Death of a Blue Movie Star

checks so she could come visit guys who watched her movies. She was one of the company’s big stars.”
    Rune watched the Circle Line
Dayliner
chugging along in the Hudson. “Hey, that’s my Viking ship. You gotta ride it sometime.”
    Crystal glanced quickly. “Danny doesn’t talk to me much about business stuff. He thinks I’m not real, you know, bright.” The glasses lifted. “I went to college.”
    “Did you?”
    “Community college. I was going to be a dental technician. And look what I’ve got now…. Everything I could want.”
    Rune said, “You won’t mention that I was …”
    Crystal took off the sunglasses and shook her head. “You still haven’t told me what you were looking for.”
    Rune couldn’t see past the blue lenses but she had an odd feeling that this was someone she could trust. “Could Danny’ve hurt Shelly?”
    “Killed her, you mean?”
    A hesitation. “That’s what I mean.”
    Her answer was as drowsy as the rest of her conversation. “I don’t know. Even if I did I wouldn’t, like, testify against him. You know what he’d do to me, I did that?”
    She knew something.
    A long moment passed as Crystal rubbed more sunscreen on. Finally she dropped the tube on the roof. “You were looking in the wrong place.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He’s not stupid.”
    “Traub?”
    “He’s not. He doesn’t keep the important things in his desk. He doesn’t keep important papers there, for instance.”
    “Why would I be interested in his papers?”
    “He keeps them where he keeps his stash. There’s a safe in the kitchen, under the sink. He doesn’t think I know the combination. But I figured it out. Want to know what it is?”
    “What?”
    “It’s forty right. Twenty-nine left. Back around to thirty-four. See, that’s his idea of a perfect woman. Her measurements. He tells us girls that all the time. The perfect woman.”
    “What’s in the safe?” Rune asked.
    “You know, I have to tan my back now. And when I do that I fall asleep. Good-bye.”
    “Thanks,” Rune said. But the woman didn’t respond.
    She hurried downstairs and found the safe. The combination worked. Inside were dozens of ounce bags of coke. Some crack too. But that didn’t interest Rune very much—she already knew about Traub’s likes.
    What interested her was the insurance policy.
    A thin binder from New York Accident & Indemnity. Rune opened it up. There were a lot of strange words, all capitalized, like
Double Indemnity
and
Key Man
and
Named Insured
and
Owner of the Policy
. She couldn’t figure out what they meant. But it didn’t take her long at all to figure out that the policy was on Shelly Lowe’s life and that because of her death Danny Traub was going to be $500,000 richer.

     
    Rune had called Sam Healy and asked him to meet her. She was going to tell him about Tucker and Traub. But before they could get together she got a phone call at L&R. And that was why she was now in a coffee shop on West Forty-sixth Street—Restaurant Row, in the heart of the Theater District.
    “I’m one of a very unelite corps,” the man said. “Theater people who’ve been betrayed, fired or assaulted by Michael Schmidt. I don’t know why you want to do a film about
him
. There’re so many decent people in the business.”
    “It’s not really about him.”
    “Good.” Franklin Becker poured another sugar into his coffee, stirred. He was a former casting director for Michael Schmidt. After she’d had her talk with the producer at the theater she’d approached the stagehand Schmidt had dressed down about dropping the load of lumber. She’d bought the poor man a cup of coffee and delicately extracted from him the names of several people who might be willing to dish on Schmidt. Becker was the first one who’d called her back.
    Rune explained, “It’s about Shelly Lowe.”
    “The actress who was killed in that bombing. And you know about her connection with Schmidt?”
    “Right.”
    Becker reminded her somewhat of Sam Healy. Tall, thinning hair. Unlike the cop’s stone face, though, Becker’s broke frequently into curls of emotion. Her impression too was that he wouldn’t have any wives in his past, only boyfriends.
    “What can you tell me about them—Shelly and Schmidt.”
    He laughed. “Well, I can tell you quite a story. What she did … it was astonishing. I’ve been casting on Broadway for almost twenty years but I’ve never seen anything like it.
    “We had a number of