Magic Hour (16 page)
Even if she ran like hell and just threw the ball once down at the beach, I had a clear twenty minutes. But I worked the upstairs first, in case I heard her and had to get out the back door.
Bingo! She used one of the bedrooms as an office, and there, under a big framed poster from the movie
Cowgirl
, beside a computer half-covered with stickum notes, in a messy, overstuffed folder marked "Pending," was a Xeroxed real estate listing for her house. It was dated August 4, so she'd decided to put it on the market while there were still summer people around to come, look and oooh: "Oh, Ian, the exposed beams!" Had she taken up with Sy yet? Was she selling it because she was already having dreams of a grand house by the ocean, a screening room, charge accounts, a wedding ring? Or was the real estate listing pre-Sy? Had she been at the end of her rope? I jotted down the broker's number.
I had to work fast—and neat. Neat wasn't too much of a problem since Bonnie's papers were just this side of chaotic. Still, this was not exactly what you could call a legal search, so I couldn't risk leaving any trace.
I went through her bedroom too, finding, mainly, that she kept the local library in business, that although her tangle of bras were what you'd expect from a female jock, utilitarian and uninspiring, her panties weren't: little string bikinis, black, red. I was starting to imagine her, but I cut myself off. Time. Also, there was something about being in her bedroom, its peacefulness, with its tied-back white lace curtains, plain four-poster bed and old-fashioned dresser with a white doilylike thing on top of it, that made me uneasy. I wanted out of there. I was half out the door, on my way downstairs, when I turned back to check out her closet.
Bingo again! Inside the toe of a pair of boots—one of those places women inevitably hide their valuable stuff—I found it: a wad of cash rolled up in a rubber band. Eight hundred and eighty dollars. More than she had in her savings account. Big bucks for a poor girl like Bonnie.
Change from a thousand.
What was so terrible? Sex, even with someone as fabulous as Lynne, can become routine. So big deal: you superimpose another woman over your dearly beloved and suddenly a predictable quickie becomes the Fuck That Shook the World. It can happen, especially if a guy's pattern has always been to step out a lot. Is that so bad? There is no betrayal. Nobody gets hurt.
But it wasn't just that one brief late-night fantasy. My whole life—not just the case—was starting to focus on Bonnie. Like when I'd gone to the bank to speak to Rochelle, I stopped at the cashier's for a couple of rolls of quarters. More than a couple: enough to hit every pay phone on the South Fork. And so once or twice—all right, three or four times—a day I'd drop in a quarter just to hear Bonnie say "Hello." Once, when I heard the tightness in her throat (she must have known it would be another hang-up, because who the hell else would call her?), I stood by the phone outside the East Hampton post office and got this terrible lump in my own throat; I wanted to cry for her.
Maybe I was so overcome with pity because an hour earlier I'd been looking over all the records we'd pulled on her, and discovered on the printout from Motor Vehicles that besides being five foot nine inches, which was not exactly a feminine asset, she was forty-five years old. Forty fucking five! I did the math three times. I couldn't believe it. But what kind of sense did it make for me to be getting all choked up with pity for a put-upon, middle-aged loser if I was the schmuck standing out in the rain, praying she'd give me another "hello" before she slammed down the phone?
Listen, I told myself, this is definitely one of those sexual obsession things. But instead of ignoring it, or figuring it out, I kept borrowing T.J.'s cars, so Bonnie wouldn't spot my Jag. I drove by her house on the way to work and on the way home. Sometimes in between. All I had to do was spot a shadow passing by an upstairs window, or catch the flutter of a white curtain, and I would feel God's grace upon me. One time, Moose was lying on the front lawn, giving her front paw a manicure with her big pink tongue, and I had this dizzying, blood-to-the-head flush of joy.
And when I'd searched her house, I'd looked in her garage right before I left and saw an old Jeep Wrangler. It made me so incredibly, stupidly happy that Bonnie drove a four-wheel-drive recreational vehicle.
But I felt the same degree of happiness when I found the wad of cash in her boot. I thought: Fantastic! I've really nailed the bitch.
So when Carbone and the lieutenant, a guy named Jack Byrne, who was so shy or weird that he whispered instead of talked, called me in and said, listen, here are a couple of people to see in the city. The first wife and Sy's divorce lawyer. You'll have to go, not Robby. We need someone with a little finesse ... Well, I should have been relieved. Here it was: a chance to get the hell off the South Fork, shake off the fixation, stop the Bonnie mania, cut the shit.
Except as I drove west on the Long Island Expressway, all I could think about was her dark, shiny, sweet-smelling hair. I wanted to stroke it back off her forehead, play with it, wrap it around my finger after we finished making love. But also, I wanted to see it inside a small plastic envelope: Government Exhibit D.
