“You buy his story?” Carbone asked.
“I buy that he heard two shots. He sounded pretty definite on that. But he kept eating nuts like a fucking maniac. There was a giant bowl of nuts on the table in the library or den or whatever it’s called, and he must have glommed two pounds of pistachios in five minutes. I was going to tell him not to eat potential evidence, but he was such a nervous wreck I didn’t have the heart. He was upset about Sy, and very worried about his client.”
“Could it be normal professional concern?”
“Could be.”
“Listen, in this situation, concern would be an appropriate response. You know and I know and this Pomerantz must know that murder may mean publicity, but in the long run, being the mistress of a homicide victim isn’t going to help anyone’s career.” I nodded in agreement. “What’s the matter?
Do you think he’s afraid of something specific?”
“Couldn’t tell. But we’ve got to consider if this business is in any way related to Lindsay Keefe. A jealous ex-boyfriend.
Or some jealous ex-girlfriend of Sy’s who got pissed off that Lindsay came into the picture.”
“And we have to find out if things were really that hunky-dory between Sy and Lindsay,” Carbone said.
“Yeah. Maybe Sy did something so terrible she felt she bad to kill him.”
“Like what?”
MAGIC HOUR / 15
“How should I know, Ray? Maybe he left dental floss with last night’s corn on the cob on the sink. Who the hell knows what sets people off, makes them kill? Do you?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Maybe it was just something boring, like Sy was getting it on with the script girl.”
“You can’t wait to start with the hypotheses, can you, Brady?”
“No. Now listen: someone on this movie besides Lindsay might have had a grudge. Or from some other movie. Or it could have been a cold-blooded hit. We’ve got to find out what kind of life Sy had—beyond his movie life. Did he gamble? Was he cooking the books? Into weird sex? Doing drugs?”
A video tech stepped in front of us and, walking around Sy’s body, aimed his camera on the white robe. Then he zoomed in on the two small splotches: the one on the hood, where a bullet entered just above Sy’s brain stem, and another by his left shoulder blade.
“You’d never think of a man like Sy as a victim of anything,” Carbone mused. “He seems like the ultimate winner.”
“I know. Look at all this,” I said, glancing around the pool area.
White wood tubs overflowed with trailing ivy and deep-purple flowers that gave off a light, spicy scent: nothing too perfumy, nothing too obvious. The chaises lay back, deep, welcoming. Small stone tables were carved like diving fish.
You’d put your drink on the tail. White umbrellas on bamboo poles stood tall, like giant parasols. Almost-invisible quadraphonic speakers peeked up from the velvet grass.
“Ray, I bet your wildest fantasy isn’t as good as what Sy actually had. What was missing that any reasonable man could want?”
16 / SUSAN ISAACS
Carbone started mulling it over, probably thinking something like a cohesive family unit or Self-knowledge.
What I was thinking was: If Sy had stuck with kosher salamis and not had all his dreams come true, would he now be alive, dressing for dinner, buttoning a three-hundred-dollar sports shirt, or sticking his pinkie into the salad dressing to check whether his cook was using enough basil or chives or whatever this month’s most fabulous herb was? Why, on this splendid summer night, was Seymour Ira Spencer, the Man Who Had Everything, playing host to a bunch of cops who were swabbing between his toes, tweezing fluff off his bathrobe and cracking Lindsay Keefe tit jokes over his dead body?
Look at a map. Long Island resembles a smiley but slightly demented whale. Its head—Brooklyn—butts against Manhattan, as if trying to get into some hot party from which it was deliberately excluded.
But unlike bubble-brained Brooklyn, the whale’s body wants no part of the high life. Queens, Nassau and suburban Suffolk County just swim, eternally, in the bracing waters between the Atlantic and Long Island Sound, yearning to reach mainland America. See how the whale’s hump arches up in longing? All it wants is to be part of the U.S. of A., where life resembles a Coke commercial.
Okay, now check out the rest of Suffolk County, the whale’s forked tail. The tail isn’t swishing a salute to either Manhattan or Middle America. No, it’s raised high to greet Connecticut and Rhode Island. The East End of Long Island is, really, the seventh New England state.
See? On the North Fork of the tail, there are Yankee-style farms, fishing fleets and a few intensely quaint colonial villages that lack only a hand-carved
MAGIC HOUR / 17
“I am unspoiled” sign. And now look at the South Fork, my home. Our accents closer to Boston than the Bronx. Solid Anglo stock, augmented (most would say improved) by Indians, blacks, Germans, Irish, Poles and Others. More farms again. More cute towns. But unspoiled like the North Fork?
No, spoiled beyond comprehension.
For over a hundred years, artists and clods, geniuses and jerks, have been coming out here with their ways—and their money. To the Hamptons. “We summer in the Homp-tons,”
they say. Do they ever: in oh-so-social Southampton, don’t-say-rich-say-comfortable Water Mill, bookish Bridgehampton, belligerently down-to-earth Sag Harbor, show-bizzy East Hampton, home-of-the-boring Amagansett (I think the last truly interesting person to live in Amagansett died in 1683) and I-am-one-with-the-sea Montauk.
This summer paradise isn’t my South Fork, though; it belongs to men like Sy and to the legions of lesser New Yorkers who yearn to walk in his footprints in the sand. It is the Eden of the urbane: beach clubs, tennis clubs, yacht clubs, golf clubs; power breakfasts in the designated-chic local coffee shop, power softball games, power clambakes, power
