Another Thing to Fall (23 page)

For a moment, Tess almost liked Ben Marcus. But then she registered that was exactly what he wanted. That he had, in fact, fastened on the topic of Lloyd’s future to divert her from something he didn’t want to discuss. Selene, Greer, Flip? It was like the childhood game of hot and cold, and Tess had been very hot there for a second, or at least warm. Now under the table Ben’s feet were still, his hands calm.

“Ben?”

“Yes?”

“Last night, after we spoke, Selene and I had a little chat. She told me her relationship with you began three weeks ago.”

“Give or take. I didn’t write it down in my diary, draw a big heart around the day, but, yeah, give or take, that’s when it started.”

“Greer was already working as Flip’s assistant by then.”

He was a bright guy. He didn’t need for Tess to connect the dots for him, to point out that this meant much of what he said was bogus. He was so bright that, when caught in a lie, he didn’t rush in with more words, or try to explain himself.

“That sounds right,” he said. “You know what, you’re good at continuity issues. You’d be a good script supervisor, if you put your mind to it. See, that’s what I do — I help people. I’m lovable that way, but I wouldn’t want it getting around.”

He grabbed his cup, rising to his feet so quickly that the small table rocked and Tess had to rescue her own cup of coffee before it toppled. “See you around, Sam Spade. Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

As she left Starbucks, Tess once again had the sensation that an overstuffed sofa was following her down the sidewalk. Yes, there was Mrs. Blossom, trying to be inconspicuous on the south side of Baltimore Street. Tess couldn’t fault her clothing — a large, flowery dress was not particularly out of place in downtown Baltimore — but there was something about Mrs. Blossom that drew the eye, a delicacy of movement, not unlike the tutu’ed hippos in
Fantasia
. Caught, she gave a cheerful wave, and dashed across the street to join Tess. For a large woman, she moved pretty fast.

“You only had to do the surveillance exercise
once,
Mrs. Blossom,” Tess said.

“But I keep getting caught,” she panted out, a little breathless from her sprint through traffic. “Except the other night, but I lost you for part of the evening, so I didn’t think I should count that.”

“The other night?”

“Yes, when you were with Selene Waites. And then you came out of the bar with Derek Nichole. I like him.” She frowned. “Well, I liked him better, before he started doing movies with so much cursing. I don’t like cursing.”

“You — you followed me to New York?” Tess had been trying to do a walk-and-talk, hurrying toward her car — and a meter that was due to expire any moment — but this conversation was worth slowing down for, even if it meant a twenty-seven-dollar parking fine. “All the way in?”

“Yes, although it seemed kind of cheating because you weren’t driving, so you wouldn’t have been as alert. I didn’t go into the restaurant—”

Tess made a conscious effort not to smile at the thought of Mrs. Blossom trying to make her way into that achingly hip eatery. That would have been something to see. Then again, they might have mistaken her for the latest drag queen to play Edna Turnblad in Broadway’s version of
Hairspray
and welcomed her as a star.

“And, you know, it’s so hard to park in New York, I just kept circling. I know that’s not a good technique — and if you had been in there a long time, I could have run out of gas — but I decided to
commit,
like you told me. I got lucky, too. I had just turned on the block when I saw you come out.”

“Did you pay attention to the time? Did you see him pick me up?”

Mrs. Blossom fished through her purse, a bright purple bag the size of a small suitcase, and pulled out a memo pad. “It was about eleven-thirty when you went in, ten to midnight when you came out.” She looked up from the pad, her eyes sorrowful. “Miss Monaghan, you looked like you’d been
drinking
. That doesn’t seem very professional.” Mrs. Blossom consulted her memo pad again, all Joe Friday just-the-facts seriousness. “At twelve-ten A.M. — should I use military time?”

“No, you can use A.M. and P.M.” Tess didn’t want to bother with the math.

“At twelve-ten A.M., the Town Car arrived at a hotel.”

“Name of the hotel?”

“The SoHo Grand.”

That was the hotel where Selene had been seen drinking later, where Derek Nichole was staying.

“I found a parking place around the corner and went into the bar, off the hotel lobby. It was tricky, because the lobby is on the second floor, and I couldn’t be sure I would see you coming and going, but I figured if I sat next to the window, I’d be able to see you leave. I went up there and had a nonalcoholic beer. It cost ten dollars! And they were so rude, made me wait forever, and it was
loud
. I don’t know why people go to places like that. But I could see the lobby from where I sat, and pretty soon, Derek Nichole and Selene Waites showed up, and they were given one of the sofas, although the table said it was ‘reserved.’ She’s so pretty in person. And little. Is she as sweet as she looks?”

