Death of a Blue Movie Star (30 page)

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 attaché 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?”