They continued down the tunnel.
"This used to be a boiler room or storeroom," Nicole said, stepping through a doorway and clicking on a light switch. Fluorescent tubes flickered overhead, then burst into light. The two women squinted in the brilliance. It was a square room, twenty by twenty. The walls were the same stained, sloppy concrete and stone as the tunnel. Rings hung from the ceiling on chains. Stained leather vaulting horses sat in the corner and there was a complicated wooden rack covering one wall.
"A gym?" Rune asked. She walked over to a trapeze made of wood and chromed steel. "I keep thinking I should work out but I don't really feel motivated. I think basically exercise should have a purpose-like running from somebody who wants to beat the hell out of you."
"This isn't a workout room, Rune," Nicole said softly.
"No?"
The actress walked to a tall, battered metal locker and opened it. Took a long, thin stick from it. It looked like the sort of pointer a teacher would use.
"See, in the movies I make sometimes we do a little fake S and M. We take a cat-o'-nine-tails made out of yarn or a riding crop that's wrapped in foam rubber. Some guys get off watching girls in leather bras and garters and black stockings making men lick their high heels. But that's all silly stuff. Somebody really into S and M'd take a tape like that back and ask for a refund. Real S and M uses things like this."
Nicole whipped the thin stick down onto a vault. It whistled and bounced with a slap like a gunshot. Rune blinked.
" Hickory," Nicole said. "Doesn't look bad, but it raises welts. It'll break the skin. You could kill somebody with this if you hit them enough times. I've heard about it happening."
"And you're telling me that Danny's into that?"
"I came down here one time and saw him making one of those flicks. He sells them privately. I don't think the regular tapes Lame Duck makes do it for him anymore. He needs something like this to get it up."
"What was he doing?"
"It was terrible. He was beating this girl and using needles-I mean, they're sterile and everything but, still, Jesus. And what happened was she started begging him to stop. But he just went crazier when he heard that. He was, like, totally out of control. I think he wanted to kill her. She passed out and a couple assistants grabbed Danny and took the girl to the hospital. She was going to go to the cops but he paid her off."
Nicole looked around the room. "So you like asked if he'd kill Shelly? I don't know. But I can tell you he likes to hurt people."
Rune picked up a thin chain with sharp alligator clips on each end. The clips were crusted with blood. She set them down.
Nicole shut off the lights, and they walked down the corridor to the stairs.
Which is when Rune heard the noise.
She whispered, "There, what was that?"
Nicole paused on the second step. "What?"
"I heard something, back there. Are there other rooms like that?"
"A couple of them. In the back. But they were dark, remember? We didn't see any lights."
They waited a moment.
"Nothing." Nicole was halfway up the stairs before Rune put her foot on the lower step. Then she heard it again, the noise.
No, she decided, it was actually two noises. One was similar to what she'd heard before: the ominous swishing of the hickory stick as it swung down on the leather bench.
The second was maybe just the sound of air escaping from a pipe or steam or distant traffic.
Or maybe it was what Rune thought it sounded like- the sound of a man's restrained laugh.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The watering can leaked but aside from that, Rune decided, it was a pretty good idea.
She rang the bell at Danny Traub's town house and wasn't surprised to find a stunning brunette in a silk teddy opening the door. She had breasts so high and jutting that Rune could have walked underneath them.
Bimbos from the Amazon… Lord help us.
Rune walked past her. The woman blinked and stepped aside.
"Sorry we couldn't make it yesterday. Had a load ol rhododendraniums to deliver to an office in Midtown, one of Trump's buildings, and the whole crew was busy."
"You mean rhododendrons?"
Rune nodded. "Yeah."
She'd have to be careful. A bimbo with some intelligence.
"Careful," the woman said. "Your can leaks. You don't want to, you know, hurt the wood."
"Got it." Rune started to work, watering Traub's plants and trimming the leaves with a pair of scissors. She carefully stuffed them into her pocket. The green jacket she wore had saidmobil on it when she'd bought the thing at a secondhand store. But she'd cut the logo off and replaced it with a U.S. Department of Forestry patch.
She'd called Lame Duck and the studio receptionist had reported that Traub would be on the set for a couple of hours and couldn't be disturbed. Her only concern had been running into the woman who'd brought them the martinis the other day.
Well, it was a risk coming here. But what in life isn't?
Traub's only guest, however, appeared to be this brunette basketball player.
The woman didn't seem too suspicious; she was moreinterested in what Rune was doing. Watching everything she did, which-as far as Rune knew-was to murder every plant she touched. She didn't know zip about gardening.
"Did it take you a long time to learn all that stuff? About plants?" the Amazon asked.
"Not too long."
"Oh," she said and watched Rune cut through the roots of an African violet.
Rune said, "You want to give themsome water but not too much. Andsome light. But-"
"Not too much of that either."
"Right."
The woman nodded and recorded that fact somewhere beneath her shiny, henna-enriched mass of hair.
"Never cut too many leaves off. And always make sure you use the proper type of scissors. That is extremely important. Sharp ones."
A nod; the woman's mental computer disk whirred.
"You make a living doing that?"
Rune said, "You'd be surprised."
"Is it hard to learn?"
"You need some talent but if you work hard…"
"I'm an actress," Amazon said, then did a line of cocaine and sat down in front of the TV to watch a soap opera.
Ten minutes later Rune had defoliated half of Traub's plants and had worked her way upstairs into his office.
It was empty. She looked up and down the corridor and saw nobody. She stepped inside and swung the door shut. There was no file cabinet inside but Traub did have a big desk and it wasn't locked.
Inside she found bills, catalogs from glitzy gadget companies, a dildo missing its batteries, dozens of German S & M photo magazines, roach clips and parts of water pipes, matchbooks, pens, casino chips. Nothing that could help her-
"Want another martini?" the voice asked, coldly.
Rune froze, then turned slowly. The blonde, the same woman who had served her and Traub the other day-the one she'd been hoping she didn't run into-stood in the doorway.
Well, it was a risk coming here…
The woman walked sullenly past her and pulled open another drawer. It held maybe a thousand in crumpled tens and twenties. "Help yourself." She turned and walked out of the office.
Rune closed the drawer. "Wait, can I talk to you?"
The blonde kept walking. When Rune caught up to her in the corridor she said, "I'm Crystal. You're…?"
"Rune."
"You want to get into films or just robbing my boyfriend?"
"Is he really your boyfriend?"
She didn't answer.
Crystal led the way to the roof. Outside, she took off her bathrobe and bikini top and stretched out on a lawn recliner covered with thick pink towels. She rubbed aloe vera sunscreen on her chest and arms and legs and lay back, closing her eyes.