Death of a Blue Movie Star

  "--buck teeth out. I--"

  Larry repeated patiently, "A distributor."

  She paused for a minute. "You what?"

  "I found somebody who said 'E might want to handle your film. Looking for gritty, noirish stuff. It's not a big outfit but they've placed at public TV stations and some of the bigger locals. We're not talking network. But sometimes good films, you know, they get picked up in syndication."

  "Oh, Larry." She hugged him. "I don't believe it."

  "Right. Now then, we're going to go back in there and make nice with the ice lady, okay?"

  Rune said, "That woman is a totally airborne bitch."

  "But they're our clients, Rune, and in this business the customer is always what?" He raised an eyebrow.

  She walked toward the door. "Don't ask me questions you don't want to hear the answers to."

  Rune's favorite part was the dogs.

  The rest was pretty neat--the artillery shells, the hand grenades, the sticks of dynamite wired to clocks, silver cylinders of detonators, which all turned out to be phony. But the really audacious part was the three Labrador retrievers that nosed their way up to her and rested their big snouts on her knees when she crouched down to pet them. They wheezed as she scratched their heads.

  Healy and Rune stood in the BOMB SQUAD headquarters upstairs at the 6th Precinct on Tenth Street. It wasn't easy to miss the office: In the corridor, over the door, hung a bright red army practice bomb, stenciled with BOMB SQUAD in gothic lettering.

  In the main room were eight battered desks. The walls were light green, the floor linoleum. One woman, in a dark sweater, sat at a desk, intently reading a technical manual. She was pretty, with long, brunette hair and still eyes. She was the only woman in the unit. The others were men, mostly in their thirties and forties, wearing white shirts and ties. Trim guns rested in hip holsters. They read, talked among themselves, stretched back, spoke quietly on the phone. A few acknowledged Healy with waves or raised eyebrows.

  No one looked at Rune.

  "We've got the biggest civilian bomb disposal unit in the world. Thirty-two officers. Mostly detectives. A few waiting for the rank."

  On the wall was an old wooden board mounted with formal portraits of policemen. Rune caught the words "In memory of ..."

  The board was the largest display in the room.

  She bent down and patted a dog's head.

  "EDC," Healy said.

  "That's a weird name," Rune said, standing up.

  "That what he is. An Explosive Detection Canine."

  "The initials again."

  "Saves time," Healy said. "You'd run out of breath, you had to say, 'I'm taking the Explosive Detection Canine for a walk.'"

  "You could try dog." One rolled onto his back. Rune scratched his stomach. "They sniff out explosives?"

  "Labradors've got the best noses in the business. We've used computerized nitrate vapor detectors. But the dogs work faster. They can sniff out plastic, dynamite, TNT, Tovex, Semtex."

  "Computers don't pee, though," one cop offered.

  "Or lick their balls in public," another one said.

  Healy sat down at a tiny desk.

  One detective said to him, "How'd you rate, missing the abortion clinic detail?"

  "Lucky, I guess." Healy turned to Rune. "You want some coffee?"

  "Sure."

  Healy walked into the locker room. Three officers sat at a fiberboard table eating Chinese food. He rinsed out a china mug and poured coffee.

  Rune stood at the bulletin board, looking at color snapshots of explosions. She pointed to a photo of a red truck that looked like a huge basket. "What's that?"

  "The Pike-La Guardia truck. We don't use it much anymore. It was built in the forties. Got its name because it was built when a guy named Pike was CO. of the BOMB SQUAD and La Guardia was mayor. See that mesh there? That's cable left over from the Triborough Bridge. They used to put IEDs in there and take them to the disposal grounds. If it went off the mesh stopped the shrapnel. Still a lot of flame escaped, though. Now we use a total-containment vehicle."

  Rune said, "A TCV, right?"

  Healy nodded.

  Rune picked up a thick plastic tube about a foot long filled with a blue gelatin printed with the words DuPont. She squeezed it. Grinned. "This is kinda kinky, Sam."

  He glanced at it. "You're holding enough Tovex to turn a pretty good-size boulder into gravel."

  She set it down carefully.

  "If it were live ... That's just for training. So's everything else in here."