“Hmmmmm,” Tess said, trying to be diplomatic. “What did they do?”

“They came in and ordered drinks — a beer for him, a cocktail for her, although she kept drinking cranberry juice — and they were talking very low to each other, kind of serious. I tried to hear what they were saying, but I wasn’t close enough. And then the bar closed, so I went outside and got in my car, and waited until I saw the Town Car come back. That was about four A.M., and this time, it was Mr. Nichole who brought you out.”

It was oddly embarrassing to think about Mrs. Blossom watching her drugged body being hauled around New York like a sack of potatoes. True, it wasn’t her fault that she had been dosed with roofies — or ketamine or GBH — but it was still humiliating. Where had she been during the interval, in Derek Nichole’s hotel room? If the two had wanted privacy, hadn’t that put a crimp in their plans? Was Selene that desperate to drink that she had to knock Tess out in order to party hearty? Nothing really added up. She thought about the multiple gossip items, her text messages to Ben — what was Selene doing?

“Wait a minute, Mrs. Blossom — are you sure Selene was drinking cranberry juice? The gossip columns said she was drinking it with vodka and Red Bull.”

“Oh, she ordered a drink, but she had a bottle of Nantucket Nectar with her, and she drank from that. The waitperson tried to give her a hard time about bringing in an outside beverage, so she tucked her bottle under the table and ordered a drink, but she kept sneaking sips from the bottle under the table and barely touched her drink.” She snorted. “I don’t blame her. They probably charge fifteen dollars for a glass of cranberry juice!”

They had arrived at Tess’s parking spot, but she was too fascinated by Mrs. Blossom’s story to worry about the meter. The woman may have signed up for the class to give herself something to do on Monday nights, but she seemed to be a bit of a prodigy. A woman such as Mrs. Blossom, properly trained, could learn to be so visible as to be invisible.

“Look,” Mrs. Blossom said, pointing skyward.

They were at the corner of Charles and Baltimore streets, where the downtown outpost of Johns Hopkins ran an old-fashioned electronic news ribbon around the top of the building. The headlines were written by the staff of the
Beacon-Light,
and they were well known throughout Baltimore for their wordy obtuseness and not infrequent grammatical errors. But the message that had caught Mrs. Blossom’s eye was crystal clear to Tess: MAN WANTED IN TV SET MURDER KILLED BY POLICE IN STANDOFF.

Part of Tess’s mind couldn’t help deconstructing the headline. “TV set murder” — that made it sound as if a large Magnavox had been the weapon. Besides, Greer hadn’t been killed on set; she had died in the production office, which was across town from the soundstage. But even as she picked those nits, Tess had no problem discerning the larger meaning — Greer’s boyfriend had been killed when police officers caught up with him. If running was a good marker of guilt, in Tull’s worldview, then resisting arrest was an unsigned confession. So, a dunker for Tull. The obvious answer was the obvious answer.

She was happy for her friend but disappointed that she would never have a chance to talk to JJ Meyerhoff about his ex-fiancée, Greer, and whether she had any connection to
Mann of Steel
’s problems.

Ben should be happy. Well, not happy — Greer was dead, and now her fiancé, poor fucker, God bless him, had gone down in a hail of bullets. But it tied everything up, neat as a bow, and Ben was in the clear. Which was only fair, because he hadn’t actually
done
anything.

But what if someone else materialized? What if Greer had confided in someone? What if he was, in fact, in some sort of fiendishly creative hell where he had to live forever with the idea of someone else popping up, full of…
insights
. That had been Greer’s airy-fairy term. “I had the most interesting insight.” Even Greer had seen his side of things, though. Then again, it was in Greer’s interest to be persuaded, because it meant she could collect endless bennies from him with a relatively free conscience. It was a relief that she was gone. Like all blackmailers, she had already started angling for what she wanted
next
. The last few weeks, Greer had reminded Ben of
The Leech Woman,
a B horror film in which a woman found the elixir to eternal youth. The trick was that it required killing a man and harvesting some gland, and each hit of the youth juice provided a shorter lease on wrinkle-free immortality, so the woman had to kill more and more frequently, until she finally killed a woman in desperation, which turned out to
accelerate
the aging process. Greer had been getting greedy that way, insatiable.

