Death of a Blue Movie Star

by Jeffery Deaver

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  "You can use L&R's camera. It's got a telephoto built in."

  Stu, the cook-editor-food stylist from Belvedere Post-Production, said, "Why exactly do you want to film this guy?"

  "I'm going to get a confession. I'm going to trick him."

  "Isn't it illegal to film people if they don't know about it?"

  "No. Not if they're in a public place. That's what public dominion means."

  "Public domain. And that's something different. The copyright law."

  "Oh." Rune was frowning. "Well, I don't know. But I'm sure it's okay and I'm doing it."

  "What kind of camera is it?"

  "Betacam. Have you--?"

  "I know how to use one. Ampex deck?"

  "Right," Rune said. "You'll be up on the balcony at Lincoln Center, shooting down. That's all you have to do. Just tape me talking to this guy."

  "You still haven't told me why. What kind of confession?"

  "I'll have a tape recorder," she said quickly. "You don't even have to worry about audio."

  "I'm not going to do it, you don't tell me what you're up to."

  "Trust me, Stu."

  "I hate that phrase."

  "Don't you like adventures?"

  "No. I like cooking, I like eating. I'd like money if I had any. But one thing I definitely don't like is adventures."

  "I'll give you a credit on my film."

  "Great. Just be sure to put my prison number after my name."

  "It's not illegal. That's not the problem."

  "So there is a problem.... What is it, getting beat up? Or killed? Will you dedicate the film to my memory?"

  "You aren't going to get killed."

  "You didn't say anything about not being beat up."

  "You won't get beat up."

  "It sounded to me," Stu said, "that there was a tacit probably attached to that last sentence. Was there?"

  "Look, you definitely won't get beat up. I promise. Feel better?"

  "No ... Lincoln Center? Why there?"

  Rune slung the battery pack over her shoulder. "So that if you do get beat up there'll be plenty of witnesses."

  Rune had flashed an ID to the security guard of Avery Fischer Hall. His eyes went wide for a moment, then he let her into the quiet hall.

  "We're doing some surveillance," she told him.

  "Yes, ma'am," he answered and returned to his station. "You need any more help you give me a call."

  "What's that?" Stu asked. "That you just showed him?"

  "An identification card."

  "I know that. What kind?"

  "Sort of FBI."

  He said, "What? How did you get that?"

  "I kind of made it. On L&R's word processor. Then I had it laminated."

  "Wait--why did you tell me? I don't want to know things like that. Forget I asked."

  They continued up the stairs. On the walls were dozens of posters of operas and plays that had been performed at Lincoln Center. Rune pointed at one. "Wild. Look." It was for Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld.

  Stu glanced at it. "I prefer easy listening. What's the significance?"

  Rune was quiet for a moment; she felt like crying. "That's Eurydice. That woman. She reminds me of someone I used to know."

  They climbed the top floor and stepped out on the roof. Rune set up the camera.

  "Now, don't pan. I'm worried about strobing. Don't get fancy. Keep the camera on me and the guy I'm going to be talking to. I want a two-shot most of the time but you can zoom in on his face if I give you the signal. I'll scratch my head. How's that? To zoom you just--"

  "I've used a Betacam before."

  "Good. You got an hour's worth of tape, two hours of batteries. And this'll probably be over in fifteen minutes."

  "About the length of time of an execution. Any final words?"

  Rune smiled nervously. "My first starring role."

  "Break a leg," Stu said.

  She'd thought that maybe he wouldn't show. And she'd thought that even if he did show, he'd sit way off to the side, where he could pull out a gun with a silencer on it and shoot her in the heart and get away and it would be half an hour before anybody noticed her, thinking that she'd just fallen asleep in the hot sun. She'd seen that in an old film--a Peter Lorre film, she thought.

  But Michael Schmidt was obliging. He sat in the center of the outdoor restaurant around the huge fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center.

  He was scanning the crowd nervously and when he saw Rune he glued his eyes on her. Recognition preceded fury by a millisecond. She paused, slipped her hand into her jacket and started the tape recorder. He noticed the gesture and leaned back, probably thinking she had a gun. He was clearly afraid. Rune continued to the table.

