Another Thing to Fall

Fall came early to Mount Vernon this October – much to the neighborhood’s disgust. According to Mandy Stewart, vice president of the Mount Vernon Neighborhood Association, workers for Mann of Steel stripped leaves from the trees in order to create the late-autumn atmosphere required for the miniseries, which is being produced by Philip “Flip” Tumulty Jr.

“They just came through in late September and ripped the leaves from the trees, then put up a few fake brown ones in their place,” Stewart told the Beacon-Light. “They stole our fall out from under us! And they’ve made parking a nightmare.”

Steelworkers are equally peeved with Mann of Steel, which they say has shown a marked indifference to portraying the industry with accuracy. “These guys couldn’t find Sparrows Point on a map,” said Peter Bellamy of Local 9477. “They’re just using us for cheap laughs.”

He said retired steelworkers are considering informational pickets at the series’ various locations around the city, but he disavowed any connection to the series of mishaps that have befallen the production, as detailed previously by the Beacon-Light.

The Maryland Film Commission and the city’s film liaison both said they had received no complaints, insisting the production had been an exemplary, polite presence in the city. Tumulty, through his assistant, refused repeated requests for comment.

Tumulty is the son of the Baltimore filmmaker Philip Tumulty Sr., who first attracted attention with lovingly detailed movies about Baltimore ’s Highlandtown neighborhood in the 1960s and early 1970s, such as Pit Beef and The Last Pagoda. But he turned his attention to more conventional – and far more lucrative – Hollywood blockbusters, including The Beast, Piano Man, and Gunsmoke, the last a reworking of the long-running television show. The younger Tumulty, after a much-heralded independent film, written with childhood friend Ben Marcus, has worked exclusively in television.

His latest project, Mann of Steel, has extended the city’s long run with Hollywood, which has been an almost constant presence in Baltimore over the last fifteen years. However, although this series centers on Bethlehem Steel and nineteenth-century Baltimore belle Betsy Patterson, Maryland almost lost the production to Philadelphia, which has more architecture dating from the early 1800s. Special tax incentives helped to lure the show to Maryland.

Unlike previous productions, Mann of Steel has had a rocky relationship with the city from the start. Complaints from neighbors and steelworkers are only part of the problems they have faced. There have been a series of small fires set near some of the locations and rumors of bad behavior by up-and-coming actress Selene Waites, 20, who keeps popping up in local bars.

“We are grateful to Baltimore and Maryland for all they’ve done to make this film possible,” said co-executive producer Charlotte MacKenzie when asked for comment. “We just wish others were grateful for the $25 million we’re spending, half of which will go directly into the local economy.”

Community activist Stewart is not about to be mollified: “The economic benefits of film production are wildly exaggerated, based on the stars’ salaries, which may or may not be taxed by local authorities,” she said. “The bottom line is that Mann of Steel is a pain in the butt.”

– THE BEACON-LIGHT,

OCT . 15

MONDAY
Chapter 1

The headphones were a mistake. She realized this only in hindsight, but then – what other vision is available to a person heading backward into the world?

True, they were good old-fashioned headphones, which didn’t seal tightly to the ear, not earbuds, which she loathed on principle, the principle being that she was thirty-four going on seventy. Furthermore, she had dialed down the volume on her Sony Walkman – yes, a Sony Walkman, sturdy and battered and taxicab yellow, not a sleek little iPod in a more modern or electric shade. Still, for all her precautions, she could hear very little. And even Tess Monaghan would admit that it’s important to be attuned to the world when one is charging into it backward, gliding along the middle branch of the Patapsco in a scull and passing through channels that are seldom without traffic, even in the predawn hours.

But Tess had painstakingly rationalized her way into trouble, which, she decided later, is pretty much how everyone gets into trouble, one small rationalization at a time. She wanted to row, yet she felt obligated to listen to her boyfriend on a local radio show, promoting the Oktoberfest lineup at her father’s bar. Besides, he planned to play some songs by Brave Combo, a nuclear polka band that Tess quite liked. She would row a path that was familiar to her, and trust the coxswains for the fours and eights to watch her back, a courtesy offered to all scullers.

It did not occur to Tess to row a little later, or skip the workout altogether. The rowing season traditionally ended after Thanksgiving, a mere month away. She had to take advantage of every waning day, especially now that Baltimore was in its full autumnal glory. If aliens had landed in Baltimore on this particular October morning, they would have concluded that it was the most perfect city on the globe they were about to conquer, truly the Charm City it claimed to be. The trees were tinged with gold and scarlet, the breeze was light, the sky was slowly deepening into the kind of brilliant blue that reminded Tess that she once knew the word cerulean, if only because it had been on the vocabulary lists for the SATs.

She set out for Fort McHenry, at the distant tip of Locust Point, rationalizing every stroke of the way: She knew the route so well, it was so early, the sun not even up. She had beaten the other rowers to the water, arriving in darkness and pushing off from the dock at first light. She wouldn’t wear the headphones on the way back. She just needed to hear Crow on WTMD, listen to him play a few snippets of Brave Combo, then she would turn off the Walkman and-

That’s when the police boat, bullhorn blaring, crossed into her line of vision and came charging toward her. By the time she registered everything that was happening – the approaching boat, the screams and shouts coming from all directions, the fact that someone was very keen that she stop or change course – the motorboat had stopped, setting up an enormous, choppy wake that was going to hit her sideways. Tess, trying frantically to slow and steady her scull, had a bona fide moment of prescience. Granted, her vision extended only two or three seconds into the future, but it was uncannily exact: She was going to go ass over teakettle into the Patapsco, a body of water that even conquering aliens from a water-deprived planet would find less than desirable. She closed her eyes and shut her mouth as tightly as possible, grateful she had no cuts or scratches into which microbes could swim.

At least the water held some leftover summer warmth. She broke the surface quickly, orienting herself by locating the star-shaped fort just to the north, then the wide channel into the bay to the east of the fort, toward which her vessel was now drifting. “Get my shell,” she spluttered to the police boat, whose occupants stared back at her, blank faced. “My shell! My scull! MY GODDAMN BOAT.” Comprehension dawning, the cops reached out and steadied her orphaned scull alongside the starboard side of their boat. Tess began to swim toward them, but a second motorboat cut her off.

A man sat in the stern of this one, his face obscured by a baseball cap, his arms crossed over a fleece vest emblazoned with a curious logo, MANN OF STEEL. He continued to hug his arms close to his chest, a modern-day Washington crossing the Delaware, even as two young people put down their clipboards and reached out to Tess, boosting her into the boat.

“Congratulations,” said the male of the pair. “You just ruined a shot that we’ve been trying to get for three days.”

Tess glanced around, taking in everything her back had failed to see. This usually quiet strip around Fort McHenry was ringed with boats. There was an outer periphery of police launches, set up to protect an inner circle, which included this boat and another nearby, with what appeared to be a mounted camera and another fleece-jacketed man. There were people onshore, too, and some part of Tess’s mind registered that this was odd, given that Fort McHenry didn’t open its gates to the public until 9 A.M. Farther up the fort’s grassy slopes, she could see large white trailers and vans, some of them with blue writing that she could just make out: HADDAD’S RENTALS. She squeezed her ponytail and tried to wring some water from her T-shirt, but the standing man frowned, as if it were bad form to introduce water into a boat.

“The sun’s up now,” said the young woman who had helped Tess into the boat, her tone dire, as if this daily fact of life, the sun rising, was the most horrible thing imaginable. “We lost all the rose tones you wanted.”

The doubly stern man threw his Natty Boh cap down in the boat, revealing a headful of brown curls, at which he literally tore. He was younger than Tess had realized, not much older than she, no more than thirty-five. “Three days,” he said. “Three days of trying to get this shot and some stupid rower has to come along at the exact wrong moment-”

“Tess Monaghan,” she said, offering a damp, sticky hand. He didn’t take it. “And I’m sorry about the accident, but you almost killed me.”

“No offense,” said Natty Boh, “but that might have been cheaper for us in the long run.”

Chapter 2

Are you sure you want to wait for your clothes to go through the wash?” asked the girl from the boat, the brunette with the clipboard. “We could dress you from the underwear up with things in the wardrobe trailer. What are you? Size twelve? Fourteen?”

Tess was seldom nonplussed, but she found this offer – and eerily on-target assessment of her size, which was usually a twelve, but had been known to flirt with fourteen after a Goldenberg Peanut Chew fling – disorienting to say the least. Surreal was an overused word in Tess’s experience, but it suited the events of the morning so far. Now that she was on land, her Hollywood rescuers were behaving more like captors, making sure she was never out of their sight. Were they worried about a lawsuit? She covered her confusion by bending down and toweling her hair, checking to see if it still carried a whiff of river water beneath the green apple scent of the shampoo. They had been kind enough to let her shower in one of the trailers, which they kept calling bangers, much to Tess’s confusion. Was the jargon some sort of sexual allusion? There also had been mention of a honey wagon and repeated offers to bring her something from craft services, but she wasn’t sure what that meant. Macramé?

“No, I’ll wait, if you don’t mind,” she said. “My Under Armour tights and jog bra will dry really fast, even on a low-heat cycle, and I don’t mind if the T-shirt is a little damp.”

“Everything we have is clean,” the young woman said, her tone huffy, as if she were personally offended by Tess’s refusal of laundered-but-possibly-used underwear. “And we’d put you in modern clothes, from the present-day sequences, not the nineteenth-century stuff.” Again, that cool appraising look, unnerving in an otherwise sweet-faced young woman, not even twenty-five by Tess’s estimation. “You probably wouldn’t fit into those, anyway. They’re quite small.”

Tess cinched the belt of the bathrobe they had loaned her. The garment was Pepto-Bismol pink and made of a fluffy chenillelike material that seemed to expand the longer she wore it, so she felt quite lost and shapeless within it. Still, she did have a waist and a respectably solid body somewhere inside this pink mass.

The man in the Natty Boh cap, who had been on his cell phone almost constantly since they arrived at the trailer – banger – suddenly barked: “Arrange for her clothes to go to the nearest coin laundry, Greer.” Then, to Tess, picking up a conversation that he had started perhaps twenty minutes earlier, during one of the lulls between phone calls: “You see the irony, right? During the Civil War, Francis Scott Key’s descendant was held as a prisoner here, in the very fort where Key was kept when he wrote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

“Well, Key was on a British ship, stationed in the harbor. But I guess I-”

“Key was on a ship?” He looked dubious. “Greer, check that out, will you? I think we have a reference to it in one-oh-three. We may have to save that with looping.”

His girl Friday dutifully jotted some notes on her clipboard. “Should I use the Internet or-”

“Just check it out. And do something about her clothes, okay?” Greer scurried away, even as Tess marveled at the man’s ability to switch from bossy-brittle to seductive-supplicant and back again without missing a beat. She wondered if he ever got confused, used the imperious tone on those he was trying to impress, then spoke beguilingly to those he meant to dominate. “On the boat or on the shore, it’s the larger irony that concerns me. ‘Everything connects,’ like it says in Howards End.”

Tess didn’t have the heart to tell him that the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s novel was only connect. Everyone made mistakes. She just wished the man would stop trying so hard to impress her and perhaps do something as rudimentary as introduce himself.

Mr. Natty Boh’s cell phone rang for what Tess estimated was the seventy-fifth time since they had left the boat. The ring tone was the brrrrrrring-brrrrrrring of an old-fashioned desk phone, something black and solid. It was a ring tone that Tess particularly hated, even more than the one on her friend Whitney’s phone, which played “Ride of the Valkyries.”

“What? WHAT? You’re breaking up, let me go outside.”

Greer returned as soon as her boss left. They seemed determined to keep an eye on Tess at all times, although they had let her shower alone. “I sent your clothes off with the P.A., Brad.”

“P.A.?”

“The production assistant from the boat. And I realized something – I know you.” The rounded O sound – knOOOOOOHw – marked her as a native Baltimorean, although one who seemed to be trying to control her os and keep her rs where they belonged.

“I don’t think so,” Tess countered.

“I’ve seen you,” she insisted, eyes narrowed until they almost disappeared in her apple-cheeked face. “You’ve been in the paper.”

“Oh, well, who hasn’t? I’m sure you’ve ended up in the paper yourself, a time or two. Engagement announcement, perhaps?” The girl wore a simple, pear-shaped diamond on a gold band, and she reached for it instinctively at Tess’s mention, but not with the expected tenderness or pride. She twisted it, so the stone faced inward, the way a woman might wear a ring on public transportation, or in a dangerous neighborhood.

Tess babbled on: “Like Andy Warhol said – in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. Actually, he didn’t say it, he wrote that, in the notes on a gallery exhibit at the University of Maryland of all places. And most people get it wrong, refer to so-and-so’s fifteen minutes of fame, which isn’t the same, not at all…”

She hoped her prattling might derail the woman’s chain of thought, but this Greer had a pointer’s fixity of purpose.

“You weren’t in the paper in a normal way,” Greer said. “It was something odd, kind of notorious.”

“One of my favorite Hitchcock films,” her boss said, returning to the trailer. “Written by Ben Hecht, with uncredited dialogue by Odets.”

“No, she’s notorious.” Greer used her clipboard to indicate Tess. “She’s been in the paper.”

“The local paper?” asked Mr. Natty Boh, suddenly all bright interest.

“Yes,” Greer said.

“No,” Tess said. “I mean, not really, not often. I started out as a reporter at the old Star, and I’ve worked for the Beacon-Light as a consultant, nothing more. Maybe that’s why she thinks I’ve been in the newspaper.”

A lie, but an expedient one, one she assumed would dull the man’s interest. Besides, how could a Hollywood director, assuming he was that, care who had been mentioned in a Baltimore newspaper?

But now he seemed even more focused on impressing her, extending his hand, something he hadn’t done even while she was treading water. “I’m Flip Tumulty.”

“Oh, right, the son of-”

At this near mention of his famous father, Flip’s features seemed to frost over, while Greer clutched her clipboard to her chest, as if to flatten the squeak of a gasp that escaped from her mouth. Tess was forced to correct her course for the second time that morning. “I had assumed you were the director on this project, but you’re a writer, right? Ben Hecht, Odets – those are the kinds of details a writer would know. Now that I think about it, I remember a Shouts and Murmur piece you wrote for the New Yorker a few years back. Very droll.”

That puffed him up with pride. “I am a writer, but here I’m the executive producer. That’s how it works in television, the writer is the boss. And you’re a rower who reads the New Yorker?”

Now it was Tess’s turn to be offended. “Rowing is my hobby, not my profession. Besides, rowers tend to be pretty intelligent.”

“Really? I don’t recall that from my days at Brown.” Oh, how Tess hated that kind of ploy, this seemingly casual mention of an Ivy League education. Shouldn’t the son of Phil Tumulty be a little more confident? Or did having a famous father make him more insecure than the average person?

“Well, Brown,” she said, trying to make it sound as if that school’s rowers were famously subpar.

“What do you do, when you’re not rowing or consulting for newspapers?”

It was a question that Tess had come to hate, because the answer prompted either a surfeit of curiosity or the same set of tired jokes, many of them centering on wordplay involving “female dick.” She hesitated, tempted to lie, but the opportunity was lost when Greer blurted out: “She’s a private investigator. That’s it. She shot a state senator who happened to be a killer, or something like that.”

“Something like that,” Tess said, almost relieved to see how the details of her life continued to morph and mutate in the public imagination. She had shot a man, once. He wasn’t a politician. If he had been, she probably would have been less haunted by the experience.

“Really?” Tumulty, who had been pacing restlessly, dropped in the makeup chair opposite Tess. “Do you do security work?”

“Sometimes. Preventive stuff, advising people about their… vulnerabilities.” Tess, naked inside the expanding pink robe, became acutely aware of her own vulnerabilities and checked to make sure that the belt was cinched. But the tighter she pulled the belt, the more the cloth seemed to expand. She was turning into a pouf of cotton candy. Or – worse – one of those Hostess Sno Balls, with the dyed coconut frosting.

“And you have an ongoing relationship with the local newspaper? Could you get them to back off us, cut us some slack?”

Tess smiled with half her mouth. “The Beacon-Light’s sort of like one of my ex-boyfriends. We’re civil to each other, but I’m not in a position to ask for any favors right now.”

“What about bodyguard work?”

“What about it?”

“Do you do it?”

“I’ve had enough trouble safeguarding my own body over the years.” If she could have found her hands within the robe’s voluminous sleeves, she might have snaked the left one down to her knee, fingered the scar she always stroked when reminded of her own mortality.

“Well, it wouldn’t be bodyguard work, per se. More like… babysitting.”

“You can get a nice college student to do that for ten dollars an hour.”

“Here’s the thing.” Tess was beginning to notice something odd about Flip: He paused during a conversation and allowed others to speak, but he didn’t necessarily hear anything that was said to him. Perhaps even his face-to-face exchanges were beset by the static and dropped words of a cell phone conversation. “We have this young actor, Selene Waites. Beautiful. And the real thing, as a talent, but very raw. Young, just twenty. She’s playing Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, one of the leads.”

“You’re making a historical miniseries about Betsy Patterson?”

“Not a miniseries – a short-order series, eight episodes that will be used midseason on Zylon, that new cable network. And Mann of Steel isn’t a biopic at all. It’s about a young steelworker who gets knocked unconscious at work, in present-day Baltimore, and wakes up in Betsy Patterson’s era. He knows just enough about history to realize that she’s going to make a terrible personal mistake, marrying Napoleon’s brother Jerome, but he’s not sure what will happen if he dissuades her, how it will affect the larger course of history, if at all. Meanwhile, he has to get back to the present, because there’s a key vote coming up for the union, and he’s a shop steward.”

As he outlined his story, Tumulty spoke with the flushed, excited air of a little boy enchanted with his own ideas, preposterous as they seemed to Tess. It wasn’t the concept of time travel via head injury that seemed most problematic to Tess, but the idea of a story centered on a steelworker in twenty-first-century Baltimore. Hadn’t these guys driven past the ghost town that was Sparrows Point? Didn’t they know that Bethlehem Steel had been sold and scavenged for its parts, leaving its retirees without so much as medical benefits or adequate pensions?

“Sounds like Quantum Leap meets Red Baker by way of The Dancing Cavalier,” she offered.

“I know Quantum Leap,” Tumulty said, his manner stiff, as if she had insulted him. “This is nothing like that. The other things you mentioned…”

He paused, and she realized that he would not admit not knowing something, but he would leave a space if she wanted to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.

“Red Baker is one of the seminal works of Baltimore fiction. It’s about a laid-off steelworker. Back in the 80s.”

Tumulty turned to the young woman. “Make a note on that, Greer. We might want to option it, if it’s available.”

Greer promptly began to scribble on her clipboard. Short and a little top-heavy, she was a pretty girl, although she seemed to be playing down her looks. Her dark hair was slicked back in a tight, unbecoming ponytail, her clothes frumpier than they needed to be. She had lovely hands, though, with a perfect French manicure, a fitting showcase for the ring, which she had turned back around at some point.

Tess asked: “You mean you’d make Red Baker, too?”

“No, but we like to hold the options on similar projects, so they don’t beat us out of the gate.”

“That seems a little… unsporting.”

“Common practice. What’s the other one you mentioned?”

“The Dancing Cavalier?” Tess could forgive Tumulty’s ignorance of literature, but shouldn’t this son of a famous director, born and bred in Los Angeles, recognize a reference to one of the greatest movie musicals ever made? “It’s the film within the film of Singin’ in the Rain. Remember? They salvage the footage from the disastrous attempt at a talkie and recast it as a musical in which a young man travels back in time.”

“Right. Of course. Well, ours is much more meta. It’s sort of like what Sofia was going for.”

“ Sofia?”

“Coppola. When she made Marie Antoinette. We’ve known each other since childhood, of course. I met her on vacations and summers up in Napa, with my dad.”

“Of course.” My, don’t you like to have it both ways, at once denying and invoking your credentials as a second-generation Hollywood insider, while wearing a Natty Boh cap, as if you were a real Baltimore boy. Of course, a real Baltimore boy would know that National Bohemian had pulled up stakes long ago. Tourists could buy the gear at a Fells Point shop and see the mustachioed mascot winking from a neon sign in Brewers Hill, but the beer itself was brewed out of state. Tess actively boycotted it.

