"I thought I saw you in the audience," she said. "Well, I guess we better have a little talk."
CHAPTER THIRTY
The two women walked down Lincoln Avenue past the closed shops and mostly empty bars to the broad intersection at Halsted and Fullerton, then they turned east.
In front of them the street and apartment lights disappeared into an expanse of blackness. Rune wondered if that void was the lake or the park or the sky.
She glanced at Shelly, who was wearing blue jeans, a silk blouse and Reeboks.
"You don't quite look the same. Close, though."
"A little plastic surgery. Eyes and nose. Always wanted it bobbed."
"Arthur Tucker knew all along, didn't he?" Rune asked.
"It was his idea, in a way. About six months ago he found out about my movie career-of course, I didn't exactly keep it a secret. We had this terrible fight."
"I met him. He doesn't like pornography very much."
"No, but it wasn't the morality of it. He thought making the movies-what's the word?-diminished me. That's what he said. That it was holding me back from being great. It dulled me creatively. Like drinking or drugs. I thought about it. He was right. I told him, though, I couldn't afford just to quit cold. I wasn't used to being poor. I said I'd have to be crazy to quit what I'm doing. Crazy, or dead.
"He said, 'So, die.' Well, I thought about disappearing the way Gauguin did. But every city that was big enough to have good theater would also have a porn market; there was a risk I'd be recognized. Unless…" She smiled. "Unless I was actually dead. A week later, that religious group set off the first bomb in the theater. The news report said some bodies had been unidentified because the blast was so bad. I got into fantasizing about what if someone had mistaken that body for me. I could go to San Francisco, L.A., even London…
"I began to obsess over the idea. It became a consuming thought. Then I decided it might actually work."
"You got the bomb from Tommy's army buddy? In Monterey? The one who was court-martialed with him?"
Shelly cocked a single eyebrow. It was hard to see her as a brunette. Blonde had definitely been her color. "How did you know that?" she asked.
"Connections."
"He sells black-market munitions. He'd been a demolition expert. I paid him to make me a bomb. He explained to me how it worked."
"Then you waited. For someone like me. A witness."
She didn't speak for a moment. The park was ahead of them, off to their left; couples were walking through the trim grass and oaks and maple trees. "Then I waited," she said softly. "I needed someone to see me in the room where the explosion was."
"You tried to get me to tape it. I remember you asking that. Then it went off. Only you were gone and the body that Andy Llewellyn'd gotten for you was next to the phone."
Shelly smiled, and Rune thought it was a smile of admiration. "You know about him? You found that out too?"
"I saw his name on your calendar. Then I saw a story in the paper the other day about a murder. It mentioned that he was a medical examiner. I figured he'd be a good source for a body."
After a moment, Shelly said, "The body… I remembered this guy-Andy-who'd picked me up at a bar one time. He was really funny, a nice guy-for someone who does autopsies all day. He was also making a nice low salary, so he was happy to take thirty thousand cash to get me a body and arrange to do the autopsy and fake the dentals-to identify the corpse as me. They aren't all that hard to come up with, did you know? Dozens of unidentified people die in the city every year."
She shook her head. "That night I was on some kind of automatic pilot. The body was in the room at Lame Duck where Andy and I had put it that evening, before I came over to your place for the taping session. The bomb was in the telephone. You were outside. I called to you, then went into the back of the studio and pressed a couple of buttons on this radio transmitter. The bomb went off.
"In my bag I had what was left of my savings, in cash, an original-edition Moliere play, a ring of my mother's, some jewelry. That was it. All my credit cards, driver's license, Citibank cash card letters, were in my purse in the room at Lame Duck."
"Aren't you afraid somebody here will recognize you?"
"Yes, of course. But Chicago's different from New York. There are only a couple adult theaters here, a few adult bookstores. No Shelly Lowe posters, like you see in Times Square. No Shelly Lowe tapes in the windows of the bookstores. And I had the surgery."
"And dyed your hair."
"No, this is my natural color." Shelly turned to her. "Besides, you're talking to me now, a few feet away-what do you think? Do I seem like the same person you interviewed on your houseboat?"
No, she didn't. She didn't at all. The eyes-the blue was there but they weren't laser beams any longer. The way she carried herself, her voice, her smile. She seemed older and younger at the same time.
Rune said, "I remember when I was taping you, you started out being so tough and, I don't know, controlled."
"Shelly Lowe was a ballbuster."
"But you slipped. Toward the end you became someone else."
"I know. That's why…" She looked away. They started walking again, and Rune grinned.
"That's why you broke into my houseboat and stole the tape. It gave away too much."
"I'm sorry."
"You know, we thought Tommy was the killer." "I heard about it. About Nicole… That was so sad." Her voice faded. "Danny and Ralph Gutman and all the others-they were just sleazy. But Tommy was frightening. That's why I left him. It was those films of his. He started doing real S & M films. I left him after that. I guess when he found he couldn't get off on just pain alone he started doing snuff films. I don't know."
They walked for a few minutes in silence. Shelly laughed sadly, then said, "How you tracked me down, I'll never understand. Here in Chicago, I mean."
"It was your play. Delivered Flowers. I saw it on Arthur Tucker's desk. He'd crossed out your name and written his in. I thought… Well, I thought he'd killed you-to steal your play. He really had me fooled."
"He's an acting coach, remember. And one of the best actors you'll ever meet."
"He gets an Oscar for that performance," Rune said. "I remembered the name of the theater. The Haymarket. It was written on the cover of the play. I called the theater and asked what was playing. They saidDelivered Flowers."
Shelly said, "That was his idea, the play. He said that we'd pretend he wrote it. A play by Arthur Tucker would be a lot more likely to be produced than one by Becky Hanson. He sends me the royalties."
"None to the AIDS Coalition?"
"No. Should he?"
Rune laughed and said, "Probably he should. But things've changed since we made our deal." Thinking: Damn, that man was a good actor.
"Arthur got the company here to produce it and arranged for me to get the lead… I thought about it afterward. It was very strange. Here, I'd had the chance to direct my own death. My God, what an opportunity for an actress. Think of it all-a chance to create a character. In the ultimate sense. Create a whole new person."
They walked along Clark Street for a few minutes until they came to a Victorian brownstone. Shelly took her keys out of her purse.
Rune said, "I don't know a whole lot about plays, but I liked it. I didn't, you know, understand everything, but usually, if I don't understand stuff all the way, that means it's pretty good."
"The reviewers like it. They're talking of taking a road company to New York. It'll hurt like hell but I won't be able to go with them. Not now. Not for a few years. That's my plan, and I'll have to stick to it. Let Shelly rest in peace for a while."
"You happy here?" Rune asked.
She nodded her head upward. "I'm nearly broke, living in a third-floor walk-up. I pawned my last diamond bracelet last month because I needed the cash." Shelly shrugged, then grinned. "But the acting, what I'm doing? Yeah, I'm happy."