Magic Hour (17 page)
I turned up a side street, went into a drugstore, got out a couple of bucks' worth of quarters. I stared at the colossal condom display, wondered what kind of a moron would buy blue, ribbed rubbers and dialed 1-516, the area code for Long Island. But instead of dialing Headquarters, I dialed Bonnie's house. She answered. "Hello." Her tone was cautious, weary, as though she expected another hang-up. I didn't say anything.
"Hello?"
she repeated. I hung up and called Robby. No DNA report yet. No nothing. To kill time, so I wouldn't have to drive back during rush hour, I had Robby give me the names, addresses and phone numbers for Mikey LoTriglio's known associates that he'd gotten from the FBI and the NYPD.
Three of Robby's names were the guys who had sworn and deposed that Fat Mikey had sat with them in a booth at Rosie's Bar in the meat district on Friday, August 18, from approximately three in the afternoon to—at least—six or seven. A couple of the other known associates were unavailable, currently residing in Allenwood federal correctional facility in
So for lack of anything better to do, I decided to check out Mikey's girlfriend, Tern Noonan, a part-time receptionist for an optician, who lived ten minutes from the
I had an image of a gun moll with blond, teased hair and a wad of chewing gum. Terri Noonan had plain curly brown hair and no makeup. She wore a starched white blouse with a little round collar and a pale-blue cardigan sweater buttoned at the top. No jewelry. She looked like she belonged to an order of nuns that had given up the habit but not the vows. Except when you looked twice—and you had to because she didn't show it off—you could see she had an absolutely spectacular, long-legged, big-boobed showgirl body. My guess was that Mikey had gotten it mixed up: he'd married the bimbo and kept the sweetie pie on the side.
Terri tried a whispery "Mikey Who?" but gave up after I said "Come on, Terri." She asked me in and made me a cup of tea. The apartment, like the woman, was comfortable, simple, although as I'd passed the bedroom, I'd spotted a round bed with a quilted violet cover. But the living room had a green-and-white-striped plaid couch, green tweedy club chairs, a couple of trees in giant pots and green wall-to-wall carpet. Nice, comfortable. The kind of stuff a cop's wife who had good taste would buy. She poured the tea from a pot with flowers, then went back to the kitchen and returned with a plate of bakery cookies; she probably bought them fresh every day in case Mikey dropped by. I couldn't help staring; instead of the nun cardigan and the plain navy skirt, she should be wearing tassels and a G-string. She said, "God, Mikey was so upset about Sy. No kidding." She pointed to a Linzer torte. "Raspberry jelly inside that one."
"You mean Mikey was upset because they were fighting about the way the movie was going?" I didn't think Terri was trying to look dumb; Mikey probably hadn't told her a thing. "You know," I said. "The movie Sy was making,
Starry Night
. The movie Mikey invested in."
"I swear to God, Officer, he never said anything about any movie or any investment."
"And he never said he and Sy had words?"
She crossed her heart, held her hand up and said, "Cross my heart, my mother's life to die. Not a word. I mean, I knew about Sy because he was kind of famous, and one time when Loretta—Mikey's wife—was out at La Costa we went to a premiere and a big party after for one of Sy's movies. But they was friends from the old days, and Mikey didn't talk about him all that much, except, like, to reminisce. But when he died, Mikey came right over." Terri blinked. "He was in tears, and Mikey's not one of these phony guys who cries all the time. I never, ever saw him like that before."
"When was that, Terri?"
"Uh, let me think. Saturday morning. That's when I make him my cheese omelet."
"You know Sy was killed late Friday afternoon. About four-twenty."
"I didn't know the exact time," she said, and broke off a tiny end of a chocolate chip cookie and put it in her mouth.
I put down the teacup and looked straight at her. "Terri, this is important. Where was Mikey at the time of the murder?"
"Friday?"
"Friday."
"Why is it important?"
"Do I have to draw you a picture?"
Terri readjusted the stiff little collar of her blouse so it lay flat over the cardigan. "Mikey was here. In this apartment."
"With you?"
"Yes."
"What was he doing?"
She glanced down at her flat-heeled shoes. "It was personal."
