Death of a Blue Movie Star

  "Another couple hours. I glued the key back on."

  Larry said, "Rune, maybe you could go work on them now."

  Rune said, "I thought we were going to talk concepts."

  "Oh," Mary Jane said, looking down at her, "I hadn't understood you were in a creative position here at the studio."

  "I--"

  "What do you do, exactly?"

  Larry said, "Rune's our production assistant."

  Looking her up and down, Mary Jane said, "Oh." And smiled like a fourth-grade teacher.

  Mr. Wallet was looking at a huge roll of a backdrop, twenty feet across, mottled like a pastel Jackson Pollock painting. "Now, that's something else. You think we can use that for the shoot? Mary Jane, what do you think?"

  She glanced toward it and said slowly, "Might just fly. We'll put our thinking caps on about it." She turned back to the desk and opened her briefcase. "I've done a memo with all the schedule deadlines." She handed the paper to Rune. "Could you run and make a copy of it?"

  Larry took the paper and held it out to Rune. "Sure she will." His eyes narrowed and Rune took the sheet.

  "I'll be back in just a minute. I'll run just like a bunny."

  "Daddy, will they have a makeup person? I don't have to do my own makeup, do I?"

  Rune vanished through the door into the office. Larry followed.

  "I thought you said it was bleedin' finished."

  "The e fell off your cheap-ass typewriter. That's the most-used letter in the English language."

  "Well, go buy a new fuckin' typewriter. But I want those estimates in a half hour."

  "You're a sellout."

  I don't 'ave time for your bleedin' lectures, Rune. You work for me. Now get the copies made and get those estimates to us."

  "You're going to let those people walk all over you. I'm looking out for your pride, Larry. Nobody else's going to."

  "You gotta pay the rent, honey. Rule number one in business: Get the bucks. You don't have any money you don't get to do what you want."

  "They're obnoxious."

  "True."

  "He smells bad."

  "He does not."

  "Somebody smells bad. And that woman, that Mary Jane, is a dweeb."

  "What the 'ell's a dweeb?"

  "Exactly what she is. She's--"

  The door opened and Mary Jane's smiling face looked out, her eyes perching on Rune. "Are you the one who's in charge of lunch?"

  Rune smiled. "You betcha."

  "We should probably get a head start on it.... We were thinking in terms of salads. Oh, and how's that copying coming?"

  Rune saluted with a smile. "It's on its way."

  The next day at eleven-thirty Sam Healy picked her up outside of L&R and they drove north.

  "It's just a station wagon." Rune, looking around inside, was mildly disappointed.

  Sam Healy said, "But it's blue and white, at least." It also had BOMB SQUAD stenciled in large white letters on the side. And a cage, empty at the moment, that he explained was for the dogs that sniffed out explosives. "You were expecting ...?"

  "I don't know. High-tech stuff, like in the movies."

  "Life is generally a lot lower-tech than Hollywood."

  "True."

  They drove out of Manhattan to the NYPD explosives disposal facility on Rodman's Neck in the Bronx.

  "Oh, wow, check this place out. This is totally audacious."

  It was essentially a junkyard without the junk. Her feet bounced up and down on the floorboards as they pulled through the gate in the chain-link fence, crowned with spirals of razor wire.

  To their left was the police shooting range. Rune heard the short cracks from pistols. To their right were several small red sheds. "That's where we keep our own explosives," Healy explained.

  "Your own?"

  "Most of the time we don't dismantle devices. We bring them here and blow them up."

  Rune picked up her camera and battery pack from the backseat. There was a green jumpsuit there. She hadn't noticed it before. She tried to pick it up. It was very heavy. The helmet had a green tube, probably for ventilation, coming out of the top and hanging down the back. It looked just like an alien's head.

  "Wow, what's that?"

  "Bomb suit. Kevlar panels in fireproof cloth."

  "Is that what you wear when you disarm bombs?"

  "You don't call them bombs."

  "No?"

  "They're IEDs. Improvised explosive devices. The Department's a lot like the military. We use initials a lot."

