Another Thing to Fall (6 page)

Tess was aware of the rest of the class’s simmering impatience, an almost Colosseum-like lust for a little Blossom blood on the floor. The woman was never prepared, and she had a habit of asking questions that were achingly off point. But Tess wanted to believe that she would never be one of those teachers who won over the majority by exploiting the class pariah.

True, Mrs. Blossom was never going to be a private investigator — but then, neither were the others in the class. She was simply the only one who was honest about it, writing on her orientation form, under “What do you hope to achieve through this class?”
Something to do on Monday nights until NBC stops running those weird shows I don’t understand.
In some ways, Tess even preferred Mrs. Blossom to the three wannabe crime novelists, who believed themselves undercover in the class. They thought they were so stealthy, but they didn’t know that Odyssey provided teachers with all the students’ previous coursework in the program, and this trio of thirty-something men had taken two semesters of creative writing and one survey, Writing Wrongs: The Crime Novel in the Twenty-first Century. But even if Tess hadn’t seen their records, she would be onto them by now, with their endless questions about the quotidian details of an investigator’s life. One had even asked what she ate for breakfast.

“I’m afraid I’m not much good with phones, either,” Tess said to Mrs. Blossom. “I know how to use mine, but not others. Why don’t you come up front and sit next to me, as I talk the class through public record searches, online and off-line?”

Beaming as if she had been anointed teacher’s pet, Mrs. Blossom bustled up front and pulled her chair so close that Tess was overwhelmed by her perfume, a sickly sweet gardenia.

“Let’s start with land records,” Tess said, trying to reach past Mrs. Blossom and type. The lyrics from the old Police song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” popped into her head, and she had to lose herself in the byways of the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation to stifle her giggles. This woman had paid six hundred dollars because NBC’s Monday night lineup had failed her. She deserved the pretense of respect at the very least. “In Maryland, you can research the history of ownership with just the address, using the assessor’s Web site, but you still might have to go to the courthouse for additional information. Your address, Mrs. Blossom?”

The woman looked around the class, then whispered into Tess’s ear. “University One, at the corner of St. Paul. But only for six months. Before that, we lived on Hawthorne.”

“Let’s use the house on Hawthorne,” Tess said. “Apartments are tricky, and you haven’t been there a year.”

“It’s a condo,” Mrs. Blossom said, “and the house on Hawthorne isn’t mine anymore.”

There was a world of sorrow in that sentence, but Tess couldn’t stop for it. She had eleven Encyclopedia Browns chomping at the bit.

Although the Hopkins campus was not even a mile from where Tess lived, it was almost ten before she disentangled herself from the last student, one of the undercover writers, who kept trying to inveigle her to go to the Charles Village Pub. Her body was so divided between fatigue and hunger that it was her plan to eat dinner while lying down, the prescribed Passover posture, but Crow was on the sofa with Lloyd Jupiter. How could she have forgotten Monday was movie night?

A seventeen-year-old West Baltimore kid, Lloyd was fast becoming Crow’s ward, the young Dick Grayson to Crow’s Bruce Wayne of semistately Monaghan manor. But had Batman and Robin’s relationship flourished after Robin had tried repeatedly to rip Batman off, con him, and inadvertently almost get him killed? Tess thought not. Still, the always forgiving Crow had taken a serious interest in every facet of the young dropout’s education, supervising not only his peripatetic march toward a GED but also his exposure to serious cinema. Tonight’s selection was
Once Upon a Time in the West,
clearly chosen to counterbalance last week’s
Children of Paradise,
which had received one finger up from Lloyd Jupiter, but not a very nice one.

Crow had paused the movie for a talking point, as was his habit. “You see, throughout his career Henry Fonda always played good guys — hey, Tess — so Sergio Leone really messed with people’s heads when he cast him in this part.”

Tess sank to the rug, relieved to see that there was plenty of homemade guacamole left. Crow was trying to broaden Lloyd’s palate, too, but that was a much tougher battle.

“That other guy — he was the Tunnel King, right, from
The Great Escape
?”

“Right!” Crow’s enthusiastic affirmation reminded Tess of her own cheerleading for Mrs. Blossom’s timid trek across the steppes of the Internet. “He also starred in a series of vigilante films in the 1970s, which were very politically divisive—”

Just out of Crow’s eye line, Tess pretended to slump in catatonia at this pedantic discussion of
Death Wish,
and Lloyd began giggling, a high-pitched bubble of sound that reminded Tess he was at once a very young and very old seventeen. Crow, catching on to their mockery, threw a pillow at her head.

