Another Thing to Fall

Would someone please tell Selene Waites that girls-gone-wild is so five minutes ago? The very wobbly demi-star was glimpsed leaving the SoHo Grand in what she obviously considered the middle of the night – that’s 11 A.M. to you poor slobs with normal jobs. Clutching a Starbucks cup that was almost larger than she was, she jumped the cab line without an apology – or a tip for the doorman who hailed it for her, unless you consider a glimpse of lime green La Perla undies a tip. Hotel types insist that she wasn’t registered, and we believe them. But we also know that Derek Nichole, who has taken a very proprietary interest in the rising star – all professional, of course – is staying at the SoHo Grand and was seen with Selene just last night in the hotel’s bar. Of course, the semilegal blonde was drinking Shirley Temples. (Ginger ale, cherry grenadine, and a shot of vodka chased by Red Bull – that is the traditional recipe for a Shirley Temple, right?)

– From an Internet gossip column

“Gawker Stalker”

Selene Waites, lurching around Penn Station, trying to find the first-class waiting room. Very pretty in person, but scary thin, and her clothes looked as if she had slept in them, assuming she had slept at all. Shot video of her on my cell and posted it to YouTube.

THURSDAY
Chapter 17

Although twenty-four hours had passed since the Internet had provided helpful video of Selene wandering dazedly through Penn Station, Tess expected to find a young woman still suffering the effects of her long night’s journey into day. Yet the actress – actor – made her 11 A.M. call time without any sign of wear or tear. Her skin was glowing, her eyes fresh and bright. Oh, to be twenty again.

“I’m so sorry you got sick up in New York,” Selene said, sitting in the makeup chair. It took more than an hour to arrange her hair in the elaborate style that had been copied from one of the portraits of Betsy Patterson, a so-called triple portrait by Gilbert Stuart, which was pinned to the mirror, a reference point for the stylist. “But that’s the risk with Mexican food – what do they call it, Petaluma ’s revenge? I wanted to take you to a hospital, but Derek said you’d be okay if we just let Moby drive you home, and I could follow on the train. Did you know the train is actually faster than a car?”

So that’s how you want to play it, Tess thought. She and Flip had discussed at length how she should behave with Selene, and he had urged her to pretend to accept Selene’s version of events – even as she allowed Selene to suspect that Tess was running her own game. As someone who could flub a role as a spear carrier – this was not hyperbole, Tess had been fired from her bit as a supernumerary in Aida a few years ago – Tess wasn’t sure she had the acting chops to achieve the desired effect. But then, the whole point of the exercise was to act badly.

“Oh, it was fine,” she said. “When nausea comes on that way, the only place you want to be is your own bed. I so appreciate you getting me home. I’m not quite recovered – that’s why Flip hired a rent-a-cop to guard your condo last night. But I’m getting better.”

“And you’re not mad at me?” Selene put on a little-girl voice, her eyes sliding away from Tess’s reflected gaze.

“No, it’s not your fault I had a bum quesadilla.”

“I don’t remember you eating a quesadilla…”

“Didn’t I? The chips, then. Although we all ate the chips, didn’t we?” Selene had licked the salt off one chip, exactly one chip, as Tess recalled, while still maintaining that she could eat whatever she wanted, thanks to her fantastic metabolism. “Oh well, what does it matter what caused it? The thing is, I’m still a little shaky, and I can’t let that get in the way of Job One, which is looking after you, especially now that we’re going twenty-four-seven. Which means, of course, I’m going to require backup. I’m only one woman, I can’t be with you constantly.”

“Back” – Selene paused almost five seconds before squeaking out – “up?”

By then she had registered the tall blonde entering the makeup trailer. It was Tess’s oldest friend, Whitney Talbot, whose very posture seemed to scream “boarding school headmistress on crack.” This was Jean Harris before she shot Dr. Herman Tarnower. Mere moments before. Whitney was wearing riding pants and boots, although Tess knew that her friend hadn’t ridden for years, and the kind of gone-to-seed Burberry blazer whose elbow patches weren’t for show. In fact, Tess was certain that she recognized the blazer from their freshman year in college, and she had thought it looked like a dog’s blanket then.

“Around the clock?” Selene said sharply, dropping her usual little-girl lilt. “Isn’t that excessive?”

“Not at all. What if something had happened to you in New York when I got sick? And, truthfully, this isn’t just about you, Selene.” The girl gave the tiniest bit of a pout, as if she found it sacrilegious to suggest that anything was not all about her. “This is a twenty-five-million-dollar production. If anything happens to you, all that money will be lost.”

“But they have insurance for that,” she said, her antennae up.

“Some. But they wouldn’t recoup all their losses, and they wouldn’t be compensated for the money that they expect to make when Mann of Steel takes off. Anyway, this is Whitney Talbot.”

Whitney shook Selene’s hand so hard that what little flesh the girl had on her arms wobbled up to the shoulder and back again. Skinny as she was, Selene didn’t have a lot of muscle tone.

“Delighted,” Whitney said. “What was your name again? I’m afraid that I don’t get to the movies much.”

“Selene Waites.”

“Right. You were in the movie about the prodigy.”

“P-p-prostitute.”

“Well, that’s a kind of prodigy, isn’t it? And I’m sure you were utterly convincing in the part.”

“Th-thanks.”

Whitney was acting, too, of course, but only a little. Tess knew that her friend really did go to the symphony more often than the cinema, and she wasn’t inclined to be impressed by any actress, even one who insisted on being called an actor. The movies that Whitney knew tended to feature Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, or Jean Arthur. Or, as she liked to say: “They were called the talkies for a reason, once upon a time.”

Tess patted Selene’s bony little shoulder, and the girl shot her a look, as if it were a breach of etiquette to touch her without permission. “Anyway, Whitney’s going to hang here on set today, then I’ll meet you back at the apartment, where we’ll both be sleeping for the duration of the shoot.”

“You and me?” Selene’s voice squeaked.

“You, me, and Whitney. Quite a threesome, don’t you think, but you’ve got all those empty rooms, right? Oh, I might sneak home to check up on my houseguest, Lloyd, but Whitney will be there every night.”

“With my rifle,” Whitney added.

Selene bit her lip, studying the two women. Tess was determined not to underestimate her again, and she doubted that the girl would give in easily. But, for now, she seemed cowed, and Tess felt more than comfortable leaving her in Whitney’s care.

“My family was distantly related to the Pattersons,” Whitney said, peering over Selene’s shoulder to study the facsimile of the Gilbert Stuart triptych. “Of course, we kept our money.”

The production office was still cordoned off, an official crime scene for at least one more day, and the writing staff had set up a makeshift workstation in another suite of offices one floor down. Tess was impressed to see Lloyd at the photocopier, running off pages with the rapt attention of a young novice.

“He doing okay?” Tess asked Ben, who was working nearby. Well, lolling, but he could have been thinking deep thoughts about the script in front of him.

“He’s great, actually. Seems thrilled to do anything we ask, and never complains, even about the most trivial assignments. I think he would draw my bathwater if I asked him – and drink from it afterward.”

“We are talking about Lloyd, right?”

Ben nodded. “But you didn’t come up here just to check on Lloyd, I’m guessing.”

“Take a walk with me,” she said. “It’s gorgeous outside.”

They wandered through the Tide Point complex. Built on the old Procter & Gamble site, it had taken the names of P &G products for the various buildings – Cascade, Joy, Dawn, Ivory. Perhaps the developers thought it a whimsical tribute. Tess remembered the hundreds of jobs lost when the plant was closed and found the theme in dubious taste.

“Want coffee?” Ben asked, gesturing to the outpost of Daily Grind just outside the fenced parking area.

“A little late in the day. I try not to drink coffee after ten or so.”

“Vodka, then?”

She laughed. “Maybe a little early.”

“Ah, it was ever thus for me. Too late or too early, never right on time.”

They settled on a bench overlooking the harbor. He extended his long legs and stared straight ahead, which suited Tess fine. There were advantages to talking to a profile. The eye was freer to roam, notice body language.

“About Greer-”

“Fucking tragedy, that.”

“The cops like the ex-fiancé for it.”

“Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it? Isn’t that how most women become homicide victims, at the hands of a husband or boyfriend?”

Normally, Tess would like a man who had that information at his fingertips. But Ben’s use of the statistic struck her as glib and incurious, a way of trying to shut down the topic.

“Actually, about one-third of the homicide cases in which women are victims are classified as ‘intimate’ homicides. So the majority aren’t.”

“Still – the broken engagement, the threats…”

“Was there a broken engagement, much less a threat? Lottie told police that you mentioned something to her yesterday, but no one else seems to know exactly where they stood.”

He crossed one leg over the other, resting his foot on his knee. He wore jeans and sneakers, with an Oxford shirt that he hadn’t bothered to tuck in, or maybe he just couldn’t keep his shirt tucked in for long.

“I was just inferring. Greer had been pretty jumpy the past couple of weeks. And there were other signs that seemed to indicate a breakup.”

“She was still wearing an engagement ring when I met her.”

