I turned over onto my side. Lynne was so pretty. Dark-red hair, that Irish setter color. Peachy young skin. A perfect nose, slightly upturned, with two tiny indentations on the tip, as though God had made a fast realignment in the final seconds before her birth. She wore khaki shorts that revealed her fabulous long
4 / SUSAN ISAACS
legs. It wasn’t just her looks, though. Lynne was a lady.
She came from a good family…well, compared to mine.
Her father was a retired navy cipher expert. His retirement seemed to consist of sitting in a club chair, his white-socked feet on an ottoman, reading right-wing magazines and getting enraged at Democrats.
Lynne’s mother, Saint Babs of Annapolis, went to Mass every morning, where she probably prayed that the Lamb of God would strike me dead before I could marry her daughter. Babs Conway needlepointed all afternoon while she watched The Young and the Restless and Geraldo; she was eight years into her masterwork, a gigantic “The Marys at the Sepulchre” throw pillow.
So there was Lynne: a nice Catholic girl. And a good woman. A beauty. Believe me. I knew precisely how lucky I was to have her. My life had not been what you’d call a charmed existence. Happiness was a blessing I’d doubted I deserved and never believed I would receive.
“For the honeymoon,” she said softly, adjusting the shoulder seam of my T-shirt, “what would you think—this is just another option—if instead of Saint John we spent a week in London?”
“You want to snorkel in the Thames in late November?”
Lynne smiled, and the smile made her look even lovelier.
She offered no wisecracks. No: Do you think I want to spend my honeymoon with some schmuck in flippers? What she said, without a trace of sarcasm, was: “I think I get the point.
Saint John.” I gazed into Lynne’s fine brown eyes.
And then I stopped having a nice day.
Because there I was with a wonderful, kind-MAGIC HOUR / 5
hearted, titian-haired, honey-skinned woman, and all I was having was a nice day. I wasn’t having fun.
This is nuts, I said to myself. I had to understand that Lynne was young. She didn’t quite get me yet. To her, I was a man of the world. It was kind of sweet. Okay, I wished she’d loosen up just a little. I admitted it. I even admitted I was a little tense. I should have wanted a drink. But listen, I told myself, I don’t want a drink. I’m doing fine.
Still, that was why, when Headquarters called fifteen minutes later and said, There’s been a homicide reported in your neck of the woods, ha-ha, on Dune Road in Southampton—that’s the high-rent district, right?—a movie producer, Somebody Spencer, was shot…
Jesus H. Christ, I said. Sy Spencer.
You know him?
I know about him. My brother’s doing some work for him on the movie he’s making out here.
Hey, is it true he won an Oscar a couple of years ago?
Yeah.
I bet I saw him! On TV, you know, one of those guys saying: I wanna thank my agent and my parents and my late cat, Fluff. Listen, it’s your day off, but you’re the only one who lives way the hell out in the Hamptons, and we just got called in on a mess in Sachem where some computer nerd got into a fight with his old man and strangled him and tried to hide him under the compost heap, so could you get over and establish a presence? Keep the village police eager beavers from playing cops, sticking everything not nailed down into Baggies. You know how they can fuck up a crime scene. Thanks, pal.
…Well, I felt a certain gratitude toward Sy Spencer.
I walked Lynne out to her car and kissed her good-6 / SUSAN ISAACS
bye. “Sorry, but this one sounds like it’s going to totally screw up our weekend.”
She squeezed my hand and said, “Come on. I’m an old pro by now. I just feel awful about your brother’s boss. What a shock!” Then she added, “I love you, Steve.”
I thought: This woman is going to be a wonderful wife.
A terrific mother. So I said, “I love you too.”
A homicide would be a snap compared to this. Which shows you how much I knew.
The night was as beautiful as the day had been. But neither the moon that rose four hours later nor the floodlights from the Emergency Services truck shining on the crime scene could make cheerful what was, in fact, gruesome: a corpse.
Although a corpse in a spectacular setting. Sy Spencer’s lifeless body sprawled facedown on his tile deck. These were no ordinary exorbitantly priced tiles; about one out of every five of the deep-blue squares was hand-painted with a different fish, all of them too fashionably thin and richly colored to truly exist in Long Island coastal waters. But as some New York exterior decorator probably explained to Sy, they combined an oceanic motif with tongue-in-cheek chic.
The pool itself was long, luminous aqua. In the cool night air, a mist, like a rectangular cloud, hovered over the water.
Sy’s graceful, sprawling gray-shingled house, built in the early twenties, in that lost era of huge families and happy servants, rose up three stories high behind the pool. If you turned the other way, you saw soft sand and the Atlantic.
“How’s your beautiful bride-to-be?” Sergeant Ray Carbone asked me. We were standing right near Sy’s head. Carbone wore a blue serge suit and Clark Kent glasses. With his small frame, potbelly and hunched-MAGIC HOUR / 7
over back, he looked more like an overtaxed accountant than a disguised Superman.
“Still beautiful,” I said.
“She’s a lot more than beautiful. Rita and I were talking about you two the other day. Lynne gives you just what you need. Stability. Stability’s the name of the game.”
“For me, it has to be.”
“Don’t think I was talking about the drinking.”
“It’s okay. You can talk about it.”
“As far as I’m concerned, that’s history. Look, I know there’s no such