  "That too?" She pointed to an artillery shell about two and a half feet long.

  "Well, it's not live. But we picked that up a year or so ago. What happened was a woman calls 911 and says she got hit by a bullet. So Emergency Services shows up and they go into the apartment. They find her on the floor. They ask, 'Where's the shooter, where's the gun?' She says, 'There's no gun--just the bullet.' She points to the shell. Then says, 'I opened the closet door and it fell out.' It broke her toe. Her husband collected artillery shells and--"

  A voice shouted, "Sam."

  He stepped into the main room. A heavy, square-jawed man with trim blond hair was leaning out of the commander's office. He glanced at Rune briefly, then looked at Healy. "Sam, ESU just got a Ten-thirty-three at a porn theater in Times Square. Somebody found a box, looked inside. Saw a timer in there and maybe a wad of something might be plastic. Seventh Avenue, near Forty-ninth. Rubin, you go with him."

  No more bombings, he'd said? But before she could comment to him Healy and another cop, a thin man of about forty-five who looked like he belonged more in an insurance office circa 1950 than in the Bomb Squad, were racing to the locker room. They opened their lockers and pulled out battered canvas bags, then ran for the door. Healy snagged his attache case as he disappeared into the corridor.

  "Hey ...," Rune was saying. Healy didn't even glance back.

  Where does he get off? Rune thought, speeding into the dark green corridor. Downstairs, the men disappeared into the station house. An officer in a blue turtleneck stopped her, wouldn't let her follow. By the time she went outside, their blue-and-white van was disappearing down Eleventh Street, the roof lights playing crack the whip. The vehicle gave a bubble of electronic siren, then sailed north on Hudson Street.

  She ran to the corner, waving for cabs that failed to materialize.

  Sam Healy had the procedure down. That was one talent he had: the ability to memorize. He'd look at a list or circuit schematic once or twice and that would be it--it was in the mental vault.

  Which was a good thing. Because there was a lot to remember when you were a BOMB SQUAD cop. He wondered if that had anything to do with why he'd chosen bomb detail in the first place. It was different from being a beat cop or an ESU cop. In Emergency Services you had to make fast decisions. They improvised.

  Healy preferred to plan every detail out, then work step by step. Slowly.

  The van clattered north. Hudson became Eighth Avenue and they passed Fourteenth Street.

  The procedure: Set up a frozen zone for a thousand feet around the theater and evacuate everybody as best you can. Easy in a Long Island strip mall; impossible in densely populated Manhattan. Then you get the robot, with its gripping claws and TV-camera eyes, to stroll up to the damn thing and take a look at it. Then you pick it up in the claws ...

  The van rocked to a stop in the showroom of emergency vehicles on Seventh Avenue. They jumped out of the van.

  ... and wheel it out nice and easy because the cable on the robot is only fifty feet long and you can get killed as fast by chunks of robot as you can by IED shrapnel. Then you go up the ramp and into the containment vehicle....

  And pray that the damn thing goes off in the vessel so you don't have to go inside and pick it up when you get to Rodman's Neck.

  But also pray that if it does go off in the vessel it doesn't have such a high brisance and isn't so big that it turns the containment truck into a huge hand grenade
.

  And then you just pray....

  That's if you can use the robot, of course. Assuming the bomb wasn't in some place the bulky crawler, looking like a moon-lander car, couldn't go.

  Under a theater seat, for instance.

  Which is, of course, where the bomb turned out to be, they learned as they deployed at the scene.

  Healy looked at his partner, Jim Rubin, and nodded. "I'll do a hand entry. Let's get the suit."

  "I'll do it, you want," Rubin said.

  And he would have. Because that was the way they all were. If Healy'd said, "Yeah, you take this one," Rubin would've done it. But Healy didn't. The game didn't quite work that way. It was who was there first, who took the call, who said "I'll go" before anybody else. Any of them would go, it came down to it. But Healy'd claimed this one. He didn't know why but he felt it was his. You just did that sometimes. For the same reason you sometimes didn't say "I'll go" quite as fast as somebody else.

  Tonight Healy felt about as invincible as anybody picking up a box that could destroy the average house could possible feel.

