Death of a Blue Movie Star

CHAPTER SIX

I Just look like you know what you're doing and he won't stop you; he'll let you right in.

Life is all a question of attitude, Rune knew.

She was wearing a blue windbreaker. On the back, in white, were the lettersny. She'd stenciled them on that morning with acrylic poster paint. She kept the Sony Betacam on her shoulder as she walked past the uniformed policeman standing in the lobby of Lame Duck Productions. She nodded in a distracted way, cool, a civil servant nod, confident he'd let her pass by.

He stopped her.

"Who're you?" he asked, a guy who looked like-what was his name?-Eddie Haskell on LeaveIt to Beaver.

"Film unit."

He looked at her black stretch pants and high-top Keds.

"Never heard of it. What precinct you out of?"

"State police," she said. "Now, you don't mind, I got five other CSs to do today."

"What's a CS?" Eddie didn't move.

"Crime scene."

"CS." He was nodding. "Shield?" he asked.

Rune reached into her purse and flipped open an ID wallet. On one side was a bright gold badge and on the other was an ID card with a sullen photo of her. It gave her name as Sargant Randolf. (The man who sold her the ID an hour before, in an arcade in Times Square, had said, "Your name's Sargant? My generation, they named kids weird things too. Like Sunshine and Moonbeam.")

Eddie glanced at it, shrugged. "You gotta use the stairs. Elevator's broke."

Rune climbed to the third floor. The scorched smell assaulted her again and turned her stomach. She stepped through the door into what had been an office. She lifted the heavy camera and started shooting. The scene wasn't what she expected, wasn't like in the movies where you see a little smoke damage, chairs knocked over, broken glass.

This was pure destruction.

Whatever furniture was in the room had been blown to shreds of wood and metal and plastic. Nothing was recognizable except a blistered file cabinet that looked as if a huge fist had slammed into it. The acoustical tile on the ceiling was gone, wires hung down and the floor was a frozen black sea of paper, trash and chunks of debris. The walls were crisp bubbles of blackened paint. Heat still rose from piles of damp black cloth and papers.

She panned slowly.

This is whereShelly Lowe's life ended. This is how it ended. Inflames, and-

Avoice behind her asked, "What do you think?"

The camera drooped and she shut it off.

She turned and saw Sam Healy, standing in another doorway, sipping coffee from a blue deli cup. She liked that. Asking what he'd asked, rather than "What the hell're you doing here?" Which is probably what he should've been asking.

Rune said, "I think it looks like Hades, you know, the Underworld."

"Hell."

"Yeah."

Healy nodded toward the hallway. "Why'd he let you up here?"

"I reasoned with him."

Healy walked up to Rune and spun her around slowly, looking at the letters on her back. "Cute. What're you, impersonating a bus driver?"

"Just shooting some tape."

"Ah. Your documentary."

She looked at a small suitcase on the floor next to him. "What're you doing here? I thought the word was, keep your distance. Remember the word?"

"I'm just a grunt. I collect the evidence. What the D.A. does with it is his business."

She looked at a number of plastic bags sitting next to his attache case. "What kind of evidence've you-"

Another voice cut through the room. "That's her."

Eddie the cop.

It was that kind of emphasis onher that Rune had heard before. It usually came from teachers, her parents and bosses.

Rune and Healy looked up. Eddie was with another man, heavyset. He looked familiar. Yeah, that was it-at the first bombing, the theater: Brown Suit.

"Sam." He nodded at Healy, then said to Rune, "I'm Detective Begley. I understand you're with the New York State Police. Could we see your ID again, please?"

Rune frowned. "I never said that. I said I wanted to do some tapesof the state police. For the news."

Eddie shook his head. "She showed me a shield."

"Miss, you know it's a crime to have a badge?"

"It's a crime for some people to have a badge."

Healy said, "Artie, she's with me. It's okay."

"Sam, she can't go flipping shields around." Begley turned to her. "Either open your bag or we'll have to take you to the precinct."

"The thing is…"

Eddie took the leopard-skin bag and handed it to Begley. He rummaged through the dull-clinking carnival of junk. He searched for a minute or two, then grimaced and dumped the contents out on the floor. There was no badge.

Rune pulled out all her pockets. Empty.

Begley looked at Eddie, who said, "I saw it. I know I did."

Healy said, "I'll keep an eye on her, Artie."

Begley grunted, handed her bag to Eddie and ordered him to fill it back up.

"She had a shield," he protested.

Begley said to Healy, "Got a positive ID on the body from dentals. It's that Lowe woman all right. Nobody else hurt. And you were asking last night about her phone call?"

Healy nodded.

"The security guard doesn't remember who the message was from. And the phone company's still running pen registers, trying to find out who called who. As soon as we know anything else we'll let you know."

"Thanks."

Begley left. Eddie finished refilling Rune's bag. With a cold glance at Rune he too left.

Rune turned and saw Healy reading her ID.

"You spelled Sergeant wrong."

She reached for it and he lifted it above her reach.