“At any rate, even though she’s second on the call sheet, Selene has more than her share of downtime. And she gets… bored. Rather easily.”

“She wasn’t there for pickup this morning,” Greer put in. Her face was bland, but Tess thought she caught a flicker of spiteful enjoyment in the timid voice.

“What? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I just found out. I got a cell call that Selene had shown up in makeup. Two hours late, but she’s there.”

“Where was she? How did she get to set if she missed her driver?”

Greer raised one shoulder, a timid halfhearted shrug. “Taxi, I think. Meanwhile, there was another one of those… incidents. A trash can fire on Fort Avenue, which closed the street down when firefighters responded, which is part of the reason she was so late. Or so she said. Apparently, it didn’t occur to Selene that she could get out of the cab and walk the last block here.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He grabbed his phone from an interior pocket of his fleece vest even as it started to ring again. “I’m losing you, you’re breaking up,” he shouted as he ran from the trailer.

“Tough gig,” Tess said.

“Oh, he loves what he does.”

“No, I mean for you, being his assistant.”

“Are you kidding?” Greer’s eyes widened for once, and they turned out to be quite pretty, a vivid pale blue set off by dark lashes and brows. “I’m really lucky. I started off as an intern during the preproduction phase for the pilot, opening mail and doing other odd jobs, then got promoted to the writer’s office assistant when the network picked up the show. I jumped at the chance to be Mr. Tumulty’s assistant when the job opened up.”

“What happened to his last assistant?”

“She left. She was a local.” The latter said with great derision.

“Aren’t you from here?”

“How could you tell?” She seemed at once insulted and shocked.

Tess considered what would be the kindest way to reply. “Because I am. Like knows like, right?”

“Well, I may have been born here, but I’m not going to be stuck here,” Greer said.

“What about-” Tess gestured at the ring.

“Everything can be negotiated. That’s one of the first things I learned, working for Fli – Mr. Tumulty. If you know what you want, you can get it. The trick is you have to know what you want.” She gave Tess an appraising look, and it was disconcerting to see that calculated, pragmatic gaze in such a young face. “And I know that-”

The door to the trailer opened, and Greer let the conversation drop.

“Don’t you think you should check to see if Miss Monaghan’s clothes are ready?” Flip asked, and Greer rushed out before Tess could say that nothing, not even Under Armour, could possibly dry that fast. Scurried, actually. She reminded Tess of a mouse, one of the animated ones that had been so devoted to Cinderella. Tess had always wondered what was in it for the mice. Did they really think they were going to get to live in the palace once all was said and done?

“I wanted a moment with you in private,” Flip said.

Tess nodded. The monstrous pink bathrobe had now risen up to her jawline, so her chin disappeared for a moment, catching in the collar.

“The thing about Selene – Greer doesn’t know this – only the other producers and I are aware of this, but… there was an incident when we returned here to film this summer. A suicide.”

“Selene attempted suicide?”

“No, no, no. It was a local man, Wilbur Grace, with no known connection to the production. He hung himself in his kitchen. Hung? Hanged?” Tess let Flip work out the grammatical possibilities for himself. “Hung,” he decided. “Police came to me, the other exec producer, Ben Marcus, and my unit production manager, Lottie MacKenzie. The man had some things in his possession, things that appeared to come from digging through the trash at the production office. He also had multiple photographs of Selene, taken during location shooting on the pilot, last winter.”

“A stalker?”

“Possibly. And a bit of a creep, based on some other things police found.”

“Creep?”

“Let’s just say he had an eye for the kiddies. As I said, no one knew him, and we hadn’t been aware of a problem. The problems started after he died. Small fires, set near our locations. A power outage, the result of someone vandalizing a transformer. Then there are the complaints from neighbors, who had been delighted to have us when the production was first announced. And now the steelworkers caterwauling. I’m not worried about Selene from a public relations standpoint. I’m worried that she’s vulnerable, when she’s out in public.”

“But you just said the man was dead, a suicide.”

“Right. Yet all this strangeness now.”

“Maybe he’s haunting you.”

Famously smart-alecky Flip Tumulty didn’t seem to enjoy flippancy in others.

“We have an order to film eight episodes of Mann of Steel in Baltimore, budgeted for three point two million per ep. If we get a pickup for a full second season, we’ll be here almost forty weeks out of the year, pumping money into the local economy. But if these petty annoyances continue, we’re going to have to rethink our commitment to the city.”

“But you want me to watch Selene, not your set?” Tess had an unerring instinct for when a story didn’t quite hang together, but she couldn’t pinpoint the logical flaw here, the missing link. She knew only that there was a lie lurking somewhere.

“Yes. Because wherever we film, whatever happens, Selene is the linchpin, our star. She’ll make or break us.”

“The show is called Mann of Steel.”

Flip glanced around, as if to be sure there was no one else who could hear him. “The program was built around Johnny Tampa, originally.”

He paused, as if waiting for Tess to squeal with excitement, but she could not bear to admit that she did know Johnny Tampa. She was, in fact, far more familiar than she wished with the entire cast of the long-ago teen nighttime soap opera The Boom Boom Room, in which Tampa had starred. In her defense, she had been an actual teenager when the show was in its heyday, which wasn’t true of Tampa, playing a high school senior with a receding hairline and crow’s-feet.

“He must be pretty long in the tooth now.”

“Only in his forties, and Tampa is actually a good actor,” Flip said. “Great comic timing. He worked with Ben and me on our first show, No Human Involved.” Again, there was a pause, as if waiting for a gasp of recognition, but Tess didn’t have to fake her ignorance this time. She remembered a terrific novel by that name, but not a television show.

“It ran for only two seasons, and it never got the ratings it deserved, but the critics loved us. Loved. Ahead of its time, a one-camera show done with voice-over. And Johnny won an Emmy for his guest shot. He was our first choice to play Mann. Like I said, he’s really good. But Selene – Selene’s got all the heat since Baby Jane.”

“A remake of the Bette Davis movie?”

“No, this was really gritty, done in the style of Requiem for a Dream, about a fourteen-year-old prostitute. The studio that bought it at Sundance had decided it was a stinker and they dumped it in theaters on Memorial Day weekend last year, a sacrificial lamb opposite X-Men. It almost disappeared, but then she got nominated for a Golden Globe. Did you see it?”

Tess decided not to volunteer that she had been part of the rabble flocking to X-Men with her boyfriend, instead of dutifully paying eight dollars to watch yet another young actress prove her Serious Thespian Chops by pretending to be a prostitute. The only cinematic cliché that bothered her more was high-spirited white guys, à la Ferris Bueller or the Blues Brothers, proving their innate soulfulness by inspiring black people to dance.

“It’s in my Netflix queue,” she lied.

“Well, she’s great in it. And she’s ours, for now. The future of this show depends far more on Selene Waites than it does on Johnny Tampa, and that’s all there is to it. I can’t risk having anything happen to her.”

“I’m a one-woman agency. I don’t have the manpower – woman-power, if you will – to provide the kind of services you want.”

“We just need someone to be with her while she’s off set. When she’s filming, our security provides all the coverage we need. But away from work, she needs someone, and it has to be a woman.”

“Why?”

“Men are… helpless around Selene. Any male between eight and eighty, she can twist to her will.”

“Including you?”

Flip pulled out a wallet and showed Tess a photograph of what appeared to be Philip Tumulty III. Same brown curls, same puckish expression – and probably the same Freudian issues in a decade or so. “My son, just turned five. He’s back in Los Angeles with his mom. Now that he’s in school, they can’t travel to locations with me, although if we get a full order for Mann of Steel, we’ll move east. Which would be a godsend, having a chance to raise him some place other than Los Angeles. You know my dad?”

Tess, remembering how upset Flip had been when she almost invoked his father’s name, shrugged vaguely to indicate that she might – possibly, maybe – have heard of someone named Phil Tumulty.

“It’s okay. I know he’s the big man, that I can make television shows the rest of my life and win a hundred thirty-seven Emmys and probably never equal the two movies he made in the ’80s. Anyway, my dad is a great director and a brilliant writer. Was, before he started doing big-budget crap. He wins on that score. But he was and is a shitty father, and I can beat him at that game. I’m not saying that I’m made of stone, that I can’t see how beautiful Selene is. I’m saying that I resist temptation for this little guy’s sake.”

“That’s great,” Tess said, meaning it, but also wondering at his vehemence. Flip’s little speech carried the whiff of addiction, a junkie at his first 12-step meeting, saying the right things, but not yet feeling them. “I get that you need a woman. But I’m not the right woman for the job.”

“We’ll see,” Flip said, putting his wallet away. His cell phone reprised its eerie imitation of a real phone, and he departed abruptly, leaving Tess alone for the first time. A sneeze overtook her, and Tess realized that the pink chenille had spread, like kudzu, almost to her nose. She hoped someone returned with her clothes before the bathrobe swallowed her completely. Killer Bathrobe – now that was a promising concept for a horror film. She would rather see that than a hundred Oscar-worthy films about beautiful underage prostitutes.

Chapter 3

What time was it?

The hotel’s blackout curtains were drawn, which always disoriented him, made him feel as if he were in a sensory deprivation tank. Going on two months in Baltimore, and he still couldn’t get on local time. Couldn’t get on anything local, if you didn’t count the local girls, and he didn’t. He was through with them, anyway.

Ben looked at the empty spot next to him. Had Selene really been there, just a few hours ago? She hadn’t left so much as a dent in the pillow. Maybe she didn’t weigh enough to make an impression. She was thin even by actress standards, almost fragile. It had been disturbing how young she looked, undressed. He wasn’t a pedophile, for fuck’s sake. And while a lifetime spent more or less in Los Angeles had inured him to bony women, at least most of those had gone out and bought a pair of tits along the way. But then, Selene liked to say she was 100 percent certified organic, one of those throwback freaks born gorgeous. He could never work out whether such women had increased or decreased in value as plastic surgery became mainstream. If anyone could buy a face and a body, then was it so special to have one bestowed on you by nature? The law of supply and demand would seem to suggest that natural beauty was less important than it had once been. But that face. With a face like that, he could forgive Selene for not having any tits.

He glanced at his Treo. Several messages from Flip, including a text, which said in its entirety: “Fucking Selene.” For one paranoid second, Ben imagined a question mark at the end of that flat phrase, and his empty stomach lurched. Flip would not be Mr. Happy if he found out that Ben had bedded Selene. In fact, Flip had expressly forbidden him to fuck Selene, which was when Ben decided he pretty much had to do it. Who was Flip to tell him anything? Other than the boss and executive producer. But Ben was an executive producer on this project as well – finally – because he had brought the concept to Flip. He had been screwed out of the created-by credit, but he was going to have sole teleplay and story credit on four of the episodes and, as always, he would stick a spoon in Flip’s mush, make it work. Flip isn’t the boss of me. Only he was, kind of.

Fucking Selene. Had he made her late for her set call? No, his conscience was pretty clear on that score. He had not only gone downstairs with her at 4 A.M., but had gotten in her cab as well, accompanying her back to her condo, watching her pass through the glass doors. He wanted to kiss her on the front steps, act like the teenager he once was and she had so recently been, at least chronologically, but they couldn’t risk that, not even at 4 A.M. in Baltimore, with only a stoned cabdriver to see. Fact was, his little act of gallantry, riding in the cab, had been a big enough risk.

The irony was Ben didn’t even sleep with actors anymore, not for years. He had had enough of that kind of crazy to last him the rest of his life. And Selene really was on the bubble, age-wise, fifteen years younger than he was. How old had Jerry Seinfeld been when he dated that huge-breasted seventeen-year-old? Were the rules different for the Jerry Seinfelds of the world than they were for the Ben Marcuses? Probably. Almost certainly. Fuck Flip for telling him not to touch her. Now he had, three times so far, and she was trouble. He should have stuck to Baltimore waitresses, girls for whom a night at the Tremont Hotel counted as an upgrade. Whereas Selene had pointed out to him tonight – twice – that it was relative slumming for her. When she was told she would have to be in Baltimore for almost four months, she had rejected every hotel in Baltimore and Washington, finally agreeing to stay in a furnished, four-bedroom waterfront condo that was costing the production four thousand dollars a week. A week! You could buy most of Baltimore for less. And she had stipulated that it was four bedrooms or nothing, saying she intended to bring her family in from Utah, but none of them had shown yet, thank God. He sometimes wondered if the family – the happy, well-adjusted Mormons who had let their youngest daughter head off to Hollywood at fourteen – were even real, or the creation of some slick publicist.

The budget wasn’t Ben’s problem, but he found Selene’s demands outrageous on principle. “What a dinky little suite,” Selene had said last night, all but inserting her entire head in the minibar, and he had experienced a clutch of fear for his per diem. Lottie was watching his expenses like a hawk, eager to catch him in any kind of impropriety of the fiscal variety. He wasn’t supposed to know it – Lottie had told Flip not to tell – but she had argued against his installation as an executive producer, said they could keep him at story editor, which meant a lower salary. Pretty ballsy, considering that the network had forced Lottie on them, insisted they needed someone with a track record for running a tight set. And Mussolini made the trains run on time, Ben wanted to say, but that comparison was decidedly unfair. To Mussolini.

What Lottie didn’t know was that it was useless to ask Flip to keep anything from Ben. Their friendship trumped all other alliances. Flip trusted Ben more than anyone, even his old man, especially his old man. Ben, after all, hadn’t dumped Flip’s mother, moved to fucking Taos, and started a second family. A second family that enjoyed the true big money, while Flip and his mom had struggled to get by on a mere fifty thousand a month.

Ben scrolled through the other messages stacked up on his Treo. Morning had been second-unit stuff, so he had been within his rights to sleep in, yet Flip was out there, raring to go. He probably just wanted to pull a head trip on Wes, the director on this episode, one of the eight hacks that the network had foisted on them, the same way they had shoved Lottie down their throats. “You two guys know words, these guys know visuals,” the network types had said. You couldn’t call them suits anymore because most of these losers didn’t wear suits, with the exception of the lone female executive, who looked as if she should be playing the male lead in some Edwardian-era drama. The network, Zylon, aka Plan-Z – God help them, their wizened corporate owner thought the name was hip, as opposed to a ready-made punch line for television critics everywhere – was struggling, trying to find a toehold among the other not-quite networks, the FXs and USAs and Spikes of the nonpremium cable world. The buzz was that Plan Z was a vanity project, that its billionaire owner would become disenchanted with the money drain, and the network would probably disappear before a single one of its shows even aired. But hadn’t they said the same thing about Fox once upon a time?

Then again, Fox had come along before all the buzz about platforms, before it was possible to download a television show on your phone, before iTunes and, worst of all, YouTube, which had convinced half the sentient world that they, too, were filmmakers because they could point and shoot. Ben and Flip were only thirty-five, way too young to be playing the “back in my day” game, but that’s how he felt, the Ancient Producer, with the albatross of new technology and old expectations weighing him down. In fact, his back hurt and his knees creaked a little as he got out of bed, but he blamed that on the subpar hotel mattress.

Selene had a Tempur-Pedic bed in her rental apartment. She had Tempur-Pedic beds in every room, for the phantom family that never showed up. Lottie had shared that with Ben in a rare burst of camaraderie, assuming he resented Selene as much as everyone else. He had before he slept with her, but he supposed it would be hypocritical now. Instead he resented her for not sharing the penthouse-condo-Tempur-Pedic wealth with him.

Not that he had ever lost too much sleep over being a hypocrite. That was Flip’s side of the street, being all earnest and lovable. Ben had no problem smiling in someone’s face, taking his money, all the while raking him over the coals behind his back. Even Flip.

He pulled on last night’s clothes, but he wasn’t a pig enough to stomach yesterday’s smells, which carried a faint whiff of Selene, so he rooted around for something fresher to wear. Eau de Selene wasn’t the light flowery fragrance that one might expect, more like cigarettes and Red Bull and Kahlúa. In fact, the whole room smelled of her. He’d go out, instead of having his usual room service breakfast, which was pretty ordinary fare anyway, although he enjoyed torturing the kitchen with special requests, such as fresh chives on his omelet. They had tried to get away with dried once and he had sent it back, if only to keep them on their toes.

But today – which, now that he had the curtains open, looked pretty nice – he was going to venture into the city, and not just his usual Starbucks. He was going to find some cool little diner, eat whatever people ate in Baltimore. Pancakes? Scrapple? Flip kept encouraging him to try scrapple, swore by the stuff, but Ben sensed he was being punked. Whatever he ended up eating, he was going to sit at the counter and inhale all the cholesterol and trans fats and scorched caffeine that the city had to offer, read the local sports page, pretend to care about the Ravens, and if Lottie bitched about him being MIA, he’d call it research. Mann of Steel was a man of the people. How could Ben write him convincingly if he didn’t get out there, mingle with the Real Folks?

Out in the crisp air, his head clearing even as his feet stumbled a bit, he thought to wonder if Selene really understood that they had to keep their thing a secret. Then he wondered if they had a thing, after three times. He didn’t really care if they slept together again. Unless she didn’t want to, in which case he would definitely be keen for it. But he cared desperately that she tell no one, because if anyone else knew, it would get back to Lottie, and if Lottie had this morsel of gossip, it would get back to Flip, who would consider it a betrayal. And as much as Ben resented Flip sometimes – for the name that opened doors, for the anticharisma that drew people to him – Ben never wanted to hurt him. Flip was his best friend.

He stopped for a second, physically and mentally centering himself. He was good at understanding people, their desires and motivations. It was, in the end, what he brought to his partnership with Flip – not just a thirty-year friendship cemented on the first day of nursery school, but a genuine curiosity about people. Flip was too used to people being curious about him – more correctly, curious about his father, and his various stepmoms. Line for line, Flip wrote terrific dialogue, but it was Ben who gave it depth, because Ben had actually spent some time thinking about other people. The joke on No Human Involved was that it would have been the show’s modus operandi if Ben hadn’t been hired. Flip was kind of a robot – at work. But Ben still remembered the kid he knew all those years at Harvard-Westlake, the one whose dad almost never showed for anything, the one who had cried when the debate team had been trounced at regionals. Sometimes, he had to remind himself that that Flip was still somewhere inside the increasingly priggish guy who showed up on set every day, wearing another goddamn local ball cap.

Now, standing on a corner somewhere in downtown Baltimore, Ben turned his knowledge of people on himself. If he had slept with Selene just because Flip told him not to, why was he so fearful of discovery? Wasn’t the point of disobeying a friend’s high-handed order to remind the friend that he wasn’t the boss, that he couldn’t control everything? What would Flip do, anyway? Wasn’t there an argument to be made that Selene would be much easier to handle if she were having an affair with one of the producers? They had actually hoped, for a day or two, that she might get attached to her costar, but for all the chemistry she and Johnny Tampa generated on-screen, their hostility toward each other was palpable. Those two really hated each other. Rumor was that Tampa was gay, but in Ben’s opinion, no gay man would have allowed himself to go that much to seed at forty-two. Wardrobe was going nuts, trying to keep up with the expanding ass of Johnny Tampa, and the DP was forced to shoot him above the waist most of the time, a waste of a great DP. Lottie rationalized that they were lucky that Tampa put on his weight below the belt, but wouldn’t they be luckier if they could just keep the fat fuck from going facedown into craft services like there was no tomorrow?

Ben popped a Nexium, which would help the reflux, but not the emotions beneath it. What was weighing him down? It wasn’t Selene, Ben decided. She was just another secret.

He found a diner tucked into a side street near the courthouse, but his appetite was gone. He drank black coffee and read USA Today, going over and over the weather info for California. Where, in fact, it was raining and there were mud slides, but he still would rather be there. Only four more weeks of shooting, and then he could go home. He didn’t belong here, and neither did Flip, much as he pretended to love it. If they got the pickup for a second season, Ben was going to actively lobby for Los Angeles or Vancouver. They could reproduce Baltimore on a soundstage. Hell, based on what he had seen, they could make a better one.

Chapter 4

He stopped at the mock-retro diner on Eastern Avenue, the one he had come to think of as his base camp, a term he had picked up from one of the call sheets he had actually seen. They were on the soundstage later today, with the second unit on the water, which would make it difficult to get to her. But then, except for that one brief encounter, it had proven impossible to get to her, and he was beginning to suspect this was no mere coincidence. They were keeping her from him. If he could just get her alone, he was sure she would be understanding, even sympathetic. But he needed her alone.

