Manhattan Is My Beat

police?”
    “Police?” She laughed. “They don’t care.”
    “Why else?” He was looking at her closely now.
    “All right,” she admitted. “Because they’d keep the money…. I know it’s out there. I mean, it could be. What you said before … about the writer making it up. He must’ve researched the real crime, wouldn’t you think?”
    “I’d guess,” Richard responded.
    “I mean, isn’t that what you do for your novels? Research?”
    “Yeah, sure. Research. A lot of research.”
    Rune mused, “Maybe he knows something…. ‘Course he wrote the script fifty years ago. Think he’s still alive?”
    “Who knows?”
    “How could I find out?”
    He shrugged. “Why don’t you ask somebody at the film school at NYU or the New School?”
    It was a good idea. She kissed his ear. “See, you like quests as much as I do.”
    “I don’t think so. But I also have a feeling I can’t talk you out of this, can I?”
    “Nup. You never give up on a quest. Until you succeed or you …” Her voice trailed off, seeing once again the pale skin of Robert Kelly dotted with his own blood, the green car speeding toward her, Susan Edelman flying into the brick wall. “Well, until you succeed. That’s all there is to it.”
    She looked at Richard’s face, his eyes closed, lips parted slightly. She tried to decide which she liked better, his looking dreamy—he was real good at dreamy—or the intense paisley eyes gazing intensely back at her. Dreamy, she concluded. He wasn’t a warrior knight—not an Arthur or Cuchulain or Percival de Gales. No, he was more of a poet-knight. Or a philosopher-knight.
    She heard his breath, steady, slow. How nice, she thought, to feel the warm weight of somebody next to you in sleep. She wanted so badly to lie beside him, feeling him against her whole body.
    But instead of stretching out, she pulled off her Wicked Witch socks and aimed the remote control at the VCR, then watched the movie one more time until the scripty words
The End
splashed up on the screen.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    A karate flick was on the monitor.
    Oriental men in black silk trousers sailed through the air, fists hissing like jet planes. Every time somebody got hit, it sounded like a cracking board.
    One of the Chinese actors stepped toward a couple of rivals and spoke in a southern drawl. “Okay, you two, back outa here real slow and you won’t get hurt.”
    Rune leaned back on the stool in front of the register at Washington Square Video. Squinted at the monitor. “Hey, you hear that? That is completely wild! He sounds just like John Wayne.”
    Tony held his blue deli coffee cup and cigarette in one hand and flipped through the
Post
with the other. He looked up at the screen critically. “And he’s going to beat the shit out of those guys in ten seconds flat.”
    It took closer to sixty and while he was doing it Rune mused, “You think that’s easy? Dubbing, I mean. You think I could get a job doing that?”
    Tony asked, “Don’t tease me, Rune. You quitting? … Or you mean when you get fired?”
    Rune spun her bracelets. “They don’t have to memorize their lines, do they? They just sit in a studio and read the script. That’d be so cool—it’d be like being an actress without having to get up in front of people and memorize things.”
    Frankie Greek was combing out his shaggy hair with a pick. He rubbed the mustache he’d started a month ago; it looked like a faint smudge of dirt. He stared at the TV screen. “Shit, look at that! He kicked four guys at once.” He turned to Rune. “You know, I just found this out. A lot of music in movies, they do it afterward. They add it on.”
    “What, you thought they had a band on set?” Rune shut off the VCR. Tony looked at the TV. “Hey, what’re you doing?”
    “It stinks,” she said.
    “It doesn’t stink. It’s great.”
    “The acting’s ridiculous, the costumes are silly, there’s no story …”
    Frankie Greek said, “That’s what makes it so, like, you know …” The end of his sentence got away from him, as they often did. He prowled through the racks to find another film.
    Rune looked over the store: the stained gray industrial carpet, the black strings—left over from promotional cards—hanging down from the air-conditioning, the faded red-and-green holiday tinsel that was stuck to the walls with yellowing glue. “I was at a video store on the Upper East Side and it was a lot classier than here.”
    Tony looked around.