Death of a Blue Movie Star

Death of a Blue Movie Star

Death of a Blue Movie Star

DEATH

OF A

BLUE MOVIE

Death of a Blue Movie Star

STAR

Jeffery Deaver

For Wiz, Chris, Charlotte and Isabel

I call for a theater in which

the actors are like victims burning at the stake,

a signaling through the flames.

—Antonin Artaud

Death of a Blue Movie Star

CHAPTER ONE

Rune had walked past the movie theater and was three blocks away when the bomb went off.

No way was it construction-site dynamite — she knew that from living for several years in urban-renewing Manhattan. The noise was way loud — a huge, painful bang like a falling boiler. The turbulent black smoke and distant screams left no doubt.

Then sirens, shouts, running crowds. She looked but couldn't see much from where she stood.

Rune started toward it but then stopped, glanced at a watch — of the three on her wrist, it was the only one that worked. She was already late getting back to the studio — was due a half hour ago. Thinking: Hell, if I'm going to get yelled at anyway why not come back with a good story to take the sting out of it.

Yes, no?

Go for it. She walked south to see the carnage.

The blast itself wasn't all that big. It didn't crater the floor and the only windows it took out were the theater's and the plate glass in the bar one address up. No, it was the fire was the nasty part. Wads of flaming upholstery had apparently arced like those tracer bullets in war movies and had ignited wallpaper and carpeting and patrons' hair and all the recesses of the theater the owner'd probably been meaning to get up to code for ten years but just hadn't. By the time Rune got there the flames had done their job and the Velvet Venus Theater (XXX Only, The Best Projection In Town) was no more.

Eighth Avenue was in chaos, closed off completely between Forty-second and Forty-sixth Streets. Diminutive Rune, thin and just over five feet, easily worked her way to the front of the spectators. The homeless people and hookers and three-card monte players and kids were having a great time watching the slick choreography of the men and women from the dozen or so fire trucks on the scene. When the roof of the theater went and sparks cascaded over the street the crowd exhaled approval as if they were watching the Macy's fireworks over the East River.

The NYFD crews were good and after twenty minutes the fires were “knocked down,” as she heard one fireman say, and the dramatic stuff was over. The theater, a bar, a deli and peep show had been destroyed.

Then the crowd's murmuring disappeared and everyone watched in solemn quiet when the medics brought out the bodies. Or what was left of them.