Death of a Blue Movie Star

CHAPTER TWELVE

The watering can leaked but aside from that, Rune decided, it was a pretty good idea.

She rang the bell at Danny Traub's town house and wasn't surprised to find a stunning brunette in a silk teddy opening the door. She had breasts so high and jutting that Rune could have walked underneath them.

Bimbos from the Amazon… Lord help us.

Rune walked past her. The woman blinked and stepped aside.

"Sorry we couldn't make it yesterday. Had a load ol rhododendraniums to deliver to an office in Midtown, one of Trump's buildings, and the whole crew was busy."

"You mean rhododendrons?"

Rune nodded. "Yeah."

She'd have to be careful. A bimbo with some intelligence.

"Careful," the woman said. "Your can leaks. You don't want to, you know, hurt the wood."

"Got it." Rune started to work, watering Traub's plants and trimming the leaves with a pair of scissors. She carefully stuffed them into her pocket. The green jacket she wore had saidmobil on it when she'd bought the thing at a secondhand store. But she'd cut the logo off and replaced it with a U.S. Department of Forestry patch.

She'd called Lame Duck and the studio receptionist had reported that Traub would be on the set for a couple of hours and couldn't be disturbed. Her only concern had been running into the woman who'd brought them the martinis the other day.

Well, it was a risk coming here. But what in life isn't?

Traub's only guest, however, appeared to be this brunette basketball player.

The woman didn't seem too suspicious; she was moreinterested in what Rune was doing. Watching everything she did, which-as far as Rune knew-was to murder every plant she touched. She didn't know zip about gardening.

"Did it take you a long time to learn all that stuff? About plants?" the Amazon asked.

"Not too long."

"Oh," she said and watched Rune cut through the roots of an African violet.

Rune said, "You want to give themsome water but not too much. Andsome light. But-"

"Not too much of that either."

"Right."

The woman nodded and recorded that fact somewhere beneath her shiny, henna-enriched mass of hair.

"Never cut too many leaves off. And always make sure you use the proper type of scissors. That is extremely important. Sharp ones."

A nod; the woman's mental computer disk whirred.

"You make a living doing that?"

Rune said, "You'd be surprised."

"Is it hard to learn?"

"You need some talent but if you work hard…"

"I'm an actress," Amazon said, then did a line of cocaine and sat down in front of the TV to watch a soap opera.

Ten minutes later Rune had defoliated half of Traub's plants and had worked her way upstairs into his office.

It was empty. She looked up and down the corridor and saw nobody. She stepped inside and swung the door shut. There was no file cabinet inside but Traub did have a big desk and it wasn't locked.

Inside she found bills, catalogs from glitzy gadget companies, a dildo missing its batteries, dozens of German S & M photo magazines, roach clips and parts of water pipes, matchbooks, pens, casino chips. Nothing that could help her-

"Want another martini?" the voice asked, coldly.

Rune froze, then turned slowly. The blonde, the same woman who had served her and Traub the other day-the one she'd been hoping she didn't run into-stood in the doorway.

Well, it was a risk coming here…

The woman walked sullenly past her and pulled open another drawer. It held maybe a thousand in crumpled tens and twenties. "Help yourself." She turned and walked out of the office.

Rune closed the drawer. "Wait, can I talk to you?"

The blonde kept walking. When Rune caught up to her in the corridor she said, "I'm Crystal. You're…?"

"Rune."

"You want to get into films or just robbing my boyfriend?"

"Is he really your boyfriend?"

She didn't answer.

Crystal led the way to the roof. Outside, she took off her bathrobe and bikini top and stretched out on a lawn recliner covered with thick pink towels. She rubbed aloe vera sunscreen on her chest and arms and legs and lay back, closing her eyes.

Rune looked around. "Nifty place."

Crystal shrugged, wondering, it seemed, what was nifty about a gray sundeck. She said, "He's not." She pulled on sunglasses with dark blue lenses. Looked at Rune. "My boyfriend, I mean." She didn't speak for a moment, then she said, "Every once in a while you see these big cruise ships come down the river. I wonder where they're going sometimes. Have you ever been on a cruise?"

Rune said, "I took this neat cruise around the city once. The Circle Line. I pretended I was a Viking."

