Death of a Blue Movie Star

thinking.
    One of the officers glanced up at Tucker’s medals. “You in the service, sir?”
    “I was in the Rangers.”
    “You ever do demolition?”
    He shrugged. “We all knew how to use bangalore torpedoes, grenades. But that was forty years ago…. Are you suggesting that I had anything to do with those bombs?”
    “Nosir. We’re just looking into what happened to Ms. Lowe.”
    Tucker looked perplexed, confused, and asked them about the Sword of Jesus.
    They continued to be evasive.
    But it was more than evasion. They were grasping at straws and even then they came away holding nothing at all. He wondered how on earth they had come to think he might be the killer. He supposed that Shelly had written his name in a Day-Timer or a wall calendar. Maybe she kept a diary—he told all of his students to keep one—and she’d written about one of their lessons. Maybe about one of their fights.
    That could have brought them here.
    But as he thought about Shelly, his mind wandered, and with his strong will and talents at concentration he brought his attention back to the policemen.
    “She was a fascinating person, Officer,” Tucker explained, with the sorrow and reverence one should have in his voice when speaking of a fascinating person who had just died. “I hope you’re close to catching these people. I can’t condone her career—you know how she made her living, I suppose—but violence like this.” He closed his eyes and shuddered. “Inexcusable. It makes us all barbarians.”
    Tucker was a good actor. But they didn’t buy it. They looked at him blankly, as if he hadn’t said a word. Then one officer said, “I understand you write plays too, sir. Is that correct?”
    He believed his heart stopped beating for a moment. “I’ve done just about everything there is to do in the theater. I started out as a—”
    “But about the writing. You do write plays?”
    “Yes.”
    “And Ms. Lowe did too. Isn’t that correct?”
    “She may have.”
    “But she was your student. Isn’t that something you’d talk about with her?”
    “I think she did, yes. We were more concerned with acting than writing in our—”
    “But let’s stick with the writing for a minute. Do you have in your possession any plays that she wrote?”
    “No,” Tucker answered, managing to keep his voice rock-firm.
    “Can you account for your whereabouts the night Ms. Lowe was killed? At around eight p.m.?”
    “I was attending a play.”
    “So I guess there’d be witnesses.”
    “About fifteen hundred of them. Do you want me to give you some names?” Tucker asked.
    “That won’t be necessary.”
    The other cop added, “Not at this time.”
    “You mind if we look around the office?”
    “Yes, I do. You’ll have to get a warrant for that.”
    “You’re not cooperating?”
    “I have been cooperating. But if you want to search my office you’ll have to get a warrant. Simple as that.”
    This didn’t evoke any emotion at all in their faces. “Okay. Thank you for your time.”
    When they were gone Tucker stood at his window for five minutes—making sure they’d left the building. He turned back to his desk and with unsteady hands found the script for
Delivered Flowers
. He put this into his battered briefcase. He then began looking through the manuscripts on his credenza. Throwing the ones Shelly had written into the briefcase too.
    But wait….
    One was missing. He searched again. No, it wasn’t there. He was sure he’d left it there. Jesus … What had happened to it?
    Then he looked up and saw the glass door to his office, the replacement for the one that was broken the other day in that abortive robbery. He’d
thought
nothing had been stolen in the break-in.
    Tucker sat down slowly in his chair.

     
    The House O’ Leather filming had been arduous.
    Larry had taken Rune off catering detail for the time being and actually let her operate the camera during one session.
    It had been a long shoot. Daughter had needed eighteen takes before she could get two lines of dialogue in the can. But Rune didn’t care—the camera was a real Arriflex 35, a beautiful piece of precision machinery, and feeling the mechanism whir beneath her fingers made up for a lot of the recent grief she’d been put through at the company.
    Mr. Wallet—she just
couldn’t
remember his name—had turned out to be not so bad. He thanked Rune whenever she brought him something to eat or drink and, on a break, they’d shared a few words