Magic Hour

by Susan Isaacs

  "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 pastrami 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 stroking 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 Hampton, 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 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 detrimental to her career to be seen in hair curlers." I shook my head. "For this the guy gets ten percent. Anyway, Pomerantz said he heard two shots over the phone."

  "You buy his story?" Carbone asked.

  "I buy that he heard two shots. He sounded pretty definite on that. But he kept eating nuts like a fucking maniac. There was a giant bowl of nuts on the table in the library or den or whatever it's called, and he must have glommed two pounds of pistachios in five minutes. I was going to tell him not to eat potential evidence, but he was such a nervous wreck I didn't have the heart. He was upset about Sy, and very wor­ried about his client."

  "Could it be normal professional concern?"

  "Could be."

  "Listen, in this situation, concern would be an ap­propriate response. You know and I know and this Pomerantz must know that murder may mean public­ity, but in the long run, being the mistress of a homi­cide victim isn't going to help anyone's career." I nodded in agreement. "What's the matter? Do you think he's afraid of something specific?"

  "Couldn't tell. But we've got to consider if this business is in any way related to Lindsay Keefe. A jealous ex-boyfriend. Or some jealous ex-girlfriend of Sy's who got pissed off that Lindsay came into the picture."

  "And we have to find out if things were really that hunky-dory between Sy and Lindsay," Carbone said.

  "Yeah. Maybe Sy did something so terrible she felt she had to kill him."

  "Like what?"

  "How should I know, Ray? Maybe he left dental floss with last night's corn on the cob on the sink. Who the hell knows what sets people off, makes them kill? Do you?"

  "No."

  "Me neither. Maybe it was just something boring, like Sy was getting it on with the script girl."

  "You can't wait to start with the hypotheses, can you, Brady?"

  "No. Now listen: someone on this movie besides Lindsay might have had a grudge. Or from some other movie. Or it could have been a cold-blooded hit. We've got to find out what kind of life Sy had—be­yond his movie life. Did he gamble? Was he cooking the books? Into weird sex? Doing drugs?"

  A video tech stepped in front of us and, walking around Sy's body, aimed his camera on the white robe. Then he zoomed in on the two small splotches: the one on the hood, where a bullet entered just above Sy's brain stem, and another by his left shoul­der blade.

  "You'd never think of a man like Sy as a victim of anything," Carbone mused. "He seems like the ulti­mate winner."

  "I know. Look at all this," I said, glancing around the pool area.

  White wood tubs overflowed with trailing ivy and deep-purple flowers that gave off a light, spicy scent: nothing too perfumy, nothing too obvious. The chaises lay back, deep, welcoming. Small stone tables were car
ved like diving fish. You'd put your drink on the tail. White umbrellas on bamboo poles stood tall, like giant parasols. Almost-invisible quadraphonic speakers peeked up from the velvet grass.

  "Ray, I bet your wildest fantasy isn't as good as what Sy actually had. What was missing that any rea­sonable man could want?"

  Carbone started mulling it over, probably thinking something like a cohesive family unit or self-knowl­edge.

  What I was thinking was: If Sy had stuck with ko­sher salamis and not had all his dreams come true, would he now be alive, dressing for dinner, button­ing a three-hundred-dollar sports shirt, or sticking his pinkie into the salad dressing to check whether his cook was using enough basil or chives or whatever this month's most fabulous herb was? Why, on this splendid summer night, was Seymour Ira Spencer, the Man Who Had Everything, playing host to a bunch of cops who were swabbing between his toes, tweezing fluff off his bathrobe and cracking Lindsay Keefe tit jokes over his dead body?

  Look at a map. Long Island resembles a smiley but slightly demented whale. Its head—Brooklyn—butts against Manhattan, as if trying to get into some hot party from which it was deliberately excluded.

  But unlike bubble-brained Brooklyn, the whale's body wants no part of the high life. Queens, Nassau and suburban Suffolk County just swim, eternally, in the bracing waters between the Atlantic and Long Island Sound, yearning to reach mainland America. See how the whale's hump arches up in longing? All it wants is to be part of the U.S. of A., where life resembles a Coke commercial.