"Begley's right. You get caught with this, it's a misdemeanor. And wising off to a cop'll get you the maximum sentence."

"You picked my purse."

He slipped the fake-leather wallet into his pocket. "Bomb Squad's got steady hands." He finished his coffee.

Rune nodded after Begley. "You were asking them to check out phone calls and things? Sounds to me like you're more than just a grunt."

A nonchalant shrug. "You leave the camera off and I'll show you what I got."

"Okay."

They walked to a crater in the concrete floor. Rune slowed as she got close. Streaks of white and gray led outward from it. Above them was a black mess of a dome where the explosion had destroyed the acoustic-tiled ceiling. In front of Rune was the gaping hole where the outer wall had been.

Healy pointed to the crater. "I measured it. We can tell from the size how much explosive there was." He held up a small glass vial with cotton in it. "This has absorbed the chemical residue in the air around the site. I'll send it over to the police lab in the Academy near Second Avenue. They'll tell me exactly what kind of explosive it was."

Rune's hands were sweating and her stomach was knotted. This is where Shelly had been standing when she'd turned to make her call. This is where she'd been standing when she died. Maybe in this very spot. Her legs went weak. She backed away slowly.

Healy continued, "But I'm sure it was composition four. C-4 it's usually called."

"You hear about it in Beirut."

"The number one choice among terrorists. It's military. You can't buy it from commercial demolition suppliers. It looks like dirty white putty, kind of oily. You can mold it real easily."

"Was it like hooked to a clock or something?"

Healy walked to his attache case and picked up one of the plastic bags. It contained bits of burnt metal and wires.

"Junk," Rune said.

"Butimportant junk. It tells me exactly how the bomb worked, how she was killed. It was in the phone she called from. Which was on a wooden desk right about there." He pointed to a space on the floor near the crater. "The phone was a new-model Taiwanese import. That's significant because in the old Western Electric phones most of the space was take up by the workings. There's a lot of empty space in new phones. That let the killer use about a half pound of C-4."

"That's not so much."

Healy smiled grimly. "Oh, yes it is-C-4's about ninety-one percent RDX, which is probably the most powerful nonnuclear explosive around. It's a trinitra-mine."

Rune nodded, though she had no idea what that was.

"They mix that with a sevacate and an isobutylene, oh, and a little motor oil-those are for stability, so it doesn't go off when you sneeze. You don't need very much at all for a very, very big bang. Detonation rate of about twenty-seven thousand feet per second. Dynamite is only about four thousand."

"If you haven't sent it to the lab how do you know it's C-4?"

"I pretty much knew when I walked in. I could smell it. It was either that or Semtex, a Czech explosive. I also found a bit of plastic wrapper-with a U.S. Army code on it. So it'd have to be C-4, and old C-4 because it didn't completely detonate."

"What set it off?"

He was absently examining burnt pieces of metal and plastic in the bag, squeezing them, sliding them around.

"The C-4 was molded around an electric detonating cap attached to a little box that contained a battery and a radio receiver. The wiring was also connected to the switch that closes the circuit on the phone-so the device wasn't armed until someone picked up the receiver. That's the problem with radio detonation. You always run the risk that somebody, police or fire or a CB operator, will hit your frequency by mistake and set the charge off while you're planting it. Or when there's somebody in the room you don't want to kill."

Rune said, "So Shelly picked up the phone, called the number, and whoever was on the other end-what?-used a walkie-talkie to set it off."

"Something like that." Healy was staring out the window.

"And that's the phone number your friend's trying to find out."

"Only he's not as enthusiastic as he ought to be."

"Yeah, I kind of saw that. Hey, there're phone booths on the corner," Rune said. Nodding out the window. "Would he've been nearby? So he could see Shelly go inside."

Healy said, "You're a born cop."

"I want to be a born film maker."

"So I already called somebody at your unit this morning."

"My unit?"

He glanced at her jacket. "CS. Crime scene. It's on their list to dust all the phones that have a clear visual path to the building here."

Definitely not a grunt. Or a techie. He sounded like a real detective.

Rune said, "So somebody followed us here… You know, there was someone spying on Shelly and me, near where I live. I went to see and he beat me up."

Healy frowned, turned toward her. "You report it?"

"Yeah, I did. But I didn't get a good look at him."

"Whatdid you see?"

"Broad-brimmed hat-kind of tan color. He was medium build. Wore a red jacket. I thought I saw him earlier too. Around the theater that night I saw you. A week after the first bomb."

"Young, old?"

"Don't know."

"Red jacket…" Healy wrote some lines in a notebook.

Rune poked at the metal bits through the plastic bag. "You know what's kind of funny?"

Healy turned to her. "That this is the kind of setup you use when you want to kill someone specific? Is that what you're thinking?"

"Well, yeah. That's exactly what I was thinking."

Healy nodded. "This is what the Mossad and PLO and professional hit men use. You just going to make a statement, like the FALN or the Sword of Jesus, you leave a timed device in front of the office. Or in a movie theater."