Goddamn, I wanted to take T.J.'s minivan, park it down the street and watch her house all day, catch a glimpse of her. I didn't want to work. And I definitely didn't want to go to Manhattan.
Imagine a cartoon of a snooty, stick-up-the-ass rich WASP. That's what Felice Tompkins Spencer Vanderventer looked like, except in 3-D. Yes, she'd heard her first husband had been murdered. Sorry.
Not really sorry or terribly sorry; she didn't gush. Everything about Felice was austere, from her face (which was very long and rectangular, like a gift box for a bottle of booze, except instead of a ribbon on top she had a thin figure eight of gray-brown hair tacked down by a couple of bobby pins) to her dress, which looked as if it were made out of a humongous brown Kleenex held together by a narrow brown belt.
She was Sy's age, fifty-three. Maybe when they were twenty-one they'd looked like a couple, but now, had he been alive and had they stayed married, she would have had to handle embarrassing references to her son; they had separated not only into different worlds but into different generations.
Like Felice, her Park Avenue living room was outmoded. But it wasn't austere. First of all, it was so big you could play basketball in there, except you'd break your neck because it was so chock-full of stuff. The place looked as though someone had bought out the entire inventory of a store specializing in dark, ugly antiques. There was no faded, restful old-money homeyness like at Germy's, just a lot of very high, overstuffed, heavy furniture with claw feet. It would have taken five moving men just to lift one of her hideous black carved-wood chairs. The pictures were heavy too, fancy gold-framed oil paintings of fruit and pitchers and dead rabbits.
"When was the last time you spoke with Mr. Spencer?" My left shoe squeaked every time I shifted my weight. She hadn't asked me to sit.
"About ten years ago." Even in the early-afternoon glare, the room was so shadowy it was hard to make out her features—except for her teeth. They were double normal human size; it looked as if she'd had a transplant from a thoroughbred mare. Felice was so aggressively unattractive that, considering her surroundings, you knew it was her, and not Mr. Spencer or Mr. Vanderventer, who owned the sixteen-foot-high ceilings and everything under them.
"Did you ever meet or speak with his second wife, Bonnie Spencer?"
"I saw them together briefly, once, in front of Carnegie Hall. Sy introduced us." Outside Felice's window, the only bright spot in the room, Park Avenue stretched out like a parade ground for the rich. The island in the middle of the street had huge tubs of bright-gold flowers; they gleamed like piles of money. Past the traffic, over at the curb, elderly doormen opened limousine doors and helped out the rich and able-bodied.
"During the time you knew him, did Sy ever mention a man named Mikey LoTriglio?"
"I believe so."
"What did he say about him?"
"I don't know. Something about their fathers having been in the meat business." She said "meat business" with distaste, as if Sy had been in wholesale carrion. "I never paid attention to that aspect of his life."
I gave it another five minutes, but all I could get was that Felice had married Sy because he could quote all of Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." She'd divorced him because she finally found out he was more interested in "social advancement" than in poetry. And all right, yes, since I'd asked (her upper lip curled, covering about half of her giant teeth), because she caught him cheating. Who with? With her first cousin Claudia Giddings, a trustee of the New York Philharmonic. He told her he'd fallen in love with Claudia, that he wanted to marry her, but of course he never did.
The trip to Manhattan looked like a waste. What had I gotten? Corroboration that Sy couldn't keep his pants on, especially when there was someone screwable who could boost either his status or his career. And that Germy had been right on the money: Sy was a chameleon. A refined poetry-spouter to Felice. An "I care" Down-to-Earth Human Being to Bonnie. A cool, masterful mogul to Lindsay. And not just to women: somehow, he became whatever anyone wanted him to be. A remote God of Cinema to Gregory J. Canfield. A congenial producer-pal to Nicholas Monteleone. A blood brother to Mikey. A savior to Easton.
I walked down Park Avenue to stretch my legs and let my shoe desqueak, twenty-five blocks from Felice's brown fortress of an apartment house to a silvery glass-and-granite office building. Nature had given up on this part of Manhattan and was hiding out in Central Park. On Park Avenue, there were only too-flawless horticulturist's gold flowers, and a thin, bleached-out strip of sky. Jesus, I hated
Well, maybe not hated. When I was a kid I'd gone on a class trip to the top of the Empire State Building and to see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, and I'd let out an "Oooh!" of honest delight. But after that, I could never figure out what to do with myself in the city, except that I always felt I should do
something
—like take advantage of Culture. Once I'd been down at NYPD Headquarters on a case and then had taken a couple of subways uptown and wound up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But it was so big. And I'd had to check my gun with security. The guy there had treated me with a combination of suspicion and contempt, like I was some Bible Belt anti-smut loony who was going to shoot the dicks off the Greek statues. Finally, I'd found myself in a room full of Egyptian mummies, and when I'd asked where the pictures were, a guard, who I'd actually smiled at because he looked like an older Dave Winfield, had said, " 'Pictures'? Do you mean 'paintings'?" That had been it for Culture.
