Another Thing to Fall (32 page)

“Over the years, we forgot about it, figured out no one ever saw it. But then this
Mann of Steel
show comes to town, and once Bob reads the pilot script, he’s sure it’s our story. Our idea was stolen and passed on to the son, but it’s still ours.”

“Phil Tumulty doesn’t send Flip birthday cards, much less give him ideas,” Ben put in, wan but defiant. “If Phil Tumulty had a great idea — and he hasn’t had one for years — he’d keep it for himself.”

“Shut up,” the man said, swinging the gun back to Ben. “Shut up. You’re the one who took our idea, you’re the one who gave it to Flip. Phil Tumulty never saw it
because you took it
. Say it. Admit it.”

Ben straightened up, although it took him some effort. “I would — if I did. But I honestly don’t remember. If I ever read your scenario, it was, what? Fifteen years ago? Do you think I sat on it all this time, while developing other shows, thinking, Boy, this
Duchess of Windsor Hills
is my golden ticket? I don’t remember it. Maybe I read it, maybe I didn’t. But… I… didn’t… remember… it, so how could I steal it?”

The man stood up, shaking all over, and Tess believed that he would have pistol-whipped Ben if it hadn’t required stepping over Alicia’s body to get to him. He was enough of an amateur to be squeamish. Good to know.

“There’s time travel, same as ours,” he said, holding up the index finger of his left hand. “A regular guy — factory worker in ours — involved with a royal woman.” Middle finger out, followed quickly by his ring finger, which had a slender gold band. “And, finally, there was the concept of the alterna-history, how things change if you disrupt even one tiny thing. You had Napoleon, we had Nazis, but it was basically the same.”

“Maybe,” Ben said. “Possibly. If I ever saw it — only I didn’t.”

That was enough to goad the man into standing up, crab-walking past Alicia’s body, and smacking Ben with the pistol. Ben’s nose started to gush blood, and he whimpered. Tess tried to get her hand inside her bag where her Beretta waited, safe and serene, but she wasn’t quick enough.

“Is that what everyone has been looking for, this letter written years ago? Is that the proof you needed to bring your claim against the production?”

“It’s not proof—” an unrepentant Ben began nasally, hands clapped over his bloody nose, and while Tess was impressed by how ballsy he was, she tried to cram a world of meaning into one stern look.
Shut UP
.

“We didn’t keep a copy. Bob didn’t even have a computer then. People didn’t, in 1992, and we didn’t think to photocopy it. We thought we were dealing with an honorable man. He kept calling the office, asking for a meeting with Flip Tumulty, sure he would do the right thing if he knew. The girls kept putting him off, although this one” — he gestured at Alicia’s body — “didn’t mind selling him the pilot script, so he could start working on the comparison chart that our lawyer recommended. But after that, she stopped taking his calls, made the other girl deal with him.”

Alicia had sold Wilbur “Bob” Grace the scripts, then taken Selene’s and Johnny’s money to wreak havoc on the set. Whatever one thought of her ethics, she was certainly entrepreneurial.

“So who found the letter, after all?” Tess asked.

“Ms. Sadowski. She called Bob, all excited, said she had found what he wanted. Then, two days later — she denied it all, said she was mistaken. I knew she was lying. But Bob gave up, and Alicia got fired, so she didn’t have access to Flip anymore. I had to get to the other one, don’t you see? I knew she had it, that she couldn’t destroy it. And once I got into her apartment, I was more sure than ever it was at the office, but I couldn’t go back there….”

Back there
. Tess’s mind registered that. He had been to the office and Greer’s apartment. But it had all been for naught.

“Alicia found it, Friday night,” Ben said. “She was the one who planted the smoke bomb, then hid in the building until the firefighters left. Then she went into the office and found it. The only thing I can’t figure out is where, because I’ve been looking for it since Greer died.”

“The base of Flip’s Emmy.” Tess gave him a sad look, aware of the irony. “Lloyd dropped it just last night, and the band popped off, and I remembered how you said—”

“That Greer was always buffing Flip’s Emmy, that she had just brought it back from being shined up. Damn. I can’t believe Alicia figured that out and I didn’t.”

