Carbone asked me.
“Fifty-three years old. Dartmouth College graduate. From a rich family—kosher provisions business. The ones with that commercial where they all sit around the kitchen table in crowns: ‘Bologna for the Royal Family!’ But it sounds like he wasn’t all that turned on by lunch meats. He wanted culture. He started a big poetry magazine, Shower of Light, about twelve years ago. Put a pile of money into it. But then he seemed to have decided that poetry wouldn’t get him what he wanted.”
“What was that?”
“Who the hell knows? What do most guys want? Excitement. Fame. Fortune. Superior ass. I mean, who would you rather hit on, a receptionist in a pas-MAGIC HOUR / 11
trami factory or a poet? Or a movie star?” Carbone the Thoughtful looked like he was actually beginning to contemplate the alternatives. “Ray, the answer is: Movie star with giant boobs.”
“I don’t like those big, big ones,” he said, thoughtfully.
“What do you like? A girl who looks like she’s got two Hershey’s Kisses glued on her chest?”
“No, but you see a young girl with giant ones, you figure that when she’s thirty-five…” He shook his head in sadness.
“When she’s thirty-five,” the ballistics guy interrupted, “you trade her in for two seventeen-and-a-half-year-olds.” He chuckled at his own wit, then added: “Move back a little, out of my way.”
“Anyway,” I continued, as we moved back, “all along, Sy Spencer was pretty much a man-about-town, one of those people who pop up now and then in the gossip columns.
No dirt: just some guy with major bucks who gave money to the right causes, went to all those jet-setty charity benefits.
That seems to be where he met the movie types who have houses out here. And he got it into his head that he wanted to be a movie producer. Apparently, so do half the people in his world. But he got what he wanted.”
“You know, I’ve heard his name. Good movies, right?”
“No doubt about it. The guy had class.”
“So, Steve. Gut reaction.”
“It’s going to be a media circus. Plus a major pain because we’re dealing with hotshots who expect heavy-duty ass-kissing: ‘No, thanks, sir, I don’t drink while I’m on duty,’ when they offer us the cheap-shit Seagram’s they’ve been keeping from before they became famous. And—unless we get lucky in the next seventy-two hours and find someone in Sy’s life strok-12 / SUSAN ISAACS
ing a warm .22—it’s going to be an absolute bitch to crack.
Sy was the ultimate fast-track guy; he probably had fourteen Rolodexes, and those were just for personal friends.”
“Where would you start?”
“The movie he was producing, I guess. It’s called Starry Night. They’re shooting it over in East Hampton now.”
“No kidding! Now? ”
Having spent my whole life being local color in what people called the Fashionable Hamptons, I was used to rubbing shoulders with celebrities. Well, not exactly rubbing.
But from the time I was a kid, besides the regular rich and semi-rich summer people, there’d be famous models squeezing tomatoes at a farm stand, or TV anchormen picking out a toilet plunger in the hardware store in town—right next to you. We knew to pretend they were just plain people, but we also knew it was okay to ogle as they paid the cashier.
Neither they nor we wanted them so plain as to be overlooked.
But Carbone came from the plain plain world, suburban Suffolk County, a world peopled by ex-third-generation Brooklynites—shoe salesmen and IRS auditors and junior high school social studies teachers—a world that, if plopped down outside downtown Indianapolis or Des Moines, would not seem an unnatural part of the landscape. “East Hampton’s only—what?—ten, twelve miles away,” he was saying.
His eyes were lit by a starry sparkle. “We may have to go over there to question some people on the movie set.” Carbone was normally so levelheaded, so thoughtful, you’d think he’d have been glitz-proof, but at the thought of Lights!
Camera! Action! he was loosening his tie, unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. If there’d been a straw hat and cane, he’d have grabbed them and high-stepped over to East Hamp-MAGIC HOUR / 13
ton, belting out “Hooray for Hollywood.” “Who’s starring?”
he asked, much too casually.
“Lindsay Keefe and Nicholas Monteleone.”
“No kidding!” Then, fast, he switched back to his I’m-a-regular-guy mode. “I always liked him,” he said. “Reminds me of a young Gary Cooper. Good without being a goody-goody. And she’s a good actress.” Carbone shook his head in sadness. “But too left-wing for my taste.”
“With her body, do you care what her position on disarmament is?”
Suddenly it hit Carbone. “Is Lindsay Keefe here? ” he asked, his voice a little hushed with awe. “In the house?”
“Upstairs, with her agent. You didn’t hear her? He’s trying to calm her down.”
“Can you believe it? I was in there, interviewing the cook.
I didn’t even know she was here, in the same house.”
“The agent brought her back from the set. Heavy-duty hysterics.” Carbone’s eyebrows began drawing together in sympathy, so I added: “Let’s not forget she’s an actress.
Anyway, according to the agent, for the last six months Lindsay’s been living with Sy. Here, and he has a duplex on Fifth Avenue. They’re madly in love. Perfect relationship.
Never a harsh word between them. Blah, blah, blah. The usual. Oh, and they were going to get married the minute the movie was finished.”
“You believe the agent?”
“He’s not a slimeball. He’s an older guy named Eddie Pomerantz. Late sixties, early seventies. You can’t miss him.
A color-coordinated hippo: pink polo shirt and forty-eight-waist pink madras slacks. He was the one Sy was on the phone with when he was killed. Claims they were discussing some minor problem about photo approval. A movie star gets to approve
14 / SUSAN ISAACS
any picture before it’s handed out to the press, and Pomerantz said someone on this movie slipped a shot of Lindsay drinking coffee with her hair up in curlers to USA Today and she started crying when it got published because it’s
