Death of a Blue Movie Star

She couldn't see his face but it seemed that he saw her; the man turned and disappeared east down Forty-seventh.

"I'm going after him!"

"Rune!" Healy called but she ducked under the yellow tape and ran through the mass of spectators pressing forward to get a look at the disaster.

By the time she broke through them, though, he was two blocks away. Still, she could see that hat. She started across Broadway but the light was against her and she couldn't get through the traffic-there were small gaps between cars but the drivers were accelerating fast and she couldn't squeeze through. No one let her by. It was as frustrating as a toothache.

The man in the red windbreaker stopped, looked back, resting against a building. He seemed winded. Then he crossed the street and vanished into a crowd of pedestrians. Rune noticed that he was walking stiffly-and Rune remembered Warren Hathaway's observation that the man who planted the bomb seemed to be older.

She returned to Healy, panting. "It was him."

"The guy in the jacket?"

She nodded. Healy seemed somewhat skeptical and she thought about telling him that Hathaway had confirmed that he'd been in the Velvet Venus. But that would involve a confession about rifling Healy's attache case and she wasn't prepared for what the fallout fromthat might be.

He was debating. He walked to a uniformed cop and whispered something to him. The cop trotted off toward his cruiser, hit the lights and drove off.

Healy returned to Rune. He said, "Go on home."

"Sam."

"Home."

Tight-lipped, she looked at him, making him see-tryingto make him see-that, goddamn it, this really wasn't a game to her. Not at all.

He must have seen some of this; he breathed out a sigh and looked around for an invisible audience like the kind Danny Traub carried around with him. Healy said, "All right, come on." He turned and walked quickly back inside the theater, Rune trotting to keep up with him.

Suddenly he stopped and turned. He spoke as if the words were lines in a high school play and he was an actor of Nicole's ability. "I know I didn't call like I said I would. And you don't have to, if you don't want to. But I was thinking, tomorrow night-it's my day off-maybe we could go out."

What a place to ask her out on a date! A bombed-out porno theater.

She didn't give him time to be embarrassed about his delivery. She smiled and said, "Ah graciously accept yo chahming invitation. Nahn, shall we say?"

He stared at her, totally lost.

Rune said, "Nine?"

"Oh, sure. Good."

And smiling while he tried not to, he walked back into the theater, banging a plastic evidence bag against his leg.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Rune spent the day assembling the reels of exposed footage for the House O' Leather commercial and stuffed it, along with the editing instructions, into a big white envelope.

Sam picked her up at L amp;R and drove to a postproduc-tion house, where the technicians would edit the raw footage into a rough cut. Rune dropped it off with instructions to deliver cassettes to L amp;R and the client as soon as possible, even if it meant overtime.

Then she said, "Okay… work's done. Time to party. Let's go to the club." And she gave him directions to the West Side piers.

"Where?" Healy asked dubiously. "I don't think there's anything there."

"Oh, you'd be surprised."

She gave him credit-he was a sport.

Healy put up with the place for a couple of hours before he managed to shout, "I don't feel quite at home here."

"How come?" Rune shouted.

He didn't seem sure. Maybe it was the decor: black foam mounds that looked like lava. Flashing purple overhead lights. A six-foot Plexiglas bubble of an aquarium.

Or the music. (He asked her if the sound system was broken and she had to tell him that the effect was intentional.)

Also he wasn't dressed quite right. Rune had said casual and so she'd dressed in yellow tights, a black miniskirt and-on top of a purple tank top-a black T-shirt as holey as Jarlsberg.

Sam Healy was in blue jeans and a plaid shirt. The one thing he shared with most of the other clubbies was a pair of black boots. His, however, were cowboy boots.

"I think I got it wrong," he said.

"Well, you may start a trend."

Maybe not but he wasn't being eyed like a geek, either, Rune noticed. Two pageboy blonds lifted their sleek faces and fired some serious "Wanna get laid?" vibrations his way. Rune took his arm. "Sunken cheeks like that, you see them? They're a sign of mental instability." She grinned. "Let's dance some more." And began to gyrate in time to the music.

"Dancing," Healy said and mimicked her. Ten minutes later, he said, "I've got an idea."

"I know that tone. You're not having a good time."

Healy wiped his forehead and scalp with a wad of bar napkins. "Anybody ever dehydrate in here?"

"That's part of the fun."

"You sure like to dance."

"Dancing is the best! I'm free! I'm a bird."

"Well, if you're really into dancing, let's try this place I know."