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

to get the psychology vote. “Ask yourselves, what MAGIC HOUR / 167

kind of a normal single woman stays in a town she has no roots in, a town that’s deserted three quarters of the year except for locals like me and some antique-dealer types who talk about stuff like the bleak beauty of the winter seascape and shit like that. How come she didn’t sell the house, which could bring her big bucks even with real estate being what it is, and move to Manhattan, get a decent job?” Charlie rubbed his chin, Robby looked mildly intrigued and Ray leaned forward. “I’ll tell you why not. She’s a loser, and she knows it. She had one minute of success that might have been a fluke, and in that minute she lands Sy. You know what that marriage said to her? It said: ‘Bonnie, babe, you’re terrific.’ But then he gets bored and takes a walk. She stays in that isolated house because she knows if she moved to the city, she’d have no excuse for being a loser. This way, she lives hand-to-mouth—but she can keep up her illusions.

That Sy will come back. That one of her shitty screenplays will get made into a movie. That she’s worth something.

And then what happens?”

Despite the fact that Mikey LoTriglio was due any second with his lawyer, Robby was getting hooked. “What happens?” he said, as if waiting for the end of a bedtime story.

I gave it everything I had; I knew it would be a major asset to have Robby on my side, not off after the Mafia. “Sy starts sleeping with Bonnie again, gives her hope. Suddenly she’s thinking: I am terrific. I can have a life. I’ll have my husband back and live in New York, on Fifth Avenue, and in a seven-million-dollar mansion on the beach. And she must have started sharing her dream with Sy, because all of a sudden he blows her off. Maybe nicely. Or maybe he just tells her the truth: ‘Bonnie, baby, I was P.O.’d at Lindsay and felt like a grudge fuck, and you were available. It didn’t mean anything.’”

168 / SUSAN ISAACS

Ray was breaking his empty Styrofoam coffee cup into white chips. “All right. His rejection might hurt her. Destroy her. But would it push her over the edge?”

“Yeah, because this time he didn’t leave her with any illusions. He didn’t want her. He didn’t want her screenplay.

Don’t forget: He humiliated her, treated her like a two-bit whore when she came to visit him on the set. And he didn’t value old times’ sake enough to help her out of a crappy financial situation. Look, two strikes: he’d used her once, to get a foot in the door of the movie business, and he’d used her again, to get his rocks off when he got mad at Lindsay.

And now it was kiss-kiss, sweetie, I’m off to L.A. I’m telling you, he walked out of that guest room leaving her with nothing.”

“It’s just a theory,” Robby murmured. But he sounded on the verge of being convinced.

So did Ray. “Okay, Steve and Robby,” he said, “keep your other options open, but follow up on this Bonnie. It sounds like she needs a little extra attention.”

Fat Mikey LoTriglio looked like a Sicilian version of Humpty-Dumpty. He had no visible neck; his silk tie, a dark blue dangerously close to purple, seemed suspended from one of the chins that rested on his chest. “I grew up wit’ Sy,” he was explaining to me and Robby. “He was like a brother to me.

Let me tell you, you find the guy who took him out, you call me. You tell me, ‘Hey, Mikey, we found the guy who blasted Sy,’ and I swear to God, I’ll—”

“At the time Mr. Spencer was murdered,” Fat Mikey’s lawyer interrupted, “Mr. LoTriglio was having cocktails with several business associates, who, naturally, can vouch for his whereabouts.” The lawyer, a guy around my age, wore round little glasses

MAGIC HOUR / 169

with wire frames, as though hoping someone would assure him that he didn’t look like the sleazy mob lawyer he’d become, that he still looked like John Lennon.

“Hey.” Mikey turned to the lawyer. “I don’t have cocktails, okay? I have drinks.” He looked back at us and explained:

“This is a new lawyer. My old one, Terry Connelly. Ever deal with him? Massive stroke. They got him in some hospital in Rhode Island, poor vegetable. Sad, sad. And now this fuckin’

murder…” He shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a knife in my heart, Sy gone.”

“What’s going to happen to your investment in Starry Night? ” I asked.

“Mr. LoTriglio’s participation in that venture has not been established,” the lawyer said.

“We know Mikey invested four hundred thousand in the movie and got his brother-in-law and an uncle to put up another six hundred thousand,” Robby said, but reasonably, not with his usual I’m-gonna-see-you-fry vengefulness. At some moment between the time Ray and Charlie left the interrogation room and the time Mikey and his lawyer walked in, Robby had switched to Bonnie Spencer. I smiled to myself. I was really happy. I’d won Robby over. I could stand back; she was his girl now, and he would do anything to get her.

“How was your investment going, Mikey?” I asked.

Mikey fluttered his eyes, a single flutter: his naive expression. “What do I know about producin’ movies?”

“You must know something if you put up a million bucks.”

“Hey, my friend Sy asks me to put up some money, I do it.”

“Mr. LoTriglio’s accountants were impressed by Mr.

Spencer’s track record,” the lawyer said softly.

170 / SUSAN ISAACS

“They felt Starry Night was an excellent investment—albeit any investment in filmmaking entails a certain degree of risk, of which they were fully cognizant.”

“Did Sy let you know how the movie was coming along?”

I asked. Fat Mikey shook his head; his chins jiggled. “A million bucks, Mikey. Weren’t you curious?”

“Nah. What do I care? Sy says this is gonna