Magic Hour (3 page)
My name is Stephen Edward Brady. I was born in
I was born on May 17, 1949, to Kevin Francis Brady, farmer and (in the great South Fork tradition) drunk, and to Charlotte Easton (of the Sag Harbor Eastons) Brady, housewife and social climber. In 1951, my brother Easton was born.
I went to
real
." So okay, A for ambience. C- for education. B for freezing dampness that makes your fingers throb in the winter. And A+ for smells from decomposing rodents under the foundation in late spring.) Then I went to Bridgehampton High. And then the
It wasn't that I'd been such a saint in high school, but at least I'd known who I was and that I'd belonged. Sure, I was a bad boy in Bridgehampton—a little driving while intoxicated, a little breaking and entering. In my heart I knew it was a phase, that someday I would become a solid citizen, buy back my father's farm, sit on the school board.
But I picked the wrong generation, and the wrong genes. Up at Albany, I became just another whacked-out asshole with sideburns. I embraced my generation's holy trinity: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I was a true believer. I screwed and drank and drugged along with Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. I didn't die, though. I flunked out.
So I enlisted in the United States Army. Why? To this day, I have no idea. I can't re-create the boy I was, the boy who could do something that dumb and self-destructive.
On my first day of basic, they clipped my hair with a machine that left it less than a quarter inch long. I remember standing at attention and having a five-foot-three Filipino drill sergeant reach up and grab those hairs between his thumb and index finger, pull at them, and scream up into my face, "Fucking hippie!" All I wanted to do was go home. I knew I wasn't man enough to take it. Except I had to take it. In those eight weeks, the army's goal is to break you down, then build you up again into a machine that obeys all commands without thought or argument. Well, they broke me down. I cried myself to sleep every night. There I was, a big guy, a soldier, boo-hooing into my pillow so that no one, especially all the other crybabies, could hear me.
But I went off to war an infantryman, a master of the M79 grenade launcher. I fought for God and America and the honor of the Brady bunch. No. Actually, I just fought to stay alive. I fought even harder not to feel alive. Feeling dead was a major asset in Vietnam. I moved on from hash and pot to smoking opium joints. And after about a month, skag.
Skag is heroin. Five or ten percent pure on the streets in the States. Ninety-six percent pure in Vietnam. No needles: cigarettes. You just had to inhale, so you weren't a junkie. We were all very clear on that. We were just a bunch of grunts sitting around smoking at night after a hard day's work in the jungle: a little patrolling, a little shooting, and then stacking up stinking dink corpses so we could get our body count and move on for more.
Skag was cheap: three bucks a hit. Skag was good for us grown-up G.I. Joes, better than pot, because pot makes time go very, very slow. Heroin lifts you out of your body, takes you out of time. It got me through those three hundred and sixty-five days in hell. No, I wasn't caught. If you had brains and a little foresight, you could get a buddy to pee for you and were home free. (Ha.) I was discharged, honorably. I hadn't been doing skag every day. Just almost every day. I said to myself: You're not addicted. But when I landed back in the States after the eighteen-hour flight, I was sick—leg pains when we refueled in Guam, stomach cramps, the sweats in
In San Francisco I had to buy heroin on the street. Three days, five hundred bucks. I couldn't handle a needle. The dealer had me wait in the basement of a burned-out grocery store; after the high started to wear off, I'd stand there shivering in the dark, my head twitching. I could smell the wet, charred wood and the decay, hear the deranged scurrying of rats. When there was a lull in his action, the dealer would clomp downstairs, hold a flashlight in his mouth and shoot me up. He had hunched shoulders and a thrust-forward turtle head, like Nixon. His damp, hot fingertips probed for a vein; there were crescents of green-black dirt under his nails. He told me: Don't expect me to keep doing this. This is a special introductory service.
It was that night I lucked out. I came up for air about two a.m. and ran right into a
The clinic was run by a woman doctor. It took almost a week to get detoxed. Then I spent another two weeks in bed—with the woman doctor. Her name was Sharon. "Positive reinforcement," she called it. Sharon panted a lot; I kept feeling her hot, moist spearmint Certs breath. She always gazed deep into my eyes the second it was over. Aren't I
marvelous?
her eyes demanded.
Marvelous? Somehow I was getting it up and, apparently, getting it off. But my dick could have been Novocained; I swear to God I felt nothing.