  "You!" he whispered. "You're the one in the theater."

  Rune sat down. "You lied to me. You didn't tell me you offered Shelly the part, then broke the deal."

  "So? Why should I tell you anything? You interrupted me in the middle of a very important meeting. My mind doesn't work like other people's. I don't have little mundane facts at my beck and call."

  "I know all about the fight you had with her."

  "I fight with a lot of people. I'm a perfectionist.... What do you want? Money?" His eyes scanned the crowds once again. He was still nervous as a deer.

  "Just answer--," she began.

  "How much? Just tell me. Please."

  "Why did you have to kill her?" Rune asked viciously.

  Schmidt leaned forward. "Why do you think I killed her?"

  "Because she tried to blackmail you into giving her the part."

  Schmidt muttered angrily, "And you're going to do what? Go to the police with that story?"

  There was something about the sweep of his skittish eyes that warned her. Twice now he'd glanced at an adjoining table. Rune followed his eyes and saw that two men were sitting in front of plates of fancy sandwiches that neither had touched.

  Jesus, they were hit men!

  Schmidt'd hired hit men. Maybe the skinnier of them was the man in the red windbreaker. They didn't give a shit about being in public or not; they were going to rub her out right here. Or follow her and kill her in an alley. Blasting away at her as if she were Marlon Brando in The Godfather.

  Schmidt swung his eyes, forced them back to her face. The two men shifted slightly.

  "Now, tell me how much you want."

  Oh, hell. No more games, time to leave.

  Rune stood up.

  Schmidt glanced at her pocket, the tape recorder. His eyes were wide.

  The heads of the two hit men swiveled toward her.

  Then: Schmidt pushing back, sliding to the ground, yelling, "Get her, get her!"

  The diners gasped and pushed back from their tables. Some ducked to the pavement.

  The hit men stood quickly, the metal chairs bouncing to the stone ground. She saw guns in their hands.

  Screams, people diving to the pavement, drinks falling, salads spinning. Lettuce and tomatoes and croissants flew to the ground.

  Rune sprinted to Columbus Avenue and ran north. She glanced behind her. The hit men were closing in. They were in great shape.

  You two assholes are surrounded by witnesses! What the hell are you doing?

  Her chest was screaming, her feet stung. Rune lowered her head and ran full out.

  At Seventy-second Street she looked behind her and couldn't see them any longer. She stopped running and pressed against a chain-link fence around a vacant lot, trying to fill her lungs, her fingers curled tight in the mesh.

  A bus pulled into the stop. She stepped toward it.

  And the hit men, waiting behind a truck, ran toward her.

  She screamed and rolled to the ground, then crawled under a gap in the chain link. She staggered to her feet and sped toward the building across the lot. A school.

  A vacant school.

  She ran to the door.

  Locked.

  She turned. They were co
ming at her again, trotting, now looking nonchalant, trying to be inconspicuous. The guns in their hands at their sides.

  Nowhere to go except down a long alley. There'd have to be an exit to the street. A door, a window, something.

  Rune ran to the end of it. It was a dead end. But there was a rickety door. She threw herself against it. The wood was much more solid than it seemed. She bounced off the thick oak and fell to the ground.

  And she knew it was over. The hit men, guns in the open now, looked around cautiously and walked toward her.

  Rune got up on her knees and looked for a brick, a rock, a stick. There was nothing. She fell forward, sobbing. "No, no, no ..." They were on top of her. She felt the muzzle of the gun at her neck.

  Rune whimpered and covered her head. "No ..."

  That was when one of the hit men said, "You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney and to have the attorney present during questioning. If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in court."

  The 20th Precinct looked a lot like the New York State unemployment office, except there weren't so many--or as many--writers and actors here. A lot of scuffed Lucite, a lot of typed announcements pinned up on bulletin boards, cheap linoleum, overhead fluorescents. Civilians milling about.

  And cops. A lot of big cops.

  Handcuffs were heavier than she'd thought. They weren't like bracelets at all. She rested her hands in her lap and wondered if she'd be out of prison in a year.

