“Go ahead.”
“I know you think I’m useless, and you’re right. I never, ever asked myself: What’s really important? And even if I had, and came up with love or friendship or something like that, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. You know that. I still would have gone for the razzle-dazzle. But now I really have to face the music. I can go to jail for the rest of my life.
You know what jail is like.”
“Yes.”
“It’s as bad as they say, isn’t it?”
“Worse.”
“I swear to you, by all that’s holy, that I’ll spend the rest of my life making up for this terrible thing I’ve done.” He stood before me in that perfect gold and pink and blue light.
“I know we’ve never been
436 / SUSAN ISAACS
close. But we are brothers. I’m not asking for special treatment, Steve, but I am asking—begging—that you give me a chance. Neither of us has ever had much of a shot at happiness, have we? I know I’ve lost that shot now, forever. But maybe I can have something, at least. Something from you.”
“What?”
“Forgiveness.”
I looked past him, out at the light. It was the magic hour.
It comes and goes so fast. In movies, though, it returns just after dawn again, and then, once more, just before dusk.
Twice a day, opportunities for wonder. But in real life, those moments that allow the possibility of grace hardly ever come at all.
If I brought my brother in, that would be the end of him.
Forgiveness, he’d said. I could allow him the possibility of finding his own salvation. Because what he said was true: nothing could bring Sy back. And the beauty of it was, I wouldn’t even have to stand in shamed silence and let Easton present his twisted, transparent alibi for Bonnie. I could just let him overpower me, escape, and disappear into a new life.
“Can’t you forgive me, Steve? Haven’t you ever done wrong?”
“Are you kidding? Most of my life has been wrong. That’s no secret.”
“So? We’re two of a kind.”
“No, East. Even when I was wrong, I knew there were laws. I knew there was a God.”
“But God forgives!”
“I know. And maybe God will forgive you, or has forgiven you. I can’t know that. And maybe I, personally, can forgive you. But a life has been taken.”
“What are you saying?”
I let the leaves drop to the floor. “I’m saying an apology won’t do it.”
“You’re going to send me to jail?”
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“No; that’s not my job. My job is much smaller. I’m just going to arrest you for the murder of Sy Spencer.”
“That’s sending me to jail, damn it!”
“That’s doing what I have to do.”
“I’ll tell them you’re setting me up to save that woman!”
“The rifle, East. The ballistics tests. Your rubber shoes with the Adelphi grass.”
“Someone else could have stolen that rifle. Or my thongs.”
“And put them back?”
“Try and prove it was me.”
“There was a man who bought bullets in a hardware store, who took target practice with an old Marlin .22 at a range near Riverhead the day before the murder. A nice-looking man in his late thirties. Don’t you think witnesses will recognize his picture? Don’t you think they’ll be able to point him out in a lineup? In court?” I opened the door of his closet.
“Get ready, East. We have to go.”
He knew better than to try and fight me. He might have tried to run for it, but being what he was, he just scurried around the bedroom for a few hysterical seconds. Then he got dressed. What else could he do? Rush outside on a Friday night in the height of the season, in a short, ugly, grayish-brown shaving robe? No. My brother had too much class.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O
In the end, I called Ray Carbone at home and asked him to please come over. I couldn’t bring myself to handcuff Easton, lead him through the house and take him to Headquarters. Also, I realized that the fact the perpetrator had a brother on the Homicide Squad should be a single sentence in the last paragraph of the news story, not a nightmare headline—HOMICIDE COP ARRESTS KILLER
BROTHER; MOTHER CRIES “MY SON!”
My mother, of course, didn’t cry anything of the sort. She came home around seven, a couple of minutes after Carbone arrived. She was a little tipsy from a martini or two with some rich lady with a dog name from her latest charity committee: Skip or Lolly or something. When she finally understood what was happening to Easton, she didn’t scream or faint or have a heart attack.
All she did was collapse onto the couch. I got her some water. Right before he left, my brother bent down and kissed her goodbye. He aimed for her cheek but somehow missed and got her nose. He told her he was sorry, for her, not for himself. Carbone
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MAGIC HOUR / 439
said he’d be at Headquarters all night if I needed him and then mumbled a few words to my mother about how bad he felt for her troubles.
I pulled up a footstool and sat in front of her. She was a fine-looking woman, with neat, even features, genuinely re-markable green-blue eyes, large and round, and a slender figure. After that momentary slump into the chair, her Emily Post spine straightened up. Her back was at a perfect ninety-degree angle to her lap. “What should I do?” she asked me.
I told her Easton needed a lawyer. I went into the kitchen and looked up Bill
