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

“Let me finish. She said, ‘His name is Stephen 240 / SUSAN ISAACS

Brady.’” I sat across from him in the booth, still shaking my head no. “I remember your name, because we had this long…well, amusing discussion about whether Brady is a WASP or an Irish name and about the…sexual proclivities of each group. Bonnie said she’d ask you what you were the next time she saw you.” Gideon took a packet of Equal and sprinkled a dusting of the powder into his coffee. “She had no doubt that she’d see you again. That was the funny part: her absolute certainty that the night had been special. She’d been around a long time, knew the ropes. She was never given to self-deception. She knew what happens when you ask someone you meet in a bar—”

“What bar?”

“The Gin Mill. Over on—”

“I know where it is. Go on.”

“What else is there to say? Bonnie knew that when you invite a man you meet in a bar to come back to your house, you don’t expect him to send flowers the next day.”

“She said I sent flowers?”

“No. A metaphor for romance. But she felt something had happened between the two of you. Something out of the ordinary.” I rested my forehead in the palm of my hand and rubbed, back and forth. “You can’t have forgotten. Or even if she had been just another pickup to you, seeing her, seeing the house—”

“I’m telling you, I have no memory.”

Gideon’s young, handsome, squished-nosed face looked more uncomprehending than angry. “Why the vendetta if you have no memory?”

“There’s no vendetta. She’s guilty.”

His spoon clanged against the glass as he stirred, but his voice was very gentle. “Why didn’t you ask MAGIC HOUR / 241

one of your colleagues to take over the Bonnie aspect of the investigation?”

“There was no reason to have someone else step in. I never met her before.”

“But you did. It happened.”

It took a very long time, but at last I said: “Look, I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for almost four years. But there are blanks in my life. Days, maybe weeks I’ll never be able to recall. Maybe…There were a lot of women. For all I know, she might have been one of them. I had this feeling almost from the beginning that she looked familiar. I figured I’d seen her around town.”

“You don’t deny it, then.”

“No. But I don’t admit it either. Maybe I spent the night with her. Maybe I told her she was a terrific person. It was one of the things I always said: ‘It’s not just the sex, babe.

It’s you. You’re a terrific person.’ But if I did spend some time with her, I’ll never know what I did or what I said.”

“For the record, you told her you loved her.”

“But I never saw her again, did I?”

Gideon sat back in the booth and crossed his arms over his chest. Relaxed, conversational. “She said you were heavier then.” I’d dropped twenty pounds after I’d stopped drinking and started running. “And you had a mustache.

Thick, droopy.” Yes. “That’s why it took her a minute to realize it was you at her door. And do you know what went through her mind then? She thought: Who cares why he never called? He’s back!”

“Mr. Friedman, don’t you get it? Either she did a little research on me in town and made this whole thing up—or it actually happened. But it doesn’t matter. They can take me off the case, put someone else in my place, and the outcome will still be the same. Bonnie Spencer will be brought to trial on—yeah,

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sure—circumstantial evidence. But strong circumstantial evidence. Most likely she will be found guilty. And she will go to jail. And whether I slept with her or gave her a line about loving her or never met her before I rang her front doorbell won’t matter one goddamn bit.”

“Bonnie was right. You are very, very bright.”

“Thanks.”

“Hear me out. You’ve constructed an intelligent, imaginative theory about how Sy was killed. All I ask now is that you look back at your data, put that same creativity to work again.”

I shook my head.

“Try it. Build another case. A real one this time, not a myth.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N

I left the diner, my lunch untouched. The afternoon had turned from plain August hot to sweltering. I thought about finding an AA meeting but instead drove north, aimlessly, farther from Headquarters. I pulled into the parking lot of a shopping center. Suburban heaven, with its open-twenty-four-hours Grand Union, its nail salon, its frozen-yogurt store and its card shop featuring Charlie Brown paper tablecloths, plates, cups and guest towels.

I put the top up, locked away my gun and changed into the shorts and sneakers I kept behind the two front seats, on the parcel shelf of the car—my gym locker on wheels. I hooked my pager onto the elastic waistband of the shorts. I had used my running shirt with the Clorox-eaten sleeve to clean the dipstick, so I had to run shirtless.

The humidity was suffocating. I would gladly have taken one of those blue bandannas I’d been laughing at all summer, the kind New York runners were twirling and wrapping around their foreheads, trying to look like construction workers instead of rich idi-243

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ots. And I’d even take one of their ass packs too, with their plastic bottle of mineral water.

For the first couple of miles through central Suffolk—past tract houses sided with cheap, already-pitted aluminum, where nobody, apparently, had enough home-owning pride to stick a mailbox with a painted “The McCarthy’s” up on a post, or plant a crab apple or a rosebush or anything beyond the token scraggly juniper the builder had stuck in the front lawn, past about ten acres of open grassland with a For Sale sign—I didn’t think about Bonnie at all. I