by Susan Isaacs
"Why would you think that?" She wasn't exactly scared, but she wasn't at ease either.
"Open up, Bonnie." I stepped toward her. She inched backward, until she was pressed against the sink. I moved in until we were almost touching. "Tell me what you're not talking about. Be smart. Because if I start to think you were involved, I'll go after you—and I won't stop."
I had a few minutes after Bonnie, so I drove down to the beach. I hadn't liked the way the interview had ended. A little official charm is one thing. That final minute, that simultaneous coming on to her and threatening her, was another. And I hadn't come on to her just for leverage; I'd really wanted to be close to her. I needed to clear my head.
Down at the beach, a stiff wind was whipping up the sand, blowing sharp, scratchy grains against my face and neck. Summer people were scuttling around, on the verge of hysteria. Nature was behaving badly. They closed their inside-out umbrellas, folded their chairs, picked up their coolers and rushed past me, back to their cars. There could be no grain of sand under gold spandex bikinis, or in eyes that had to be wide open for the next hostile takeover.
I took off my shoes, squatted down by the dunes near a patch of jointweed, pretty much out of the worst of the wind, and watched until all the New York bodies had run away. Back in the late fifties, when I was a kid, people still slept on the beach, right where I was, on hot summer nights. Grownups would pitch tents, but the rest of us would lug out the blanket rolls we'd learned to make in Boy Scouts. Sometimes we'd tell scary stories about the Cropsey Maniac or whisper dirty jokes, but by eleven, we'd fall silent and just lie on our backs, staring up at the night sky. The stars were so beautiful they shut us up.
I must have been about ten when I started sneaking out of the house one or two nights a week to sleep on the beach after the summer was over. I did it all year round, except for the winter months. Once the house was dark, I'd tiptoe down the steep back staircase and out the door, grab the blanket roll I kept in the toolshed behind the house, take my bike and race like hell for three quarters of a mile over the pitch-black road.
I don't know why I had to get out. Okay, even back then, my brother and I didn't exactly revel in each other's company; but our relationship was more mutual annoyance than animosity. At his worst, Easton was just a pata-in-the-ass prig who ironed his T-shirts.
My mother? A lady. She didn't hit me or scream at me. She just didn't like me, and probably didn't love me. I was the mirror image of the drunk farmer who'd fucked her over and then taken off. Just being myself—dangling my legs over the arm of the couch while I read, whistling a tuneless few notes when I was doing something mindless like washing windows—pissed her off. She'd pass by, and there'd be just a sharp expulsion of air through her nose, an irate snort. When I was younger I'd ask, "Hey, Ma, what's wrong?" Her answer would be "nothing" in the form of a high-society chuckle—a throaty heh-heh of denial. Then she'd say, "Steve, sweetheart, please. Anything but 'Ma.' Did I raise a hillbilly?" My mother always made me feel like total shit.
I know. She didn't have it easy. The farm was gone, and so was my old man. There was no way near enough money to feed me and Easton, and keep us in jeans and sneakers, much less for her to lead the gracious-lady life she aspired to. So she got a job—at Saks Fifth Avenue
in Southampton, selling expensive dresses to expensive women. And when she wasn't involving herself in rich lives by zipping up their dresses or stroking their embossed names on their charge cards, she was busting her chops doing scutz work for their charity groups. My mother would do anything—set up three hundred bridge chairs in the midday sun, lick one thousand envelope flaps until past midnight—to be allowed into their swan-necked, high-cheekboned society.
I don't know where my mother got her obsession with the upper crust. Sure, her family was an old one in Sag Harbor, and to hear her you could practically see portraits of bearded Eastons in the brass-buttoned uniforms of whaling boat captains. But there were no portraits; I'd hiked up to the Sag Harbor Library in eighth grade and learned there was absolutely no basis for ancestor worship. Early Eastons might have gone to sea, but they'd obviously been ordinary sailors: guys with bowlegs and black stumps for teeth. Her old man, who died before I was born, had sold tickets for a ferry company that had the Sag Harbor and New London, Connecticut, route.