"A Viking. With the helmets?"

"Right."

"I mean a real cruise."

"No."

"I never have either. I'd like to go sometime."

Rune said, "You have a wonderful figure."

"Thank you," she said as if no one had ever told her. "You want some blow?"

"No thanks."

Crystal 's head lolled toward the sun. Her arms draped over the edges of the recliner. Even her breathing was lethargic. "I'd like to live in the Caribbean, I think. I was in St. Bart's once. And I've been to Club Med a couple times, Paradise Island. I met a guy, only he was married and was separated and after we got back to New York he went back to his wife. Funny, he had a kid and he didn't even tell me about it. I saw him on the street. You don't want to get into movies."

"I know I don't."

"I could do exotic dancing-I don't have to make films. But the thing is, with the dancing… You stand in a little room and guys look at you and, well, you know what they're doing. It's not really disgusting, it's more… what's the word?…" She searched for a while but couldn't find it. She gave up. Put on more lotion. "What were you looking for upstairs?"

"Did you know Shelly Lowe?"

The head turned but where the eyes might be looking under the gunmetal-blue reflections Rune couldn't tell. She saw only two identical, fish-eye images of herself. Crystal said, "I met her once or twice. I never worked with her."

"Did she and Danny get along?"

Crystal eased onto her stomach. "Not too bad, not too good. He's a, you know, asshole. Nobody gets along with Danny very much. Are you, like, a private detective or something?"

"Just between you and me?"

"Sure" was the response, so lazy that Rune believed her.

"I'm doing a film about Shelly Lowe. She was a real actress, you know."

"We're all real actresses," Crystal said quickly as if she'd been conditioned to respond this way. But she didn't sound defensive or angry.

"I want to do a film about her career. She wasn't happy. She didn't like the business, you know."

"What business?"

"Adult films."

Crystal seemed surprised. "Didn't she? Why not? She could have anything she wanted. I make fifty a year cash for working two times a week. And Shelly could get twice that. Only…"

"What?"

"People're scared now though. With this AIDS thing. I keep getting tested; everybody does. But you never know… John Holmes died of AIDS. He said he slept with ten thousand women." She rolled onto her back again, the glasses tilted toward the hot disk of a sun.

Crystal finally continued. "She was good. Shelly was. We get a lot of fan letters. Some are kind of weird-like, men'll mail us their underwear-but mostly it's just, I love you, I think about you, I rent all your movies. I get asked for a lot of dates. Danny told me that Shelly used to get things like airline tickets and checks so she could come visit guys who watched her movies. She was one of the company's big stars."

Rune watched the Circle LineDayliner chugging along in the Hudson. "Hey, that's my Viking ship. You gotta ride it sometime."

Crystal glanced quickly. "Danny doesn't talk to me much about business stuff. He thinks I'm not real, you know, bright." The glasses lifted. "I went to college."

"Did you?"

"Community college. I was going to be a dental technician. And look what I've got now… Everything I could want."

Rune said, "You won't mention that I was…"

Crystal took off the sunglasses and shook her head. "You still haven't told me what you were looking for."

Rune couldn't see past the blue lenses but she had an odd feeling that this was someone she could trust. "Could Danny've hurt Shelly?"

"Killed her, you mean?"

A hesitation. "That's what I mean."

Her answer was as drowsy as the rest of her conversation. "I don't know. Even if I did I wouldn't, like, testify against him. You know what he'd do to me, I did that?"

She knew something.

A long moment passed as Crystal rubbed more sunscreen on. Finally she dropped the tube on the roof. "You were looking in the wrong place."

"What do you mean?"

"He's not stupid."

"Traub?"

"He's not. He doesn't keep the important things in his desk. He doesn't keep important papers there, for instance."

"Why would I be interested in his papers?"

"He keeps them where he keeps his stash. There's a safe in the kitchen, under the sink. He doesn't think I know the combination. But I figured it out. Want to know what it is?"

"What?"

"It's forty right. Twenty-nine left. Back around to thirty-four. See, that's his idea of a perfect woman. Her measurements. He tells us girls that all the time. The perfect woman."

"What's in the safe?" Rune asked.

"You know, I have to tan my back now. And when I do that I fall asleep. Good-bye."