“Yeah, well, Greer wasn’t one inclined to let go of anything once she got it in her grasp. I guess she persuaded herself that she was within her rights to keep the ring. Look, why do you care? This is what homicide detectives do, right?”

“I was hired because of problems on the set. This could be connected.”

“Then the problems will stop, won’t they, once they have the guy locked up.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Ben was getting irritated. “Fuckin’ Flip. Look, I know what he thinks. It’s not Selene.”

“How can you be so adamant?”

“Because, well…” He scratched his cheek. At least he shaved every day, didn’t cultivate the stubble look. “Because that girl doesn’t have the necessary IQ to organize a trip to the 7-Eleven, much less play these kind of pranks. As for murder-”

“Selene went to a lot of trouble last night to get out of town, establish an alibi.”

“She went to a lot of trouble to dump your ass the way I hear it, Sam Spade.”

“I fancy myself more as the Continental Op. After all, he has his roots in Baltimore.”

“Bullshit. Hammett wrote about San Francisco.”

“He was born in St. Mary’s County and grew up in Southwest Baltimore, and started work as a Pinkerton here. In the Continental Building at Baltimore and Calvert streets. Which, by the way, has two birds above the front door, birds that were once painted black.”

Now he was interested. “No shit?”

“Why would I make up something like that?”

“I live in a place where people tell a dozen lies before breakfast, just to stay in practice. Myself included.” He almost seemed to be boasting.

“Don’t lie to the cops when you talk to them,” Tess said. “Although, admittedly, almost everybody does.”

“Why would I lie to them?”

“Where were you last night?”

“In my hotel room. Alone. Oh, by the way, fuck you. I didn’t kill Greer. Why would I?”

He was staring straight out at the water. Tess was watching the suede Nike balanced on his left knee. He had been jiggling his foot from the first mention of Selene, although he had been the one who brought her name into the conversation. Or had the jiggling begun with Greer? It was tricky sometimes, not taking notes, but it made people so nervous that it wasn’t worth it.

“I don’t know. Why does anyone kill anyone? And yet they do, almost every day in this city.”

“I hate this place.”

Normally, Tess took such statements about her hometown about the same way she responded to imprecations against her mother. But she decided to play along.

“It’s not an easy town to be an outsider. A lot of Baltimoreans – they’ve never been anywhere, so they don’t know what it’s like to be new to a place, and they don’t reach out to newcomers. But won’t you have to live here if Mann of Steel gets picked up?”

“Probably. Makes it hard to know whether to root for a success.” He must have caught something in Tess’s face because he quickly added: “Kidding. I’m kidding. I don’t want to shut the production down. Frankly, Flip and I need a hit. We’ve been critical darlings and wunderkinds long enough. We’re older now, the rules have changed. We need to be straight-up wunders, and being beloved by the critics isn’t enough anymore. It’s time to make serious money for somebody.”

“But it does appear that someone wants to hamper the production. And now Greer is dead.”

“That stuff that’s been happening… it could just be bad luck. And if Greer’s fiancé killed her, that has bupkes to do with the production. I’m not big on conspiracy theories. Real life is simple.”

“Yes,” Tess said agreeably. “In real life, for example, sometimes people are just hanging out in their hotel rooms, alone, on nights when it would be nice to have an alibi.”

“You know, you’re the first woman I’ve ever wanted to call an asshole.”

It was the second time in two days a man had used this word to describe her. Tess decided it was a compliment of sorts. She’d rather be an asshole than a bitch.

“What about Lottie?”

“What about her?”

“My sense is that you’re not too fond of each other.”

“Look, Miss Marple-”

“She was an amateur. I’m paid to do what I do.”

“Did you know there has never been a successful television show about a female private investigator?” Ben asked abruptly. “Spies, yes. Amateurs, yes. Straight-up cops, sure. But no female private investigators. I know, it’s what killed Ottoman’s Empire. What does that tell you about your chosen profession?”

“It tells me,” Tess said, “that you’ll go a long way out of your way to change the subject, rather than talk about last night, or Greer. Or Selene.”

“I don’t care what time it is,” he said, rising to his feet. “I need coffee. And vodka. Right now, what I really want is coffee with vodka in it. You think I can find that in this godforsaken peninsula?”

He walked away but didn’t stop at the Daily Grind, just kept going toward Fort Avenue. It was almost as if he planned to turn right and start walking westward, all the way home to California. And that was fine with Tess.

Chapter 18

Lottie MacKenzie held up one finger – one tiny, rigid index finger – and Tess froze on the threshold of her office like a well-trained dog at the edge of an invisible fence. I could learn things from this woman, she thought. Tess had yet to hear Lottie raise her voice or threaten anyone, yet she somehow managed the trick of being formidable. The fact that she didn’t try to fight her size only served to make her more intimidating, even in her overalls and voguish Skechers. No heels for Lottie, which was shrewd. If she had attempted a more grown-up outfit, a suit and heels, she would have looked like a doll, or a child playing dress up. Instead, she appeared to be a precocious sixth-grader who happened to be in charge of a $25 million production.

Her office furnishings did make one concession to her height – a footstool next to her Herman Miller chair, but she wasn’t using that just now. She sat with her legs crossed, in the style that the un-PC still called “Indian fashion,” and her body sang with such palpable energy that Tess wouldn’t be surprised if she could levitate from that position. She reminded Tess of a hummingbird, a very industrious one, hovering in the air with so much to do, so much to accomplish.

A hummingbird – and Tess was scared to death of her.

“I thought,” Lottie said, when she hung up the phone, “that your job was to watch Selene, not hang around here. Although, if I had my way, you wouldn’t have that job anymore.”

“I’ve added personnel. At no extra cost,” Tess added swiftly when Lottie’s eyes narrowed. “Someone will be with her at all times now, even during filming. But Flip also has given me latitude to look into the other problems you’ve had on set.”

“You think Greer’s murder…”

“I don’t think anything. My job is to have an open mind. However, if I find a connection, I’m obligated to go to the police.”

“But you’ll talk to us first.” Lottie tried to make it sound like an order, but there was the tiniest hesitation in her voice, the hint of a question mark. “I mean, we pay you, so whatever you learn is proprietary to us, I assume.”

“Maybe,” Tess said, determined not to have that fight until it was necessary. “Right now, I’m more interested in how proprietary materials – the pilot script, the show’s bible – ended up in the home of that man who committed suicide. A man who might have been stalking Selene.”

Lottie had a pencil holder filled with actual pencils, old-fashioned yellow no. 2s, uniformly, lethally sharp. When did she find the time to sharpen them all, how did she maintain them at the same length? She pulled one out of the lumpy ceramic mug that held them and pressed the point into her palm. Tess was reminded of the old story about G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate burglar, passing his hand through a flame to show how tough he was, and she relaxed a little. If Lottie needed to make a show of strength for Tess’s sake, then she wasn’t that strong.

“That’s a personnel matter, and I can’t discuss it with you. Liability issues.”

Tess took a moment. She didn’t count to ten – experience had taught her there was no number, whether it was ten, a hundred, or a billion – that could reverse her temper’s trajectory. Instead, she studied her surroundings, thought about what she wanted, and how saying something rude or snappish, while providing a fleeting satisfaction, would not get her any closer to that goal.

“Lottie, I work for you. For the production. We’re on the same team.”

“You were hired by Flip, who didn’t even consult me beforehand. I was against this from the start, and given what’s happened, I wasn’t wrong.”

Tess remained calm, but she didn’t bother to hide her exasperation at Lottie’s logic. “Greer isn’t dead because I came to work here.”

Lottie didn’t blush when embarrassed, not exactly, but color rose slightly in her face, two freakishly perfect round dots of red. Tess would bet anything that older people had grabbed those cheeks once upon a time, pinched them, and told Lottie how cute she was. How she must have loathed it.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” she conceded. “But it’s hard not to consider the… juxtaposition. The other things, before, were relatively minor. Trash can fires when we filmed outside. The sudden flak from the community people and the steelworkers. Nair in cold cream. This – murder, ransacking the office – is something different.”

“And, as far as the police can tell, probably unrelated. They’re looking for Greer’s ex-fiancé.”

Lottie resumed testing the pencil points against her palm.

“Did you ever meet him?” It was a hunch, but Tess was no enemy of hunches.

“Once. Greer tried to get him a job here. He has some carpentry skills, he thought he could work with the art department, but we have a full complement. The guy who’s doing our set is a local, a veteran who came up with John Waters, and he has all the people he needs. I wasn’t going to force some nepotism hire on him to make an intern happy.”

“So Greer put her fiancé up to it?”

Lottie suddenly seemed to become aware of her own strange behavior and put the pencils back in the holder, brushing her palms together. “That’s what I thought at the time. But, later, I wondered if it was his idea, if he wanted a job here so he could keep an eye on Greer.”

“Was Greer involved with someone on the production?”

Lottie didn’t speak right away, and Tess willed herself to wait it out, let the silence work on Lottie. The person who speaks next is a loser, she chanted in her thoughts. The person who speaks next is a loser.

