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Death of a Blue Movie Star

Page 26

by Jeffery Deaver


  Adam decided he liked Rune a lot and asked her advice on which rock groups were current and where to get good chic secondhand clothing. ("It's all right, Sam. You don't want him to be a geek, do you?") The two of them went to a Mets game once after Healy'd bought tickets but couldn't make it because of a travel alarm ticking away in a suitcase in a Port Authority locker. Rune and Adam had a great time; when somebody had tried to pick her up by telling her what a cute brother she had Adam had said, "Don't talk about my mom that way."

  They laughed about the guy's reaction for a good portion of the trip home.

  Tonight was Sunday and Sam Healy had stayed the night. He was watching the ball game as Rune looked through the Times working up the courage to actually cook breakfast and wondering how risky it would be to make waffles. She noticed an article, read it, sat up suddenly.

  Healy looked at her.

  She pointed to the story. "That guy they found in the trunk of the car at La Guardia a couple of days ago?"

  "Somebody with the Family?"

  "Yeah."

  "What about it?" Healy asked.

  "The medical examiner said the autopsy showed he'd been dead for a week."

  Healy turned back to the game. "The Yankees're behind by seven and you're worried about dead hit men."

  "The assistant medical examiner who did the autopsy--his name is Andy Llewellyn."

  But Healy was directing all his attention to help the boys from the Bronx rally back in the eighth.

  "I've got a couple errands to run," Rune said. "You'll be here when I get back?"

  He kissed her. "They can do it," Healy said.

  She looked at him.

  "The Yankees," he said.

  "I'll keep my fingers crossed," Rune said sincerely.

  Rune went for a long walk and ended up--surprised to find herself there--in Times Square. She walked into the old Nathan's Famous and ordered a Coke and a cardboard carton of crusty French fries, which she covered with sauerkraut and ketchup and mustard and ate as best she could with the little red skewer they give you instead of a fork.

  She hadn't quite finished when she got up suddenly and went outside to a pay phone. She made two long-distance phone calls and in five minutes was in a cab on the way back to her houseboat, wondering if Sam would loan her the money for a plane ticket.

  Beneath the 727, the sheet of Lake Michigan--so much bluer than New York Harbor--met the North Shore somewhere near Wilmette. The fragile lattice dome of the Baha'i temple rose just above the dark green sponge of late-summer trees.

  Rune, looking through the viewfinder of the little JVC video camera, lost sight of the temple as the plane eased out of its bank. She released the shutter. The wheels lowered with a quivering rush of protest against the slipstream, bells sounded and lights came on and in five minutes they were on the ground at O'Hare. With the roar of the reverse thrusters, the final-approach thoughts of mortality vanished.

  "Welcome to Chicago," the steward said.

  I don't know about that, Rune thought, and unbuckled her seat belt.

  "This city is flat.... It's not like New York, where all the energy is crowded onto a rocky island. It's a sprawl, it stretches out, it's weak, it's ..." Rune's voice faded; the miniature tape recorder sagged.

  "Dissipated?" The cabdriver offered.

  "Dissipated?" Click. She shut off the recorder.

  Rune glanced at his head, balding on top but hair pulled back from the sides and tied into a long ponytail. In the rearview mirror she noticed he had a demonic goatee.

  "Diffused?" he tried.

  Click.

  "... It's weak and diffused.... Great expanses of land stretch between the pockets of ..."

  "How about extend?" the driver said. "You used stretch earlier."

  "I did?" The train of her poetic thought vanished. Rune dropped the tape recorder in her bag.

  "What are you, a writer?" he asked.

  "I'm a film maker," she said. Which she wasn't exactly, she figured, if being something had to do with making regular money while you did it. On the other hand, filmmaker had a lot more class than occasional waitress at a bagel restaurant on Sixth Avenue, a job she'd just accepted.

  Anyway, who was going to check?

  The driver--actually part-time student, part-time driver--loved movies and concluded by the time the cab cruised past Lawrence Avenue that Rune should do a film on Chicago.

