Magic Hour (19 page)
She didn't answer me, didn't acknowledge that I'd grabbed onto her arm, trying to steady her or just hold on to her. "And why did you lie about your screenplay? Didn't you bother to think that he'd tell the people he worked with that it was a piece of shit?"
She tripped over a tree root. I lost my grip on her, and she fell on her hands and knees. "Are you okay?" I asked. She couldn't get up. She sat back on the ground, breathless, and looked down at the pebbles and grass embedded in her hands, at the little rivulet of blood that ran toward her wrist, but she didn't wince or weep. "Bonnie," I said. Her spirit was gone.
Moose wandered over, wagged her tail and licked Bonnie's hand, but Bonnie didn't acknowledge her. "Please," I said. I pulled her up. She didn't stop me. When she was on her feet again, she continued her unsteady journey toward the house. "Listen, your lawyer friend ... He's going to pay for the best criminal lawyer around."
I felt sick. Empty. But I'd lived through too much. I knew. Part of me understood that in two weeks, I'd be hoisting an alcohol-freebeer, eating potato chips, and Lynne would be saying: "Forget that you're going to get the fattest gut in Bridgehampton. Do you
know
what those chips look like on your insides?"
You forget pain. You really do.
Bonnie opened the screen door to her kitchen. "Congratulations," she said softly.
"I don't want congratulations. Believe me, I'm sorry."
"No. You did what you set out to do. You got me. That's it. My life is over. What you did isn't homicide, but the effect is pretty much the same: a dead person." There was so much grief in her voice, as if she was mourning someone she had loved very much.
"It has to be," I said.
"Why?"
"Because you killed someone." She walked inside and closed the screen door. I looked at her, blurred, distant, through the mesh. "Don't try and leave. There'll be a twenty-four-hour watch—"
"Where could I go that you wouldn't find me?"
"That's right."
"It's so sad."
"It is," I agreed.
"No. It's sad because I didn't do it. You know I didn't." It was about sixty-five degrees. I began to shake. I knew: This would be pain I would never forget. "Don't worry," Bonnie said, just before she closed the kitchen door. "You'll get over it."
We got to Bonnie's house before eight the next morning. Less than thirty seconds later, she looked up from the fine print on the search warrant, swallowed and said: "I'll have to call my lawyer."
"Feel free," Robby said magnanimously, a second before he and the other detective, a short bodybuilder type in his late twenties, tried to push past her, into the house. The kid's thighs were so overdeveloped that he couldn't get his legs together. He walked like a chimpanzee.
"You can't do this!" Bonnie shouted, trying to block us. I was the one who finally shoved her aside.
"Reasonable force," I said. "Call your Civil Liberties Union."
At first I'd expected hysteria. Then—especially when I noticed she was wearing those tight turquoise bicycle shorts and a T-shirt—I did a fast fantasy number. She'd faint. I'd grab her, lead her over to her couch and mumble something calming, like "Easy, Bonnie," as, slowly, I let her out of my arms. Easy, Bonnie: I liked the idea of saying her name out loud.
But she'd just stood near the staircase, completely still. She was there, but she wasn't there. The world she was living in was so awful that she withdrew and entered some other, kinder universe. At last, she drifted past me, into the kitchen to call Gideon. I could have been a ghost, just air and vapor. Moose picked up Bonnie's mood, staying right beside her, concerned, not giving me so much as a wag of the tail.
I followed them into the kitchen and started going through her cabinets as if assuming I'd find a cupful of .22 bullets behind the Down Home Gourmet barbecue sauce. For someone who was close to broke, Bonnie was spending too much money on mustard: honey mustard, tarragon mustard, green peppercorn mustard. I looked over at her. Maybe I'd try a little mustard humor, clear the air. But her back was toward me, and she was speaking quietly into the phone.
I shook a jar of popcorn hard and loud, like some maracas-playing fool in a Latin American band. I wanted attention. Maybe if she acknowledged I was alive I would be able to feel alive. I was so goddamn down.
Fuck this sadness shit, I told myself. Your obsession's dead. Be glad. But I couldn't let it rest in peace. And I couldn't stop trying to get a rise out of Bonnie.
I made a big production out of going through her pocketbook. Obnoxious. Intrusive. A deliberate invasion of privacy. I examined each key, flattened out a couple of linty tissues, studied a supermarket cash register tape. In slow motion, I took apart her wallet, laying out her seventeen bucks in bills, her forty-four cents in change, her driver's license, her Visa card, her library card, her video store membership card. And the pictures: father in a plaid shirt holding up a prizewinner of a trout. Father and mother—tall and broad-shouldered like Bonnie—all dressed up, like for a wedding, smiling, but starched, stiff. You just knew they'd rather be in their plaid shirts. Brothers and sisters-in-law on skis. Nieces with horses. Nephews with dogs. All the Bernstein pictures had mountains in the background.
I waited for her to show some spirit: run, try and punch me, scream out something like "I hate you!" Nothing. So I made a big deal of opening a purple plastic case that held a couple of Tampax. I held each one—Super—up to the light, as if anticipating a fuse instead of a string. Zero response. Should I taunt her? Say, No shit. You still have a period? and then deny it if her lawyer bitched about my being insulting? But I kept quiet. Thighs, the kid detective, was around; I didn't want him to think I was anything other than neutral.