Still, my mother was convinced, despite all hard evidence to the contrary, that she was a gentlewoman. She didn't give a damn about the local South Fork female elite, the wives of lawyers, doctors, successful farmers, or even the moneyed Yanks—maybe because they all knew who she was, or wasn't. No, she lived for Memorial Day, when her "friends" opened up their summer houses out here. Even when we were kids, she'd sit at the supper table and talk about her New York "friends." Quality People.
Her friends, of course, were not her friends but her customers, summer women who came to the grand old houses, "cottages" in Southampton—like the one Sy bought—for the summer. She'd go on and on about Mrs. Oliver Sackett's hand-embroidered-in-England slips ("Divine, teeny stitches!"), or the thirty-one ("Norell! Mainbocher! Chanel!") dresses Mrs. Quentin Dahlmaier had ordered from the main branch in New York, one for every night of the month of July.
Bottom line? My mother felt fucked every single day of her life because she didn't have a driver ("Never say 'chauffeur'!" she warned Easton; "it's nouveau riche") and a maid and a sable coat. She didn't even have a roof that didn't leak.
And I think that's why I got out from under her roof as often as I could. Sitting over a plate of her specialite de la maison, macaroni and undiluted Campbell's Cheddar Cheese Soup (which, of course, she knew was not Quality, but which she announced was Great Fun), listening to her go on to Easton in her throaty voice—she was a heavy smoker and wound up sounding like Queen Elizabeth with laryngitis—Jesus. She'd talk about how Mrs. Gabriel Walker ("one of the Bundy sisters, from Philadelphia") was mad for nubby linen, absolutely mad ... Her conversation was directed to Easton, never to me. But then she knew and I knew that would be a waste of time.
I did not belong in that house. Like my old man, I was not Quality.
"Had Mr. Spencer to the best of your knowledge received any threatening messages or phone calls?" Robby Kurz was asking Lindsay Keefe.
You could tell Robby had gotten up extra early to get spiffy. He'd arranged a yellow handkerchief in the breast pocket of his brown plaid jacket into points. The smell of his double dose of hairspray overpowered the scent arising from a huge bowl of white roses on the table in front of the couch he and I were sitting on.
"Of course there were no threats," Lindsay exhaled, a sharp, pissed-off breath between pursed lips. She was trying very hard to be patient. "What do you expect? That his killer went up to him and announced: 'You're a dead man'? And there were no heavy-breather phone calls either." For a woman in shock, Lindsay sounded clearheaded. In fact, completely self-possessed, not a hint of hysteria. The batshit, Valiumed, sensitive artiste her agent had described could have been some other person.
Even though I'd caught a glimpse of her the night before, in the back of my mind I must have been expecting a fifteen-foot-tall Goddess of Film, a gargantuan babe with enormous, glistening lips and colossal legs that could crush any man caught between them. But Lindsay, standing by the window, fingering the sheer white curtain, was of ordinary height, although so small-boned and petite (except for her world-famous tits) that she looked as if she'd been created solely to make men feel big, important. In her daintiness, she must have been a perfect match for Sy. Two exquisite pocket-size people: a separate species.
But Sy had been an ordinary-looking man. Lindsay Keefe's looks were extraordinary. No wonder she'd gone from doing Greek tragedies in little theaters in little midwestern cities to making avant-garde films in Europe to being an American movie star. Her features were beautiful. Okay, they didn't add up to perfection, but they came damn close. (Movie stars usually have one annoying flaw—a wen, a strawberry ma
rk that you can't ignore, one defect that makes you wonder why they couldn't pop a few thou for a plastic surgeon. Lindsay had a black mole on her neck, at the spot where a guy's Adams apple is. It was a thing you'd never think about on a regular person, but I couldn't keep my eyes off it.)
Her skin was the palest possible, the kind where you can almost picture the whole blood vessel network underneath. Her hair was some miraculous white-blond, but with half silver, half gold overtones. And the eyes: pure black.
She'd gotten herself up all in white. A long, filmy skirt and a plain, schoolgirl blouse. The living room was all white also, like a stage set designed solely to flatter blondes. There were a lot of what I'm sure were antiques, but solid stuff: fat couches and chairs covered in different materials—but all whites too, various shades of it, so it became a kind of color.
