Rune couldn't see past the blue lenses but she had an odd feeling that this was someone she could trust. “Could Danny've hurt Shelly?”

“Killed her, you mean?”

A hesitation. “That's what I mean.”

Her answer was as drowsy as the rest of her conversation. “I don't know. Even if I did I wouldn't, like, testify against him. You know what he'd do to me, I did that?”

She knew something.

A long moment passed as Crystal rubbed more sunscreen on. Finally she dropped the tube on the roof. “You were looking in the wrong place.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's not stupid.”

“Traub?”

“He's not. He doesn't keep the important things in his desk. He doesn't keep important papers there, for instance.”

“Why would I be interested in his papers?”

“He keeps them where he keeps his stash. There's a safe in the kitchen, under the sink. He doesn't think I know the combination. But I figured it out. Want to know what it is?”

“What?”

“It's forty right. Twenty-nine left. Back around to thirty-four. See, that's his idea of a perfect woman. Her measurements. He tells us girls that all the time. The perfect woman.”

“What's in the safe?” Rune asked.

“You know, I have to tan my back now. And when I do that I fall asleep. Good-bye.”

“Thanks,” Rune said. But the woman didn't respond.

She hurried downstairs and found the safe. The combination worked. Inside were dozens of ounce bags of coke. Some crack too. But that didn't interest Rune very much — she already knew about Traub's likes.

What interested her was the insurance policy.

A thin binder from New York Accident & Indemnity. Rune opened it up. There were a lot of strange words, all capitalized, like Double Indemnity and Key Man and Named Insured and Owner of the Policy. She couldn't figure out what they meant. But it didn't take her long at all to figure out that the policy was on Shelly Lowe's life and that because of her death Danny Traub was going to be $500,000 richer.

Rune had called Sam Healy and asked him to meet her. She was going to tell him about Tucker and Traub. But before they could get together she got a phone call at L&R. And that was why she was now in a coffee shop on West Forty-sixth Street — Restaurant Row, in the heart of the Theater District.

“I'm one of a very unelite corps,” the man said. “Theater people who've been betrayed, fired or assaulted by Michael Schmidt. I don't know why you want to do a film about him. There're so many decent people in the business.”

“It's not really about him.”