"Thanks," Rune said. But the woman didn't respond.

She hurried downstairs and found the safe. The combination worked. Inside were dozens of ounce bags of coke. Some crack too. But that didn't interest Rune very much-she already knew about Traub's likes.

What interested her was the insurance policy.

A thin binder from New York Accident & Indemnity. Rune opened it up. There were a lot of strange words, all capitalized, likeDouble Indemnity and Key Man andNamed Insured andOwner of the Policy. She couldn't figure out what they meant. But it didn't take her long at all to figure out that the policy was on Shelly Lowe's life and that because of her death Danny Traub was going to be $500,000 richer.

Rune had called Sam Healy and asked him to meet her. She was going to tell him about Tucker and Traub. But before they could get together she got a phone call at L &R. And that was why she was now in a coffee shop on West Forty-sixth Street -Restaurant Row, in the heart of the Theater District.

"I'm one of a very unelite corps," the man said. "Theater people who've been betrayed, fired or assaulted by Michael Schmidt. I don't know why you want to do a film abouthim. There're so many decent people in the business."

"It's not really about him."

"Good." Franklin Becker poured another sugar into his coffee, stirred. He was a former casting director for Michael Schmidt. After she'd had her talk with the producer at the theater she'd approached the stagehand Schmidt had dressed down about dropping the load of lumber. She'd bought the poor man a cup of coffee and delicately extracted from him the names of several people who might be willing to dish on Schmidt. Becker was the first one who'd called her back.

Rune explained, "It's about Shelly Lowe."

"The actress who was killed in that bombing. And you know about her connection with Schmidt?"

"Right."

Becker reminded her somewhat of Sam Healy. Tall, thinning hair. Unlike the cop's stone face, though, Becker's broke frequently into curls of emotion. Her impression too was that he wouldn't have any wives in his past, only boyfriends.

"What can you tell me about them-Shelly and Schmidt."

He laughed. "Well, I can tell you quite a story. What she did… it was astonishing. I've been casting on Broadway for almost twenty years but I've never seen anything like it.

"We had a number of EPIs… Michael preferred interviews to EPAs-auditions. He's a funny fellow. You ever talk to him, you know he's got very definite ideas. Usually the producer couldn't care less about the hired help-the actors, I mean. He leaves that to the director. As long as the principals get good reviews and pull in a. crowd that's enough for them. But not for Michael. He rides herd on everybody: director, principals, walk-ons, arrangers, musicians, everybody."

Rune wasn't sure where this was going but she let the casting director continue at his own pace.

"So when it came time for casting, Michael kept his beady little eyes over my shoulder. We read resumes, we saw tapes, we talked to talent agencies." He shook his head. "Everybody went through the standard interview- everybody but Shelly. That's the astonishing part.

"Somehow she'd gotten her hands on a copy of the script for the new play. I can't guess how. Michael treated them like gold ingots. There just weren't any copies floating around. But she'd gotten one and had memorized the leading role. So it's time for her interview. She walks into Michael's office and doesn't say anything. She just starts walking around. What's she doing? I don't know. He doesn't know.

"But then I catch on. I've cross-read the play enough during auditions… She's doing one of the crucial scenes, following the stage directions for the beginning of Act Three. Then she gives the first line of dialogue in that act and looks at me-like a prima donna looking at a conductor who's dropped the beat. So I start feeding her the lines. I thought Michael was going to be royally pissed. He doesn't like people to do clever things he hasn't thought of. But after a minute he's impressed. My God, he's beside himself. And so was I. Shelly was amazingly good. We tell her, Great, thank you, we'll be in touch, which is what we always say. And Michael was his typical noncommittal Michael. Only she's got this look in her eye because she knows she's blown everybody else out of the water.

"After she leaves we read her resume again. Strange, you know: She doesn't have any formal training. Some respectable off-Broadway productions, some LORT- that's regional theater. Some summer stock and some performance pieces at Brooklyn Academy and local repertory groups. Either she shouldn't be as good as she is or we should've heard of her. Something was fishy."

Rune said, "And he did some investigating?"

"Right. Michael found out what kind of movies Shelly made. And that was it for her."

"He's got a thing about dirty movies?"

"Oh, yes. See, he's very religious."

