“You think he wanted marriage?”
“Oh, he would have needed a week or two to cool down over Victor, but yes. Definitely.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“Would you have married him?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. He was a guy who threatened to have you disfigured. Ruin your life, ruin your career.”
“He was a man eaten up inside by jealousy.”
“He was a producer who wanted you out of his life, out of his movie.”
404 / SUSAN ISAACS
“Only because I’d wounded him so deeply. I admit it: I made a mistake. A big one. But Sy would have come around.
We were so well suited, and he knew it. I’m…well, what I am, and he was a brilliant, successful film producer. He cared about serious social issues. And he was my intellectual equal.
To tell you the truth, as far as the jealousy, I loved it that he was finally displaying some real emotion.” Lindsay began to rub her bare legs together; she seemed to be getting aroused, not so much by her recollection of Sy’s crazy behavior but by the remembrance of her power over him. “Jealousy,” she said again, savoring the word. “Sy was consumed.”
“You think he loved you?”
“Of course he loved me.”
I got up and stood behind the chair. “The killer was fifty feet away from a small, white-robed figure about your size.
At the moment the rifle was fired, Sy was supposed to have been flying somewhere over Kansas. And you were supposed to be getting ready to do your late-afternoon laps in the pool.”
“No!” The makeup didn’t help. Her skin started to lose its color. It took on a waxen cast, like a corpse’s.
“Yes.” I pushed aside a drooping piece of mosquito net and walked out of the room.
I called Carbone and told him I was at the Starry Night set on the off chance Bonnie Spencer had connected with any of the crew members, and also to check if she’d showed up again after Sy threw her off, maybe doing some kind of neurotic, obsessive number. He said that Thighs, Robby and Charlie Sanchez were all out trying to get a lead on her.
Casually, as if I already knew what the answer would be, I asked if the DNA results had come in on the new hair sample. It’s Bonnie’s, Carbone said. Still think she didn’t do it?
MAGIC HOUR / 405
I told him if he had nothing better to do, to check the evidence record files. Find out the number of hairs we’d picked up that first night, then go down and look in the envelope the lab had returned. He’d find a minus-one factor.
He told me I was losing my emotional equilibrium, that I was projecting something—I forget what—onto Robby Kurz, that I needed a vacation, and if I passed the fancy Italian store in East Hampton to pick him up two pounds of sausage with fennel.
I hung up. Robby had to have planted the hair. And for sure, he had spread the drinking rumor, the Steve luvs Bonnie 4-ever rumor. He was out to get her—and me. Sooner or later, he was going to realize that Bonnie had a protector and had gotten some help with her disappearing act. And then he would be at my house.
Gregory J. Canfield was supposed to be in a store in the village doing his job as production assistant, which, in this instance, meant picking up fresh figs, prosciutto, a semolina bread and a bottle of Dolcetto wine for Nick Monteleone since, according to a couple of people on the set, Nick had mumbled that what with the heat, he wanted a light bite, not a heavy supper, and since Lindsay’s performance was still so inert, any hope of salvaging Starry Night seemed to rest on Nick’s well-moussed head, so finally, after forty minutes of consultation between the line producer and the first assistant director (which included a call to Nick’s agent in Beverly Hills), a definition of the term “light bite” was agreed upon, and Gregory was dispatched.
But I figured he might stop in to say goodbye to his woman, Myrna the costume lady, and sure enough, they were holding hands in the costume trailer, staring into each other’s eyes, giving each other sweet,
406 / SUSAN ISAACS
delicate, pursed-lip kisses of farewell. It didn’t seem to bother them that one of Myrna’s assistants was no more than a foot away from them, ironing a duplicate of the tennis outfit Lindsay was wearing. And it didn’t seem to bother them when I called out “Hey, Gregory!” He gave me a slightly dopey glance, then gazed back into the depths of Myrna’s eyes.
The trailer was huge, like a wildly inflated walk-in closet, with rack after rack of clothes, shelves of shoes, and drawers with scarves and underwear and fake jewelry spilling out. I walked to the back and tapped Myrna on the shoulder.
“Hello!” she said. “How are you?”
“Fine, thanks.” She looked as messy as when I’d caught her in her inside-out negligee. This time she was wearing a long sacklike thing with a parrot design; it looked as if she’d picked it up in Woolworth’s in Honolulu in 1957 and had worn it frequently since. “Myrna, I need Gregory for a minute.”
“Is anything wrong?” she asked.
“No. Everything’s fine. A couple of minor points need clarification.” She nodded, released Gregory’s hands and gave him a tender nudge toward me.
I took him away from her, outside to where they had a table set up with bagels and cookies and doughnuts with melting sugar and M&M’s and nuts and raisins. There was a bowl of red grapes, but they were hot. He gave me a Coke from a cooler beneath the table. “How’s it goin’, man?” he asked. A few nights with Myrna
