Death of a Blue Movie Star

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-oras many-writers and actors here. A lot of scuffed Lucite, a lot of typed a

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 fromhim. 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 go

"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 co

"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 youimagine 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. Ahome 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 Iact 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-"

"1 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."