Death of a Blue Movie Star

coldly.
    Rune froze, then turned slowly. The blonde, the same woman who had served her and Traub the other day—the one she’d been hoping she didn’t run into—stood in the doorway.
    Well, it was a risk coming here
….
    “I—”
    The woman walked sullenly past her and pulled open another drawer. It held maybe a thousand in crumpled tens and twenties. “Help yourself.” She turned and walked out of the office.
    Rune closed the drawer. “Wait, can I talk to you?”
    The blonde kept walking. When Rune caught up to her in the corridor she said, “I’m Crystal. You’re …?”
    “Rune.”
    “You want to get into films or just robbing my boyfriend?”
    “Is he really your boyfriend?”
    She didn’t answer.
    Crystal led the way to the roof. Outside, she took off her bathrobe and bikini top and stretched out on a lawn recliner covered with thick pink towels. She rubbed aloe vera sunscreen on her chest and arms and legs and lay back, closing her eyes.
    Rune looked around. “Nifty place.”
    Crystal shrugged, wondering, it seemed, what was nifty about a gray sundeck. She said, “He’s not.” She pulled on sunglasses with dark blue lenses. Looked at Rune. “My boyfriend, I mean.” She didn’t speak for a moment, then she said, “Every once in a while you see these big cruise ships come down the river. I wonder where they’re going sometimes. Have you ever been on a cruise?”
    Rune said, “I took this neat cruise around the city once. The Circle Line. I pretended I was a Viking.”
    “A Viking. With the helmets?”
    “Right.”
    “I mean a real cruise.”
    “No.”
    “I never have either. I’d like to go sometime.”
    Rune said, “You have a wonderful figure.”
    “Thank you,” she said as if no one had ever told her. “You want some blow?”
    “No thanks.”
    Crystal’s head lolled toward the sun. Her arms draped over the edges of the recliner. Even her breathing was lethargic. “I’d like to live in the Caribbean, I think. I was in St. Bart’s once. And I’ve been to Club Med a couple times, Paradise Island. I met a guy, only he was married and was separated and after we got back to New York he went back to his wife. Funny, he had a kid and he didn’t even tell me about it. I saw him on the street. You don’t want to get into movies.”
    “I know I don’t.”
    “I could do exotic dancing—I don’t have to make films. But the thing is, with the dancing … You stand in a little room and guys look at you and, well, you know what they’re doing. It’s not really disgusting, it’s more … what’s the word? …” She searched for a while but couldn’t find it. She gave up. Put on more lotion. “What were you looking for upstairs?”
    “Did you know Shelly Lowe?”
    The head turned but where the eyes might be looking under the gunmetal-blue reflections Rune couldn’t tell. She saw only two identical, fish-eye images of herself. Crystal said, “I met her once or twice. I never worked with her.”
    “Did she and Danny get along?”
    Crystal eased onto her stomach. “Not too bad, not too good. He’s a, you know, asshole. Nobody gets along with Danny very much. Are you, like, a private detective or something?”
    “Just between you and me?”
    “Sure” was the response, so lazy that Rune believed her.
    “I’m doing a film about Shelly Lowe. She was a real actress, you know.”
    “We’re all real actresses,” Crystal said quickly as if she’d been conditioned to respond this way. But she didn’t sound defensive or angry.
    “I want to do a film about her career. She wasn’t happy. She didn’t like the business, you know.”
    “What business?”
    “Adult films.”
    Crystal seemed surprised. “Didn’t she? Why not? She could have anything she wanted. I make fifty a year cash for working two times a week. And Shelly could get twice that. Only …”
    “What?”
    “People’re scared now though. With this AIDS thing. I keep getting tested; everybody does. But you never know…. John Holmes died of AIDS. He said he slept with ten thousand women.” She rolled onto her back again, the glasses tilted toward the hot disk of a sun.
    Crystal finally continued. “She was good. Shelly was. We get a lot of fan letters. Some are kind of weird—like, men’ll mail us their underwear—but mostly it’s just, I love you, I think about you, I rent all your movies. I get asked for a lot of dates. Danny told me that Shelly used to get things like airline tickets and