Magic Hour

by Susan Isaacs

  "For the record, you told her you loved her."

  "But I never saw her again, did I?" Gideon sat back in the booth and crossed his arms over his chest. Relaxed, conversational. "She said you were heavier then." I'd dropped twenty pounds after I'd stopped drinking and started running. "And you had a mustache. Thick, droopy." Yes. "That's why it took her a minute to realize it was you at her door. And do you know what went through her mind then? She thought: Who cares why he never called? He's back!"

  "Mr. Friedman, don't you get it? Either she did a little research on me in town and made this whote thing up—or it actually happened. But it doesn't mat­ter. They can take me off the case, put someone else in my place, and the outcome will still be the same. Bonnie Spencer will be brought to trial on—yeah, sure—circumstantial evidence. But strong circumstantial evidence. Most likely she will be found guilty. And she will go to jail. And whether I slept with her or gave her a line about loving her or never met her before I rang her front doorbell won't matter one goddamn bit."

  "Bonnie was right. You are very, very bright."

  "Thanks."

  "Hear me out. You've constructed an intelligent, imaginative theory about how Sy was killed. All I ask now is that you look back at your data, put that same creativity to work again."

  I shook my head.

  "Try it. Build another case. A real one this time, not a myth."

  "I can't."

  "You have to."

  *13*

  I left the diner, my lunch untouched. The after­noon had turned from plain August hot to sweltering. I thought about finding an AA meeting but instead drove north, aimlessly, farther from Headquarters. I pulled into the parking lot of a shopping center. Sub­urban heaven, with its open-twenty-four-hours Grand Union, its nail salon, its frozen-yogurt store and its card shop featuring Charlie Brown paper tablecloths, plates, cups and guest towels.

  I put the top up, locked away my gun and changed into the shorts and sneakers I kept behind the two front seats, on the parcel shelf of the car—my gym locker on wheels. I hooked my pager onto the elastic waistband of the shorts. I had used my running shirt with the Clorox-eaten sleeve to clean the dipstick, so I had to run shirtless.

  The humidity was suffocating. I would gladly have taken one of those blue bandannas I'd been laughing at all summer, the kind New York runners were twirling and wrapping around their foreheads, trying to look like construction workers instead of rich idiots. And I'd even take one of their ass packs too, with their plastic bottle of mineral water.

  For the first couple of miles through central Suffolk—past tract houses sided with cheap, already-pitted aluminum, where nobody, apparently, had enough home-owning pride to stick a mailbox with a painted "The McCarthy's" up on a post, or plant a crab apple or a rosebush or anything beyond the token scraggly juniper the builder had stuck in the front lawn, past about ten acres of open grassland with a For Sale sign—I didn't think about Bonnie at all. I didn't think about anything.

  I ran past a small farm, just like any on the South Fork, although here there was no sweet ocean tang in the air to obscure the harsh perfume of fertilizer and pesticides. Pretty, though: a brown field of russet po­tatoes, almost ready for harvest. It was edged by a border of dark-pink clover and white trumpet vines. The potatoes look good, I was thinking, A lot of Long Island farmers don't like russets because they can get all knobby, but there'd been just enough rain—

  Bonnie! Not a fantasy this time. A true recollection.

  Labor Day, about four in the afternoon. Inside the bar—yeah, Gideon, the Gin Mill—it was murky, and packed, like the Friday night of Memorial Day week­end. But the season was over, and the too-old-to-be-yuppies were no longer cruising loose, happy, expec­tant. The same hot-shit Yorkers now jammed against the bar, pushing each other. They were overtanned and overdesperate, with stiff, extended, sun-dried arms, hands grasping for their margaritas ("No salt!"), drinking too hard to hide their despair that another summer had passed without their falling in love, or at least finding someone who wouldn't hu­miliate them by guffawing—Har! Har! Har!—in a movie on the Upper East Side, or by being fat in TriBeCa, or by wearing brown suede Hush Puppies on Central Park South.