Perhaps he should hire a pro, someone detached, but that was exactly the reason he didn’t want a pro. A pro had nothing on line but his fee. Besides, the pros used so far had done nothing but collect their fat checks. They hadn’t even bothered to apologize for their failures, their incompetence.

The diner, with its aluminum siding and leatherette booths, reminded him of Diner, although he knew this one was shiny new, a fake on many levels, its booths harboring video games instead of miniature jukeboxes. The real diner from Diner had been moved downtown after the movie wrapped, and staffed with juvenile delinquents as part of a training program. Funny to think how desolate East Baltimore and the waterfront had been then, how easy it was to create the illusion that a diner sat on a lonely little forkful of land in the middle of the old industrial base. That had been his first visit to a movie set, more than twenty-five years ago. No – wait, his memory was playing tricks on him. It was only after seeing Diner in the theater that he realized that a movie had been made here, in Baltimore. He had been almost sick over it. What were the odds that Hollywood would ever return? But Levinson had come back, several times over, and Phil Tumulty had followed with his version of Baltimore. Although he thought Tumulty the better filmmaker, he felt closer to Levinson’s world. He remembered the day that they closed Howard Street to film the collision outside the old Anderson Cadillac – that was Levinson’s Tin Men – and the balloon festival in Patterson Park, staged expressly for Pit Beef, the first in Tumulty’s trilogy about growing up in Highlandtown.

He reached into his briefcase and, after taking care to make sure there was nothing on the tabletop, opened his scrapbook. There were photographs and articles about every production that had ever come to Baltimore – not just Levinson’s and Tumulty’s films, but And Justice for All and Homicide and The Wire and Ladder 49 and Red Dragon and The Replacements and Step Up and, almost every year, like the groundhog, another John Waters film. He visited Waters’s sets because he felt he had a duty to completeness, to see them all, but he didn’t really care for the movies because they so seldom had real stars. What had Gloria Swanson said? She stayed big, the movies got small. He didn’t get Waters, his insistence on making things look the way they actually were. Who needed movies for that?

He flipped through the pages, stopping at the one instance when a newspaper photographer had caught the both of them, standing on the edge of everything. Their own mothers probably couldn’t pick them out of the shot, but he knew they had been there, so he could identify the backs of their heads, then thick with hair. There they were down in Fells Point, the night the big fire scene in Avalon was filmed. That had been fascinating. And Levinson’s people had been nice. When it came down to it, he might have preferred Tumulty’s movies, but his people – Tumulty made very bad choices in his people, and now he had foisted those choices onto his son. Tumulty had forgotten where he came from, living out there… wherever. Tahoe? Santa Fe? Some suspect place, neither here nor Hollywood.

His breakfast arrived – how did they do it so fast? He was almost skeptical at the speed with which diner food arrived. Given the time, past eleven, he had opted for a grilled cheese and french fries with gravy. Had he put gravy on his french fries before he saw Diner, or had the movie persuaded him that this was what people in Baltimore did? He could no longer remember. It wasn’t that he had any trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality. He was as sane as the next guy, and had the tests to prove it, as the old joke went. They had made him talk to a psychiatrist as part of the exit interview, but that had been to cover their own asses. He had been in HRD; he knew the drill. He propped the local section of the Beacon-Light against the old-fashioned sugar dispenser, and read the latest litany of complaints about Mann of Steel. You reap what you sow, you reap what you sow. He wondered if Mandy Stewart could be of any use to him, but decided that she had been too open in her hostility. She probably couldn’t get any closer to Tumulty Jr. and his minions than he could at this point. The steelworkers, too, were of little use. Besides, he didn’t know any steelworkers.

His cell phone rang, and he debated not answering. The french fries were at that divine, fleeting moment of perfect hotness. But ignoring Marie was never a good idea, under any circumstances, and she had been especially needy the past few months.

“Where are you?” she said.

“Having an early lunch.”

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“ Holiday.”

“What holiday?”

“Columbus Day.” The lies were coming so easily now. The mark of an artist, he decided.

“Isn’t that the Monday that falls the same week as the twelfth?”

“Used to be,” he said agreeably. “But they had to start switching it around because people complained about the Italians getting their own holiday. So the federal holiday was last week, but the state-city holiday is today.”

“What does that have to do with the date? And why would they have more Columbus Days if people are angry about the one?” He could imagine her face – forehead creased, mouth turned down – panicking a little at this information, more proof that the world outside the house was going on without her. For some reason, she seemed to think that the world should have halted when she stopped participating in it.

Then again, he was lying to her. He should factor that in. But it was out of consideration. Everything he did, he did for her.

“No, there’s only one, and it’s today.”

“Oh…” Her voice trailed off.

“Marie?”

“Hmmmmm?”

“Why did you call?”

“Can’t remember. I wanted you to bring me something from the grocery store… a magazine? Candy? Hey – if there’s no work today, why did you put on your suit and everything, leave the house at the normal time?”

Good question. He had to remind himself sometimes that while Marie may be odd, an ever-growing bundle of tics and neuroses, she wasn’t simpleminded or unobservant. Given how little of the world she could see from her perch on the sofa, she tended to be extremely sharp-eyed about what was within her view.

“Force of habit,” he said. “It’s kind of embarrassing, but – I didn’t remember about the holiday until I showed up at North Avenue. Once I was all the way downtown, I thought I could do some work on my own, play catch-up. But there’s no heat in the building.”

“Isn’t it warm today?”

“You’d think so, looking at the temperature.” She was probably doing that just now, he calculated, pulling the draperies aside and squinting at the thermometer next to the bay window, or quickly punching through the channels on the remote to the Weather Channel. Stand-up comics were always making jokes about men and remote controls, but Marie wielded hers like a light saber. He didn’t dare try to take it from her. “The nights have been getting cooler, and that old pile just holds in the cold, with all that marble and all. And the heat was off all weekend.”

“They never ought to have renovated that old school for the administration headquarters. They just love throwing the taxpayers’ money away, don’t they? But I guess I shouldn’t complain, since that includes paying you.” She made a funny sound, and he knew she had brought her fist up to her mouth. “I don’t mean paying you is a waste.”

“I know,” he said. “Look, Marie, I have to go. Our minutes-”

“Then why do you tell me to call your cell instead of the office phone?”

“They’re sticklers about personal calls,” he began, trying to talk over her, but she was hurtling down her own track of thought: “You always – Mounds bars! That’s what I want. Mounds bars. I was watching television, and there was some commercial, and it reminded me of the old commercial, sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. Well, I don’t, so I want Mounds, okay?”

Trust me, Marie. You feel like a nut every day. Then he felt bad, as he always did, for his sour interior monologue. Marie couldn’t help how she was. “Mounds bars, got it.”

“The little ones. But not the ones in the bag. The ones that they line up in a row, on the cardboard.”

“You’ve got it, my sweet tooth Marie.”

He opened his wallet, and looked at the ATM slip from that morning’s withdrawal: $17,922 in his account. There was another $55,000 in the IRAs, but they couldn’t touch it for another five years. He had their regular expenses down to less than $2,500 a month, so they had a year before the money ran out, and then there was always a second mortgage, although that would require Marie’s signature. But he didn’t need a year. All he needed was to get that girl’s attention, get her to fulfill the promises she had made, even if she acted as if she had never heard of him.

The french fries had passed their peak, but he ate them anyway. Why was that? Why did fries lose their perfection so quickly, and why did people keep eating them once they had turned cold and mushy? If he were an inventor, he would come up with a way to produce ever-crisp, ever-hot french fries. Or maybe a restaurant that served only french fries, and not just the Thrasher’s-in-a cup-on-the-boardwalk thing. He’d have french fries with gravy and hollandaise and mayonnaise and all kinds of sauces. That’s what he would do, if he were an inventor. But he was a dreamer, in the best sense of the word. His head was filled with beautiful stories, stories that unfolded the way that How the West Was Won had raced across the screen at the Hillendale, back when he and Bob were no more than eleven, and you could see the lines on the print, breaking the picture into thirds, because the theater wasn’t set up for the Cinerama technique.

He remembered, too, how ancient Jimmy Stewart had looked to them, how they had cringed at the idea of that bony codger pitching woo to Carroll Baker, who made them feel vaguely strange inside, although they didn’t want to admit it to each other, and didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what they felt, not even to themselves.

Now he was older than Jimmy Stewart was then. How had that happened?

Chapter 5

Tess’s day was thrown off course much as her scull had been, and she never quite caught up, running late for every appointment, five in all. Autumn was turning into a reliably busy season, almost as good as February. It was as if back-to-school fever carried over into every aspect of people’s lives. Summer gone, people got serious about their messy legal claims. Tess also had a booming business in background checks on nannies. She had told Flip Tumulty the truth: She had more business than she could handle.

Besides, Tess, too, had gone back to school in a fashion, teaching a course through Johns Hopkins’ noncredit division, the Odyssey program. To her amazement, there were a dozen people in Baltimore who thought they might want to be private investigators. More shockingly, they believed Tess Monaghan was the woman who could show them how. She had scoffed at the idea when the program’s director first proposed it – her own career path had been highly unorthodox, perhaps even mildly illegal – but her network of PI friends had been so openly covetous of the offer that she had been forced to reconsider. The only downside was that it made for a very long Monday, and today’s disruptions meant she barely had time to fortify herself with a Luna bar before the three-hour session started at 6:30.

For this, the fourth meeting in the ten-week course, the students had been asked to bring laptops with wireless access. Eleven of her Charles Street Irregulars, as she had begun to think of them, had their computers open and ready to go. The twelfth, Felicia Blossom, had a cell phone on her desk, a cell phone so ancient and relatively massive that it could be a candidate for a Smithsonian exhibit on early mobile telecommunications.

“Do you not have a laptop, Mrs. Blossom?” The woman was in her sixties and given, perhaps inevitably, to wearing flowery dresses. Had she dressed that way after she became Mrs. Blossom, or had her riotous prints of peonies and cabbage roses attracted Mr. Blossom to her?

She nodded, brandishing the phone.

“That’s a phone,” Tess said, trying to mask her irritation.

“Yes, but don’t phones have all the same geegaws as computers?”

“Geegaws?”

“You know, the bells and whistles? Whatever. My son’s phone can take pictures and send e-mails – he sends me photos of my grandbabies from Phoenix – so I figure mine could, too, if someone showed me how. I couldn’t find the instruction booklet.”

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.

Chapter 6

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.

As it turned out, her father had died in less than two months, so her mother hadn’t really needed her at all. Greer had been twenty-three and, in her mind, washed up. She couldn’t ask for her old job back, and she couldn’t get a new one without a good reference from Stay Puft. Sucked back into life in Arbutus, she worked at a small law firm, dating her high school boyfriend. When JJ had asked her to marry him, she had said yes because she was too beaten down to remember that she had the right to say no. She was one of the unlucky ones, who had better take what life offered, meager as it might be.

When it was announced that the Mann of Steel pilot would film in Baltimore – through an online service that kept Greer apprised of television and movie deals – she felt like a prisoner glimpsing sunlight for the first time in years. She bluffed her way into a gig as an unpaid intern, given the make-work job of cataloging Flip’s and Ben’s papers in case their alma maters wanted them one day. From there, it hadn’t taken long to persuade Ben that she should be the writers’ office assistant. And when the job as Flip’s assistant suddenly became available, she knew the gods were finally smiling on her. So what if Flip sometimes failed to notice that a breathing, heart-beating human was in the room? She had lived through the rain of staplers, through the drought of her father’s illness. There was nothing she couldn’t endure, as long as she was moving up.

“That’s it?” Ben had said, when she asked him to put in a word for her, back her for the job as Flip’s assistant. “That’s all you want, is to work for Flip?” He seemed at once relieved and disappointed. “It’s not a guarantee, you know. Of anything.”

“Well, I want to write,” she said. “What better teacher could I have?”

She knew that had been a twist of the knife, suggesting that Flip had more to teach her about writing than Ben did. But all Ben had said was, “There’s a difference, between wanting to write and writing. What are you working on? Show it to me and I’ll critique it.” Sensing her hesitation, he had added: “Honest, I’ll give you a fair read. And you know I don’t offer my services to just anyone.”

“I’m not ready yet. I’m studying scripts, getting ready. You know that.”

“Yeah,” Ben had said. “You’ve zipped through the collected works of Ben Marcus and Flip Tumulty, reading our rough drafts, following our stunning trajectory from No Human Involved to Ottoman’s Empire to Mildred, Pierced. You might aim a little higher, you know. Billy Shakespeare. Chekhov. Hell, at the very least try Robert Towne or William Goldman.”

She had dutifully recorded those names in her notebook – Towne and Goldman, that is. She wasn’t so ignorant that she needed Ben to tell her about Shakespeare. But she also wasn’t so naïve that she thought she would learn to write television by studying playwrights.

Yet Ben had hit close to an uncomfortable truth without even trying, his peculiar talent. So far, Greer hadn’t been able to bridge the gap between wanting to write and writing. For one thing, there was never any time. But when she did find a free hour to sit in front of her computer, she froze. Staring at a blank screen almost made her feel sorry for Ben, something she never felt. Filling up that emptiness with her own ideas and stories – it seemed as unfathomable as contemplating one’s own death. Where did a story begin? What kind of story should she tell? In the early days, when Ben still sort of liked her – or, more correctly, didn’t actively dislike her – he would offer advice. “Take one idea – for example, the housebound private investigator, à la Nero Wolfe. Add something new – a female Archie Goodwin. That’s all we had when we started Ottoman’s Empire and everyone loved it.”

Everyone but the viewers, she had amended silently.

Idea number one: A girl wants to work in the movies. Idea number two: She gets a job, through hard work, and keeps her eyes open. But that was just her life, and she could not imagine her life becoming a movie or a television show. If her life had been rich enough to be the stuff of fiction, she wouldn’t be so desperate to flee it.

What she could imagine was success, the end result, at once vague and specific. She had – yes, why not, it wasn’t wrong to dream, quite the opposite – she had even imagined herself in a gown – floor length, gold, assuming gold was a favored trend, with a high waist to make the most of her top-heavy figure, although she would probably be thinner by the time she won a big award, having found the time and money for a personal trainer. In her fantasy, the statue was an Oscar, which made no sense relative to her own ambitions, but the Oscar looked to be a far more satisfactory object to clutch than the Emmy, with its sharp, pointy wings.

She had held an Emmy, secretly. Flip had won one, awarded for a spec script written for a long-running comedy. Just twenty-three at the time – younger than she was now – he had written it as a calling card, determined to break into the business without using the connections that his father could have provided. Flip had never expected to sell it, but the producers had loved it and used it, revising only a third of it. Greer knew this story because Flip had told it often, in almost every interview. “I was so depressed to find out that they had rewritten some of my pages. I didn’t know that first-timers often see their scripts rewritten from top to bottom, much less that spec scripts seldom become episodes, much less that they go on to be submitted for awards.” Greer was skeptical of that story. Could Phil Tumulty’s son really be that naïve about the television business?

She glanced again at the clock, realized she had forgotten to send the backup electronic copies of the call sheet and quickly fired it off to the mailing list. Lottie would chew her out for that, even though the paper copies had been distributed hours earlier. The call sheet shouldn’t fall to the show runner’s assistant, but Lottie had somehow finagled that. Greer assumed it was punishment for wanting to work for Flip instead of Lottie, but then Alicia had been forced to do it, too, when she was Flip’s assistant. She debated once more whether to call the detective again. Flip had to know it was wrong to call people past 10:59. Greer’s mother still jumped when the phone rang that late, her flutter of panic running through the house. God, it had been good to get out of that sad little house, even if it had meant moving in with JJ. What would Flip say tomorrow, when Greer admitted that she hadn’t been able to get the Monaghan woman on the phone? He would sigh, disappointed. Or he might have forgotten already why he had wanted Greer to call her. That happened sometimes. Monday’s whim was forgotten by Tuesday’s call time. But the problems with Selene weren’t going to go away. And the next time she caused a disruption, Flip would turn to Greer and say: “Whatever happened with that private detective, the one I wanted you to hire?”

Greer turned out the lights in the office, after making sure all the equipment was turned off. Ever since Flip had seen An Inconvenient Truth, he was insane on the topic of electricity. He had issued a memo, through Greer, that computers and other electronics were to be unplugged every night, and that the production offices were to use fluorescent bulbs everywhere – except in Flip’s private office, because he hated the quality of the light. The night was really too warm for her jacket, but she pulled it on anyway, eager for autumn. She had missed fall in L.A. It was about the only thing that she had missed about Baltimore.

Tomorrow’s start was civilized, 10 A.M., and they were on the soundstage, which meant that fewer variables would be thrown into the mix. No troublesome bystanders, no sirens going off during quiet moments, no worries about weather, no stupid rowers crashing their perfect sunrise. Today had been a mere nineteen hours, 4 A.M. to 11 P.M.

She rode the elevator down to the lobby of the deserted office building. The production had the top floor, and while the building claimed other tenants, Greer had seen scant evidence of them. Flip and Ben had wanted something flashier for their headquarters – sweeping water views, good restaurants – but Lottie had prevailed on this decision, insisting they take this cheaper suite of offices in a development on Locust Point, a boomtime project that had never actually boomed. Well, it had a water view, it was just from the other side of the harbor. There were perfectly good restaurants, too, although Ben bitched and moaned, even as he hit Popeyes three days out of four. Greer had seen the buckets in his trash. Even before she had known, for a fact, that Ben could not be trusted, she had plenty of reasons to believe that he was a phony and a liar.

As she reached for the outer door, she was aware of a movement in the parking lot, a skittering figure in the corner of her eye. A rat, she tried to tell herself, or a dog. But while both species could be exceptionally large in South Baltimore, neither one walked upright. She fell back behind the glass door, wondering what to do. She had her cell. She could call the police. And say what? “I want to report a shadow in the parking lot at Tide Point.” He’s more scared of you than you are of him, she told herself. He dislikes conflict just as much. More. Maybe it was a ghost, after all.

“I’m within my rights,” she announced to the empty parking lot. “Stop bothering me. I don’t have to give it back, under the circumstances.”

It was, she realized, an all-purpose pronouncement, one that could work for all the problematic people in her life. She waited, watching for that hint of movement again, then decided she had imagined it. Even so, she ran toward her car, unlocking it with the remote and leaving the parking lot gate open behind her, too scared to get out of her car and close it. She would have to make a point of being the first at work tomorrow, so it wouldn’t get back to Lottie that she had left the gate up.

TUESDAY
Chapter 7

“The lamb,” Tess decided. “And – no, yes, no – yes, a glass of wine, whatever you think best.”

Flip Tumulty, who had ordered a salad and sparkling water, gave her a hard look. Tess wasn’t sure what shocked him more, the food or the beverage. Perhaps Hollywood had only two channels on its dial – abstemious self-denial and wretched excess.

“And what can I get for you, young lady?” the waiter asked.

The third member of their party – definitely young, not so obviously a lady, not to Tess’s eyes – peered over enormous sunglasses, very Jackie O, circa Ron Galella. The glasses weren’t exactly the best way to travel incognito. She was attracting a lot of attention – or would have been, if there had been more people in Martick’s for late-afternoon lunch. Tess had chosen this determinedly obscure restaurant on the grounds that Selene Waites would be charmed by what looked like a private club. From the outside, Martick’s didn’t even appear to be open for business. There was no sign, no way of knowing it existed, and one had to buzz for entry. Of course, anyone who buzzed was promptly admitted, but Selene didn’t know that. Tess thought Selene might at least take off her sunglasses to inspect the black pressed-tin ceiling, the sturdy old bar, the stained-glass windows, all dating back to Martick’s life as a speakeasy. But Selene kept staring fixedly at her spoon. Was it dirty?

She said in a wispy monotone: “Venti half-caf frappuccino, please.”

“We don’t make cold coffee drinks here, but I could do just about anything else – cappuccino, latte, Americano, even a good old-fashioned cup of joe.”

“Who’s Captain Joe?” Selene asked, pursing her lips, eyes still trained on the spoon. She’s using it as a little mirror, Tess realized. Selene even bared her teeth to check if there was lipstick on them.

“Cup of joe,” Tess said. “It’s slang for coffee.”

“Why?”

