Death of a Blue Movie Star

it’s all right there. You’ve got the beginning of life right in front of you….”
    Nicole, begging with her eyes, maybe screaming through the gag.
    Nicole, crying tears that sloughed off her makeup in brown and black stripes across her face.
    Nicole, closing her eyes, as Tommy walked forward with a knife.
    “… also religious. In the beginning God
created
… See, created. That’s a fucking wild coincidence, wouldn’t you say? God and the artist. And pornography brings it all together….”
    Nicole, dying.
    Rune surrendered to her sobbing.
    Savorne watched the tape with sad, hungry eyes. “I really loved Shelly,” he said in his slurred voice. “When she left me I died. I couldn’t believe that she’d actually gone. I didn’t know what to do. I’d wake up and there would be the whole day ahead of me without her, hours and hours without her. I didn’t know what to do. I was paralyzed. At first I hated her. Then I knew she was sick. She’d gone crazy. And I knew it wasn’t all her fault. No, it was other people too: people like Nicole. People like you. People who wanted to seduce her.”
    “I didn’t seduce her!”
    Rune’s words didn’t register. Tommy set up his camcorder, then he paused. “I’m tired. I’m so tired. It’s hard. People don’t understand how hard it is. It’s like working in a slaughterhouse, you know? I’ll bet those guys get tired of it sooner or later. But they can’t quit. They’ve got a job to do. That’s how I feel.”
    He switched the lights on. The sudden brilliance made Rune scream.
    “When they die,” he said softly, “part of me dies too. But nobody understands.”
    He looked at her and touched her face. Rune smelled the metallic scent of blood. Tommy said, “When you die, part of me will die. It’s what an artist has to go through…. There was one night …” He seemed to forget his train of thought. He sat down, his hand on the small camera, staring at the floor. Rune squirmed. The wire was thin but it didn’t give.
    He finally recalled his thought. “There was one night, we were living in Pacific Grove then. Not far from the beach. It was a weird night. We’d been doing okay with the movies, making some good money. I was directing then. We were watching a rough cut, Shelly and me, and what usually happened was she got turned on watching herself and we’d have a wild time. Only this time, something was wrong. I put my arms around her and she didn’t respond. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me in this eerie way. She looked like she’d seen her own death. It wasn’t long after that she left me.
    “I spent hours and hours thinking about it. Seeing her that way, the expression on her face …” He gazed at Rune, a sincere face, intense. A man talking about important things. “And I finally understood. About sex and death—that they’re really the same.”
    He was lost in a memory for a moment, then he focused on Rune, almost surprised to see her. He dug the vodka bottle out of his bag and took another hit. He smiled. “Let’s make a movie.”
    Tommy turned on the camera and focused it at Rune.
    The sweat from the heat of the lights ran down from his eye sockets and he made no attempt to wipe it away.
    Rune was sobbing.
    He caressed the knife. “I want to make love to you.”
    He stepped forward and rested the blade on Rune’s forearm.
    He pressed it in and cut a short stroke.
    She screamed again.
    Another cut, shorter. He looked at it carefully. He’d made a cross.
    “They like this,” he explained. “The customers. They like little details like this.”
    He lifted the knife to her throat.
    “I want to make love to you. I want to make love to—”
    The first shot was low and wide. It took out a lamp.
    Tommy was spinning, looking around, confused panic in his eyes.
    The second was closer. It snapped past his head, like a bee, and vanished through the window, somewhere into the dark plain of the Hudson.
    The third and fourth caught him in the shoulder and head, and he just dropped, collapsing, slumping from the waist, like a huge bag of grain dumped off a truck.
    Sam Healy, breathing hard, his service Smith & Wesson still pointed at the man’s head, walked up slowly. His gun hand was shaking. His face was pale.
    “Oh, Sam,” Rune said, sobbing. “Sam.”
    “You all right?”
    Tommy had fallen against Rune, his head resting on her foot. She was trying to pull away. She said, panicky, through her tears, “Get him