“No, but-”

Loser! I win, I win. High-five me. It’s my birthday, it’s my birthday. Yes, it was ridiculous, but Tess wasn’t above a little end-zone celebrating in her head.

“I think she aspired to be.”

“With whom?”

“Anyone. Anyone, that is, who could help her. Greer would have initiated a relationship with me, if she thought that would be beneficial to her career goals.”

Lottie’s gaze dared Tess to ask the question. But she had a different tack in mind.

“Interesting, that she would think that a married woman with kids might be open to that. She must have been casting a wide net.”

Lottie, surprised, held out her hands, as if to check that her ring finger was, in fact, quite bare.

“I noticed you don’t wear any jewelry,” Tess said. “No earrings, no necklaces, not even a watch. Perhaps your skin doesn’t do well with any metal, even gold? Or maybe it’s just part of the androgynous look you cultivate. And while there may not be photos of your family here in the office, your leather satchel is a mom’s bag, and that ceramic mug you use as a pencil holder – a child made that.”

Lottie eyed her skeptically. “Flip told you.”

Having won the point, Tess didn’t mind revealing her source. “Yeah, he did. But I like to think that I’m not the sort of person who assumes a woman is gay just because she wears overalls and painter’s pants. Okay, so Greer was putting out the vibe that she was open to – we’ll call it off-the-books overtime. Did anyone take her up on it?”

“Not to my knowledge. The crew is too tired at this point to get anything going. Flip’s almost as happily married as he says he is, and Ben always says he doesn’t shit where he eats. Still – have you ever seen All About Eve?”

Tess nodded, fighting the urge to sigh. After just two days among the Hollywood crowd, she longed for a good nature analogy, a food metaphor, or even a reference to one of Aesop’s fables.

“Greer was shaping up to be quite the little manipulator. I gave her the original internship. I was impressed that a teamster’s daughter had made it to L.A., gotten a toehold in the business. It wasn’t her fault she had to come home when her father got sick. In the beginning, she sucked up to me big-time, and I thought I might train her to be an A.D., but she didn’t have the patience to work her way up that way. She decided the writers’ office was a faster fast track, so she put in for the assistant’s job after the pilot was picked up. Then, when Alicia was fired, the job as Flip’s assistant fell into her lap. Greer was very good at being in the right place at the right time.” Lottie’s face crumpled a little. “Until the other night.”

They had circled back to what Tess wanted to discuss all along.

“Alicia was the one who gave the materials to the man who killed himself?”

“Wilbur Grace,” Lottie said, and Tess realized she was the first person in the production to concede the man had a name, that he was something more than just a link in their chain of bad luck. “She swore she didn’t, that she had never heard of the guy, but when the phone logs showed he had called her repeatedly, she offered to resign. I told her that she could at least collect unemployment if she was fired, and she agreed. And who would admit to doing something they hadn’t done, just to get benefits?”

Flip had all but said the same thing. Hollywood must be a charmed place, where no one was ever wrongly accused of anything, never forced to choose between principles and pocketbooks.

“Why would the guy have wanted those things in the first place?”

“Fans are obsessive. There’s nothing they don’t want, and there’s no show or actor that doesn’t have its own set of fan-boys and fan-girls. Johnny and Selene have lots of fans, and there’s even a cultish sect for Flip and Ben. Plus, with the advent of eBay, a lot of stuff is making its way to the Internet. There’s always been a small tradition of graft on sets, as there is in any office, and I’ll turn a blind eye to some props walking off. But scripts – look, it’s not as if Mann of Steel is the final episode of The Sopranos. Still, we can’t have our scripts floating around out there. That was a serious transgression, and Alicia had to go.”

“But, to be precise – she never admitted to being the person who gave the documents away? She tried to resign when it became clear no one believed her and agreed to be fired so she could collect unemployment.”

“Who else could have done it?”

“Lottie, you’re the one who said Greer was a schemer. And she’s the one who benefited when Alicia was fired, getting her job.”

Lottie eyed Tess thoughtfully.

“I’m still not sure I like you,” she said in her blunt way, “but I like the way you think. Only here’s something else for you to consider – we only found out about the scripts after the guy killed himself and the police notified us. So was that part of Greer’s plan, too? Goad the guy into killing himself, in order to get Alicia fired? Or maybe you think Greer hunted this guy down, hung him from his own ceiling fan?”

The two women shared a look, the kind of grudgingly respectful gaze more often seen between two adversaries in a western – oh, crap. Now Tess was falling into the habit.

“I’m guessing someone has Alicia’s particulars? Home address, phones?”

Lottie detached a Post-it from a hot pink pad and handed it to Tess.

“You had this ready, all along?”

She nodded.

“I’m always three steps ahead. I have to be. I know tomorrow’s weather forecast and every actor’s call time and what kind of sandwiches they’re going to hand out at break tomorrow. I know Saturday’s schedule and how the set designers are going to create a faux chapel on the soundstage, for Sunday’s memorial service, and how much the catering is going to run us, and if I have to put that against our budget or can get accounting to keep it outside the line costs. I know everything.”

Tess believed her. That is, she believed that Lottie thought she knew everything. There was a difference.

Chapter 19

No one said outright that it was Johnny Tampa’s fault that they had to have second meal that night, but he knew they were blaming him. The crew seemed to have fallen into the habit of believing everything that went wrong was Johnny’s fault, which was so unfair. He was in almost every scene of this goddamn thing, and he was always meticulously prepared – had his lines cold and was even making a good run at a Baltimore accent before Flip and Ben decreed that he shouldn’t. But he needed to understand the mechanics of this time-travel gig, why his character seemed to move between present and past in ways he couldn’t control or predict. Until that was made clear, he was going to have trouble in certain scenes.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ben had said tonight, clearly exasperated that Johnny wouldn’t let the subject drop. “Mann doesn’t know how it works, so why should you know?”

“Mann also doesn’t know that he’s going to end up living in the present, with Betsy as his wife, and I do, so it’s clearly okay for me to be privy to information that Mann doesn’t have,” Johnny countered. “This is about the implicit integrity of the show, whether viewers will feel cheated. If the time travel doesn’t have a logical explanation, even if it’s never spelled out for the viewer, then the character, the world, won’t feel real. People will reject it instinctively, sensing you’re not playing fair.”

Ben had sighed, and gone to summon Flip, the great soother and smoother. But Johnny wasn’t looking for an ego stroke, or even assurance that it was his part that really mattered, that the show was called Mann of Steel, and it wasn’t likely to change. Likely – wait, had Flip said likely the last time they spoke? Likely meant it could change. Was the network going to build up Selene’s part even more? There had been a lot of changes in the last script; they had gone all the way to buff pages. Johnny couldn’t remember a single episode in his career that had gone even as far as cherry.

Second meal was pizza from a local place called Matthew’s, and it was pretty much the best pizza in Baltimore. Johnny circled the table sadly, knowing he should skip it. A year ago, he had hired a life coach who had put him on an intuitive eating program, dictating that Johnny should eat what he wanted when he wanted it. The result was that Johnny had intuitively eaten his way up to almost two hundred and thirty pounds. He watched Selene take a single slice of the crab pizza, which was kind of like a soufflé on a crust, rich and creamy and cheesy… She took exactly one bite, then left the slice on her plate, which only affirmed his belief that she wasn’t human. A succubus, maybe, or were women incubuses? Incubi? Borg?

Ben and Flip could tell themselves all they wanted that they weren’t trying to make a time-travel show, but they would need that sci-fi core audience to get a second season. Johnny Tampa knew this because he was the core audience, a diehard science fiction fan. Over the last five years, when he had been on what he now called his hiatus, he had spent most of his time in his Santa Monica condo, reading fantasy and science fiction. It was the time-travel angle that had interested him most in Mann of Steel, not that beggars could be choosers. Truthfully, his dream gig was that vampire show that HBO was doing, but they hadn’t even given him a courtesy audition. “Not ethereal enough,” they had said, and everyone knew what that was code for: too fat.

He decided to retreat to his banger, away from the temptations of second meal. He realized Selene had nibbled just enough pizza so that her breath would be all crab-and-cheese stink in their next scene, when they were supposed to kiss. Very clever, Selene, but had anyone else noticed? Flip and Ben melted in her presence. Lottie didn’t seem quite as impressed, but then Lottie didn’t like anyone. The fact was, it probably didn’t matter if everyone saw through Selene, if everyone realized what a phony and a bitch she was. It was understood that Mann of Steel had a shot only because Ben and Flip had been lucky enough to sign Selene before Baby Jane earned her that Golden Globe nomination.

Johnny wondered if they still considered themselves lucky, or if they had stopped to consider why Selene had been so convincing as an amoral, scheming teen whore. Johnny, who read the trades and the tabloids as obsessively as he read science fiction, knew all the rumors about Baby Jane. Moreover, he believed them, too. It was said that Selene had an affair with the director, which had been dicey, given that Selene was barely legal at the time. The bigger sticking point, however, Hollywood being Hollywood, was that the director was married to the screenwriter, and she tried to block the release. At least, they were married when the project started. Part of the reason the film had languished for two years was that its distribution rights had to be divvied up in the divorce. The screenwriter couldn’t decide, for a while, what she wanted more – to destroy Selene’s career or make a bundle off a low-budget movie with a star-making performance. Ultimately, she had chosen the bundle. Didn’t everyone?

