Death of a Blue Movie Star (15 page)

“It’s finished, though.”

“Rune, they’re ’ere. Now. We’re going to talk concepts today. They should’ve ’ad the estimate before this meeting.”

“Sorry. I’ll bring it in.”

He sighed. “All right, let’s go meet everybody. If they ask we’ll tell ’em we were ’olding on to the estimate till this meeting. It was intentional.”

“Larry, you shouldn’t do advertising. It—”

“Oh, one of your boyfriends called.”

“Yeah, who?”

“’ealy, something like that. Wants you to call.”

“Sam called? Great. I’ll just be—”

“Later.”

“But—”

He held the door open and smiled threateningly. “After you, luv.”

Rune heard the name but forgot it immediately.

Larry was droning on, looking impressed as he recited, “… the second biggest wallet and billfold manufacturer in the United States.”

Rune said, “How interesting.”

The man with the company and the unmemorable name—Rune called him Mr. Wallet—was about fifty, round and sharp-eyed. He wore a seersucker suit and sweated a lot. He stood with his arms crossed, hovering beside a doughy woman in her late twenties, who also
crossed her arms, looking with flitting eyes at the lights and cameras and dollies. She worked for the company too and was his daughter. She was also, Rune found out, going to act in the commercial.

Larry pretended to miss Rune’s eyes as they made a circuit of the ceiling at this news.

Another young woman, horsey, with a sensible pageboy haircut and an abrasive voice, said to Rune, “I’m Mary Jane Collins. I’m House O’ Leather’s advertising director. I’ll be supervising the shoot.”

“Rune.”

Mary Jane extended her bony hand, the costume jewelry bracelets jingling. Rune gripped it briefly.

Daughter said, “I’m a little nervous. I’ve done voice-overs but I’ve never been on camera before.”

Mr. Wallet: “You’ll do fine, baby. Just forget that—” He looked at Mary Jane. “How many people are going to see her?”

“The media buy should put us at about fifteen million viewers.”

He continued, “Fifteen million people are going to be watching your every mood … oops, I mean move.” He laughed.

“Daddy.” She smiled with a twisted mouth.

Mary Jane read some papers. To Larry she said, “The budgets. I haven’t seen the revised budgets.”

Larry looked at Rune, who said, “They’re almost ready.”

He mouthed,
Almost?

Mary Jane’s dark hair swiveled as she looked down at Rune. “Almost?”

“A problem with the typewriter.”

“Oh.” Mary Jane laughed with surprise. “Sure, I understand. It’s just that … Well, I would’ve
thought
you’d have them for us before this. I mean, this is the logical
time to review them. Even today is a little tardy, in terms of timing.”

“Another couple hours. I glued the key back on.”

Larry said, “Rune, maybe you could go work on them now.”

Rune said, “I thought we were going to talk concepts.”

“Oh,” Mary Jane said, looking down at her, “I hadn’t understood you were in a creative position here at the studio.”

“I—”

“What do you do, exactly?”

Larry said, “Rune’s our production assistant.”

Looking her up and down, Mary Jane said, “Oh.” And smiled like a fourth-grade teacher.

Mr. Wallet was looking at a huge roll of a backdrop, twenty feet across, mottled like a pastel Jackson Pollock painting. “Now, that’s something else. You think we can use that for the shoot? Mary Jane, what do you think?”

She glanced toward it and said slowly, “Might just fly. We’ll put our thinking caps on about it.” She turned back to the desk and opened her briefcase. “I’ve done a memo with all the schedule deadlines.” She handed the paper to Rune. “Could you run and make a copy of it?”

Larry took the paper and held it out to Rune. “Sure she will.” His eyes narrowed and Rune took the sheet.

“I’ll be back in just a minute. I’ll run just like a bunny.”

“Daddy, will they have a makeup person? I don’t have to do my own makeup, do I?”

Rune vanished through the door into the office. Larry followed.

“I thought you said it was bleedin’ finished.”

“The
e
fell off your cheap-ass typewriter. That’s the most-used letter in the English language.”

“Well, go buy a new fuckin’ typewriter. But I want those estimates in a half hour.”

“You’re a sellout.”

I don’t ‘ave time for your bleedin’ lectures, Rune. You work for me. Now get the copies made and get those estimates to us.”

“You’re going to let those people walk all over you. I’m looking out for your pride, Larry. Nobody else’s going to.”

“You gotta pay the rent, honey. Rule number one in business: Get the bucks. You don’t have any money you don’t get to do what you want.”

“They’re obnoxious.”

“True.”

“He smells bad.”

“He does not.”

“
Somebody
smells bad. And that woman, that Mary Jane, is a dweeb.”

“What the ’ell’s a dweeb?”

“Exactly what she is. She’s—”

The door opened and Mary Jane’s smiling face looked out, her eyes perching on Rune. “Are you the one who’s in charge of lunch?”

Rune smiled. “You betcha.”

“We should probably get a head start on it…. We were thinking in terms of salads. Oh, and how’s that copying coming?”

Rune saluted with a smile. “It’s on its way.”

The next day at eleven-thirty Sam Healy picked her up outside of L&R and they drove north.

“It’s just a station wagon.” Rune, looking around inside, was mildly disappointed.

Sam Healy said, “But it’s blue and white, at least.” It also had
BOMB SQUAD
stenciled in large white letters on the side. And a cage, empty at the moment, that he explained was for the dogs that sniffed out explosives. “You were expecting …?”

“I don’t know. High-tech stuff, like in the movies.”

“Life is generally a lot lower-tech than Hollywood.”

“True.”

They drove out of Manhattan to the NYPD explosives disposal facility on Rodman’s Neck in the Bronx.