  He shut off the meter and for the next half hour took her on a tour of the city.

  "Chicago means Wild Onion,' "he said. "That'd be a good way to open the film."

  He told her about Captain Streeter, the Haymarket Riots, Colonel McCormick, William Wrigley, Carl Sandburg, Sullivan and Adler, the Sox and the Cubs, the Eastland boat disaster, the Water Tower, Steve Goodman, Big Bill Thompson, Mayor Daley, the ugly Picasso monkey woman, snow and wind and humidity, Saul Bellow and Polish, German and Swedish food.

  "Kielbasa," he said with admiration in his voice.

  He talked a lot about the Great Fire and showed her where it began, west, near the river, and where it ended, up north.

  "Hey, that'd be great." He looked back at her. "A film about city disasters. San Francisco, Dresden, Nagasaki ..."

  They arrived at her hotel. Rune thanked him and decided that, while she appreciated his thoughts, it was a film she'd never make. She'd had enough cataclysm.

  They exchanged names and phone numbers. He wouldn't take a tip but she promised to get some footage of him to use for atmosphere if she ever needed to.

  Rune checked into the small hotel just off Lincoln Park. The room overlooked the lake and she sat looking at it for a while.

  The bathroom was fantastic--enough towels so she could dry every limb with a different one. Enough mirrors so that she found she had a birthmark in the small of her back that she'd never known she had. Rune used the tiny scented cake of soap to wash her face, then the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner. That was a real treat; at home she used an old bar of Ivory for everything, including dishes. She stole the complimentary shower cap. After the shower Rune put on her one dress--a blue silk number her mother had sent her four years ago (but since she'd only worn it three times she figured it still qualified as new).

  She looked at herself in the full-length mirror.

  Me, in a dress, staying in a hotel that overlooks a beautiful lake with rocking, blue-green waves, in a city that burned down and has come back from the ashes ...

  Rune then turned on the desk lamp and took out her makeup kit. She began to do something she hadn't done for almost a year--put on nail polish. A dark red. She wasn't quite sure why she'd picked this shade, but it seemed sophisticated, cultured--the color you'd want to wear if you were going to the theater.

  "That's where John Dillinger bought the big one," a square-jawed, sandy-haired young man told her. She was eating a hamburger in a half-deserted folk music club. He'd leaned along the bar and pointed to the old Biograph movie house across the street.

  "He was betrayed by a woman in a red dress," the man said, adding some flirt to his voice.

  But Rune scared the guy off when she asked with gleaming eyes if you could still see the bloodstains.

  The Haymarket Theater was in a small two-story Victorian building, on Lincoln Avenue, just north of Fullerton, up the street from the Biograph. She picked up her ticket at the box office and wandered into the small auditorium. She found her seat and thumbed through the program. At one minute after eight the lights went down and the curtain rose.

  Rune wasn't sure what to think about the play. As much as she loved movies, she generally didn't like plays very much. Just when you started to believe the painted sets and the funny way everyone talked and walked, the two hours were up, and you had to go back to reality. It could be very jarring.

  But this wasn't bad at all. At least, unlike a lot of modern plays, it had a story you could follow. It was about a young woman--played by a pretty brunette actress named Rebecca Hanson--who kept postponing her r
omantic life because of her family. The major incident in the play was her decision to leave home at the age of thirty-two.

  There was some very clever stuff in it, like the scene where one actor's talking to another actor who suddenly becomes someone else in a flashback. It was funny in parts, then sad, then funny again. Rune cried when the actress left her small-town boyfriend and headed off for Europe.

  The audience loved it and about half of them gave the star a standing ovation. The play was long; by the time the curtain calls were over, it was 10:45. The audience, all except for Rune, left soon after the lights came up.

  She waited until the actors and actresses had disappeared, then strolled backstage.

  No one stopped her.

  Rebecca Hanson's dressing room was at the end of the corridor.

  Rune paused in front of it, collected herself, then knocked.

  "Yes?"

  Rune opened the door.

  Shelly Lowe finished wiping the cold cream off her face and gave Rune a smile. It was pretty bleak, Rune decided.

