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

his name at the tail end of the movie, next to something like best boy. A normal guy would forget it. A nut job could have spent two, three years plotting revenge.”

“How often does that happen?”

“Not often. Even nuts get bored. They find new villains.

So unless we get bogged down—I’m talking completely, totally stumped—we wouldn’t do anything more than a routine check on a victim’s distant past. See, nuts usually don’t suffer in silence. They send hate mail, make threatening phone calls. And a guy like Sy would be smart; he’s seen too many celebrities hit by psychos to ignore those kind of threats. Right?”

“Definitely. If Sy had thought someone crazy was out to get him, he’d have probably gone the whole route. Hired bodyguards, even. Sy had no physical courage.”

That surprised me. He was so smooth. “Give me a for-instance.”

Bonnie thought, rubbing her forehead to help herself along.

“Like one time, we were riding, up in the Grand Tetons. Sy got thrown. Nothing happened; he wound up with a sore behind. You couldn’t blame the horse; it saw a bear and got spooked. But he wouldn’t get back on that horse for anything, even when I kidded him about being a scaredy-cat—which, okay, I admit might have not been my most sensitive moment in my career as wife.

“But it didn’t take an actual event to frighten him. Sy could get scared by nothing. We’d be walking in the theater district and if a couple of black guys who

344 / SUSAN ISAACS

didn’t look like they were headed for an NAACP fund-raiser at the Pierre walked by, he’d stiffen. Just a little, but you knew in the back of his mind he was seeing headlines: ‘Producer Castrated by Rampaging Youth Gang.’ What I’m getting at is, if someone from his past had been gunning for Sy, he’d have gotten protection. You’d have heard about it.”

“Good.” I went into the kitchen for another cup of coffee.

When I came back I started telling her: “You know, talk about riding, my family had a farm when I was little. We kept a horse. Prancer. I haven’t ridden for years, but—”

“What do you want from me?” Bonnie asked softly.

“I don’t know,” I answered, just as softly.

“Whatever we had ended an hour and a half ago. Just remember that. And no matter what happens today, what you find or don’t find, I’m out of here by five o’clock. So I don’t want to know that you rode horsies when you were a little boy. I don’t want to hear about your first Yankee game. I don’t want you to tell me how you got the monkey off your back after Vietnam.”

“I told you about that? My drug problem?”

“Your heroin problem. You told me. I don’t care about it.

And I don’t care about your alcoholism—which obviously made you forget you told me about your heroin addiction.”

“What did I say about heroin?”

“Not much. It was when you were telling me about Vietnam.”

“I told you about Vietnam?”

Bonnie said coldly: “It must have been one heck of a night for you, that you remember so much of it.”

“I remember enough to know it was one hell of a night.”

“Do you remember talking about why you became a cop?”

MAGIC HOUR / 345

“No. I didn’t think I ever really gave it much thought, much less talked about it.”

“You told me how terrified you’d been after you got back from the war. Walking down a street, if there was a crumpled-up Burger King bag on the sidewalk, you’d stop short, almost panic. Remember telling me that?” I didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t believe I’d told anyone about that time; my heart would bang in my chest and I’d want to scream out, Clear the area! Clear out! Watch that crumpled Burger King bag! We can all get killed! “We were talking about how come you chose something potentially dangerous like being a cop instead of something safe, and you said,

‘This will show you how irrational I was—I thought of being a cop as safe, maybe because I’d be armed. I was so goddamn frightened all the time.’”

“I didn’t realize how I opened up to you, how I—”

Bonnie cut me off. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. I want you to understand: I don’t give a damn about what you did in Vietnam, or what Vietnam did to you. I don’t give a damn about your drugs or your alcohol or your recurring nightmares. I don’t give a damn about you. And while we’re at it, I don’t give a damn about your fiancée’s long auburn tresses or her commitment to the learning disabled. In another ten hours—unless, God forbid, I happen to wind up in court and you’re a witness for the prosecution—we’ll never see each other again.”

I got up and walked out of the room. I remember nothing about what I thought or felt. I do remember rinsing the breakfast dishes and sticking them in the dishwasher and pouring what was left of the milk into the container. Then I went back in. Bonnie was the same; maybe even more remote.

If she had been in a movie, they’d have had some lens that would make her look as if she was moving 346 / SUSAN ISAACS

back, farther and farther. Eventually she would become just a point of light. And then she’d vanish.

“Tell me who had a real motive to kill Sy,” she said.

“You.”

“Who else?”

“Lindsay.”

“You know what I think of that theory.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck what you think,” I said. “She’s on the list.”

“Anyone else?”

“Some guy who invested in Starry Night, a guy from Sy’s days in the meat industry.”

“Who?”

“Mikey LoTriglio.”

“Fat Mikey?” Bonnie’s face got all pink and glowy; just hearing his name seemed to make her happy. She forgot to be remote. “I love Fat Mikey!”

“You love him? He’s a bad guy. Mafia.”

“I know. But for a bad guy, he was so wonderful. Well, wonderful to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He knew I was a writer, so