It was a reasonable question, albeit one more appropriate to a two-year-old. But then, Tess was quickly discovering that Selene Waites was not that far removed from toddlerhood – a mercurial being who was all id, focused on satisfying her desires as she experienced them, determined to control anything she could, because, on some level, she sensed that she controlled nothing. This explained why Flip had warned Tess to play out the charade of letting Selene believe that it was ultimately her decision to hire Tess as her bodyguard.

Five seconds passed and Selene forgot her own question, or else grew bored with it. Her threshold for boredom was shockingly low. To call it attention deficit disorder would be inaccurate, because it wasn’t clear that Selene was attentive enough to achieve a deficit in that area. In the ten minutes they had been in the restaurant, she had already arranged her hair three different ways and applied her lipstick twice, using two different colors.

“Your order, miss?” This waiter was working hard for his tip.

“The mussels to start,” she said, her voice continuing thin and flat. Perhaps she only used inflections when she was being paid. “And the pâté, and the steak frites, with rolls. And a Bloody Mary, please. Do you have Effen?”

The waiter, a Baltimore hipster – that is, an art student at MICA – was pretty quick on the uptake. “No, we’ve got something much better, beat all the other vodkas in a taste test, very smooth, hard to find. I can’t even pronounce it.”

Selene nodded, and the waiter, aware that she wasn’t looking at him, took the chance to mouth “Smirnoff” over her oblivious head. Tess enjoyed the joke, but their conspiratorial moment gave Flip a spasm of panic.

“I admire your appetite,” Tess said to Selene. “It’s rare that I meet a woman who can match mine.”

“Well, I have a great metabolism,” Selene said, stroking her hair, styled in a side ponytail. The motion seemed to soothe her, in the manner of a child clutching the remnant of a beloved blanket. “I eat all the time, constantly. That eating disorder stuff in the tabloids is bullshit. I’m naturally thin. I mean, if I blew up to a size six or eight, then maybe I would worry about it, but as long as I can maintain this weight-”

Her cell phone rang, a mildly surreal moment, as Selene’s ring was her own voice, doing a cover of Blondie’s “ Call Me. ”

The waiter, slightly less relaxed, rushed back to the table. “We don’t allow cell phones here, miss.”

“It’s an iPhone,” Selene said with elaborate patience. “Bill Gates gave it to me personally.”

“Do you mean Steve Jobs?” Tess asked.

“Of course he has a job,” Selene said. “I mean, he’s pretty successful.”

The waiter persisted: “We don’t let people talk on wireless devices here, and we ask that all patrons turn those devices to silent or vibrate.”

“Well, then,” Selene said, “how am I going to take calls?”

“You’re not,” Flip said, his voice kind yet authoritative, as he closed his hand over her iPhone. “You’re here to talk to Miss Monaghan about your safety concerns.”

“Okay,” she said, falling back into an abstracted silence, stroking her hair so long that her first course arrived before she spoke again.

“I wanted mussels,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She had amazing control over her features, Tess noted; the movement was contained to the nostrils alone. The result of acting for film? Botox? But surely she was too young for such things.

“These are mussels,” the waiter said. Now he, too, had taken on the patient tone that Selene inspired in others. The whole world is her enabler, Tess thought.

“No, mussels have, like, little legs and you suck their heads. It’s fun.”

Tess counted very slowly to ten – not because she was angry, but because ridiculing a potential client was a bad business practice. Luckily, it turned out that Selene really didn’t need anyone to participate in her conversations. “I know what mussels are. I was supposed to shoot a film in New Orleans, but it never happened. Stupid hurricane.”

“That’s crawfish you’re thinking of,” the waiter said.

“Oh. Well, can I have some of those?”

“We don’t have crawfish on the menu. We have mussels. They’re quite good, especially prepared this way. And easier to eat than crawfish. Use the bread to sop up the sauce.”

“Could we have more bread? I’m ravenous.”

The waiter brought them more rolls, but Selene had already lost interest. For all her talk about her famous appetite and penchant for head sucking, Selene simply sniffed at the bread, leaving a whitish smear of flour beneath her nose. It looked rather natural to Tess. How strange Selene’s world must be, where spoons were used for mirrors, and mirrors were used for-

“The thing is, I don’t feel, like, I need a bodyguard.” Selene spoke as if she were picking up a thread that had been discussed at some length, when the topic had yet to be broached. “Nothing’s happened to me, not even close. I don’t think I’m the issue. I think the production is. It’s jinxed.”

“You’re part of the production,” Flip said, “and if anything were to happen to you…”

“You could write Betsy out, easy,” Selene said. “The show is called Mann of Steel, after all. It’s Johnny’s show.”

Tess didn’t know much about actors, but she didn’t think it was common for them to argue against the primacy of their roles.

“Yes, well, the man who died didn’t have photographs of Johnny in his house,” Flip said. “He had photographs of you.”

She preened a little, as if she had been complimented.

“If I’m going to have a bodyguard, shouldn’t it be a guy, like in the movie?” Selene asked. “Nobody has a girl bodyguard.”

“You’ll be the first,” Flip said. “After you do it, everyone will want to do it.”

Selene stroked her hair a little faster, clearly excited by the notion of setting a trend. “Could we design an outfit for her, a uniform, something like Angelina Jolie in the Lara Croft movies, only by Prada?” She regarded Tess. “You would look a little like Angelina if you had longer hair with a completely different face. And if you dropped some weight, of course, and got your lips plumped up.”

“Of course,” said Tess, feeling a pang for the long braid she had worn most of her life. Her hair fell to her shoulders now, and she kept it loose most of the time, or pulled back in a ponytail when rowing. She realized these styles were more suitable, perhaps even more flattering, to a woman in her thirties. But she missed her braid. “Only this isn’t a part, and I’m not going to lose weight for it, or wear a uniform, or do my hair a certain way. I’m going to be working for you, and I take my work seriously.”

“As do I,” Selene said, a little heatedly.

“Then you both should get along great,” Flip said. “No fights, no feuds, no egos.”

“Amigos!” Selene sang, although Tess was pretty sure that Flip had slightly mangled the lyrics to the old show tune. “I was Baby June at summer camp, which is funny that I then became Baby Jane. I wanted to be Louise, though. Stupid old June, she disappears by act two.”

Now that was more what Tess expected in an actress.

“Well, Betsy has plenty to do in our production, more than we planned,” Flip said, buttering a piece of bread and actually trying to press it into Selene’s hand, as if he were her mother. Or nanny. “You know we’ve been rewriting the last three episodes of the season, because that was the only note the network gave us – more Selene, keep her story open-ended. More, more, more. They love you, and they’re willing to spend extra money to keep you safe.”

Flip might seem overly solicitous of Selene, Tess realized, but he was smooth, too, steering her toward what he wanted. Was he manipulating Tess in the same way? But no, she had decided to take the job only for Lloyd’s sake, and Flip couldn’t have foreseen that. She was calling her own shots.

The main courses arrived and Tess dug in, happy for the cover of chewing. Selene sliced and cut her steak into ever smaller pieces, spread pâté on the saltines provided, and twirled her frites in the mayonnaise she had demanded that the waiter bring, much to his barely concealed disgust. But Tess never observed a morsel of food going in.

Meanwhile, Flip was studying Tess, and less covertly.

“I’ve never seen a woman eat like that,” he said, caught staring at her quickly cleaned plate. “It’s…impressive.”

“I eat like that,” Selene said. “I have a really high metabolism.”

“Of course you do,” Flip said, buttering another roll and handing it to the young woman, who placed it on the bread plate with the other roll she had ignored.

What kind of weird family am I joining? Tess decided to focus on the money she was going to be paid, twice her usual rate. In the fine tradition of private detectives, she told herself that she would believe the money, not the story.

She then spent the rest of lunch trying to forget the kind of terms used for those who did things just for the money.

“You a midget?” the homeless man asked Lottie MacKenzie. Or maybe he was a vagrant. She couldn’t know that he was homeless, just that he was dirty. Lottie MacKenzie always tried to stick to the facts, things that could be quantified, even in her private thoughts.

“No,” she said. “I’m not a midget.”

“Then you a dwarf? There’s a difference, ain’t there? Whatever you are, you probably prefer to be called a little person, right?”

“What I am,” Lottie said, “is short. That’s all. Just short. If you must put a word to it, that’s the one.”

“Sheeeeeeeeeeeit. Short don’t cover it. You pocket-size.”

“Depends on the pocket, I suppose.”

He laughed and used her rejoinder as a cue to pull his own pocket inside out, showing that it was empty – and filthy.

Although she usually stiffed panhandlers, especially those who so much as alluded to her height, Lottie gave the man a dollar, rationalizing that it balanced her indulgence in a three-dollar latte from the Daily Grind, not to mention the five-dollar éclair from Bonaparte Bread across the street. Lottie had grown up listening to a lot of people lay a proprietary claim to guilt – Jews, Catholics – but she couldn’t imagine that anyone felt the clutch of anxiety she did at the thought of her Scottish father finding out that she had spent three dollars on coffee and milk.

But such extravagance was preferable to making the production pay for every goddamn beverage she bought herself during the course of a working day. That would make her no different from Ben, the moocher, the schnorrer – a word she had embraced since learning it from Flip, although he laughed at how it sounded in her mouth. Her family had arrived in California when Lottie was five, and she didn’t have anything resembling a Scottish accent. But there was something clipped about her voice, an inability to wrap her mouth around the Yiddish terms so common to Hollywood and movie-making. Schnorrer. Ben was such a rip-off artist that he had tried to submit receipts for the music he downloaded from iTunes, claiming he listened to music while he wrote, so it was a production-related expense. “Try that shit on the tax man, not me,” Lottie had snapped at him.

In Lottie’s experience – and she had almost twenty years of working in television, far more than the Wonder Boys; she was second generation like Flip, although her father had been a propmaster – there were two ways of looking at a production. You could treat it like carrion and pick its bones clean, or you could give it the respect of a small but solid nest egg that would keep producing income as long as people didn’t get greedy. Movies were carrion. Mann of Steel had the potential to be a nest egg production, something that could provide them all steady work for three or four years if people didn’t lose their heads. She had lectured Ben on this concept just last week, thinking she might actually convert him to being a team player.

“Jesus, Lottie,” he had said. “Why do you think so small?” There was an awkward pause, and he had apologized, but with a smirk that made it clear his words had been chosen in order to create that awkwardness. Here she was, going on forty, and still dealing with stupid jokes about her height. Four feet ten, she should have told the homeless man, singing the words out loud and clear. Four feet fucking ten, which is not a midget or a dwarf or a little person, just short, according to the clinical definition. Four feet ten, a full foot shorter than her father, and almost six inches shorter than her mother, for no reason that anyone had ever discerned. Her mother blamed the postwar shortages, but how could her father’s poor nutrition have stunted Lottie’s growth when it hadn’t affected his? And her mother, an American studying abroad when she met Lottie’s father, had never known any dietary lack greater than decent peanut butter. Certainly, food had been abundant for all of Lottie’s life, especially after they moved to Los Angeles. Her new schoolmates, incapable of understanding the difference between Scotland and Ireland, had called her Lottie the leprechaun, mocked her size and her vowel sounds. The accent was vanquished quickly, but her small stature was one of the few things that remained beyond her control.

Behind the wheel of her car – a midsize rental, because a small car made her feel doll-like and an SUV would seem so compensatory – she fastened on her headset and began running through her calls with furious efficiency. A long lunch in the middle of a brutal day, what was Flip thinking? He would be logy and cranky for much of the afternoon. Ben wasn’t answering his phone, per usual. They may have been hailed as geniuses, but Flip had trouble seeing the bigger picture outside the script, while Ben… Ben! He was simply one of the most undisciplined men she had ever worked with, and she had known some real fuckups in her time. He procrastinated, got behind, ended up with too much on his plate, and then went into hiding, like a little kid late on his homework. So many people mistook speed for urgency. Lottie was slow and methodical in her movements and her speech, but she almost never had to redo anything. She got things right the first time.

Of course, the most frustrating thing about Ben was that the work, once done, was stellar. Not that Lottie had any intention of letting him know that.

Besides, she had bigger worries. Something was rotten in the city of Baltimore. Throughout her career, Lottie had battled government interference, various actors’ addictions, and nepotism. She had weathered weather, gone toe-to-toe with God and won the argument. But this production was off in a way that Lottie couldn’t define, and it troubled her. They were making their days more often than not, Flip was dealing pretty well with the network demands for more Selene, and no one in the cast had been arrested. Yet.

Still, there was someone in the production who couldn’t be trusted, although she wasn’t sure who it was. Lottie had never worked with any of these bozos before – not Flip or Ben, but also not the string of second-rate directors that the network had foisted on them, and definitely none of the union locals here in Baltimore. The last, at least, had been a pleasant surprise. The crew was disciplined and professional, honed by years of steady work. Even the Teamsters were a joy, relatively. But no spring ran forever, and Mann of Steel was now the city’s only shot at getting something up and running for a few years. Movies spent more by the day, but a successful television series spent it longer. Even a two-season run for Mann of Steel would be a godsend for the city, make its little slice of Diehard 4 look anemic.

So why did it feel as if someone was actively rooting against the project, orchestrating its problems? Ever since that night in August, when the police had come to them with those photographs and the story of that poor man, hanging from his ceiling fan, Lottie had felt a sickening thump in her stomach, the sense that the production was somehow outside her control, an unfamiliar sensation for her.

And she had been right – that was the beginning of their troubles, more or less, although Johnny Tampa had been whining from almost day one. Flip had his theories, but Lottie thought he was cracked. Take Mandy Stewart, the so-called community activist who was always spouting off to the newspapers. Lottie knew exactly why Mandy Stewart had become such a vocal critic, and it didn’t have shit to do with the neighborhood. A local baker, she had approached Lottie about getting the production to use her goods. Lottie would have worked it out, too, if the woman had been even semireasonable, but she had quintupled her normal prices. Lottie knew this for a fact, because she had asked her assistant to call and pretend he was looking for pastries for an event at the local library, and gotten the real quote. Then there were the retired steelworkers, who had nothing better to do than drum up bad press. Again, they would go away if Lottie would hire one of them as a consultant, but she refused to be bullied that way. Why did locals try to kill the goose that laid the golden egg? Well, not kill it exactly. No, it was more like fattening a goose for pâté, only in this case, they squeezed everything out. Everyone seemed to think that Hollywood minted its own money, that it produced currency the same way it produced stories.

One thing she knew for sure: This Theresa Esther Monaghan of Keyes Investigations was crazy if she thought she could bid a security job so high. They could get twenty-four-hour rent-a-cops for not much more. Flip could promise anything he liked, but all the paper moved through Lottie’s office, and she had the final say on expenditures. She would knock Monaghan’s price down and insist that the kid, the one she was forcing on them, take an unpaid internship. The specter of that small victory lifted her spirits and carried over to her conversation with the locations manager, whom she proceeded to ream with the quiet, no-nonsense tone that everyone on the crew had learned to fear. Flip yelled, Ben blustered, but it was Lottie’s quiet voice that got things done.

Chapter 8

“Man, isn’t this something?”

Lloyd stood in the middle of what looked to Tess to be a relatively ordinary suite of offices, indistinguishable from any other in the city, aside from the fact that this one featured posters from several film and television projects she had never heard of – No Human Involved; Ottoman’s Empire; Mildred, Pierced.

“It’s something,” she managed.

“And look in there.” Lloyd dashed through the open door of the corner office before Tess could admonish him, emerging with a winged statue.

“This thing is heavy,” he said, hoisting it in two hands. “I want to thank the members of the Academy and my mama-”

“Don’t forget God. He’s big this year.”

The dark-haired man slouching in the doorway was tall and thin, with the type of sharp-featured face that Tess usually found attractive. But there was something a little mocking in his eyes, unkind. Lloyd was only seventeen, and his life had been sheltered in a lot of ways. Besides, he couldn’t be the first person to play this game. Tess bet almost everyone who saw the Emmy grabbed it instinctively, delivering a mock acceptance speech. The cleaning lady had probably done it.

“I’m sorry,” Lloyd said.

“Oh, I don’t mind,” the man said. “And I doubt that Flip would care. Greer – now Greer is another thing. She just had it all shined up, special for the boss man. But then, Greer is always buffing Flip’s Emmy, in one sense or another.”

Was that supposed to be a double entendre? It didn’t fit the dynamic that Tess had observed between Flip and Greer. Besides, the girl had a fiancé.

“How do they get your name on it?” Lloyd said, puzzling over the inscribed base. “Wouldn’t that give away who won, ahead of time? They always make a big deal of it being a secret.”

“You get them blank, then they send you a band that’s fitted over the base. Or so I’ve heard.” There was a lot of topspin on the last word, but Tess decided to make nice, anyway.

“Tess Monaghan. I’m coming on board as security for Selene Waites, and Flip agreed that the production would find a space for Lloyd here in the writers’ office, as an intern, doing whatever you need.”

She was a little bitter about Lottie MacKenzie, whom she had yet to meet, shortchanging Lloyd that way. It had been bad enough, agreeing to a cut in her own fee, but the truth was that Tess had jacked it up quite a bit, testing the limits, and even the renegotiated price was far better than what she usually got. Denying minimum wage to Lloyd was downright mean-spirited – not to mention detrimental to Crow’s hope of instilling a work ethic in the kid.

“Can you type?” the man asked Lloyd.

“Sorta…,” Lloyd said, an honest enough answer. Tess had seen him on a computer keyboard. He used the two-finger method, and his speed was admirable, his accuracy and spelling less so.

“Work a photocopier? Answer phones? Get a lunch order right? The last is really the most important. A writers’ office, like an army, travels on its stomach.”

Tess thought that Lloyd would bristle at this list of less-than-illustrious tasks, but he nodded earnestly.

“Whatever you want, Mr. Marcus.”

“Ben,” the man said, then on a delayed double take: “How do you know my name?”

“When I learned I was going to work here, her boyfriend, Crow” – he jerked a thumb at Tess – “sat me down with the computer, and we went over everybody’s credits on IMDb, then I matched the names to images on Google.”

“Were you familiar with our work before you did that little exercise?” Tess couldn’t decide if the question was supercilious, or merely insecure. Of course, it was possible to be both, to use the former as a cover for the latter.

“I seen The Beast twelve times,” Lloyd said. “It’s one of my favorite movies.”

Ben Marcus looked pained. “That’s Tumulty, and Tumulty Senior at that. We don’t give points for that around here.”

“Yeah, I know, but that’s what I like. Horror. You wrote one of my favorite episodes on my favorite show ever, Freak Fest. I mean, I admit, I didn’t know who wrote it before we looked it up, but when I did, I remembered it and shit. There was some righteous evil in that.”

Shamed out of his sardonic smile, Ben Marcus looked awkward, even naked.

“I’d almost forgotten about Freak Fest.” He turned to Tess. “It was an attempt to update the old anthology shows, like Night Gallery, and one of the few things I ever wrote on my own.”

“I liked it when those strange little men chanted, ‘One of us, one of us, one of us.’” Lloyd squatted down and began hopping around in the fashion of a demented chicken. Perhaps Crow should have spent less time on the Internet, more time briefing Lloyd on acceptable office behavior.

“Yeah,” Ben said, his tone moving back into its naturally arch range. “Well, there’s a reason for that.”

Lloyd, still in chicken mode, nodded. “I know, Tod Browning’s Freaks, 1932. Johnny Eck, the Baltimore screen painter, was in it. You know, one of them guys with no legs. Crow ’n’ me watched it a couple of weeks ago. I love those pinhead ladies.”

If the life I see on my deathbed is more a series of greatest hits than unfiltered memories, Tess thought, then this moment will be part of that final slide show: Achingly Hip Screenwriter Dude shot down by a seventeen-year-old street kid, left nonplussed by Baltimore arcana. Johnny Eck! Screen painting! Oh, it was lovely.

“Yeah,” Ben said at last. “Unfortunately, Freak Fest was more of a Weak Fest. No one can make an anthology show work anymore.”

“Why is that?” Tess asked. She had zero interest in the answer, but she didn’t want Ben to resent Lloyd, and appealing to Ben’s insider knowledge might restore the equilibrium, allow him to play the expert he clearly prided himself on being.

