Death of a Blue Movie Star

by Jeffery Deaver

  "I'm not saying I feel that way."

  "Would it give you any more incentive if you knew she was trying to get out of the business?"

  "Rune--"

  "Somebody kills you and it's a crime. Somebody kills Shelly Lowe and it's urban renewal. That sucks."

  A Fire Department inspector walked up to them, larger than life in his black-and-yellow gear. "We're going to have to put supports in before anybody can go up, Sam."

  "I've got to do the postblast."

  "Have to wait till tomorrow."

  "I wanted to finish up tonight."

  Rune walked away. "Sure, he wants to take five minutes or so and look for clues."

  "Rune."

  "... then get back to protecting nuns."

  Healy called after her. "Wait." The voice was commanding.

  She kept going.

  "Please."

  She slowed.

  "I want to ask you some questions."

  She stopped and turned to him and she knew that he could see her thick tears in the swinging glare of the fire-truck lights. She held up a hand. Angrily she said, "Okay, but not tonight. Not now. There's something I've got to do and if I don't go now I won't ever. The detectives have my number."

  She thought maybe Healy called something to her. She wasn't sure; her hearing was, at the moment, a lot worse than his. But mostly she was concentrating on where she was going and had absolutely no idea how she was going to handle what she now had to do.

  Nicole D'Orleans, however, had already heard the news.

  Rune stood in the doorway of the apartment in a high-rise in the Fifties, watching the woman lean against the doorjamb, exhausted by the weight of sorrow. Her face was puffy. Along with the tears, she'd scrubbed away some of the makeup, but not all. It made her face lopsided.

  Nicole straightened up and said, "Like, sorry. Come on in."

  The rooms were cool and dark. Rune smelled leather and perfume and the faint fumes of the vodka that Nicole had been drinking. She glanced at the blotches of modern paintings on the wall, the theatrical posters. She noticed some framed signatures. One looked like it said George Bernard Shaw. Most she didn't recognize.

  They walked into a large room. A lot of black leather, though not kinky the way you'd think a porn star's apartment would be. More like some millionaire plastic surgeon would have. There was a huge glass coffee table that looked like it was three inches thick. The carpet was white and curled around the toes of Rune's boots. She saw packed bookshelves and remembered the way she and Shelly had looked through some of Rune's books just that morning and she wanted to cry. But forced herself not to because Nicole seemed to be pulling up just shy of hysterical.

  The woman had her mourning station assembled. A box of Kleenex, a bottle of Stoly, a glass. A vial of coke. She sat down in the nest of the couch.

  "I've forgotten your name. Ruby?"

  "Rune."

  "I just can't believe it. Those bastards. They're supposed to be religious but that's not the way good Christians ought to be. Fuck 'em."

  "Who told you?" Rune asked.

  "The police called one of the producers. He called everyone in the company ... Oh, God."

  Nicole blew her broad nose demurely and said, "You want a drink? Anything?"

  Rune said, "No. I just came by to tell you. I was going to call. But that didn't seem right--you two seemed close."

  Nicole's tears were streaming again but they were the sort that don't grab your breath and her voice remained steady. "You were with her when it happened?" She hadn't heard Rune's refusing a drink, or had decided to ignore it, and was pouring Stoly over small, half-melted ice cubes.

  "I was in the street, waiting for her. We were going to a party."

  "The AAAF party, sure."

  The memory of which set off another jag of tears. Nicole handed Rune the drink. She wanted to leave but the actress looked at her with such wet, imploring eyes that she eased into the hissing leather cushions and took the offered glass.

  "Oh, Rune ... She was one of my best friends. I can't believe it. She was here this morning. We were joking, talking about the party--neither of us really wanted to go to it. And she made breakfast."

  What should I say? Rune thought. That it'll be all right? Of course it won't be all right. That time heals all wounds? Forget about it. No way. Some wounds stay open forever. She thought of her father, lying in a Shaker Heights funeral home years ago. Death changes the whole landscape of your life, forever.

  Rune sipped the clear, bitter drink.

  "You know what's unfair?" Nicole said after a moment. "Shelly wasn't like me. Okay, I do a pretty good job. I've got big boobs so men like watching me and I think I know how to make love pretty good. And I like what I do. I make good money. I've even got fans send me letters. Hundreds of 'em. But Shelly, she didn't like the business. It was always like she was carrying around a, you know, burden of some kind. She would've done something else if she had a chance. Those religious nuts ... It's not fair they picked her."

  Nicole stared at the bookcases for a moment. "You know, one time we went to this movie about this hooker who was also a blues singer. She had a terrible life, she was so sad.... Shelly said that was her, that's how her life was. Blue. We saw it twice, and, boy, did we cry."

  Which is what she did now.

  Rune set the vodka down and put her arm around Nicole's shoulders. What a pair we are, she thought. But there was nothing like tragedy to bring out sisterliness.

  They talked for another hour until Rune's head began to ache and the cuts on her face began to throb. She said she had to leave. Nicole was sentimental drunk and still segued into tears every few minutes but she also would be asleep in a few minutes. She hugged Rune hard and took her number at L&R.

  Rune waited for the elevator to take her down to the shiny marble lobby of the building.

  Thinking how it was really sad that now with Shelly gone, Rune wouldn't be able to make the movie that would tell everyone about her--about how she was really a serious person, despite what she did for a living, how she wanted to rise above it.

  But then she thought: Why not?

  Why couldn't she make the film?

  Sure she could.

  And remembering something that Nicole had said, about the blues, suddenly the title for her film came to mind. She thought about it for a minute and decided that, yes, that was it. Epitaph for a Blue Movie Star.

  The elevator arrived. Rune stepped in, rested her face against the cool brass plate holding the buttons and sent the car on its journey to the first floor.

  CHAPTER SIX

  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 letters NY. 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 Leave It 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 where Shelly Lowe's life ended. This is how it ended. In flames, and--

  A voice 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 on her 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 tapes of 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.

  "But important 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 trinitramine."

  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 fre
quency 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."

  "What did 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--"