  One of the hit men, a Detective Yalkowsky, deposited her in an orange fiberglass chair, one of six bolted together into a bench.

  A woman officer in a ponytail like Rune's, the desk sergeant, asked him, "What've you got here?"

  "Attempted grand larceny. Extortion, attempted assault, fleeing, resisting arrest, criminal trespassing--"

  "Hey, I didn't assault anyone! And I was only trespassing to get away from him. I thought he was a hit man."

  Yalkowsky ignored her. "She hasn't made a statement, doesn't want a lawyer. She wants to talk to somebody named Healy."

  Rune said, "Detective Healy. He's a policeman."

  "Why do you want to see him?"

  "He's a friend."

  The detective said, "Honey, the mayor could be a friend of yours and you'd still be in deep shit. You tried to extort Michael Schmidt. That's big stuff. You're gonna be potato chips for the newspapers."

  "Just give him a call, please?"

  The detective hesitated, then said, "Put her in a holding cell until we talk to him."

  "A holding cell?" The desk sergeant looked Rune over and frowned. "We don't want to do that."

  Rune looked at her concerned face. "She's right, you don't want to do that."

  Yalkowsky shrugged. "Yeah, I think we do."

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Rune and Sam Healy made their way along Central Park West, past the knoll where dog-walkers gathered. Poodles and retrievers and Akitas and mutts tangled leashes and pranced on the dusty ground.

  Healy was silent.

  Rune kept looking up at him.

  He turned and walked into the park. They climbed to the top of a huge rock thirty feet high and sat down.

  "Sam?"

  "Rune, it isn't that they could've prosecuted you--"

  "Sam, I--"

  "--they couldn't have made the extortion case, and, yeah, they didn't identify themselves as cops. And somebody found a fake FBI ID, but nobody's connected it to you yet. But what they could have done is shot you. Fleeing felon. If they thought you were dangerous they could have shot."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I do something risky for a living, Rune. But there are procedures and backup and a lot of things we do to make it less dangerous. But you, you get these crazy ideas about killers and blackmail and you dive right in."

  They watched a softball game in the meadow for a minute. The heat was bad and the players were lethargic. Puffs of dust rose up from the yellow grass as the ball skipped into the outfield.

  "There were some rumors about Schmidt and this teenage boy in Colorado. I thought Shelly found out about it and was blackmailing him to get the part."

  "Did the facts lead you to that conclusion? Or did you imagine that's what happened and shoehorn the facts into your idea?"

  "I ... I shoehorned."

  "Okay."

  Rune said, "Sam, I have this notebook at home. I write all kinds of stuff in it. It's sort of like a diary. You know what I have written on the first page?"

  "'I won't grow up'?"

  "If I'd thought about it, yeah, it probably would say that. But what I wrote is: 'Believe in what isn't as if it were until it becomes.'"

  Crack. A home run. The pitcher watched the ball sail toward the portable toilet a hundred feet from home plate.

  "Sam, this movie is important to me. I didn't go to college. I worked in a video store. I did store-window design. I worked in restaurants. I've sold stuff on the streets. I don't want to keep doing that forever."

  He laughed. "You've got a few years' worth of false starts ahead of you."

  "At the film company they treat me like a kid.... Well, okay, sometimes I act like a kid. But I mean, they don't think I'm capable of anything more. I know this film about Shelly is going to work. I can feel it."

  "What you did back there, with Schmidt, that wasn't bright."

  "He was the last of my suspects. I thought he was the one."

  "A suspect doesn't call the cops to--"

  "I know. I was wrong.... It's just that, well, I can't point to anything in particular. I just had a, I don't know ..."

  "Hunch?"

  "Yeah. That somebody killed her. And it wasn't this stupid Sword of Jesus."

  "I believe in hunches too. But do us both a favor, forget about this movie of yours. Or just tell the story about a girl who got killed and let it go at that. Forget about trying to find the killer. Leave a little mystery in it. People like mystery."

  "That's what my name means. In Celtic."

  "Your real name?"

