Death of a Blue Movie Star

There was some very clever stuff in it, like the scene where one actor's talking to another actor who suddenly becomes someone else in a flashback. It was funny in parts, then sad, then funny again. Rune cried when the actress left her small-town boyfriend and headed off for Europe.

The audience loved it and about half of them gave the star a standing ovation. The play was long; by the time the curtain calls were over, it was 10:45. The audience, all except for Rune, left soon after the lights came up.

She waited until the actors and actresses had disappeared, then strolled backstage.

No one stopped her.

Rebecca Hanson's dressing room was at the end of the corridor.

Rune paused in front of it, collected herself, then knocked.

"Yes?"

Rune opened the door.

Shelly Lowe finished wiping the cold cream off her face and gave Rune a smile. It was pretty bleak, Rune decided.

"I thought I saw you in the audience," she said. "Well, I guess we better have a little talk."

CHAPTER THIRTY

The two women walked down Lincoln Avenue past the closed shops and mostly empty bars to the broad intersection at Halsted and Fullerton, then they turned east.

In front of them the street and apartment lights disappeared into an expanse of blackness. Rune wondered if that void was the lake or the park or the sky.

She glanced at Shelly, who was wearing blue jeans, a silk blouse and Reeboks.

"You don't quite look the same. Close, though."

"A little plastic surgery. Eyes and nose. Always wanted it bobbed."

"Arthur Tucker knew all along, didn't he?" Rune asked.

"It was his idea, in a way. About six months ago he found out about my movie career-of course, I didn't exactly keep it a secret. We had this terrible fight."

"I met him. He doesn't like pornography very much."

"No, but it wasn't the morality of it. He thought making the movies-what's the word?-diminished me. That's what he said. That it was holding me back from being great. It dulled me creatively. Like drinking or drugs. I thought about it. He was right. I told him, though, I couldn't afford just to quit cold. I wasn't used to being poor. I said I'd have to be crazy to quit what I'm doing. Crazy, or dead.

"He said, 'So, die.' Well, I thought about disappearing the way Gauguin did. But every city that was big enough to have good theater would also have a porn market; there was a risk I'd be recognized. Unless…" She smiled. "Unless I was actually dead. A week later, that religious group set off the first bomb in the theater. The news report said some bodies had been unidentified because the blast was so bad. I got into fantasizing about what if someone had mistaken that body for me. I could go to San Francisco, L.A., even London…

"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.