Johnny had left The Boom Boom Room at the height of his popularity to pursue the movie offers that were pouring in. Of course, he hadn’t known it was the height, far from it. He thought there was still plenty of sky over his head. Separated from the part that had made him a household name, he seemed to lose whatever charisma he had. On television, he was handsome, in an interesting way. On a movie screen – he just disappeared, couldn’t hold the frame. “It’s kind of like Samson,” his agent had said. “When he cut his hair.” Which was confusing, because Johnny hadn’t cut his hair. He hadn’t changed at all, and that seemed to be the problem. It was as if the rules of the universe had been subverted, as if all the physical laws, such as gravity, had reversed when he wasn’t looking. Hot was cold. Up was down – and out. That’s when he started reading science fiction.

There was an envelope propped up in front of his mirror, addressed to him in care of the set’s street address, which few people knew. Inside was a recent tabloid, with a paper clip attached helpfully, pointing him to an article headlined: WHO SAYS MEN AGE WELL? There were photographs of Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin, and, shit, him, circled with a big red pen mark, just in case he couldn’t find his own fat mug on the page. The photograph was at least six months old, when he was thirty pounds heavier. So unfair. He was – he looked in the mirror, lifted his chin, lifted it higher. There was the old jawline. Sort of.

Suddenly, it seemed as if the mirror was the only place to look, there was no angle in the trailer where he couldn’t see himself. He charged back to where the crew was eating, eager to show Ben the magazine. Selene gave him a triumphant little look, her eyes flicking to the rolled-up tabloid in his fist. He ignored her and, when he couldn’t find Ben, turned his attention on the icy blonde who had been lingering around set all day, Selene’s babysitter or bodyguard, take your pick. She looked to be in her early thirties, which was his demographic. She would have been in high school about the time he was playing high school senior Trip Winters on Boom Boom.

“Johnny Tampa,” he said.

“Really?”

“Really,” he said, with an aw-shucks grin, waiting to hear how much she had loved him when she was in high school, how his posters had covered her room.

“I mean, that’s your real name? Or did you change it from something?”

That question was so tired that he had long ago developed a standard answer. “I was born Johnny St. Petersburg, had to shorten it when I went into show business.”

After a small delay, as if she needed time to process the fact that he had actually said something clever, she laughed. It was a rather metallic, rat-a-tat sound, but it seemed genuine enough. She had a hard, almost scary edge to her. He liked it.

“Whitney Talbot,” she said. “I’m here to-”

“I know. You follow her everywhere? To the bathroom and stuff?”

“I let her have her bathroom breaks in privacy.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t.”

“What?”

“I mean, this soundstage, it’s a big space. And it might seem secure, but who knows? I mean, you’re here to protect her, right?”

“Right,” she said, after a beat.

“If I were you, I’d never let her out of my sight. You never know what she’s going to be up to.” He turned his head to the side, in case his profile jogged her memory. Pride vanquished, he said: “The Boom Boom Room?”

She looked puzzled. “Is that one of the strip clubs still operating on the Block?”

“No, it was a television show, about kids put in a school-within-a-school on special detention, kind of like The Breakfast Club – oh never mind. A lot of people watched it, back in the day.”

“I didn’t watch a lot of television, growing up. I was kind of outdoorsy.” She said it nicely, apologetically, not in the snobby way some people had. He almost believed her, except he didn’t believe anyone who claimed not to watch television. Who didn’t watch television? It was like… not brushing your teeth, or refusing to shower, odd to the point of being uncivilized. Everybody watched television. There had been a time, around season four of Boom Boom, when he couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without being recognized. He hadn’t always enjoyed the attention, but he hadn’t been stupid enough to wish it away, and he had been genuinely surprised when it stopped. Since then, it was as if he couldn’t get quite enough oxygen in his blood, as if he were living at 75 percent. He had plenty of money, he had been smart that way, but his financial stability was scant comfort. He wanted another success in this business, and to get that, he had to pretend to be in love with some twenty-year-old twat. He hated her. He needed her. Well, that’s why they called it acting.

Dinner was wrapping up. He couldn’t help noticing there was a lot of leftover pizza. He wondered if he should take it home. No, it wouldn’t be any less fattening at breakfast tomorrow, only colder. He wondered if he should try to take the blonde home, but he supposed she had to stick close to Selene. Besides, she hadn’t seemed terribly interested. No, he would just go home and get into bed, read a few pages of the latest Robert Harris. He had tried to get Flip and Ben to read Harris, engage them in the rules of alterna-history, but to no avail. They seemed to think that because Napoleon had, in the end, forced the divorce between his brother and Betsy Patterson, they could remove her from history with no real effect. But what about Betsy’s son? You couldn’t just eliminate people from history. That was a kind of murder.

The PAs were calling them back to work, but Johnny spotted Lottie huddled with the director and showed her the magazine.

“Look what was in my trailer.”

Lottie glanced at the photos. “It’s not so bad, Johnny. Besides, it can’t hurt to be considered in the same class as Mel Gibson and Alec Baldwin.”

“That’s not the point. Someone sent it to me, to unnerve me.”

“You’ve got to start locking your door,” Lottie said. “I thought, after the Nair-”

“It came in the mail. And it proves the Nair wasn’t an isolated incident. You know who’s behind this. Why don’t you do something about it?”

“Selene’s got a bodyguard now,” Lottie said. “She can’t go anywhere without being seen.”

“Well, maybe the bodyguard is in on it, then. Someone’s doing her dirty work. We can’t go on like this. She doesn’t want to be here. I hate working with her. How are we going to get through this season, much less another one if we’re lucky enough to get picked up?”

“Johnny.” She sighed, weary as his mother, although she was several years younger and barely came to his collarbone. “Let’s just get this scene and let everyone go home, okay?”

The stand-ins had cleared the set, and he and Selene took their places. In this scene, Mann had brought Betsy to his home in twenty-first-century Baltimore – although, damn Flip and Ben, he still didn’t know how – to persuade her that he really was from the future, that it was possible for him to know her fate. Tomorrow, they would go on location in Green Mount Cemetery, and he would show Betsy her own tombstone. He wasn’t crazy about that scene, which seemed unduly influenced by the graveside scene in A Christmas Carol – and the Mr. Magoo version at that. But that was Ben and Flip for you. They hadn’t read Dickens, but they knew their Mr. Magoo. Today, however, they were in the Mann family rowhouse, and Betsy was supposed to be overwhelmed by the modern ingenuity of the La-Z-Boy recliner. Was this stuff really as sly and ironic as everyone else seemed to think? Or was it stupid and vapid? You couldn’t tell everything from the words on the page. So much depended on the editing, the look. And the performances, although Ben and Flip seemed to have lost sight of that as well.

“Quiet on the set. Sound speed. Rolling… action.”

Selene, in character, gave him a flirtatious look. Sure enough, garlic fumes were everywhere. He gave her one back, topping it with a wink, and they ran their lines, building up to their big kiss in the La-Z-Boy. Johnny Tampa could kiss, he knew that much about himself. There was no one he couldn’t kiss, under any circumstances. He could tongue a dog, a real one, or even French a potato if that was what he had to do. He was a great kisser, on camera. Off camera, it didn’t interest him that much. He preferred it impersonal because he had grown tired of girls staring at his face, as if they couldn’t believe they were with Johnny Tampa. And then there were those who hadn’t known they were with Johnny Tampa, and that had been even worse.

“Cut,” yelled the director, who then walked over to Johnny. He lowered his voice, his style when giving notes. “Lose the wink, okay, Johnny? It’s way too lecherous for Mann.” As usual, Wes had no notes for Selene.

The crew was too professional to sigh, but Johnny could feel everyone slumping. After all, they were now three hours over the day. Meanwhile, Selene, who had set him up to flub the scene, could barely suppress her smile as she threw herself back into the La-Z-Boy.

Chapter 20

It was Tess’s nature to be suspicious of anything that came too easily, and finding Alicia Farmer fell into that category. With Lottie’s piece of paper in hand, all Tess had to do was drive to the address listed and wait for someone to show up. Was Lottie trying to manipulate her? “Trust no one” was beginning to seem a very apt motto for this job.

At least the address itself was surprising, a working-class neighborhood in Northeast Baltimore. Tess had assumed that someone in the television business would have settled into one of the hip, emerging areas favored by the postcollege crowd. Alicia Farmer lived in a small brick bungalow on a large, irregular plot, a diamond shape that looked as if it had been created by accident when the street was widened a few years back. The result was that the house sat slightly apart from the others, lonely and isolated, like the first kid to go in the stew pot in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose.