  "I thought I saw you in the audience," she said. "Well, I guess we better have a little talk."

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The two women walked down Lincoln Avenue past the closed shops and mostly empty bars to the broad intersection at Halsted and Fullerton, then they turned east.

  In front of them the street and apartment lights disappeared into an expanse of blackness. Rune wondered if that void was the lake or the park or the sky.

  She glanced at Shelly, who was wearing blue jeans, a silk blouse and Reeboks.

  "You don't quite look the same. Close, though."

  "A little plastic surgery. Eyes and nose. Always wanted it bobbed."

  "Arthur Tucker knew all along, didn't he?" Rune asked.

  "It was his idea, in a way. About six months ago he found out about my movie career--of course, I didn't exactly keep it a secret. We had this terrible fight."

  "I met him. He doesn't like pornography very much."

  "No, but it wasn't the morality of it. He thought making the movies--what's the word?--diminished me. That's what he said. That it was holding me back from being great. It dulled me creatively. Like drinking or drugs. I thought about it. He was right. I told him, though, I couldn't afford just to quit cold. I wasn't used to being poor. I said I'd have to be crazy to quit what I'm doing. Crazy, or dead.

  "He said, 'So, die.' Well, I thought about disappearing the way Gauguin did. But every city that was big enough to have good theater would also have a porn market; there was a risk I'd be recognized. Unless ..." She smiled. "Unless I was actually dead. A week later, that religious group set off the first bomb in the theater. The news report said some bodies had been unidentified because the blast was so bad. I got into fantasizing about what if someone had mistaken that body for me. I could go to San Francisco, L.A., even London....

  "I began to obsess over the idea. It became a consuming thought. Then I decided it might actually work."

  "You got the bomb from Tommy's army buddy? In Monterey? The one who was court-martialed with him?"

  Shelly cocked a single eyebrow. It was hard to see her as a brunette. Blonde had definitely been her color. "How did you know that?" she asked.

  "Connections."

  "He sells black-market munitions. He'd been a demolition expert. I paid him to make me a bomb. He explained to me how it worked."

  "Then you waited. For someone like me. A witness."

  She didn't speak for a moment. The park was ahead of them, off to their left; couples were walking through the trim grass and oaks and maple trees. "Then I waited," she said softly. "I needed someone to see me in the room where the explosion was."

  "You tried to get me to tape it. I remember you asking that. Then it went off. Only you were gone and the body that Andy Llewellyn'd gotten for you was next to the phone."

  Shelly smiled, and Rune thought it was a smile of admiration. "You know about him? You found that out too?"

  "I saw his name on your calendar. Then I saw a story in the paper the other day about a murder. It mentioned that he was a medical examiner. I figured he'd be a good source for a body."

  After a moment, Shelly said, "The body ... I remembered this guy--Andy--who'd picked me up at a bar one time. He was really funny, a nice guy--for someone who does autopsies all day. He was also making a nice low salary, so he was happy to take thirty thousand cash to get me a body and arrange to do the autopsy and fake the dentals--to identify the corpse as me. They aren't all that hard to come up with, did you know? Dozens of unidentified people die in the city every year."

  She shook her head. "That night I was on some kind of automatic pilot. The body was in the room at Lame Duck where Andy and I had put it that evening, before I came over to your place for the taping session. The bomb was in the telephone. You were outside. I called to you, then went into the back of the studio and pressed a couple of buttons on this radio transmitter. The bomb went off.

  "In my bag I had what was left of my savings, in cash, an original-edition Moliere play, a ring of my mother's, some jewelry. That was it. All my credit cards, driver's license, Citibank cash card letters, were in my purse in the room at Lame Duck."

  "Aren't you afraid somebody here will recognize you?"

  "Yes, of course. But Chicago's different from New York. There are only a couple adult theaters here, a few adult bookstores. No Shelly Lowe posters, like you see in Times Square. No Shelly Lowe tapes in the windows of the bookstores. And I had the surgery."

  "And dyed your hair."

