"Murder?"
"What do you think, Nicole? Was there anybody that would've wanted Shelly dead?"
Rune could sense the gears turning beneath the teased, sprayed hair that glittered with tiny silver flecks, a living Hallmark decoration.
Nicole shook her head.
"Was she going out with anybody?"
"Nobody serious. The thing is, in this business, it's real-what's the word?-incestuous, you know? You can't just meet some guy at a party like anybody else. Sooner or later he's gonna ask what you do for a living. Nowadays, with AIDS and Hep B and everything, that's a way for a girl to get dropped real fast. So what happens is, you tend to just hang out a lot with other people in the business.
Date a lot. Maybe move in with a guy and finally get married. But Shelly didn't do that. There was one guy she was seeing recently. Andy… somebody. A funny last name. 1 don't remember. He was never over to the apartment. It seemed pretty casual."
"Could you find out his name?"
Nicole walked into the kitchen and looked at the wall calendar. She traced a pencil-written note with her finger; it made a sad sweep as it followed Shelly's writing.
"Andy Llewellyn. Fourl' s in his name. That's why I thought it was weird."
Rune wrote down the name, then looked over the calendar. She pointed. "Who's that?"A. Tucker was penned in. His name appeared almost every Wednesday going back for months. "Doctor?"
Nicole blew her red nose with a paper towel. "That was her acting coach."
"Acting coach?"
"The movies we did, they paid the rent. But she loved real plays most of all. It was kind of a hobby of hers. Going to auditions. Doing small parts. But she never got any big roles. As soon as they found out what she did for a living it was, Don't call us, we'll call you. Come here…" Nicole motioned Rune back into the living room and over to the bookcases. Her neck crooked sideways, Rune read some of the titles. They were all about acting. Balinese theater, Stanislavsky, Shakespeare, dialects, playwriting, history of theater. Nicole's hand strayed to a book. The astonishingly red nails tapped the spine. "That was the only time Shelly was happy. When she was rehearsing or reading about the theater."
"Yeah," Rune said, remembering something that Shelly'd told her. "She said she had some real parts. She made a little money at it." Rune pulled a book off the shelf. It was written by someone named Antonin Artaud. The Theater and Its Double. It was dog-eared and battered.
A lot of it was underlined. One chapter had an asterisk next to it. It was headed, "The Theater of Cruelty."
"Sometimes she'd take time off and do summer stock around the country. She said that regional theater was where most of the creative playwrights were being showcased. It was all very brainy stuff. I tried to read some of the scripts. Gosh, I tell you, I can follow lines like, 'And then they take their clothes off and fuck.'" Nicole laughed. "But this stuff Shelly was interested in was way, way beyond me."
Rune put the book back on the shelf. She jotted Tucker's name next to Andy Llewellyn's.
"Shelly said what made her decide to do the film was that she had a fight with somebody she worked with. You know who that was?"
Nicole paused. "No."
Rune had seen Nicole inLusty Cousins. She was a bad actress then and she was a bad actress now.
"Come on, Nicole."
"Well, don't make too much out of it-"
"I won't."
"It's just, I don't want to get anybody in trouble."
"Tell me. Who?"
"Guy who runs the company."
"Lame Duck?" Rune asked.
"Yeah. Danny Traub. But him and Shelly fought all the time. They have since she's been working for them. A couple of years."
"What do they fight about?"
"Everything. Danny's, like, your nightmare boss."
Into the notebook. "Okay. Anybody else?"
"Nobody she worked with."
"But maybe somebody she didn't?"
"Well, there's this guy… Tommy Savorne. He was her ex."
"Husband?"
"Boyfriend. They lived together in California for a couple years."
"He still lives there?"
"He does, yeah. Only he's been in town for the past couple weeks. But I know he didn't have anything to do with the bomb. He's the sweetest guy you'd ever want to meet. He looks kind of like John Denver."
"What happened with them? Did they break up because of her business?"
"She didn't talk about Tommy much. He used to make porn. Did a ton of drugs too. Hey, who doesn't, right? But then he cleaned up his act. Got out of the business, dried out at some fancy clinic like Betty Ford, did the twelve steps or something. Then he started doing legit videos-exercise tapes, something like that. I think Shelly resented that he went legit. Kind of a slap at her. I think he kept needling her to leave the business, but she couldn't afford to. Finally she left him. I don't know why she wouldn't go back. He's cute. And he makes good money."
"And they were fighting?"
"Oh, not recently. They didn't have much contact. But they used to fight a lot. I heard her on the phone sometimes. He kept wanting to get back together and she kept saving she couldn't. One ofthose conversations-ex-boyfriend thing. You know, you've had those a hundred times."
Rune, whose romantic life had been nonexistent since Richard had left-and pretty damn bleak before him too-nodded with phony female conspiracy. "Hundreds, thousands."
"But that was months ago," Nicole added. "I'm sure he couldn't have hurt her. I see him from time to time. He's really sweet. And they were good friends. Seeing them together-there's no way he could look at Shelly and hurt a hair on her head."
"Why don't you tell me where he's staying anyway."
Hearing in her memory Sam Healy's voice: I've been in ordnance disposal for fifteen years. The thing about explosives is that they're not like guns. You don't have to look the person in the eyes when you kill them. You don't have to be anywhere near.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The hotel overlooked Gramercy Park, that trim private garden bordered in wrought iron at the end of Lexington Avenue.
The lobby of the place was all red and gold, with flecked fleur-de-lis wallpaper. Dozens of layers of paint coated the woodwork and the carpet smelled sour-sweet. One of the two elevators was broken-permanently, it seemed.
It was quiet as Rune waited for the elevator to descend to the ground floor. A woman in her fifties, wearing a green-and-gold dress, her face a smooth curve of foundation makeup, watched Rune from under jutting glossy eyelashes. A middle-aged musician with dirty brown hair sat with his foot up on a battered Ovation guitar case and read the Post.
Tommy Savorne's room was on the fourteenth floor, which, it occurred to Rune, was really the thirteenth, because when they built hotels in the thirties and forties they didn't label the thirteenth floor. That had a certain appeal for her. She felt that superstition was something people who were unliteral tended to believe in. And being too literal was a major sin in her bible.
She found the door and knocked.
Chains and latches jangled and the heavy door swung open. A man stood there, sunburned and cute-and looking, yeah, a bit like John Denver. More like a cowboy at a dude ranch. His face was somber. He wore blue jeans and a work shirt. He wore one crew sock; the other dangled from his hand. His hair was shaggy and blond. He was thin.
"Hi, what can I do for you?"
"You're Tommy Savorne?"
He nodded.
"I'm Rune. I knew Shelly. Nicole said you were in town and I just wanted to come by and say I was real sorry about what happened."