Death of a Blue Movie Star (20 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

The watering can leaked but aside from that, Rune decided, it was a pretty good idea.

She rang the bell at Danny Traub’s town house and wasn’t surprised to find a stunning brunette in a silk teddy opening the door. She had breasts so high and jutting that Rune could have walked underneath them.

Bimbos from the Amazon … Lord help us.

Rune walked past her. The woman blinked and stepped aside.

“Sorry we couldn’t make it yesterday. Had a load of rhododendraniums to deliver to an office in Midtown, one of Trump’s buildings, and the whole crew was busy.”

“You mean rhododendrons?”

Rune nodded. “Yeah.”

She’d have to be careful. A bimbo with some intelligence.

“Careful,” the woman said. “Your can leaks. You don’t want to, you know, hurt the wood.”

“Got it.” Rune started to work, watering Traub’s plants and trimming the leaves with a pair of scissors. She carefully stuffed them into her pocket. The green jacket she wore had said MOBIL on it when she’d bought the thing at a secondhand store. But she’d cut the logo off and replaced it with a U.S. Department of Forestry patch.

She’d called Lame Duck and the studio receptionist had reported that Traub would be on the set for a couple of hours and couldn’t be disturbed. Her only concern had been running into the woman who’d brought them the martinis the other day.

Well, it was a risk coming here. But what in life isn’t?

Traub’s only guest, however, appeared to be this brunette basketball player.

The woman didn’t seem too suspicious; she was more
interested
in what Rune was doing. Watching everything she did, which—as far as Rune knew—was to murder every plant she touched. She didn’t know zip about gardening.

“Did it take you a long time to learn all that stuff? About plants?” the Amazon asked.

“Not too long.”

“Oh,” she said and watched Rune cut through the roots of an African violet.

Rune said, “You want to give them
some
water but not too much. And
some
light. But—”

“Not too much of that either.”

“Right.”

The woman nodded and recorded that fact somewhere beneath her shiny, henna-enriched mass of hair.

“Never cut too many leaves off. And always make sure you use the proper type of scissors. That is extremely important. Sharp ones.”

A nod; the woman’s mental computer disk whirred.

“You make a living doing that?”

Rune said, “You’d be surprised.”

“Is it hard to learn?”

“You need some talent but if you work hard …”

“I’m an actress,” Amazon said, then did a line of cocaine and sat down in front of the TV to watch a soap opera.

Ten minutes later Rune had defoliated half of Traub’s plants and had worked her way upstairs into his office.

It was empty. She looked up and down the corridor and saw nobody. She stepped inside and swung the door shut. There was no file cabinet inside but Traub did have a big desk and it wasn’t locked.

Inside she found bills, catalogs from glitzy gadget companies, a dildo missing its batteries, dozens of German S & M photo magazines, roach clips and parts of water pipes, matchbooks, pens, casino chips. Nothing that could help her—

“Want another martini?” the voice asked, coldly.

Rune froze, then turned slowly. The blonde, the same woman who had served her and Traub the other day—the one she’d been hoping she didn’t run into—stood in the doorway.

Well, it was a risk coming here
….

“I—”

The woman walked sullenly past her and pulled open another drawer. It held maybe a thousand in crumpled tens and twenties. “Help yourself.” She turned and walked out of the office.

Rune closed the drawer. “Wait, can I talk to you?”

The blonde kept walking. When Rune caught up to her in the corridor she said, “I’m Crystal. You’re …?”

“Rune.”

“You want to get into films or just robbing my boyfriend?”

“Is he really your boyfriend?”

She didn’t answer.

Crystal led the way to the roof. Outside, she took off
her bathrobe and bikini top and stretched out on a lawn recliner covered with thick pink towels. She rubbed aloe vera sunscreen on her chest and arms and legs and lay back, closing her eyes.

Rune looked around. “Nifty place.”

Crystal shrugged, wondering, it seemed, what was nifty about a gray sundeck. She said, “He’s not.” She pulled on sunglasses with dark blue lenses. Looked at Rune. “My boyfriend, I mean.” She didn’t speak for a moment, then she said, “Every once in a while you see these big cruise ships come down the river. I wonder where they’re going sometimes. Have you ever been on a cruise?”

Rune said, “I took this neat cruise around the city once. The Circle Line. I pretended I was a Viking.”

“A Viking. With the helmets?”

“Right.”

“I mean a real cruise.”

“No.”

“I never have either. I’d like to go sometime.”

Rune said, “You have a wonderful figure.”

“Thank you,” she said as if no one had ever told her. “You want some blow?”

“No thanks.”

Crystal’s head lolled toward the sun. Her arms draped over the edges of the recliner. Even her breathing was lethargic. “I’d like to live in the Caribbean, I think. I was in St. Bart’s once. And I’ve been to Club Med a couple times, Paradise Island. I met a guy, only he was married and was separated and after we got back to New York he went back to his wife. Funny, he had a kid and he didn’t even tell me about it. I saw him on the street. You don’t want to get into movies.”

“I know I don’t.”

“I could do exotic dancing—I don’t have to make films. But the thing is, with the dancing … You stand in a little room and guys look at you and, well, you
know what they’re doing. It’s not really disgusting, it’s more … what’s the word? …” She searched for a while but couldn’t find it. She gave up. Put on more lotion. “What were you looking for upstairs?”

“Did you know Shelly Lowe?”