  Okay, now check out the rest of Suffolk County, the whale's forked tail. The tail isn't swishing a salute to either Manhattan or Middle America. No, it's raised high to greet Connecticut and Rhode Island. The East End of Long Island is, really, the seventh New En­gland state.

  See? On the North Fork of the tail, there are Yan­kee-style farms, fishing fleets and a few intensely quaint colonial villages that lack only a hand-carved "I am unspoiled" sign. And now look at the South Fork, my home. Our accents closer to Boston than the Bronx. Solid Anglo stock, augmented (most would say improved) by Indians, blacks, Germans, Irish, Poles and others. More farms again. More cute towns. But unspoiled like the North Fork?

  No, spoiled beyond comprehension.

  For over a hundred years, artists and clods, ge­niuses and jerks, have been coming out here with their ways—and their money. To the Hamptons. "We summer in the Homp-tons," they say. Do they even in oh-so-social Southampton, don't-say-rich-say-comfortable Water Mill, bookish Bridgehampton, belliger­ently down-to-earth Sag Harbor, show-bizzy East Hampton, home-of-the-boring Amagansett (I think the last truly interesting person to live in Amagansett died in 1683) and I-am-one-with-the-sea Montauk.

  This summer paradise isn't my South Fork, though; it belongs to men like Sy and to the legions of lesser New Yorkers who yearn to walk in his footprints in the sand. It is the Eden of the urbane: beach clubs, tennis clubs, yacht clubs, golf clubs; power breakfasts in the designated-chic local coffee shop, power softball games, power clambakes, power naps.

  But along this narrow strip of trendy whale's tail, there are also hamlets called Tuckahoe and North Sea and Noyack and Deerfield. And there are people who neither know nor care that the copper beech is the Tree of Choice and the Japanese maple is Almost Out, or that duck is a passe poultry. There are people who are here not to vacation but to live lives: farmers, supermarket cashiers, dentists, welfare recipients, li­brarians, truckdrivers, short-order cooks, lawyers, housewives, carpenters, lobstermen, hospital order­lies. Oh, yes—and cops.

  My name is Stephen Edward Brady. I was born in Southampton Hospital. A few days later, I went home with my mother to Brady Farm in Bridgehampton. It's still there. Not the farm, of course. My father sold everything but the farmhouse and two acres in 1955, a little more than a decade before the big land boom that would have made them rich, the only thing my mother had ever wanted to be.

  I was born on May 17, 1949, to Kevin Francis Brady, farmer and (in the great South Fork tradition) drunk, and to Charlotte Easton (of the Sag Harbor Eastons) Brady, housewife and social climber. In 1951, my brother Easton was born.

  I went to Sagaponack Elementary School, a one-room schoolhouse. (The summer people say: "I love it! It's so real." So okay, A for ambience. C- for edu­cation. B for freezing dampness that makes your fin­gers throb in the winter. And A+ for smells from de­composing rodents under the foundation in late spring.) Then I went to Bridgehampton High. And then the State University of New York at Albany.

  It wasn't that I'd been such a saint in high school, but at least I'd known who I was and that I'd be­longed. Sure, I was a bad boy in Bridgehampton—a little driving while intoxicated, a little breaking and entering. In my heart I knew it was a phase, that someday I would become a solid citizen, buy back my father's farm, sit on the school board.

  But I picked the wrong generation, and the wrong genes. Up at Albany, I became just another whacked-out asshole with sideburns. I embraced my genera­tion's holy trinity: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I was a true believer. I screwed and drank and drugged along with Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. I didn't die, though. I flunked out.

  So I enlisted in the United States Army. Why? To this day, I have no idea. I can't re-create the boy I was, the boy who could do something that dumb and self-destructive.

