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

is goin’ to get his nuts chopped for this.’ And then he walked out.”

C H A P T E R T W E L V E

What the hell was wrong with Robby? Jesus, if I’d been the one assigned to Mikey LoTriglio, I’d have been kicking chairs, screaming at the cop who kept insisting the perpetrator was the ex-wife. So what if Bonnie slept with Sy, I’d yell.

There’s a law against that? She humped him, kissed him goodbye, told him to call when he got back from L.A., and then went home. Period. Oh, your she-can-shoot theory? Is that your problem, jerk? Well, what about Mikey—or one of his boys? And what about that Lindsay? Turn on your VCR and watch her toting a rifle, in living color.

And even if the ex-wife had, in fact, slept with a .22

between her legs all the years when she was a kid in Utah, could she still bag Sy? Could such a nice, warm lady plan such a mean, cold killing? This is life we’re talking about here, not goddamn Agatha Christie, where Lord Smedley-Bedley’s black-sheep cousin gets murdered after crumpets with the vicar on a rainy afternoon.

And listen, jerk, I’d bellow, and maybe jab my pen toward him, like it was a dart, listen! What about the criminal personality? Who is more likely to shoot 226

MAGIC HOUR / 227

when betrayed? A kissed-off screenwriter who’s slept with every other guy on the South Fork, who’s so used to hearing guys tell her goodbye that she could write their rejection speeches for them? Or a Known Bad Guy who’s just discovered his alleged good friend is screwing him out of half a million bucks?

If I were Robby I’d have fought. I’d have built up a terrific case against Fat Mikey. Against Lindsay, come to think of it.

She was a movie star, a professional egomaniac, and Sy was about to blow her out of the water.

So what the hell was wrong? When I’d sat at the meeting, stacking up the cards against Bonnie, why hadn’t Robby knocked down a few of them? It would have been so easy.

I had a fast thought: Oh, Jesus, could I have destroyed an innocent life?

But then I told myself: Asshole, look what she’s done to you! Miss All-Natural is a brilliant con artist. First she looks up from the warrant, gives you that look of pain, then that disbelieving how-can-you-hurt-me? stare. And then the cold shoulder. She’s got great ESP, that Bonnie. You thought you were so cool, but she’s known all along you’ve had a major thing for her. So she sits and shivers by the fireplace on a hot day. Lets her mouth quiver. Swears she didn’t do it. Why shouldn’t she swear? She knows how the conned want so desperately to keep being conned. But then she sees she can’t get to you…. Well then, okay, too bad; she gave it her best shot. So she goes upstairs and puts on a sexy skirt and gold earrings.

But what if she’s telling the truth?

Then why did she lie so much?

Well, what if she lied through her teeth…but still didn’t kill him?

Didn’t kill him? Take Bonnie Spencer, Mikey Lo-228 / SUSAN ISAACS

Triglio and Lindsay Keefe. Which one of the three is most likely—

Robby came in just then and hurried over. He didn’t like my feet up on his desk, near his pen set, but he was too excited to waste time in a protest. “Bonnie’s in the lab!” Only his nervousness that the side of my shoe would smear the

“Detective Robert Leo Kurz” brass plate kept him from positively gurgling with delight. “She’s down there now. With the lawyer.” I didn’t budge. “What’s wrong? Don’t you want to go?”

“What about Mikey’s payoff?” I asked him. He gave me a village idiot look that was so completely moronic I knew it was fake. “His payoff to the bookkeeper at the Starry Night office.”

“Who cares?”

“I care. We know Mikey’s alibi sucks shit. So he had opportunity. And now, from what the bookkeeper says, motive.

Why the hell didn’t you pursue that line of questioning and—”

Robby held up his hand, swift, full-palm. Stop! Aggressive, angry, like one of the neo-Nazi cretins in the police academy who demonstrate how to direct traffic. “Wait just one second here, Steve.” Huffy. Definitely huffy. “We have our perpetrator, who we all agree is our perpetrator, over in the lab, as we speak.” He did an about-face, marched out of Homicide, down toward the lab.

I kept up with him. What a born dork Robby was, with his white Tums crust at the edges of his mouth. He radiated hairspray scent. His suit matched his pale-beige loafers. A fucking dork suit: the fabric was supposed to look luxurious, like nubby linen, but instead it looked as if it was cut from a bolt of cloth that was having an allergic reaction to its own ugliness. You could see its unhealthy sheen; it was covered with minuscule bumps.

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“Hey, I want to talk to you for a second,” I called out. He didn’t stop.

We got to the door of the lab just as Bonnie and Gideon were leaving. She was pressing a gauze pad against the bend in her arm where they’d drawn blood, so she didn’t see me until I said “How’d it go?” She glanced up, startled, terrified, the nice girl in a horror movie who had just seen the monster.

I might as well have been one. She tried to get away so fast that she wound up stepping on her own high-heel shoe and would have fallen if Gideon hadn’t grabbed her arm.

She slumped against him for just a second, until she regained her balance.

For that one second, though, Bonnie’s eyes were on my face. Finally, there it was: absolute fear. Eyes floating in the whites, unfocused, in terror of the monster who was stalking her. And then she was rushing away, down the hall.