By the end of the second week, Sharon was after me to go back to college—in San Francisco. Hey! I could move in with her! What a fabulous idea! Together we could bang our brains out! Detox the toxed! Refinish her floors!
I did not leave my heart—or any other part of me—in San Francisco. I was back home for Christmas.
Two days of my mother and brother, and I moved out. I needed a job. One of my buddies from high school had joined the Southampton Town P.D. No degree necessary. Decent pay. I applied, but there was a waiting list, so instead I joined the
I soon began showing my true Brady (as opposed to Easton) colors, popping a few beers a day. Then a six-pack. I was an alcoholic—not that I knew it—and an armed officer of the law. But hey, I was a terrific, ambitious cop. My job meant everything to me. In the beginning, I was even snowed by the dumb stuff: the uniform, the shield, the gun, the siren. Finally, I was part of something good. Law and order. With a little effort, I felt that my life, like
Mainly I worked. I spent my days off in Bridgehampton, picking up women and getting laid or watching the Yankees. In an ideal world, it would have been both.) In eighteen years, I don't think I had a relationship that lasted longer than a month. I worked my way up to drinking two six-packs and half a fifth of booze a day. Scotch in winter, vodka in summer.
Like every other drunk, I was absolutely positive I wasn't a drunk. My mind was so sharp; I could give you every single stat from Thurman Munson's entire career. And at work, when I was on a hard case, I could lay off booze completely. Hey, I had no problem.
By 1984 I was a detective sergeant in Homicide. I was working eighteen, twenty hours a day. I'd go on the wagon and stay on for a couple of months; then I'd slide off. But I was good at hiding my drinking.
Finally, not good enough. Fourteen years after I'd been an alcoholic, someone in the department noticed that what even my friends had been calling my short fuse might be a bad drinking problem when I got into a fight with some guy from Missing Persons in the parking lot at headquarters in Yaphank. I pulled my gun, aimed and shot out his side mirror. I have absolutely no memory of it. They told me I started up because this guy had parked over the line, too close to my car, an indigo '63 Jaguar, E-type. It could go from zero to fifty in 4.8 seconds. I loved my car.
My commanding officer, Captain Shea, suggested a vacation at South Oaks, the department's favored drying-out spot. Vacation: They took away my suitcase and searched it; they strip-searched me; they took away my razor.
I was so scared. No one else there was. This was the place to see and be seen. Anybody who's anybody is drying out, all the hip guys and gals in sweatpants and slippers seemed to be saying. They all loved group; they loved to talk about their sodden daddies, their stinko moms. They couldn't wait to tell about waking up caked in their own vomit. They cried. They laughed. They hugged each other. They all seemed to think they were auditioning for the lead in their own TV bio-movie:
Debbie [or Marvin]: Portrait of a Long Island Alcoholic
.
I remember always being cold at South Oaks, and talking as little as I could get away with. But I thought all the time. I thought: My life is shit. All I have is work—death—my dick and TV. Listen, when you're sitting in a therapy session at a funny farm with seven substance abusers and a psychiatric social worker and you look back and realize that the highlight of the last decade of your life was getting cable so you could watch Sports Channel, you begin to realize you might be a little deficient in the humanity department.
I dried out at South Oaks. After I left, I stayed with AA. The department told me they wouldn't can me, but I would have to go back into uniform.
That was terrible. No, humiliating was what it was. Forget that I'd once been thrilled to be the boy in blue. Now I was a man. So what was I doing all dressed up like Mr. Policeman for Halloween? Was I doomed to endless, mind-numbing cruising in a patrol car for the rest of my life?
I fought like hell for half a year to get back into Homicide. Besides the Yankees, my work—putting together the puzzle—was the only thing I really cared about in the world, the only thing that made me feel alive. I finally made it back in, mainly because Shea and Ray Carbone knew they needed me and went to bat for me. But I lost my rank of sergeant. I was clearly not a leader of men. Shea said, "Bottom line, Brady. I don't give a rat's twat that alcoholism's a disease. That's your problem. If I hear you even walk within a mile of a bottle of anything, I'll bust your ass for good. Hear me?" Yeah, I said. Fair enough.
In January 1989, on my way home from an AA meeting, I met Lynne, age twenty-three, originally of Annapolis, Maryland, a teacher of learning-disabled kids at Holy Spirit Academy in Southampton, when I stopped to help her with a flat tire. Lynne was intelligent. Serious. Classy. Pretty. And competent: she really didn't need me to help her change the flat. And yes indeed, she was stable. On July 4, we got engaged.
