Magic Hour (2 page)
But just as there were no indications of cruelty, there were no signs of decency either: no concern, no remorse. The killer had not covered Sy's face, or closed that awful, staring eye, or picked a flower and tossed it toward the body.
Of course, it could be a stranger murder, a nut case unknown to Sy. "You hear about anybody else getting taken out this way?" I asked Carbone. I did my homework if I was in the mood; he always did his. If there was a serial killer operating within fifty thousand miles of
"Rich people? Movie people? People shot from a distance?"
"I'll check with the FBI, but I don't think so. Unless this is number one."
"We've got a cool cookie here," I observed. "An organized fucker." We'd wait for the post-offense behavior, to see if it was a Son of Sam-type wacko who'd want to declare his genius to the police. "Good shot too. Got to give him credit."
"So what do you think the weapon was?"
"Low-gauge rifle?" I asked the ballistics guy, who was standing a couple of yards away, opening his case.
He nodded. "Looks like a .22."
Carbone muttered: "Damn. That's not going to make our life easy."
He was right. Here on the South Fork, .22s were a dime a dozen. Everybody had one; locals used them for target practice, small-varmint shooting. Or anything. If a farmer wanted to kill a pig, he'd get out his .22; my father had owned one.
"What background were you able to get on this Sy guy?" Carbone asked me.
"Fifty-three years old.
Shower of Light
, about twelve years ago. Put a pile of money into it. But then he seemed to have decided that poetry wouldn't get him what he wanted."
"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
"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 carved 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
Okay, now check out the rest of
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.
