Death of a Blue Movie Star

  But whatever he liked, Sam Healy didn't think he had any business being involved with somebody like Rune. When he'd seen her the other night he'd promised to call her. But each of the dozen times he'd thought about picking up the phone he'd resisted. It seemed like the better thing to do. The more stoic. And safer for him. It was ridiculous. The weird clothes she wore. The three wrist-watches. She only had one name and it was fake, of course, like a stage name. On top of that, she was probably fifteen years younger than he was.

  Oh, no--that damn number fifteen again.

  No business at all.

  Add to that, she was playing detective, which really upset him. Good citizens, wound up to the excitement of police work by the cotton candy of TV, often tried to play cop. And ended up getting themselves, or someone close to them, killed in the process.

  So why was he thinking about Rune so much? Why was he seeing her?

  Because he wanted to make Cheryl, the soon-to-be ex-wife who dated regularly, jealous?

  Because she was sexy?

  Because he liked younger women?

  Because he--

  The phone rang.

  He answered it.

  "'Lo?"

  "Sam." It was the 6th Precinct's ops coordinator, the second in command at the station.

  "Brad. What's up?"

  "We got another one."

  "Sword of Jesus?"

  "Yep. Forty-seventh near Eighth. Blew just a while ago."

  Christ. They were coming more quickly now. Only a day apart on these. "How bad?"

  "Nobody outside the theater but inside it's a fucking mess."

  "MO the same?"

  "Seems to be. You get on it. Get on it big."

  Healy hesitated. Didn't feel like he wanted to mince words. "I thought you wanted low-profile."

  There was a second of silence. The ops coordinator hadn't anticipated that question. "It's kind of ... What it is, it's kind of embarrassing now."

  "Embarrassing."

  "You know. We need a perp in custody. That's from the mayor."

  "You got it," Healy said. "Any witnesses?"

  The response was a bitter laugh. "Parts of 'em, yeah. Those pricks must've used a pound of plastic this time."

  Sam Healy hung up the phone and pulled his blue-jean jacket on. He was all the way out to the elevator when he remembered his pistol. He went back and got it and had to wait three long minutes for the elevator. The door opened. He got in. He looked at his watch. At least the timing was right. Rune would be at work and wouldn't hear about the bombing until later. He'd have time to finish the postblast and seal the site before she found out.

  It was one problem he'd never had with a girlfriend before: intruding at a crime scene.

  Rune, sitting on the subway, thought about men.

  Older men, younger men.

  Her most recent boyfriend, Richard, had been close to her age, just a few years older. Tall, skinny, with that narrow, dark, French face that you found everywhere in straight and gay New York City. (She'd leave him alone in bars to go to the john and come back and find bartenderettes leaning forward, dreamily pouring him free drinks.) They were together about six months. She'd enjoyed the time but toward the end she knew it wasn't going to work. He'd gotten tired of her ideas for dates: picnicking next to the huge air conditioner vents on the roof of a Midtown office building, playing with the Dobermans in her favorite Queens junkyard, wandering through the city looking for the sites of famous gangland rubouts. They talked about getting married. But neither of them was real serious about it. Richard had said, "The thing is, I think I'm changing. I'm not into weird anymore. And you're ..."

  "Becoming weirder?"

  "No, it isn't that. I think I'd say, you're becoming more you."

  Which she took as a compliment. But they still broke up not long afterward. They still talked some on the phone, had a beer now and then. She wished him well though she'd also decided that if he married the tall, blonde advertising account executive he'd been dating their wedding present was going to be the four-foot stuffed iguana she'd seen in a resale shop on Bleecker Street.

  Young, old ...

  But, naw, it isn't the age. It's the state of mind.

  Her mother had told her--during one of the woman's pretty much incoherent facts-of-life lectures that ran from ages twelve to eighteen--that there was only one thing that older men would want from her. Rune's experience, though, was that it was pretty much all men who wanted that one thing and older men were a lot safer because you usually could stay up later than them and, if worse came to worst, you usually could scare them into submission by talking about your recent twenty-year-old lover who kept you up all night with sexual acrobatics.