“I haven’t a clue. William Goldman gets credit for saying ‘Nobody knows anything’ in the movie business. I’m just the rare soul who admits it. Okay – Lloyd, was it? Welcome to writers’ world. Flip and I are actually doing all the writing this first season, and Flip has a personal assistant, so you’ll be fetching and carrying for me, mainly, but also doing anything that Greer tells you to. Or the script supervisor, Bonnie. Or Lottie MacKenzie, especially Lottie MacKenzie. She may not even come up to your shoulder, but she’s the one person you never want to disappoint on this set. Lottie fires people.”

“He’s not getting paid,” Tess pointed out.

“That won’t stop Lottie. Where’s Greer? Never mind, I’ll show you the computer basics, and the phones. Lottie has mad-anal systems for everything here, from the phones to e-mail. With phone messages, you have to log everything in by hand and by computer. When you send an e-mail, always blind-copy it to yourself. And make sure you have a list of all the restaurants we like for lunch, along with their menus. But you’ll also have to call them to check the specials every day.”

Tess felt a little like a mom, watching the kindergarten teacher lead her son to his cubbyhole. Lloyd, however, had no separation anxiety whatsoever. He couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about the mundane tasks that Ben was outlining.

She gave it three days.

Greer tried to wrap her arms around the slippery dry-cleaning bags, but there was too much to carry in one trip, and one of the bags ended up slipping to the pavement. How did someone who seemed to dress exclusively in T-shirts and blue jeans generate so much dry cleaning? When Flip had interviewed her for the job of his assistant, he had cited dry cleaning as the type of errand she would never be asked to do. No dry cleaning, no child or pet care, Flip had promised. Nothing demeaning. The problem was that Flip, who had been sucked up to most of his life, had no idea what demeaning was. He had kept his promises about children and pets, but that was probably because his son was on the West Coast, along with whatever animals the family kept.

Still, there was no end to the trivial shit she was asked to do. Last week, Greer had spent her workday trying to find out if the cable system in Flip’s rented house could be reconfigured so he could get a different menu of pay-per-view options on the sports channels. She had then spent the better part of an afternoon with one of the electricians, setting up the DVR, and writing a sort of “TiVo for dummies” shortcut guide for Flip.

And now Greer was supposed to be shopping for a bigger house, in case the series got a pickup and Flip had to relocate to Baltimore. This meant endless and exhausting conversations with Mrs. Flip, whose singular obsession seemed to be kitchen countertops. Mrs. Flip had decreed that granite was over, that her Baltimore kitchen, should it come to pass, must have cement or slate surfaces, a hard-to-find decor element in a Baltimore rental, where granite was considered pretty high-end.

Mrs. Flip also had endless questions about the quality of life in Baltimore, which she seemed to think was one rank above a Third World country. Were there mangoes in the grocery stores? Bottled water? Good bottled water? Gluten-free products? What was the local version of Fred Segal? She prefaced every conversation by saying, “You know me, Greer, I really don’t want to be any trouble,” then proceeded to outline a list of demands, questions, and needs so extreme that she was right, they weren’t any trouble. They were way beyond that.

Mrs. Flip’s most offensive moment, however, had come when Greer was offered the assistant job. Mrs. Flip had e-mailed Flip, asking that he send a photograph of the prospective employee. After seeing the JPEG, she had replied: “So not a temptress. Approved.” Greer knew this because she was the one who had sent the photo – attachments were beyond Flip’s computer capabilities – and she opened Flip’s in-box every morning, per his instructions, and “previewed” his mail, assigning each communication a priority code. But then, Mrs. Flip must have known that, too.

The dry cleaning, even halved, was still too much to handle, and another bag slid to the street just steps from her car, a pair of khakis brushing the pavement. Would Flip even notice, much less care? If he did, she could always blame the dry cleaner. Greer had quickly learned that it was always easier to blame someone else, then promise to handle the problem as if she hadn’t caused it. Things had a way of working out. The detective lady had come to work on the production, after all, just as Flip wanted, and as far as he was concerned, Greer got the credit for that. And she would be happy to take it, as long as everyone was happy.

Of course, Tess Monaghan had made it a package deal, which bothered Greer far more than it did anyone else. She had insisted on installing some inner-city kid in the writers’ office, and Greer had worried for a moment that he might turn out to be a spy or, worse, someone as ambitious as herself. But when she came into the office, her arms full of plastic, and saw how young the kid was, she decided that she had nothing to fear from him.

“You the new intern?” she asked, and he nodded eagerly. “Go to my car and get the rest of Mr. Tumulty’s dry cleaning, then hang it in his office.” He all but ran from the office, happy to have something to do. Later, she would blame him for the dirt on the khakis.

“Don’t abuse him, Greer,” Ben said, popping out of nowhere. He was a sneaky one, although not quite as sneaky as he thought. “There’s enough scut work. You don’t have to create more for him.”

“He works for the writers’ office and Flip is one of the writers, is he not?” She had a troubling thought. “Hey, will he get a credit?”

Ben sighed. “Jesus, Greer. You worry about the tiniest things.”

“Well, I could worry about some pretty big things, but I think you would prefer that I not do that.”

“Flip wants you on set,” Ben said. “He wants you to give the lady dick a tour, show her where the magic happens, give her the lay of the land. More clichés to come, as they occur to me. In fact, I think I’ll just plug that in the minipub for episode seven – more clichés TK. She’s going to meet you over there in an hour.”

“Are you heading over to the soundstage eventually?” she asked. “I’ll drive you.”

“I was going to check in later, see how the new scenes are working.”

“We should go together,” she said. “Then we can… catch up.”

“Yeah,” he said, rubbing his chin. Flip liked to tease Ben that the mannerism was a holdover from their college days, when Ben had sported a Vandyke for a while. Ben rubs his chin like that to apologize to it for the years of pretentious stupidity. Flip could tease Ben, and Ben could tease Flip, but no one else was allowed to speak about them the way they spoke of each other. “Okay, if that’s what you want to do.”

“Yes, it is what I want to do. Let the new kid answer the phones.”

“He’s barely been briefed on Lottie’s system-”

“It’s not exactly rocket science.”

“Speaking of clichés.”

She shot him a look. “I’m going to set. Flip likes to have me around. Do you want to come or not?”

She could tell that Ben longed to say something snarky, but he remained silent, bobbing his head slightly. Greer felt a strange surge of emotion – a rush of blood to her cheeks, a flip in her stomach. She wasn’t sure what to call it, but power was as good a word as any.

Chapter 9

He stopped at an ATM, making sure it was affiliated with his own bank to save the two-dollar user fee. Even before his money worries had become chronic, he had kept track of such fees, calling the bank each month to argue over ATM charges and point-of-service fees. The bank always backed down, too, refunding him the ten or twenty dollars on his statement. More things could be negotiated than people realized. The key was to have the stamina, the willingness to fight, and that was one thing he did have.

The drawback to using his own bank was that it always showed him the balance in his account, a number he preferred not to see, much less think about. He took out twenty dollars. How much time did he have to resolve things? Six months? Nine? It was the COBRA that was killing him, an apt bureaucratic acronym if ever there was one. He was being poisoned, oh so slowly, by that monthly nut for medical insurance, a breathtaking two thousand dollars, as much as all their other bills combined, even the mortgage, which was five years from being paid off. But the only thing worse than making COBRA payments for eighteen months would be not making them, because no other medical plan would touch them if they had to go through an underwriting period. If they exhausted COBRA, then someone would have to take them. That was the law, the very rules and policies he had explained to so many others, over the years, with patience and, in his opinion, compassion. Yet people had yelled at him, and cursed, as if he were the arbitrary power denying them what they needed. In hindsight, he had to admit that he was a bad fit for human resources. He was a scientist by nature. He never should have left the classroom for a job in administration.

Was there any way he could save money? He could pack a bag lunch, but Marie would find that odd. When he started working at North Avenue, he had always maintained that eating lunch out was the one reward in his dull gray day. Perhaps he could say he was putting himself on a diet? But she would find that strange, too, possibly suspicious. Sometimes, when her moods sunk to their lowest, Marie would accuse him of having an affair. No, accuse wasn’t the right word. It was more like an invitation, a concession. She would enumerate all her inadequacies and issues, making the case for him to find another woman, and he would be forced to argue the other side – death till do us part, for better for worse, in sickness and in health. Secretly, he had wondered over the last few months whether he was still obligated to stay with her. Whose enmity would he risk if he left? Who would care now?

He had hated that glimpse into himself, however. He hadn’t married Marie because she was his best friend’s sister, and he wasn’t staying with her for that reason, either. He remained because he loved her, strange and surprising as that fact might be to everyone, including Marie. Marie needed him. He wouldn’t let her down. He was going to make sure they were set for life.

Let’s see – according to his source, they were on the set today. Of course, that didn’t mean she would be on the set. She wasn’t, not every day. Still, he decided to drive over there, take his position, as he thought of it. He never parked in the part of the lot directly in front of the soundstage. That might be noticed. Instead, he chose the far end, near a run-down Chinese takeout. The people who owned the restaurant were wonderfully incurious, indifferent to his on-again, off-again presence. Only once, when he had been writing in his notebook, had anyone approached him. The owner, Mr. Chen, had questioned him nervously, and he realized that he had been mistaken for some sort of official, probably from immigration. He had shown Mr. Chen his legal pad, and said the first thing that came into his mind: “Poetry. I’m a poet and I find this a peaceful place to write.”

Mr. Chen had been happy to accept the idea that the parking lot of a derelict strip center on Eastern Avenue was a suitable place to write poetry. But then, people often were quick to hear what they wanted to hear. Wasn’t he the same way himself?

He glanced toward the far end of the parking lot. He wished he could buy some expensive surveillance equipment, but he was stuck with the old camcorder, which he didn’t dare bring up to his eye here. From this distance, it wasn’t really possible to make out the people coming and going. Of course, she was somewhat distinctive, and he knew her vehicle, too, but she had a way of slipping in and out that made her easy to miss. Not that he could always stay until the end – the later they started, the later they went – which was frustrating. It was very hard for him to come up with plausible cover stories for any late-night shenanigans, although he sometimes found a way to sneak out after Marie was asleep, especially if she had been hitting the Xanax a little harder than usual. But there was almost no way he could justify being out regularly between the hours of eight and twelve, not without sending her into shrill lamentations about how she would wander, too, if placed in his situation.

He saw a car pull in, not the usual one, and he wondered if they were onto him, trying to trip him up. He watched the driver help her out of the car, as if she were fragile. Ah, she was anything but, he was sure of that. If only he could get to her, talk to her. Then she would be on his side, he was sure of it. Once they met, face-to-face, she would be his.

Chapter 10

Places in Baltimore often have many lives. Tess recognized the soundstage on Eastern Avenue as a former department store, one of the better ones – Hochschild Kohn, she thought, but maybe Hecht’s – that had then been demoted to bargain chain status before settling into life as a members-only big lots store. It anchored the end of a sad and lonely strip mall, where at least half the stores were vacant. A small band of protesters – ah, the disgruntled steelworkers – marched along a grassy strip, earning a few halfhearted honks of support for their cause, but they looked pretty harmless to Tess. She parked and walked the perimeter of the freestanding building, noting the entrances. There was a fire door in the rear, but otherwise no way in and out of the building. That was good.

The front, however, had no security – no lock on the door, no one sitting at the front desk just inside the doors. A worker tried to wave her in the direction of a sign that said EXTRAS HOLDING, even as Tess insisted she was here to meet with Greer. The young woman arrived just in time to save Tess from being shunted off to a wardrobe fitting.

“Isn’t that a little slipshod?” Tess asked. “Anyone could get in, under the guise of being an extra.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t get far,” Greer said. “Strangers are noticed pretty quickly.”

“Still, it’s a risk, and I’m here to assess weaknesses. Remember, I’m watching Selene only during her nonwork hours. It’s up to the production to make the workplace as secure as possible. And most of the problems have happened at work, right?”

Greer was turning out to be one of those people who simply didn’t answer questions not to her liking. “I suppose you want a tour of the set,” she said. “Flip said I should take you around, if that’s what you want.”

Tess didn’t really care about a tour, but Greer sounded grudging, as if she resented being given this task, and her attitude made Tess perverse.

“Love to.”

The former store had been more or less stripped down to its concrete floors, with a labyrinth of plywood now taking up half of the space. Vast and high ceilinged, the building held the morning’s chill and then some.

“I’ll take you to the sets we’re not using, first.” Greer headed toward the maze, and Tess had one brief paranoid fear that Greer was planning to lose her in it, that Tess would end up wandering for days among artificial rooms.

“This is the Mann rowhouse,” Greer said, stopping in front of a living room that played to every stereotype of how blue-collar workers lived, replete with shag carpeting, velvet paintings, and a plaid La-Z-Boy. “We’re not using it in the current episode, because that’s set almost entirely in the nineteenth century.”

“It looks a little wide,” Tess murmured. “But then, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Film isn’t very good at conveying narrow spaces like eleven-foot rowhouses.”

“What do you mean?” Greer appeared to be offended by the mere suggestion that a film could fail to emulate real life.

“My boyfriend and I went to New York this summer, and we toured this amazing museum in a former tenement, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the kind of place you saw in The Godfather, Part II, or Once Upon a Time in America.” Tess didn’t bother to add that she had been motivated to visit the museum because of memories of books like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or the All-of-a-Kind Family series. Film was the only language spoken here, the only cultural reference that anyone seemed to get. “And the thing is, the real tenements were so tiny, so claustrophobic and dark. Even in the best films, the tenement sets are too big, too filled with light. I’m guessing it’s going to be the same for this rowhouse.”

“We have a very good DP,” Greer said, still haughty.

“DP?”

“Director of photography.”

“Oh.” Tess decided not to suggest that Francis Ford Coppola and Sergio Leone might have had good directors of photography as well. DPs. She was a quick study. She would learn to talk the talk, if that’s what it took.

The next set was a run-down meeting room. “The union hall.” Tess stepped into the room, marveling at the level of detail – the newspaper splayed across the Formica-topped table, the mismatched chairs, the faded memos tacked to the bulletin board, the coffee cups. There was even a fake coffee stain on one table. Tess couldn’t help but approve of such conscientiousness.

She was taken aback, however, by the view through the “window” – an extremely realistic photographic backdrop of the waterfront, with cranes rising in the distance, the blue smear of the harbor just beyond.

“So the things we see through the windows in a movie or television show – they’re not real?”

Greer looked amused, superior – Tess’s intent. People tend to reveal more to those they consider ignorant.

“Of course not. Think about the lighting and continuity issues created by a real window.”

“But it looks so real. I mean, on film. Here, it looks like a photograph, but on a screen, you can’t tell.”

“The camera has no depth perception,” Greer said. “And, of course, sometimes they cut in a shot of the real view – say a character had to look out the window and see something in particular. You edit that shot in, and it heightens the illusion. But look up and you can see the lights hanging from the ceiling, which allows us to light the view for day or night.”

It was an intriguing insight, but Tess wasn’t sure she liked this behind-the-scenes view of things. While movies weren’t as magical to her as they had been, back in her late teens and twenties, she still wanted to be able to suspend belief, not think about all the ways she was being fooled. She didn’t share these thoughts with Greer, however. Instead, she continued to inspect the set with pretended awe, as she assumed most people did.

“You said they were filming today?”

“They are, but it’s way off in another corner of the set, where we’ve created Betsy’s world.” We, we, we. To hear Greer tell it, she was part of everything that happened on Mann of Steel. “I’ll take you there.”

Tess had not necessarily wanted to watch filming, but she figured she should. Observing Selene at work might give her a sense of what her charge would be like at rest. Restless, she supposed.

They wound their way through the maze, stepping over endless rivers of coiled cords and cables, until they finally found themselves in a thriving hive of activity, where young men and women – and they were overwhelmingly young, Tess noticed – rushed around with ferocious certainty. She was shocked at how many people there were working – twenty, thirty, maybe even forty. It was hard to keep track, given how they kept moving. Maybe Mann of Steel could be a good little economic engine for Baltimore, assuming these technical folks were locals, not imports.

“Last looks,” someone called out, and Tess watched as makeup and hair people swarmed Selene and a puffy middle-aged man – oh dear, it was Johnny Tampa, seriously gone to seed. “Last looks” turned out to be a flurry of pampering – makeup was tweaked, hair smoothed and coaxed into position. One woman produced a camera and shot Polaroids of both actors, instructing them to hold up their hands.

“Continuity, again,” Greer said, as if sensing what Tess was about to ask. “We have to keep careful records, so if there are reshoots, or other scenes in this time frame, everything matches up. If Selene’s wearing a ring, we can’t have it disappear later.”

A round-shouldered man lumbered over to Selene and Johnny, mumbled something inaudible to them. Selene, stroking her much-amplified mane of hair, nodded absently while Johnny Tampa looked confused, not unlike an animal that had just been poleaxed. The round-shouldered man shuffled away. Whoever he was, his posture made him quite the saddest sack that Tess had ever seen.

“The director,” Greer said. “Wes Stark. Flip calls him Willie Stark, but I’m not sure why.” Tess thought about explaining All the King’s Men to Greer but knew she would be depressed if Greer’s only point of reference was Broderick Crawford. Or even worse, Sean Penn.

“But I thought the woman, the one who’s been running the crew, calling out some of the orders-”

“First AD. Assistant director, Nicole. She’s really good, and Stark’s smart enough to cede a lot of power to her. Smart or lazy – he doesn’t like to leave the video village if he can help it. At any rate, she’s pulling his bacon out of the fire on this ep.”

Something in the phrase, the bit about pulling Stark’s bacon, didn’t ring true to Tess. She didn’t doubt its veracity, having no basis to judge his performance. But she didn’t believe it was Greer’s unique opinion. Someone must have told her that, or Greer had overheard that scrap of phrase and decided to appropriate it.

“You need to watch from the village,” Greer said. “Where the director is.”

“Oh, I’m fine here,” Tess said.

“You may be fine, but Johnny’s not. You’re in his eye line, and he freaks out when there are strangers watching him.”

Tess decided not to point out that someone who freaked out when strangers were watching was a bad fit for the acting profession.

Greer led her to an encampment of director’s chairs, some of which did have names on their backs. Here was Flip, along with the tiniest adult woman that Tess had ever seen, her chair fitted with a wooden footrest higher than the others, so her legs didn’t swing free. The back of her chair identified her as Charlotte MacKenzie. So that was the bean counter who had cut her fee and reduced Lloyd to an intern. Ben wasn’t in his chair. He was several feet away, standing next to a cart piled high with food. Flip glanced up, caught Tess’s eye, greeted her with a curt, professional nod. Ah, she had segued into the category of “help,” alongside Greer. She no longer qualified for the thick charm Flip had piled on when trying to hire her. As long as his checks cleared, she didn’t give a damn.

“Here you go,” Greer said. “If you want to watch, you can take Ben’s chair and I’ll get you a headset.”

“Oh, I-” But Greer was off, catching a man by the sleeve and bringing Tess back what looked like a small battery pack with headphones.

“Just remember to give it back to me, okay? Don’t walk off with it, whatever you do.”

“I wouldn’t-”

“Do you want sides?”

“You mean like french fries?”

Greer gave an exaggerated sigh and thrust some pages into Tess’s hand – not a script, proper, but just a few pages, including the scene in question – then rushed away again, returning to her natural orbit at Flip’s elbow. She considered Tess a waste of time, and Greer clearly didn’t value people unless she felt they could do something for her. She wanted to be around those with power, and Flip was the power source here.

“Rolling… action… fuck.” The camera, a two-headed behemoth set on a wheeled cart, had snagged on its track. Workers rushed to it, not even waiting for instruction, already aware of what they had to do to fix the problem.

Ben wandered over to Tess, having snagged a handful of miniature candy bars, but waved Tess back into his seat when she tried to surrender it to him.

“Exciting, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” Tess said.

“I was being sarcastic. The most exciting thing on a movie set is craft services. The food,” he added helpfully, brandishing a Snickers. “Movie sets are lousy with free food.”

“Isn’t that hard on the actors?”

“Harder on those of us who have no incentive to maintain our boyish figures.” More sarcasm, she figured, as Ben still had the bean-pole skinniness of an adolescent who had grown six inches in the past year. Tess’s greyhound had more body fat. “Although some actors aren’t as disciplined, and it gets to be a problem.”

“Really?”

“Let’s just say that our Mann of Steel is at risk of becoming Man of Flab.” He flapped a candy wrapper at the two actors on the set, Selene and Johnny Tampa. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. He was a shadow of his former heartthrob self. Well, not a shadow. Something considerably more substantial than a shadow.

