Magic Hour by Susan Isaacs (i want to read a book TXT) 📗

that she was a good person, that whatever ties she had to her ex-husband had to do strictly with making movies. Because if I ever was going to be friends with a woman, Bonnie would have been exactly the kind of woman I would have picked. She seemed so straight that in spite of all my doubts, when Wendy Morrell opened her gummy mouth, I truly believed she was going to say: A black sports car? No! The only car I ever saw in her driveway was the Lilco meter reader’s—and he was never there for more than ninety seconds.

To hell with Bonnie. I shifted into third.

The trip from Bridgehampton to Headquarters in Yaphank was thirty-nine miles, most of it along straight-arrow, four-lane Route 27. Once it had been my own personal test track.

Since sobriety, though,

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MAGIC HOUR / 157

I’d become an old fart and never pushed much beyond seventy-five mph.

But now, going west against beach traffic, I decided I needed speed. I couldn’t believe how badly I’d misjudged her. Moose wasn’t the town slut; the animal wasn’t the animal. The stupid bitch, Bonnie, couldn’t keep her legs together. I shifted into fourth, heard the deep, throaty hum of the exhaust, watched the tachometer go into redline. I eased up when I got to a hundred and five. Fuck Bonnie Spencer! This was fantastic! In most sports cars, when you’re in last gear, you feel like you’re skyrocketing, leaving the pull of earth’s gravity. But the XKE kind of squats, fuses with the road. It’s the ultimate down-to-earth experience.

There just isn’t anything like speed to take you away, especially sober. (Driving drunk, you know in your gut that Death, carrying a scythe, in that hooded bathrobe—sort of like Sy’s, although not as good-quality terry cloth—is standing over the next rise.)

So fuck Bonnie. And fuck this case. The minute it was over, I’d say to Lynne: Come on. No waiting till Thanksgiving weekend. Let’s find some priest whose dance card isn’t all filled up the way your guy’s is. We’ll get married right away. And forget Saint John. We’ll go to London. I’ll go to museums with you. To Shakespeare. I’ll visit English schools and stand by your side and learn all about the newest methods for combating dyscalculia. I swear to God, I’ll even go to the opera.

Sergeant Alvin Miller of the Ogden, Utah, Police Department talked re-e-e-eal slo-o-o-ow, as if each word had to mosey down a long dirt road before it could come out. “Well, now, Detective Brady. One of the boys passed on your message last night. ’Bout ten. I’m not with the department anymore.

Re-tired, you

158 / SUSAN ISAACS

know. Have been for eleven years.” I transferred the phone to my other ear. “But seeing as you said it wasn’t urgent, I wasn’t going to call you up there in Noooo Yorrrk, where it was midnight.” He said “New York” in the resentful way guys in my company in Vietnam did, as if ordinary people and ordinary places—suburbs, farms, beaches and forests—were just camouflage for a state whose sole business was mocking the rest of America. “Hope my not calling back right away didn’t hold you up.”

“No problem.” Across the room, Charlie Sanchez sat at his desk holding aloft a cheese Danish from the daily love-me bag of bakery goodies Robby had brought in. Charlie was sticking out his tongue, licking the yellow cheese in the center. The crime-scene photographs on my desk, showing Sy with his two small, neat little wounds, were less revolting than watching Charlie tongue a pastry. “I appreciate your calling back,” I said to Sergeant Miller.

“You bet. Now, you wanted to know something about the Bernstein girl. Don’t tell me she’s in trouble?”

“No, she’s okay. Her ex-husband—”

“She got a divorce?”

“Yeah. A few years ago.”

“No, kiddin’. What was her first name, now?”

“Bonnie.”

“That’s it, all right. Bonnie Bernstein. She living in New York?”

“No. In Bridgehampton. It’s a little town on the East End of Long Island.”

“Oh. I heard she went to Hollywood. She made a picture, you know. I forget what they called it, but I saw it. Not bad.”

“The detective I spoke to said you might know the family.”

“Yup. Knew them. Pretty well, at one time.” I MAGIC HOUR / 159

wanted to grab this fucker by his string tie and shake him, make the words come out faster.

“Can you tell me about them?”

“Sure.” I licked my fingertip and erased a coffee ring while I hung around and waited for his next word. “If memory serves me, the Bernsteins—that would be Bonnie’s grandpar-ents—opened the store.”

“Uh-huh,” I muttered encouragingly.

“Called it Bernstein’s.”

“Did her parents keep it up?”

“Kept it up real nice.”

Out in the anteroom, Ray Carbone was handing one of Homicide’s two secretaries a piece of paper. From the pained look in his eyes, it was probably a draft of the next press release, which would say, essentially, that we knew nothing.

The secretary glanced around for her glasses, didn’t find them, and so stretched out her arm and pulled back her head to read. Hanging above her head was the giant banner that no one could miss when they walked into Suffolk County Homicide: THOU SHALT NOT KILL.

“What kind of a store was Bernstein’s?”

“A sporting goods store.”

“Bats, balls?”

“Nope. More like guns, fishing gear.”

“Handguns?”

“Sure, handguns. This is Utah.”

“Rifles?”

“Yup.”

“Is the store still around?”

“No. Mrs. Bernstein—that would be Bonnie’s mother—died. Dan—that’s her father—sold the place and retired.

I believe to Arizona, but I won’t swear to it. Maybe New Mexico. And the boys—three or four of them—didn’t stay in Ogden. One of them is a college professor at U.U., and I don’t know what the others did.”

160 / SUSAN ISAACS

“Bonnie was the only girl.”

“So far as I can remember, and I remember her because she was friends with the boys and girls in my Eddie’s Mutual.

I guess you don’t know what that is.”

“No.”

“It’s a group for Mormon junior high and high school kids.”

“Were the Bernsteins Mormons?”

“Of course not. You’re from New York. You should know that.”

“Right. Okay now,