  Not that she was inclined to scare off Healy. Hell, she thought he was totally sexy. She just wished he'd hurry up and get the preliminary pass over with, then get down to some serious moves. Maybe it was out of line, loaning him Lusty Cousins. There was a lot of gentleman in him, though, and she wanted to see what was underneath that.

  But what do you do with a sexy gentleman who doesn't call you?

  The train pulled into the station, and she got off, climbed the steep stairs and began walking west.

  Wondering if there was maybe something weird or Freudian about what she felt for him. Father image, something like that. That Oedipus thing.

  Okay, he was older.

  Okay, he was a cop.

  Okay, her mother would shit a brick when she heard.

  Still ...

  At a deli she bought a chocolate milk and a package of Oreos--lunch--then walked up the street a half block and sat on a fire hydrant, sipping the milk out of the carton through a bent straw.

  Healy's wife, she reflected. That was probably the problem. Why he hadn't called.

  He was attracted to Rune--oh, she could tell that--but he was still in love with this wife.

  That was a weird thing about men: Love was like a business to them. They get it into their heads that they invest so much time in somebody, it's like a total bummer to give it up too fast. The wife, what was her name, Cheryl? She'd be a bitch, of course. She'd eat him alive. Oh, already the shifty lawyers were working on gouging him for alimony, while she dressed up in silky oriental dresses and had affairs. She neglected Adam, locked him in the basement while she had sex with her lovers on the rec-room floor....

  Vampire, vampire!

  He should dump her fast.

  The last of the milk was slurping through the straw when she saw the station wagon turn the corner and cruise past, slowing down. It stopped fast and screeched backward, stopping quickly in front of her.

  The engine idled for a moment, then went silent. Sam Healy got out. He looked at Rune, then at the smoldering front of the Pink Pussycat, then back to Rune. She picked up the video camera and walked over to him.

  "How--," he began.

  Rune held up a small black box. "These guys are great. Police radio receiver. Reporters use them to get the scoop. I heard the call. Code Ten-thirty-three."

  The smile began low and wouldn't stay down. "You shouldn't be here. But I'm getting tired of telling you that so I don't think I will."

  "Sorry to hear about the trouble at home."

  He frowned, shook his head. "What trouble?"

  "About your phone breaking. So you couldn't make calls."

  Maybe he was blushing but if so he didn't look embarrassed. "I'm sorry. I should have."

  No excuses. She liked that. "I'd be mad," she said, "except you actually look kind of glad to see me."

  "Maybe I am."

  A voice called from beside the shattered box office. "Hey, Sam."

  They turned. Rune was glad to see it wasn't Brown Suit. A uniformed cop waved lazily. He shouted, "The battalion commander says it's okay to go in. We've rigged lights for you. Not much to see, though."

  "Can I?" Rune asked.

  Healy kept his face on the front of the building.

  "Please?"

  He said, "You
get hurt in there, I could lose my job."

  "I won't get hurt. I'm tough. I bounce."

  His lips twisted slightly, Sam Healy's concession to a sigh, and he nodded his head in a way that might have meant anything but that Rune knew meant: Shut up and get your ass inside.

  "No taping."

  "Aw."

  "No."

  "Okay, you win."

  Together, for an hour, they sifted through the debris. Rune kept running to Healy every few minutes with bits of metal and wire and screws in her hand and he'd explain they were chair hardware or wires from the wall or the plumbing.

  "But they're all burnt. I thought--"

  "Everything's burnt."

  "That's true," she said and went back to sifting.

  Healy's own pile of Significant Junk, which is how Rune thought of it, was growing, nestling in a stack of plastic bags under the exit sign.

  "Zip is what I've got. Zip."

  "No note this time," Rune pointed out.

  He said, "The MO's the same as the first."

  "Modus operandi," Rune said.

  "The bomb was C-3. Timed detonator. You know, these last two bombs don't help your theory about someone covering up Shelly's murder. Nobody's going to keep bombing just to cover up a crime."

  "Sure they are. If they're smart."

