Magic Hour (8 page)

"Actually, once. And I
was
passing by—not eavesdropping. Don't condescend to me."

"Okay. What did you happen to hear, passing by?"

"Sy was reassuring this man that everything was going well."

"Was Mikey worried that it wasn't going well?"

"No, of course not. It was one of those soothing, stroking, you're-so-important phone calls. Sy was a master of those."

"No problems with
Starry Night
!"' I asked. She shook her head, allowing a curl of her long platinum hair to fall in front of her shoulder. She started twirling it around her index finger; I assume my eyes were supposed to follow the little circles until I was mesmerized. But I couldn't stop watching the mole on her neck; it was so black it looked like an undeveloped third eye. "Mr. Spencer was pleased with how it was going?" I asked.

"Yes."

"No problems with the director? Any of the actors?"

"Nothing that wasn't routine."

"He was happy with your performance?"

"Of course." Emphatic. Clipped. "Why do you ask?"

"Just trying to get the lay of the land," I said.

"Let's be straight with each other, Detective Brady. I don't know what you've heard, but there's always on-set gossip about the star of a film. Sometimes it's more than petty nastiness. I'm sure there are people saying terrible things, like that I'm a tough bitch. That's because I'm serious—
passionately
serious—about my work. Or that my performance is somehow lacking. Or that my relationship with Sy was ... well, one of mutual convenience. The truth is, yes, I am tough. But I also happen to be a vulnerable human being."

"I'm sure you are."

"And I loved Sy very, very much."

"I understand."

"I hope you also understand that Sy loved my work." She bowed her head for an instant, a second of silence. Then she looked me right in the eye. "And he loved me."

"I don't doubt that for a minute," I said, and thought about the long, dark hairs that had gotten caught on the headboard in the guest room.

"We were going to be married."

I asked: "What do you know about his ex-wives?"

"I haven't met either of them."

"Did he ever talk about them?"

"Not very much. The first was named Felice. He married her right after college. She was getting her Ph.D. at Columbia. Supposedly very brilliant. Came from a distinguished family. A great deal of money."

"What happened?"

"Truthfully?"

"Please."

"Bor-ing."

"Did he have any contact with her recently?"

"No. I'm almost positive. They were divorced in the late sixties. She's remarried."

"What about his second wife?" I asked.

"Bonnie. From out West someplace."

"Do you know anything about that marriage?" Robby asked.

"A mismatch." Lindsay placed the fingers of one hand in the palm of the other; they needed a rest, or else she was examining her nails. "She's a writer. Well, she had one movie produced, and that's when Sy met her. I think he was enamored of what he thought was a lively, unpretentious intelligence. All zip, and hero-worshiping quotes from Joseph Mankiewicz's screenplays. That appealed to him—for five minutes."

"And then?" I asked.

"The truth? She had one movie in her. She was yesterday's news by the time they were married."

"Do you know if he saw her at all?" Robby asked.

"No. Of course not. But she lives around here. When they split, she got their old summer place. Actually, though, Sy did hear from her a few months ago. She sent him some new script she'd written."

I asked: "Was he going to produce it?"

"God, no."

I found myself swallowing hard. "He told her no?"

"Of course. He told me he had to. Kindly, probably generously. But I'm sure very, very firmly. Oh, but wait a second. That's right. I'd forgotten. She came onto the set in East Hampton,
pursuing
him. I didn't see her, but she went and knocked on the door of his trailer. It was awful. But he said he told her in no uncertain terms: 'Goodbye. Stay off the set of my film. And keep your screenplays to yourself.' That may sound harsh, but he had no choice. This business is a magnet for all sorts of unstable people."

"He knew her, though," I said. "She was his ex-wife. Did he think she was unstable?"

"No. As far as I know, he just thought she was a loser. But if Sy had given her the least bit of encouragement, she'd have been all over him: Love my screenplay. Love me. Do for me. Make me rich, famous. Make me a star. People like her are
desperate
. Sy had to get rid of her."

