“Well, he’d laugh at someone’s joke on the phone, that sort of thing. One time, when he was talking to someone who I guess was very important, he was doing William Powell. You know, roguish charm. But nothing else. Not while I was around, sir.”
“Sounds like he must have been rough to work for.”
“He was kind of like a combo William Hurt-Jack Nich-olson. Classy-scary-cold. I think if you had some value to him he could be very nice. But I had absolutely no idea if he liked me or hated me.”
“But still, even though he didn’t show emotion, you say you sensed he wasn’t thrilled with the dailies?”
“Yes. The last couple of nights, he was white as a sheet after the lights came back on. He had to have known that Lindsay was running the film into the ground.”
“But do you know that for a fact?”
“No. I could just…intuit it.”
“Had Lindsay and Sy been fighting?”
“No direct confrontation. Not that I ever saw. But most of this week, the air was charged. I’m sure, with you being in Homicide, sir, you know better than most people that anger isn’t always expressed verbally.”
“Yeah, I know that. But if you’re trying to sell me a charged-air theory, you’ve got to give me some substanti-ation. Come on now. How angry was Sy? How angry was Lindsay? Angry enough to have pumped two bullets into him?”
Down near the beach, there was just enough light from Emergency Services for me to see Gregory’s white skeleton arms start popping goose bumps. “Please, Detective Brady, Ms. Keefe may have been wrong for this particular role, but I have the greatest respect for her not only as a performer but as a hu-MAGIC HOUR / 29
man being. I’m sure someone of her intellectual stature and—”
“Can it, Gregory! This isn’t some NYU film school fucking seminar. Now, you’d been shooting the movie for three weeks. Isn’t that early to know a picture’s in trouble?”
“No. Everyone sensed it. You know how there’s a feeling of intense community? Did you ever see Day for Night? ”
“No. And don’t tell me about movies or actors. Tell me about life.”
“On the set, the cast and crew were just going through the motions, talking about all the other movies they’d worked on. Not about this one.”
“But what about Lindsay Keefe? How could she stink?
She’s supposed to be one of the best actresses around, right?”
“She is a good actress. But her role calls for vulnerability under a brittle exterior. The only thing that came through in dailies was brittleness. And not sophisticated, Sigourney Weaver brittleness. Just hardness, shallowness. Very TV
miniseries.”
“You personally saw these dailies?”
“Yes.”
“Well? Was she bad?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did Sy ever express displeasure over her, either to her or to you or to anyone else?”
“Not…really. But he was so circumspect, you never had any idea what he was thinking unless he specifically told you.” Gregory hesitated. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to come up with something—anything—to please me or whether he was honestly trying to remember something. But just then, Robby Kurz came sauntering down the lawn.
30 / SUSAN ISAACS
Detective Robert Kurz. Rain, shine, sleet, hail. Gunshot, strangling, knifing, poison. Man, woman, child. No matter what the conditions of a homicide were, Detective Robby lit up every crime scene with his big Howdy Doody smile, his endearing, snub-nosed face and the bright white light of his enthusiasm.
“Yo, Steve!”
“Hi.” To get away from his relentless exuberance, I walked toward the beach, pretending I wanted to think. Naturally, Robby hurried after me.
Lucky for me, Robby was thirty. That provided some distance. I’d had almost ten years more on the force than he did. While he was still sitting in his patrol car, waiting for some commuter in Dix Hills to run a stop sign, I’d been the rising star of Homicide. In rank, having been busted, I was his equal. In fact, being lead detective, I was his superior.
He tried not to acknowledge it. Robby—despite the shiny bald spot he tried to hide by combing his hair sideways and spraying it into paralysis, despite his desperately-eager-to-cheat wife (Mrs. Howdy Doody, with a silver heart dangling in her freckled cleavage) and, more important, despite his arrest record, which was, embarrassingly and unfortunately, almost triple his conviction record—had determined that he was the perfect cop. This notion filled him with pleasure; it was impossible to pass him in the john, on the stairs, at the coffee machine without getting a rapturous grin. Every morning he handed out bagels and crullers and Danish to the squad like the Pope bestowing blessings.
Robby stood beside me near the dune, one foot higher than the other, his body on an awkward slant. He was definitely not an outdoor guy; the security of Suffolk County-issue linoleum was vastly preferable to sand.
MAGIC HOUR / 31
“What’ve you got?” I asked. I ran my hand over the spikes of some tall beach grass.
“Footprints on the grass near the house!” he enthused.
“From rubber thongs. The regular, cheap kind. Mitch from the lab says they’re a man’s size ten or eleven, although obviously”—Robby paused, probably so I could prepare myself for a blast of deductive brilliance—“those kind of shoes can be worn by anyone. But if we can track them down—”
“Where exactly were the footprints?”
He pointed past the pool and the lawn, to the corner of the big porch that ran the entire length of the back of the house. I stretched my neck and squinted. A guy from the lab was straddling an area of grass right up against the house.
He was just finishing photographing the footprints, getting ready to apply the dental stone we use for making molds of them.
At that particular corner, the crawl space, neatly covered in lattice, rose about five or six feet high, with the porch above it. From up on the dunes, not far from where we were standing, a hundred feet away, it would have been easy to spot a man with a