  It was the perfect time for a local like me, bored with a June, July and August of receptionists and nurses, who wanted (for one night) a grown-up, dressed-for-success lay. Easy pickings: By that first Monday in September, I knew the thirty-five-year-old lady corporate vice presidents would have stopped playing the Geography Game, with an automatic You're Out for Hamptons hicks. I also knew all those frosted-haired, lip-glossed, scrawny-necked financiers would no longer be muttering "Really?" and then two seconds later going to the ladies' room when they heard I was a cop. These women at the Gin Mill hadn't caught themselves a banker or a doctor or even an accountant without his CPA. So now it would be: "I envy you, living here year round" and "A homicide detective! Tell me, how can you stand look­ing at ... what's the best way to express it? Look­ing at the dark side of the human condition day after day?"

  Except instead of hitting on one of those, I spotted Bonnie. If I had to say why I chose her, it could have been because it was the Summer of the Perm, and she was the only woman without cascades of frizzles. Or because she wasn't wearing an outfit, one of those things with plaids and stripes and flowers, where nothing matches on purpose.

  Bonnie leaned against the bar, foot up on the rail, standing tall among the other women. She was work­ing her way through tissues and keys in the side pocket of a short red-and-yellow-plaid skirt, on her way to money to pay for a beer. She wore a red tank top. As I maneuvered toward her, I could see the sheen of her broad, tanned shoulders. Silky skin, I thought, not leathery. I put my hand on her shoulder. It was silky. I said: "I'll buy," and gave the bartender three bucks for her beer. She smiled. "Thanks."

  But that was all that would come: an image. I kept on running, sweat dripping down onto the blacktop, for another two miles, all around the farm, then back past the grassland, into that pathetic stretch of alumi­num-sided Long Island. I'd been hoping to clear my head. But all I could recollect in that killing heat was Bonnie Spencer in the crisp, conditioned air of the Gin Mill, holding her beer in front of her with two hands, the way a bride would hold her bouquet. Her hair was short then, a little choppy; maybe she'd tried to give herself a sophisticated haircut, but she'd wound up looking like a wood nymph's older sister instead. The recessed lights over the bar made her arms and shoulders gleam.

  I walked around the parking lot a few times to cool down, except the air was so thick and humid all I was able to do was stop wheezing. I hung around for an­other five minutes, hoping for a breeze, but none came, so I got into the car and used the oil-streaked T-shirt as a towel. The pager had rubbed against my skin, and there was a dark-red bruised spot on my right side.

  I got into the Jag, sprayed a little Right Guard under my arms and then contorted myself to get back into my shirt, tie and suit fast, before some housewife could peer down and catch me humping the steering wheel as I pulled up my zipper. I kept replaying the scene in my mind.

  "I'll buy." Putting down my drink—vodka with a wedge of lime—and handing three folded singles to the bartender.

  Bonnie's smile, so radiant that for a second I felt light-headed. "Thanks."

  I went into the supermarket and bought a big bot­tle of club soda. My face must have been close to purple, because the express-line cashier said, "Y'oughta watch it, hon. This heat and all."

  "I'll buy," I said to Bonnie.

  "Thanks."

  I sat in the car again, glugging down the soda, try­ing to re-create what happened next. Logically I would have said "Steve Brady" and she would have said "Bonnie Spencer," and a couple of minutes later maybe we would have chuckled about two Bridgehampton rubes having to meet in East Hampton, in a phony "genuine" gin joint with a bullshit ceiling fen and bartenders who deliberately didn't shave because scruffy was a Great Look, surrounded by city slickers in two-hundr
ed-dollar sandals.

  Except I couldn't remember anything more. Maybe nothing more had happened. Maybe, for some rea­son, she had just recalled what turned out to be an aborted pickup attempt. Being a screenwriter, she'd whipped up a littie love story around it and, casting herself in the leading role, said to her lawyer: Here, maybe you can use this. Except Gideon had remem­bered her euphoria, remembered hearing my name. Whatever else he was, he was a smart man, and a savvy, probably even an ethical, lawyer. I didn't think he would lie to a cop during a homicide investiga­tion, not even to help a friend.

  Well, whatever had happened with Bonnie, it was lost to me. Too bad. I would have liked to know what it had been like, screwing her. I drove back toward the farm, put the top down again, took a leak by the side of the road and got back into the car to drive to Headquarters. I put my hand on the stick.

  God almighty, it began to come back.

  We took a sip of our drinks and then exchanged names and discovered we both lived in Bridgehampton, although on different sides of the tracks. "You weren't born here," I said.

