Death of a Blue Movie Star

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Detective Sam Healy, lying on his couch, was thinking about the women he'd had in his life.

There hadn't been a lot.

A couple of typical college romances.

Then he'd lived with one woman before he met Cheryl and had one affair just before they'd gotten engaged.

A little flirtation after he'd been married-a few drinks was all-and only after Cheryl had mentioned for probably the hundredth time what a nice sensitive man the contractor doing the addition to the bedroom was.

Though Cheryl hadn't been unfaithful. He was sure about that. In a way he wished that she had been. That would've given him an excuse to do a John Wayne number: kick in the door, slap her around, and in the aftermath give them a chance to pour out their hearts and express their fiery love for each other.

Nowadays, that wouldn't work. Think aboutThe Quiet Man -Maureen O'Hara'd call the cops the minute John Wayne touched her and he'd be booked on second-degree assault, first-degree menacing.

Times were different now.

Ah, Cheryl…

He stopped the VCR when he realized he hadn't been watching the tape for the past ten minutes.

The problem was that Lusty Cousins was just plain and simple boring.

He found the other remote control-the one for the TV-and turned on the ball game. Time for lunch. He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He took out one of the thirty-six Rolling Rocks it contained and popped it. On a piece of Arnold's whole wheat bread he laid four slices of Kraft American cheese (four of the hundred and twenty-eight) and added mayonnaise from a quart jar. Then topped it with another slice of bread.

Sam Healy had been grocery-shopping that morning.

He walked back to the living room. He gazed out the window at quiet Queens. Silhouettes showed on window shades in the houses across the street. Seeing them depressed him. He couldn't concentrate on the game either. The Mets were having less luck than both of the lusty cousins.

He looked at the cover to the cassette of the film and decided he didn't like adult films in the first place. They were as interesting as watching a film about someone eating a steak dinner. He also didn't like the weird, slutty makeup and lingerie contraptions the actresses wore. They looked prosthetic and artificial: the fingerless lace gloves, the garters, the black leather bras, the orange fishnet stockings.

And he didn't like silicone boobs.

He liked women like Cheryl.

He liked women like Rune.

Were they similar? He didn't think so. Why would he be so interested in both of them?

He liked innocence, he liked pretty… (But how innocent was Rune? She'd loaned him Lusty Cousins. And what was the message for him there?)

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 muchall 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 fromthat 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-tryingto 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.