The head turned but where the eyes might be looking under the gunmetal-blue reflections Rune couldn’t tell. She saw only two identical, fish-eye images of herself. Crystal said, “I met her once or twice. I never worked with her.”

“Did she and Danny get along?”

Crystal eased onto her stomach. “Not too bad, not too good. He’s a, you know, asshole. Nobody gets along with Danny very much. Are you, like, a private detective or something?”

“Just between you and me?”

“Sure” was the response, so lazy that Rune believed her.

“I’m doing a film about Shelly Lowe. She was a real actress, you know.”

“We’re all real actresses,” Crystal said quickly as if she’d been conditioned to respond this way. But she didn’t sound defensive or angry.

“I want to do a film about her career. She wasn’t happy. She didn’t like the business, you know.”

“What business?”

“Adult films.”

Crystal seemed surprised. “Didn’t she? Why not? She could have anything she wanted. I make fifty a year cash for working two times a week. And Shelly could get twice that. Only …”

“What?”

“People’re scared now though. With this AIDS thing. I keep getting tested; everybody does. But you never know…. John Holmes died of AIDS. He said he slept
with ten thousand women.” She rolled onto her back again, the glasses tilted toward the hot disk of a sun.

Crystal finally continued. “She was good. Shelly was. We get a lot of fan letters. Some are kind of weird—like, men’ll mail us their underwear—but mostly it’s just, I love you, I think about you, I rent all your movies. I get asked for a lot of dates. Danny told me that Shelly used to get things like airline tickets and checks so she could come visit guys who watched her movies. She was one of the company’s big stars.”

Rune watched the Circle Line
Dayliner
chugging along in the Hudson. “Hey, that’s my Viking ship. You gotta ride it sometime.”

Crystal glanced quickly. “Danny doesn’t talk to me much about business stuff. He thinks I’m not real, you know, bright.” The glasses lifted. “I went to college.”

“Did you?”

“Community college. I was going to be a dental technician. And look what I’ve got now…. Everything I could want.”

Rune said, “You won’t mention that I was …”

Crystal took off the sunglasses and shook her head. “You still haven’t told me what you were looking for.”

Rune couldn’t see past the blue lenses but she had an odd feeling that this was someone she could trust. “Could Danny’ve hurt Shelly?”

“Killed her, you mean?”

A hesitation. “That’s what I mean.”

Her answer was as drowsy as the rest of her conversation. “I don’t know. Even if I did I wouldn’t, like, testify against him. You know what he’d do to me, I did that?”

She knew something.

A long moment passed as Crystal rubbed more sunscreen on. Finally she dropped the tube on the roof. “You were looking in the wrong place.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s not stupid.”

“Traub?”

“He’s not. He doesn’t keep the important things in his desk. He doesn’t keep important papers there, for instance.”

“Why would I be interested in his papers?”

“He keeps them where he keeps his stash. There’s a safe in the kitchen, under the sink. He doesn’t think I know the combination. But I figured it out. Want to know what it is?”

“What?”

“It’s forty right. Twenty-nine left. Back around to thirty-four. See, that’s his idea of a perfect woman. Her measurements. He tells us girls that all the time. The perfect woman.”

“What’s in the safe?” Rune asked.

“You know, I have to tan my back now. And when I do that I fall asleep. Good-bye.”

“Thanks,” Rune said. But the woman didn’t respond.

She hurried downstairs and found the safe. The combination worked. Inside were dozens of ounce bags of coke. Some crack too. But that didn’t interest Rune very much—she already knew about Traub’s likes.

What interested her was the insurance policy.

A thin binder from New York Accident & Indemnity. Rune opened it up. There were a lot of strange words, all capitalized, like
Double Indemnity
and
Key Man
and
Named Insured
and
Owner of the Policy
. She couldn’t figure out what they meant. But it didn’t take her long at all to figure out that the policy was on Shelly Lowe’s life and that because of her death Danny Traub was going to be $500,000 richer.

Rune had called Sam Healy and asked him to meet her. She was going to tell him about Tucker and Traub. But
before they could get together she got a phone call at L&R. And that was why she was now in a coffee shop on West Forty-sixth Street—Restaurant Row, in the heart of the Theater District.

“I’m one of a very unelite corps,” the man said. “Theater people who’ve been betrayed, fired or assaulted by Michael Schmidt. I don’t know why you want to do a film about
him
. There’re so many decent people in the business.”

“It’s not really about him.”

“Good.” Franklin Becker poured another sugar into his coffee, stirred. He was a former casting director for Michael Schmidt. After she’d had her talk with the producer at the theater she’d approached the stagehand Schmidt had dressed down about dropping the load of lumber. She’d bought the poor man a cup of coffee and delicately extracted from him the names of several people who might be willing to dish on Schmidt. Becker was the first one who’d called her back.

Rune explained, “It’s about Shelly Lowe.”

“The actress who was killed in that bombing. And you know about her connection with Schmidt?”

“Right.”

Becker reminded her somewhat of Sam Healy. Tall, thinning hair. Unlike the cop’s stone face, though, Becker’s broke frequently into curls of emotion. Her impression too was that he wouldn’t have any wives in his past, only boyfriends.

“What can you tell me about them—Shelly and Schmidt.”

He laughed. “Well, I can tell you quite a story. What she did … it was astonishing. I’ve been casting on Broadway for almost twenty years but I’ve never seen anything like it.