And just walking through the streets, either I'd see nothing but the homeless, and sick whores, and drug deals going down, or—today, as I pushed open the heavy door of the office building—swanky, Sy-like people saying, throatily, "Hiiii" to each other. I always felt like a rube. All dressed up with no place to go. And no matter what jacket I put on in Bridgehampton, when I got to Manhattan my cuffs were too short.
Jonathan Tullius Esq.'s cuffs were, of course, just the right length. He'd been Sy's divorce lawyer, both times. It looked like business was good. His office, filled with soft-looking leather furniture, smelled like the inside of an expensive loafer. "Sit down, Detective Brady." He had a deep, melodic voice and the barrel chest of an opera singer. He said: "I called your offices immediately after I heard about the murder, and spoke with a Sergeant Carbone. And I see now I was right to do so. You people must have some interest in Bonnie Spencer, since you are, in fact, responding to my call." He was crazy about the sound of his own voice. "To get to the point, Detective Brady: Sergeant Carbone agreed this conversation would be strictly off the record and disclosed
only
on a need-to-know basis."
"Right."
"You see, on one hand the attorney-client privilege survives death."
"Yeah."
"Therefore, I should not be talking to you." He swiveled around in his throne of a leather chair and then rested his elbows on his desk. "On the other hand, Sy was a dear friend as well as a client. He called me last Thursday. The day before he was killed. He was quite, quite concerned." Tullius had one of those soft, pampered, self-satisfied faces you see at Republican National Conventions.
"What was he concerned about, Mr. Tullius?"
"Money." I waited. "And his former wife. Bonnie Spencer."
I thought: Oh, fuck it! "Was she holding him up for money?"
"No. But Sy was concerned that she might. You see, he'd run into her out in the Hamptons. She lives there full-time. Got their old summer house. He had nothing to do with her after the divorce, but then she'd dropped him a note about some screenplay she'd written..." He paused. "You do know that she had been a screenwriter at one time."
"Yeah," I told him. "I'm the squad's Bonnie Spencer expert."
"They had one or two telephone conversations about it. He was trying to be nice, encourage her. And then he was out there almost the entire summer, filming
Starry Night
. Well, just on a whim, he dropped by her house. One thing led to another." The lawyer cleared his throat.
"Sexual congress," I suggested.
"Yes. He called me about it. Apparently, she's in a bad way financially, and
Sy—post hoc ergo propter hoc
—was worried that she might attempt to make some sort of a case for alimony because they had resumed sexual intimacy. I assured him she could not. The marriage was over, as was his responsibility toward her."
"He said they only slept together once?"
"Oh, yes. Absolutely. You see, he was living with Lindsay Keefe. Why, under that circumstance, he chose a dalliance with Bonnie is one of those conundrums only the Higher Powers can unravel, but there you have it."
"Did Bonnie make any threats?"
"No, but Sy seemed unduly concerned over her. Disquieted, guilty. And over a single lapse. It didn't 'play,' as they say in the film world. That's why I decided to phone your office. There was
something
about Bonnie. I met her during the divorce proceedings and, quite frankly, did not care for her. That rampant good nature; there was something so false. I simply did not trust her. My guess is, Sy finally smelled something fishy too. He might have been worrying about the possibility of extortion: Pay me or I'll tell Lindsay. Or he might have been thinking she would seek revenge against him, against his property. You see, he was quite taken aback by Bonnie's poverty. He said he'd seen holes in one of her pillowcases. Just a symbol, naturally, but he
did
say about his little tryst with her, his little one-afternoon stand: 'I wonder what this is going to cost me?' What's been bothering me ever since his murder is ... did he have any intimation that the cost would be his life?"
What a toad-load, I thought, as I walked up Park Avenue again, back to my car. I couldn't believe Carbone and Byrne had insisted I piss away a day on these two fuckheads. The entire bureaucracy of the
New York Times
came right out and said that the
Newsweek
agreed: "The police seem not to have a clue..." The department only wanted to look good and to protect itself, and that meant following up every single lead, even the most idiotic. So a whole day shot to shit. A hundred miles to