"What?" She laughed.

"I'm not kidding. The pornography thing-it was a moral issue. And the funny thing is he was furious. Because she was perfect for the part. But he wouldn't let himself hire her. He was quite, um, vocal when he found out."

"But the way he behaved… This poor stagehand, the one who gave me your name… I thought he was going to kill the guy."

"Ah, but not one foul word passed his lips, did it?"

"I don't remember."

"He's very active in his church. He prays before each performance."

Rune said, "Well, so what? The Bible's full of begatting, isn't it?"

"Hell, there're actresses on Broadway've slept with as many men-and women-off camera as Shelly Lowe did on film. But Michael's a deacon of his church. A newspaper story-oh, the Post would love it-about Michael Schmidt's leading lady being a porn queen?" Becker's eyes brightened. "As appealing as that thought is to those of us who'd like to scuttle the bastard… So, you see why he couldn't let that happen."

"She must have been heartbroken."

Becker shrugged. "She was an adult and she made a choice to make those films. Nobody forced her to. But she didn't give up without a fight. And what a fight it was."

"What happened?"

"After I called her to give her the bad news-I felt I owed her that-Shelly made an appointment to see him. We'd already cast somebody else by then but I guess it half-crossed my mind that she was going to try tocharm, if you want to be euphemistic, Michael into giving her the part after all."

"Shelly wouldn't do that."

Becker looked at her with his eyebrow raised.

"Not to get a part," Rune said. "She wasn't like that. It doesn't make sense but I know that about her now. There were some lines she wouldn't cross."

"In any case that's what occurred to me. But that wasn't what happened…" His voice faded. "I probably shouldn't be telling you this."

Rune squinted. "Just pretend it's gossip. I love gossip."

"A terrible fight. Really vicious."

"What could you hear?"

"Not much. You read poetry, Robert Frost?"

Rune thought. "Something about horses standing around in the snow when they should be going somewhere?"

Becker said, "Ah, does anybody read anymore?… Well, Frost coined this term called thesound of sense. It refers to the way we can understand words even though we can't hear them distinctly. Like through closed doors. I got a real sense of their conversation. I've never heard Michael so mad. I've never heard him so scared, either."

"Scared?"

"Scared. He comes out of the meeting, then paces around. A few minutes later he calms down. Then he asks me about the new lead for the play and whether the Equity contract has been signed and I tell him it was. And I can tell he's thinking about casting Shelly again even though he doesn't want to."

"What happened, do you think?"

"I noticed something interesting about Shelly," Becker said. "She really did her homework-getting the script in the first place, for instance. See, we get a lot of young, intense hopefuls in here. They know Chekhov and Ibsen and Mamet cold. But they don't have a clue about the business of the theater. They think producers are gods. But as creative as Shelly was she also had a foot in the real world. She was a strategist. For the first EPI, she'd found out everything there was to know about Michael. Personal things as well as professional." Becker gave Rune a meaningful smile and when she didn't respond he frowned. "Don't you get it?"

"Uh, not exactly."

"Blackmail."

"Blackmail? Shelly was blackmailing him?"

"Nobody here knows for certain but there're rumors about Michael. A few years ago he was traveling through some small town in, I don't know, Colorado, Nevada, and we think he got arrested. For picking up a high school boy-the story was that he was just seventeen."

"Ouch."

"Uh-huh. Also around that time there was an announcement that Michael had paid two hundred thousand for the rights to a play. Nobody pays that kind of money for a straight, nonmusical play. It had to've been a phony transaction-I'm sure he used company money to pay off locals and keep out of jail."

"I thought he was a deacon in his church?"

"This was before he saw the light."

"You think Shelly found out about it?"

"Like I say, she did her homework."

Rune said, "He fired you. You're a little prejudiced against him."

Becker laughed. "I respect Medea's strength. Can I forgive her for killing her children? I respect Michael for what he's done for New York theater. Personally, I think he's a pompous ass. Draw your own conclusions about what I tell you."

"One last question. Was he in Vietnam? Or was he ever a soldier?"

"Michael?" Becker laughed again. "That would have been a delightful sight. When you're in the army I understand you have to do what other people tell you. That doesn't sound very much like the Michael Schmidt we all know and love, now does it?"