Death of a Blue Movie Star

like a diary. You know what I have written on the first page?”
    “‘I won’t grow up’?”
    “If I’d thought about it, yeah, it probably would say that. But what I wrote is: ‘Believe in what isn’t as if it were until it becomes.’”
    Crack
. A home run. The pitcher watched the ball sail toward the portable toilet a hundred feet from home plate.
    “Sam, this movie is important to me. I didn’t go to college. I worked in a video store. I did store-window design. I worked in restaurants. I’ve sold stuff on the streets. I don’t want to keep doing that forever.”
    He laughed. “You’ve got a few years’ worth of false starts ahead of you.”
    “At the film company they treat me like a kid…. Well, okay, sometimes I
act
like a kid. But I mean, they don’t think I’m capable of anything more. I know this film about Shelly is going to work. I can feel it.”
    “What you did back there, with Schmidt, that wasn’t bright.”
    “He was the last of my suspects. I thought he was the one.”
    “A suspect doesn’t call the cops to—”
    “I know. I was wrong…. It’s just that, well, I can’t point to anything in particular. I just had a, I don’t know …”
    “Hunch?”
    “Yeah. That somebody killed her. And it wasn’t this stupid Sword of Jesus.”
    “I believe in hunches too. But do us both a favor, forget about this movie of yours. Or just tell the story about a girl who got killed and let it go at that. Forget about trying to find the killer. Leave a little mystery in it. People like mystery.”
    “That’s what my name means. In Celtic.”
    “Your real name?”
    “Reality,” she said, “is highly overrated. No, I mean ‘Rune’.”
    He nodded and she couldn’t tell whether he was sad or angry with her or whether he was just being a silent cowboy.
    “I don’t think you’re going to see any more bombings,” Healy said. “The profile is they get tired after a while. Too risky to be a serial criminal nowadays. Forensics are too good. You’ll get nailed.”
    Rune was silent. Healy said, “I’ve got watch in a couple of minutes. I was thinking, you want, maybe you could stop by the Bomb Squad. See what it’s like.”
    “Really? Oh, yeah. But I’ve got to get to work now. Today’s the last shot for this stupid commercial.”
    Healy nodded. “I’ll be there all night.” He gave her directions to the 6th Precinct.

     
    Dominoes. All she could see was dominoes.
    “Come on, luv,” Larry was cajoling, “you get to be the one to knock ’em over.”
    Rune was still setting them up. “I thought you were going to hire another couple of P.A.’s for the shoot.”
    “You’re all the assistant we need for this one, luv. You can do it.” Rune was working from a piece of paper on which he’d drawn the pattern. She reluctantly admitted to herself that it was probably going to be a hell of a shot.
    “’Ow many we have?”
    “Four thousand, three hundred and twelve, Larry. I checked them all.”
    “Good for you.”
    Once, halfway through the assembly, two hours into the process, she set them off accidentally. The rows of rectangles clicked against one another with the sound of chips around a Las Vegas roulette wheel.
    Double shit …
    “I would’ve thought you’d’ve started from the other side,” Mary Jane contributed. “That way you probably wouldn’t’ve bumped into them as easily.”
    “Doing good,” Larry said quickly.
    “Is this art?” a fuming Rune asked him as she crawled over the twenty-foot sweep of gray seamless backdrop paper to set them up again.
    “Don’t start.”
    Finally, hours later, she got the little army of dominoes arranged and backed off the paper without breathing. She crawled to the first one and nodded to Larry.
    Rune glanced at the camera operator, a nerdish, bearded guy who sat in the seat of the Luma crane boom. It looked like earthmoving equipment. “Make sure you got film,” Rune said to him. “I’m not doing this again.”
    “Lights.” Larry liked playing director. The lighting man turned the lamps on. The set was suddenly bathed in oven-hot white light. “Roll.”
    “We’re rolling.”
    Then Larry nodded to Rune. She reached toward the first domino.
    The dominoes fell and clicked as they spread over the paper, the camera swept over the set like a carnival ride and Larry murmured with the preoccupation of a man who was getting paid two hundred thousand dollars for five days’ work.
    Click
. The last one fell.
    The