Death of a Blue Movie Star

Still, she missed him and on Thursday when she called she got a pleasing jolt when he said, "Tomorrow's my day off, how about we go-"

"Blow things up?"

"I was going to say, have a picnic someplace."

"Oh, yeah! I'd love to get out of the city. The streets smell like wet dogs and it's supposed to hit ninety-seven. The only thing is I've got this interview at a restaurant."

He said, "You're making a movie about a restaurant?"

"Sam, I'm applying for a job as a waitress."

"Postpone it for a day. We'll get out of the city."

"You're twisting my arm."

"I'll call you tomorrow with details."

"I haven't said yes."

"Tomorrow."

He hung up.

"Yes," she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Kent was a small town in Putnam County, sixty-seven miles north of New York City, near the Connecticut state line. The population was 3,700.

The town hadn't changed much since the day it was incorporated in 1798. It was too far from New York or Albany or Hartford for commuters, though a few people drove to and from Poughkeepsie for work at Vassar. The residents mostly made their money from farming and tourism and the staples of small-town economics: insurance, real estate and building trades.

Travel books about the area generally didn't mention Kent. The MobilGuide gave the restaurant in the Travel-lodge near the Interstate a couple of stars. The Farming Museum got mentioned. So did a spring flower festival. It was a quiet place.

Outside of the small downtown, about a mile from the last of the seven Protestant churches in Kent, was an old rock quarry. The huge pit did double duty: a Saturday night hangout for teenage boys who had either dates or six-packs of Bud, and an informal shooting range during the day. This afternoon, three men stood at a disintegrating wooden board that served as a table for bench-resting rifles and for holding ammo and targets and extra magazines.

All three were in the NRA-accepted standing firing position-right foot back, parallel to the target, left forward and pointed downrange. They were tall men with shortcut hair sprayed into place. Two of the men had graying hair and were thin. The other, a younger man with black hair, had a beer belly, though his legs were thin and his shoulders broad. They all wore light-colored shoes, light slacks (two pink and one gray) and short-sleeved dress shirts with ties kept in place with a tack or bar. In the shirt pocket of the fatter man was a plastic pen-and-pencil caddy.

They all wore teardrop-shaped shooting sunglasses tinted yellow and made out of impact-resistant glass. In their ears were flesh-colored earplugs.

One thin man and the fat man held Kalashnikov assault rifles, whose clips they had just finished emptying at paper targets 150 feet away. They rested the guns on the ground, muzzles up, and began picking up the empty brass cartridges, which they would reload themselves on the weekend.

The third man held a square, ungainly Israeli Uzi, which he fired in two-second bursts. The muzzle ended in a ten-inch sound suppressor, and the gun made a sound like a hushed chain saw.

All three guns were fully automatic and therefore in violation of federal and state law. The suppressor was a separate offense. None of the men, however, had ever even seen an agent from the FBI or BATF in this part of the county and they weren't any more secretive with these guns than they were with their favorite. 30-06 deer rifle or Remington side-by-side.

The man with the Uzi aimed carefully and emptied the clip.

He took his earplug out and said, "Cease fire," although the others had already laid the guns on the bench, muzzles downrange. There were just the three of them present but they'd been raised in the protocol of firearms and adhered to formalities like this-the same as when they'd arrived, an hour before, and this man had glanced at the others and said, "Ready on the left, ready on the right, ready on the firing line… commence fire."

These were rituals they respected and enjoyed.

He set down the Uzi and went downrange to pick up targets. When he walked back to the shooting stations they picked up their guns, pulled out the clips, opened the bolts, put the safeties on and started toward the parking lot. The guns disappeared into the trunk of a Cadillac

El Dorado.

The ride took only ten minutes. The car pulled into the black gravel driveway of a white colonial, which had been built with money from the man's insurance business. The three men walked around a fieldstone path to the entrance of a den. Inside the large room, decorated with dark green carpeting and wormwood walls, they rolled a gray tarpaulin out on the floor and laid the guns on the thick canvas. Battered metal cleaning kits appeared and the sweet smell of solvent filled the room.

In thirty seconds the guns were stripped down into their component parts and the three men were swabbing the bores with patches threaded through eyelets in the tips of aluminum rods. They lovingly cleaned their weapons.