No one answered her knock, so Tess took a quick walk around the house, which looked well tended, although a new deck seemed to have been abandoned in midconstruction. She then took up residence on the bench at the bus stop across the street. Sitting in a car for long periods of time caught the attention of nosy neighbors, but one could sit at a bus stop all afternoon and no one would notice.

It was after eight when a woman not much younger than Tess parked a Chevrolet Caprice at the curb and trudged toward the door, head down, a single plastic sack of groceries dangling from her right hand. Tess let her get inside, then waited another ten minutes before knocking, allowing the woman to decompress a little – put her groceries away, make the transition from work to home. She wouldn’t have thought of such a tactic when she started this kind of work, but she knew how she felt at the end of a long day, and she saw no harm in letting this woman decompress before Tess peppered her with questions about a workplace she had left involuntarily.

“I’m from the state unemployment office,” she said exactly twelve minutes later, “and we’re doing spot checks of departmental efficiency. Do you know where we might find Alicia Farmer?”

“I’m Alicia Farmer,” the woman said, as if confessing to something unpleasant. “But I never put in for unemployment. I got another gig.” She indicated the insignia on her blouse. CHARM CITY VIDEO.

“So you’re still in the film business?”

“Yeah.” Alicia laughed, a little unwillingly. “For now, until Netflix or the idiot management puts us out of business. Now if you don’t mind-”

“I wasn’t exactly truthful,” Tess said, smiling in a way that she hoped would take the sting out of her confession, all the while positioning her body slightly forward, so the door couldn’t be closed without real force. Alicia seemed too downtrodden, too defeated, to slam a door on someone’s foot. Speaking swiftly now: “I’m an investigator working for Mann of Steel, and I’m looking into some of the security issues on set.”

“Security issues? Like the death of Greer Sadowski? Yeah, I guess that was a real security issue.”

Alicia had reddish brown hair, pulled back in a ponytail, and such dark shadows beneath her light eyes that they might have been bruises. She reminded Tess of someone she knew, although it took her a second to pin it down. She reminded Tess of herself, the woman she was on the verge of becoming after she lost her job at the Star. God, she had been lost for a while. If she hadn’t allowed Tyner to talk her into becoming a private investigator, if she hadn’t taken the risk of opening her own business, if she hadn’t met Crow and, yes, allowed him to woo and pursue her, this could be her, in a red CHARM CITY VIDEO smock, living in a safe, but not particularly desirable, Baltimore neighborhood, sarcasm her only defining trait.

“The police are looking into Greer’s death, not me.” Then, on a hunch. “Should I give them your name?”

“I didn’t hate her that much.” Tess liked the precision of Alicia’s candor. Not wanting the girl dead, but not pretending to care more than she did. “Look, I’m exhausted and all I want is to drink a beer, watch some stupid television. Can we sit down? I’ll even give you a beer.”

Tess took the offer, sitting with Alicia in a small den off the kitchen, an addition that appeared to have been made circa 1982, judging by the butternut squash-colored appliances, with a Formica breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the pine-paneled alcove. With only a few small tweaks, it could have passed for cheerfully funky, a retro gem. Instead, it seemed resigned to dowdiness.

“My folks’ place,” Alicia said. “My father died ten years ago, my mother just two years ago. When I have the time to renovate, I don’t have the funds. When I have the funds, I don’t have the time. I don’t know. I watch all those home improvement shows, but I think it’s decadent, the way we fetishize our homes. Or maybe that’s a convenient rationalization for my crap house.”

“It’s cozy,” Tess said, sucking up, but not completely insincere. “I’m guessing your parents died kind of young?”

“Dad had that cancer no one can pronounce, the one that steelworkers get from asbestos. Mom went out the old-fashioned way, good old lung cancer.” Alicia Farmer fired up a Lucky with a great deal of style and ceremony. “Me, I’m invincible. Or I don’t give a shit. I haven’t figured out which one it is yet.”

“Wasn’t it weird working on Mann of Steel when your dad had worked at Beth Steel?” Tess may have been trying to ingratiate herself, but she also was genuinely interested. “I mean, you had to realize how bogus it was, a thriving steel plant in modern-day Baltimore. Plus, you probably know some of the steelworkers who have raised a stink about it.”

The question seemed to catch Alicia by surprise. She blew smoke at the ceiling while she thought about it. “It’s a television show. A guy time-travels after he gets hit on the head. It wasn’t exactly a documentary. I have to say, though, you’re the first person who ever asked me that particular question about my job at Mann of Steel.”

“What do people usually ask?”

“What’s Johnny Tampa really like, do I ever get to ride in a limo. Shit like that.”

Tess smiled. “I’ve worked there less than a week, and I’ve been asked the Johnny Tampa question.”

“What do you say? I told people he had all the personality of particle board, and everyone thought I was kidding. Me, I thought it was kind of unfair to particle board.”

“How did you end up working for them?”

“The usual Baltimore thing – I know a girl who knows a girl who does the hair of an old friend of John Waters. John’s been working with the same people forever and didn’t have anything for me. But when his casting director, Pat Moran, heard that Mann of Steel was coming to town, she made inquiries on my behalf. I got hired as Flip’s assistant before the pilot was shot, and it was great… for a while.”

“What happened?”

Alicia looked to the ceiling again, blew more smoke. “Oh, the usual girl-on-girl action. Greer got hired, she wanted my job. Somehow she made it happen.”

Time to go straight at it, Tess decided.

“Lottie MacKenzie says you photocopied a script and gave it to someone outside the production, that you resigned when asked about it.”

“I resigned because I was so damn sick of Greer’s manipulations by then. Who do you think ran to Lottie, blaming me? She was going to get me one way or another. If I had been smarter, I would have gotten out of her way the first time we clashed, asked Lottie for another job in a different department. But by this time, Greer had trashed me so thoroughly that I didn’t have a chance. Besides, she had a protector. I never had a chance, once she got him on her side.”

“A protector? Flip?”

“Ben Marcus.”

Strange. Tess had the impression that Ben didn’t particularly like Greer. And then she wondered why she thought that. Perhaps it was just that Ben didn’t seem to like anyone, starting with himself. Or perhaps it was because Ben wanted her to think he wasn’t particularly fond of Greer, that he had taken every opportunity to run her down. Lottie had said that Greer seemed to be open to any kind of liaison that would give her career a boost.

“Are you saying…?”

“I can’t say anything for sure. Still, she wheedled her way into the writers’ office as an intern, when we really didn’t need anyone. Then, all of a sudden – bam, she’s got a paying gig, as the second assistant. She was very efficient, however. Meanwhile, phone messages were disappearing from my desk, I didn’t get e-mails that I was supposed to get. Penny-ante shit like that.”

“And the script? The one that was found in the dead man’s house?”

Alicia stubbed her cigarette out in a bright yellow ashtray that could probably fetch an outrageous price in some hip little secondhand store. “Truthfully? I don’t know shit about it. The guy’s name was in the phone log, but I don’t remember him, and I never said anything to him beyond ‘I’ll pass that on to Flip.’”

“Pass what on?”

“Who knows? He was one of a dozen people who called or e-mailed every day, claiming an urgent need to talk to the executive producer. My job was to be politely unhelpful – take the message, send a ‘Thank you for your inquiry’ e-mail, whatever. He was one name among many, Wilbur Grace. Hard to forget a name like that. But I sure as shit didn’t give him anything. All he ever got from me was ‘Hello,’ ‘I’ll tell him,’ ‘Yes, he’s got your number.’”

“Someone gave him the script and the bible. The man killed himself. And now Greer is dead.”

Alicia studied Tess. “But you just said they’re looking for her boyfriend, right?”

Actually, Tess hadn’t said that. “He’s officially a person of interest at this point.”

“But it makes sense, especially if she was sleeping with Ben Marcus.”

“Are you saying that you know this for a fact?”

“I’m saying that I know Ben Marcus has sex so often, and with so little thought, that I wouldn’t be surprised if he started humping a doughnut off the craft services cart one day.”

Flip had alluded to the same behavior on Ben’s part but said an affair between Ben and Greer was unthinkable. And it was, Tess decided – not because of Ben but because Greer wouldn’t settle for anyone less than the boss.

Her beer finished, Tess decided to let her doppelgänger have the oblivious evening she so clearly desired. She stood. “One last thing-”

“Home alone, sleeping. That’s one thing I don’t miss about the old job, those crazy hours.” Alicia smiled. “That is what you were going to ask me, right? Where I was the night Greer died?”

“Actually, I just wanted to use your bathroom.”

The powder room proved to be one of the few projects that Alicia had found the time and money to complete. It had a pretty pedestal sink, a striking light fixture, and one of those state-of-the-art toilets that used a minimum of water. Tess flushed it twice, giddy as a child.

A few blocks away, Tess pulled over and found a little free wireless bleeding into the air, possibly from the McDonald’s. She used it to look up Wilbur Grace on her laptop, see if he was still listed in Baltimore. There he was, Wilbur R. Grace on Elsrode Road, mere blocks from where she sat. How could she not at least drive by, given that it was all but on her way back to Selene’s condo?

