Death of a Blue Movie Star (29 page)

Today the owner was sitting in the ticket booth, smoking and thinking of the lamb kurma that his wife would be making in their Queens apartment for dinner. He
heard angry words coming from the theater. That was one thing that scared him—his patrons. There were a lot of crack smokers, a lot of men working on their third or fourth Foster’s. These were big men and could have broken his neck before they even thought about it. He called the cops occasionally but he’d gotten their message: Unless somebody had a knife or a gun the police didn’t want to be bothered.

Now, when the dispute didn’t seem to be vanishing, he rummaged under the ticket booth and found a foot-long pipe, capped at both ends and filled with BBs. A homemade cudgel. He walked into the theater.

The blonde on the screen was saying something about there being one kind of love she hadn’t tried and would the actor please accommodate her. He seemed agreeable but no one could tell exactly what he was saying to the woman. The voices from the front row were louder.

“The fuck you think you’re doing? S’mine, man.”

“Fuck that shit. I lef’ it here.”

“An’ fuck that! Wha’ you mean, you lef’ it, man? You sitting three seats over, maybe four, man. I seen it.”

The owner said, “You must be quiet. What is it? I call police, you don’t sit down.”

There were two of them, both black. One was homeless, wearing layers of tattered clothes, matted with dirt. The other was in a brown deliveryman’s uniform. He was holding a paper-wrapped box, about the size of a shoe box. They looked at the Indian—they both towered over him—and pled their cases as if he were a judge.

The homeless man said, “He be stealing mah package. I lef’ it, I wenta take a leak, and—”

“Fuck, man. He din’t leave no box. I seen some guy come in, watcha movie for ten minutes and leave. It was there when he left, man. I seen it. He left it and it’s mine. That’s the law.”

The homeless man grabbed for the box, a shoe box.
The deliveryman’s long arms kept it out of reach. “Get the fuck outa here.”

The owner said, “Somebody leave it? He’ll be back. Give it to me. Who was it left it?”

The deliveryman said, “How’m I supposed to know who the fuck he was? Some white guy. I found it. S’what the law say, man. I find it, I get to keep it.”

The owner reached out. “No, no. Give it to me.”

The homeless man said, “I said I lef’ it. Give it—”

They were in that pose, all three sets of arms extended and gesturing angrily, when the fourteen ounces of C-3 plastic explosive inside the box detonated. Exploding outward at a speed of almost three thousand miles an hour, the bomb instantly turned the men into fragments weighing no more than several pounds. The theater screen vanished, the first four rows of seats shredded into splinters and shrapnel, the floor rocked with a thud that was felt a mile away.

Mixed with the roar of the explosion was the whistle of wood and metal splinters firing through the air as fast as bullets.

Then, almost as quickly, silence returned, accompanied by darkness filled with smoke.

No lightbulbs remained in the theater. But from the ceiling came a tiny green light, swinging back and forth. It was an indicator light on the videotape player, a large black box dangling from a thick wire where the projection booth had been. It blinked out and a second light, a yellow one, flickered on, indicating that
Caught from Behind, Part III
had finished, and
High School Cheerleaders
was now playing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Detective Sam Healy, lying on his couch, was thinking about the women he’d had in his life.

There hadn’t been a lot.

A couple of typical college romances.

Then he’d lived with one woman before he met Cheryl and had one affair just before they’d gotten engaged.

A little flirtation after he’d been married—a few drinks was all—and only after Cheryl had mentioned for probably the hundredth time what a nice sensitive man the contractor doing the addition to the bedroom was.

Though Cheryl hadn’t been unfaithful. He was sure about that. In a way he wished that she had been. That would’ve given him an excuse to do a John Wayne number: kick in the door, slap her around, and in the aftermath give them a chance to pour out their hearts and express their fiery love for each other.

Nowadays, that wouldn’t work. Think about
The Quiet Man
—Maureen O’Hara’d call the cops the minute John
Wayne touched her and he’d be booked on second-degree assault, first-degree menacing.

Times were different now.

Ah, Cheryl …

He stopped the VCR when he realized he hadn’t been watching the tape for the past ten minutes.

The problem was that
Lusty Cousins
was just plain and simple boring.

He found the other remote control—the one for the TV—and turned on the ball game. Time for lunch. He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He took out one of the thirty-six Rolling Rocks it contained and popped it. On a piece of Arnold’s whole wheat bread he laid four slices of Kraft American cheese (four of the hundred and twenty-eight) and added mayonnaise from a quart jar. Then topped it with another slice of bread.

Sam Healy had been grocery-shopping that morning.

He walked back to the living room. He gazed out the window at quiet Queens. Silhouettes showed on window shades in the houses across the street. Seeing them depressed him. He couldn’t concentrate on the game either. The Mets were having less luck than both of the lusty cousins.