"You and Mikey were having relations at or about four p.m. last Friday?"
She raised her right hand. "From three till six," she swore.
"Mikey must be quite a guy."
"He's a little on the large side, but he's in very good health."
"Will you sign a statement to the effect that he was here with you?"
"In blood," she said. Instead, I handed her my Bic and watched as she began writing "I, Theresa Kathleen Noonan, do swear..." "See," she said, after she signed her name, "Mikey couldn't have been out in the Hamptons when Sy was killed, because he was here with me!"
But now Mikey had two alibis—which was as good as none at all.
So I should have felt better about Bonnie, right? It ought to be comforting to know that your sicko obsession may, in fact, be a nice, nonhomicidal girl.
Driving home on the
Then I had an alternate fantasy where she's back from a hard run, her face rosy, her breath coming in gulps, and I pull up, get out of the car and tell her, Listen, everything's okay. We did a routine check, and it turns out that Victor Santana, the director, was renting a house that had a gun rack—and the owner confirmed a .22 was missing! Oh, no—not Santana. Lindsay! She knew Sy was going to
Starry Night
set and bought ammo. She was wearing dark sunglasses—like the guy at the store had never seen a movie and wouldn't recognize her! Listen, I tell Bonnie, I know it's been hell for you. I'm sorry. And Bonnie says, Thank God, and she's so grateful she puts her arms around me and I say, It's okay, but then I rub my face against the softness of her skin and one thing leads to another and we're inside, in her bedroom, having incredible, sweaty sex that lasts the whole night.
The daydream lasted all the way to Southampton, to the point where I was crying out Bonnie, baby! and about to come for the fourth time, when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the turnoff to Lynne's. That's when I cooled down enough for my brain to start functioning again.
And it told me that no matter how many phony alibis he had, it wasn't Mikey or Lindsay who killed Sy Spencer. In my heart I knew it was Bonnie.
It was confirmed. It was confirmed by Bonnie's real estate agent that Bonnie had been expecting big things from Sy. I finally reached the agent at home. She answered her phone with a hearty "Hi! Regina!" She sounded like one of those fervently friendly divorcees, women abandoned by rich men, stuck on the South Fork, who con other women with rich husbands into houses so expensive that the husbands will feel fucked over and so, after an exorbitant season or two, leave, thus creating still more real estate agents.
She was saying: "I told Bonnie, 'Hon, this is
not
a seller's market. Hold on to your house. Wait.' " It was after nine at night, but the agent's voice was still horribly hearty, although a little mushy around the edges, probably from two or three gimlets. "But she said she really needed the money and to try."
"Did she say what she was going to do if she sold it?" I asked.
"Let me think." I waited. "Something about going back to wherever it was she came from, even though I told her, 'Bonnie, you can't go home again.' Right?"
"Any interest in the house?"
"One or two offers, but very low-ball, and she was holding out for the asking price, which was very unrealistic, and believe me, I told her so."
"And then?"
"I called to ask if I could come over and show the house to people, and all of a sudden she was saying, Sorry, I have guests. This happened two or three times. Well, finally I said, Bonnie, they're not beating down the door to buy an upper-midrange listing, because you literally have hundreds of them from Quogue to Montauk, so the next time I call maybe you can take your guests to the beach or into town for a half hour. And then she laughed—she's got a sense of humor—and said it wasn't guests, it was a man. And the next day she called me to put the deal on hold, because things were really looking up. I asked her if that was French for man, and she said yes. Like, he was a very high-powered type, but he was still managing to see her
every single day
for the last few days, and so she wasn't about to have people looking at the house with that kind of interest. So I said, Marriage-type interest? And she said she'd settle for someone's hand to hold on New Year's Eve. Sweet. Right? But the thing of it was, she was staying put. To me, that meant she was thinking about more than a New Year's Eve date; it had a certain ring of seriousness. You know? I remember, I kidded her and asked if her man had a friend, and we had a good laugh about two old dames like us—not really
old
, we're in our forties—having a double wedding."
