Magic Hour Read Online Free PDF Page B

Robby was thirty. That provided some distance. I'd had almost ten years more on the force than he did. While he was still sitting in his patrol car, waiting for some commuter in Dix Hills to run a stop sign, I'd been the rising star of Homicide. In rank, having been busted, I was his equal. In fact, being lead detective, I was his superior.
    He tried not to acknowledge it. Robby—despite the shiny bald spot he tried to hide by combing his hair sideways and spraying it into paralysis, despite his desperately-eager-to-cheat wife (Mrs. Howdy Doody, with a silver heart dangling in her freckled cleavage) and, more important, despite his arrest record, which was, embarrassingly and unfortunately, almost triple his conviction record—had determined that he was the perfect cop. This notion filled him with pleasure; it was impossible to pass him in the John, on the stairs, at the coffee machine without getting a rapturous grin. Every morning he handed out bagels and crullers and Danish to the squad like the Pope bestowing blessings.
    Robby stood beside me near the dune, one foot higher than the other, his body on an awkward slant. He was definitely not an outdoor guy, the security of Suffolk County-issue linoleum was vastly preferable to sand.
    "What've you got?" I asked. I ran my hand over the spikes of some tall beach grass.
    "Footprints on the grass near the house!" he enthused. "From rubber thongs. The regular, cheap kind. Mitch from the lab says they're a man's size ten or eleven, although obviously"—Robby paused, probably so I could prepare myself for a blast of deductive brilliance—"those kind of shoes can be worn by anyone . But if we can track them down—"
    "Where exactly were the footprints?"
    He pointed past the pool and the lawn, to the corner of the big porch that ran the entire length of the back of the house. I stretched my neck and squinted. A guy from the lab was straddling an area of grass right up against the house. He was just finishing photographing the footprints, getting ready to apply the dental stone we use for making molds of them.
    At that particular corner, the crawl space, neatly covered in lattice, rose about five or six feet high, with the porch above it. From up on the dunes, not far from where we were standing, a hundred feet away, it would have been easy to spot a man with a rifle. But not from the house. Unless you were deliberately leaning over the porch rail, looking right down at the spot where lawn met lattice, someone with a .22 could probably crouch in the shadowy safety of the grand old house and you'd never see him.
    "This could be major important!" Robby announced, nodding his head in agreement with himself. His sprayed hair didn't move.
    But despite his excitement, I wasn't ready to have an orgasm over the footprints; good investigators shouldn't come too fast. I wanted to rule out all other possible explanations for the footprints before I wasted two days on a major thong hunt.
    "See if you can get someone to check out the gardeners," I said to Robby. "Find out if any of them wore thongs. Also, take a look in Sy's closet. I didn't notice any in there when I did my walk-through, and I don't think he'd do anything like wear them, but this could have been the summer that guys like him decided K Mart was tres amusing or some shit, and he'd have bought fifty pairs." I thought for a second. "Except maybe not a size ten or eleven. He was a little guy: little hands, little feet, probably little—"
    I stopped before I even started. It was no fun being immature and dirty around Robby. His idea of humor was Polack knock-knock jokes. His concept of sex talk was to confide that he and Freckled Cleavage had gone on a marriage encounter weekend. "Anything else?" I asked him.
    Robby grinned (boyishly) and fiddled with a cuff of his sports jacket, a shiny blue thing that had a half-belt stitched around the waist in back. He dressed as though he made an annual haberdashery pilgrimage to suburban