“Oh, wow, check this place out. This is totally audacious.”

It was essentially a junkyard without the junk. Her feet bounced up and down on the floorboards as they pulled through the gate in the chain-link fence, crowned with spirals of razor wire.

To their left was the police shooting range. Rune heard the short cracks from pistols. To their right were several small red sheds. “That’s where we keep our own explosives,” Healy explained.

“Your own?”

“Most of the time we don’t dismantle devices. We bring them here and blow them up.”

Rune picked up her camera and battery pack from the backseat. There was a green jumpsuit there. She hadn’t noticed it before. She tried to pick it up. It was very heavy. The helmet had a green tube, probably for ventilation, coming out of the top and hanging down the back. It looked just like an alien’s head.

“Wow, what’s that?”

“Bomb suit. Kevlar panels in fireproof cloth.”

“Is that what you wear when you disarm bombs?”

“You don’t call them bombs.”

“No?”

“They’re IEDs. Improvised explosive devices. The Department’s a lot like the military. We use initials a lot.”

They walked into a low cinder-block building that reeked of city government budget. A single, overworked air conditioner groaned in the corner. Healy nodded at a couple uniformed officers. He carried a blue zipper bag.

She glanced at a poster
RULES FOR BOILING DYNAMITE
.

There were dozens of others, all with bullet points of procedures on them. The clinical language was chilling.

In the event of consciousness after a detonation, attempt to retrieve any severed body parts
….

Jesus …

He noticed what she was reading and, maybe to distract her from the gruesome details, asked, “Hey, want to hear the basic lecture on explosive ordnance disposal?”

She looked away from the section on improvising tourniquets and said, “I guess.”

“There are only two goals in dealing with explosives. First, to avoid human injury. Destroy or disarm by remote if at all possible. Goal number two is to avoid injury to property. Most of our work involves investigating suspicious packages and sweeps of consulates and airports and abortion clinics. Things like that.”

“You make it sound, I don’t know, routine.”

“Most of it is. But we also got odd jobs, like a couple weeks ago—some kid buys a sixty-millimeter mortar shell from an army-navy store in Brooklyn and takes it home. He and his brother’re in the backyard playing catch with it. Supposed to be a dummy—all the powder drained out. Only the kid’s father was in Nam and he thinks it looks funny. Takes it to the local precinct station. Turns out it was live.”

“Ouch.”

“We got it taken care of…. Then we get a lot of false alarms, just like the Fire Department. But every once in a while, bingo. There’s a suitcase at the airport or a bundle of dynamite or a pipe bomb and we’ve got to do something with it.”

“So somebody crawls up and cuts the wires?”

Healy said, “What’s the first goal?”

Rune grinned. “Don’t get anybody’s ass blown up.”

“Mine included. First we evacuate the area and set up a frozen zone.”

“Frozen?”

“We call it a frozen zone. Maybe a thousand yards wide. Then we’ll put a command post behind armor or sandbags somewhere within that area. We have these remote-control robots with video cameras and X rays and stethoscopes and we send one up to take a look at the thing.”

“To listen for the ticking?”

“Yep. Exactly.” He nodded at her. “You’d think everybody’d be using battery-powered digital timer-detonators—Hollywood again. But ninety percent of the bombs we deal with are really crude, homemade. Pipe bombs, black or smokeless powder, dynamite, match heads in conduit. And most of these use good old-fashioned dime-store alarm clocks. You need two pieces of metal coming together to complete the circuit and set off the detonating cap. What’s better for that than a windup alarm clock with a bell and clapper on top? So, we look and listen. Then if it really is an IED and we can disarm without any risk we do a render-safe. If it’s a tricky circuit or we think it’ll go off we get it into the containment vehicle.” He nodded toward the field near the shack. “And bring it here and blow it up ourselves.”

They walked outside. Two young men stood a hundred yards away from them in one of the three deep pits dug into the field. They wound what looked like plastic clothesline around a square, olive-drab box.

Rune looked around. She said, “This looks just like the Underworld.”

Healy frowned. He asked her, “Eliot Ness?”

“No, like Hades, I mean. You know, hell.”

“Oh, yeah—your analysis of the crime scene the other day.” Healy looked back to the men in the pit. He said to Rune, “You have to understand something about explosives. In order to be effective, they have to be explosive only under certain conditions. If you make this stuff that
blows up when you look at it cross-eyed, well, that’s not going to be real useful now, is it? Hell, most explosives you can destroy by burning them. They don’t blow up; they just burn. So to make it go bang, you need detonators. Those’re powerful bits of explosive that set off the main charge. Remember the C-4 that they used in the second bombing? If you don’t have the detonator surrounded by at least a half inch of C-4 you might not get a bang at all.”

She heard enthusiasm in his voice. She thought how good it is when you’ve found the one thing in life that you’re really good at and that you enjoy doing for a living.

“That’s what we look for,” Healy continued. “That’s the weak point in bombs. Most detonators’re triggered electrically. So, yeah, we cut the wires, and that’s it. If somebody wants to get elaborate they could have a timed detonator and a rocker switch, so that even if you cut the timer, any movement will set off the bomb. Some have a shunt—a galvanometer hooked up to the circuit so that if you cut the wire the needle swings to zero because the current’s been cut and
that
sets off the bomb. The most elaborate bomb I ever saw had a pressure switch. The whole thing was inside a sealed metal canister filled with pressurized air. We drilled a tiny hole to test for nitrate molecules—that’s how bomb detectors at airports work. Sure enough, it was filled with explosives. There was a pressure switch inside. So if we’d open the canister the air would have escaped and set it off.”