The Homicide team meeting turned out to be six cops sitting around a blackboard shrugging shoulders. Robby hadn't been able to interview Easton because he'd been tracking down the kosher-meat guy, Mikey, who turned out to be Fat Mikey LoTriglio—a real sweetheart. Like the Spiegel-Spencers, Mikey's family had owned a major meat-processing plant, but he also had ties to another family—the Gambinos. He had a dandy record of arrests for extortion and aggravated assault—our kind of guy—but he'd never been convicted of anything.

Ray Carbone announced that all he'd been able to do, because he'd been busy calming down the higher-ups and helping write a press release, was find out that Sy's first wife's name was Felice Vanderventer and she lived on Park Avenue.

Our man at the autopsy, Hugo Schultz, the Sour Kraut, reported that not counting his death, Sy had been in great shape. No diseases. No traces of alcohol or drugs. His last meal seemed to have been bread and salad. There was evidence of recent ejaculation, probably post-salad. Oh, he'd been killed by the first bullet, which had gone through his head; the one that had gone through his heart was unnecessary: Target practice, Hugo said.

The other two guys listened and drank coffee. I briefed everyone on Bonnie's story on her screenplay versus the opposing Lindsay version—and how there was something not right about Bonnie, something that bothered me. Oh, and that Lindsay's claim of giving a stellar performance was countered by both Bonnie and Gregory J. and how I thought
Starry Night
, the twenty million dollars it was costing and, possibly, Lindsay's reputation might be headed for the crapper.

In other words, what I got from the meeting was not much. It was then that I thought about my movie man. Jeremy. Germy. Jeremy Cottman, the most famous movie critic on TV, was my one rich and famous friend. Okay, so it wasn't exactly a big-ass buddy friendship. In fact, it had been over twenty years since I'd laid eyes on him.

Jeremy had been a Bridgehampton summer kid, the son of rich but not famous parents. His father had been a stockbroker whose only customer seems to have been himself. Mr. Cottman played perpetual golf; his skin had the texture of a grilled cheese sandwich. Mrs. Cottman, who called everyone "cutie-pie," had spent whole summers in a sunbonnet that tied under her chin, clutching a pair of clippers, pruning anything that didn't run away. Their house, a rambling white wood Victorian, overlooked
Mecox
Bay
.

Rich kids like Jeremy played all summer swimming in each other's pools, going to parties at each other's beach clubs, taking riding lessons in those puff-thigh pants. Kids like me worked. I started out scraping duck shit and sorting potatoes for the farmer who had bought our land. When I was twelve, I graduated to cleaning swimming pools, and later to caddying at one of the local golf clubs.

But in spite of work, summer had always been an enchanted time. It didn't get dark until late, so we'd grab a bite of supper and rush down to the ball field. We were in the four thousandth inning of a baseball game that had been going on since the summer after third grade: shirts and skins, our shirts getting progressively scruffier as the fifties gave way to the sixties, our skins darkening from the white, stick-out-ribbed chests of nine-year-olds to the broad, tanned, hairy torsos of high school seniors.

It was a strictly Bridgehampton game. Every once in a while, a summer kid would ride past—on an English racing bike. After a few nights of bypasses, he'd brake, knock down his kickstand and get really busy inspecting a tire. Usually we'd ignore him, as in: This is one club you can't join, fuckface. But if he looked like a terrific jock, we'd be a little less exclusive. Sure, the kid would have to have the balls to grunt the opening "hi." But then, if he wasn't too well-dressed, we might ask him if he wanted to hit a few.

Jeremy (I was the one who started calling him Germy) made our team. He was an incredible power hitter, a so-so outfielder, and a cruel and funny mimic. He'd pick some movie star or a baseball player and have them say terrible things about one of the kids, so it was like being dumped on by Marilyn Monroe or Carl Yastrzemski (the greatest human being Bridgehampton had ever produced, even though he'd played for Boston).

I'd never met anyone like Germy Cottman. To be able to hit those line drives. To have discovered a way to say
whatever
was on his mind. God, how good that must feel! We became great summer friends, eventually trusting each other enough to share our most intimate sports fantasies. We were the best of buddies from about the time we were twelve until we went off to college.