So Bonnie had expected something from Sy. Well, why not? She was putting out plenty. That, too, confirmed: the DNA report was on Carbone's desk first thing the next morning. The hair I had gotten off Bonnie's head was a genetic match to the hair on the headboard in Sy's guest room. She had been in the house with Sy the afternoon of his murder.
Motive? Yeah. And now, definitively, opportunity.
I'd gotten Bonnie out of the tub. She was wearing a blue-and-white-striped bathrobe, and the bottom of her ponytail was wet. Her wrists glowed from too-hot water. I guess she'd been trying to soak out the tension. Maybe she'd succeeded, although her eyes were puffy, probably from sleeplessness, possibly from crying. She had to know she was on our Hit Parade. Maybe she even knew she was Number One.
But she wasn't doing any wounded-petunia number. She crossed her arms and stood up straight, an I'm-not-taking-any-shit stance. "I'd be grateful if you could come by during normal business hours," she said. Her crossed arms pushed her breasts up. She saw me staring and, slowly, trying to look casual, lowered her arms and slipped her hands into her pockets. I pictured myself standing behind her, kissing her sweet-smelling hair, the nape of her neck, then slipping my hands into her pockets and feeling her. It was one of those she-knows-that-I-know-that-she-knows moments. We both knew she wasn't wearing anything under the robe. We both knew I was aware of it. And we both knew if I tugged at the sash, the robe would open. We'd do it standing up in that front hallway of her house because we were so wild for each other we couldn't wait.
I said: "I understand you don't like being disturbed this late. But these are my normal business hours."
She said: "All right. Excuse me for a minute. I'll put something on." She walked upstairs. I closed my eyes, leaned against the wall and began to imagine I had pulled the sash. The robe opens and I pull her up against me—she's still hot from the bath—but before I can ease the robe off, she goes for my pants, unzips them, takes it out, holds it in her hands and...
I heard her on the landing and opened my eyes fast, in time to watch her walk downstairs. She'd put on jeans and a white T-shirt, a man's V-neck undershirt of washed-out cotton, only hers was tucked in tight, so you could see every stitch of the white lace of her bra. I hadn't seen this one on my illegal search; it was one of those tiny bras women wear not for support but for men. I thought: Over-the-hill bitch. Except she looked fantastic. I caught myself rubbing the pads of my fingers together, in anticipation.
"Uh," I said. Oh, was I one cool cop.
"Beg your pardon?"
"Where's your dog?" That was the only thing I could think of to say.
"My
dog
?" She started to relax. Even to get playful. "Why? Do you want to question her?"
"Yeah. I want to know about her relationship with the deceased."
"I got her at Bide-A-Wee about two years ago, so I don't think she ever really got to know Sy. I mean, beyond the usual social superficialities. 'Hi, angel.
Fabulous
haircut.' "
I started to smile. "I just asked where your dog was."
Bonnie's tone stayed teasing, light. "I shot her."
"Stop it."
"Ha!" she exclaimed, like a TV lawyer who's just elicited a damaging admission in front of a jury that will help his client. "See? Deep down, you don't think I'm capable of murder."
"No. I don't think you're capable of murdering your dog." Bonnie laughed a little too hard. She took a step back; this was too real, and suddenly she was comprehending how terrified she was. But she made herself take a deep, deliberate breath. Easy, she was telling herself. Relax. She stuck her thumbs into the belt loops on her jeans, cowgirl style, as in, Get off my ranch, mister. "Where is she?" I hated to keep asking the same stupid question, but having made a fool of myself asking about the dog, I now had to treat it like it was a key to the investigation.
"She likes to go out at night." A cool, matter-of-fact response. No, cold. "Sometimes around ten I open the back door and yell for her. She's back inside in two minutes." Bonnie turned away from me, probably to hide her fear. Despite her laid-back, home-on-the-range posture, it was stealing over her face—jaw a little rigid, eyes too wide. She strode into the kitchen, opened the door and yelled: "Moose! Milk-Bone!" While we waited, she went to the refrigerator and took out an Amstel Light. She did not offer me one, so I wasn't able to say "No, thanks." By the time she popped off the cap, Moose came barreling up to the screen door. I opened it. She let out a blissful bark and started licking my hand.