“He doesn’t look so bad,” Tess said, out of loyalty to her teenage crush.

“He split two pairs of pants yesterday and we lost almost an hour finding a third. Okay, they’re getting ready to film again, so you know to be-”

“Quiet on the set. Sound speed. Rolling. Action.”

Ben cocked an eyebrow at Tess and held a finger to his lips. He joined Flip and Lottie at the monitors, but she didn’t feel entitled to jockey for the best view. Besides, she sensed that Greer might tackle her if she tried to get too close to Flip. She stayed in Ben’s chair, catching only a glimpse of the actors through the equipment and personnel circling around the set, but able to hear every word they said over the headset. It was a short scene, nonsensical without the context of the larger story. Mann seemed to be trying to pass himself off as a sailor, but Betsy Patterson, who had dated a sailor or two in her time, kept catching him in lies and misstatements. “Are you wellborn?” she asked at last, and the scene ended, apparently on a hilarious close-up of Johnny Tampa, considering the question. All in all, it was no more than two minutes, but they filmed it again and again from different angles, while the director, the stoop-shouldered man, kept pulling Tampa aside to chat. No one had anything to say to Selene, and Tess had to admit that she was convincing as Betsy Patterson, perhaps even more captivating than the real-life coquette, managing the trick of being innocent and knowing at the same time. But Johnny seemed tentative, off in a way that even a civilian could discern.

“Someone put Nair in Johnny’s face cream yesterday,” Ben whispered to Tess during one of the breaks. “He smelled it before he put it on, but it freaked him out. He could have ended up losing his eyebrows if he had used it.”

“Where was this?”

“In his banger. Trailer. We have a bank of trailers on the parking lot, which the actors and day players use as dressing rooms.”

Tess made a mental note that the trailers were something else she would have to be concerned about. Meanwhile, she was able to piece together much of what was happening on her own – two cameras, for example, took simultaneous “A” and “B” shots, which reduced the amount of time spent on coverage. The director never told either actor how to say a line but spoke more generally about the emotion he was looking for, the tone. They were on the ninth take, and even Tess could tell that they were finally getting what they wanted from Tampa when three bars of an Iguanas’ song trumped the tender scene. Para donde vas? Her cell phone. Oops.

“Whose fucking cell phone was that?” Lottie leapt from her chair – a not inconsiderable feat for her, given the distance to the ground. Her voice was soft but vicious. “I was serious about the fine, I will fucking fine you, I will have your fucking head, what kind of idiot doesn’t turn his phone off-” When she realized that the culprit was Tess, she softened her approach, but only slightly. “Oh, you must be the… security detail. Monaghan. Well, I guess no one told you, but there are signs posted all over the fucking place. You can read, can’t you? Greer-”

She motioned to the young woman and leaned toward her, giving her what Tess could only suspect was a whispery scolding.

“I’m sorry,” Tess said. “It was all my fault. Greer did tell me.” She thought that might win her a look of gratitude from Greer, but the young woman had a panicky, stay-away-from-me expression. Flip looked sheepish, knowing he had arranged for Greer to bring her here, while Ben’s usual smirk was in place. Tampa was clearly frustrated, having been interrupted just as he was beginning to calm down. Only Selene seemed oblivious to everything going on around her, playing with her hair even as a woman kept poking at the elaborate upsweep with a long comb.

“Thanks,” Tess said, waving as she stepped backward. “I’m going to run over to my office, but I’ll be back when Selene’s finished for the day. Give me a thirty-minute heads-up, so I can be here when she’s ready to go.”

Still moving backward, she gave what she hoped was a nonchalant wave, only to trip over a mass of cables. Righting herself, she fought the urge to run from the soundstage, settling for a brisk walk. It was only when she was in her car that she realized she had, in fact, fled with the headset that Greer had explicitly told her to leave behind. Poor Greer, she’d probably be blamed for that as well.

“Great hire,” Ben said to Flip a little later as they were preparing the setup for another scene, a dinner party. It was going to be an absolute ballbuster – three full pages of dialogue, half of it Tampa ’s. He was so good in his other scenes, but he seemed to fall apart whenever he had to act opposite Selene. A problem, given that the network kept pounding on them to write more for her. Their chemistry had been good initially but had deteriorated as Selene’s part expanded.

Flip nodded absently, not catching the tone – a habit of Flip’s, not catching the tone of things in real life. Then, on a double take: “Hey, don’t be an asshole. She’s okay.”

“You really think this is going to solve anything, assigning her to Selene?”

Flip gave him a measuring kind of look. Ben wondered if his old friend guessed that Ben’s real concern was how he could continue seeing Selene if she was watched every minute she was off set. But how could Flip know? How could anyone know? Selene was as intent on keeping their secret as he was. Or so she had said.

But all Flip said was: “I think it’s going to solve a lot of our problems. You’ll see.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

Flip shook his head, as if refusing to acknowledge this possibility. Greer – nearby, always nearby, always hovering, always spying, God, how Ben hated her – looked defensive, as if her work, her decision, had been challenged. Ever since she had started working for Flip, she seemed increasingly confused about her role in things, apparently believing that the orders she carried out were her orders. Ben wished that she would make a fatal mistake – insult Flip’s wife, or confess to a profound admiration for Flip Senior. She was an operator, this one, although not as smooth as she thought she was, not nearly as smooth.

“She’s kind of attractive,” Flip said. “If I were single, I’d ask her out.”

Ah, good old Flip, always looking for a matrimonial noose to slip around Ben’s neck, so they both could be monogamous and miserable.

“She has a boyfriend,” Greer said quickly. Flip, perhaps startled by the shrill tone in her voice, gave her a look, and she mumbled: “I remember from when the newspaper wrote about her. They live together.”

Flip had a finite amount of attention for nonwork matters, and it was now exhausted. “I’m going back to the writers’ office, so you’ll have to cover set for the rest of the day, Ben.” It was an order. To the world at large, Flip pretended they were two equals, two longtime friends who never quarreled. But someone had to be in charge, as Flip often said, and that person happened to be, well, Flip.

“You’re the boss,” Ben told his oldest friend.

Chapter 11

Tess had a secret recipe for cooling the flush brought on by humiliation – she went to the nearest Baskin-Robbins and got a double scoop, chocolate chip and orange sherbet. It was a homeopathic cure of sorts, for it reminded her of a night when she was eight, when she had taken a lick of this admittedly odd pairing only to see both scoops fall and go rolling across the floor. But the clerk had been kind, giving her a new cone for free, and it was this kindness, the acknowledgment that everyone made mistakes, that the flavors brought back to her. She drove one-handed to her office, where she spent an hour on bills, paying and sending. In the end, she was dead even – assuming her clients weren’t deadbeats.

Her nerves soothed, Tess raced home to walk the dogs. Her new assignment would be hardest on them, for they were used to tagging along to the office and even to some of her jobs. They were, in fact, great decoys on surveillance. A woman walking an unruly greyhound and a placid Doberman was so conspicuous as to be inconspicuous, Tess had discovered. If she struggled with her cell phone as leashes twisted around her like a maypole, no one would ever suspect she was actually snapping photographs. She should structure one of her classes around that concept, how to hide in plain sight.

Stony Run, the park that bordered her backyard, was empty at this time of day, and she enjoyed having it to herself. She scuffed her feet through the leaves, wistful for a time when people had made huge piles of them and started bonfires, environmentally unfriendly as she now knew that practice to be. Now, in upscale neighborhoods such as hers, leaves were piled along the curbs and sucked up by a huge city machine on an appointed date. She scuffed harder, enjoying the rustling sound. She stopped. The rustle didn’t, not quite.

Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw what appeared to be an enormous mound of camouflage, tiptoeing from tree to tree. It was like something out of a cartoon, one where Wile E. Coyote dressed up as a cactus and attempted to blend into the landscape while stalking the Road Runner.

“Mrs. Blossom?”

The woman’s considerable girth was visible from both sides of the tree she was using for cover, but she didn’t acknowledge Tess, just stayed where she was.

“Mrs. Blossom, I see you.”

The woman peered around the tree. “Does that mean I failed?”

Now that Tess had a chance to inspect the full, head-to-toe effect of Mrs. Blossom’s surveillance costume – no other word would do – she was impressed almost in spite of herself. It was camouflage, yes, but not the usual browns, grays, and greens. This was purple camouflage, popularized a few years ago by fans of the Ravens, and Mrs. Blossom had found oversize men’s cargo pants that actually bagged on her. To finish off her look, she had chosen low-heeled brown pumps and – this detail was utterly endearing to Tess – a moss green hat. She had thought about her costume, perhaps even opened up her pocketbook to complete it.

“We don’t have grades. And you were on the honor system, right? You were to write up a report on how it went, good or bad. So how do you think you did?”

Mrs. Blossom stubbed her toe in the dirt. “Not very well. You saw me.”

“Yes, but – not until we got to the park. Were you waiting here, or near my house? Did you follow me?”

“From your office,” Mrs. Blossom said. “I parked there the whole day and – I was so worried, I had to go to the bathroom, which I know isn’t allowed, but I went to this bar, which looked a little scary from the outside, although the bathrooms were really clean. Nice, even.”

Tess knew the bar, an unofficial lesbian hangout, and its bathrooms were, in fact, impeccable.

“I was getting ready to go home – Oprah is on at four, and I like to make a little snack first – but then you finally showed up. So I waited to see where you would go.”

And, still in a self-castigating snit over my loutish behavior on set, I didn’t notice a car tailing me for seven or so miles. Tess couldn’t decide whether to be proud of her student, or appalled at her own obliviousness.

“That’s pretty good, actually. It’s hard to follow someone in a car.”

The praise made Mrs. Blossom’s cheeks flush pink.

“Do you want to walk with me?” Tess asked, holding out the Doberman’s leash. “Don’t worry, Miata just looks scary. She’s a sweetheart.” Esskay, the greyhound, was the far more difficult dog to walk, lurching and bolting at every leaf, even the movement of the breeze through the grass, convinced that all motion was indicative of a smaller creature to be chased and eaten.

Mrs. Blossom looked worriedly at her watch. “I don’t know – there’s the news, after Oprah. I like to watch that, be up on things. And then there’s Wheel of Fortune and Access Hollywood.”

“Access Hollywood,” Tess said. “That’s what my life has become actually. I have all this access to Hollywood, and it doesn’t interest me at all. I’m doing some work for that television show that’s filming here.”

“Really?” Mrs. Blossom’s voice rose to a fan-girl squeal. “Have you met Johnny Tampa?”

Tess was surprised that Mrs. Blossom knew the details of the production.

“I saw him from across a room,” Tess said.

“What does he look like in person?”

She thought about this. “Broader.”

Mrs. Blossom took Miata’s leash, fell into step beside Tess. They were coming up on the synagogue, the busy street beyond it, and the dogs recognized this as the point where they usually turned around.

“But what’s he like, Johnny Tampa? Nice. I bet he’s nice.”

“I saw him for only ten minutes or so. You can’t know anything about someone in such a short period of time.”

“I decided I wanted to marry Hamilton Blossom the moment I met him, and we got married four days later. The moment I saw him, I thought he was the nicest, kindest man I could ever find. We celebrated our forty-third anniversary last year.”

“And forty-three years later, do you still think he is the nicest, kindest man you’ve ever met?”

“Oh, by then… well, by then, I realized that I didn’t know the half of things. He was nicer than I ever suspected. He died this winter.”

Her matter-of-factness about her loss made it sadder somehow.

“I’m sorry,” Tess said.

“Me, too,” Mrs. Blossom said, sighing, not from self-pity but from the simple acknowledgment that she was sad, and likely to be so for some time.

The dogs, sensing the nearness of home – and the implicit promise of a treat upon their arrival – picked up the pace. Mrs. Blossom had to trot to keep up with Miata. “What’s Selene Waites like?”

Self-centered to the point of idiocy, the walking punch line to every dumb-blonde joke ever told, but a pretty good actress. “About what you would expect, I think.”

“She looks so thin. She looks as if a good breeze would break her in two. Mr. Blossom always told me he liked a woman with some meat on her bones.”

A breeze eddied around them, fluttering the leaves, sending a few swirling to the ground. Both dogs perked their ears, as if they could pick up the scent of the changing season. The small shot of cool air reminded Tess that such golden autumn days were a short-term loan, and that winter would be here sooner rather than later, intent on being paid in full for all this loveliness. She would have liked to linger on the path, in the surprisingly not-bad company of Mrs. Blossom. But she needed a nap so she would be fresh and alert for her first solo evening with Selene Waites.

Chapter 12

“Sorry about earlier today,” Tess said.

“About what?” Selene was standing in the living room of her rental condo, a place with the kind of sweeping harbor view that Tess had always coveted. Come to think of it, she had once enjoyed such a view, from the rooftop of her aunt’s bookstore, when Tess had lived in the little apartment on the top floor. But with high-rise condos such as this one going up all over what was now billed as Harbor East, some longtime residents were living in shadowy canyons, barely capable of seeing the sun, much less the water.

“My cell phone going off in the middle of your scene.”

“Was that your cell phone?” Selene began pulling off the baggy sweater that she was wearing over tight, odd-looking jeans, along with a pair of freakishly furry boots. It was a fall night, barely in the fifties, and the actress was dressed for a hipster ski lodge. But then, given how thin she was, she was probably cold all the time.

If the outfit was strange, Selene’s decision to remove it in the middle of her living room seemed downright bizarre. In seconds, she was down to nothing but a pair of panties and the ridiculous boots, and Tess couldn’t begin to imagine how she had gotten the jeans off over the boots. Perhaps the denim had some stretch to it.

“Selene-”

“Hmmmm?” She headed toward the kitchen, separated from the living and dining rooms by a breakfast bar, and briefly disappeared behind the door of a vast refrigerator whose veneer matched the cherrywood cabinets. She emerged with a Red Bull and the largest bottle of vodka that Tess had ever seen in her life. And Tess had seen some pretty large vodka bottles in her day.

“You can’t have that,” she said firmly, removing the vodka bottle from Selene’s grasp while letting her keep the Red Bull. “You’re underage.”

The girl blinked once, twice, then burst into tears.

“It’s in private, not in a bar,” she blubbered. “Why can’t I do what I like in the sanctuary of my home?”

Tess’s lips twitched at the slight misstatement – Selene probably meant sanctity, although sanctuary wasn’t necessarily incorrect – but she kept her tone stern.

“You’re twenty. If this were wine with dinner, or even a beer, I might be a little more permissive. But coming home at eight o’clock and going straight for a vodka-caffeine cocktail, when you haven’t had a bite to eat – that’s not a good idea. Also, would you put a top on? I’ve spent a lot of time in locker rooms, but I’m not really comfortable with sustained nudity in people I hardly know.”

Selene looked down at her shallow, almost concave chest. Her tears had ended as suddenly as they started, and Tess wondered if the tantrum had been a bit of stagecraft, a test to see if she was susceptible to Selene’s pouting. The men in Selene’s life probably fell apart at the first tiny blubber.

“Do you think I should get a boob job?”

“God, no.”

“Easy for you to say, walking around with what-” Selene curved her hand, as if she were going to feel Tess up, and Tess backed away so she was safely out of reach. “A C cup?”

“D,” Tess admitted.

“Of course, they would be smaller if you took a little weight off, but still, a D cup. Would you trade that in for an A-minus? I’m built like a boy. My collarbone sticks out farther than my breasts.”

She smacked her clavicle, which was, in fact, more pronounced than the glands beneath it.

“If there was an operation to change your height, would you get it?” Tess asked.

“Is there?” Selene’s eyes shone with excitement. The body may have verged on plucked chicken, but the face was almost inhuman in its beauty, a Botticelli come to life. Well, it was Botticellian in the coloring – the pink-and-gold glow in the cheeks, the masses of strawberry blond hair. The shape owed far more to the narrow visages of Modigliani, all cheekbones and almond eyes. “Can you choose where you gain the length? Because I would love to have longer legs.”

“I was trying to make a point,” Tess said. “We accept our height, and we don’t think it signifies anything about our character or discipline. We should accept our body types, too, not fight to be what we’re not. I could live off dandelion greens and never be a stick figure. You don’t have big breasts. So what?”

“You don’t understand,” Selene said. She walked back to the pile of clothes she had left on the living room floor and fished out a tiny pink T-shirt. Tess couldn’t help noticing it was printed with the slogan SPOILED BRAT. “My body affects my career. I’m not going to get certain parts without tits. I got this stupid shit show because women back then, fashionable ones, wore those Empire gowns, so my body type works for this.”

Tess noticed she pronounced it the French way – om-peer.

“If your body is right for this, it will be right for other things.”

“I’ll never be a Bond girl.”

“Why would you want to be a Bond girl? You should aspire to be James Bond.”

“Are they doing that?” Selene asked eagerly. “A female James Bond? Because that would totally rock.”

She threw herself down on the sofa, sloshing some Red Bull but making no move to clean it up. Like almost all the other furnishings here, the sofa was huge and oversize, which gave Tess the sense that she had climbed Jack’s beanstalk to arrive at the giant’s aerie. But she couldn’t help noticing that the apartment, for all its high-end details – the view, the top-notch appliances, the velvety upholstery – could not quite transcend the blandness that marked it as a rental unit, a temporary place for those with money, but no roots. It lacked the touches that quotidian life bestows – a teakettle, framed photographs, objects collected on travels. It was nothing more than an enormous hotel suite, and the size only emphasized its sterility.

“Do you like having a place this large, when you’re all alone?”

“I needed space in case my family visits,” Selene said. “But they’re schoolteachers, it’s hard for them to get away.”

Tess had learned that much on her first Google pass. Selene was the youngest of five children from a relentlessly normal Utah family. When their youngest daughter decided she wanted to be in the movies, the Waites hadn’t objected, but they also had refused to uproot the rest of the family. She had gone to live with her mother’s sister in Orange County and sought emancipation as a minor at the first opportunity. It was curious to Tess that Selene’s parents, who seemed sensible and solid, would essentially give their daughter license to be a wild child, but maybe people got tired by kid number five. “Selene knows her own mind,” her mother had said in one of the few interviews to which she had ever consented. Asked if she was proud of Selene, she had said: “I’m proud of all my children.” Selene might as well have been parentless Aphrodite, rising from the sea on a clamshell.

“Let’s get dinner,” Tess suggested.

Selene made a face. “I haven’t found a single decent place to eat in this town.”

That stung a little. Tess thought that Baltimore, whatever its limitations, could put on a pretty good feed. “There’s Charleston, right here in the neighborhood.”

“Too much fish.”

“Do you like pizza-”

“I love it, but” – Selene patted her nonexistent belly – “I can’t risk it. I’ll be all bloated tomorrow. It’s got to be protein. Sushi is best, although I have to go easy on the soy sauce. Puffy eyes.”

“Well, I could do sushi,” said Tess, a little uncertainly. Hadn’t Selene just vetoed fish? Besides, Tess wasn’t big on raw things.

“Can I pick the restaurant?” Selene’s manner was coy and wheedling, her default mode.

“Sure.”

“And wherever I pick, you’ll go?”

“Yes.”

“Wherever I want to go?”

“Wherever you want to go,” Tess promised.

Which is how they ended up, not even thirty minutes later, in Selene’s driver-equipped car, headed for New York.

They were just about to enter the Holland Tunnel when Selene pulled out her iPhone and, with a quick glance at Tess, began sending what appeared to be the War and Peace of text messages. Lloyd could do the same thing with his cell phone, whereas Tess was reduced to playing a virtual Gary Cooper when she texted, laboriously tapping out yes and no.

“Change of plans,” Selene announced. “Nobu is mobbed. We’re doing Mexican instead of sushi.”

But when the Town Car stopped in front of what appeared to be a very ordinary diner, Tess was dubious.

“This? We had to drive two hundred miles so you could eat here?”

Selene laughed at her. “You’ll see.”

Selene pulled on her hoodie and donned a pair of oversize sunglasses, despite the fact that it was now 11:30 P.M. They went inside, passing through the bright, quiet diner and into a concealed staircase that led to a very different establishment beneath, a truly subterranean lair of cavernlike rooms. The bar was jammed with people waiting for tables, but the bored-looking hostess raised one eyebrow at the sight of Selene and said: “Of course.” The hostess, a ravishing creature in her own right, did not acknowledge Tess at all; she might have been a piece of toilet paper stuck to Selene’s boots which, now that she noticed, weren’t actual boots but spiked Mary Janes with knitted tops that reached just to her knees, worn with a skirt that barely covered her silky underwear. At least Selene was wearing underwear.

