Until Sy.
“Steve Brady!” Marian Robertson, Sy’s cook, exclaimed. Then she made a twirling motion with her index finger. Spin around, boy, it said. And, obedi-MAGIC HOUR / 35
ently, I turned around so she could get the three-hundred-sixty-degree picture. “I can’t say you don’t look a day older than you did in high school,” she went on, “though you are that same boy—but with a man’s face. I said to myself the minute you walked in: ‘That’s the boy who was shortstop on Mark’s team,’ although I went blank on your name. I do see your brother. Easton Brady’s your brother, right?” I nodded. “Such a handsome boy. Could be a movie star himself.”
Mrs. Robertson babbled away with the absolute self-confidence that came with the conviction that she was the South Fork’s Most Unforgettable Character. In fact, I’d totally forgotten her until I walked into Sy’s kitchen.
And what a kitchen—especially if you were a big eighteenth century fan. Strings of garlic, wreaths of herbs, copper pots and straw baskets hung from the walls and the beams. An iron kettle hung in a six-foot-high brick fireplace; it was so gargantuan Sy could have played hide-and-seek in it.
Mrs. Robertson turned away from me to finish cutting the crusts off the sandwiches she was making for the crime-scene crew and began arranging them in a perfect, intricate pile: some creamy-colored cheese on the bottom, pale-pink pâté next, and then dark smoked ham, so the platter looked like a spiffy architectural model of a ten-million-dollar beach house. “Isn’t this something?” she inquired. “One of my specialties. Anyway, Steve, the minute you showed me your badge, of course I remembered hearing you had become a policeman, although as you may imagine, between you and I and a lamppost, you were pretty near the last boy at Bridgehampton High I’d expect to see in uniform, so to speak.” She gave me a nose crinkle that (I think) meant: You may have a gun and a badge, but to me you’re still a teeno with Clearasil
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dots. “I see being a detective you can wear regular clothes.
Rank does have its privileges, and that’s nice, because you are looking fit.”
Marian Robertson looked the same as when she sat in the first row of the stands at every high school baseball game: dark-brown skin, short, with rounded features and a cute, pudgy body, as if, through interracial marriage, she was half sister to the Pillsbury Doughboy. The only change I could see was her hair; it looked like she’d slapped a gray wig on her head as a seventh-inning joke to give the Bridgies a laugh.
Back in high school, she’d acted Unforgettable too, bringing cookies for “you young fellows,” handing each of us a chocolate-chip or a pecan sandy as we trotted off the field, calling out, There’s more where that came from!
“Mrs. Robertson, I know you gave your statement to Sergeant Carbone, but I have a couple more questions. What does the maid look like?”
“The maid? She’s very plain.” Mrs. Robertson opened one of the glass doors of the giant restaurant-style refrigerator, eyed the melons and took out an enormous beige ball that was probably a twenty-five-dollar, genetically engineered cantaloupe.
I glanced at my pad. “There’s only the maid, Rosa?”
“That’s right.”
“Is she black, white, Hispan—”
“Portuguese.” Marian Robertson cut me off. “Short, but taller than me. Maybe five foot two. You know, there used to be a song.” She cleared her throat: “‘Five foot two / Eyes of blue / But oh what those five two can do…’ Oh, Lord!
Steve, that I’m singing! I apologize. How it must look! But I’ve been working for Mr. Spencer for fourteen summers, and it’s so…Murdered!”
MAGIC HOUR / 37
“Listen, you’re upset. You have every right to be.” I paused.
“Were you very fond of him?”
“Well…fond enough. I mean, he was so polite. That’s what everyone said: ‘Sy is so divinely polite. So courtly.’ You know how those Yorkers talk.” I nodded; all of us who were born here shared the knowledge that we were more decent and more down-to-earth than the slickers from New York City. When you really came down to it, we knew we were better human beings. “Let me tell you, you can double the phoniness in spades for movie types. But Mr. Sy Spencer himself seemed to be genuine silk stocking—not at all flashy or fresh.”
“But did you like him?”
“Well…now that I think about it, I’m not sure. He was one cool cucumber.”
“Was he cold? Withdrawn?”
“No. Very toned down, but decent enough. Smiled a lot.
Didn’t laugh. Never treated me any different the first summer or the fourteenth. But it was like he had a script of how to act with a cook, and that was that. Teasing, like about how he was going to have to mortgage the house to pay for my chickens; I make a very rich chicken stock. But the same joke for fourteen years.
“And let’s see. He was indeed polite: a compliment after every dinner party, and if he didn’t like something, which was hardly ever, he wasn’t rude. He’d just say, ‘I am not entranced by chocolate-dipped fruit.’” She opened a plastic container and handed me a cookie. “Viennese almond wafer.”
“Thank you. Getting back to the maid, Mrs. Robertson.
What does she look like?”
“Short, like I told you. Yellowish skin, but with pockmarks, poor baby.”
The cookie was good. I smiled. “What color is her hair?”
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“My, are you handsome when you smile! You should smile more often. It lights up your face like a Christmas tree.”
“Rosa’s hair, Mrs. Robertson?”
“Originally, only the good Lord and her mother know, although my guess is your basic brown. For all the time she’s worked here”—she shook her head sadly—“fire-engine red.”
“And you and Rosa were the only people who work here?
I expected valets or chauffeurs or butlers.”
“No. He hired waiters and bartenders for dinners and parties. He had a driver in the city, but he took a helicopter