But Bonnie was hardly blissed out. She was busy being tough. She pulled the dog away from me, patted its head, then took a doggy bone out of a cookie jar and put it in Moose's mouth. For that instant, Bonnie forgot herself and was tender, a mother offering her child a lollipop. Moose, meanwhile, glanced up. She may have been nuts about me, but I wasn't part of her nightly ritual; she decided I might want to grab her treasure, so she hightailed it out of the kitchen, bone in mouth. I grinned. Bonnie didnt.
"What do you want to know?" she demanded. She tilted back her head and took a swig of beer. I stared at the arch of her throat, the rise of her breasts. I wanted her so much. "Well?"
All right. She wanted it, I'd give it to her. "Can you shoot a .22 rifle?"
In a movie, Bonnie would have shown her shock by spritzing out the beer. Real life lacks grand gestures, or even spectacularly messy ones. She just swallowed a little harder than normal. "That's not funny."
"I'm not being funny. You're the funny one. I'm the cop. And I'm very, very serious. I want to know whether you can shoot a .22."
"I don't have to answer that."
"You already have. You didn't say no."
"I didn't say yes, either." Suddenly her fear turned to anger. She slammed the beer bottle down on the counter. "Just let me tell you something. I've been watching detective movies since I've been eight or nine years old. I know hard-boiled and soft-boiled. I know you're supposed to frighten me so much that I spill whatever beans there are to be spilled. Or you're supposed to charm me, so I'll get giddy and babble all my girlish secrets. Well, guess what, buster? You're no Humphrey Bogart. And guess what again? I didn't do anything wrong. I have nothing to confess. You're wasting your time."
"Yeah?" I shouldered an invisible rifle. I sighted. I pulled the trigger. "Bonnie Bernstein Spencer. Her family owned Bernstein's Sporting Goods in Ogden,
She started to cry, those round, silent tears that drift down cheeks and leave trails. "Please," she whispered, "don't do this to me."
"I just have to get to the truth." I realized I was whispering too. "Bonnie, can you shoot?"
"Yes." I could barely hear her. "But I swear to God, I didn't kill Sy."
Jesus, I thought, I almost have her. Almost. "You have to understand," I told her gently, "people swear to God all the time. 'I swear to God, I'm innocent.' "
"But I am."
"Prove it to me."
"How?"
All I had to do was pull her in very slowly, lovingly, as though seducing the most reluctant of women. "We can rule you out with a simple little test. Come with me. I'll drive you down to Headquarters, stay with you the whole time. You just give a small sample of saliva and blood—a pinprick, nothing more. And then you're in the clear."
For a long moment there was silence. I heard the deep hum of the refrigerator and then the click of Moose's paws as she toddled back into the kitchen, across the tile, to look up at us. She didn't understand why we weren't having fun.
"Come on, Bonnie."
I imagined her beside me in the Jag on the way to Headquarters, our arms and shoulders touching when I took a curve; I thought about the heat that instant of friction would give off. Shit, I don't want this fantasy.
But then, at Headquarters, my bewitchment would finally be over. In that hard fluorescent light, I'd see Bonnie Spencer for what she was: a killer. Of course, she hadn't meant to do it. Of course, if she could live the moment all over again, Sy would still be alive. And of course, she was, without a doubt, honestly and profoundly sorry. But still, a killer. And seeing her in that merciless light, I would no longer be able to desire the thing I most hated. Murderer.
I would no longer spend every goddamn obsessed minute creating different scenarios of kissing her, caressing her, fucking her: in beds, in chairs, on tables, in showers, on floors, in cars, on the beach, in the ocean, in the woods. I would be relieved of my madness. I would save thousands staying away from pay phones. I would go to my wedding with a peaceful mind and a loving heart.
All of a sudden, I felt sick, awful—the opposite of dizzy: heavy-headed. Despair settled on me. In that terrible moment, I wondered, How the hell am I going to live out the rest of my life without this woman? For a minute I truly could not speak. Then, I don't know how, I got it together: "Let's go, Bonnie."
"No."
"Come on. You've got everything to gain, nothing to lose. Let it be over."
"I want you out of here."