Come to think of it, Tess decided as she followed Selene’s twitching bottom, a piece of toilet paper might get more attention. After all, someone might have felt obligated to point out that trailing tissue to Selene, however discreetly, while Tess was invisible to this young, chic crowd. How could they decide so quickly that she was a person of no consequence? There was nothing outrageously wrong with what she wore. In fact, her black trousers and sweater, paired with flat-heeled boots, weren’t that different from what many of the diners here wore. Granted, most of the people dressed like her were men, but still, she was carrying the look. No, there must be something indefinably off about her, an unshakable whiff of hoi polloi.

Yet Tess recognized no one – except the young man who was waiting for Selene. But then, Buddhist monks, living in seclusion in the mountains of Tibet, probably knew of Derek Nichole, a pretty boy who had transformed himself into the actor of the moment by taking on a trio of foolproof roles – crippled man, developmentally disabled man, cancer-ridden gangster trying to make one last score so his small daughter would be financially secure. He hadn’t been nominated for an Oscar, but the consensus was that it was a matter of when, not if.

“Hey, doll,” he said, not bothering to get up as Selene slid into the semiconcealed booth. No cheek kiss, no hug, just the smallest of waves, the fingers barely lifting from the table. Tess wondered if it was film or fame that taught one to modify gestures that way. “I didn’t know you were bringing your mom.”

“Joke,” Selene assured Tess. “JOKE. I mean, Derek’s met my mom, and she’s a blonde like me.”

“I don’t know,” Tess said. “I could be your Baltimore mama. The city used to lead the nation in pregnancies to girls under fourteen.”

“Yes, but I’m twenty, so you would have had to have me when you were six.”

Tess waited a beat for Selene to declare again “JOKE!” When she didn’t, it seemed too late to correct her math skills. Yet Derek, his tone gentle, said: “The numbers go the other way, baby. You add fourteen to your age to figure out how old – well, it’s not important. Margaritas for everybody?”

“I’m working,” Tess said, “and she’s underage.”

Derek looked at Selene. “I thought you were coming to New York to have fun. You told me you had a late call tomorrow.”

She shrugged prettily. “I can have fun, within limits. I told you what the perimeters were.”

“Parameters,” Derek said. Again, he managed to correct her without being condescending or unkind.

“Isn’t that what I said? I’m going to the loo.”

She didn’t ask Tess to let her out from the banquette, just crawled over her as if she were a piece of furniture.

Tess started to stand: “I should-”

“Don’t be silly,” Selene said. “It’s a one-seater. Besides, you can see me from here. I don’t need that much guarding, not here. It’s Baltimore where all the strange shit is happening. Baltimore ’s the real problem.”

Tess settled for watching Selene thread her way through the crowd, then keeping an eye on the door marked CHICAS.

“She’s a good kid,” Derek said.

“Kid being the operative word. How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven, so it wouldn’t be exactly scandalous if we were dating.” He held her gaze. There were more handsome men in movies, with smoother, regular features, but Derek Nichole commanded one’s attention. “Look, it’s not like that with us. We’re pals. She wants to do what I did, careerwise, but it’s harder for girls. All the media wants to write about is the bad-girl stuff. I ran with a tough crowd, back in Philly, wiseguys, but nobody cared where I went, or who I fucked, as long as I didn’t break a bottle over somebody’s head. Her, that’s all they want to write about.”

“Poor thing,” Tess said, and it didn’t come out as sarcastic as she had intended.

“I told her not to sign up for this stupid television show. I said go do theater in the West End, make another independent film, but she began to worry that she didn’t know where her next Chloe bag was coming from, and she jumped at the paycheck. Now she’s got all this great attention from the film, and she can’t leverage it. She’s sewed.”

“Sewed?”

“Television shows require a minimum commitment of five years. And it’s one way. You commit to them for five years, but they’re not obligated to keep you. I made the same mistake, but I got lucky. The show I did ended up six and out. If it had been a success, I would have been stuck.”

“How did you do it?” Tess asked. “I mean, you weren’t much older than Selene when you…”

He smiled at her inability to find a tactful way to finish her thought. “When I went from a punch line to being touted for an Oscar? Let’s just say I was smart enough to know I wasn’t quite smart enough, and I found some people who understood what I wanted to do. Mentors. Or, Mentos as Selene calls them, and she’s not far wrong. The fresh-maker, right? Well, they made me fresh again, made me someone who had to be considered in a different light. The only thing they couldn’t change was my own stupid stage name. I meant to be Derek Nichols, but when I put my paperwork in, they misread my handwriting.”

Tess helped herself to the chips on the table, dragging one through a wonderfully subtle salsa verde. She was aware that people were glancing covertly toward their booth. Who was that woman with Derek Nichole? She also was aware that she was on the verge of enjoying herself, that Derek had shown more depth and subtlety in five minutes than Selene had over the course of an entire journey up the New Jersey Turnpike, where she had quizzed Tess on the origins of every rest stop name. Tess could forgive a twenty-year-old for not knowing who Joyce Kilmer was, but her ignorance of Walt Whitman and Woodrow Wilson had been a little staggering. Selene had asked if Whitman had invented the Whitman Sampler.

“What are you going to do next?”

“You know that best seller, the one about the two gay chaplains during World War I, one American, one British?”

Tess had managed to miss this novel.

“I’m producing that for my company, and I’m going to play the younger chaplain.” Her expression must have betrayed her, because he laughed. “Don’t worry, that’s the American. I know I can’t do accents.”

“And is there a part for Selene in it?”

“Afraid not. In fact, there are almost no women in it. You see, my character ends up shell-shocked-”

But here was Selene, back from the bathroom, holding a margarita the size of her head.

“Someone gave it to me,” she squealed in protest as Tess unwound her fingers from the stem. Tess took a sip – definitely tequila. Really good tequila.

“Don’t waste it,” Derek said. “That would be a crime.”

“You drink it, then,” Tess said, but he gestured toward the bottle of Negra Modelo in front of him.

“Okay,” she said. “Just one, and only because I’m opposed to waste. I’m working after all.”

WEDNESDAY
Chapter 13

Tess awoke to a perfect sunrise, a piercing red-orange light that she normally would have admired. Today, it felt like dozens of needles stabbing her eyelids.

“Where am I?” she rasped, putting a hand to her head. Once she touched it, she realized it was throbbing. Strange, for Tess seldom had headaches and never had hangovers. And she felt as if she were moving. Could she have bed spins? No, she was moving, lying in the backseat of a car traveling swiftly.

“ Delaware, for a few more minutes,” the driver replied. Selene’s driver, in Selene’s car, but-

“Where’s…where’s Selene?”

“Back in New York. Once you got ill, her only thought was to make sure you were taken care of.”

“I got… ill?”

“That’s what she told me. She called and asked that I come get you, said you had reacted very strongly to something in your food or drink, that you seemed to be going into some kind of shock.”

“Not shock,” Tess said. “And not food poisoning.” Her head felt as if it had been filled with wet cotton balls, but she could still find the thread of what happened. The drink that had materialized, Derek’s insistence that she not waste it, a few sips, a few chips and salsa – and no memory beyond that. Fuck them. They hadn’t even let her enjoy the chorizo con queso appetizer that she had ordered before the drink kicked in.

“They drugged me,” she said flatly. “They drugged me, and you obligingly whisked me away. How can you do that? You know I’m supposed to be with her at all times.”

“I work for Miss Selene,” the driver said. What had Selene called him? Moby? That seemed an unlikely name for a thin black man. “I may have been hired by the production, but I quickly learned that it’s better to do what she tells me to do. For one thing, she pays me extra. Besides, Mr. Nichole is a nice young man. A good influence.”

Tess had thought so, too. But now she was thinking that Derek Nichole was an even better actor than he was reputed to be. He had seemed so kind, so genuine. A genuine jerk.

“Where did Selene tell you to take me?”

“Initially, we took you to Mr. Nichole’s suite at the SoHo Grand to assess your condition. When it became apparent that you didn’t need a doctor, I started back to Baltimore at Miss Selene’s insistence. And she said to tell you that she promises to make her call today. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ if she doesn’t. Those were her very words.” He sounded a little sheepish, repeating his employer’s assurances.

“How’s she going to get there if you’re with me?”

“She’ll hire another car, or even take the train. The Acela’s only a little more than two hours, and her call’s not until two P.M. She has plenty of time. Now where would you like to go?”

“Take me to the production offices. I might as well resign before they fire me. On the job for all of a day and I fuck it up.”

“You underestimated Miss Waites’s ability to get what she wants,” the driver said. “Don’t feel bad – everybody does. You sure you wouldn’t like to go home first? Take a shower? Maybe throw down a little mouthwash?”

Tess registered the metallic lime aftertaste in her mouth. “That’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

The driver laughed, a rumbling rolling bass that managed to charm Tess despite her foul mood and pounding head. “And what would that be, exactly?” he asked. “What is the worst idea you’ve ever heard?”

“Hard to say, but taking this job is in the top five.”

Once home, she released the driver, showered, then drove herself to the production office, feeling marginally better. It was embarrassing being undone by a roofie, the date rapist’s drug of choice, but Tess was far more humiliated by being outwitted by two actors. They may, per Alfred Hitchcock’s edict, be treated like cattle, but they had trumped her, so what did that make her in this barnyard analogy? A hen they had stomped on? A fly that they had swatted with their perfect little tails while never missing a beat in their cud chewing?

The production office parking lot was filled with patrol cars, and for one paranoid moment, Tess thought that someone had called the police to report Selene missing. Shit, what if something had happened to her while I was out? But then she registered the evidence unit and the yellow tape, and her self-centric fear was replaced by something more substantial.

She found Lottie in a cluster of people standing just outside the front door. Lloyd was in the group of production employees, and part of Tess’s mind registered that fact, pleased he had shown up on time for his second day of work with no adult oversight whatsoever. She hoped he wouldn’t be denied a third day on the job because of her ineptitude.

“What-” She stopped at the sight of Lottie’s face, about as gray as any face Tess had ever seen.

“Greer. She was working late and – they don’t know. They just don’t know. A break-in – but I don’t see how. Or why. There’s nothing of real value here, nothing worth – and, Greer, who would-”

Lottie bit her lip fiercely, as if she’d rather inflict pain on herself than cry in front of employees.

Homicide detective Martin Tull, Tess’s one true friend at the Baltimore Police Department, came out of the building just then, snapping off his rubber gloves.

“Hey, Tess,” he said, not the least surprised to see her there. Life in Baltimore was full of such coincidences. “You working on this show?”

“I was,” she said. “I’m not sure where I stand just now. What happened?”

He glanced at Lottie and the other Mann of Steel types, then motioned Tess to walk with him toward his car, out of earshot. “She was beaten to death. The office is trashed, but all the major stuff, the computers and television, were left behind. That woman, Lottie, is going to look around once the evidence techs get through, see if anything was taken. But there’s enough small valuable shit – iPods, laptops – that it’s hard to see it as a burglary.”

“When?”

“Last night, after ten. They say she worked late a lot, so it’s either someone who knew that – or someone who didn’t expect to find her here late.”

“Weapon?”

“We haven’t found it yet. If the guy’s smart, he tossed it in the harbor as he left.”

“They’re not always smart, of course.”

“No, and this looks impromptu as hell. The little lady” – he jerked his head back toward Lottie – “says there was a fiancé, though, and that there’s been some trouble there, a bad breakup, maybe.”

“You have any information on him?”

“John ‘JJ’ Meyerhoff – not one of those Meyerhoffs,” Tull added at Tess’s sharp intake of breath. It was a surname that one found on big buildings all over Baltimore, most notably the symphony hall. “I have a feeling I’m going to be making that point all day. This is a rough-and-tumble family out in the county. We’ve already sent a car there, but Mama Meyerhoff says her son took off for a fishing trip about two A.M. – she doesn’t have any idea where he goes to fish, of course.”

Of course, Tess thought. An ex-fiancé. That made more sense than anything running through her head. It looked personal, it looked like an act of passion, and only a foolish detective would disdain such an obvious answer. So there was every reason to believe that this was a huge coincidence, someone at the production getting killed while Tess was in New York, sleeping off a roofie-in-duced coma. She wasn’t on the hook for this. Then why did she feel so guilty?

Someone grabbed her elbow. It was Flip, flipping out, and now her guilt was earned.

“Jesus, Tess. I just got off the phone with Selene’s driver and he told me what happened, how you were in New York -”

She stopped him, unwilling to hear her incompetence rehashed. “I’m sorry. It was a complete screwup on my part, and I know I have to resign and refund your retainer. There’s no excuse for what I did. But if you could, consider keeping Lloyd on, okay? Don’t hold him accountable for my mistake.”

“Resign? Because that little bitch drugged you and dumped you? This just convinces me more than ever that she’s behind all the shit that’s been happening.”

Chapter 14

Ben had taken to writing in a local Starbucks, much as he loathed the cliché of the whole enterprise, the screenwriter at Starbucks. But the room at the Tremont got old fast, and when he tried to write in his office in Locust Point, there were always interruptions. Flip could sequester himself in his office and no one would get past his little pit bull, Greer, but Ben’s closed door didn’t persuade anyone that he was working. Lottie, especially. Granted, Lottie had caught him napping once. It was after his first night with Selene, and he was exhausted because seducing her had required an actual courtship, the big buildup of dinner and talking, not just the usual hump-and-dump, but he couldn’t exactly explain to Lottie that he was worn out by the demands of getting a twenty-year-old girl in bed. A twenty-year-old girl who knows far more than I do, not like I was her first, he told himself now.

Even so, when he had come to work the day after he was discovered napping, the little sofa in his office was gone. Lottie had given him a supercilious smile, daring him to object. He hadn’t said a damn word, just gone online and ordered another sofa from Pottery Barn, a much more expensive one that actually had a foldout bed, then put the bill on his expense account, with the scrawled notation: writing supplies.

The irony, of course – one of the ironies; there were ironies upon ironies in his relationship with Flip – was that Ben was the real writer of the two, the one who took the final-final pass on all the scripts. Everyone thought that Flip was carrying him, but Flip would be lost without Ben. Oh, Flip pretended to go over Ben’s scripts, but it was acknowledged between them that this charade was for everyone else, because Lottie, the directors, and the various department heads were less likely to argue with Flip, whereas they would happily bust Ben’s balls over any detail. When they had the tone meeting for one of the early eps, Lottie had tried a little divide-and-conquer. “I’m not so sure about this beat,” she had said. “It’s a little glib, don’t you think? The kind of conventional sitcom scene that you’re trying to avoid.” The director, the has-been of the week, had nodded, although it wasn’t clear that the guy could read, much less form an opinion about the words in front of him. Flip said: “Well, it was my idea, but if you think it could change…” “No, no, no.” Lottie had backtracked so fast that she almost ended up leaving the room. “I guess I just didn’t get it. Now that I see – sure, of course. And the next scene is even better, really pulls it all together, pays off the conceit.” “Ben thought of that,” Flip said cheerfully. Yes, after that meeting, no one had tried to worm between them again. And when they were alone, Flip was generous in his praise for Ben. Plus, Ben finally had an executive producer’s title and a “story by” credit on every episode. What more could he want?

To do it by myself.

He glanced around the Starbucks, wondering if he had spoken this traitorous thought aloud. It had actually been hard finding a Starbucks in Baltimore. There was only one within walking distance of his hotel – well, two, if one took a more generous view of what was walking distance, but he was a California boy through and through – and almost nothing was near the production offices, stuck as they were on that godforsaken peninsula. Out there, they had to drink the coffee from a local purveyor, which tasted funny to Ben, although everyone swore it was better. Locally roasted, blah, blah, blah. As if local was necessarily a good thing here in Charm City, where the people, even the people in Starbucks, all looked weird to Ben. Pale, pasty. All right, downright doughy. Not to mention the teeth – God, the teeth. Living in California, where almost everyone had veneers and whiteners, one forgot what real teeth looked like. These relatively normal mouths were as shocking as a Shane McGowan convention. Worst of all, Baltimoreans also had this – how to describe it – bovine happiness. No one seemed rushed or impatient here, a fact that drove Ben mildly insane when he was trying to order his morning mocha and get to work. The people around him were too dumb to know how miserable they should be.

Whereas, I’m smart enough to know exactly how unhappy I am.

His Treo, set to silent, vibrated on the table, and he glanced at the caller ID. Lottie. No way, no how. Flip was to have told her that Ben was off the reservation, trying to figure out how to beef up the Betsy part in episode 107, per the network’s notes. He may have stayed up until three, waiting for Selene to visit as she had promised, but he had been awake by nine and out the door by ten, at his table in Starbucks by ten-fifteen, a very good boy, and he had actually… gotten nothing done. But he was trying. He had parked his ass in the chair and he had his computer open and he wasn’t checking e-mail or voice mail or surfing the Internet. The phone chirped angrily, indicating he had a message, then began vibrating again. Lottie. And again. Lottie. About the fourth time, he decided to pick up, choosing to take the offensive before she could start haranguing him.

“I’m writing, Lottie. Don’t you remember? Flip’s orders. I’m trying to figure out how to add some scenes without losing some key beats, or else the final episode is going to be overstuffed with exposition. For every beat that goes in, one has to come out and-”

“Greer’s dead,” she said. “Killed at our offices, so we’re canceling the shoot today and I’m reworking the schedule accordingly. We’ll probably have to shoot Saturday to make up for it. I assumed you’d want to know.”

He thought, but couldn’t be sure, that he stammered out the appropriate questions – what, how, when? Lottie replied as if he had.

“She was beaten to death, last night or early this morning. The police want to interview anyone who had access to the office after hours, by the way, so they have your name.”

“I was in my room all night.”

“Jesus, Ben, no one’s suggesting you’re a suspect. Calm down. I just wanted to give you a heads-up that I gave this number to a Baltimore city homicide detective, Tull. If you see a three-nine-six prefix on your phone, take the call, okay?”

The last was laced with meaning, Lottie reminding Ben that she knew he didn’t take most of his calls.

“Sure, of course, whatever they need. Do they… know anything?”

“Not really. I know they’re going to be looking at her fiancé.”

“She was having problems with him.” Shit, why had he said that? Why would Ben know the state of Greer’s love life? What did it matter what Lottie thought? What mattered was what the police knew, or might find out.

“Really? I mean, I knew they were on and off, but she still had the ring.” There was a silence, as if Lottie might be mulling her words, wondering if things might be different if Greer had felt free to confide her problems to someone. “Well, that’s the kind of thing the police will want to know, I guess.”

“It’s so… awful.”

“You have no idea. I’ve been working in this business all my life, Ben, and I’ve probably seen every variety of murder there is in film. They all looked real to me, or real enough. But nothing I ever saw compares to…”

Her voice broke, and Ben was almost persuaded for a moment that Lottie was human, capable of normal emotion. But she quickly undercut that impression when she added: “So it’s a day off for crew but not for us. You, Flip, and I are having a working dinner tonight, and you should have the new beat sheet, so Flip can go over it.”

“So Flip can flip it, work his flippin’ magic?”

“Right.” She hung up without wasting time on pleasantries she didn’t mean. Lottie may have seen a dead body this morning, but the show must go on.

He stared at the computer screen in front of him, the few words that he had managed to peck out a jumble to him. Greer dead. Why? Let it be the fiancé, he found himself praying. Or a burglar, who didn’t expect to find someone in the office that late. Let it be something that leads them away from the set and the production. Not that it mattered. He had an alibi.

Alone in his room.

Waiting for Selene.

Who had told him to wait for her there, who had promised that she would slip away from her babysitter, somehow, some way.

He got back in line for another mocha, this one with two extra shots. It took so long for the guy in front of him to order that Ben almost began to shake.

“You must really like coffee,” the barista observed. She was young and well cushioned – fat by California ’s standards, but normal for Baltimore, and the extra weight gave her face a sweet roundness, true apple cheeks. She reminded him of someone.

She reminded him of Greer, the way she had been when she first started working in the office, so sweet and helpful, happy to do anything she was asked.