"If you want to know the truth," Lindsay went on, "nothing could scare Sy. He was a man in control, at the peak of his powers. Intellectually, emotionally, financially..." She stopped for a second. When she continued, it was with disgust, as though she'd caught us sniggering over the notion of Sy's "powers." She seemed exasperated with what she'd decided were our infantile, dirty cop minds. "All right, I'll fill in the blank for you: at the peak of his powers sexually."
Forget that her words were unfair, to say nothing of blunt, brusque and bordering on the stunningly snotty; it hardly mattered. Robby and I sat motionless as she spoke. Her voice had a deep, sensual undercurrent, a hypnotic hum. You wanted to hear whatever she had to say. She could be talking about Sy's death, or reciting erotic poetry, or reading the ingredients off a Kaopectate label. You couldn't resist being Lindsay Keefe's audience.
You wanted to applaud everything. Because besides the Face and the Voice, there was the Body. She had positioned herself perfectly in front of the window. With the curtains open, the late-morning light behind her was so strong you could practically see what she had for breakfast. Everything was lit up: her legs, the line of her bikini underpants stretched over her flat stomach, her hand-span waist—and most of all, the fact that she wasn't wearing a bra. Incredible: her boobs were flawless, the awesome ones that defy gravity and point north. And naturally, she stood slightly sideways, making sure the sunshine lit her up so you couldn't avoid seeing the pokes her nipples made as they pushed against the gauzy fabric of the tightly tucked-in blouse.
"Sy was a great success artistically and financially. You must know that this is not an industry where people wish each other well. But would someone murder him because his last film won the Gold Palm at Cannes and grossed ninety-two million? Please."
Robby was nodding at everything Lindsay said, but it was nodding run amok. His head kept bobbing up and down, nonstop, like one of those jerky dolls with springs for necks you used to see in the backs of cars.
I wasn't nodding at all. Because, number one, although I might have been spellbound by the Voice, I still had enough brains to realize all we were getting from Lindsay were words. She was giving a brief (but wonderfully well lit) personal appearance that would satisfy two uncouth cops—without revealing anything.
And, number two, my nodding reflexes weren't working so well because I was genuinely stunned at Lindsay Keefe's absolute indifference to us. Hey, we hadn't dropped in to discuss delinquent parking tickets. You'd think, being an actress, she'd offer a few chest-heaving sobs, or at least sniffle. All she was doing, though, was going through the motions of an interview so she wouldn't get marked down as uncooperative—and keeping us titillated while she was at it, only because it would have been against her nature to be in the same room with a human dick and not titillate. But she totally didn't give a shit about what we thought about her. I'd never come across that before.
Homicide is not a common circumstance in most lives and, therefore, neither are homicide detectives. I'd always gotten some reaction: respect, hostility, obsequiousness, guardedness, guile, cooperation. Forget personal qualities: to anyone remotely connected to a murder, Robby and I were figures of authority, symbols of the Law. But not to Lindsay. To her, we were clowns in cheap sports jackets.
She lifted her hair out from under her collar, letting it fall over her shoulders. "Is there anything else you want from me?" Lindsay demanded.
Robby tried to be cool. He didn't get anywhere. He started giving off a sour wet-wool smell; he was in a sweat of nerves and desire. "Did Mr. Spencer ever mention anyone from his past who might not wish him well?" he asked. Lindsay took a slow, deep breath, presumably to show us how she was trying to retain her composure so she could continue the ordeal of questioning. "Miss Keefe?" To be fair, Robby's voice didn't quite squeak, but it wouldn't have won any prizes for resonance.
She left her position near the window and came and sat on a chair opposite us, her legs curled under her, her hands clasped in ladylike fashion in her lap. "Look, I've given you all the help I can," Lindsay said. "I don't know anything more."