  "Which means you must have been."

  "Right. Where are you from?"

  She must have said the West, or Utah, because somehow—and this came back so vividly—we got to talking about trout fishing. It turned out that she could tie her own flies. I said, I'm not much of a fisherman. I've only gone for fluke and blues a couple of times, but maybe we could go together one day. And she said, Night's better for trout, and smiled and added, Tell you what. Give me a call when you can tie at least three leader knots as easy as you tie your shoelaces, and I'll take you to the perfect mountain stream. I said, Can't I give you a call before that? and she flashed me a beautiful smile.

  Just as I was thinking to myself, This is one incredi­ble woman, somebody pushed to get closer to the bar, knocking me into Bonnie. Oh my God!

  Electricity. Magnetism. Whatever the hell it was, I couldn't believe it was happening. We stood there, body against body, unable to pull apart, like victims of an uncontrollable mob, crushed together. Except we could have parted, without too much trouble. We were just being jostled by a crowd of ordinary, pushy New Yorkers. But I was so aroused, and the pressure felt so good.

  And clean-cut Bonnie—courteous ("Nice of you to pay for my beer"), amiable, humorous, lover of mountains and fisher for golden trout—was as hot and irrational as I was. Her hand slid between my legs. Jesus! In the dim, smoky light of the bar, in the press of bodies, in the dehumidified, perfume- and aftershave- and mouthwash-scented air, in the noise of raised voices and clanking glasses, she was tuning out everything—and going for it. Not just to provoke me, but for her own pleasure, which, of course, be­came my pleasure. She let out a small, low sound. She was going to be a noisy one, a wild one.

  "Let's get out of here," we both said at the exact same time. Normally, when that happens, you laugh, but we had crossed some boundary and gone where there was no kidding around.

  What happened next? We took my car to her house. I must have been in a white heat, because I couldn't remember any conversation or anything about her street, or the downstairs of her house—only following her ass up to the bedroom and pulling off her clothes the minute we passed through the doorway.

  We were just starting, but both of us were so in­flamed we tore at each other, groaning, the way peo­ple do in that moment right before the end. We parted for a second; Bonnie's hands were trembling, and she couldn't manage my buttons, so I undressed myself. She watched me, spellbound, and I became so excited by her intensity I couldn't finish the slow strip I'd begun. I threw off my khakis, my undershorts, my shoes.

  Bonnie moved close to me and touched me for a second, to verify that what I had wasn't going to go away. Then she moved in even closer. She raised her hips, straddled me. No teasing, no foreplay; we were way past that. I pushed in right away and we stood, her back against the bedpost, screwing our brains out.

  She came first. I lowered her onto the bed. I wanted to finish on top. Her arms and legs wrapped around me, and we became the two halves of a greater person.

  I'd never had sex like that before. It wasn't that I was voluntarily letting go; it was that I had no con­trol. Just when I thought that I'd ridden out the last wave, that I could catch my breath, slow things down, speed them up, subdue her, another, bigger wave knocked me senseless.

  At last, her whimpers and moans turned to shrieks of pleasure. I joined her. I heard myself screaming so loud it scared me.

  We lay there on top of the white popcorn bed­spread, not knowing what to say to one another. It was that moment where my foot or my hand would inevitably begin to drift along the floor, searching for a sock or my shorts. Except I couldn't move. And I didn't want to go. Finally, Bonnie said: "Think of a way we can get over the awkward silence."

  "Tell me more about fly-fishing."

  "You need an eight-foot glass rod," she murmured. "Don't let them talk you into bamboo."

  I held her lightly, running my hand up and down her back. Her skin was like velvet. A breeze that had a hint of autumn in it fluttered the white lace curtains.

  "This is wonderful," I said.

  "I know."

  "I meant the breeze."

  Suddenly she noticed the window was open. She sat up. "Oh, God."

  "What?"

  "We were kind of loud. Just watch. One of my neighbors will think I was being murdered and call the police—after she serves the carpaccio." I started to laugh. I hadn't told her what I did for a living. "You won't think it's so funny when you hear the sirens."

  "Want to bet?" I pulled her back down, so she was lying facing me. "I'm a cop. A detective on the Homi­cide Squad."

