Manhattan Is My Beat (Rune 1)

Rune shook her head. "I knew a guy, a friend used to work at one of the restaurants I tended bar at. I watched his boyfriend get sick and die. Then I saw my friend get sick and die. I was at the hospital. I saw the tubes, the monitors, the needles. The color of his skin. Everything. I saw his eyes. I was there when he died."

An image of Robert Kelly's face came back to her, sitting in the chair in his apartment.

An image of her father's face ...

Richard was silent and Rune knew she'd committed the New York City crime: being too emotional. She cleaned up the remnants of dinner, kissed Richard's ear, and said, "Let's watch a movie."

"A movie? Why?"

"Because I have to catch a killer."

CHAPTER TEN

She'd already seen Manhattan Is My Beat once but watching it this time was different.

Not because she was on a quote date unquote with Richard, not because they were lying side by side in the loft, with hazy stars visible overhead through the peaks of glass.

But because when she'd watched it before, it had just been a movie that a nice, quirky old man had rented. Now it was the rabbit hole--a doorway to an adventure.

The film was hokey, sure. Filled with those classic images from that whole cumbersome era she'd told Frankie Greek about--the baggy suits, stiff hair, the formalities of the dialogue. The young cop, twirling his billy club, would say, "Well, now, Mrs. McGrath, how are the Mister's corns this morning?"

But she paid little attention to the period costumes and the words. Mostly what she noticed, watching it this time, was the grit. The film left a sandy uneasiness in her heart. Shadows everywhere, the contrasty black and white, the unanticipated violence. The shootings--where the robber winged one of the hero's fellow cops and a bystander, for instance, or the scene where the cop died in front of the hotel--were very disturbing, even though there was no Sam Peckinpah slow-motion blood splattering, no special effects. It was like that great old Alan Ladd movie Shane--unlike modern thrillers, there'd been only a half dozen gunshots in the entire film but they were loud and shocking and you felt each one of them in your gut.

Manhattan Is My Beat also seemed pretty G-rated. But Rune felt the studio pulling a fast one in its portrayal of the cop's virginal girlfriend, played by--what a name-- Ruby Dahl. It was so clear to Rune that the poor thing was lusting. You'd never know it from her lines ("Oh, I can't explain my feelings, Roy. I just worry about you so. There's so much ... evil out there.") But if her dresses and sweaters were high-necked, Ruby's bosom was sharp and beneath the tame dialogue you knew she had the hots for Roy. She was the character that got the long camera shot when the judge announced that her fiance was going to prison. She was the one Rune cried for.

At two A.M. Sandra threw a shoe at them and Rune shut off the VCR and the TV.

"Not bad once," Richard said. "Why'd we have to sit through it twice?" He himself had given up his own quest for the evening and had kept his hands off her for the past several hours.

"Because I didn't take notes the first time." She rewound the tape, the bootleg copy she'd made for Robert Kelly. She looked at the scrawl of notes she'd written on the back of a flier for a health club.

Richard stretched and went into some weird yoga position, like a push-up with his pelvis pressed into the floor, his head back at a crazy angle, staring at the stars above them. "Okay, I slept through most of it the second time, I have to be honest. Were you joking about the killer?"

"The movie is why that customer I told you about is dead."

"He saw it three times. He couldn't take it anymore. He killed himself."

"Don't joke." She was whispering and he missed the flare in her voice.

She pulled her bag toward her and handed him the clipping she'd found in Kelly's apartment. He looked at it but put it down before he could have read more than a couple of paragraphs. He closed his eyes. She frowned and took the yellow, brittle paper.

"What it is," she explained, "the movie was a true story. There really was a cop in the thirties who stole some robbery money and hid it. He denied the whole thing and nobody ever found the million dollars. He got out of Sing Sing and got gunned down a few days later. And supposedly he never had a chance to collect the money. It's just the way it happened in the film."

Richard yawned.

Rune, on her knees, crouched like a geisha, holding the clipping. "I think what happened was Mr. Kelly bought an old book at a secondhand store on St. Marks.... You know the book vendors near Cooper Union? There was this clipping in it. He read it--I think he was interested in New York history--so he got a kick out of it but didn't think too much about it. Then what happens?"

"What?"

"Then," she said, "last month he's walking past Washington Square Video and sees the poster for the film. He rents it, he watches it. And he gets the bug. You know what I mean? The bug." She waited. Richard seemed to be listening. She said, "That feeling that gets to you when you know there's something out there. But you don't know what. But you have to find out what the mystery is."

"Like you. You're mysterious."

She felt a trill of pleasure. "That's what my name means, you know."

"Rune? I thought a rune was a letter."

"It is. But it also means 'mystery' in Celtic."