  On my first day of basic, they clipped my hair with a machine that left it less than a quarter inch long. I remember standing at attention and having a five-foot-three Filipino drill sergeant reach up and grab those hairs between his thumb and index finger, pull at them, and scream up into my face, "Fucking hip­pie!" All I wanted to do was go home. I knew I wasn't man enough to take it. Except I had to take it. In those eight weeks, the army's goal is to break you down, then build you up again into a machine that obeys all commands without thought or argument. Well, they broke me down. I cried myself to sleep every night. There I was, a big guy, a soldier, boo-hooing into my pillow so that no one, especially all the other crybabies, could hear me.

  But I went off to war an infantryman, a master of the M79 grenade launcher. I fought for God and America and the honor of the Brady bunch. No. Actu­ally, I just fought to stay alive. I fought even harder not to feel alive. Feeling dead was a major asset in Vietnam. I moved on from hash and pot to smoking opium joints. And after about a month, skag.

  Skag is heroin. Five or ten percent pure on the streets in the States. Ninety-six percent pure in Viet­nam. No needles: cigarettes. You just had to inhale, so you weren't a junkie. We were all very clear on that. We were just a bunch of grunts sitting around smoking at night after a hard day's work in the jungle: a little patrolling, a little shooting, and then stacking up stinking dink corpses so we could get our body count and move on for more.

  Skag was cheap: three bucks a hit. Skag was good for us grown-up G.I. Joes, better than pot, because pot makes time go very, very slow. Heroin lifts you out of your body, takes you out of time. It got me through those three hundred and sixty-five days in hell. No, I wasn't caught. If you had brains and a little foresight, you could get a buddy to pee for you and were home free. (Ha.) I was discharged, honorably. I hadn't been doing skag every day. Just almost every day. I said to myself: You're not addicted. But when I landed back in the States after the eighteen-hour flight, I was sick—leg pains when we refueled in Guam, stomach cramps, the sweats in Hawaii. Ter­rible diarrhea the whole time, banging on the door of the airplane bathroom, doubled over, screaming at the top of my lungs: Please, oh God, let me in!

  In San Francisco I had to buy heroin on the street. Three days, five hundred bucks. I couldn't handle a needle. The dealer had me wait in the basement of a burned-out grocery store; after the high started to wear off, I'd stand there shivering in the dark, my head twitching. I could smell the wet, charred wood and the decay, hear the deranged scurrying of rats. When there was a lull in his action, the dealer would clomp downstairs, hold a flashlight in his mouth and shoot me up. He had hunched shoulder
s and a thrust-forward turtle head, like Nixon. His damp, hot finger­tips probed for a vein; there were crescents of green-black dirt under his nails. He told me: Don't expect me to keep doing this. This is a special introductory service.

  It was that night I lucked out. I came up for air about two a.m. and ran right into a San Francisco P.O. street

  sweep. A big, mean-looking black cop grabbed me. He was about to pat me down when he took a second look and said, Army? I said, Yeah, and he said, You dumb piece of white shit, but instead of taking me in, he dropped me at one of those free clinics in Haight-Ashbury.

  The clinic was run by a woman doctor. It took almost a week to get detoxed. Then I spent another two weeks in bed—with the woman doctor. Her name was Sharon. "Positive reinforcement," she called it. Sharon panted a lot; I kept feeling her hot, moist spearmint Certs breath. She always gazed deep into my eyes the second it was over. Aren't I marvel­ous? her eyes demanded.

  Marvelous? Somehow I was getting it up and, ap­parently, getting it off. But my dick could have been Novocained; I swear to God I felt nothing.

  By the end of the second week, Sharon was after me to go back to college—in San Francisco. Hey! I could move in with her! What a fabulous idea! To­gether we could bang our brains out! Detox the toxed! Refinish her floors!

  I did not leave my heart—or any other part of me—in San Francisco. I was back home for Christmas.

  Two days of my mother and brother, and I moved out. I needed a job. One of my buddies from high school had joined the Southampton Town P.D. No degree necessary. Decent pay. I applied, but there was a waiting list, so instead I joined the Suffolk County P.D. I became Guardian of the Suburbs, Keeper of the Peace for the lawn-tenders and split-level dwellers.