And once she found the house, on a dead end that ran into Herring Run Park, how could she not get out, walk around. It was never her intention to break in, of course – or so she told herself as she fiddled with the kitchen window, which slid up so effortlessly that it seemed rude to resist its invitation.

She flicked the kitchen light switch. No power – it must have been turned off by now – and it only would have drawn the neighbors’ attention. But there was a streetlight outside, and once her eyes adjusted, she began to look around, feeling silly. What did she expect to find? A man had killed himself here, hung himself from the ceiling fan above the charming, old-fashioned table, a white metal top with an elaborate black design. It was sad, but it probably didn’t have anything to do with Mann of Steel, despite what had been found among his effects.

“Don’t disdain the obvious, Monaghan,” she said out loud, keen for company in the dark, achingly quiet house. She wandered into the living room. Like the kitchen in Alicia Farmer’s house, it was a Baltimore time capsule, only this one was stuck in the early 1960s. Why was the furniture still here? Maybe Wilbur Grace had died without a will and everything was being held up by probate. That was a mess, Tess knew from experience, but it would be sorted out eventually. Until then, the house would sit, and – she heard a creak back in the kitchen. Someone else was opening the kitchen window, which Tess had been careful to close behind her.

Flight or fight? She chose neither, crouching behind the sofa instead. Her eyes had adjusted to the light; that was her one advantage. If someone else was entering through the kitchen window, he – or she – had no more right to be there than she did, so that was a push. She had left her gun in the car – distinct disadvantage. Burglars tended to be averse to violence, hence their choice of profession. But when confronted, they could be unpredictable.

Voices. There were two of them, male and female, trying to whisper but not having much success. “Are you sure-?” “Yes, I’ve done it before.” “But what if-?” “He’s dead, no one’s here, no one’s ever here.” “It’s creepy, though, him dying here.”

By then, the duo was in the living room, heading toward the stairs, two teenagers, a six-pack of beer dangling from the boy’s hand. Tess should have let them go. It was no business of hers if two kids wanted to take a shot at adding another stat to the city’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy rate. She could have let them pass, then retreated silently out the window. She was trespassing, too.

“You come here often?” Tess called out when they were about halfway up the stairs.

The girl screamed, and the boy dropped the six-pack, which bounced down the steps and broke free of the plastic rings, rolling across the wooden floor. Surprised and overwhelmed, they couldn’t begin to figure out what to do. The girl tried to run down the stairs as the boy ran up, only to block each other.

“Don’t choose a career in any kind of crisis or emergency work,” Tess said, picking up a beer. She was tempted to open it for the sheer insouciance of it, but it would only spray everywhere, making a mess. Besides, she wasn’t in the mood for a Natural Light. She was never in the mood for a Natural Light.

“Who are you?” the boy asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Let’s just say I have a right to be here,” she bluffed, “which is probably not your situation. Breaking and entering, drinking alcohol when you’re under twenty-one, getting ready to have sex with a minor-”

“I’m a minor,” the boy protested, even as the girl said: “We were not!”

“The law doesn’t care about the boy’s age,” Tess said, having no idea if this were true. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll forget about everything I saw and everything you’ve done, if you’ll just tell me some things I need to know about the man who lived here. You did know him, right?”

“Mr. Grace?” the boy said. “Yeah.”

“What was he like?”

“Weird.”

That was more than she had hoped for, actually. She was counting on getting the usual “Nice man, quiet man” rap, the default of incurious neighbors everywhere. Translated: I never paid attention to him.

“How so?”

“He’d invite the neighborhood kids over to watch movies.”

Well, Crow did that with Lloyd.

“And that was okay, he would give us sodas and stuff, screen us these old movies, then ask us what we thought.”

Again, not so different from what happened in her home.

“And he even wanted to make movies with some of us.”

Shit.

“Not like that,” the young man added hastily. Perhaps he had told the story before and always gotten the same reaction. “Movies with stories, that he had written out. Short. They weren’t exactly the Matrix, but they were kind of good. Only he stopped doing that, like, a year ago or so.”

“Did he keep the movies?”

“Shit, I don’t know. His equipment was old school, some big clunky camcorder, VHS tapes. Who still has that shit?”

Tess glanced around the room. There was a large armoire in one corner of the living room. Using a pinpoint flashlight on her key ring, she opened it and found a television and a cable box, but no DVD player, and no VCR. Below the television was a shelf with films in both formats, mostly classics, but there were no homemade movies among them.

“You steal this stuff?” she said.

“What stuff?”

“You said he watched movies, he had to have something to watch them on.”

“No,” the boy said, adamant, even a little offended. “I wouldn’t do nothing like that. I come over here to – you know, have fun. I’m not a thief.”

The girl spoke up, outraged. “This is the first time I’ve ever been here.”

The boy smiled sheepishly at Tess, as if expecting her to take his side, to understand that a super-suave Herring Run stud such as himself – hadn’t he sprung for an entire six-pack of Natural Light – couldn’t be expected to be tied down to just one girl.

“But there was equipment,” Tess insisted, examining the armoire. In the back, several small holes had been bored into the wood so cords could be passed through.

“Like I said, I hadn’t come over to see Mr. Grace for a couple of years. He liked the younger kids, mainly.” Again, he seemed to know what Tess was thinking. “Not like that. When you’re little, it’s not embarrassing, doing that shit, running around and pretending to be other people. But you outgrow it, you know?”

Tess studied the living room, best as she could see it in the dim light. Nothing else seemed missing, or off. The television was light enough and, although not a flat-screen, new enough to fetch a decent sum at a pawnshop. If there had been a burglary, why not take that as well?

“What’s upstairs?”

“Bedrooms,” said the playboy of Northeast Baltimore, leering, and Tess froze him with a look. “Not trashed or anything,” he added. “I been coming and going from here since he died, and I ain’t noticed anything missing. He didn’t really have any friends. Just the little kids.”

“You left the window unlatched?”

He shrugged, almost proudly. He wasn’t altogether dim-witted. Tess stared him down.

“The first time, I came through the cellar,” he admitted. “He has them Wizard of Oz doors.”

It took her a second to get that reference, but it made her smile. Some old Baltimore houses did have storm cellar doors, although tornadoes were rare.

“Once I pried them open, I bolted ’em shut from the inside. I just leave the one window unlocked, on the back porch.”

“Very considerate,” Tess conceded. “How about I give you guys a ride home? It’s getting late, and it’s a school night.”

“Well, we don’t live far…” he began, then realized it hadn’t really been a question.

“And I’ll take the beer,” Tess said. “For your own good.”

“Like you never drank when you was my age.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying I didn’t get caught.” She regarded the beer with little affection. Crow could always use it for crab boil, she guessed. “By the way, drink what you want, but when it comes to birth control, don’t do that on the cheap, okay? That’ll cost you.”

Chapter 21

Martin Tull was, as Tess had assured Flip, good police. Smart, methodical, with a kind of confidence that can’t be faked and a work ethic that few could equal. While some detectives welcomed homicides because they started the overtime clock, Tull was inclined to work eighteen-hour days no matter the circumstances. Going on nine-thirty, it was a toss-up whether he would be free, but Tess decided to try to lure him out anyway.

“A man has to eat,” she said persuasively. “And drink.”

He agreed to meet her at Burke’s, a reliable all-night refuge, the kind of place that made its living off cops, emergency room personnel, reporters, and insomniacs. Tess decided to have mozzarella sticks and a beer. Tull, as was his habit, ordered coffee, black. Tess wasn’t sure she had ever seen him drink anything else. Come to think of it, in all the years she had known Tull, she wasn’t sure she had ever seen him eat.

“A shot of whiskey would be healthier,” she said. “It reduces stress. And who knows how long that coffeepot has been sitting on the burner?”

“I love the coffee here,” he said. “It’s boiled down to the essence. It’s like… caffeine syrup.”

“Are you trying to get a second wind, or just maintaining for the drive home?”

“Home, I guess. We can’t find the boyfriend. Which, of course, makes me happy in the long run – just convinces me that he’s the one we want – but I wouldn’t have minded finding him today.”

“So, a dunker?”

“I think so, yeah. Based on how his family’s acting. Alternating between ‘Oh, JJ just disappears sometimes, goes fishing up at Deep Creek Lake when the weather is like this,’ then, in the next breath, mentioning what a bitch the dead girl is, how badly she behaved, and then ‘Not that we’d wish any harm on her.’”

“Behaved badly how?”

“JJ was convinced there was another guy – his mother let that slip, and tried to backpedal. From what I gather, the two were high school sweethearts, years ago, got back together in the past year, but the mother never thought the girl’s heart was in it.”

“What did they say at his job?” Tess asked, knowing that Tull would have checked with the suspect’s co-workers as well.

“All they know is that his mom called in early Wednesday, said he was sick, too sick to even talk on the phone, expected to be out all week. Look, I’ve got a patrol on his house. He’s going to try and come back, maybe as early as tonight. He’s not bright. Even his own mother isn’t putting him forward for genius status. He’s probably scared and freaked out, trying to figure out if there’s anywhere he can go on the lam. But he doesn’t have the resources.”

