Death of a Blue Movie Star

looked at the napkin. “Let’s do one at a time. No rush. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
    “See, I told you we’d make a great team.”
    “Team,” he was saying, only in a softer voice. He leaned toward her. His head tilted slightly. His eyes darted to where Adam had been just a moment before; the boy wasn’t visible. Quickly Healy bent closer to her. “You’re very pretty. You know that?”
    She didn’t know it at all. But it didn’t matter. She was perfectly happy to know that
he
felt that way. Rune found her eyes closing, her head tilting back, lifting up to meet his lips. He reached over and took her hand and she was surprised that his was shaking slightly.
    “Don’t do it,” Adam said, scaring the hell out of them both as he climbed on top of the bench from behind it, where he’d been stalking them. “You’ll scar me for life.”
    Healy jerked back.
    The boy grinned and motioned for Rune to help him chase pigeons. She squeezed Healy’s knee and ran into the park.

     
    “Where do I apply?”
    The receptionist on the fourth floor of the Lame Duck studio looked up at Rune, scanned her figure, and went back to her occult paperback. “We don’t need no secretaries.”
    “I want to be in films,” she said.
    “You know what kind of films we make here?”
    “I figured
The Erotic Adventures of Bunny Blue
isn’t an army training film,” Rune said.
    Today—after another phone call—Rune had found that Danny Traub was at home, entertaining some prospective actresses, if that verb worked with Traub. The woman who’d blown the whistle on the insurance policy had assured her that the producer would be busy for hours.
    The Lame Duck receptionist marked her place and looked up from underneath a sheen of brown eye makeup.
    Rune had decided she wasn’t as content as Sam Healy was to forget about the other two suspects. So she was going to find more evidence—either for or against Danny Traub and Michael Schmidt.
    The receptionist continued. “The thing is, the people they hire are a certain kind of person.”
    “Certain kind?”
    “A little, well …”
    “What?” Rune was frowning. The girl glanced at her chest.
    “More …”
    “Are you trying to tell me something?”
    “… voluptuous, like.”
    Rune’s eyes went wide. “Don’t you know about the
Constitution?
”
    The horror novel was a loss. The girl folded it over without marking her place. “Like the ship? That was a ship in the Civil War? What’s that got to do with—”
    Rune said, “You can’t discriminate against anyone just because they aren’t Dolly Parton.”
    “Dolly Parton?”
    “All I want to do is audition. If you don’t want me because I can’t act, okay. But you can’t deny me a chance to try out because I don’t have big boobs. That’s, like, a federal lawsuit.”
    “Federal?”
    There was a pause. The woman debated within herself, rifling pages of the paperback.
    Rune asked, “Can I have an application?”
    “They don’t have applications. All they do is, like, they look at a reel you bring in of yourself. Or else you go into the studio here and, you know, do it. They tape it and if they like it, they call you back. Let me see if there’s anybody around.”
    The girl stood up and walked into the back part of the office, swaying her independently connected hips. “Wait here.”
    She returned a minute later. “Go on back, the second office on the right.” She looked at her novel with disappointment, realizing she’d have to find her place again.
    The rooms were divided off with the same clumsily cut Sheetrock rectangles that she remembered from Nicole’s so-called dressing room. The walls had been recently painted but the surfaces were already scuffed and dirty. The posters and shades were from discount import stores, the sort where newlyweds and NYU students buy wicker, bamboo and plastic to furnish first apartments. There was no carpet.
    The Second Office on the Right contained more or less what she’d been expecting. A fat, bearded man in a T-shirt and black baggy slacks.
    He looked up and smiled in a curious way. It wasn’t lecherous, wasn’t provocative, wasn’t friendly. The odd thing about this smile was that the face it was etched into didn’t seem to understand he was looking at another human being.
    “I’m Gutman. Ralph Gutman. You’re who?”
    “Uh, Dawn.”
    “Yah. Dawn what?”
    “Dawn Felicidad.”
    “I like that. Are you, what? Hispanic or something?