Chapter 15

“You can’t possibly believe that Selene has anything to do with Greer’s death,” Tess said.

“I agree,” Flip said in a loud clear voice, casting a nervous look at the waiter. “That plot point wouldn’t work at all in Mann of Steel. But I thought it might solve some things in the final episode, which is why I threw it out there. Could you bring us a bottle of the white Burgundy?”

“We have several. Did you want-”

“Just any decent white Burgundy. I leave it to you.”

The waiter gone, Flip dropped the plummy tone. “Let’s try to be a little discreet, okay?”

“It’s Baltimore, Flip. It’s not like the waiters have the National Enquirer on speed-dial. Read it, yes; tip it off, no. Waiters here are just… waiters. Not aspiring actors.”

Flip, unconvinced, studied their surroundings. The Wine Market on Fort Avenue was Baltimore hip, a mere five or six years behind the decorating curve – brick walls, exposed pipes threading the high ceilings, maple furniture. Tess forgave its derivative look because the food was good and the wine a bargain, sold at only 10 percent above retail.

“I was surprised that the police let me leave the scene without giving a statement,” he said. “Your doing?”

“Luck of the draw,” Tess said. “If anyone other than Tull had been the primary, we’d all be down on Fayette Street right now. Tull trusts me to bring you in later for a more detailed debriefing. Relatively sober,” she added, after watching Flip chug the Burgundy that the waiter had left in an ice bucket.

“Don’t worry, this is just going to restore my equilibrium. Did you-”

“See her? No, fortunately. It sounds as if it was particularly… unsettling.”

“I’ve never seen Lottie that upset about anything,” Flip said. “I didn’t know she could get upset. The joke on Mann of Steel is that she’s the Woman of Steel, an absolute ice queen. We’re all a little terrified of her.”

Lottie was not the woman who interested Tess just now. She broke off a piece of bread and swished it through the little dish of olive oil and peppers. “And Selene? What kind of emotions does she engender?”

Flip let loose a sigh so long that it was almost a whistle. “Satanic spawn. A total nightmare. God, I wish the network would let us write her out of the show after the first season, have Mann continue on without Betsy Patterson.”

“And lose the whole blue-blood-meets-blue-collar thing? I thought that was the concept that made this whole thing go.”

She didn’t quite achieve the sincere tone she was trying for.

“Are you this obnoxious to all the people who hire you, or do you sometimes manage to fake enthusiasm for their enterprises?”

“It’s the nature of my business to work for people with different tastes, values. Essential, even. I wouldn’t work at all if I had to be gung ho about all my clients’ professional lives.”

“Still, do you have to be such an asshole?”

A fair question, under the circumstances.

“I don’t mean to be a jerk. The broad outlines of this show you’re doing – I’ll admit, I just don’t get it. It’s history, it’s time travel, it’s comedy, all set in the context of the never-never land of a thriving steel company in the twenty-first century.”

“Girl’s house gets swept up by tornado and she’s transported to a magical land where she expends all her power trying to get home again.”

“Okay, yeah, but The Wizard of Oz is a fantasy.”

“Billionaire media mogul whispers a mysterious name on his deathbed, launching a journalist’s attempt to understand the private man behind the public figure. Yet the truth about Rosebud doesn’t really solve any of those mysteries.”

“Although it was rumored to be William Randolph Hearst’s pet name for Marion Davies’s nether regions,” said Tess, grateful to have one of Crow’s bits of trivia so readily at hand. “Okay, when you reduce anything to a thumbnail description, it sounds a little silly, but-”

“Woman will do anything for the love of her ungrateful daughter – including confessing to the murder that the daughter committed.”

“Mildred Pierce and there’s no murder in the book, which is a thousand times better.”

“Man builds a baseball diamond in a cornfield behind his house and Shoeless Joe Jackson appears-”

But now Flip had gone too far. A bridge too far, a baseball diamond too far.

“I HATE THAT MOVIE!” Tess said, and the bare brick walls sent her voice bouncing into every corner of the restaurant. She regained her composure. “Sorry, but do not get me started on that cornball mush.”

“How can you hate Field of Dreams?”

“It’s a male weepie, as I think Pauline Kael or some other critic said. And, you know, I’m okay with the male weepie. We all deserve our weepies. My issue is that what makes men cry is elevated to profundity, while what makes women cry is denigrated as sentimental. When you take my corn seriously, I’ll grant yours equal respect.”

“What makes you cry? Beaches?”

“Major League, which is a better baseball movie than Field of Dreams, by the way.”

Even as Tess’s mouth provided that glib reply, her brain was thinking about what really did make her cry. There was a certain expression on her greyhound’s face, a wisp of a seeming smile. The Bromo-Seltzer Tower, glowing blue in the night. Old television footage of Brooks Robinson being inducted into the Hall of Fame. And there was the matter of a young woman, beaten to death just last night, but Tess wasn’t hypocrite enough to admit that she felt anything but shock and dismay over that. The only thing that resonated was the violence of the death. A fatal beating took time – and not a little passion.

Besides, Flip was talking about cinematic tears. Okay. Then – little Dominic dying in Noodles’s arms in Once Upon a Time in America, but also Noodles coming back through the bus station door, thirty years of time summed up in a single shot. The Wild Bunch. The memory of a carrot-haired man who had loved The Wild Bunch, living – and dying – by the codes distilled from his beloved westerns. Had it really been just a little over a year ago? She reached for her knee. Maybe one day the scar wouldn’t be there. Maybe one day, it would all be a dream. Just like in the movies.

“Strictly Ballroom,” Tess admitted. “When the music goes out, and the father starts to clap, and they show they can do the paso doble without any music at all…”

Her eyes started to mist, making her seem truthful, but she was still thinking of that carrot-haired man, dying on the cold cement of a parking lot, leaving her to fight for her own life – and avenge his.

“You haven’t shot down my central point. Anything sounds ludicrous when boiled down to the pitch. But it’s all in the execution. Why do you think Hollywood produces so much crap?”

“Because there’s seldom any economic penalty?”

“No. Well, yes. I mean, no. People’s careers do suffer from doing critically disdained work-”

“If it’s also commercially inert.”

“The point,” Flip said irritably, as if unused to being interrupted, and he probably was. “The point is that the writing, the performances, the visuals – those will combine to make this show something really special. That’s why we’re starting small, on a C-list cable network with only eight episodes. People forget, but there was a time when getting a series on HBO was considered second-rate. The Sopranos was pitched to the networks first, and they all passed. By the way, has anyone ever proposed adapting your life story?”

Food arrived – a house salad for Flip, a much heartier steak salad for Tess – and she was spared answering right away. “Last year – I was involved in a case of some notoriety, and some producers circled for a while.”

“You make them sound like vultures.”

Tess forked up a mouthful of steak and greens that required much judicious chewing.

“They were just doing their job,” he persisted. “Look, you go to the movies. You read newspapers and magazines, right? Well, the material has to come from somewhere.”

“A friend of mine was killed in front of me. I killed a man. I never thought of it as material. A woman you know was killed in your office last night. Are you going to make a miniseries about that?”

Flip blushed, and she warmed to him. She knew he was pure Hollywood, bred and buttered, as the old Baltimore saying went. Flip’s father was the one who had the claim to Charm City normalcy, a claim he had pretty much squandered years ago. But Flip did seem relatively down-to-earth.

“How-”

“Shot him.” Over and over again, until the clip was empty. Shot him, but only after gaining advantage by almost gouging his eye out with scissors. She withheld these details as a courtesy.

“That must have been awful.”

“It was. That’s why I feel for Lottie, walking in on Greer.”

“I can’t imagine – this is going to sound heartless-”

“Go ahead.”

“I can’t imagine Greer engendering that kind of passion in anyone. She was a little machine. We used to joke about it, Ben and I, call her Small Wonder, after that sitcom.” He glanced at Tess to see if the cultural reference connected for her. “The one about the robot? Voice Input Child Identicant, Vicki for short?” Tess couldn’t even fake knowing what he was talking about now. “Well, anyway, she was just extremely competent, her feathers never ruffled.”

“Still, they like the fiancé for it. Ex-fiancé, maybe. There seems to be some confusion about whether they were on or off.”

“Never met him. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I would have believed he even existed if it weren’t for the ring on her hand. Certainly, she wasn’t spending any time with him, once we got into production.”

“How did you find Greer, anyway?”

“She found us, poor thing. Called my father’s production company. My dad has a policy. If you have an area code beginning with four-one-zero, you get treated with respect and deference by his office. Maybe that was my problem. I had the wrong area code, so my dad never had time for me.”

Oh, poor little rich boy. “So how does that connect you to Greer?”

“Her dad was a teamster, worked on one of my father’s early films. She called my dad’s assistant, and I told Lottie to interview her with an open mind. She started off as an unpaid intern in the writers’ office, basically an assistant to my assistant. Then my assistant left, and Ben came to me, said I should give the job to Greer, that she was actually fantastically competent. And, for once, Ben was right.”

“For once?”

“He’s not the best judge of other people. Especially women. Although Greer isn’t exactly Ben’s, um, type.”

“You mean – he sleeps with women, then tries to find them jobs?”

“Sometimes. It’s not as crass as you make it sound. Ben really is a fool for love. He falls for a girl – or thinks he does – courts her, builds her up big-time, then sleeps with her, and bam, all interest gone. It’s like sex is the third act for him, and the only thing he knows to do afterward is to go to the credits. Over the years, he’s doled out a few jobs to soothe their hurt feelings. Actors, usually.”

“Guys?” She hadn’t figured Ben for being that inclusive in his sexual appetites.

Flip looked at her as if she were insane. “Women. Oh – we call them actors, Tess, not actresses. Actress is considered derogatory.”

Whereas actor is shot through with dignity. “Are you sure that Ben didn’t sleep with Greer?”

“Let’s just say I’d be shocked. So not his type. Why, you think the fiancé killed her in a jealous rage?”

Tess shook her head. “I won’t second-guess Tull, or get in his way. He’s good police.”

“People really say that?”

“Say what?”

“‘Good police.’ I’ve heard it on television, but I thought it was pure affectation.”

“It’s what cops in Baltimore call themselves. Police, a police, a murder police. Where do you think the television shows got it?”

“Thought they made it up, like Ben and I do. You can be over-reliant on reality, you know.”

Tess was unsure if Flip was explaining his rules for writing or his worldview.

“Let’s leave the homicide investigation to Tull. I’m far more curious why you were so quick to blame Selene for what happened to me last night. You sold me on the idea that she was this poor little fragile actress – actor – at risk from her own bad behavior and, possibly, unwanted fan attention.”

Flip glanced around the restaurant, almost empty this late in the lunchtime hours. “Okay, I wasn’t entirely forthcoming when I hired you. But wouldn’t it have been irresponsible of me to tell you that I suspected Selene of the various problems on set? I didn’t want to prejudice you against her. In fact, I was hoping the two of you might bond, and she would end up confiding in you.”

“We were getting along famously until she drugged my drink. So why do you think Selene is the source of your problems?”

“Selene is signed to a five-year contract. That’s standard. When she signed it, she probably thought the show had no shot of going five years, but then, when she signed it, she was thrilled to have any steady gig. Plus, she didn’t know we planned to leave her in the nineteenth century.”

So Derek had been right: The producers demand commitment, but it’s not mutual.

“Then Baby Jane was finally released, and Selene’s success heightened the profile of our show. The network demanded we keep the Betsy character if we wanted any chance of getting a pickup for second season. They also ordered a lot of rewrites to beef up her part. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t change the name before it’s over, which will freak Johnny Tampa out – and he’s already plenty freaked. This was supposed to be his comeback. Instead, it’s Selene’s buildup.”

“So, you think Selene might be the source of the fires, the leaks to the newspaper, the community malcontents, even the Nair in Johnny Tampa’s cold cream?”

“Maybe.”

“When you first hired me, you said all these things happened subsequent to the suicide of a man who might be Selene’s stalker.”

Flip at least had the good manners to look embarrassed about lying. “There were photos of Selene in his home, three or four. I was truthful about that. They appeared to be shot early on, when we were on location for the pilot last spring. There was some other stuff, too, the cops told us. Homemade movies of kids. Not porn, but kind of creepy. Selene looks fourteen, so maybe she was his type. The weird part was – he had a photocopy of the pilot script, the minipub.”

“The what?”

“The minipub is the first version of the script, which means it has the most limited distribution. In our office, each copy has a name and number. This was a photocopy, with the number blocked out, so it couldn’t be traced back to the source. The dead man also had the show bible, which outlines the first season. Lottie thought my previous assistant, Alicia, did it, and insisted she be fired. Alicia said she was innocent but agreed to be fired for the unemployment insurance, which makes me think she wasn’t so innocent. After all, innocent people have nothing to fear.”

Tess didn’t bother to contradict Flip on that score, although she knew from personal experience that innocent people are often the most vulnerable in a criminal investigation.

“And this is-?”

“Midsummer, right after we returned to shoot. Things escalated after that. And that’s when I began to think Selene was involved.”

“Why would Selene give some stranger the script?”

“With a script, and the bible, he could get some sense of what we were doing, and wreak havoc. Of course, he’d need our shooting schedule to figure out where we were filming on any given day, but he could have figured that out via our permits, for example. Or, again, through Selene. The call sheet is faxed to her apartment every night, even if she’s not needed on set the next day.”

“Do you think Selene was cultivating the dead man, using him to be her troublemaker, then moved on to someone else after the suicide?”

Flip looked at his wineglass with sudden distaste. He seized his water glass and gulped down its contents as if doing a keg-stand. “Maybe he was just one of the people Selene was working with,” he said. “I don’t know. I was counting on you to keep tabs on Selene, making it harder for her to cause mischief. Look, I’m not saying she would have Greer killed. But she’s stupid enough to hire someone stupid enough to screw up that way. Say she asked someone to break into the office last night, knowing she’s going to have this elaborate alibi. Maybe the guy didn’t expect to find Greer.”

“When the police came to talk to you about the suicide – did you tell them that you thought the script had been provided by someone in your office?”

“No. I suggested it could have been found in a Dumpster, which was a lie – we have a strict shredding policy in the office. But we had already started having problems with that crazy community activist, and I didn’t want any more bad press.”

“Is that all? Is there anything else you haven’t told me? Because, at this point, the lying has to stop. If I had known why you needed me in the first place, I would have been much more vigilant around Selene, approached the job differently.”

Flip took his time answering. “I think so. Look, I never meant to deceive you. I needed someone to watch Selene. It didn’t seem vital to me that you have all the background. As long as you were with her, I’d know what she was up to.”

“Only she dumped me, first chance she got, and went out on the town with Derek Nichole, someone who seems very sympathetic to Selene’s desire to get out of her contract and establish herself as a legitimate movie star.”

“You’re not suggesting-”

“No, just observing. How will Greer’s death affect Mann of Steel, day to day?”

“We lost today,” Flip said. “And the network types are blaming Baltimore, saying this would never have happened if we filmed in L.A. Or Vancouver. Charm City ’s homicide rate is suddenly right at their fingertips, and it’s being suggested that I pushed to film here because of some Oedipal issue, akin to George W. going after Saddam to placate Daddy.”

“Locust Point isn’t exactly murder central. I won’t speak to your Oedipal issues.”

“Thanks,” Flip said. “That puts you in the minority, unfortunately. Everyone else feels very free to speculate on my ‘issues’ – Ben, Lottie, columnists for Variety. Anyway, I talked the network down. For now. We’ve agreed we’ll put up a reward for information leading to Greer’s killer and we’ll have a memorial service Sunday. By the way, when that rolls around, make sure Selene wears something appropriate.”

Tess hadn’t expected this. “I’m still on that detail? After what happened?”

“I’ve got no issue with your job performance, I just wish you could dial the sarcasm down a notch. The way I see it, I set you up by not telling you what a devious little bitch she is. I should have been straight with you, not try to play you. Besides, someone on the production was killed. Now we have even more reason to guard our precious little Selene, right?”

Tess grinned. She liked Flip’s conniving streak when it wasn’t directed toward her.

“I hate her, I wish I didn’t have to work with her, but she may be my only hope for getting a pickup. From now on, don’t eat or drink anything that she’s had access to. In fact, if she offers you an aspirin from a sealed bottle, be skeptical. She’s evil.”

“She’s twenty. And not exactly a criminal mastermind.”

“She’s precocious, and she’s got great instincts. Probably what makes her such a good actress.”

“Actor, I thought. We’re supposed to call them actors.”

“You’re a quick study, Monaghan.” He raised his water glass in salute, and Tess was almost flattered – until she realized that was his intention. He was still playing her. Then again, she wasn’t being completely honest when she told him she wasn’t interested in Greer’s death. Oh, she wouldn’t interfere in the homicide investigation. But, as she interpreted her role, she now had free rein to figure out what was happening on set – and whether it was a coincidence that Selene was in New York the night that Greer was killed. She would need backup, of course. But at the prices she was charging Hollywood, she could more than afford it.

Chapter 16

That got out of hand fast.

What was that from? Something, something recent, seen on the cable with Marie, the two of them drowsing on the sofa together, too tired to stay awake, yet not wanting to retreat to the bedroom. It was like that game he and Bob had once played, dropping a line of dialogue into conversation – something deceptively ordinary, no smell-of-napalm-in-the-morning, no offers-you-can’t-refuse, nothing instantly recognizable. Anyone would know those lines. That got out of hand fast. Did anything about that strike you as unusual? This shit just got serious.

He thought he was doing pretty well, all things considered, until he reached for his coffee and the cup slipped from his hand and into the saucer – not enough of a fall to break the heavy cup, but coffee sloshed everywhere, irritating the waitress who had to mop up the spill.

“I shouldn’t be drinking caffeine so late in the day,” he said, hoping to make a joke of it.

“You’re having decaf,” she pointed out.

“So I am. May I have a refill?”

She stood over him, holding the orange handle that signified the decaf pot, looking as if she wasn’t sure she was going to grant his wish, as if he had no standing to ask for anything, even something as small as a refill, and he was reminded of the very person, the very thing, he did not want to remember.

“Please,” he said at last. It was several minutes before he trusted himself to raise the cup to his lips.

She had been so young. It had been easy to lose sight of the fact when she was a disembodied voice – on an answering machine, picking up the phone in the production office. She was young, not that much older than the teenagers he used to teach. He should have been able to bully her, use his age and gravitas to his advantage. And for all her bluster, she was scared of him, at first. Then something had switched, and she had the upper hand. How had he betrayed his uncertainty, his desperation?

You have to pay attention to me, he had said. You have to acknowledge me. A small word, a small thing. But she had shaken her head. “You’re wrong, it never happened. I’ll swear you’re lying. Besides, it doesn’t work that way.” Kept repeating these things, in fact, over and over again. It doesn’t work that way. In that moment, she reminded him of every customer service representative with whom he had ever quarreled, every bureaucrat on North Avenue, every medical professional and insurance company employee who had refused to authorize certain treatments for Marie. It doesn’t work that way. As if they were talking about immutable laws of nature, instead of man-made rules and systems. Didn’t this girl see that her very existence was proof that things did work that way? If there was room for her – young, barely out of school, with no discernible talent for anything – then there must be room for anyone. He said as much. She continued to shake her head, increasingly sure of herself, smug. The power had shifted. It doesn’t work that way.

And she had pushed him. Don’t forget that. She had pushed him, tried to rush past him, and he had grabbed her arm.

Later, standing at the water’s edge, he regarded the bloody bat in his hand. It was no ordinary bat, but one inscribed TO FLIP JR., A “FLIP” OFF THE OLD BLOCK – BARRY. Oh dear, it must be from The Natural, a gift from Levinson to a little boy, probably no more than ten at the time. Had Redford held this bat? Or, at the very least, Joe Don Baker?

He had stood at the water’s edge longer than he should, summoning the will to toss the storied bat, something he would have loved to own, once upon a time, even twenty-four hours ago. He had to tell himself that no one of note had touched it, that it was probably just a leftover prop, something that otherwise would have been thrown away. Why, he wouldn’t be surprised if the bat had never been in the movie at all. They had probably purchased them in bulk and given them away, telling the same lie over and over.

Still, he clutched it, realizing that his cynicism about the business had come too late to save him. Too late to turn back now. Was that a line of dialogue? It should be.

He threw the bat as far as he could, surrendering his piece of Hollywood history, with absolutely no regret.