  "Sam!" Rune called as she climbed out of the cab. He looked at her only for an instant. She glanced at his eyes and fell silent. He understood that she was looking at someone she didn't know at all.

  He whispered to Rubin, "Keep her the hell away. Cuff her, you have to, but I don't want her close."

  "Sam ..." He glanced at her once more. She put the camera on the ground, which was a message, he thought. Telling him she wasn't here for the movie or because of Shelly Lowe or for any reason other than that she was worried about him. But he still turned away from her.

  As Rubin drove the robot out of the van--they'd drive it as far as they could--Healy put on the heavy green bomb suit, thick with Kevlar panels and steel plates. He put the helmet on and started the circulator pump to get air into the helmet.

  Rubin stopped just inside the theater doors and drove the robot down the aisle the supervisor had marked with yellow plastic tape. He wore a headset and a microphone on the tip of a thin armature that ended in front of his mouth. His eyes were distorted behind thick goggles. Healy walked past him, then past the robot. He said into the helmet's mike, "How you reading me, homes?"

  "Good, Sam. Lucky you got the hat--this place fucking stinks."

  Healy walked farther into the theater, his feet shuffling aside empty crack vials and Kleenex wads and liquor bottles.

  "Talk to me, Sam, talk to me."

  But Healy was counting on his fingers. The manager had said the bomb was in Aisle M. Was that the fifteenth letter of the alphabet? Man, he hoped not. Fifteen wasn't a good number for him. Cheryl had left on the fifteenth of March. Wasn't that the ides of March? His only car crash had been a rear-ender on the Merritt Parkway--Route 15.

  J, K, L, M ... Good. M was the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. He felt unreasonably cheered at this news.

  "Okay, I see it," he said, smelling the stale air, sweating terribly already, feeling breathless. "Cardboard box, shoe box, lid off."

  He knelt for stability--the suit was very heavy; if you fell over you sometimes couldn't get up by yourself. He leaned over the box. Said into the radio, "I'm looking at C-3 or C-4, maybe six ounces, timer face up. If it's accurate, we got ten leisurely minutes. Don't see any rocker switches."

  Rocker switches were the problem. Little switches that set off the bomb if it's moved.

  But not seeing them didn't mean there weren't any.

  He probed into the box with a pencil.

  "You going to render safe?" Rubin asked.

  "No, looks like the timer's pretty fancy. I'm betting there's a shunt, but I can see the circuitry. I'm not going to cut anything. I'm going to bring it out.

  "Okay, here we go." He reached down. The gloves were plated, but Healy knew he was looking at enough plastic to snap a steel beam. The theory was that there wasn't much you could do about your hands anyway. At least, if anything happened, you'd be alive afterward to retire on disability, even if somebody else had to endorse the checks for you.

  Healy squinted--pointlessly--and lifted the box off the ground. You had to be careful--you tended to think that explosives were going to be heavy as iron weights. They weren't. The whole thing didn't weigh more than a pound.

  "No rocker," he said to the microphone. The smell of his own sweat was strong. He breathed slowly. "Or maybe I've got steady hands."

  "Doing good, Sam."

  The timer on the clock showed seven minutes until detonation.

  Healy backed out into the aisle, sliding his feet behind slowly to feel the way. He set the box into the arms of the robot.

  "This place is gross," Healy said.

  "Okay, we'll take over," Rubin told him.

  Healy didn't argue. He dropped his hands to his side and walked backward until he felt Rubin tap him on the shoulder.

  Rubin drove the robot out of the theater and up the ramp to the containment chamber, which fellow BOMB SQUAD officers had driven up from the garage connected to the 6th Precinct. It looked like a small diving bell on a platform. He gingerly manipulated the remote controls to get the box inside. The robot backed away and Healy approached the open door from the side. He pulled a wire to close the door most of the way, then quickly stepped in front and spun the lever. He stepped back.

  Rubin helped him out of the suit.

  "Whatsa time?" Rubin asked.

  "I make it about a minute to go."

  Rune broke through the police line and ran up to Healy. She squeezed his arm.

  He pushed her around behind him.

  "Sam, are you all right?"

  "Shh. Listen."

  "I--"

  "Shhhh," Healy said.