“While you’ve been here, communing with the end product of Hollywood, I had an encounter with the real thing,” Tess said, regaling them with the story of her accidental set visit, although it was slightly changed now, with her saying out loud many of the things she had merely thought.

“Tumulty?” Crow said. “That might explain the series of phone messages we’ve been getting tonight, which I’ve been trying to ignore. The phone had been ringing every half hour, to the minute, but I didn’t recognize the caller ID so I didn’t pick up. After the fifth message or so, I checked, and the messages were identical. ‘This is Greer Sadowski, calling Tess Monaghan for Mr. Tumulty. Are you there? Will you pick up? Please call me back at your convenience.’”

Crow was a good mimic, catching the young woman’s not quite suppressed
o
sounds, the mechanical flatness of her voice.

“He wants me to work for him.”

“Really?” Lloyd’s eyes lit up. It was, quite possibly, the only time that Tess had ever managed to impress Lloyd, who was consistently underwhelmed by the mundaneness of her life as a private investigator. That, and the fact that she didn’t know tae kwon do, or how to use nunchakus.

“Yeah, but it’s not my sort of gig, Lloyd. More security than investigation or paper trails, and I’m a one-woman agency. I simply don’t have the personnel.”

“But you would be working on a
movie
. A movie made by the son of Philip Tumulty, the guy who made
The Beast
.”

Given his youth, Lloyd had no use for the gentle, nostalgic — and, truth be told, very, very white — comedies made by Tumulty senior. Tess wondered how Tumulty would feel to learn that there were, in fact, some Baltimoreans who preferred the special effects epics that had made him rich while destroying his artistic cred.

“I wouldn’t be working on the movie, Lloyd. I’d be babysitting a spoiled actress.”

“Still…” He groaned in frustration at her stupidity, her obtuseness at rejecting this golden ticket into a rarefied world.

“Lloyd, buddy, why don’t you get a head start on the dishes?” Crow asked. Lloyd slumped back in a sullen teen pout, and Crow added: “You
promised
. I said you could bunk here tonight, and you said you would clean up the kitchen. Remember?”

“He has his own apartment,” Tess said, waiting until Lloyd was in the kitchen and out of earshot, where odds were that one in ten pieces of crockery wouldn’t make it out alive. “You went to a lot of trouble to set him up, get him to establish some independence, but he seems to be here more and more.”

“He
had
his own apartment,” Crow said. “That didn’t work out so well.”

“Don’t tell me…”

In the six months since Lloyd Jupiter had invaded their lives — and Tess could not help thinking of it as a criminal act, given that it had begun with a series of misdemeanors and felonies — Crow had done everything he could to help the teenager stand on his own two feet, but it was proving far more difficult than even Tess had anticipated.

“He started letting some old friends flop there. Drugs followed, although I’m pretty sure that Lloyd’s not using. He’s content with smoking a blunt now and then, and I’m not a big enough hypocrite to lecture him on that. But when the landlord got wind of what was happening, he evicted him.”

“You can’t evict someone just because you suspect illegal activity.”

“You can if your tenant is an inexperienced seventeen-year-old who doesn’t know his rights. Anyway, Lloyd tried going back to his mom’s. That lasted all of a week.”

“His stepfather?”

“Yeah, there’s no bridging that gap. Lloyd called me today, asked for bus fare, thought he could go back to the Delaware shore and stay with the friends he made there over the summer. But there’s not enough work to keep him busy off-season, and an idle Lloyd is a dangerous Lloyd, at least to himself.”

“So he’s staying with us — and you’re heading out of town tomorrow to scout polka bands. Wow, I just gave birth to a seventeen-year-old and I didn’t even know I was knocked up.”

“It’s only temporary. And you know money’s not the issue.” Lloyd did have a small trust, controlled by Crow, who doled out living expenses while trying to goad him into getting ready for college. “Finding a way to fill his days is. He’s
bored,
Tess. As long as he’s bored, he’s going to be in trouble.”

The phone rang. “Ten-thirty,” Crow said. “You could set your watch by this woman.”

“I’ll tell her no tomorrow,” Tess said. “I don’t have the energy to talk to her tonight.”

“You know, if you said yes — well, it’s my understanding that a film crew is kind of elastic. There’s always some place where they could use an extra body.”

It took her a moment to get it, but then — it had been a long day. Tess had risen before the sun, more than seventeen hours ago.