There it is.
My Life
, by Stephen Edward Brady. Not precisely a sterling character. In fact, something of a not-so-good guy. Maybe even a bad guy. But a man who, like all men, holds within him the possibility of redemption. Right?
Anyway, my autobiography until that not-nice day when Sy Spencer was murdered and when I realized that—till death do us part—I would find peace and quiet and even happiness with Lynne.
But I might never have fun.
"Come
on
," I urged the kid, hoping for an argument. "Sy and Lindsay were the perfect couple." Jesus, I wanted
life
. Believe me, I'd worked on enough homicides to know that the first interviews set the tone for the whole investigation. You had to charge up your sources; any passion—rage at the killer, outrage, grief, hostility to the police—was better than slack jaws and lead asses. I paced back and forth. "Sy Spencer and Lindsay Keefe. A brilliant show-business couple: successful, in love, making a great movie."
"No," Gregory J. Canfield whispered. He had actually uttered a word. That meant he was metabolizing. But it was hard to tell; he was about as animated as the average homicide victim. Gregory was Sy's personal production assistant, hired through some work-study deal with NYU film school. Poor guy: not only was his personality bordering on inert, but he was a born creep. He was the world's skinniest human being, and his tight maroon T-shirt, which clung to his rib cage, and his wide-legged shorts with pleats didn't help. Also, he had those spooky blue-white, almost colorless eyes, eyes that belonged to some slime-bellied animal that crawled along the sticky, grape-soda-splattered floors of dark movie theaters. "Uh, Mr. Spencer and Ms. Keefe—they weren't any Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer." I could hardly hear him.
In comparison, my voice sounded overly strong—like an announcer on a toilet-bowl-cleaner commercial. "What are you saying? They weren't happy?"
"Maybe Lindsay Keefe told you something else, sir," Gregory J. Canneld mumbled. That seemed as close to authoritative as he could get. "But I think, you know, maybe they were headed for disaster."
"What do you mean? Personal disaster?"
"Well, urn, more with the film. Maybe the personal stuff would follow." He bent down and ran his finger under a too-tight strap on his leg. He was wearing sandals, handmade things with leather thongs that crisscrossed up his stick legs.
"What was wrong with the movie?" I asked. But I'd lost him; his attention was riveted on Sy and the crime-scene crew. His eyes panned the activity and then bugged out for a close-up of a couple of ID apprentices who were unreeling a tape measure from the corner of the pool deck to the back of Sy's skull. Gregory's skin got a little green; he swayed: a potential fainter. "Let's move," I said, grabbing his shoulder and steering him away from the action, down toward the stillness of the dune heath. "Talk to me. That's it. Concentrate. Now, what makes you think
Starry Night
was in trouble?"
"Uh, the dailies. What they used to call the rushes. They weren't ... good."
"Not good, or lousy?"
"Um, more than lousy. Actually, more than horrendous."
His head had swiveled back to watch an M.E. tech swabbing Sy's nose with a giant Q-tip. I turned him around so he was facing the ocean and held my hands up on the sides of his face for a second, like blinders. "Stop looking at all the cop crap, Gregory. You're a movie guy, not a Homicide guy. You'll just make yourself sick. Now tell me about
Starry Night
."
"Lindsay was killing the film. You should have seen Sy's face after dailies: it went from disappointed to ... traumatized."
"What did he say?" I asked.
"Uh, well, you see, nothing. He was very—how can I put it?—reticent."
"What do you mean? Reserved? Cold? Nasty?"
Gregory swallowed to clear his throat; his Adam's apple bobbled. "No. He just didn't ... didn't respond. It wasn't one of those comfortable Gregory Peck silences, you know? More brooding De Niro—
if
De Niro was playing an Ivy League type. Something was going on underneath, but you weren't sure what. Anyway, Sy's secretary was staying in his New York office, so my job was to always be there for him: place phone calls, keep lists of whatever he wanted people to do, run errands back and forth to the set that his personal assistant—the assistant producer—was too important to do. I was in the house a lot, sometimes in the same room. But he never said anything to me unless it was some specific request. Like get a glass of Evian; he liked it plain, no lemon. Or find out what kind of flowers the costume designer likes, because Lindsay had gotten pretty nasty over a red lace teddy; Sy wanted to smooth things over."