  Suddenly, a loud ping--it sounded like a hammer on a muffled bell. Smoke and fumes began to hiss out of the side of the changer. A sour, tear-gassy smell filled the air.

  "C-3," Healy said. "I'd know that smell anywhere."

  "What happened?" Rune asked.

  "It just exploded."

  "You mean that thing you were bringing out? It just blew up? Oh, Sam, you could have been killed."

  For some reason Rubin was laughing at that. Healy himself was fighting down a grin.

  He looked at her. "I'm going to be here for a while."

  "Sure. I understand." She didn't like the glazed, wild look on his face. It scared her.

  "I'll call you tomorrow." He turned and began speaking to a man in a dark suit.

  She started back to the sidewalk and then glanced at the tailgate of the BOMB SQUAD station wagon. Sam Healy's briefcase was resting on it.

  She wasn't exactly sure why she did it. Maybe because he'd scared her, looking the way he did. Maybe because she'd spent the day setting up little squares of plastic and enduring small-minded people.

  Maybe because it was just in her nature never to give up a quest--just like it was in Sam Healy's to go into buildings like this and find bombs.

  In any case Rune quickly flipped open Healy's briefcase and examined the contents until she found his small notebook. This she thumbed through until she found what she was looking for. She memorized a name and address.

  She glanced toward Healy, standing in a cluster of other officers. No one noticed her. Their attention was on a clear plastic envelope Healy held. A moment later Rune's voice, theatrical and low, filled the theater. "'The third angel blew his trumpet and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water.'"

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  "Look, I'll talk to you. But you can't use my name."

  They sat on the deck of Rune's houseboat that night, drinking Michelob Light. The skinny young man continued, "I mean, my mother thinks I was in a car crash. If she ever found out ..."

  Warren Hathaway was the witness whose name she'd found in Sam Healy's notebook. He'd been in the Velvet Venus Theater when the first bomb blew. Rune had called him and asked if she could interview him.

 
"I'm the only person in the world who got blown up my first time in a porno theater...." Then he caught her amused look. "Well, okay, maybe not my first. But I don't go all that often."

  Hathaway was about five six, early thirties, pudgy. He had bandages on his neck and his arm was taped. He spoke loudly too--just like Rune after she'd witnessed the bombing--and she guessed the explosion in the Velvet Venus had temporarily deafened him. "How did you find me?"

  "The policeman who interviewed you? Detective Healy? I got your name from him."

  The camera was set up. Hathaway looked at it uneasily. "You can mask my face out, can't you? So nobody'll recognize me?"

  "Sure. Don't worry."

  She started the camera. "Just tell me what you remember."

  "Okay, I was doing an audit at a publishing company on Forty-seventh. I'm an accountant and financial advisor. And, what happened was I had a couple hours off and I walked to Eighth Avenue to this deli I'd seen. They had great-looking fruit cups--they seemed nice and fresh, you know, lots of watermelon--and there was this theater right in front of me and I thought, Hell, why not?" He took a sip of the beer. "So I walked in."

  "What was your impression?"

  "Filthy, first of all. It smelled like, you know, urine and disinfectant. And there were these tough-looking guys. They were ... well, black mostly, and they looked me over like I was, I don't know, dessert. So I hurried down to a seat. There were about ten people in the whole place is all and some of them were asleep. I sat down. The picture was awful. It wasn't a movie at all but this videotape. You could hardly see anything it was so fuzzy. After a while I decided to leave. I stood up. There was a big flash and this incredible roar and the next thing I know I'm in the hospital and I can't hear."

  "How long were you in the theater?"

  "Total? Maybe a half hour."

  "Did you get much of a look at the other people in there?"

  "Sure. I was looking around. You know, to make sure I didn't get mugged. There were some folks there. Some dockworker sorts. And transvestites--you know, prostitutes." He looked away from both Rune and the camera.

  Rune nodded sympathetically and it crossed her mind that Warren Hathaway might know more about transvestite prostitutes than he wanted to admit.

  "Did you maybe see somebody in a red windbreaker?"

  Hathaway thought for a moment. "Well, there was somebody in a red jacket, I think. And a hat."