  "No, this is my natural color." Shelly turned to her. "Besides, you're talking to me now, a few feet away--what do you think? Do I seem like the same person you interviewed on your houseboat?"

  No, she didn't. She didn't at all. The eyes--the blue was there but they weren't laser beams any longer. The way she carried herself, her voice, her smile. She seemed older and younger at the same time.

  Rune said, "I remember when I was taping you, you started out being so tough and, I don't know, controlled."

  "Shelly Lowe was a ballbuster."

  "But you slipped. Toward the end you became someone else."

  "I know. That's why ..." She looked away. They started walking again, and Rune grinned.

  "That's why you broke into my houseboat and stole the tape. It gave away too much."

  "I'm sorry."

  "You know, we thought Tommy was the killer."

  "I heard about it. About Nicole ... That was so sad." Her voice faded. "Danny and Ralph Gutman and all the others--they were just sleazy. But Tommy was frightening. That's why I left him. It was those films of his. He started doing real S & M films. I left him after that. I guess when he found he couldn't get off on just pain alone he started doing snuff films. I don't know."

  They walked for a few minutes in silence. Shelly laughed sadly, then said, "How you tracked me down, I'll never understand. Here in Chicago, I mean."

  "It was your play. Delivered Flowers. I saw it on Arthur Tucker's desk. He'd crossed out your name and written his in. I thought ... Well, I thought he'd killed you--to steal your play. He really had me fooled."

  "He's an acting coach, remember. And one of the best actors you'll ever meet."

  "He gets an Oscar for that performance," Rune said. "I remembered the name of the theater. The Haymarket. It was written on the cover of the play. I called the theater and asked what was playing. They said Delivered Flowers."

  Shelly said, "That was his idea, the play. He said that we'd pretend he wrote it. A play by Arthur Tucker would be a lot more likely to be produced than one by Becky Hanson. He sends me the royalties."

  "None to the AIDS Coalition?"

  "No. Should he?"

  Rune laughed and said, "Probably he should. But things've changed since we made our deal." Thinking: Damn, that man was a good actor.

  "Arthur got the company here to produce it and arranged for me to get the lead.... I thought about it afterward. It was very strange.
Here, I'd had the chance to direct my own death. My God, what an opportunity for an actress. Think of it all--a chance to create a character. In the ultimate sense. Create a whole new person."

  They walked along Clark Street for a few minutes until they came to a Victorian brownstone. Shelly took her keys out of her purse.

  Rune said, "I don't know a whole lot about plays, but I liked it. I didn't, you know, understand everything, but usually, if I don't understand stuff all the way, that means it's pretty good."

  "The reviewers like it. They're talking of taking a road company to New York. It'll hurt like hell but I won't be able to go with them. Not now. Not for a few years. That's my plan, and I'll have to stick to it. Let Shelly rest in peace for a while."

  "You happy here?" Rune asked.

  She nodded her head upward. "I'm nearly broke, living in a third-floor walk-up. I pawned my last diamond bracelet last month because I needed the cash." Shelly shrugged, then grinned. "But the acting, what I'm doing? Yeah, I'm happy."

  Rune looked at the twisty wrought-iron gate. "We've got kind of a problem."

  "What's that?"

  "There's a film about you."

  "The one you were working on when I was killed?" Shelly looked at her curiously. "But after the bombing ... Well, there was nothing more for you to make a film about. You stopped working on it, didn't you?"

  Rune leaned against the grille and turned to face Shelly. "It's slotted on PBS."

  Shelly's eyes went wide. "Oh, Rune, you can't ... PBS is national. Someone here could see it."

  "You don't look like you."

  "I look enough like me so people could make the connection."

  Rune said, "You used me. You weren't honest with me."

  "I know I don't deserve to ask--"

  "You didn't want to help me make my film at all. You just used me."

  "Please, Rune, all my plans ... They're just starting to work out. For the first time in my life I'm happy. No one knows what I did--the films. I can't tell you how wonderful it is, not to be looked at like a thing. It's so wonderful not to be ashamed...."

 

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