Death of a Blue Movie Star (43 page)

“I began to obsess over the idea. It became a consuming thought. Then I decided it might actually work.”

“You got the bomb from Tommy’s army buddy? In Monterey? The one who was court-martialed with him?”

Shelly cocked a single eyebrow. It was hard to see her as a brunette. Blonde had definitely been her color. “How did you know that?” she asked.

“Connections.”

“He sells black-market munitions. He’d been a demolition expert. I paid him to make me a bomb. He explained to me how it worked.”

“Then you waited. For someone like me. A witness.”

She didn’t speak for a moment. The park was ahead of them, off to their left; couples were walking through the trim grass and oaks and maple trees. “Then I waited,” she said softly. “I needed someone to see me in the room where the explosion was.”

“You tried to get me to tape it. I remember you asking
that. Then it went off. Only you were gone and the body that Andy Llewellyn’d gotten for you was next to the phone.”

Shelly smiled, and Rune thought it was a smile of admiration. “You know about him? You found that out too?”

“I saw his name on your calendar. Then I saw a story in the paper the other day about a murder. It mentioned that he was a medical examiner. I figured he’d be a good source for a body.”

After a moment, Shelly said, “The body … I remembered this guy—Andy—who’d picked me up at a bar one time. He was really funny, a nice guy—for someone who does autopsies all day. He was also making a nice low salary, so he was happy to take thirty thousand cash to get me a body and arrange to do the autopsy and fake the dentals—to identify the corpse as me. They aren’t all that hard to come up with, did you know? Dozens of unidentified people die in the city every year.”

She shook her head. “That night I was on some kind of automatic pilot. The body was in the room at Lame Duck where Andy and I had put it that evening, before I came over to your place for the taping session. The bomb was in the telephone. You were outside. I called to you, then went into the back of the studio and pressed a couple of buttons on this radio transmitter. The bomb went off.

“In my bag I had what was left of my savings, in cash, an original-edition Molière play, a ring of my mother’s, some jewelry. That was it. All my credit cards, driver’s license, Citibank cash card letters, were in my purse in the room at Lame Duck.”

“Aren’t you afraid somebody here will recognize you?”

“Yes, of course. But Chicago’s different from New York. There are only a couple adult theaters here, a few adult bookstores. No Shelly Lowe posters, like you see in Times Square. No Shelly Lowe tapes in the windows of the bookstores. And I had the surgery.”

“And dyed your hair.”

“No, this is my natural color.” Shelly turned to her. “Besides, you’re talking to me now, a few feet away—what do you think? Do I seem like the same person you interviewed on your houseboat?”

No, she didn’t. She didn’t at all. The eyes—the blue was there but they weren’t laser beams any longer. The way she carried herself, her voice, her smile. She seemed older and younger at the same time.

Rune said, “I remember when I was taping you, you started out being so tough and, I don’t know, controlled.”

“Shelly Lowe was a ballbuster.”

“But you slipped. Toward the end you became someone else.”

“I know. That’s why …” She looked away. They started walking again, and Rune grinned.

“That’s why you broke into my houseboat and stole the tape. It gave away too much.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You know, we thought Tommy was the killer.”

“I heard about it. About Nicole … That was so sad.” Her voice faded. “Danny and Ralph Gutman and all the others—they were just sleazy. But Tommy was frightening. That’s why I left him. It was those films of his. He started doing real S & M films. I left him after that. I guess when he found he couldn’t get off on just pain alone he started doing snuff films. I don’t know.”

They walked for a few minutes in silence. Shelly laughed sadly, then said, “How you tracked me down, I’ll never understand. Here in Chicago, I mean.”

“It was your play.
Delivered Flowers
. I saw it on Arthur Tucker’s desk. He’d crossed out your name and written his in. I thought … Well, I thought he’d killed you—to steal your play. He really had me fooled.”

“He’s an acting coach, remember. And one of the best actors you’ll ever meet.”

“He gets an Oscar for that performance,” Rune said. “I remembered the name of the theater. The Haymarket. It was written on the cover of the play. I called the theater and asked what was playing. They said
Delivered Flowers
.”

Shelly said, “That was his idea, the play. He said that we’d pretend he wrote it. A play by Arthur Tucker would be a lot more likely to be produced than one by Becky Hanson. He sends me the royalties.”

“None to the AIDS Coalition?”

“No. Should he?”

Rune laughed and said, “Probably he should. But things’ve changed since we made our deal.” Thinking: Damn, that man
was
a good actor.

“Arthur got the company here to produce it and arranged for me to get the lead…. I thought about it afterward. It was very strange. Here, I’d had the chance to direct my own death. My God, what an opportunity for an actress. Think of it all—a chance to create a character. In the ultimate sense. Create a whole new person.”

They walked along Clark Street for a few minutes until they came to a Victorian brownstone. Shelly took her keys out of her purse.

Rune said, “I don’t know a whole lot about plays, but I liked it. I didn’t, you know, understand everything, but usually, if I don’t understand stuff all the way, that means it’s pretty good.”

“The reviewers like it. They’re talking of taking a road company to New York. It’ll hurt like hell but I won’t be able to go with them. Not now. Not for a few years. That’s my plan, and I’ll have to stick to it. Let Shelly rest in peace for a while.”