Tess whisked a mozzarella stick through the marinara sauce. She had always liked this particular brand of bar food, but her fondness for it had soared when it was demonized by the Center for Nutrition and Public Policy as one of the worst possible foods to eat. She kept a mental list of such foods – pad thai, kung pao chicken, fettuccine Alfredo – and tried to eat them as frequently as possible.

“I know the rule of thumb is that the obvious suspect is the obvious suspect,” Tess said. “My only concern is if there’s any connection between him and the problems that have been dogging this production. Could this guy be our arsonist, for example?”

“If the problems stop now, you’ll know.”

“Yes, or maybe someone else will have figured that out as well, and will use this as an opportunity.” She was thinking of Selene. If she had been creating the problems on set, what would she do now? What if she had hired Greer’s ex-boyfriend to be her private little troublemaker, and he had been sidetracked by whatever had happened between him and Greer? Selene’s trip to New York could have been an elaborate alibi. Only – did it even count as an alibi? She could have left the restaurant anytime after Tess passed out. She was spotted at Penn Station at noon, but it had been a very conspicuous sighting, the kind of thing tailor-made for cell phone video cameras and TMZ.com. The gossip item put her at the SoHo Grand about 11 A.M. That was at least eleven hours – more than enough time to return to Baltimore, and go back to New York, with six hours in between. Do it in a private car without an E-ZPass, pay cash for whatever gas you need, avoid red-light cameras at intersections, and it was possible to make the trip without leaving a single electronic footprint.

It was all very interesting, but Tess was working for Flip, and the last thing Flip wanted was for his star to be connected to Greer’s death. Tess was supposed to be using her relationship with Tull to ensure that the production was shielded, as much as possible, from scandal. And based on what Tull was saying, she should be happy on that score. Yet she felt a mild, nagging discontent. Maybe it was nothing more than the cheese inside its deep-fried coat, growing rubbery and cold.

Back in Selene’s condo, Whitney poured Tess a glass of port.

“Roomies again,” she said, toasting her. “After all these years. But is this the future we envisioned for ourselves, babysitting a spoiled twenty-year-old?”

“I can hear you.” Selene’s voice came from the living room, where she was watching a huge plasma television with the sound turned off. Selene used the television the way a baby interacted with the mobiles hung over a crib, lying back and letting the images wash over her, although without any evidence of intellectual stimulation.

“I wanted you to,” Whitney assured her. “I want you to hear every syllable that emanates from my mouth. I’m going to school you, girl.”

Tess snorted port. Whitney attempting the outmoded slang of school was too funny. She suspected Whitney knew as much.

“So, who did we expect to be, all those years ago? How are we different?” Whitney asked. Tess didn’t jump in. She knew Whitney had her own set of answers and would want to go first. “We’ve traded Coors for Taylor Fladgate. And instead of Kent House, our dorm, we’re in a Baltimore high-rise that neither of us can afford.”

Tess was sure that her friend could afford such an apartment, but she had the WASP habit of cheapness when it came to big-ticket items. Whitney would probably live and die in the guesthouse at her parents’ mildly run-down valley home because it was free.

“We were both going to be journalists,” Whitney continued. “You, a crusading investigator, part Nellie Bly, part Woodstein. Me, a globe-trotting foreign correspondent. Now you’re the owner of your own business, and I run the family foundation. Upgrade?”

“Downgrade, I would think,” Selene snarked.

“My uncle Toddy married an actress,” Whitney said, addressing Tess in a stage whisper. “He was disinherited.”

Selene got up and flounced into her room, slamming the door behind her.

“She hates me,” Whitney said cheerfully.

“Good, then you’re doing your job. How was the day on set?”

“Tedious. Why do people think it’s glamorous, spending hours in a big drafty barn of a place, watching people say and do the same things over and over again?”

“Did they give you one of those little headset thingies that allows you to listen to the scene?”

“Yes, but I turned the sound off after the third take. I couldn’t take listening to that dialogue. I felt like my IQ was dropping by the minute.”

“And the day was problem free?”

“For our purposes. The tiny woman, Lottie, said the energy was a little off, because people are upset, but it seemed to be going well. Johnny Tampa was pissed because someone left an unflattering photo of him in his trailer. What a fat load he is. Remember how-”

“No,” Tess said quickly, knowing where her friend was heading and prepared to disavow it, three times if necessary, like Peter denying Jesus before the cock crowed. She was never going to admit to her youthful yearnings toward Johnny Tampa.

“Oh you did too have a crush on him when you first got to school.” Whitney spoke with the smugness of a true friend. “What were you thinking? Even thin, he wasn’t that attractive.”

Tess looked out at the harbor, so beautiful at night. Her thoughts followed her eyes eastward, to the mouth of the bay and then across it, time-traveling to the pretty little college campus where two girls had met, two girls who were at once so much younger and older than the girl who had just closeted herself behind her bedroom door. “We thought that we would never get old, much less fat. Well, fatter, in my case. We thought our metabolisms would never change. We thought we would get everything we wanted. We were, in short, twenty.”

Whitney laughed in rueful agreement. “What if someone had made you a bargain, all those years ago, offered you all this? Not just the apartment, but the life, too? The money, the beauty, the attention. Would you have wanted it under these conditions – life in a fishbowl, a job at which you have very little control?”

“Honestly? At twenty? I think I would have said yes. I think almost anyone would. At twenty. Not now.”

“Poor baby,” Whitney said, looking at the closed bedroom door, sotto voce for once. “She’s already beaten the million-to-one odds by becoming a successful actress. Now she has to face the ten million-to-one odds of becoming an actress who finds work past the age of thirty-five. Remember the silent stars whose careers ended when the talkies came along? For women, it hasn’t really changed.”

“Marie… Dressler, the one whose dog ate her,” Tess recalled.

“Wrong Marie,” Whitney said. “Marie Dressler was in Dinner at Eight. You’re thinking of Marie Prevost. Remember, Nick Lowe had a song about her. He rhymed winner with doggie’s dinner. And then there was Lupe Velez-”

“She was in talkies,” Tess said.

“Right. But she went bankrupt and ended up drowning in her toilet when she vomited up all the Seconals she had taken in hopes of a slightly more, uh, picturesque suicide. Don’t you know your Hollywood Babylon? Hollywood kills its own.”

“Well, there was Thelma Todd, whose murder was never solved,” Tess said. “But I’m not sure that was actually Hollywood ’s fault.”

“You’ve forgotten the starlet who jumped from the thirteenth letter of the Hollywoodland sign – back when it had thirteen letters. Oh, and another one who immolated herself on a pyre of her own clippings. What a way to go.”

The two old friends fell silent, and Tess assumed that Whitney must be thinking, as she was, of the fates available to actresses of a certain age. To women of a certain age. The distinctive ring of Selene’s cell phone broke the silence, followed by her side of the conversation – not the words, only the tone, which was suffused with a husky, flirtatious giggle.

“I wonder who she’s talking to,” Tess said. “Then again, knowing Selene, she’d talk to the dry cleaners in that breathy little voice.”

“Easy enough to find out.”

“How?”

“She has an eleven o’clock call tomorrow. Grab her cell while she’s still asleep, check the received call log, make a note of it.”

As it happened, Tess didn’t have to wait until morning. A few minutes later, the water started running in Selene’s bathroom. Tess knocked softly on the bedroom door in a pretense of courtesy, then pushed inside, Whitney trailing her. While Whitney kept an eye on the closed bathroom door, Tess grabbed the iPhone. It took a second for her to figure out its protocols, and when she did find the received call log, the latest call wasn’t particularly surprising: DEREK. He and Selene had probably shared one more laugh over drugging Tess; that gag never got old. The other calls were from her driver, Lottie, and Selene’s mother. In fact, it looked as if Selene’s mother called every day about the same time, which surprised Tess. She hadn’t thought the Waites family was particularly supportive of their daughter.

The received call log exhausted, Tess was about to put the phone back on the nightstand when she remembered Selene’s furiously tapping thumb, texting in the car on the way to New York. She found the text function and clicked back two days in time. Derek again, checking Selene’s ETA. And, in between Derek’s calls, one from a different number, a text that read simply: ACHING FOR YOU. WHERE ARE YOU? The absence of text shorthand – no 4 for for, no u for you, no r for are – might have been enough to tip Tess off to the sender – someone who had enough pride, or time, to use the language in full. But she didn’t have to guess. The text was from someone named “Benny,” who happened to have a number in Selene’s phone book.

She pressed the call button, hanging up when Ben Marcus picked up breathlessly on the second ring: “Have you figured out a way to get rid of them?”

