Death of a Blue Movie Star (12 page)

“But why would somebody want to kill Shelly?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out. That’s what my movie’s going to be about. I’m going to find the killer.”

Nicole asked, “What do the police think?”

“They don’t. First of all, they don’t care she was killed. They said … Well, they don’t think much of people in your line of work. Second, I haven’t told them my theory. And I’m not going to. If I do, and it’s true, then everybody’ll get the story. I want it for me. An exclusive …”

“Murder?”

“What do you think, Nicole? Was there anybody that would’ve wanted Shelly dead?”

Rune could sense the gears turning beneath the teased, sprayed hair that glittered with tiny silver flecks, a living Hallmark decoration.

Nicole shook her head.

“Was she going out with anybody?”

“Nobody serious. The thing is, in this business, it’s real—what’s the word?—incestuous, you know? You can’t just meet some guy at a party like anybody else. Sooner or later he’s gonna ask what you do for a living. Nowadays, with AIDS and Hep B and everything, that’s a way for a girl to get dropped real fast. So what happens is, you tend to just hang out a lot with other people in the business.
Date a lot. Maybe move in with a guy and finally get married. But Shelly didn’t do that. There was one guy she was seeing recently. Andy … somebody. A funny last name. I don’t remember. He was never over to the apartment. It seemed pretty casual.”

“Could you find out his name?”

Nicole walked into the kitchen and looked at the wall calendar. She traced a pencil-written note with her finger; it made a sad sweep as it followed Shelly’s writing.

“Andy Llewellyn. Four
l
’s in his name. That’s why I thought it was weird.”

Rune wrote down the name, then looked over the calendar. She pointed. “Who’s that?”
A. Tucker
was penned in. His name appeared almost every Wednesday going back for months. “Doctor?”

Nicole blew her red nose with a paper towel. “That was her acting coach.”

“Acting coach?”

“The movies we did, they paid the rent. But she loved real plays most of all. It was kind of a hobby of hers. Going to auditions. Doing small parts. But she never got any big roles. As soon as they found out what she did for a living it was, Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Come here….” Nicole motioned Rune back into the living room and over to the bookcases. Her neck crooked sideways, Rune read some of the titles. They were all about acting. Balinese theater, Stanislavsky, Shakespeare, dialects, playwriting, history of theater. Nicole’s hand strayed to a book. The astonishingly red nails tapped the spine. “That was the only time Shelly was happy. When she was rehearsing or reading about the theater.”

“Yeah,” Rune said, remembering something that Shelly’d told her. “She said she had some real parts. She made a little money at it.” Rune pulled a book off the shelf. It was written by someone named Antonin Artaud.
The Theater and Its Double
. It was dog-eared and battered.
A lot of it was underlined. One chapter had an asterisk next to it. It was headed, “The Theater of Cruelty.”

“Sometimes she’d take time off and do summer stock around the country. She said that regional theater was where most of the creative playwrights were being showcased. It was all very brainy stuff. I tried to read some of the scripts. Gosh, I tell you, I can follow lines like, ‘And then they take their clothes off and fuck.’ “Nicole laughed. “But this stuff Shelly was interested in was way, way beyond me.”

Rune put the book back on the shelf. She jotted Tucker’s name next to Andy Llewellyn’s.

“Shelly said what made her decide to do the film was that she had a fight with somebody she worked with. You know who that was?”

Nicole paused. “No.”

Rune had seen Nicole in
Lusty Cousins
. She was a bad actress then and she was a bad actress now.

“Come on, Nicole.”

“Well, don’t make too much out of it—”

“I won’t.”

“It’s just, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”

“Tell me. Who?”

“Guy who runs the company.”

“Lame Duck?” Rune asked.

“Yeah. Danny Traub. But him and Shelly fought all the time. They have since she’s been working for them. A couple of years.”

“What do they fight about?”

“Everything. Danny’s, like, your nightmare boss.”

Into the notebook. “Okay. Anybody else?”

“Nobody she worked with.”

“But maybe somebody she didn’t?”

“Well, there’s this guy … Tommy Savorne. He was her ex.”

“Husband?”

“Boyfriend. They lived together in California for a couple years.”

“He still lives there?”

“He does, yeah. Only he’s been in town for the past couple weeks. But I know he didn’t have anything to do with the bomb. He’s the sweetest guy you’d ever want to meet. He looks kind of like John Denver.”

“What happened with them? Did they break up because of her business?”

“She didn’t talk about Tommy much. He used to make porn. Did a ton of drugs too. Hey, who doesn’t, right? But then he cleaned up his act. Got out of the business, dried out at some fancy clinic like Betty Ford, did the twelve steps or something. Then he started doing legit videos—exercise tapes, something like that. I think Shelly resented that he went legit. Kind of a slap at her. I think he kept needling her to leave the business, but she couldn’t afford to. Finally she left him. I don’t know why she wouldn’t go back. He’s cute. And he makes good money.”

“And they were fighting?”

“Oh, not recently. They didn’t have much contact. But they
used
to fight a lot. I heard her on the phone sometimes. He kept wanting to get back together and she kept saying she couldn’t. One of
those
conversations—ex-boyfriend thing. You know, you’ve had those a hundred times.”

Rune, whose romantic life had been nonexistent since Richard had left—and pretty damn bleak before him too—nodded with phony female conspiracy. “Hundreds, thousands.”

“But that was months ago,” Nicole added. “I’m sure he couldn’t have hurt her. I see him from time to time. He’s really sweet. And they were good friends. Seeing them together—there’s no way he could look at Shelly and hurt a hair on her head.”