"This bomb, was it different from the one in the theater?"

"A bit. This was remote-detonated, that one was timed. And the charge was different too. This was C-4. That was C-3, which is about as powerful but leaves dangerous fumes and is messier to work with."

"Isn't that suspicious? Two different explosives?"

"Not necessarily. In the U.S., good explosives are hard to find. Dynamite's easy-hell, southern states, you can buy it in hardware stores-but, like I told you, C-3 and C-4 are strictly military. Illegal for civilians to buy. You can only get them on the black market. So bombers have to take what they can get. A lot of serial bombers use different materials. The common elements are the target and message. I'll know more when I talk to the witness-"

"What witness?"

"A guy who was hurt in the first bombing. He was in the theater watching the movie."

Rune said, "And what was his name again?"

"Noagain about it. I don't give out the names of witnesses. I shouldn't even be talking to you."

"Then why are you?"

Healy looked out the gap. Traffic moved slowly by on the street. Horns screamed and drivers hooted and gestured, everyone in a hurry. A half-dozen people stood outside, gawking up at the hole. He looked at her for a moment, in a probing way that made her uncomfortable. "What they did here"-Healy nodded at the cratered floor-"that was real slick. Real professional. I were you, I'd think about a new subject for your film. At least until we find this Sword of Jesus."

Rune was looking down, playing with the plastic controls on her Sony. "I have to make my film."

"I've been in ordnance disposal for fifteen years. The thing about explosives is that they're not like guns. You don't have to look the person in the eyes when you kill them. You don't have to be anywhere near. You don't worry about hurting innocent people. Hurting innocent people ispart of the message."

"I told Shelly I was going to make this film. And I am. Nothing's going to stop me."

Healy shrugged. "I'm just telling you what I'd want you to do, you were my girlfriend. Or something."

Rune said, "Can I have my wallet back?"

"No. Letme destroy the evidence."

"It cost me fifty bucks."

"Fifty? For a phony shield?" Healy laughed. "You're not only breaking the law, you're getting ripped off in the process. Now get out of here. And think about what I said."

"About the Mossad and bombs and C-4?"

"About making a different kind of movie."

Sonof a bitch.

That night, home from work, Rune stood in the doorway of her houseboat and looked at the damage. Every drawer was open. The thief hadn't been very careful-just dumping clothes helter-skelter, opening notebooks and dressers and galley drawers and looking under futons. Clothes, papers, books, tapes, food, utensils, stuffed animals… everything everywhere.

Sonof a bitch.

Rune pulled a new tear gas canister out of a closet near the door and walked through the boat.

The burglar had left.

She stepped into the middle of the mess, picked up a few things-a couple of socks, the book of Grimms' fairy stories. Her shoulders slumped and she set the objects on the floor again. There was too much to do, and none of it was going to get done tonight.

"Damn."

Rune turned a chair right side up and sat on it. She felt queasy. Somebody had touched that sock, touched the book, touched her underwear and maybe her toothpaste… Throw them out, she thought. She shuddered from the sense of violation.

Why?

She had valuables, fifty-eight Indian head nickels, which she thought were the neatest coins ever made and would have to be worth something. About three hundred dollars in cash, wadded up and stuffed in an old box of cornflakes. Some of the old books would be worth something. The VCR.

Then she thought: Shit, the Sony.

L &R's camera!

Hell's bells it cost forty-seven thousand dollars shit Larry's gonna sue me double shit.

Enoughfor a man to live in Guatemala for the rest of his life.

Shit.

But the battered Betacam was just where she'd left it.

She sat for ten minutes, calming down, then started to clean. An hour later a good percentage of order had been restored. The burglar hadn't been particularly subtle. To unlock the door, he'd pitched a rock through one of the small windows looking out on the Jersey side. She swept the glass up and nailed a piece of plywood over the opening.

She'd thought about calling the cops again, but what would they do?

Why bother? They'd be too busy protecting nuns and the mayor's brother and celebrities.

She was just finishing cleaning when she glanced at the Betacam once more.

The door on the video camera's recording deck was open and the cassette of Shelly was gone.

The man in the red jacket had robbed her.

A moment of panic… until she ran to her bedroom and found the dupe tape she'd made. She cued it up to make sure. Saw a bit of Shelly's face and ejected the cassette. She put it in a Baggie and slipped it into the cornflakes box with her money.

Rune locked the doors and windows, turned out the outside lights. Then she made herself a bowl of Grape-Nuts and sat down on her bed, slipped the tear gas canister under a pillow, and lay back against the pile of pillows. She stared at the ceiling as she ate.

Out the window, a tug honked its deep vibrating horn. She turned to look and caught a glimpse of the pier. She remembered the attack, the man in the red windbreaker.

She remembered the terrible burst of explosion, the pressure wave curling around her face.

She remembered Shelly's blonde head turning into the room to die.

Rune lost her appetite and put aside the bowl. She climbed out of bed and walked to the kitchen. She opened the phone book and found the section on colleges and universities. She began to read.