Death of a Blue Movie Star (25 page)

Rune smiled nervously. “My first starring role.”

“Break a leg,” Stu said.

She’d thought that maybe he wouldn’t show. And she’d thought that even if he did show, he’d sit way off to the side, where he could pull out a gun with a silencer on it and shoot her in the heart and get away and it would be half an hour before anybody noticed her, thinking that she’d just fallen asleep in the hot sun. She’d seen that in an old film—a Peter Lorre film, she thought.

But Michael Schmidt was obliging. He sat in the center of the outdoor restaurant around the huge fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center.

He was scanning the crowd nervously and when he saw Rune he glued his eyes on her. Recognition preceded fury by a millisecond. She paused, slipped her hand into her jacket and started the tape recorder. He noticed the gesture and leaned back, probably thinking she had a gun. He was clearly afraid. Rune continued to the table.

“You!” he whispered. “You’re the one in the theater.”

Rune sat down. “You lied to me. You didn’t tell me you offered Shelly the part, then broke the deal.”

“So? Why should I tell you anything? You interrupted me in the middle of a very important meeting. My mind doesn’t work like other people’s. I don’t have little mundane facts at my beck and call.”

“I know all about the fight you had with her.”

“I fight with a lot of people. I’m a perfectionist…. What do you want? Money?” His eyes scanned the crowds once again. He was still nervous as a deer.

“Just answer—,” she began.

“How much? Just tell me. Please.”

“Why did you have to kill her?” Rune asked viciously.

Schmidt leaned forward. “Why do you think I killed her?”

“Because she tried to blackmail you into giving her the part.”

Schmidt muttered angrily, “And you’re going to do what? Go to the police with that story?”

There was something about the sweep of his skittish eyes that warned her. Twice now he’d glanced at an adjoining table. Rune followed his eyes and saw that two men were sitting in front of plates of fancy sandwiches that neither had touched.

Jesus, they were hit men!

Schmidt’d hired hit men. Maybe the skinnier of them was the man in the red windbreaker. They didn’t give a shit about being in public or not; they were going to rub her out right here. Or follow her and kill her in an alley. Blasting away at her as if she were Marlon Brando in
The Godfather
.

Schmidt swung his eyes, forced them back to her face. The two men shifted slightly.

“Now, tell me how much you want.”

Oh, hell. No more games, time to leave.

Rune stood up.

Schmidt glanced at her pocket, the tape recorder. His eyes were wide.

The heads of the two hit men swiveled toward her.

Then: Schmidt pushing back, sliding to the ground, yelling, “Get her, get her!”

The diners gasped and pushed back from their tables. Some ducked to the pavement.

The hit men stood quickly, the metal chairs bouncing to the stone ground. She saw guns in their hands.

Screams, people diving to the pavement, drinks falling, salads spinning. Lettuce and tomatoes and croissants flew to the ground.

Rune sprinted to Columbus Avenue and ran north. She glanced behind her. The hit men were closing in. They were in great shape.

You two assholes are surrounded by witnesses! What the hell are you doing?

Her chest was screaming, her feet stung. Rune lowered her head and ran full out.

At Seventy-second Street she looked behind her and couldn’t see them any longer. She stopped running and pressed against a chain-link fence around a vacant lot, trying to fill her lungs, her fingers curled tight in the mesh.

A bus pulled into the stop. She stepped toward it.

And the hit men, waiting behind a truck, ran toward her.

She screamed and rolled to the ground, then crawled under a gap in the chain link. She staggered to her feet and sped toward the building across the lot. A school.

A vacant school.

She ran to the door.

Locked.

She turned. They were coming at her again, trotting, now looking nonchalant, trying to be inconspicuous. The guns in their hands at their sides.

Nowhere to go except down a long alley. There’d have to be an exit to the street. A door, a window,
something
.

Rune ran to the end of it. It was a dead end. But there was a rickety door. She threw herself against it. The wood was much more solid than it seemed. She bounced off the thick oak and fell to the ground.

And she knew it was over. The hit men, guns in the open now, looked around cautiously and walked toward her.

Rune got up on her knees and looked for a brick, a rock, a stick. There was nothing. She fell forward, sobbing. “No, no, no …” They were on top of her. She felt the muzzle of the gun at her neck.

Rune whimpered and covered her head. “No …”

That was when one of the hit men said, “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney and to have the attorney present during questioning. If you give up the right to remain silent,
anything you say can and will be used against you in court.”

