Death of a Blue Movie Star (34 page)

The smell.

Rune sensed it suddenly, though she understood in that instant that she had been aware of it for a long time, ever since she’d returned to the houseboat. It had a familiarity about it, but a scary one. Like the sweet-sick chemical scent that bothers you an instant before you remember it’s the smell of a dentist’s office.

Cleanser? No. Cologne? Maybe. Perfume.

Rune’s thoughts began jumping, and she didn’t like where they arrived.

Incense! Sandalwood.

The smell of Tommy Savorne’s apartment.

She thought: Run, or get the tear gas?

Rune turned fast toward the front door.

But Tommy got there first, and leaned up against it. He was smiling when he locked the latch.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

She fought him.

Knees, elbows, palms … everything Rune remembered about self-defense from a tape she’d watched over and over again because the black-belt tae kwon do instructor was so cute.

But she didn’t get anywhere.

Tommy was very drunk—she realized why Warren Hathaway had thought he was older and why he’d been so winded as she’d chased him from the Pink Pussycat theater. And she was able to dodge away from his groping hands.

She grabbed a pole lamp and hit him so hard it made the flesh on his arm shake. But even though it made him uncoordinated, the liquor also anesthetized him, and Tommy just grunted, knocked the pole aside, then swiped his forearm across her face. She went to the floor hard. She tried for the tear gas but he slung her bag across the room.

“Bitch.” He grabbed her by the ponytail and pulled her over to a straight-back chair, then shoved her down into it and wound brown doorbell wire around her wrists and ankles.

“No!” she screamed. The wire dug into her flesh and hurt terribly.

He sat back on his heels, rocking slowly, and studied her. His hair was greasy. The tiny crevices and cracks in his fingers were stained dark red, like Chinese crackle pottery, his shirt was stained with sweat and his jeans were dark with black shapes that Rune knew were Nicole’s blood.

He leered at her. “Was she good?”

“What do you want?”

“Was it worth it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Making love to Shelly. You were her girlfriend, weren’t you? You and Nicole both were.” His eyes were unfocused. “She slept with Nicole—I’ve seen the movies. I could see in her face how much she liked it! Did she like it with you too? Did
you
enjoy it?” Tommy squinted, then asked calmly, “Will you think about it while you die?”

“I didn’t take Shelly away from you. I hardly knew her. I just—”

He opened his bag and took out a long knife. There were dark stains on the wooden handle. Something else was in his hand: a videocassette. He looked at Rune’s TV set and VCR, started them both and, after three tries, slipped the tape in. A crackle, then a hum, and the screen became a fuzzy black-and-white.

He watched the set, almost incidentally, as he began mumbling, reciting a mantra. “Way I see it, pornography is art. What
is
art exactly? It’s creation. The making of something where there was nothing before. And what does pornography show? Fucking. The act of creation.” He tried to find the fast forward on her VCR but couldn’t.
He turned back to her. “When I figured that out it was like a revelation. A religious experience. You
write
about fucking and it’s not real. But with movies … you can’t fake it. You are watching, like, the whole act of creation in front of you. Fucking amazing.”

“Oh, God, no.” Rune, staring at the screen, began to cry.

Watching:

Nicole, hanging from the rack.

Nicole, twisting, futilely, away from the swinging whip.

“… but with film, it’s so different. The artist can’t lie. No way. I mean it’s all right there. You’ve got the beginning of life right in front of you….”

Nicole, begging with her eyes, maybe screaming through the gag.

Nicole, crying tears that sloughed off her makeup in brown and black stripes across her face.

Nicole, closing her eyes, as Tommy walked forward with a knife.

“… also religious. In the beginning God
created
… See, created. That’s a fucking wild coincidence, wouldn’t you say? God and the artist. And pornography brings it all together….”

Nicole, dying.

Rune surrendered to her sobbing.

Savorne watched the tape with sad, hungry eyes. “I really loved Shelly,” he said in his slurred voice. “When she left me I died. I couldn’t believe that she’d actually gone. I didn’t know what to do. I’d wake up and there would be the whole day ahead of me without her, hours and hours without her. I didn’t know what to do. I was paralyzed. At first I hated her. Then I knew she was sick. She’d gone crazy. And I knew it wasn’t all her fault. No, it was other people too: people like Nicole. People like you. People who wanted to seduce her.”

“I didn’t seduce her!”

Rune’s words didn’t register. Tommy set up his camcorder, then he paused. “I’m tired. I’m so tired. It’s hard. People don’t understand how hard it is. It’s like working in a slaughterhouse, you know? I’ll bet those guys get tired of it sooner or later. But they can’t quit. They’ve got a job to do. That’s how I feel.”

He switched the lights on. The sudden brilliance made Rune scream.

“When they die,” he said softly, “part of me dies too. But nobody understands.”

