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

had changed. He was quiet, thoughtful, no longer outraged; he seemed like a man beginning to acknowledge doubt. “I don’t know; maybe I can’t see straight when it comes to Lindsay—my adolescent crush. Maybe you’re right.”

“Right about what?”

“About Lindsay being less than the loving…well, not wife.

Less than the loving lover. It’s possible she could have been stepping out. I can’t swear to it. You see, no one would talk in front of me because I was Sy’s boy, so to speak. But I did hear a few whispers about her and Santana.”

“Was there any chance Sy knew about the two of them?”

Easton gave it a lot of thought. Too much; it was getting late. I glanced at the crew list, then at my watch. Most of the Starry Night company was staying at a motel in the Three Mile Harbor section of East Hampton. Maybe I could catch them; some of them might have left town for a long weekend, but I didn’t think many would voluntarily walk away from what was probably the most renowned vacation spot in America for three days on West Ninety-fifth Street or in Hoboken. “East, I’ve got to go.”

“Sy played it very close to the vest,” he said thoughtfully, not hearing me. “But I remember one thing. Maybe it’s significant. Every Saturday, the week before, and the first two weeks of shooting, he gave Lindsay a present. Left it at her place at the table so

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when she came down for coffee, she’d find it. I don’t mean a box of chocolates. I mean Art Deco diamond ear clips.

Five-hundred-dollar cashmere shawls in a rainbow of colors: I think he gave her seven or eight of them at once. They were spilling over her chair; it was an incredible sight. A Piaget watch. Nothing he gave her cost less than two or three thousand, and the average was closer to five. But that last Saturday he was alive, all he left was a note: ‘In tennis tournament. See you tonight.’”

“You saw the note?”

“Yes. It was just lying there. Not in an envelope, or even folded. And all right, maybe I’m not the gentleman I pretend to be. I guess you know that better than anyone. I have no qualms about reading other people’s mail, especially not a note to Lindsay.”

“Was he actually playing in a tennis tournament?”

“I would seriously doubt it. He wasn’t a particularly good player. Limp forehand; he would have been eliminated long before lunch. And, Steve, this is the thing: I was in the house when Lindsay came down. I saw her. She looked at her place setting. Nothing there. At her chair, under the table. Nothing.

Then she read the note. And she stormed out of the room.”

The only time I went into a bar anymore was when I was on a case; otherwise it was a risk I figured I didn’t need to take. Still, even though it was business, the first thing I did when I walked into the Harbor Room at the Summerview Motel was to grab a glass of club soda, grip it hard and sip like crazy.

The Teamster drivers, a group of six, were big-bellied and Irish, beardless Santa Clauses who could hold their liquor.

They were guys who had brothers or sons who were cops and who respected the shield. We got to be pals fast. Lindsay’s driver was a

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two-hundred-fifty-pound, apple-cheeked guy named Pete Dooley.

“She doesn’t get a chauffeured limo?” I asked.

“Uh-uh.” Classic Brooklyn. “Maybe, you know, Stallone, somebody like that. Lindsay gets me and a station wagon.”

He glanced at my glass. “Want something stronger?”

“Can’t.” He understood. “What’s she like, Pete?”

“I’ve had worse. She’s a bitch. Big deal. Doesn’t feel she has to say things like hello or please or thank you. But on the other hand, she don’t snort coke, or mess herself, or cry and ask me to hook up a hose to the tail pipe.”

“She ever talk to you?”

“Uh-uh. Just says where she wants to go, what she wants.”

“What did she want on the day Sy Spencer was shot?”

“Nothing much. I picked her up at six in the morning.

Didn’t drive her home. Her agent came to break the bad news, and he took her back.”

“Did you see her at all during that day?”

“Just, you know, around. Before lunch, she sent a P.A.

over to me with a note. I should pick up a package at an underwear store on Hill Street back in Southampton. Pay them, get a receipt—and make sure to count the change.

What a bitch! So I waited till after lunch, did it, came back.”

“The package was already wrapped?” He nodded. “Did it feel light like underwear, or could it have been something heavier?”

“Underwear. Four hundred sixty-three bucks and eighteen cents’ worth of underwear, and this is for someone who lets

’em bounce all the time. Never wears a bra. What the hell could cost over four hundred bucks?”

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“Beats me. Fancy lace shit, maybe. She gave you the money in cash, Pete?”

“Yeah. Twenties.”

I got another club soda. He and the other drivers went over the crew list with me. They said Barbara, her makeup lady, had gone back to the city for the weekend, but to try the hair guy and the costume lady. They pointed out their names and said they were probably somewhere around the motel.

Except for the fact that he had four or five super-blond, Lindsay-color wigs in his room, on faceless Styrofoam heads, the hair guy could have passed for a cabdriver, or a steamfit-ter. He was about as stylish as the pizza sauce, cheese and pepperoni that had plopped down onto his shirt. He and a couple of other guys—he said they were grips—were watching one of those soft-core horny-airline-stewardess movies that motels pipe into rooms. All he could tell me was that in the party scene they’d been shooting, Lindsay, trying to show how wild and carefree she was even though she was hurting inside,