But that wasn’t what killed her, Ben reminded himself. She had been killed, fittingly enough, by one of the people she had stepped on as she climbed her little ladder.

“If
Mann of Steel
gets a pickup for season two,” she had said in the car just the other day, on the way to set, “do you think an associate producer credit would be appropriate?” Then quickly, before he could answer, she conceded the impossibility of her own ambition. “Oh, never mind, I guess I’m being silly.” Ben would have been charmed if he hadn’t remembered, in vivid, glaring detail, how she had played the same trick with her current position. “I know I just got promoted to the writers’ office, but I wonder — could I be considered to fill Alicia’s job, now that she’s been let go? I guess not, that’s silly, although I am the only one who’s been on board since preproduction, and I’m the one who knows all of Lottie’s systems — no, it’s ludicrous, forget I ever said anything.”

Ben hadn’t forgotten exactly, but he had thought that Greer had talked herself into seeing that she was pushing too hard, too fast. He had been shocked when Greer became more pointed a few days later: “Look, you’ll see that I get an interview, right? With Flip? And you’ll put in a good word for me? I mean, that’s not too much to ask, is it? After — well, I just thought I had demonstrated to you what a conscientious employee I am, that I am absolutely loyal to the production.”

God, it had probably been only a matter of time before he was one of the bodies who fell under those sensibly shod size seven feet.

He should be happy. Or something. Whatever he felt, he had to start revising Flip’s version of 107, the penultimate ep. Flip had brought it in at sixty pages, twelve too long, knowing that Ben would fix it.
Yassuh, yes, Master Flip, I’ll tighten up your flabby-ass script.
He sighed, glancing at the bedside clock radio, thinking about the all-nighter ahead. Now that Monaghan knew about his affair with Selene, what did he have to lose? Why couldn’t Selene just come over here, while Monaghan or her cohort waited in the lobby? Isn’t that what a real bodyguard would do? Sure, he had implied that he would stop if Monaghan wouldn’t rat him out to Flip, but he hadn’t
promised
. Okay, the idea was crazy, but he could call Selene, flirt with her. Maybe phone sex? He selected her name from his address book but ended up going straight to voice mail. When had they spoken last, outside work? He couldn’t remember. When had she last called or texted him? It was the night Greer was killed, the night she went to New York. Since then — nothing.

Suddenly, it seemed essential to walk to Little Italy, the littlest Little Italy he had ever seen, and grab a cup of real espresso to power him through the night of writing ahead. Vaccaro’s was only a mile or so, and it was a nice night for a walk — crisp, autumnal. The fact that Vaccaro’s was blocks away from Selene’s apartment — well, that was mere coincidence, didn’t enter into his decision at all.

Within an hour, he found himself standing on the sidewalk across the street from her building, feeling like the most pathetic sap that ever lived. He wanted to scream her name, hold a boom box above his head in the pouring rain, all the clichés. Instead, he stood there, blowing on his espresso, wordless. And what could be more impotent than a writer without words?

Johnny Tampa’s bedtime ritual took almost an hour, but he was proud of the fact that he used inexpensive products — cold cream on his face, generic shampoo, the drugstore knockoff of Oil of Olay. His mother had raised him to believe in thrift, and he had never broken faith with her ways. Some of his peers had, and where were they now? Johnny may have endured a long dry spell, workwise, but he would never have to worry about money. The hardest part had always been reconciling his private habits with his public image, which demanded a certain amount of extravagance. It killed him, buying a first-class ticket with his own money, but he had to do it from time to time, lest he be seen flying coach. He couldn’t afford being marked as a loser. He had to keep up the pretense that he had been waiting for the right job all these years.

The television droned in the background, keeping him company. One of the cable channels was doing an all-weekend marathon of
The Boom Boom Room
with “extras” — shopworn trivia that would be old news to diehard fans, and who but diehard fans would watch a marathon of
The Boom Boom Room
? Besides, some of the so-called trivia was just plain lies. He and his mom had not lived in their car when they first went out to Los Angeles. They had a perfectly nice apartment, in a building favored by lots of young actors. And, yes, he had been in the Mickey Mouse Club, but not the cool one, which spawned Britney, Justin, Christina, et al. He had been in the lame 1970s version. But no reason to sweat that inaccuracy, given that it made people think he was a lot younger than he was. Then again, if people thought he was doing the Mickey Mouse Club back in the early 1990s, they might conclude he had aged horribly.