Germy went to Brown. I went to
Albany
State
. I looked for him that summer after freshman year, but his mother, clipping roses that were doing something to annoy her, said, Sorry, cutie-pie, Jeremy is in Bologna, learning Italian. I saw him around once or twice after that, but we didn't have much to say; by then, he was an intellectual, I was a druggie, and neither of us was playing ball anymore.

But every now and then Germy's name came up around town. I heard he was in graduate school in Chicago for something; he was working on a newspaper in Atlanta; he was working on a newspaper in Los Angeles; he was writing long movie reviews—film criticism, I suppose—for some high-minded magazine.

And then one night on TV: the Germ! I remember lying on my couch, pretty drunk but not totally gone, slugging down a beer, thumbing the remote control. There he was, swiveling back and forth in a big leather chair, legs crossed, telling us folks at home in his familiar, clothespin-on-the-nose prep school nasality—why
Out of Africa
was such an overrated movie; then he did a brief, mean, but exceedingly accurate, imitation of Meryl Streep.

Germy was on the map. A celeb. And over the next couple of years, his show actually got better. He wasn't only negative. Sure, there were still his killer reviews and his snide imitations, but he stopped showing off his intellectual superiority and started displaying his real intelligence. He'd run a film clip in slow motion and explain exactly about how a certain shot was done, or describe precisely why So-and-so was a good editor, or a bad production designer. He knew the players too; he'd report how some internal fight at a studio affected a particular movie.

All America watched Germy: seven-thirty, Friday nights. And read about him too, in
People, Time, Newsweek
. I read he'd married the daughter of a famous 1940s director; that he had a house on a cliff overlooking the Pacific; that he'd moved back to
New York
; that he'd divorced his wife after fifteen years and married some very famous Broadway lighting designer—not that I'd ever heard of her. Around town there was talk that his father had had a heart attack on the eighteenth hole and had died before they could get him back to the clubhouse and that his mother had died too, and Germy had inherited the house. But although I kept up with what he was doing, I hadn't spent any time with him since I'd played shortstop and he'd played outfield.

I felt a little nervous about calling him, but then I thought: I've got to give it a shot. It being a glorious, sunny Saturday afternoon, Germy could actually be a couple of miles away. He might be spending the day practicing a cruel Clint Eastwood imitation or banging the lighting designer or (I smiled to myself as I pulled into his driveway) sitting cross-legged on his bed the way he used to, working neat's-foot oil into his mitt.

A minute later, there he was at his front door, his hands braced against the frame, as if he were defending his house from some intruder who might push him aside and ransack his living room, or demand to know what Chevy Chase was really like. "Yes?" Chilly, about to cross the border into absolute iciness.

"You don't recognize me, Germy?"

Then he did the Oh-my-God! I-don't-believe-it! bit, followed by our mutual finger-squishing handshake. It was for real. We were both pretty touched at seeing each other, although not comfortable enough to follow our natural inclination, which was to give each other one of those acceptable, non-homo, World Series hugs. "Steve! Come in!"

I followed him through the front hall, toward the living room. It was like stepping back into 1959: the blue-and-white umbrella stand filled with tennis rackets, the dark, scratched-up old mirror in a carved wood frame. "I can't believe it," I said. "It looks exactly the same. Any minute your little sister's going to come running in and spit at me."

"That's right!" Germy said in his slow honk. "I'd forgotten. She spent a whole summer spitting at you. She was madly in love."

The Cottman house still had the we've-been-rich-forever shabbiness it had when we were kids: faded flower print cushions, threadbare rugs with flowers that skidded across wood floors, old wicker chairs. Out on the back terrace, there were flowers blooming in his mother's mossy clay pots, and the old, white-painted wrought-iron chairs, chipped in the same places.

Like the house, Germy hadn't changed much. He was tall, about my height, but he hadn't outgrown his round-chinned baby face, with its button nose and wide-open eyes. Sure, his forehead was a little lined, his brown hair had a little gray, but in his hornrimmed glasses and white tennis sweater, he looked more like a tall kid in a daddy costume than a full-fledged adult. He made a take-a-seat gesture. "Can I get you anything? A cup of coffee?" Then he remembered. "A beer?" I shook my head. "Steve! God! Tell me about yourself. Where are you living? What do you do?"