  "Reality," she said, "is highly overrated. No, I mean 'Rune'."

  He nodded and she couldn't tell whether he was sad or angry with her or whether he was just being a silent cowboy.

  "I don't think you're going to see any more bombings," Healy said. "The profile is they get tired after a while. Too risky to be a serial criminal nowadays. Forensics are too good. You'll get nailed."

  Rune was silent. Healy said, "I've got watch in a couple of minutes. I was thinking, you want, maybe you could stop by the Bomb Squad. See what it's like."

  "Really? Oh, yeah. But I've got to get to work now. Today's the last shot for this stupid commercial."

  Healy nodded. "I'll be there all night." He gave her directions to the 6th Precinct.

  Dominoes. All she could see was dominoes.

  "Come on, luv," Larry was cajoling, "you get to be the one to knock 'em over."

  Rune was still setting them up. "I thought you were going to hire another couple of P.A.'s for the shoot."

  "You're all the assistant we need for this one, luv. You can do it." Rune was working from a piece of paper on which he'd drawn the pattern. She reluctantly admitted to herself that it was probably going to be a hell of a shot.

  "'Ow many we have?"

  "Four thousand, three hundred and twelve, Larry. I checked them all."

  "Good for you."

  Once, halfway through the assembly, two hours into the process, she set them off accidentally. The rows of rectangles clicked against one another with the sound of chips around a Las Vegas roulette wheel.

  Double shit ...

  "I would've thought you'd've started from the other side," Mary Jane contributed. "That way you probably wouldn't've bumped into them as easily."

  "Doing good," Larry said quickly.

  "Is this art?" a fuming Rune asked him as she crawled over the twenty-foot sweep of gray seamless backdrop paper to set them
up again.

  "Don't start."

  Finally, hours later, she got the little army of dominoes arranged and backed off the paper without breathing. She crawled to the first one and nodded to Larry.

  Rune glanced at the camera operator, a nerdish, bearded guy who sat in the seat of the Luma crane boom. It looked like earthmoving equipment. "Make sure you got film," Rune said to him. "I'm not doing this again."

  "Lights." Larry liked playing director. The lighting man turned the lamps on. The set was suddenly bathed in oven-hot white light. "Roll."

  "We're rolling."

  Then Larry nodded to Rune. She reached toward the first domino.

  The dominoes fell and clicked as they spread over the paper, the camera swept over the set like a carnival ride and Larry murmured with the preoccupation of a man who was getting paid two hundred thousand dollars for five days' work.

  Click. The last one fell.

  The camera backed off for a longer angle shot of the entire logo: a cow wearing a top hat.

  "Cut," Larry yelled sternly. "Save the lights."

  The lights went out.

  Rune closed her eyes, thinking that she'd still have to get all the little rectangles packed up and returned to the prop rental store before six; Larry and Bob wouldn't want to pay another day's fee.

  Then the voice came from somewhere above them. "One thing ..."

  It was Mary Jane, who'd watched the whole event from a tall ladder on the edge of the set.

  "What's that?" Mr. Wallet asked.

  "I'm just wondering.... Do you think the logo's a little lopsided?" She climbed down from the ladder.

  Mr. Wallet climbed up, surveyed the set.

  "It does look a little that way," he said.

  Mary Jane said, "The cow's horns aren't even. The left one and the right one."

  Mr. Wallet looked at the fallen dominoes. "We can't have a lopsided logo."

  Mary Jane walked forward and adjusted the design. She stood back. "See, that's what it should be like. I would've thought you'd tried a test first."

  As Rune took a breath to speak the words that would send her straight to Unemployment, Larry squeezed her arm. "'Ey, Rune, could you come out here for a minute, please?"

  In the hall she turned to him. "Lopsided? She's lopsided. What does she think it is, oil paint? It's not the Sistine Chapel, Larry. It's a cow with a fucking top hat. Sure it's going to be lopsided. She's on some kind of a power trip--"

  "Rune--"

  "We do it again the horns'll be fine but the hat'll be wrong. I want to knock her--"

  "I've got a distributor for your film."