Magic Hour by Susan Isaacs Page A

pocket of his brown plaid jacket into points. The smell of his double dose of hairspray overpowered the scent arising from a huge bowl of white roses on the table in front of the couch he and I were sitting on.
    "Of course there were no threats," Lindsay exhaled, a sharp, pissed-off breath between pursed lips. She was trying very hard to be patient. "What do you expect? That his killer went up to him and announced: 'You're a dead man'? And there were no heavy-breather phone calls either." For a woman in shock, Lindsay sounded clearheaded. In fact, completely self-possessed, not a hint of hysteria. The batshit, Valiumed, sensitive artiste her agent had described could have been some other person.
    Even though I'd caught a glimpse of her the night before, in the back of my mind I must have been expecting a fifteen-foot-tall Goddess of Film, a gargantuan babe with enormous, glistening lips and colossal legs that could crush any man caught between them. But Lindsay, standing by the window, fingering the sheer white curtain, was of ordinary height, although so small-boned and petite (except for her world-famous tits) that she looked as if she'd been created solely to make men feel big, important. In her daintiness, she must have been a perfect match for Sy. Two exquisite pocket-size people: a separate species.
    But Sy had been an ordinary-looking man. Lindsay Keefe's looks were extraordinary. No wonder she'd gone from doing Greek tragedies in little theaters in little midwestern cities to making avant-garde films in Europe to being an American movie star. Her features were beautiful. Okay, they didn't add up to perfection, but they came damn close. (Movie stars usually have one annoying flaw—a wen, a strawberry mark that you can't ignore, one defect that makes you wonder why they couldn't pop a few thou for a plastic surgeon. Lindsay had a black mole on her neck, at the spot where a guy's Adams apple is. It was a thing you'd never think about on a regular person, but I couldn't keep my eyes off it.)
    Her skin was the palest possible, the kind where you can almost picture the whole blood vessel network underneath. Her hair was some miraculous white-blond, but with half silver, half gold overtones. And the eyes: pure black.
    She'd gotten herself up all in white. A long, filmy skirt and a plain, schoolgirl blouse. The living room was all white also, like a stage set designed solely to flatter blondes. There were a lot of what I'm sure were antiques, but solid stuff: fat couches and chairs covered in different materials—but all whites too, various shades of it, so it became a kind of color.
    "If you want to know the truth," Lindsay went on, " nothing could scare Sy. He was a man in control, at the peak of his powers. Intellectually, emotionally, financially..." She stopped for a second. When she continued, it was with disgust, as though she'd caught us sniggering over the notion of Sy's "powers." She seemed exasperated with what she'd decided were our infantile, dirty cop minds. "All right, I'll fill in the blank for you: at the peak of his powers sexually."
    Forget that her words were unfair, to say nothing of blunt, brusque and bordering on the stunningly snotty; it hardly mattered. Robby and I sat motionless as she spoke. Her voice had a deep, sensual undercurrent, a hypnotic hum. You wanted to hear whatever she had to say. She could be talking about Sy's death, or reciting erotic poetry, or reading the ingredients off a Kaopectate label. You couldn't resist being Lindsay Keefe's audience.
    You wanted to applaud everything. Because besides the Face and the Voice, there was the Body. She had positioned herself perfectly in front of the window. With the curtains open, the late-morning light behind her was so strong you could practically see what she had for breakfast. Everything was lit up: her legs, the line of her bikini underpants stretched over her flat stomach, her hand-span waist—and most of all, the fact that she wasn't