  They'd both begun to cough; the fumes were thick. Healy motioned her to follow him outside.

  As they stepped into the air, breathing deeply, Rune looked up at the crowd.

  She saw a flash of color.

  Red. It looked like a red jacket.

  "Look! It's him!"

  She couldn't see his face but it seemed that he saw her; the man turned and disappeared east down Forty-seventh.

  "I'm going after him!"

  "Rune!" Healy called but she ducked under the yellow tape and ran through the mass of spectators pressing forward to get a look at the disaster.

  By the time she broke through them, though, he was two blocks away. Still, she could see that hat. She started across Broadway but the light was against her and she couldn't get through the traffic--there were small gaps between cars but the drivers were accelerating fast and she couldn't squeeze through. No one let her by. It was as frustrating as a toothache.

  The man in the red windbreaker stopped, looked back, resting against a building. He seemed winded. Then he crossed the street and vanished into a crowd of pedestrians. Rune noticed that he was walking stiffly--and Rune remembered Warren Hathaway's observation that the man who planted the bomb seemed to be older.

  She returned to Healy, panting. "It was him."

  "The guy in the jacket?"

  She nodded. Healy seemed somewhat skeptical and she thought about telling him that Hathaway had confirmed that he'd been in the Velvet Venus. But that would involve a confession about rifling Healy's attache case and she wasn't prepared for what the fallout from that might be.

  He was debating. He walked to a uniformed cop and whispered something to him. The cop trotted off toward his cruiser, hit the lights and drove off.

  Healy returned to Rune. He said, "Go on home."

  "Sam."

  "Home."

  Tight-lipped, she looked at him, making him see--trying to make him see--that, goddamn it, this really wasn't a game to her. Not at all.

  He must have seen some of this; he breathed out a sigh and looked around for an invisible audience like the kind Danny Traub carried around with him. Healy said, "All right, come on." He turned and walked quickly back inside the theater, Rune trotting to keep up with him.

  Suddenly he stopped and turned. He spoke as if the words were lines in a high school play and he was an actor of Nicole's ability. "I know I didn't call like I said I would. And you don't have to, if you don't want to. But I was thinking, tomorrow night--it's my day off--maybe we could go out."

  What a place to ask her out on a date! A bombed-out porno theater.

  She didn't give him time to be embarrassed about his delivery. She smiled and said, "Ah graciously accept yo chahming invitation. Nahn, shall we say?"

  He stared at her, totally lost.

  Rune said, "Nine?"

  "Oh, sure. Good."

  And smiling while he tried not to, he walked back into the theater, banging a plastic evidence bag against his leg.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Rune spent the day assembling the reels of exposed footage for the House O' Leather commercial and stuffed it, along with the editing instructions, into a big white envelope.

  Sam picked her up at L&R and drove to a postproduction house, where the technicians would edit the raw footage into a rough cut. Rune dropped it off with instructions to deliver cassettes to L&R and the client as soon as possible, even if it meant overtime.

  Then she said, "Okay ... work's done. Time to party. Let's go to the club." And she gave him directions to the West Side piers.

  "Where?" Healy asked dubiously. "I don't think there's anything there."

  "Oh, you'd be surprised."

  She gave him credit--he was a sport.

  Healy put up with the place for a couple of hours before he managed to shout, "I don't feel quite at home here."

  "How come?" Rune shouted.

  He didn't seem sure. Maybe it was the decor: black foam mounds that looked like lava. Flashing purple overhead lights. A six-foot Plexiglas bubble of an aquarium.

  Or the music. (He asked her if the sound system was broken and she had to tell him that the effect was intentional.) Also he wasn't dressed quite right. Rune had said casual and so she'd dressed in yellow tights, a black miniskirt and--on top of a purple tank top--a black T-shirt as holey as Jarlsberg.

  Sam Healy was in blue jeans and a plaid shirt. The one thing he shared with most of the other clubbies was a pair of black boots. His, however, were cowboy boots.

  "I think I got it wrong," he said.

  "Well, you may start a trend."