“Why don’t you tell me where he’s staying anyway.”

Hearing in her memory Sam Healy’s voice:
I’ve been in ordnance disposal for fifteen years. The thing about explosives is that they’re not like guns. You don’t have to look the person in the eyes when you kill them. You don’t have to be anywhere near
.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The hotel overlooked Gramercy Park, that trim private garden bordered in wrought iron at the end of Lexington Avenue.

The lobby of the place was all red and gold, with flecked fleur-de-lis wallpaper. Dozens of layers of paint coated the woodwork and the carpet smelled sour-sweet. One of the two elevators was broken—permanently, it seemed.

It was quiet as Rune waited for the elevator to descend to the ground floor. A woman in her fifties, wearing a green-and-gold dress, her face a smooth curve of foundation makeup, watched Rune from under jutting glossy eyelashes. A middle-aged musician with dirty brown hair sat with his foot up on a battered Ovation guitar case and read the
Post
.

Tommy Savorne’s room was on the fourteenth floor, which, it occurred to Rune, was really the thirteenth, because when they built hotels in the thirties and forties
they didn’t label the thirteenth floor. That had a certain appeal for her. She felt that superstition was something people who were unliteral tended to believe in. And being too literal was a major sin in her bible.

She found the door and knocked.

Chains and latches jangled and the heavy door swung open. A man stood there, sunburned and cute—and looking, yeah, a bit like John Denver. More like a cowboy at a dude ranch. His face was somber. He wore blue jeans and a work shirt. He wore one crew sock; the other dangled from his hand. His hair was shaggy and blond. He was thin.

“Hi, what can I do for you?”

“You’re Tommy Savorne?”

He nodded.

“I’m Rune. I knew Shelly. Nicole said you were in town and I just wanted to come by and say I was real sorry about what happened.”

She hadn’t been sure what she was going to say after that, but it didn’t matter. Tommy gave a nod and motioned her inside.

The room was small, the walls off-white, the carpet gold. She got a whiff of a stale smell—what was it, old food? Aging plaster? Probably just the smell of a prewar hotel going to seed. But Tommy was burning incense—sandalwood—which helped. Two table lamps gave off a salmon glow. He’d been reading a cookbook, one of a dozen of them on the chipped brown-laminate desk.

“Sit down. You want something?” He looked around. “I don’t have any liquor. Just soda. Mineral water. Oh, I have some babagounash.”

“What’s that, like sassafras? I had this ginseng cola one time. Yuck.”

“It’s eggplant dip. My own recipe.” He held up a plastic container of brown-green mash.

Rune shook her head. “I just ate. But thanks. Nothing for me.”

Savorne sat on the bed and Rune flopped into the Naugahyde chair with split sides; it bled dirty-white upholstery stuffing.

“You were Shelly’s boyfriend?” Rune asked.

He was nodding, squinting slightly. Tommy said, “Shelly and I broke up over a year ago. But we were good friends. I still live in California where she and I used to live. I’m just in town now for a job.”

“California,” Rune mused. “I’ve never been. I’d like to go sometime. Sit under palm trees and watch movie stars all day long.”

“I’m from the north. Monterey. It’s about a hundred miles south of San Francisco. Hard to star-spot there. Except for Clint Eastwood.”

“That’s a pretty good exception.”

Tommy was carefully pulling a sock over his large foot. Even his feet looked tanned and trim. She looked closely: Wild! He’s got manicured toenails. She saw cowboy boots and several cowboy hats in the closet.

He sighed. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s dead.” He reached lethargically under the bed then snagged a black loafer. Slipped it on. Found the other one. It drooped in his hand. “How did you know her?”

“I was making a movie about her,” Rune said.

Savorne said, “A movie?”

“A documentary.”

“She didn’t mention that.”

“We just started the day she was killed. I was with her when it happened.”

Savorne scanned her face. “That how you got those scratches?”

“I was outside when the bomb went off. It’s nothing serious.”

“You know, even though we weren’t going out anymore we still talked a lot. I was thinking…. That’s something I won’t be able to do anymore. Not ever again …”

“How long’ve you known her?”

“Five, six years. I used to …” He looked away. “Well, I used to be in her line of work. The films, I mean.”

“An actor?”

He laughed wanly. “Not really built for that.” Laughed again; his red face turned redder. “I’m talking about physique, not equipment.”

Rune smiled. He continued. “No. I was a cameraman and director. Did some editing too. I’d was in film school at UCLA for a couple of years, but that wasn’t for me. I knew how to handle a camera. I didn’t need to sit in classes full of these nerds. So I borrowed some money, bought an old Bolex and opened my own production company. I was going to be the next George Lucas or Spielberg. I didn’t get to first base. I went under in about three months. Then this guy I knew called and told me about a job shooting an adult film. I thought, Hey, watching beautiful women and getting paid for it? Why not? I gotta admit I thought maybe I’d get a little of the action myself. Everybody in the crew thinks that but it never works out that way. But they paid me a hundred cash for two hours’ work and I decided that was going to be my career.”

“How’d you meet Shelly?”

“I moved to San Francisco and started making my own films. Shelly was auditioning at the theaters in North Beach—the legit theaters. Actually I picked her up in a bar is how we met. We started going out. When I told her what I did, well, most girls’d go, I’m outa here. But Shelly was interested. Something about it really turned her on. Something about the power … She was reluctant, sure,
but since her theater career was going nowhere I talked her into working for me.”