Death of a Blue Movie Star

houseboat from Fire Island she saw that it had been broken into. Nothing was missing, she thought at first, until she noticed that the script she had lifted from Arthur Tucker’s office was gone.
    She’d called him, threatened to call the police and tell them that he’d stolen a dead woman’s plays. The crotchety old man had told her, “Call away. It’s got your fingerprints on it and I’ve already got a police report filed about a break-in a week ago—just after you came to interview me. And I’m not very happy that you told half the world I was a suspect in the case. That’s slander.”
    Their compromise was that neither would press charges and that if he made any money from the plays, he’d donate a quarter of it to the New York AIDS Coalition.
    Then something odd happened.
    Larry—the Larry who was half of L&R—had appeared at the door of her houseboat.
    “No bloody phone. What good are you?”
    “Larry, I’ve had my abuse for the week.”
    “It’s a bleedin’ ‘ouseboat.”
    “Want a drink?”
    “Can’t stay. I came by to tell you, ’e’s an arse, Mr. House O’ Leather, what can I tell you?”
    “I still lost you the account, Larry. You can’t give me my job back.”
    He snorted an Australian laugh. “Well, luv, that wasn’t
ever
gonna ’appen. But truth is, there’s this guy called me, ’e’s got some ins at PBS and seems there’s this series on new documentary filmmakers they’re looking to do….”
    “Larry!”
    “All right, I recommended you. And they got a budget. Not much. Ten thousand per film. But you can’t bring it in under that you got no business being a film maker.”
    He wrote down the name. She got her arms most of the way around him and hugged him hard. “I love you.”
    “You fuck it up, I don’t know you. Oh, and don’t tell Bob. What ’e does is ’e ‘as this little doll and it’s got your name on it and every night ’e sticks pins—”
    “That’s a load of codswallop, Larry.”
    “Rune, that’s Brit, not Aussie. Work on your foreign languages some, right?”
    Five minutes after he’d left Rune was on the phone. The distributor had been pretty aloof and said, real noncommittally, to submit a proposal and they’d make their decision on funding.
    “Proposal? I’ve got rough footage in the can.”
    “You do?” He sounded more impressed than a film person ought to. “Everybody else has these one-page treatments.”
    Two days later, when she called, he told her he’d sold
Epitaph for a Blue Movie Star
to PBS. It was slotted for September, on a program about young film makers. A check for all her postproduction work would be sent shortly.
    Sam Healy emerged again and began spending more and more nights on the houseboat. He complained about the rocking motion for a while, though that was mostly for effect; Rune figured something inside of him felt it was better for the woman to move into his homestead, rather than the other way around.
    He saw Cheryl some, too. He told Rune about it—
Honesty, goddamn honesty
—but it seemed that their get-togethers were to discuss the sort of nitty-gritty details appropriate for people on the verge of divorce. Nonetheless, dear Cheryl still hadn’t filed papers and once or twice when Rune stayed over at his place he took calls late at night and talked for thirty, forty minutes. She couldn’t hear what he said but she sensed that it wasn’t Police Central he was talking to.
    Adam decided he liked Rune a lot and asked her advice on which rock groups were current and where to get good chic secondhand clothing. (“It’s all right, Sam. You don’t want him to be a geek, do you?”) The two of them went to a Mets game once after Healy’d bought tickets but couldn’t make it because of a travel alarm ticking away in a suitcase in a Port Authority locker. Rune and Adam had a great time; when somebody had tried to pick her up by telling her what a cute brother she had Adam had said, “Don’t talk about my mom that way.”
    They laughed about the guy’s reaction for a good portion of the trip home.
    Tonight was Sunday and Sam Healy had stayed the night. He was watching the ball game as Rune looked through the
Times
working up the courage to actually cook breakfast and wondering how risky it would be to make waffles. She noticed an article, read it, sat up suddenly.
    Healy looked at her.
    She pointed to the story. “That guy they found in the trunk of the car at La Guardia a couple of days