Death of a Blue Movie Star

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 LineDayliner 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.