Manhattan Is My Beat

going to the health club.”
    He sucked his gut in, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and pushed out the door.
    Isn’t she pretty, got great hair
…
    Rune stepped on the jealousy long enough to say to Stephanie, “Thanks. I don’t know what to say. I can’t really afford to get fired right now.”
    “Oh, I’ve been there.” Stephanie glanced at the door as Tony disappeared down the street. “So
he’s
really in a health club?”
    “You bet he is,” Rune whispered.
    Then said, “Burger King,” at the same time Stephanie said, “McDonald’s?” They burst into laughter.

     
    “You don’t want to get the straight and gay adult mixed up when you’re putting them back,” Rune was explaining.
    “Right. You don’t.” The woman
did
have incredible hair—long red-blond strands that tumbled over her shoulders the way hair seems to do only in shampoo commercials.
    “What’s your name again?” Rune now asked her. It started with an S. But she had a lot of problems with S names. Susan, Sally, Suzanne …
    “Stephanie.”
    Right. Rune stored it away in her brain and continued with the training session. “See, we don’t have covers on the porn so people have to rent them by the titles. With some it’s easy.
Soldier Boys, Cowboy Rubdown, Muscle Truckers
, you know? But some, you can’t tell. We had one guy rent
Big Blonds
, only it turns out that blondes with an E on the end is girl blondes and
without
the E is boy blonds. Did you know that? I didn’t. Anyway, he got boys with big dicks and he wanted girls with big boobs. He wasn’t happy. Hey, your hair
is
totally radical. Is that your real color?”
    “For now it is.” Stephanie examined Rune’s arm. “Love your bracelets.”
    “Yeah?” Rune shook her arm. They jingled.
    Stephanie said, “Someone wanted me to do a porn movie once. In L.A. This guy said he was a UCLA film grad. Came right up to me in a coffee shop—I was hanging, reading
Variety
—and asked me if I wanted to do skin flick.”
    “No kidding,” Rune said. Nobody’d ever asked her to do a porn film. She was wondering if she should feel insulted.
    Stephanie paused, looking at a poster for
Gaslight
. “Ingrid Bergman. She was beautiful.”
    “Even with short hair,” Rune said. “Like in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.” She ran her fingers over her head. Patted the strands down again. Thought about a wig. “The porn, did you do it?”
    “Naw. Just didn’t seem right.”
    “I’d be scared to death of, you know, catching something.”
    Stephanie shrugged. “Where’d you get them? The bracelets?”
    “Everywhere. I’ll be walking down the street and then there’s this feeling I get and it’s a bracelet calling me. Next store I come to, bang, there’s one in the window.”
    Stephanie looked at her skeptically.
    “It happens. I swear to God.”
    “Tony said you were slacking off.”
    “Every minute I spend not making his life easier is his definition of slacking off. What it is, this friend of mine got murdered. And I’m trying to find out what happened.”
    “No!”
    “Yeah.”
    Stephanie said, “I got carjacked in Hollywood. I was in a Honda. You wouldn’t think anybody’d kill somebody for a Honda. But I thought they were going to shoot me. I let ‘em take it. They just drove off. Stopped at a stop sign and signaled to make a right turn. Like nothing’d happened. Doesn’t it seem weird they’d kill you for a car? Or even just a few hundred dollars?”
    Or for a
million
dollars, Rune thought. Seeing in her mind’s eye Robert Kelly, lying back in his chair. The bullet holes in his chest. And the one in the TV.
    Stephanie added, “I took a self-defense course after that. But that doesn’t do you any good against a guy with a gun.”
    Rune pushed the sad thoughts from her mind and walked through the shelves, putting the tapes back, gesturing Stephanie after her.
    “You’ll learn stuff, working here. About human nature. That’s why I took the job. Of course I don’t exactly know what to do with the human nature I learn. But it’s still fun to watch people. I’m a voyeur, I think.”
    “What can you learn about people in a video store?”
    “How’s a for-instance? There’s this guy, cute, a stockbroker, always smelled like garlic but I flirted with him anyway. He rents all these Charles Bronson films, Chuck Norris, Schwarzenegger. Then he shows up here one night and he’s got this yuppie trendoid girl hanging on him like he’s a trapeze,