Death of a Blue Movie Star (Rune 2)

"You're not in the business anymore?"

Tommy shook his head. "Nope. Porn used to be a classier crowd. And a smarter crowd. Real people. It was fun. Now, there's too many drugs. I started to lose friends to overdoses and AIDS. I said, Time for me to move on. I wanted Shelly to come with me but ..." Another faint smile. "I couldn't exactly see her working for my new company."

"Which does what?"

"Health food how-to videos." He nodded at the babagounash. "You ever hear of infomercials?"

"Nope."

"You buy a half hour--usually on cable--and make it look like a real program, something informative. But you also sell the product it's about. They're fun."

"How's business?"

"Oh, not great compared with porn, but I'm not embarrassed to tell people what I do." His voice faded. He stood up and walked over to the window, pulled aside a stained orange drape. "Shelly," he whispered. "She'd still be alive if she'd quit too. But she didn't listen to me. So pigheaded."

Rune flashed back to her fiery blue eyes.

Tommy's lips were trembling. His thick, sunburned fingers rose to his face. He started to speak but his breath caught and he lowered his head for a moment in silent tears. Rune looked away.

Finally he calmed, shook his head.

Rune said, "She was quite a person. A lot of people'll miss her. I just met her and I do."

It was hard to watch him, a big man, a healthy, cheerful man overcome by grief.

But at least it answered the first of Rune's two questions: Tommy Savorne probably wasn't Shelly's killer. He didn't seem to be that good an actor.

So, Rune asked the second: "Do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt her?"

Savorne looked up, a frown of curiosity on his face. "This religious group ..."

"Assuming this Sword of Jesus doesn't exist."

"You think?"

"I don't know. Just consider it."

At first he shook his head at the foolishness of the question, at the craziness of anyone's wanting to hurt Shelly. But then he stopped. "Well, I wouldn't make much out of it ... but there was somebody. A guy she worked for."

"Danny Traub?"

"How did you know?"

"Let me tell you, and I mean this sincerely, that I loved Shelly Lowe. I loved her as an artist and I loved her as a human being."

Danny Traub was short and thin, but muscular thin, tendony. His face was round and his hair was a cap of tight brown curls. He had jowl lines that enclosed his mouth like parentheses. He was wearing baggy black slacks, a white sweatshirt with a design like semaphores. His jewelry was heavy and gold: two chains, a bracelet, a ring with a sapphire in it and a Rolex Oyster Perpetual.

That watch cost more than my parents' first house, Rune guessed.

Traub continually looked around him as if there were a crowd of people nearby, an audience. An insincere smile kept curling into his face and he gestured constantly and arched his eyebrows. The phrase class clown came to mind.

They were in Traub's Greenwich Village town house. It was a duplex, done in blond wood and off-white walls and loaded with small trees and plants. "Like a jungle," she said when she'd arrived. He had her leave the Betacam and the battery packs in the front hall and walked her through the place. He showed her his collection of Indonesian fertility gods and sculpture. One, Rune loved: a four-foot-high rabbit with a mysterious smile on his face. "Hey, you're great!" she'd said, walking right up to it.

"Oh, she could have dicks and boobs but she wants to talk to the rabbit," Traub had said to his invisible audience, glancing over his shoulder.

They'd walked past blotchy paintings, glass and metal sculpture, huge stone pots, Indian baskets, brass Buddhas, more plants (the smell was heavy-duty greenhouse). Upstairs, one door was partially open. As they'd walked past, Traub'd shut it quickly, but not fast enough to keep Rune from seeing an assembly of sleeping limbs. There were at least three arms and she was pretty sure she saw two blonde hairdos.

The back of the apartment opened onto a courtyard around a green bronze fountain. This is where they were sitting when Rune told him that she was doing a film about Shelly Lowe.