Death of a Blue Movie Star (26 page)

“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.”

“—buck teeth out. I—”

Larry repeated patiently, “A distributor.”

She paused for a minute. “You
what?
”

“I found somebody who said ’E might want to handle your film. Looking for gritty, noirish stuff. It’s not a big outfit but they’ve placed at public TV stations and some of the bigger locals. We’re not talking network. But sometimes good films, you know, they get picked up in syndication.”

“Oh, Larry.” She hugged him. “I don’t believe it.”

“Right. Now then, we’re going to go back in there and make nice with the ice lady, okay?”

Rune said, “That woman is a totally airborne bitch.”

“But they’re our clients, Rune, and in this business the customer is always what?” He raised an eyebrow.

She walked toward the door. “Don’t ask me questions you don’t want to hear the answers to.”

Rune’s favorite part was the dogs.

The rest was pretty neat—the artillery shells, the hand grenades, the sticks of dynamite wired to clocks, silver cylinders of detonators, which all turned out to be phony. But the really audacious part was the three Labrador retrievers that nosed their way up to her and rested their big
snouts on her knees when she crouched down to pet them. They wheezed as she scratched their heads.

Healy and Rune stood in the
BOMB SQUAD
headquarters upstairs at the 6th Precinct on Tenth Street. It wasn’t easy to miss the office: In the corridor, over the door, hung a bright red army practice bomb, stenciled with
BOMB SQUAD
in gothic lettering.

In the main room were eight battered desks. The walls were light green, the floor linoleum. One woman, in a dark sweater, sat at a desk, intently reading a technical manual. She was pretty, with long, brunette hair and still eyes. She was the only woman in the unit. The others were men, mostly in their thirties and forties, wearing white shirts and ties. Trim guns rested in hip holsters. They read, talked among themselves, stretched back, spoke quietly on the phone. A few acknowledged Healy with waves or raised eyebrows.

No one looked at Rune.

“We’ve got the biggest civilian bomb disposal unit in the world. Thirty-two officers. Mostly detectives. A few waiting for the rank.”

On the wall was an old wooden board mounted with formal portraits of policemen. Rune caught the words “In memory of …”

The board was the largest display in the room.

She bent down and patted a dog’s head.

“EDC,” Healy said.

“That’s a weird name,” Rune said, standing up.

“That what he
is
. An Explosive Detection Canine.”

“The initials again.”

“Saves time,” Healy said. “You’d run out of breath, you had to say, ‘I’m taking the Explosive Detection Canine for a walk.’”

“You could try
dog
.” One rolled onto his back. Rune scratched his stomach. “They sniff out explosives?”

“Labradors’ve got the best noses in the business. We’ve
used computerized nitrate vapor detectors. But the dogs work faster. They can sniff out plastic, dynamite, TNT, Tovex, Semtex.”

“Computers don’t pee, though,” one cop offered.

“Or lick their balls in public,” another one said.

Healy sat down at a tiny desk.

One detective said to him, “How’d you rate, missing the abortion clinic detail?”

“Lucky, I guess.” Healy turned to Rune. “You want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

Healy walked into the locker room. Three officers sat at a fiberboard table eating Chinese food. He rinsed out a china mug and poured coffee.

Rune stood at the bulletin board, looking at color snapshots of explosions. She pointed to a photo of a red truck that looked like a huge basket. “What’s that?”

“The Pike-La Guardia truck. We don’t use it much anymore. It was built in the forties. Got its name because it was built when a guy named Pike was CO. of the
BOMB SQUAD
and La Guardia was mayor. See that mesh there? That’s cable left over from the Triborough Bridge. They used to put IEDs in there and take them to the disposal grounds. If it went off the mesh stopped the shrapnel. Still a lot of flame escaped, though. Now we use a total-containment vehicle.”

Rune said, “A TCV, right?”

Healy nodded.

Rune picked up a thick plastic tube about a foot long filled with a blue gelatin printed with the words DuPont. She squeezed it. Grinned. “This is kinda kinky, Sam.”

He glanced at it. “You’re holding enough Tovex to turn a pretty good-size boulder into gravel.”

She set it down carefully.

“If it were live … That’s just for training. So’s everything else in here.”

“That too?” She pointed to an artillery shell about two and a half feet long.

“Well, it’s not live. But we picked that up a year or so ago. What happened was a woman calls 911 and says she got hit by a bullet. So Emergency Services shows up and they go into the apartment. They find her on the floor. They ask, ‘Where’s the shooter, where’s the gun?’ She says, ‘There’s no gun—just the bullet.’ She points to the shell. Then says, ‘I opened the closet door and it fell out.’ It broke her toe. Her husband collected artillery shells and—”

A voice shouted, “Sam.”

He stepped into the main room. A heavy, square-jawed man with trim blond hair was leaning out of the commander’s office. He glanced at Rune briefly, then looked at Healy. “Sam, ESU just got a Ten-thirty-three at a porn theater in Times Square. Somebody found a box, looked inside. Saw a timer in there and maybe a wad of something might be plastic. Seventh Avenue, near Forty-ninth. Rubin, you go with him.”

No more bombings, he’d said? But before she could comment to him Healy and another cop, a thin man of about forty-five who looked like he belonged more in an insurance office circa 1950 than in the Bomb Squad, were racing to the locker room. They opened their lockers and pulled out battered canvas bags, then ran for the door. Healy snagged his attaché case as he disappeared into the corridor.

“Hey …,” Rune was saying. Healy didn’t even glance back.

Where does he get off? Rune thought, speeding into the dark green corridor. Downstairs, the men disappeared into the station house. An officer in a blue turtleneck stopped her, wouldn’t let her follow. By the time she went outside, their blue-and-white van was disappearing down Eleventh Street, the roof lights playing crack the whip.
The vehicle gave a bubble of electronic siren, then sailed north on Hudson Street.

She ran to the corner, waving for cabs that failed to materialize.

Sam Healy had the procedure down. That was one talent he had: the ability to memorize. He’d look at a list or circuit schematic once or twice and that would be it—it was in the mental vault.