Magic Hour by Susan Isaacs (cheapest way to read ebooks .txt) 📕

mind would have wanted to be there. It was at least a hundred in the shade, but there was no shade. Lindsay Keefe and Nick Monteleone were volleying—if you could call it that—in about a hundred-and-ten-degree heat. There wasn’t even a hint of cool air. Beyond the court, the foam on the waves made the ocean look as if it were boiling.

Every time Nick swung his racquet, he missed the ball and Victor Santana called “Cut!” Then a sweat-removal brigade would race over to the actors. Production assistants got there first. Some of them held umbrellas over the actors’ heads, others held battery-operated fans. Then the makeup and hair people went to work, while still other attendants offered bottles of water with straws so Lindsay and Nick could 396

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sip without getting drinking-glass dents around their mouths.

“One more take,” Santana promised me. His dark skin was flushed almost maroon. The color looked great against his Outfit of the Day: green jungle fatigues. All Santana needed was a scruffier haircut, an M-16 and a couple of joints of skag, and he could have passed for one of my old buddies.

He went on: “I must get enough footage of Lindsay because Nick…” He sighed in weary resignation. “This is going to cost an extra half day of long shots, with a tennis pro standing in for Nick. I simply cannot believe it; we gave him a full four weeks of tennis lessons preproduction.”

“Monteleone has zero hand-eye coordination,” I pointed out. “He’d need an instruction manual if he wanted to scratch his balls. Now look, Mr. Santana, I know making a movie is the most important thing in the world and it’s not easy making a guy who doesn’t know a tennis racquet from a pogo stick look like a jock. But I need more cooperation from you than I’m getting.”

“Please, just one more take for the master shot.” The brigade was walking off the court. “I give you my word of honor.”

Lindsay was no natural athlete, but she could place a serve and look beautiful at the same time. Her dark eyes were shaded with a pink sun visor. Her pale hair, done up in some special curly ponytail, began to flutter as some guy in surfer trunks turned on a giant wind machine to the breezy setting.

Santana called “Action” one more time.

I watched the crew watching the actors. The guys were taking in the whole scene. But the women seemed to have eyes only for Lindsay. Were they contemplating what life could be like with those breasts, those legs, that perfect ponytail? Were they curious?

398 / SUSAN ISAACS

Jealous? Raging, that such glorious gifts had not been bestowed upon them? I thought about Lindsay’s competi-tion—Bonnie.

If Mikey had, in fact, nixed killing Lindsay, could Sy have persuaded his Annie Oakley of an ex-wife to pick up a .22?

I’m aching to make your movie next, he’d have sworn. But I need some help getting over this rough patch. Or maybe: I want to marry you, bring you to Sandy Court, back to Fifth Avenue. My life will be your life, my friends your friends, my charge cards your charge cards. Remember how it was?

Bonnie, darling, it was such a ghastly mistake, our splitting, and I know how profoundly lonely you’ve been. Let me make it up to you. But first, help me.

Why the hell was I thinking these things? Did I believe Bonnie Spencer was capable of willfully taking the life of another human being?

No.

The compressors in the trailer air conditioners had died under the strain of the humidity, so after Santana gave everybody a twenty-minute break, Lindsay and Nick, accom-panied by assistants who, probably by tradition and job description, were paid to grovel, trekked up to the mansion—a modern interpretation of the White House cross-pollinated with the Taj Mahal—and went into two upstairs bedrooms.

Before he went into his, my pal Nick gave me a for-your-eyes-only, homicide-cop-to-homicide-cop one-finger salute.

I was about to walk into Lindsay’s room, which seemed to be some sort of homage to mosquito netting, but one of her designated toadies tried to shut the door on me. “She needs to recoup,” the girl whispered in hospital-corridor tones. I pushed past her, ordered everybody except Lindsay to get out and slammed the door.

Filmy stuff formed a canopy and curtains around MAGIC HOUR / 399

the bed. It covered the windows from ceiling to floor. For some reason, odd pieces of it were draped over chairs. There were three chairs and one of those chaise longues in the room, but naturally, given the choice, Lindsay stretched out on the bed. I pulled up a chair and pushed away some stuff, so I wouldn’t have to interrogate her through gauze. Right away she started with the lascivious shit, running her hands slowly over her face and neck, arranging pillows so she was angled to achieve maximum tit power.

On the table next to the bed, there was a six-pack of foreign water in blue bottles. She put out a languid hand to take one but couldn’t quite reach it. She waited for me to get up and hand her one. I didn’t. She got one for herself and drank, not sexily, but with the loud glug-glug noises of a cartoon character.

“I feel sick from the heat,” she said. I don’t think she was acting. Her whole body was red and covered in a cold sweat.

“It must be a bitch out there.”

I guessed she’d fulfilled her courtesy quotient by making a comment about the weather. She snapped: “Well, what do you want?”

“I want you to stop lying. If you don’t stop lying, you’re going to find yourself under arrest.”

“You tried that tactic with my agent. He’s old, losing his touch, so it worked. It won’t work with me.”

“Want to bet? Fifty bucks says before I even bring you in for fingerprinting, you’ll—”

“Do you honestly think you can scare me?”

“Beats me. But I do know I can interrupt your moviemaking. And when you