“Am I Bonnie Spencer?” She laughed. But then she did an awkward box step of embarrassment, probably sensing her manner wouldn’t win any awards for Most Seemly Display of Wistful Sadness in a Situation in Which an Ex-Spouse Has Been Offed. She switched to subdued. “Of course I’m Bonnie.” Then she added: “Gee.”
Gee. Bonnie Spencer.
Okay, picture the ex-wife of a celebrated movie producer.
What comes to mind? A cold, elegant bitch with tobacco-colored arms who wears jewelry to the beach. A stunner with pointy, polished nails that tap all the time, sending out the coded message: Fuck you; I’m dissatisfied.
But Bonnie Spencer didn’t seem dissatisfied. And she definitely didn’t come across as elegant, especially with that goof of a dog slobbering with happiness at her side. Looks?
No glamour girl, not by a long shot. More like one of those girl-buddy types, tall—five eight or nine—broad-shouldered and clean, probably from some clean town where all the girls said “Gee.” Nothing to write home about. Not much to look at. But the weird thing was, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.
Her best feature was her hair, glossy and dark, MAGIC HOUR / 53
pulled back into a ponytail. Other than that…well, okay features. Deep laugh lines around her eyes. She had the high, healthy color men have more often than women: that rosy brownness that comes to the naturally fair-skinned who spend a lot of time out of doors. In other words, Bonnie Spencer, sneakers in hand, looked like someone you never really got to know in high school: the big, strapping girl jock who gets over mourning the end of field hockey season by spending the winter stroking her lacrosse stick.
Except she was no girl—not anymore. The strong body and the shiny hair were deceptive. At first glance I had put her in her early thirties. But her neck was a little too lined, her lips a little too pale. She was in her late thirties, maybe even forty.
In relation to Sy she made absolutely no sense. To have seen the compact, richly robed, perfectly groomed Mr.
Spencer and his exquisite world of hand-painted pool tiles, and then to look at big, all-American Bonnie standing on the planked wood floor of a pretty but definitely not show-stopping old salt-box house…The question was not why Sy had dumped her, but how such a man had come to marry such a woman in the first place.
She was staring at me again. Her eyes were dark gray-blue, a deep, mysterious color for such a straightforward girl, the color of the ocean. I looked into them; that how-come- you’re-here expression had returned.
“Ms. Spencer?”
“Please,” she said, almost shyly. “Bonnie.”
And then, once more, ka-boom, her mood changed. Suddenly she became friendly, easy. She gave me a smile. A great, generous smile. Perfect white teeth, except for a slightly crooked one in front, as though her parents had run out of money a month before the orthodontist had finished. Listen, it
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can make you so happy to get a warm, uncomplicated smile like that. But why the hell was she smiling? Why the hell was her face lit up like that? What did she think I was going to do? Ask her to the senior prom?
“You’ve heard about your former husband, Seymour Spencer?”
“Oh, God,” she breathed. The smile vanished. Her eyebrows, the kind that slant up, like a bird’s wings, drew together; they were eyebrows meant for a more delicate woman. “It was on the ten o’clock news last night. One of those god-awful stories about famous people you don’t know. Except it was about Sy.” For a minute, her expression reflected the normal disorientation of the average citizen confronted with murder: a flash of horror, then a fast flare-up of incomprehension. “You probably hear this all the time, but I can’t believe it.” Her voice was filled with fervent emotion. “I’m so sorry.”
Too much emotion. Too goddamn fervent. Look, I’d been in Homicide a long time. Every working day of my life was spent with the distraught, the agitated, the grieving, the indifferent. And so I knew that something wasn’t right about Bonnie Spencer. First of all, her “I’m so sorry” was overly personal; it’s hard to explain, but even the world’s most ex-troverted person doesn’t respond to a cop with that kind of familiarity.
And another thing: just standing there in the doorway, she kept changing her mood. Not in the usual way, like a dazed person trying to come to grips with a too-terrible reality, but as though she were searching for the perfect, appropriate emotion to show off to me.
How did I know all this? Any decent detective knows when to turn off his mind and tune in his gut.
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And my gut was saying: Something’s going on with this woman.
So all of a sudden, instead of a routine interview with a dead hotshot’s ex-wife to see if I could come up with any leads, I was on the alert.
“Would you like to come in?” she was asking.
“Thanks.”
It was a good-size, solid house, built for a farm family. I followed her—and the dog—into a roomy kitchen and, naturally, said “Yeah, great” when she offered to make me coffee.
(Saying yes to coffee during an investigation makes people feel you’ve accepted them; it makes them relax, open up.
Unfortunately, half the time you wind up drinking stuff that tastes like lukewarm liquid shit, but in the long run it’s probably worth it.)
She cleared the morning’s papers—the Times, Newsday, the Daily News— all with their stories about Sy’s murder, off the table. She must have gone out for them when the coffee shop opened, at six; they’d all been read. I tipped the chair back and sat quietly, the way I usually do. I wanted to see what Bonnie Spencer would reveal. But she turned away to put the water up to boil and measure out coffee, so for a few seconds the only thing she
