Death of a Blue Movie Star (41 page)

Warren Hathaway was proud of his precision. When not building bombs he was in fact a bookkeeper—though not a CPA—and he enjoyed the sensuality of the act of filling in the numbers on the pale green paper with a fountain pen or a fine-tipped marker—one that did not leave indentations on the sheet. He enjoyed the exactness and detail.

He also enjoyed watching big explosions.

So when the windows of the beach house did not disintegrate in a volley of shards and the sandy earth did not jerk beneath him from the huge jolt of the bomb he felt his stomach twist in horror. He didn’t swear—the thought never would have entered his mind. What he did was pick up the hammer and walk the hundred yards back into the house.

The trials of Job …

He knew he’d set the system properly. There was no doubt that he knew his equipment. The cap was buried in just the right thickness of plastic. The C-3 was in good condition. The battery was charged.

The little whore had ruined his handiwork.

He walked inside and then slammed the hammer down on the wooden boards barring the door. He struck them near the nails to lift their heads and then caught them in the claw. With a loud, haunted-house creak the nails began coming out.

With the first nail: He heard the girl’s voice in a panic, asking who was there.

The second nail: She was screaming for help. How silly and desperate they were sometimes. Women. Whoring women.

The third nail: Silence.

He paused. Listening. He heard nothing.

Hathaway pulled the rest out. The door opened.

Rune stood inside the room, in front of the table, looking at him defiantly. Her hair was stuck to her face with sweat, her eyes were squinting. She drew the back of her hand across her mouth and swallowed. In her other hand was a leg wrenched from a table or chair.

He laughed at it, then frowned, looking past her at the bomb. He studied it with professional curiosity. She’d bypassed the shunt.

He was frowning. “You did that? How did you know—?”

She held up the club.

Hathaway said, “You whore. You think that’s going to stop me?”

He stepped forward toward her. He got only six inches before he tripped over the taut strands of telephone wire Rune had strung across the bottom of the doorway.

Hathaway fell heavily. He caught himself but his wrist
bone snapped with a loud crack as it struck the floor. He shouted in pain and struggled to his feet. As he did Rune brought the club down on his shoulders as she ran past him through the doorway. It hit hard and he fell forward on his bad hand with a cry.

Hathaway was trying again to stand, supported by one knee and one foot planted on the floor, reaching into his pocket with his good hand for the box cutter. Staring at her as if she were the Devil come to earth. He started to his feet.

Rune waited for just a moment, then flung the leg of the table past Hathaway.

After that, the images were just a blur:

Rune’s diving fall as she threw herself to the floor against the baseboard in the living room.

Hathaway’s awkward, panicked attempt to grab the leg before it hit its intended target.

Then—when he failed to stop it—the cascading flash and ball of flame as the leg struck the bomb and the rocker switch set off the C-3.

Then the whole earth joined in the blur. Sand, splinters, chunks of Sheetrock, smoke, metal—all tossed in a cyclone of motion.

Hathaway had been right about the walls. The outer one held; it was the interior walls that shattered and whistled around Rune like debris in a hurricane. The floor dropped six inches. There was no fire, though the smoke was as irritating as he’d promised. She lay curled up in a ball until her throat tightened and the coughing became too violent, then she rose to her feet—without looking into the bedroom—and staggered outside.

Deafened, eyes streaming, she dropped to her knees and crawled slowly to the beach, coughing and spitting out the bitter chemical smoke.

Fire Island was empty on weekdays; there was no one even to be enticed by the bang. The beach here was completely deserted.

Rune dropped to the sand and rolled onto her back, hoping that the surf would rise closer and closer and touch her feet. She kept urging it on, and didn’t know why she felt an obsession for the touch of the water. Maybe it was primal therapeutics; maybe she needed to feel the motion of something that seemed to be alive.

At the first brush of the cold water Rune opened her eyes and scanned the horizon.

A helicopter!

She saw it coming in low, then another.

Then a dozen more! All cruising directly toward her, coming in for an urgent rescue. Then she was laughing, a deep laugh she couldn’t hear but which ran through her whole body, as the helicopters turned miraculously into fat seagulls that didn’t pay her the least attention as they cruised down for their ungainly landings on the firm sand.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Rune spent the next couple weeks by herself. That was the way she wanted it. She saw Sam Healy a few times but she thought it was best to keep things a little casual.

And professional. There’d been some follow-up. Rune had told the police that she’d heard Hathaway on the phone not long before he’d locked her in the bedroom. He might have been talking to the others in the Sword of Jesus. The New York State Police traced the call and started an investigation of their own. Three days after Gabriel was blown to pieces three senior members of the Sword of Jesus were arrested.