"Bonnie—"
"Don't come back. I won't speak to you again."
"Honey, I'm sorry, but you'll have to."
"No. And I'm not your honey. Not by a long shot, you son of a bitch. If you have any more questions, you can speak to my lawyer. Now
out
."
Robby Kurz came swishing over to my desk, licked his pinkie and ran it over his eyebrow. I told him: "Hey, you're not telling me anything about yourself I don't already know."
"Gideon is outside," Robby simpered, in an exaggeratedly faggy way. Well, what do you expect from a cop? A gay rights button? "He's simply
dying
to see you."
"Gideon who?"
"Are you ready for this?" He waved a business card. "Gideon Isaiah Friedman, Esquire. Of East Hampton, sweetie. Attorney for Bonnie Spencer."
Gideon Friedman walked toward me. He didn't take little mincing steps. And he didn't lisp or wave a limp wrist. Still, you knew what he was. Maybe it was that his getup was impeccable country lawyer, English style: awesomely casual, perfectly cut brown tweed suit with a tattersall shirt, green knit tie and shoes that looked like wing tips, except they were brown suede. Or maybe it was the flawless haircut, where every single strand of brown hair lay smooth against his head, as if his skull were magnetised. Or maybe it was that he was too boyishly handsome for a guy in his late thirties, with that innocent, round-eyed, ultra-upper-class queer look male models have, the ones who always have very long scarves tossed around their necks in interesting ways. Forget his name; he had the look of one of those guys with a wood racquet who leap over the net at the Meadow Club.
Or maybe it was just the way he checked me out when I stood up to shake his hand. "Hi," he said.
"Hi," I responded.
"I'm here representing Bonnie Spencer." He had a breathy voice, like a waiter in one of those trendy, expensive seafood restaurants, Fish Hampton or whatever, that open and close every summer because nobody, not even the most pretentious schmuck from
"Why don't you sit down?" I suggested. He sat in the plastic chair next to my desk and glanced around the squad room. I figured he'd murmur, Oooh, how butch! or at least cross his legs at the knees. "Well, Mr. Friedman, what can I do for you?"
"Well..." And suddenly he stopped being a homo. He became a lawyer. "Why not start by telling me what this bullshit is about Bonnie coming in and taking blood and saliva tests to 'rule her out' as a suspect."
"I meant that. Sincerely."
"Give me a break. You were referring to that DNA testing, right?" I shrugged. "What's the story here? Sy Spencer was shot from a distance. Are we talking about some perspiration that dripped onto the murder weapon? A little saliva? Did the perpetrator drool?" It was weird, the hard-edge-lawyer sarcasm presented in that whispery waiter's voice. "Or was there some kind of a fight, and you have blood—or skin cells from under Sy's nails?" For a lawyer with no leverage, who had no idea what we had or where we were going, he was pretty good.
"I'm not prepared to discuss the evidence at this time."
"Why not?"
"You should know why not. There's no percentage in it."
"Okay," he said. "Then I suppose there's no percentage in anyone taking any blood tests." He stood, regretfully, as if he hadn't been able to save me from making the most grievous misjudgment of my career. "I'm going to have to advise my client to stand on her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and not take the test."
It was only then that it hit me that Gideon probably represented dress designers. "You're not a criminal lawyer, are you?" I asked.
I waited for him to get pissed or, minimally, petulant, but to his credit he stayed composed; serene, even. He sat back down and examined the nap of the suede on his English shoe. "Why do you ask?"
"Because a criminal lawyer would know that a suspect in a murder case can't refuse a blood test."
"Why not?"
"Because blood tests and other medical tests are fact, not testimony. They aren't covered by the Fifth Amendment."
"Says who?"
"Says the U.S. Supreme Court."
"Really? Recently?"
"Within the last five or ten years."
"It must have happened after law school. I'll check it out."
All right, so maybe he represented a hairdressers' lobbying group. But he wasn't that bad a guy. Not full of shit. And not full of himself. Except what the hell would he do when he got to court? Go fancy dress, show up in a black robe and white wig? And what would he do when the chief of the Homicide Bureau of the D.A.'s office cross-examined Bonnie? Take smelling salts?