Bonnie hung up the phone. I went back to the pocketbook. There was some powder on the bottom of her purse, red, obviously the blushing stuff women put on with those big fluff brushes. But I did a major number, sifting it into a plastic envelope, like it was a new, killer form of cocaine that made crack look like aspirin. She made no snide remarks. Clutching the warrant in her hand, she simply walked out on me. I stood there, a complete jerk, helpless, yearning, watching her turquoise ass until it disappeared into the hall.
I was like a husband whose wife has just walked out on him. I sank into the same chair where I'd sat that first day, having coffee. I was still holding her pocketbook.
About ten minutes later, when I finished the kitchen and found absolute squat, I went looking for her. She was sitting on the brick ledge in front of her fireplace, the search warrant beside her. She was hugging herself, as if waiting for logs to blaze up and thaw her out. Of course, there was no fire. Outside, it was already over seventy. The sky was too bright, an almost painful blue, the brilliant morning light of the end of August. The sun poured through Bonnie's living room window, making shining squares on a dozing Moose and on the dark wood floor beneath her.
Bonnie's head was down, so she didn't notice Thighs rush over and hand me a heavy shopping bag. Since all he'd turned up so far was one of Moose's half-chewed rawhide bones under the couch, he was clearly longing for some significant sign of Bonnie's guilt.
I emptied the shopping bag onto the coffee table. Bonnie glanced over. There were two unopened boxes: a coffee grinder and one of those expensive espresso-cappuccino machines. In the bottom of the bag was an American Express receipt: Sy Spencer, card member since I960, had paid for them.
I walked over to her, sat down on the other side of the search warrant and fluttered the receipt in front of her. "Sy like a cup of espresso afterwards?" I inquired. "Or before? Some guys need a little stimulant." She didn't answer, but then I hadn't expected her to. I didn't exist. Plus Gideon had obviously warned her not to say anything, and she was taking him literally. "Is your lawyer coming over?" I asked. She picked up the warrant. She looked for a pocket for it, but since she was wearing the shorts and T-shirt, she didn't have any. She just held on to it. I shifted so I could at least look at her. Her T-shirt was from some film festival, probably a feminist thing. Across her breasts it said women make movies in red and green and yellow and blue.
I rested the receipt on top of the warrant she was holding and pointed to Sy's name. "Three hundred and fifty-five bucks for a cup of coffee," I said. Across the room, Thighs sniggered; he probably thought the sound was a manly detective laugh. Bonnie brushed away the receipt with the back of her hand. It floated onto the floor.
It was so quiet. The only sound was the dog's snoring and then the clunk, clunk of Robby walking around upstairs. I'd wanted him to be the one to find the money in her boot, the real estate listing. I told him: I'll stay downstairs, keep an eye on her.
But she wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't move anymore. I just sat there beside her. We could have been a heartbroken couple waiting for some sad appointment together, cancer specialist, marriage counselor. I kept sneaking glances at her; instead of wearing her hair loose, tucked behind her ears, or in a ponytail, she'd put it into a braid. I had the urge to reach over and, with the tip of my index finger, stroke each one of the shiny intertwinings. I'd say, It'll be all right.
What I actually said was: "Where'd you hide the rifle?" She didn't move. "Bonnie, your window of opportunity is closing. You make it tough on us, we'll make it tough on you."
Just then, Gideon Friedman came striding in. Ninja Lawyer: baggy, rolled-at-the-cuff black cotton slacks, a black sweater, hair combed back with slickum. I stood up. "Hey, Counselor Friedman," I said. "Good to see you."
He walked past me and hunkered down in front of Bonnie. "Did you say anything to him?" he asked her. "Anything at all?" She shook her head. "Good girl." He picked up the search warrant, stood, and read it over. He saw it was okay. He wanted it out of sight, but since he didn't have any pockets either, he held on to it and, with his other hand, pulled Bonnie up and steered her into the kitchen.
They must have been talking softly in there. I couldn't hear anything, not even the hum of muted conversation. I walked over to her bookshelves. Most of them were paperbacks: hundreds of mysteries and novels. There were books about movies—biographies of actors and directors,
Cinematographer's Handbook, Farce in Film
—and about nature stuff.
Flowering Plants of Beach and Dune. Hiking Long Island
. There were no sex books tucked behind
Birds of North America
, no
Memoirs of a Victorian Serving Wench
, and no
Stop Being a Compliant Cunt and Get Him to Marry You
, one of those books single women always seem to have.
Just then Robby clomped down the stairs. His beige loafers had thick black heels with what sounded like metal taps. He was grinning, brandishing a plastic evidence bag with the wad of bills that had been in Bonnie's boot. I walked over to him. "Eight hundred eighty!" he announced.
"In tens or twenties?" I tried to look amazed, thrilled, "like from a cash machine?"
"You got it."
"Anything else?"
"Not really." Robby seemed a little disappointed. He'd probably been hoping for a smoking rifle.
