Death of a Blue Movie Star

tip but she promised to get some footage of him to use for atmosphere if she ever needed to.
    Rune checked into the small hotel just off Lincoln Park. The room overlooked the lake and she sat looking at it for a while.
    The bathroom was fantastic—enough towels so she could dry every limb with a different one. Enough mirrors so that she found she had a birthmark in the small of her back that she’d never known she had. Rune used the tiny scented cake of soap to wash her face, then the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner. That was a real treat; at home she used an old bar of Ivory for everything, including dishes. She stole the complimentary shower cap. After the shower Rune put on her one dress—a blue silk number her mother had sent her four years ago (but since she’d only worn it three times she figured it still qualified as new).
    She looked at herself in the full-length mirror.
    Me, in a dress, staying in a hotel that overlooks a beautiful lake with rocking, blue-green waves, in a city that burned down and has come back from the ashes …
    Rune then turned on the desk lamp and took out her makeup kit. She began to do something she hadn’t done for almost a year—put on nail polish. A dark red. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d picked this shade, but it seemed sophisticated, cultured—the color you’d want to wear if you were going to the theater.

     
    “That’s where John Dillinger bought the big one,” a square-jawed, sandy-haired young man told her. She was eating a hamburger in a half-deserted folk music club. He’d leaned along the bar and pointed to the old Biograph movie house across the street.
    “He was betrayed by a woman in a red dress,” the man said, adding some flirt to his voice.
    But Rune scared the guy off when she asked with gleaming eyes if you could still see the bloodstains.
    The Haymarket Theater was in a small two-story Victorian building, on Lincoln Avenue, just north of Fullerton, up the street from the Biograph. She picked up her ticket at the box office and wandered into the small auditorium. She found her seat and thumbed through the program. At one minute after eight the lights went down and the curtain rose.
    Rune wasn’t sure what to think about the play. As much as she loved movies, she generally didn’t like plays very much. Just when you started to believe the painted sets and the funny way everyone talked and walked, the two hours were up, and you had to go back to reality. It could be very jarring.
    But this wasn’t bad at all. At least, unlike a lot of modern plays, it had a story you could follow. It was about a young woman—played by a pretty brunette actress named Rebecca Hanson—who kept postponing her romantic life because of her family. The major incident in the play was her decision to leave home at the age of thirty-two.
    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