He looked at the cover to the cassette of the film and decided he didn’t like adult films in the first place. They were as interesting as watching a film about someone eating a steak dinner. He also didn’t like the weird, slutty makeup and lingerie contraptions the actresses wore. They looked prosthetic and artificial: the fingerless lace gloves, the garters, the black leather bras, the orange fishnet stockings.

And he didn’t like silicone boobs.

He liked women like Cheryl.

He liked women like Rune.

Were they similar? He didn’t think so. Why would he be so interested in both of them?

He liked innocence, he liked pretty…. (But how innocent was Rune? She’d loaned him
Lusty Cousins
. And what was the message for him
there?)

But whatever he liked, Sam Healy didn’t think he had any business being involved with somebody like Rune. When he’d seen her the other night he’d promised to call her. But each of the dozen times he’d thought about picking up the phone he’d resisted. It seemed like the better thing to do. The more stoic. And safer for him. It was ridiculous. The weird clothes she wore. The three wrist-watches. She only had one name and it was fake, of course, like a stage name. On top of that, she was probably fifteen years younger than he was.

Oh, no—that damn number fifteen again.

No business at all.

Add to that, she was playing detective, which really upset him. Good citizens, wound up to the excitement of police work by the cotton candy of TV, often tried to play cop. And ended up getting themselves, or someone close to them, killed in the process.

So why was he thinking about Rune so much? Why was he seeing her?

Because he wanted to make Cheryl, the soon-to-be ex-wife who dated regularly, jealous?

Because she was sexy?

Because he liked younger women?

Because he—

The phone rang.

He answered it.

“‘Lo?”

“Sam.” It was the 6th Precinct’s ops coordinator, the second in command at the station.

“Brad. What’s up?”

“We got another one.”

“Sword of Jesus?”

“Yep. Forty-seventh near Eighth. Blew just a while ago.”

Christ. They were coming more quickly now. Only a day apart on these. “How bad?”

“Nobody outside the theater but inside it’s a fucking mess.”

“MO the same?”

“Seems to be. You get on it. Get on it big.”

Healy hesitated. Didn’t feel like he wanted to mince words. “I thought you wanted low-profile.”

There was a second of silence. The ops coordinator hadn’t anticipated that question. “It’s kind of … What it is, it’s kind of embarrassing now.”

“Embarrassing.”

“You know. We need a perp in custody. That’s from the mayor.”

“You got it,” Healy said. “Any witnesses?”

The response was a bitter laugh. “Parts of ’em, yeah. Those pricks must’ve used a pound of plastic this time.”

Sam Healy hung up the phone and pulled his blue-jean jacket on. He was all the way out to the elevator when he remembered his pistol. He went back and got it and had to wait three long minutes for the elevator. The door opened. He got in. He looked at his watch. At least the timing was right. Rune would be at work and wouldn’t hear about the bombing until later. He’d have time to finish the postblast and seal the site before she found out.

It was one problem he’d never had with a girlfriend before: intruding at a crime scene.

Rune, sitting on the subway, thought about men.

Older men, younger men.

Her most recent boyfriend, Richard, had been close to her age, just a few years older. Tall, skinny, with that narrow, dark, French face that you found everywhere in
straight and gay New York City. (She’d leave him alone in bars to go to the john and come back and find bartenderettes leaning forward, dreamily pouring him free drinks.)

They were together about six months. She’d enjoyed the time but toward the end she knew it wasn’t going to work. He’d gotten tired of her ideas for dates: picnicking next to the huge air conditioner vents on the roof of a Midtown office building, playing with the Dobermans in her favorite Queens junkyard, wandering through the city looking for the sites of famous gangland rubouts. They talked about getting married. But neither of them was real serious about it. Richard had said, “The thing is, I think I’m changing. I’m not into weird anymore. And you’re …”

“Becoming weirder?”

“No, it isn’t that. I think I’d say, you’re becoming more you.”

Which she took as a compliment. But they still broke up not long afterward. They still talked some on the phone, had a beer now and then. She wished him well though she’d also decided that if he married the tall, blonde advertising account executive he’d been dating their wedding present was going to be the four-foot stuffed iguana she’d seen in a resale shop on Bleecker Street.

Young, old …

But, naw, it isn’t the age. It’s the state of mind.

Her mother had told her—during one of the woman’s pretty much incoherent facts-of-life lectures that ran from ages twelve to eighteen—that there was only one thing that older men would want from her. Rune’s experience, though, was that it was pretty much
all
men who wanted that one thing and older men were a lot safer because you usually could stay up later than them and, if worse came to worst, you usually could scare them into submission by
talking about your recent twenty-year-old lover who kept you up all night with sexual acrobatics.

Not that she was inclined to scare off Healy. Hell, she thought he was totally sexy. She just wished he’d hurry up and get the preliminary pass over with, then get down to some serious moves. Maybe it was out of line, loaning him
Lusty Cousins
. There was a lot of gentleman in him, though, and she wanted to see what was underneath that.