"No vibrator in the night table?" Robby shook his head. "No interesting papers?"
"Nothing." Shit, I'd have to go up to have a casual look-through and then find the real estate listing. Unless she'd thrown it out. "Just a lot of movie script stuff in her office," he said. "Rejection letters in a file. But listen, we have enough! This money is the stake in her heart. And once we get her blood samples, it's all over."
"Any rejection letters from Sy?"
"No, but we don't need any. Where is she?"
"In the kitchen with her lawyer."
"Think we should stick it to her now?" He was like a leashed, drooling Doberman; he couldn't wait.
"Yeah," I said. "Might as well get it over with." My throat felt swollen. My chest rose, but I couldn't get enough air.
We walked into the kitchen. Robby waved the bag of money in front of Bonnie's face. "Eight hundred eighty dollars in twenties," he said to her.
"If you have any comments, please address them to me," Gideon responded.
"Oh,
sorry
," Robby said, giving him a big, shit-eating grin. "We found this hidden in your client's boot. All I want to know is where this money came from. Maybe she could tell us."
"Oh," Bonnie began, "it's—"
"Quiet," Gideon snapped at her.
"But, Gideon, it doesn't have anything to do with Sy."
Gideon did not look thrilled with her. "Would you please leave us alone for a minute?" he asked. We walked into the hall outside the kitchen, heard whispers. I took deep breaths, but I just made myself dizzy. Then Gideon called, "All right. You can come back in." When we did, he nodded at Bonnie.
She spoke to Robby, as if there was only one cop in the room. "The money you found is what's left of twenty-five hundred dollars I got last December. I do a lot of work for a catalog company, and the owner pays me once a year. In cash." Then she added, "Off the books."
"So there's no record of your having received the payment," I said. Bonnie made herself look at me, except her eyes did not meet mine.
"That's the point of being paid off the books," she explained, too patiently, as if talking to someone with an IQ in the minus column. "There isn't supposed to be any record."
"So
we
just have your word that that's where the money came from?"
"Where else would I get eight hundred and eighty dollars?"
"On the morning of his death, Sy Spencer withdrew a thousand bucks from a cash machine. It was gone when we found him."
Gideon broke in. "Do you call this police work? You don't investigate. You just drop whatever you can't explain at Bonnie Spencer's front door. Obviously Sy gave it to someone. Or he bought something."
"No," Robby said.
"Don't say no. I knew the man. He had a great eye, and he loved to indulge himself. If he saw a hundred-dollar tie he liked, he'd buy one in every color."
"Believe me, we checked," Robby continued. "There was no time for him to buy anything. And he didn't give anything to anyone. Whoever was with Sy Spencer last took the money. And we know that person was Mrs. Spencer here."
"You
know
that? How do you know?" Gideon asked, as if he couldn't believe our stupidity. But I could tell; he knew too.
"Because they were in bed together in the guest room of his house that afternoon."
"Really?" There's nothing like watching a desperate lawyer trying to do an amused act.
"Yeah, really," I broke in. "There was some hair in the bed that wasn't Sy's. We're betting that when we get a sample of Ms. Spencer's blood, it'll be a perfect DNA match."
Bonnie's hand flew up to touch the top of her head. She remembered. She understood. She looked at me with a terrible mixture of fury and grief.
"Now, you want to know what happened the afternoon Sy was killed?" I could only talk to Gideon. I didn't have the courage to look at Bonnie anymore. "Your client had relations with Sy Spencer. They had a disagreement. He left the bedroom. She took the thousand bucks from his pants pocket. When he went for a swim, she put on a pair of rubber thongs—"
"I don't have rubber thongs," she said to Gideon.
"—and went downstairs. At some point, she walked to a spot right by the back porch, where she—"
I could feel Bonnie staring straight at me. Her eyes were huge. "
No.
I did not do it. That money ... I got it—"
"Okay," I cut her off. "Give me the number of the guy at the catalog company."
Bonnie looked over at Gideon but didn't wait for a signal. Just as he started to shake his head no, she said, "The man's name is Vincent Kelleher. He lives in Flagstaff,
Country Cookin', Juno
—that's for heavy women—and ... God, I'm going blank on the other one right now. Oh,
Handy Dandy
. Hardware, gadgets."
Before I could say anything, she hurried out of the kitchen, upstairs, to her office. I followed. Her hands were shaking as she leafed through her address book. "Here."
I dialed the number. The place wasn't open yet. Gideon came upstairs, into the office, followed by Robby. Finally, I got Kelleher's home phone from Information and woke him up. Yes, he was Vincent Kelleher. Thighs must have sensed something going on, because he came upstairs too, but the small office was too crowded for him to fit in; he stood outside the door, staring at Bonnie's
Cowgirl
poster. Yes, Vincent Kelleher affirmed, he owned several mail-order catalog companies. Yes, Detective Brady, a Bonnie Spencer had done some work for him. Off the books? I demanded. In cash? No! Did you pay Ms. Spencer two thousand five hundred dollars in cash last December? No! At any other time? No! She'd done some work for him a couple of years ago, and he'd paid her ... by check. Was she in some sort of trouble, Detective Brady?