He looked at her and touched her face. Rune smelled the metallic scent of blood. Tommy said, “When you die, part of me will die. It’s what an artist has to go through…. There was one night …” He seemed to forget his train of thought. He sat down, his hand on the small camera, staring at the floor. Rune squirmed. The wire was thin but it didn’t give.

He finally recalled his thought. “There was one night, we were living in Pacific Grove then. Not far from the beach. It was a weird night. We’d been doing okay with the movies, making some good money. I was directing then. We were watching a rough cut, Shelly and me, and what usually happened was she got turned on watching herself and we’d have a wild time. Only this time, something was wrong. I put my arms around her and she didn’t respond. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me in this eerie way. She looked like she’d seen her own death. It wasn’t long after that she left me.

“I spent hours and hours thinking about it. Seeing her that way, the expression on her face …” He gazed at Rune, a sincere face, intense. A man talking about important things. “And I finally understood. About sex and death—that they’re really the same.”

He was lost in a memory for a moment, then he focused on Rune, almost surprised to see her. He dug the
vodka bottle out of his bag and took another hit. He smiled. “Let’s make a movie.”

Tommy turned on the camera and focused it at Rune.

The sweat from the heat of the lights ran down from his eye sockets and he made no attempt to wipe it away.

Rune was sobbing.

He caressed the knife. “I want to make love to you.”

He stepped forward and rested the blade on Rune’s forearm.

He pressed it in and cut a short stroke.

She screamed again.

Another cut, shorter. He looked at it carefully. He’d made a cross.

“They like this,” he explained. “The customers. They like little details like this.”

He lifted the knife to her throat.

“I want to make love to you. I want to make love to—”

The first shot was low and wide. It took out a lamp.

Tommy was spinning, looking around, confused panic in his eyes.

The second was closer. It snapped past his head, like a bee, and vanished through the window, somewhere into the dark plain of the Hudson.

The third and fourth caught him in the shoulder and head, and he just dropped, collapsing, slumping from the waist, like a huge bag of grain dumped off a truck.

Sam Healy, breathing hard, his service Smith & Wesson still pointed at the man’s head, walked up slowly. His gun hand was shaking. His face was pale.

“Oh, Sam,” Rune said, sobbing. “Sam.”

“You all right?”

Tommy had fallen against Rune, his head resting on her foot. She was trying to pull away. She said, panicky, through her tears, “Get him away! Get him off me. Please, get him off!”

Healy kicked him over, made sure he was dead, then
began undoing the bell wire. “God, I’m a lousy shot.” He was trying to joke but she could hear the quaver in his voice.

When Rune was free, she fell against his chest.

He kept repeating, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

“He was going to kill me. He was going to tape it. What he did to Nicole, he was going to do that to me.”

Healy was speaking into a Motorola walkie-talkie. “Two-five-five to Central.”

“Go ahead, Two-five-five.”

“I have a DCDS on houseboat in the Hudson River at Christopher. Send Homicide, an EMS bus, and a tour doctor from the ME’s office.”

“Roger, Two-five-five. Just the DCDS? You have injuries too?”

Healy turned to Rune, and asked, “You all right? You need a medic?”

But she was staring at Tommy’s body and didn’t hear a word he said.

It was very domestic.

That was the eerie part.

Rune had wakened at seven-thirty. She’d been having a nightmare but it wasn’t about Tommy or Shelly. Just some kind of forgetting-to-study nightmare. She had those a lot. But she relaxed at once, seeing Sam asleep next to her. She’d watched him breathing slowly, the slight motion of his chest, then climbed out of bed and walked into the house.

Pure burbs, pure domestic.

She made coffee and toast and looked at all the beer bottles and cheese slices and junk food in the refrigerator. Why did he refrigerate Fritos?

No, this whole thing didn’t seem right.
She
ate junk food, sure, but he was a man. And a policeman. It seemed
that he ought to eat something more substantial than beer and corn chips. In the freezer were TV dinners, three stacks, each different. He must work his way from right to left, she figured, so he wouldn’t have the same thing twice in a row.

She walked around an ugly yellow kitchen, with huge daisies pasted on the refrigerator and pink Rubbermaid things all over the place—wastebaskets, drying racks, paper-towel holders, dish drains. Pictures of Adam were everywhere.

Rune studied it all, as she made coffee and burned bread into toast.

Was this what it was like to be a wife?

Probably what it was like to be a Cheryl.

Rune wandered through the one-story house as she sipped coffee from a white mug that had cartoons of cows on it.

One bedroom was a study. There were odd gaps in the room where furniture should have been. Cheryl had done okay, it seemed; from the looks of what was left she’d taken the good stuff.

In the white shag-rugged living room she looked at the bookcases. Popular paperbacks, textbooks from school, interior design.
Explosive Ordnance Disposal—Chemical Weapons…. The Claymore Mine: Operations and Tactics
.

The last one was pretty battered. It was also water-stained and she wondered if he’d been reading it in the bathtub.