“You happy here?” Rune asked.

She nodded her head upward. “I’m nearly broke, living in a third-floor walk-up. I pawned my last diamond bracelet last month because I needed the cash.” Shelly
shrugged, then grinned. “But the acting, what I’m doing? Yeah, I’m happy.”

Rune looked at the twisty wrought-iron gate. “We’ve got kind of a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s a film about you.”

“The one you were working on when I was killed?” Shelly looked at her curiously. “But after the bombing … Well, there was nothing more for you to make a film about. You stopped working on it, didn’t you?”

Rune leaned against the grille and turned to face Shelly. “It’s slotted on PBS.”

Shelly’s eyes went wide. “Oh, Rune, you can’t … PBS is national. Someone here could see it.”

“You don’t look like you.”

“I look enough like me so people could make the connection.”

Rune said, “You used me. You weren’t honest with me.”

“I know I don’t deserve to ask—”

“You didn’t want to help me make my film at all. You just used me.”

“Please, Rune, all my plans … They’re just starting to work out. For the first time in my life I’m happy. No one knows what I did—the films. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is, not to be looked at like a thing. It’s so wonderful not to be ashamed….”

Rune said, “But this is
my
one big chance. I’ve lived with this film for months. It’s gotten me fired and nearly gotten me killed a couple times. It’s all I’ve got, Shelly. I can’t let it go.”

Tears formed in the actress’s eyes. “Remember in your houseboat, we were looking through the mythology book. The story about Orpheus and Eurydice? Shelly Lowe is dead, Rune. Don’t bring her back. Please, don’t.” Shelly’s eyes were round and liquid with tears. Her hand closed
on Rune’s arm. “Look at me, Rune! Please. Like Orpheus. Look at me and send me back to the Underworld.”

The Hudson was choppy; a storm was coming. Rune was afraid she’d lose electricity.

That’s all I need tonight. My television premiere and all of New York has a blackout.

A flash of lightning over Jersey froze the image of Sam Healy, opening two cans of beer at once.

The rain began, whipped against the side of the houseboat by fast, surprised sweeps of wind.

“I hope the moorings hold,” Rune said.

Healy looked out the window, then back at the dinner resting on Rune’s blue Formica coffee table. The cold anchovy pizza seemed to bother him more than an unplanned voyage into New York Harbor.

“They pay you much for your film?”

“Naw. This is public television—you do it for love,” Rune said, turning on the TV. “And because, if I’m lucky, a lecherous producer with a ton of money he’s dying to give away is gonna be watching.”

“You use your real name?”

“You don’t believe Rune’s my name?”

“No.” He sipped the Miller. “Is it?”

“The credit line is Irene Dodd Simons.”

“Classy. So
that’s
your real name.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Rune smiled mysteriously and sat back in the old couch she’d bought from a Goodwill shop. It was still uneven from the time she’d cut through a lot of the stuffing looking for hidden money but if you settled yourself enough it got to the point where it was pretty comfortable.

Healy tried the couch, then sat on the floor, picking anchovies off half the pizza and dropping them onto the other half.

“You disarm bombs,” Rune pointed out. “You’re scared of a few little fish?”

The screen coalesced into the dense, fuzzy color of old TV sets and with just a hint of reverberation, the sound boomed into the room from the huge speakers.

They sat through previews of future programs—a science show on amniocentesis and a nature program that showed grown-up vultures feeding something red and raw to baby vultures.

Healy gave up on the pizza.

The
Young Filmmakers
program was introduced by a middle-aged Englishman. He referred to Irene Dodd Simons as a young, up-and-coming film maker from Manhattan who never had any formal film training but who’d gotten her experience doing television commercials.

“If they only knew,” Rune said.

The camera closed on him as he said, “And now, our first feature,
Epitaph for a Blue Movie Star
….”

The fade from black emerged slowly as a gaudy mosaic of Times Square at dusk. Men in raincoats walked past.

A woman’s voice:
“Adult films. Some people pornography excites, some people it repulses, and some are moved by it to acts of perversion and crime. This is the story of one talented young woman, who made her living in the world of pornography and was pulled down by its gravity of darkness
….”

“Did you write that?” Healy asked.

“Shhh.”

Times Square dissolved into abstract colors, which faded and became a black-and-white high school graduation picture.

“Nice effect.”

“
… a young actress who searched and never found, who buried her sadness in the only world she understood—the glitzy world of fantasy
….

The camera closed in on the high school picture, slowly coming into focus.

“This is the story of Nicole D’Orleans. The life and death of a blue movie star.”

A cut to Nicole, sitting in her apartment, looking out the window, tears on her face, recorded by the unsteady, unseen camera. She was speaking softly.
“These movies, the thing is, it’s all I can do. I make love good. But I’m such a failure at anything else. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work…. It’s such a hard feeling, to hate the one thing you’re good at.”

Cut back to the high school picture, as the opening credits rolled.

Healy asked, “Who’s doing the narration? She’s great.”

Rune didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “I got a pro to do it. An actress in Chicago.”

“A pro? Anybody I’d know?”

“Naw, I doubt it.” Rune tossed the pizza on the table and moved closer to Healy, resting her head against his chest, as the opening credits ended and Nicole’s picture faded into the grimy, cold-lit marquee of a movie theater on Eighth Avenue.