The man with the gun had grown impatient, or perhaps he felt frustrated that even a firearm couldn’t guarantee him center stage. “It was my property, with Bob gone. She had no right to sell it. But I came here this morning, and she said she was going to meet with Ben next, see what he was willing to pay, and that she would get back to me.” He was waving his hands as he spoke, getting more and more worked up. Tess didn’t think that was to anyone’s benefit. “
Get back to me
. Do you know how many times I’ve heard that? Do you know how many times I said that, back when I had a job?
I’ll get back to you
. It always means they won’t, that you’ll have to call and call, and ask to speak to their supervisors.”

Tess gave him a chance to catch his breath, then asked: “Can I see it?”

“What?”

“The letter, the one you say you gave to Ben.”

“It’s not a matter of saying. I have photographic proof.” He gestured again to the scrapbook lying on the coffee table in front of Ben, then opened it with his left hand. He was being very disciplined about maintaining his grasp on his gun, much to her disappointment.

Tess looked. There indeed was a young Ben, in the background of a photo, which had been carefully labeled. GEORGE ON THE SET OF
THE LAST PAGODA,
SUMMER 1992.

“You’re George?” she asked. Fifteen years had worn much differently on this man than they had on Ben. Harder. Was it just that the trip from twenty to thirty-five was less fraught than the journey from early forty-something to late fifty-whatever? Or had this man weathered a much tougher fifteen years than Ben?

“I’d prefer to be called Mr. Sybert. I deserve that courtesy.”

“Okay, Mr. Sybert.”

Ben looked stricken, as if knowing the man’s name put them at greater risk.
It’s not
Reservoir Dogs
and he’s not Mr. Brown,
Tess yearned to tell him.
For one thing, you’re not tied to that old sofa. For another, you still have both your ears.
There was a dead body at their feet and the man had already revealed his relationship to Wilbur Grace. His name was small potatoes.

“So you came here this morning, thinking you were going to be given this letter?”

“Yes.”

“And you just happened to have a gun with you?”

Mr. Sybert hesitated, working through the implications of Tess’s question.

“None of this matters, Mr. Sybert,” she assured him. “I’m not a police officer, and this isn’t a confession. I’m merely curious. I want to know your side of things. Did you come here, knowing you would use violence if Alicia didn’t give you what you wanted? Or was it more like the night at the production office, where you lost control and killed Greer when she refused to listen to you?”

“I didn’t kill that girl,” he said tentatively, as if testing a story out. “She was dead when I got there. I started to search for things, but I got scared and left.”

“Here, though…” Tess was making a considerable effort not to throw up when she looked at the body between them. Judging by Ben’s face and the sickly dairy smell that lingered in the room, he had lost that battle sometime earlier.

“I pulled the gun, but only to get what I wanted.” He was still trying out his story, thinking as he spoke. “It was an accident?”

“I can see how that might happen,” she lied. Again, one didn’t have to be a regular viewer of
CSI
to wonder how a person got shot in the back of the head, accidentally. The silence in the room stretched out, uncomfortable, possibly lethal. Tess knew that she could get to her gun and get a shot off. But Ben was so nearby. She couldn’t be sure that Mr. Sybert wouldn’t shoot him, if only by accident. And — she tried to suppress the thought, but there it was, flickering at first, then bright as neon:
She didn’t want to kill this man, if she could avoid it
. Yes, she knew he had shot Alicia, and probably in the most cowardly fashion possible. She didn’t believe his story about Greer, either. Yet she couldn’t help thinking that if she kept calm, if she continued to show him respect, all three of them might leave here alive.

“A friend of mine explained the basics of the Zervitz case to me,” Tess said, more to Ben than to Sybert, as if she had all the time in the world. “The thing that sticks in my head is that they never proved the producers of the film saw the original treatment. They just proved that they
might
have, that it was reasonable to infer that from the similarities. Expert witnesses for both sides then argued whether the film clearly plagiarized the two-page scenario. The plaintiff ’s witness said yes, the defense’s witness said no, and the jury decided they believed the plaintiff.”

“Home court advantage,” Ben muttered. Tess wished he would stop being so damn feisty. She had a hunch that simple acknowledgment could go far in this situation.

“Well, let me be the judge. Literally. Mr. Sybert, would you show me the letter—”

“No,” he said, patting his breast pocket with his left hand. “I don’t intend to let anyone else touch this.”

“Then read it to me, Mr. Sybert. Go through it, a paragraph at a time, and then we’ll let Ben counter how his idea was different. After all, with me you’ll have — what did Ben call it — home-court advantage. And I always root for the home team.”