  They walked into a low cinder-block building that reeked of city government budget. A single, overworked air conditioner groaned in the corner. Healy nodded at a couple uniformed officers. He carried a blue zipper bag.

  She glanced at a poster RULES FOR BOILING DYNAMITE.

  There were dozens of others, all with bullet points of procedures on them. The clinical language was chilling.

  In the event of consciousness after a detonation, attempt to retrieve any severed body parts....

  Jesus ...

  He noticed what she was reading and, maybe to distract her from the gruesome details, asked, "Hey, want to hear the basic lecture on explosive ordnance disposal?"

  She looked away from the section on improvising tourniquets and said, "I guess."

  "There are only two goals in dealing with explosives. First, to avoid human injury. Destroy or disarm by remote if at all possible. Goal number two is to avoid injury to property. Most of our work involves investigating suspicious packages and sweeps of consulates and airports and abortion clinics. Things like that."

  "You make it sound, I don't know, routine."

  "Most of it is. But we also got odd jobs, like a couple weeks ago--some kid buys a sixty-millimeter mortar shell from an army-navy store in Brooklyn and takes it home. He and his brother're in the backyard playing catch with it. Supposed to be a dummy--all the powder drained out. Only the kid's father was in Nam and he thinks it looks funny. Takes it to the local precinct station. Turns out it was live."

  "Ouch."

  "We got it taken care of.... Then we get a lot of false alarms, just like the Fire Department. But every once in a while, bingo. There's a suitcase at the airport or a bundle of dynamite or a pipe bomb and we've got to do something with it."

  "So somebody crawls up and cuts the wires?"

  Healy said, "What's the first goal?"

  Rune grinned. "Don't get anybody's ass blown up."

  "Mine included. First we evacuate the area and set up a frozen zone."

  "Frozen?"

  "We call it a frozen zone. Maybe a thousand yards wide. Then we'll put a command post behind armor or sandbags somewhere within that area. We have these remote-control robots with video cameras and X rays and stethoscopes and we send one up to take a look at the thing."

  "To listen for the ticking?"

  "Yep. Exactly." He nodded at her. "You'd think everybody'd be using battery-powered digital timer-detonators--Hollywood again. But ninety percent of the bombs we deal with are really crude, homemade. Pipe bombs, black or smokeless powder, dynamite, match heads in conduit. And most of these use good old-fashioned dime-store alarm clocks. You need two pieces of metal coming together to complete the circuit and set off the detonating cap. What's better for that than a windup alarm clock with a bell and clapper on top? So, we look and listen. Then if it really is an IED and we can disarm without any risk we do a render-safe. If it's a tricky circuit or we think it'll go off we get it into the containment vehicle." He nodded toward the field near the shack. "And bring it here and blow it up ourselves."

  They walked outside. Two young men stood a hundred yards away from them in one of the three deep pits dug into the field. They wound what looked like plastic clothesline around a square, olive-drab box.

  Rune looked around. She said, "This looks just like the Underworld."

  Healy frowned. He asked her, "Eliot Ness?"

  "No, like Hades, I mean. You know, hell."

&nbs
p; "Oh, yeah--your analysis of the crime scene the other day." Healy looked back to the men in the pit. He said to Rune, "You have to understand something about explosives. In order to be effective, they have to be explosive only under certain conditions. If you make this stuff that blows up when you look at it cross-eyed, well, that's not going to be real useful now, is it? Hell, most explosives you can destroy by burning them. They don't blow up; they just burn. So to make it go bang, you need detonators. Those're powerful bits of explosive that set off the main charge. Remember the C-4 that they used in the second bombing? If you don't have the detonator surrounded by at least a half inch of C-4 you might not get a bang at all."

  She heard enthusiasm in his voice. She thought how good it is when you've found the one thing in life that you're really good at and that you enjoy doing for a living.