That voice! It was one of those voices you read about in old detective stories, which girls with names like Velma have: rich, luscious, like warm cream. Except the funny thing was, for all her cream and translucent skin and superior tits and blond hair and black mystery eyes, Lindsay Keefe wasn't knocking my socks off. Sure, if your taste ran to devastating blondes she wasn't bad. But on or off the job, I was never the kind of guy who gets off on contempt. Okay (to be fair), maybe this was Lindsay's tough act, to hide some vulnerability—or some real or imagined indiscretion she was afraid was incriminating. Or (not to be fair) maybe Lindsay was just an insolent, contemptuous, cold, emotionally defective twat.
"Well?" she asked. "Any more questions?"
Robby wasn't completely star-struck, but he seemed to have forgotten, momentarily, that he was the killer interrogator of the Suffolk County P.O. Homicide Squad and the beloved husband of Freckled Cleavage. He gulped. "I think that about covers it for now," he said.
"Fine," she said, and stood. Robby stood too, although not without hanging his shin on the white marble coffee table.
I stayed on the couch. "Did Mr. Spencer ever mention seeing any of his colleagues from his days in the kosher meat business?" Lindsay eyed me a little curiously. I hadn't said anything beyond a "Hello" and an "I'm sorry"; until now, I'd been letting Robby do the questioning. "Why don't you sit down just for one more minute, Ms. Keefe." She sat, and then Robby did too. "The meat business," I prompted.
"No," she answered. "I'm almost positive he didn't see any of them. For him, that was another life. But let me say this, Detective ... I forgot your name."
"Steve Brady. Did any people he knew from the meat business invest in this movie, Ms. Keefe?"
"Yes. One or two."
"Do you know their names?"
"Just one. Mikey. Michael, I suppose."
"Any last name?"
"I don't know it."
"Did you ever hear of Mr. Spencer meeting with this Mikey?" She shook her head. "Having a phone conversation with him?"
"Sy made most of his calls from his study."
"Right, but did you ever happen to be passing by and hear any call to this Mikey?"
"Actually, once. And I was passing by—not eavesdropping. Don't condescend to me."
"Okay. What did you happen to hear, passing by?"
"Sy was reassuring this man that everything was going well."
"Was Mikey worried that it wasn't going well?"
"No, of course not. It was one of those soothing, stroking, you're-so-important phone calls. Sy was a master of those."
"No problems with Starry Night!"' I asked. She shook her head, allowing a curl of her long platinum hair to fall in front of her shoulder. She started twirling it around her index finger; I assume my eyes were supposed to follow the little circles until I was mesmerized. But I couldn't stop watching the mole on her neck; it was so black it looked like an undeveloped third eye. "Mr. Spencer was pleased with how it was going?" I asked.
"Yes."
"No problems with the director? Any of the actors?"
"Nothing that wasn't routine."
"He was happy with your performance?"
"Of course." Emphatic. Clipped. "Why do you ask?"
"Just trying to get the lay of the land," I said.
"Let's be straight with each other, Detective Brady. I don't know what you've heard, but there's always on-set gossip about the star of a film. Sometimes it's more than petty nastiness. I'm sure there are people saying terrible things, like that I'm a tough bitch. That's because I'm serious—passionately serious—about my work. Or that my performance is somehow lacking. Or that my relationship with Sy was ... well, one of mutual convenience. The truth is, yes, I am tough. But I also happen to be a vulnerable human being."
"I'm sure you are."
"And I loved Sy very, very much."
"I understand."
"I hope you also understand that Sy loved my work." She bowed her head for an instant, a second of silence. Then she looked me right in the eye. "And he loved me."
"I don't doubt that for a minute," I said, and thought about the long, dark hairs that had gotten caught on the headboard in the guest room.
"We were going to be married."
I asked: "What do you know about his ex-wives?"
"I haven't met either of them."
"Did he ever talk about them?"
"Not very much. The first was named Felice. He married her right after college. She was getting her Ph.D. at Columbia. Supposedly very brilliant. Came from a distinguished family. A great deal of money."
"What happened?"
"Truthfully?"
"Please."
"Bor-ing."
"Did he have any contact with her recently?"
"No. I'm almost positive. They were divorced in the late sixties. She's remarried."
"What about his second wife?" I asked.
"Bonnie. From out West someplace."