She was charmed in spite of herself by how conscientiously Mr. Sybert managed to remove the letter and his reading glasses from his pocket, all the while keeping a firm grip on the gun. Ah, too bad, she had hoped he might put it down for this recitation.

“Let the record reflect,” he began “that the letter is dated June 19, 1992. Now that I have it in my possession, I can have someone test it, however they do that, prove that it was written when it says it was, but you can see” — he flipped it quickly, too quickly for Tess to see anything, not that it mattered — “that it was written on a typewriter, just as I told you. That typewriter is still in Bob’s house by the way, so we’ll be able to match it.”

“Noted for the record,” Tess said, in what she hoped was a judicious tone.

“For fuck’s sake,” Ben said. Tess tried another stern look, but Ben was impervious. Luckily, Mr. Sybert had started to read.

“‘Dear Mr. Tumulty: As you may recall, we met a few years ago, when you were filming
Pit Beef
. I was the photographer who came to the set with my brother-in-law, George, and talked to you about the old Westview movie theater, how weird it was to see Barry Levinson use that as a nightclub in
Tin Men
. Anyway, I am a filmmaker, too, and although I usually work from classic texts, my brother-in-law, George, had a terrific idea the other day: What if Wallis Warfield Simpson, a Baltimore girl as you well know, didn’t marry King Edward, but instead settled in Windsor Hills with a nice Baltimore boy who worked in a factory?’”

He looked up at Tess expectantly. “Okay,” she said. “I see the royal angle. You had the would-be Duchess of Windsor settle for a Baltimore boy—”

“A factory worker,” Mr. Sybert clarified.

“Ben has a steelworker romancing Napoleon’s future sister-in-law. I’ll give you that point. It’s suspiciously similar.”

“Don’t I get to speak?” Ben asked.

“Keep it brief,” Tess admonished.

“Okay, two things: Betsy Patterson’s marriage to Jerome Bonaparte didn’t last. And, two, our original plan was for Mann to leave Patterson in the nineteenth century, let her pursue her destiny. That’s in the bible. It’s the network that wanted them to marry and time-travel together.”

Tess pretended to think about this. “I see what you’re saying,” she said. “Still, this round goes to Mr. Sybert.”

The man’s chest seemed to expand. Someone was listening to him, drinking in every word with rapt attention. Attention must be paid, as Mrs. Loman had tried to tell us. Mr. Sybert resumed reading.

“‘Now, as many people know, Edward was thought to be a Nazi sympathizer. But if Wallis Warfield Simpson had married someone else and Edward had not, in fact, given up the throne, could that have affected the outcome of World War II? In our alternative version of history, Mrs. Simpson’s decision to marry a Baltimore man has that catastrophic effect, and the present day shows us a world controlled by the Nazis. The resistance’s only hope is to send an emissary back into the past and get Mrs. Simpson to make a different romantic choice.’”

“That’s a direct steal from the
Terminator,
” Ben said. “I can’t believe you’re calling me a plagiarist when you’re ripping off James Cameron right and left.”

“Ours is an homage,” Mr. Sybert replied. “Besides, that’s our very next line — Think
Terminator,
by way of Robert Harris. See, the fact that you mentioned that movie proves that you read Bob’s letter.”

“Or proves that there’s no such thing as an original idea, so it’s actually reasonable to believe I developed my show without ever seeing your stupid letter.”

Stupid
was a mistake. Tess saw the man’s cheeks redden while his chest, swollen with pride just a few seconds ago, started heaving.

“I agree with Mr. Sybert,” she said quickly. “There’s a difference between conscious tribute and ripping off someone’s idea without acknowledgment. And it is awfully coincidental that you cited the same movie, Ben.”

“A person would have to be a moron not to see—” he began, then finally —
finally
— caught the look in Tess’s eye and seemed to realize exactly who, in this scenario, was being moronic. “Okay, I concede this round, too. I mean, I’m not admitting that I did anything, but I can see that a jury might find it suspect. But then I always knew that a jury might not believe me. That’s why I panicked when Greer showed me the letter, stuck in a bunch of school crap that Flip asked her to sort. My conscience is clear on this score, and I haven’t been able to say that very often in my life. I think the local jury was crazy to find for the plaintiff in that other case, but I could see that these guys had an even better case. I told Greer I would get her a paid job if she could make the letter disappear.”