Germy had much too much class to ask: What do you want? although it must have been in the back of his mind that maybe I was there for a handout, or with some obnoxious request: Can you get me an autographed picture of Goldie Hawn?

"I'm here, in Bridgehampton, north of Scuttle Hole—"

"Married, single, div—" He interrupted both me and himself with his own enthusiasm. "I got married again last year!" He paused as if to give me time to prepare myself for something wonderful. "To Faith Armstead!"

I nodded respectfully, as in: Oh, of course, I'm always dazzled by Faith Armstead's lighting. "Congratulations."

"She's stuck in a theater all day today. Can you believe it?" His second marriage was working; I could hear the pleasure as Germy pronounced his wife's name. And he seemed proud, almost awed by her dedication; she could have been the first wife since the dawn of history to work on a Saturday. "Now, what about you?" he demanded.

"I never got married. I was pretty screwed up when I got back from Vietnam."

"Vietnam," Germy echoed.

"And then I got used to being single, being free. But I finally met a great girl. We're getting married Thanksgiving weekend."

"You were in Vietnam," he said softly. The new quietly-moved reaction. After all those years of being Asian-baby butchers, we had somehow turned into national treasures. "Did you see action?"

"No, you jerk-off. They needed a shortstop on the Saigon intermural team, so I spent the whole war on the ball field. Listen, I really want to catch up, but I'm actually here on business..."I saw his face fall a little, his round kid-cheeks flatten. "Eat it, Je-re-my. You think I'm going to give you a life insurance pitch?"

"Well..." His embarrassment evaporated. "No." He became his real self, his caustic TV self. "You look more like redwood decks, actually."

"I'm a detective with Suffolk County Homicide."

"You?"

"Yeah. Never thought I'd wind up on this side of the law, did you?"

"Homicide!" he said. "Steve, that's exciting. Glamorous!"

"Yeah, well, the violence is fantastic, and I've always been crazy about decomposition."

"Seriously, do you like what you do?"

"It stimulates my intellectual processes."

"I said seriously."

"Yeah, I like it. A lot. Now, do you know why I'm here?"

It took him less than a tenth of a second. "Sy Spencer."

"I need background, foreground, whatever you've got. Did you know him?"

He turned his chair so he was facing me; his back was to the bay. "Slightly."

"You didn't hang out with him?"

"No. He ran on that middle-aged fast track: a little old money, a
lot
of new money, and writers, restaurant owners, fashion designers. All those emaciated, face-lifted women and their beefy men."

"Sy wasn't beefy. Five six, a hundred thirty-two pounds."

"He was an exception." Germy hesitated: "Oh. You know how much he weighed from...?"

"Yeah. The autopsy. Listen, the guy was in fantastic shape. I should have his liver. If he hadn't backed up into those bullets, he'd have lived till a hundred. The thing is, Germy, I know more than I want to about all his organs. But I want to know about
him
. So I need you. Even if you weren't his best friend, you must know about him, about what he was doing."

"Of course."

"Okay, what do you know about
Starry Night
?"

"Gossip or substance?"

"Both. Substance first; get it over with."

Genny took off his glasses and gave the earpiece a thoughtful chew. "All right. I actually read an early draft of the script. It's an action-adventure-love story about a charming heel who marries a very rich woman for her money. Superficially she's the frosty, sophisticated sort—a 'Hamptons' type, if you'll forgive me. She's overwhelmed by the heel's magnetism and sexuality. Well, to make a convoluted story short, his past—dealing a little cocaine—catches up with him, and some Colombian types kidnap his wife for reasons the script does not adequately make clear. The heel doesn't care at first. Then slowly he realizes he has fallen madly in love with the wife, and she ... she's tied up in a basement in ... I'm a little foggy here, but I think in Bogota. Maybe Brooklyn. In any case, it dawns on her that he's more than a charming stud; he's the first true love of her life. He goes after her, she escapes, there's a gratuitous car chase, the bad guys seem about to win. But in the end they live happily ever after."