"He never talked to you personally?"
"No. Just hello in the morning and goodbye when I left—if he wasn't on the phone."
"Did you ever see him angry?" Gregory shook his head. "Did you ever see him show any emotion at all?"
"Well, he'd laugh at someone's joke on the phone, that sort of thing. One time, when he was talking to someone who I guess was very important, he was doing William Powell. You know, roguish charm. But
nothing
else. Not while I was around, sir."
"Sounds like he must have been rough to work for."
"He was kind of like a combo William Hurt-Jack Nicholson. Classy-scary-cold. I think if you had some value to him he could be very nice. But I had absolutely no idea if he liked me or hated me."
"But still, even though he didn't show emotion, you say you sensed he wasn't thrilled with the dailies?"
"Yes. The last couple of nights, he was white as a sheet after the lights came back on. He
had
to have known that Lindsay was running the film into the ground."
"But do you know that for a fact?"
"No. I could just ... intuit it."
"Had Lindsay and Sy been fighting?"
"No direct confrontation. Not that I ever saw. But most of this week, the air was charged. I'm sure, with you being in Homicide, sir, you know better than most people that anger isn't always expressed verbally."
"Yeah, I know that. But if you're trying to sell me a charged-air theory, you've got to give me some substantiation. Come on now. How angry was Sy? How angry was Lindsay? Angry enough to have pumped two bullets into him?"
Down near the beach, there was just enough light from Emergency Services for me to see Gregory's white skeleton arms start popping goose bumps. "Please, Detective Brady, Ms. Keefe may have been wrong for this particular role, but I have the greatest respect for her not only as a performer but as a human being. I'm sure someone of her intellectual stature and—"
"Can it, Gregory! This isn't some NYU film school fucking seminar. Now, you'd been shooting the movie for three weeks. Isn't that early to know a picture's in trouble?"
"No. Everyone sensed it. You know how there's a feeling of intense community? Did you ever see
Day for Night
?"
"No. And don't tell me about movies or actors. Tell me about life."
"On the set, the cast and crew were just going through the motions, talking about all the other movies they'd worked on. Not about this one."
"But what about Lindsay Keefe? How could she stink? She's supposed to be one of the best actresses around, right?"
"She
is
a good actress. But her role calls for vulnerability under a brittle exterior. The
only
thing that came through in dailies was brittleness. And not sophisticated, Sigourney Weaver brittleness. Just hardness, shallowness. Very TV miniseries."
"You personally saw these dailies?"
"Yes."
"Well? Was she bad?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did Sy ever express displeasure over her, either to her or to you or to anyone else?"
"Not ... really. But he was so circumspect, you never had any idea what he was thinking unless he specifically told you." Gregory hesitated. I couldn't tell if he was trying to come up with something—anything—to please me or whether he was honestly trying to remember something. But just then, Robby Kurz came sauntering down the lawn.
Detective Robert Kurz. Rain, shine, sleet, hail. Gunshot, strangling, knifing, poison. Man, woman, child. No matter what the conditions of a homicide were, Detective Robby lit up every crime scene with his big Howdy Doody smile, his endearing, snub-nosed face and the bright white light of his enthusiasm.
"Yo, Steve!"
"Hi." To get away from his relentless exuberance, I walked toward the beach, pretending I wanted to think. Naturally, Robby hurried after me.
Lucky for me, Robby was thirty. That provided some distance. I'd had almost ten years more on the force than he did. While he was still sitting in his patrol car, waiting for some commuter in Dix Hills to run a stop sign, I'd been the rising star of Homicide. In rank, having been busted, I was his equal. In fact, being lead detective, I was his superior.
He tried not to acknowledge it. Robby—despite the shiny bald spot he tried to hide by combing his hair sideways and spraying it into paralysis, despite his desperately-eager-to-cheat wife (Mrs. Howdy Doody, with a silver heart dangling in her freckled cleavage) and, more important, despite his arrest record, which was, embarrassingly and unfortunately, almost triple his conviction record—had determined that he was the perfect cop. This notion filled him with pleasure; it was impossible to pass him in the John, on the stairs, at the coffee machine without getting a rapturous grin. Every morning he handed out bagels and crullers and Danish to the squad like the Pope bestowing blessings.