  "That's what we look for," Healy continued. "That's the weak point in bombs. Most detonators're triggered electrically. So, yeah, we cut the wires, and that's it. If somebody wants to get elaborate they could have a timed detonator and a rocker switch, so that even if you cut the timer, any movement will set off the bomb. Some have a shunt--a galvanometer hooked up to the circuit so that if you cut the wire the needle swings to zero because the current's been cut and that sets off the bomb. The most elaborate bomb I ever saw had a pressure switch. The whole thing was inside a sealed metal canister filled with pressurized air. We drilled a tiny hole to test for nitrate molecules--that's how bomb detectors at airports work. Sure enough, it was filled with explosives. There was a pressure switch inside. So if we'd open the canister the air would have escaped and set it off."

  "God, what did you do?"

  "We brought it up here and were just going to detonate it but the word came from downtown they wanted to check the components for fingerprints. So we put it in a hyperbaric chamber, equalized the pressure inside and outside, opened it up and rendered it safe. It had two pounds of Semtex in it. With steel shot all around. Like shrapnel. Purely antipersonnel. Mean, son-of-a-bitch bomb."

  "You got the robot into the chamber?"

  "Well, no. Actually I dismantled it."

  "You?"

  He shrugged and nodded to the pit, where the two men had finished their wrapping exercise and were retreating to a bunker of concrete and sandbags.

  "They're practicing setting off military charges. That's an M118 demolition block. About two pounds of C-4. For blowing bridges and buildings, trees. They've wrapped it with detonating cord and'll set it off by remote control."

  Over the loudspeaker came a voice: "Pit number one, fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!"

  "What do they mean?" Rune asked.

  "That's what they used to yell in coal mines when they lit the fuse on the dynamite. Demolition people use it now to mean there's about to be an explosion."

  Suddenly a huge orange flash filled the sky. Smoke appeared. And an instant later a clap of thunder slapped their ears.

  "Boaters hate us," Healy explained. "City gets a lot of claims for broken windows."

  Rune was laughing.

  Healy looked at her. "What?"

  She said, "It's just weird. You brought me all the way out here to give me a lesson on IEDs."

  "Not really," he said, considering.

  "Then why did you invite me?"

  Healy looked away for a moment, cleared his throat. His face was ruddy to start with but it seemed he was blushing. He opened his attache case and took out a couple of cans of diet Coke, two deli sandwiches, a bag of Fritos. "I guess it's a date."

  CHAPTER TEN

  He may have looked like a cowboy but he wasn't the silent type.

  Detective Sam Healy was thirty-eight. Nearly half of his fellow BOMB SQUAD detectives had gotten into demolition in the military but he'd gone a different route. First a portable--a foot patrolman--then working an RMP.

  "Remote motor patrol. It means police car."

  "Initials, I remember."

  Healy smiled. "You're talking to an MOS."

  "Moss?"

  "Member of Service."

  After a few years of that Healy'd gone into Emergency Services: New York's SWAT team. Then he'd signed up for the Bomb Squad. He'd taken the month-long course at the FBI's Hazardous Devices School in Huntsville, Alabama, and then was assigned to the Squad. Healy had majored in electrical engineering in college and was studying criminal justice at John Jay.

  He talked with excitement about his workshop at home, inventions he'd made as a kid, his twenty-year, uninterrupted subscription to Scientific American. Once he had come up with a formula for a chemical solution to neutralize a particular high explosive and had almost gotten a patent. But a big military supplier beat him to it.

  He'd never fired his gun, except on the range, and had only made four arrests. He carried a Brooklyn gun shop's business card, on the back of which was printed the Miranda recitation; he knew he'd never remember the words in a real arrest. He'd been called on the carpet several times for failing to wear his service revolver.

  When the conversation turned personal he became quieter, though Rune sensed he wanted to talk. His wife had left him eight months before and she had informal custody of their son. "I want to fight it but I can't bring myself to. I don't want to put Adam through that. Anyway, what judge is going to award me custody of a ten-year-old kid? I deal with explosive devices all day."

  "Is that why she left you?"

  Healy pointed across the field. Rune heard the staticky warning again. Another huge flash, followed by a tower of smoke fifty feet high. Rune felt a concussion wave slap her face like a sudden summer wind. The cops watching lifted their fingers to their mouths and whistled. Rune jumped to her feet and applauded.

  "Nitramon cratering charge," Healy said, studying the smoke.