“You’re suggesting I make it a twofer?
I’ll do whatever you want, if you find a spot for my young friend?
That would be double the stress, Crow. I’d be doing a job I didn’t want to do, while worrying about what havoc Lloyd was wreaking.”

“Lloyd would be so thrilled to work on a set that he would be on his best behavior.”

“Lloyd’s best behavior isn’t exactly the gold standard.” Tess fell back on the rug. She was having her second psychic episode of the day, seeing the next hour in vivid detail. She could argue with Crow, eventually giving in, and he would rub her back as a reward. Or she could give in now and cut straight to the back rub.

“I’ll call tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll have to inflate my usual price, to make it worth farming out some of the other gigs I have lined up, but if they agree to my price and a place for Lloyd, I’ll do it.”

“I owe you,” Crow said, leaving the sofa to lie next to her, working his fingers into her hair.

“I lost track of who owed whom in our relationship long ago,” Tess said.

Actually, she hadn’t. But it
sounded
healthy.

Greer put the phone back in its cradle and looked at the clock on her computer, which she knew to be accurate to the second. That was one of her jobs, making sure that every time device in the office — the wall clocks, the phones, the computers — was synced. Ten-thirty. Flip had told her to continue trying to reach Tess Monaghan every half hour until the news came on.
Until the news came on
— those had been his very words. She had puzzled over those instructions. If the news came on at eleven and she was to call exactly on the half hour, did that mean she wasn’t to call at eleven? Did Flip know that Baltimore had a ten o’clock newscast? Didn’t most cities have ten o’clock newscasts? And then, in those cities on midwestern time, or whatever it was called, Greer believed they had nine o’clock newscasts. Not that the Midwest was relevant to this situation, but it was interesting to think about, how even seemingly precise instructions can end up being pretty vague. Yet Greer’s attention to detail was almost irrelevant, given how scattered Flip could be.

When Lottie had talked to Greer about her desire to move into the job as Flip’s assistant — interrogated her, really, in that skeptical, suspicious way she had — she had told Greer that the biggest challenge would be knowing what Flip wanted. “Even when he doesn’t. And that’s often.” Greer had chalked the warning up to jealousy. Lottie, who had “discovered” Greer, couldn’t get over the fact that Greer wanted to stay in the writers’ office instead of training to be an assistant director. Lottie, like most would-be mentors, needed her protégée to mirror her exactly.

But Greer had no intention of leaving the writers’ office, despite Lottie’s assertion that a job as Flip’s assistant was more of a cul-de-sac than a promotion. Writers were the bosses in television. And here she was in only her second industry job, working for one of the best, Flip Tumulty, the kind of person that others deferred to, sucked up to. People all over Hollywood, people whose names left Greer a little breathless, were constantly checking in with him, sending him gifts, currying favor.

“Aw, the old Tumulty charisma,” Ben had said, when she tried to feel him out on this topic, discover why people yearned for Flip’s approval. She didn’t think that was the whole story, not quite. You could argue that Ben had more charm, while there was a hint of the — what was the word Ben had used in a different context? A hint of the nebbish about Flip, that was it, and it served him well. Disorganized as he was when it came to his life, he never lost sight of the tiniest detail in the work. He also put in longer hours than anyone else, a trial for Greer, given that she was trying to impress Flip by being the first to arrive and the last to leave every day. Not that he noticed. There were moments where Greer stood silently in the office, assuming Flip was deep in thought, waiting for him to acknowledge her and what she had just said, only to realize that it hadn’t occurred to him that her presence required any acknowledgment whatsoever.

He wasn’t mean, though. Greer knew from mean. When she had gone to California right after college, Greer had worked for the King of Mean, an entertainment lawyer-slash-manager-slash-thrower, specializing in tantrums and staplers. He had burned through golden boys and girls with better alma maters and more sterling connections, but Greer was tougher. She quickly developed a way of coping, a strategy drawn, as most of her strategies were, from the movies. She imagined that the lawyer was the Stay Puft marshmallow man from
Ghostbusters,
marching down the streets of New York. He could grimace, he could wave his big puffy arms, he could threaten all sorts of things, but what could a man made of sugar and water really do to her, ultimately? She developed her own stoic marshmallow-ness, an outward manner so soft and placid that he couldn’t find a hold or a weak spot, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. She hadn’t returned to Baltimore because she couldn’t cut it out there. Her father had gotten ill, and her parents had insisted that it was a daughter’s responsibility to help out at home, even though she had two brothers closer by, one in Pennsylvania, the other in Delaware.