There was also the matter of Arthur Tucker. When Rune arrived back at her houseboat from Fire Island she saw that it had been broken into. Nothing was missing, she thought at first, until she noticed that the script she had lifted from Arthur Tucker’s office was gone.

She’d called him, threatened to call the police and tell
them that he’d stolen a dead woman’s plays. The crotchety old man had told her, “Call away. It’s got your fingerprints on it and I’ve already got a police report filed about a break-in a week ago—just after you came to interview me. And I’m not very happy that you told half the world I was a suspect in the case. That’s slander.”

Their compromise was that neither would press charges and that if he made any money from the plays, he’d donate a quarter of it to the New York AIDS Coalition.

Then something odd happened.

Larry—the Larry who was half of L&R—had appeared at the door of her houseboat.

“No bloody phone. What good are you?”

“Larry, I’ve had my abuse for the week.”

“It’s a bleedin’ ‘ouseboat.”

“Want a drink?”

“Can’t stay. I came by to tell you, ’e’s an arse, Mr. House O’ Leather, what can I tell you?”

“I still lost you the account, Larry. You can’t give me my job back.”

He snorted an Australian laugh. “Well, luv, that wasn’t
ever
gonna ’appen. But truth is, there’s this guy called me, ’e’s got some ins at PBS and seems there’s this series on new documentary filmmakers they’re looking to do….”

“Larry!”

“All right, I recommended you. And they got a budget. Not much. Ten thousand per film. But you can’t bring it in under that you got no business being a film maker.”

He wrote down the name. She got her arms most of the way around him and hugged him hard. “I love you.”

“You fuck it up, I don’t know you. Oh, and don’t tell Bob. What ’e does is ’e ‘as this little doll and it’s got your name on it and every night ’e sticks pins—”

“That’s a load of codswallop, Larry.”

“Rune, that’s Brit, not Aussie. Work on your foreign languages some, right?”

Five minutes after he’d left Rune was on the phone. The distributor had been pretty aloof and said, real noncommittally, to submit a proposal and they’d make their decision on funding.

“Proposal? I’ve got rough footage in the can.”

“You do?” He sounded more impressed than a film person ought to. “Everybody else has these one-page treatments.”

Two days later, when she called, he told her he’d sold
Epitaph for a Blue Movie Star
to PBS. It was slotted for September, on a program about young film makers. A check for all her postproduction work would be sent shortly.

Sam Healy emerged again and began spending more and more nights on the houseboat. He complained about the rocking motion for a while, though that was mostly for effect; Rune figured something inside of him felt it was better for the woman to move into his homestead, rather than the other way around.

He saw Cheryl some, too. He told Rune about it—
Honesty, goddamn honesty
—but it seemed that their get-togethers were to discuss the sort of nitty-gritty details appropriate for people on the verge of divorce. Nonetheless, dear Cheryl still hadn’t filed papers and once or twice when Rune stayed over at his place he took calls late at night and talked for thirty, forty minutes. She couldn’t hear what he said but she sensed that it wasn’t Police Central he was talking to.

Adam decided he liked Rune a lot and asked her advice on which rock groups were current and where to get good chic secondhand clothing. (“It’s all right, Sam. You don’t want him to be a geek, do you?”) The two of them went to a Mets game once after Healy’d bought tickets but couldn’t make it because of a travel alarm ticking away in
a suitcase in a Port Authority locker. Rune and Adam had a great time; when somebody had tried to pick her up by telling her what a cute brother she had Adam had said, “Don’t talk about my mom that way.”

They laughed about the guy’s reaction for a good portion of the trip home.

Tonight was Sunday and Sam Healy had stayed the night. He was watching the ball game as Rune looked through the
Times
working up the courage to actually cook breakfast and wondering how risky it would be to make waffles. She noticed an article, read it, sat up suddenly.

Healy looked at her.

She pointed to the story. “That guy they found in the trunk of the car at La Guardia a couple of days ago?”

“Somebody with the Family?”

“Yeah.”

“What about it?” Healy asked.

“The medical examiner said the autopsy showed he’d been dead for a week.”

Healy turned back to the game. “The Yankees’re behind by seven and you’re worried about dead hit men.”

“The assistant medical examiner who did the autopsy—his name is Andy Llewellyn.”

But Healy was directing all his attention to help the boys from the Bronx rally back in the eighth.

“I’ve got a couple errands to run,” Rune said. “You’ll be here when I get back?”

He kissed her. “They can do it,” Healy said.

She looked at him.

“The Yankees,” he said.

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” Rune said sincerely.