The 20th Precinct looked a lot like the New York State unemployment office, except there weren’t so many—or
as
many—writers and actors here. A lot of scuffed Lucite, a lot of typed announcements pinned up on bulletin boards, cheap linoleum, overhead fluorescents. Civilians milling about.

And cops. A lot of big cops.

Handcuffs were heavier than she’d thought. They weren’t like bracelets at all. She rested her hands in her lap and wondered if she’d be out of prison in a year.

One of the hit men, a Detective Yalkowsky, deposited her in an orange fiberglass chair, one of six bolted together into a bench.

A woman officer in a ponytail like Rune’s, the desk sergeant, asked him, “What’ve you got here?”

“Attempted grand larceny. Extortion, attempted assault, fleeing, resisting arrest, criminal trespassing—”

“Hey, I didn’t assault anyone! And I was only trespassing to get away from
him
. I thought he was a hit man.”

Yalkowsky ignored her. “She hasn’t made a statement, doesn’t want a lawyer. She wants to talk to somebody named Healy.”

Rune said, “
Detective
Healy. He’s a policeman.”

“Why do you want to see him?”

“He’s a friend.”

The detective said, “Honey, the mayor could be a friend of yours and you’d still be in deep shit. You tried to extort Michael Schmidt. That’s big stuff. You’re gonna be potato chips for the newspapers.”

“Just give him a call, please?”

The detective hesitated, then said, “Put her in a holding cell until we talk to him.”

“A holding cell?” The desk sergeant looked Rune over and frowned. “We don’t want to do that.”

Rune looked at her concerned face. “She’s right, you don’t want to do that.”

Yalkowsky shrugged. “Yeah, I think we do.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Rune and Sam Healy made their way along Central Park West, past the knoll where dog-walkers gathered. Poodles and retrievers and Akitas and mutts tangled leashes and pranced on the dusty ground.

Healy was silent.

Rune kept looking up at him.

He turned and walked into the park. They climbed to the top of a huge rock thirty feet high and sat down.

“Sam?”

“Rune, it isn’t that they could’ve prosecuted you—”

“Sam, I—”

“—they couldn’t have made the extortion case, and, yeah, they didn’t identify themselves as cops. And somebody found a fake FBI ID, but nobody’s connected it to you yet. But what they could have done is shot you. Fleeing felon. If they thought you were dangerous they could have shot.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I do something risky for a living, Rune. But there are procedures and backup and a lot of things we do to make it less dangerous. But you, you get these crazy ideas about killers and blackmail and you dive right in.”

They watched a softball game in the meadow for a minute. The heat was bad and the players were lethargic. Puffs of dust rose up from the yellow grass as the ball skipped into the outfield.

“There were some rumors about Schmidt and this teenage boy in Colorado. I thought Shelly found out about it and was blackmailing him to get the part.”

“Did the facts lead you to that conclusion? Or did you
imagine
that’s what happened and shoehorn the facts into your idea?”

“I … I shoehorned.”

“Okay.”

Rune said, “Sam, I have this notebook at home. I write all kinds of stuff in it. It’s sort of like a diary. You know what I have written on the first page?”

“‘I won’t grow up’?”

“If I’d thought about it, yeah, it probably would say that. But what I wrote is: ‘Believe in what isn’t as if it were until it becomes.’”

Crack
. A home run. The pitcher watched the ball sail toward the portable toilet a hundred feet from home plate.

“Sam, this movie is important to me. I didn’t go to college. I worked in a video store. I did store-window design. I worked in restaurants. I’ve sold stuff on the streets. I don’t want to keep doing that forever.”

He laughed. “You’ve got a few years’ worth of false starts ahead of you.”

“At the film company they treat me like a kid…. Well, okay, sometimes I
act
like a kid. But I mean, they don’t think I’m capable of anything more. I know this film about Shelly is going to work. I can feel it.”

“What you did back there, with Schmidt, that wasn’t bright.”

“He was the last of my suspects. I thought he was the one.”

“A suspect doesn’t call the cops to—”

“I know. I was wrong…. It’s just that, well, I can’t point to anything in particular. I just had a, I don’t know …”

“Hunch?”

“Yeah. That somebody killed her. And it wasn’t this stupid Sword of Jesus.”

“I believe in hunches too. But do us both a favor, forget about this movie of yours. Or just tell the story about a girl who got killed and let it go at that. Forget about trying to find the killer. Leave a little mystery in it. People like mystery.”