Robby stood beside me near the dune, one foot higher than the other, his body on an awkward slant. He was definitely not an outdoor guy, the security of Suffolk County-issue linoleum was vastly preferable to sand.
"What've you got?" I asked. I ran my hand over the spikes of some tall beach grass.
"Footprints on the grass near the house!" he enthused. "From rubber thongs. The regular, cheap kind. Mitch from the lab says they're a man's size ten or eleven, although obviously"—Robby paused, probably so I could prepare myself for a blast of deductive brilliance—"those kind of shoes can be worn by
anyone
. But if we can track them down—"
"Where exactly were the footprints?"
He pointed past the pool and the lawn, to the corner of the big porch that ran the entire length of the back of the house. I stretched my neck and squinted. A guy from the lab was straddling an area of grass right up against the house. He was just finishing photographing the footprints, getting ready to apply the dental stone we use for making molds of them.
At that particular corner, the crawl space, neatly covered in lattice, rose about five or six feet high, with the porch above it. From up on the dunes, not far from where we were standing, a hundred feet away, it would have been easy to spot a man with a rifle. But not from the house. Unless you were deliberately leaning over the porch rail, looking right down at the spot where lawn met lattice, someone with a .22 could probably crouch in the shadowy safety of the grand old house and you'd never see him.
"This could be
major
important!" Robby announced, nodding his head in agreement with himself. His sprayed hair didn't move.
But despite his excitement, I wasn't ready to have an orgasm over the footprints; good investigators shouldn't come too fast. I wanted to rule out all other possible explanations for the footprints before I wasted two days on a
major
thong hunt.
"See if you can get someone to check out the gardeners," I said to Robby. "Find out if any of them wore thongs. Also, take a look in Sy's closet. I didn't notice any in there when I did my walk-through, and I don't think he'd do anything like wear them, but this could have been the summer that guys like him decided K Mart was
tres
amusing or some shit, and he'd have bought fifty pairs." I thought for a second. "Except maybe not a size ten or eleven. He was a little guy: little hands, little feet, probably little—"
I stopped before I even started. It was no fun being immature and dirty around Robby. His idea of humor was Polack knock-knock jokes. His concept of sex talk was to confide that he and Freckled Cleavage had gone on a marriage encounter weekend. "Anything else?" I asked him.
Robby grinned (boyishly) and fiddled with a cuff of his sports jacket, a shiny blue thing that had a half-belt stitched around the waist in back. He dressed as though he made an annual haberdashery pilgrimage to suburban Peoria. "There were hairs. In one of the guest bedrooms, although there weren't any guests."
"Were they all from Sy?"
"There was one pubic hair, probably his. Four head, someone leaning back against one of those wicker headboards. The hairs got caught."
"Any with roots?" With the new DNA typing, you can get a genetic make on someone from any cell with a nucleus. But to test hair, you need the follicle cells that cling to the root, and although you can sometimes make do with one, it helps if you have a clump of ten or twelve hairs.
"Complete roots on two of the head hairs from the headboard. They were
not
Sy Spencer's hairs, because they were black or very dark brown, and long-ish. He had short gray—"
"Yeah, I saw."
I'd also gotten a fast look at Lindsay Keefe when her agent had half escorted, half hauled her out of the car, and she'd been what I'd remembered from movies. Blond, in fact, the blondest.
"That's all you found?" I asked him.
"Come on," he said. He was so goddamn chipper. "You know how long it takes to get anything resembling an opinion from ID."
"So while you were inside with Carbone you didn't happen to ask if there were any live-in people who might have had a quickie in the bedroom? Maids, valets—that kind of thing?"
"Relax. Where are you going? To a fire? I was just about to ask about servants, but I thought I'd fill you in first." Robby paused. It had been three minutes since he'd displayed any disarming boyishness, so I got a lopsided smile. "Look, we both know this is a major case, Steve. I want the brownie points on this one—and so should you. If we can close this neat and fast, it could mean
big things
."
When you work with a bunch of cops, or any group of people, there are always some who are going to irritate you. Either with lousy character traits, like laziness, dishonesty, sloppiness, or just with irritating personal habits like teeth sucking, cuticle nibbling or superfluous grinning. But Robby wasn't awful. He wasn't hateful. Sometimes, like when he was talking sports, especially hockey, he could actually be interesting; nobody knew as much about the Islanders' offensive strategy as he did. And so what if behind all the smiles he was a self-righteous dick? I just steered clear of him.