  "Fantastic!"

  Healy was nodding, looking at her. She caught him and he looked away.

  "The job, you mean?" he asked.

  Rune had forgotten her question. Then she recalled. "The reason your wife left?"

  "I don't know. I think the reason was I didn't ever get home. Mentally, I mean. I live in Queens. I've got a house with a lab in the basement. One night I'd been doing some work downstairs and I was kind of lost in it and my wife came down and said dinner was ready. I wasn't paying any attention and I told her about the experiment and I said, 'You know, this feels just like home.' And she said, 'This is your home.'"

  Rune said, "Don't be too hard on yourself. Takes two."

  He nodded.

  "Still in love with her, huh?"

  "No way," he said quickly.

  "Uh-huh."

  "No, really."

  The sound of wind filled the range. He became silent, almost impenetrable.

  Which would have been one of his wife's gripes. The difficulty of reaching him.

  After a moment Healy said, "All of a sudden, out of the blue, she says she can't stand me. I'm just one big irritation. I don't understand her. I'm never there for her. I was floored. I really asked for it, in a way--I pushed her, I kept telling her how much I loved her, how sorry I was, how I'd do anything.... She said that was just torturing her. I went a little nuts."

  "Lovers can do that to you," Rune said.

  Healy continued. "For instance--when she left, Cheryl took the TV. So the next day all I can think about is getting a replacement. I went out and bought Consumer Reports and read all about the different kinds of sets. I mean, I had to buy the best TV there was. It became an obsession. Finally, I went to SaveMart and spent--God, I can't believe it--eleven hundred on this set...."

  "Whoa, that must be one hyper TV."

  "Sure, but the thing is: I never watch television. I don't like TV. I'd do things like that. I was pretty depressed. Then one day we got a call on this pipe bomb. See, they're real dangerous because they're usually filled with gunpowder, which is awfully unstable. Thing weighed about thirty pounds. Turns out it's planted in front of a big bank downtown. In a stairwell. We can't get the robot in there so
I get a bomb suit on and take a look at it. I could just carry it out to where the robot can pick it up, then put it in the containment vehicle. But I'm thinking, I don't care if I'm dead or not. So I decide to do a render-safe myself.

  "I started twisting the end off the pipe. And what happened was some of the powder got in the threads of the cap and the friction set off the charge."

  "God, Sam ..."

  "Turned out it was black powder--not smokeless. That's the weakest explosive you can find. And most of it was wet and didn't go off. Didn't do anything more than knock me on my ass and blister my palms. But I said to myself, 'Healy, time to stop being an asshole.' That helped me get over her pretty well. And that's where I am now."

  "Over her."

  "Right."

  After a moment Rune said, "Marriage is a very weird thing. I'm not sure it's healthy. My mother's always after me to get married. She has a list of people for me. Nice boys. Her friends' sons. She's nondenominational. Jewish, WASP ... doesn't matter to her. Okay, they are sort of ranked by professions and, yeah, a doctor's first--but she doesn't really care as long as I end up rich and pregnant. Oh, and happy. She does want me to be happy. A rich, happy mother. I tell you, I have a great imagination but that's one thing I can't picture, me married."

  Healy said, "Cheryl was real young when we got married. Twenty-two. I was twenty-six. We thought it was time to settle down. People change, I guess."

  Silence. And Rune sensed he felt they'd gone too far into the personal. He shrugged in a dismissing way, then noticed a uniformed cop he recognized and asked what had happened to a live hand grenade someone had found in the Bronx.

  "S'in the captain's office. On his chair."

  "His chair?" Healy asked.

  "Well, we took the TNT out first."

  He turned back to Rune and to fill the silence she asked, "You ever happen to talk to that witness?"

  Healy drank most of his soda but left half his sandwich. "What witness?"

  "The guy who was hurt in the first bombing? The first angel?"

  The wind came up and whipped smoke from a burning pit toward them.

  "Yeah."

  "Ah," Rune said. "Was he helpful?"

  Healy hooked his thumbs into his thick belt, which really made him look a lot like a cowboy.

  "Aren't you going to tell me what he said?"