I got to the highway. Then I floored it. A hundred and ten.

Big stud in a Jaguar. When I got to Headquarters, way ahead of them, I couldn’t even make myself go into Homicide. I went into a stall in the men’s room and sat down on the can.

I was afraid to face Bonnie.

No, I was afraid to face what I had done. I sat there, heart hammering, realizing I was the butt of some Almighty joke: This woman who somehow had come to mean a lot—no, everything—to me, this woman who I couldn’t imagine living without, was, due to my sharp investigatory skills, my crafty persuasiveness, my flawless logic, going to go to jail and would come out an old lady. I would never see this woman, this enchantress, again.

Whatever the hell her magic was, this woman was able to do what no one else had ever done before: bring me to life.

But before I could solve the mystery of what her power was, I solved the mystery of Sy Spencer’s murder. Oh, I was one shrewd dude. I’d broken her spell.

So now I was totally, wholly and entirely without her, without any hope of touching her or talking to her, for the rest of what will be, at best, thirty or forty years of my lifeless life. I would move through marriage, kids, more homicides, grandchildren, retirement, as though moving through a thick and dirty fog.

There I was, a real man. A homicide detective, sitting on a toilet because I was afraid to face some killer with a shining braid who makes good coffee and has a wonderful dog.

But I got myself under control, except for one or two trembling breaths. Still, I couldn’t leave for another five minutes because some guy from Sex Crimes or Robbery could come in to take a leak and

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when I passed him, I might suddenly get the shakes, or even burst into tears. He would realize then that, somehow, I was not the tough guy he and I and everybody else were so convinced I was.

So I just hid out in the toilet until I could become a man again.

Bonnie and Gideon, while not true locals, had probably lived on the South Fork long enough to know how to get to the Long Island Expressway without having to wait in the summer traffic caused by Yorkers, who, while normally the world’s pushiest people, were totally feeble when it came to driving: sitting passively in their overheating cars, moving at the speed of a slug, on their way to buy a bottle of balsam-ic vinegar for thirty dollars. Their city brains could not comprehend the concept of turning off main roads. Naturally, all this would change the second New York magazine published an “Insiders Tell Their Secret Hamptons Shortcuts”

article.

But Bonnie and Gideon wouldn’t take a shortcut. What was waiting for them that would make them want to rush over to Headquarters? And Robby and Thighs weren’t going to push them; they knew just enough about the South Fork of Suffolk to know that a road on a map did not necessarily mean a road in reality. Why risk a wrong turn, wind up in the middle of a field of cauliflower and have Gideon reconsider and decide to spend a few days fighting the blood test, litigating the unlitigable? So they’d creep along with all the other cars. They could be another thirty, forty minutes. An hour even.

I left the men’s room and dragged myself into Homicide.

Since we work on shifts, two or three guys share a desk.

Hugo the Sour Kraut was at mine. I waved at him to stay put and sat down at Robby’s. Two minutes later, Ray Carbone stuck his head into

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the room. He was wearing his congenial expression, like he wanted to talk about the exit wound in Sy’s skull, or the Jungian theory of personality, so I picked up the phone, dialed the number for time and made a show of holding on, expectant, like I was waiting to speak to some Ultimate Witness. “Eastern Daylight Time, ten-fourteen…and twenty seconds,” the computer voice said. Carbone saluted goodbye and left. I was too exhausted to even hang up the phone, so I just sat there, listening to time passing. “Eastern Daylight Time, ten-sixteen…and thirty seconds.”

I opened Robby’s drawer, searching for a pen so I could look like I was taking notes. No pens, but there were a couple of near-empty bottles of breath freshener drops, a business card from Mikey LoTriglio’s lawyer and, toward the back, Robby’s file on Mikey. I took it out: Michael Francis LoTriglio, aka Mikey LoTriglio, aka Fat Mikey, aka Mickey Lopkowitz, aka Mr. Piggy, aka Michael Trillingham. Faxed forms and computer printouts from NYPD and the FBI showing his arrest record: extortion, loan-sharking, conspir-acy to sell stolen securities, tax evasion. And homicide, twice.

Richie Garmendia of the Retail Butchers Union had been found floating under a West Side pier with his skull battered in. And Al Jacobson, an accountant for a carting company, was missing and presumed dead, death reportedly caused by being dropped in a cement mixer and thereby becoming part of Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan.

With all his arrests, Mikey had been brought to trial only once, on tax evasion. Well, twice. Two hung juries, and the government had severed him from their case.

“Eastern Daylight Time, ten-eighteen…and ten seconds.”

I closed my eyes and pictured Bonnie as I’d last seen her; she had changed clothes to come to Headquarters. I’d watched her