“Do you think Sy was fearful of you?”
“Nervous. You know. Ever since we was kids, Sy would pee in his pants if I even made a fist. But he wasn’t terrified or nothin’ like that.”
“Did he say why he was giving Lindsay the extra money?”
Mikey shook his head, rolled his eyes, as if unable to believe mankind’s capacity for idiocy. “You wanna shit a brick, Brady? You ain’t gonna believe this one. When I was yellin’
at him, he broke down. Not cryin’, but sittin’ in a chair, doin’
a lot of cringin’ shit. He finally stopped the crap about that Lindsay got a better movie offer and needed a added financial incentive. He told me he gave it to her because she said—you ready?—‘Sy, I hate men who hold back. I need a man who can give of himself.’”
“What? ”
Mikey shoved some potato chips into his mouth and said:
“I swear to God. Is that pussy-whipped, or what?”
MAGIC HOUR / 393
“That’s pussy-whipped,” I agreed. “So he was really in love with her?”
“Out of his mind nuts for her. I’d never seen him so hot for anybody.”
“Not even Bonnie or his other wife?”
“The first was a stringy, ugly sourpuss wit’ no tits and these big, ugly yellow teeth from some old family he married so people would think he was high-class. And Bonnie…I could never figure out that marriage. It was like a snake marrying a puppy dog. Probably had something to do with Sy’s being all hot to get into the movie business, and she was in it then.
And maybe he was tired of being a pretend WASP and got on a Jew kick, and she was a Jew but not too Jewey.”
“Do you think he would have married Lindsay?”
“Sure.”
“Then how come he took up with Bonnie?”
“Beats the hell out of me. When she called and said she’d been seeing him again, my mouth dropped open ten feet.
You want my guess? The Lindsay thing knocked the shit out of him, and he was running home to Mommy.” He paused.
“You gonna eat your potato chips?” I pushed my plate over to him. He woofed down the chips and the crinkle-cut pickle slice.
“You’re telling me interesting stuff but not helpful stuff.”
“You sayin’ I’m holdin’ back?”
“I don’t know, but what you’ve given me isn’t going to help Bonnie. Do you want to help her?”
He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “Don’t ask dumb-fuck questions. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I found out about the extra half mil the second week of shooting. I confronted him. He wimped out right away, apologized, like I told you. Next day he 394 / SUSAN ISAACS
messengered over a half mil in negotiable securities to me, and if you try to use that against me, you better hire somebody to start your car every morning.”
“Mike,” I said quietly, “no threats. I want to help Bonnie.
That’s all.”
“You married?” he asked.
“No.”
“Anyways, that was that. Until the Tuesday before he died.
He calls me up, says he can’t leave the Hamptons ’cause of the movie, but he’s got to talk with me. He’ll arrange for a private plane, or send a car and driver. I told him I don’t like aer-o-planes and I don’t use drivers because they got ears and mouths, but I’d drive out there because I was his friend.
So I get there to his house—Jesus, that was some beautiful house. He tells me Lindsay’s acting is terrible, that the movie is in deep shit. I tell him I’d heard that from my sources and so what else was new, and that if I lost my investment, I was sure he’d make good.”
“That’s a great way to invest.”
“The only way. So then he tells me Lindsay is cheatin’ on him. I start to say some garbage like ‘Too bad,’ but he didn’t want that.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted her removed.”
“Killed?”
“What do you think, Brady?”
“He asked you to get rid of her?” Mikey nodded. His chins, dotted with potato chip crumbs, bobbed up and down. “Did he suggest how?”
“No, because I stopped him right there. Oh, he did say it would be easy: There could be a letter to make people think it was some crazy fan who did it. But I just told him to shut his mouth and keep it shut and don’t even think about anything like that. He was an
MAGIC HOUR / 395
amateur, and he didn’t know what the fuck he was doin’.”
“Actually, it sounds like he did.”
“I got to admit, it wasn’t a bad idea. But no way I was gonna tell him that. He wanted to kill her because she was bompin’ the director and because he wanted to start his movie all over again and needed the bucks. You think I’d get anywhere near somethin’ like that?”
“Did he offer to pay you?”
“We didn’t get that far.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“No. I got up and before I walked out I told him he didn’t have what it takes, that his plan was full of holes, that if he tried to arrange something stupid with some two-bit local hood, they’d grab him in less than twenty-four hours. And then I told him to be a man. If he had to take a fall on the movie, take the fuckin’ fall. And then I got the hell out of there. I gotta tell you: you know how I scared Sy?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he scared me. I got a chill down my spine. What the hell’s happenin’ to this world if guys like Sy Spencer want to kill people? Tell me. What have we become?”
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y
The tennis court of the East Hampton waterfront mansion that was Starry Night’s main set had everything: white wood benches, a water fountain, piles of snowy towels on a white wrought-iron stand, blue spruce and cypresses to obscure the chain-link fence. Beautiful. Except no one in their right