  "No. That would be too interesting. You're not."

  "Of course I am." She shook her head. "Okay, what am I?"

  "I don't know. You sort of have a macho style, but you probably do something adorable. Sell children's shoes. Teeny size-two Mary Janes, with a free balloon." She bit her lip. "God, I'm going to die if that's what you really do."

  I forced myself out of bed and retrieved my pants from where I'd tossed them, between a little stool and one of those old-fashioned makeup tables with a skirt. Bonnie looked bewildered, then hurt; she combed her short hair with her fingers, as if prepar­ing for a dignified goodbye. But I tossed her my shield. She caught it, too, and it had been a lousy throw. Her left hand shot out.

  "Good reflexes," I said.

  "I need them. You're not exactly Sandy Koufax."

  We stared at each other across the room, she amazed that I was a cop, me, that she knew baseball. For some crazy reason, after all that had transpired, this was too intimate. Real fast, we began to talk over each other, she saying something pointless about lov­ing whodunits, me asking if she had anything to drink. She offered iced tea or Diet Coke, but then I said "drink drink." All she had was light beer and a bottle of one-step-up-from-rotgut red wine she'd bought to use for sangria, for a picnic, but it had rained. I settled for the wine. She threw on a bath­robe and went downstairs.

  The minute she was gone, I got claustrophobic; I wanted out. It wasn't the room. I knew that much. It was sizable, appealing, all white except for the old wood beams and the painted blue-green chair rail. It definitely wasn't overstuffed; there was a four-poster bed with plain wood nightstands on either side, the little stool and vanity table with its ladylike yellow-and-white-striped skirt, and a clumsy, cozy-looking club chair, covered in a shiny cotton—big yellow flowers with blue-green leaves—a stand-up lamp be­side it.

  But even though there was that cool breath of air coming through the open windows, I wanted to get outside. Go home, have a couple of drinks, maybe drive up to the bay afterwards, watch the sunset. I put on my shorts.

  I heard her coming upstairs, so I picked up the phone. I'd say "Damn. Yeah. Right away" when she walked in, and then tell her a fast-but-grisly homicide story: maybe a stabbing followed by arson. Some­thing nice and graphic, full of gaping tracheas, muti­lated geni
tals. Run while she was still gagging.

  Except she came in carrying a can of Diet Coke, a wineglass, the bottle, and holding a corkscrew be­tween her teeth. She looked so goofy. I hung up the phone and took the corkscrew. "Calling your office?" she asked, and handed me the wine.

  "Yeah. No emergencies that can't wait." I opened the bottle, poured, drank. The pressure to escape eased a little. I'm sure we must have talked for a while, because if I had taken her in my arms again, I would have been lost. I remember stretching out on my side, letting my fingers graze over her fabulous skin, but not getting too close. It was perfection, ly­ing there like that, feeling the warmth of her, the coolness of the breeze. The sky had lost its daytime glare and had become softer, finer: blue tinged with pink and gold.

  I whispered, not to disturb the beauty: "I love this time of day."

  Bonnie glanced at the window. "Magic hour." She kissed me on the mouth, but sweetly, almost daintily. "It's a term in cinematography. The time after dawn and before dusk. Enough light for shooting, but there's a fineness, a tranquillity to it—magical light. You have to work fast, because before you know it, the enchantment is over, but while it's there ... you can get something beautiful."

  I drank some more wine. I must have fallen asleep for a couple of minutes. When I woke up I caught Bonnie studying my face. She averted her eyes and said too fast: "I was just wondering how you'd look without the mustache."

  "No. You were thinking: This is one hell of a man."

  "Yes."

  I let my fingers glide down, over her throat and breasts. I caressed her stomach and felt her muscles contract. Two or three good, deep kisses. And then we were at it again, this time with a lust that made the last go-round seem a lighthearted tease. We were biting and clawing at each other. I heard myself growl.

  Bonnie pulled back. The wildness disturbed her. She wanted to be civilized again, a sexy woman, not an animal. She got cool and urbane on me, did a cou­ple of cute maneuvers with the tip of her tongue. Then she got to her knees to climb on top. I knew what would happen: She'd arch her back, toss her head, let her breasts bounce. Then she'd bend over and do some more tongue tricks. She wanted what I wanted: mastery.