  Maybe not but he wasn't being eyed like a geek, either, Rune noticed. Two pageboy blonds lifted their sleek faces and fired some serious "Wanna get laid?" vibrations his way. Rune took his arm. "Sunken cheeks like that, you see them? They're a sign of mental instability." She grinned. "Let's dance some more." And began to gyrate in time to the music.

  "Dancing," Healy said and mimicked her. Ten minutes later, he said, "I've got an idea."

  "I know that tone. You're not having a good time."

  Healy wiped his forehead and scalp with a wad of bar napkins. "Anybody ever dehydrate in here?"

  "That's part of the fun."

  "You sure like to dance."

  "Dancing is the best! I'm free! I'm a bird."

  "Well, if you're really into dancing, let's try this place I know."

  "You're pretty good doing this stuff." Rune drank down half of her third Amstel as she continued to move in time to the music.

  "Oh, you think this is good, try my place."

  "I know all the clubs. What's this one called?"

  "You've never heard of it. It's real exclusive."

  "Yeah? You need a special pass to get in?"

  "You need to know the password."

  "All right! Let's go."

  The password was "Howdy" and the girl at the door checking IDs and stamping hands with a tiny map of Texas responded with the countersign--"How y'all doing tonight?"

  They were shown into the club--which for having a four-piece swing band was incredibly quiet. Or maybe it just seemed that way after the deafening roar of Rune's place. They were seated at a small table with a gingham plastic tablecloth.

  "Two Lone Stars," Healy ordered.

  Rune looked at a girl sitting next to them. A tight white sweater, a blue denim skirt, stockings and white cowboy boots.

  "Very, very weird," she said.

  "You hungry?"

  "You mean this's a restaurant too? What, you get to pick your own cow out of the pen in the back?"

  "The ribs are great."

  "Very weird."

  "I like
d that other place," he said. "But I kind of have to watch the noise." Pointing to his ears. She remembered that bomb blasts had affected his hearing.

  They drank the beers and were still thirsty so they ordered a pitcher.

  "You come here much?" Rune asked.

  "Used to."

  "With your wife?"

  Healy didn't answer for a minute. "Some. It's not like it was a special place for us."

  "You still see her at all?"

  "Mostly just when I pick up Adam."

  Mostly, she noticed.

  Healy continued. "There're books she left she comes by to pick up. Kitchen things. Stuff like that ... I never asked you if you're going with anybody."

  Rune said, "I'm sort of between boyfriends."

  "Really? I'm surprised."

  "Yeah? It's not as unbelievable as some things, like talking dogs or aliens."

  "I'd think you'd have them lined up."

  "Men have these strange feelings about me. Mostly, they ignore me. The ones who don't ignore me, a lot of them just want sex and then the chance to ignore me afterward. Sometimes they want to adopt me. You see people in Laundromats Saturday night doing their underwear and reading two-week-old People magazines? That's me. From what I've learned during the rinse cycle I could write a biography of Cher or Vanna White or Tom Cruise."

  "Let's dance," he said.

  Rune frowned and looked out over the dance floor.

  Healy said, "It's called the two-step. Best dance in the world."

  "Let me get this straight?" she said. "You hold on to each other and you dance at the same time?"

  Healy smiled. "It's a whole new idea."

  Tommy Savorne pressed the buzzer of Nicole D'Orleans's apartment and thought of how strange it was going to be to see her standing there and not Shelly.

  He had tried--often, lately--to remember the first time he saw Shelly. He couldn't. That was another odd thing. He had a good memory and there didn't seem to be any reason why he shouldn't remember Shelly. She'd been a person you could picture clearly. Maybe it was the poses she struck. She was never--what was the word?--random about anything she did. She was never careless in the way she stood or sat or spoke.

  Or in what she decided to do.

  He had recent images: Shelly on Asilomar Beach in Pacific Grove or at Point Lobos, on the bluffs where the park rangers were always telling you to stay away from the edge. Man, he could picture her clearly there.

  He pictured her in bed.

  But the first time they met, no, he couldn't see that at all.

  He'd tried a lot lately.