Chapter 22

He waited until Marie was asleep to put in one of Bob’s movies. Marie knew about the stash of VHS tapes, of course, and the old VCR that had suddenly materialized. He could never hide anything in this house. Marie knew their home the way some people knew their bodies – she could detect any change in it, no matter how small. The house was her body, in a sense; she inhabited it the way a hermit crab lived in its shell, only she never outgrew it. She could be resting on the sofa in the evening, yet tell by sound alone if he put something away in the wrong place in the kitchen. Where would he hide her Christmas gifts this year, now that he didn’t have an office? But everything should be solved by Christmas, one way or another. It had to be. Bob’s estate would be settled, the other matter resolved as well, and he could tell Marie everything. Well, not everything, but he could tell her that he had decided to take early retirement, thanks to this windfall that Bob had engineered for them before he died. Even then, Marie probably wouldn’t want to watch the films. They always made her cry, even the silly ones.

When he brought the VHS tapes home, he had told a semitruth, as he liked to think of it. It was hard for him to think of anything he said as a lie, because then he would be a liar, and that didn’t fit with his sense of himself. He told Marie that while Bob’s estate was held up in probate, the Orphans’ Court had determined that certain items of no financial value could be removed from the premises. And a judge might have ruled that way, if a judge had been asked. In reality, he had made the ruling, after a fashion, entering and leaving with the set of keys that Bob had given him years ago – the same keys he had used to unlock the back door that day, after a week of Bob not answering his phone.

In his mind, he framed the memory as Bob might have framed the scene in his viewfinder. He did not see the kitchen through his own eyes but saw it as if the camera was watching him from the other side of the room – the door opening, his eyes moving slowly upward, only Bob’s feet and ankles on view. It was a clichéd way of seeing, a scene stolen from someone else – but then, he didn’t have Bob’s eye.

He had wanted to believe it was despair, nothing more, Bob finally laid low by some variant of the same odd brain chemistry that affected his only sister, Marie. But then he discovered what a mess Bob had left behind – the debts, the second mortgage, the refinance on the first mortgage, a balloon that was going to come due in a year, kicking up to a disastrously high rate. Then there was the lawyer, saying he was still owed money, even though it was his bills that had driven Bob to near bankruptcy in the first place, and that he planned to attach the house. Who cared if some VHS tapes disappeared? Even a grasping lawyer wouldn’t assign them any value.

Still, they might try to take the movies from him, if they knew. He wouldn’t put anything past these people. Thinking about them, thinking about all the people who were allied against him, made his face grow hot, then anger and humiliation overtook him again, just as it had the other night. Quickly, he pushed the play button, desperate to lose himself in Bob’s meticulous fantasy world.

The film opened on a shot of a castle – this would be the decrepit old mansion on St. Lo Drive, but it looked so elegant on film, so much better than it did in life. Most things did. A knight and his squire entered the frame. Don Quixote? Ivanhoe? While some of Bob’s movies had dialogue, this one had only a musical score, and it quickly burst into a choreographed battle, with other knights emerging from the forest to challenge the hero. Ivanhoe. He and Bob were infants when that film was first released, the version with the two Taylors, Elizabeth and Robert, but they had probably caught it in reruns, on the old Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. Had that been Channel 2 or Channel 11? He could no longer remember, but he did recall that there were two movies, at most, on Sunday afternoons, and people waited years for a big movie to make its way from the cinema to the television. Now movies were everywhere, all the time, available with one click of a computer mouse, on sale at the grocery store, in rental bins at McDonald’s. This easy accessibility should cheapen the experience, but it somehow never did. Nothing could break the spell of a good movie.

On his screen, the eleven-year-old versions of Ivanhoe and his squire broke free and ran across the undulating hills of Clifton Park. Okay, he wasn’t objective, but it seemed to him that Bob’s camerawork was outstanding.

In the bedroom, Marie was snoring. He picked up the phone, called his contact.

“Have you seen the call sheet for tomorrow?”

“Yes, only – look, I’m not sure I should be doing this anymore. Someone was killed. There’s a lot more attention.”

“I know,” he said. “But that has nothing to do with us, does it?”

A short silence, as if the question was being considered. “You had the code, to get into the building. I gave that to you weeks ago.”

“I never used it,” he said swiftly. “As you pointed out to me, access to the building wasn’t worth anything, if I couldn’t get into the offices, and you said they were always locked tighter than a drum.”

“Of course, yeah, but – you can see why I’m creeped out. What if they find out I’m the one who gives you the information about the call sheet?”

“You told me the list is set up on a bcc, so they don’t even see the addresses. Even if someone goes looking for it, they’ll just think it was a mistake, an oversight.”

“I suppose…”

He turned off the video player, and watched the CNN crawl on mute, relying on silence to get him what he wanted, an old teacher’s trick. He could bring his classes to order simply by staring at the students, back in the day, although that had gotten more difficult toward the end of his time in the classroom. The children became so hard, so mean.

A resigned sigh. “They’re going to be at Green Mount Cemetery most of the day. With both Mann and Betsy.”

“Thank you-”

“Also, there’s something else, something extra.”

“You already told me they’ll be shooting Saturday to make up for the missed day. But I don’t think I’m going to worry about that.” It was hard for him to get away on weekends. Besides, the person he needed was dead now.

“No, not shooting. Something else.”

“Yes?”

“You see, it’s extra. Outside our agreement, which covers only the information on the call sheets and other production-related e-mails. So…”

A childhood taunt came back to him – greedy guts. “How much do you want?”

“Fifty?”

The matter was open to negotiation, but he was too tired to barter. The fact was, when you were going broke, small sums became less urgent, paradoxical as that might seem. With only a few months between him and an abyss of debt, he couldn’t worry about the stray fifty here or there, especially if it led to his windfall. “Fifty it is.”

“There’s a memorial service Sunday, on the soundstage. For Greer. Everyone will be there. There’s going to be security – they don’t want any press – but I don’t think they’ll question anyone who claims to be family, and she’s got some uncles and cousins. You could blend right in.”

This was good information, although not in the way she thought. He could definitely use this. “Okay, look for an extra fifty in your pay envelope Monday.”

“I’ve been thinking – what will you do now? Without Greer, I mean. Didn’t everything depend on her?”

“You let me worry about that.”

“I might figure out a solution to your problem. I might be able to help.”

The impudence! So now it was to be a partnership – and he didn’t need or want a partner. He might not resent an extra fifty dollars here or there, but he wasn’t sharing the jackpot with anyone.

“I really don’t want you to worry. Good night, and look for your bonus, come Monday.”

FRIDAY
Chapter 23

The Starbucks barista seemed to know Ben Marcus, at least by sight and coffee preference, calling out his order before he reached the cash register. Hidden in a corner, Tess watched him, happy for the chance to observe an unwary Ben. He was always so on during their encounters – picking even his most sarcastic words with care. But maybe that was Ben’s way of speaking to everyone. Although she couldn’t hear what he was saying to the peppy young barista, Tess could tell from his expression that he was his usual arch self. If he was nervous about this meeting, it wasn’t apparent. Last night, when Tess had called him on her own phone for a more substantive conversation, he had been caught off guard and had even stammered in a place or two. But in the intervening nine hours since he agreed to this meeting, he would have had time to think about what he wanted to say, to shape his story. He was, after all, a professional storyteller.

He doctored his mocha with extra sugar, then plopped down in the upholstered chair opposite Tess.

“Thanks,” he said, although neither his tone nor his expression indicated gratitude. “For meeting me here, instead of the office. There’s not much privacy there.”

“Is that how Greer found out you were sleeping with Selene?”

He seemed surprised that she was so direct – and a little relieved. Ben was probably used to meetings that began with more smoke blowing and ass kissing.

“I suppose so,” he said, after a beat. “I never really knew how Greer found out. She was sneaky that way.”

“And she used the information to force you to get her – well, which job? She was promoted twice, first to the production assistant’s job in the writers’ office, then to Flip’s assistant. At what point did she play the Selene card?”

“Greer wasn’t that direct.” Ben’s characterization surprised Tess; she thought the girl had bordered on tactlessly blunt at times. Perhaps she was different with her bosses. “She asked for my help, yes, but it was never a strict quid pro quo. Look, no one cares who Selene sleeps with.”

“If that’s so, then who’s keeping the tabloids in business?”

That earned a wan smile from Ben. “I mean, no one on the production cares about Selene’s love life, as long as she shows up for work on time. Underage drinking, breaking the drug laws of this country? That makes us nervous, because if she gets busted, we’re not insured for that. But she can fuck anyone she wants to.” His own words seemed to give him pause. “As long as it’s someone or something that can give informed consent.”

Tess allowed herself the luxury of thought, of not coming back at Ben too quickly with another question. She had the same sensation that she had when speaking with Flip. She was being tricked, diverted – but from what? Alicia had suggested that Ben was Greer’s protector, and Tess was curious about that dynamic. But the fact that Ben was sleeping with Selene was of interest to her because it meant he might have information that would confirm whether Selene was the source of the problems on the set. Why hadn’t Flip asked his old friend what he knew about Selene, tried to use him as a double agent? Certainly, Ben’s loyalties to Flip and the production had to trump this – Tess groped for a noun but found none. Relationship? Fling? Soulless carnal encounter? She settled, in her head, for thing.

“No one cares who Selene sleeps with,” she repeated. “Does anyone care who Ben sleeps with?”

Bingo. He flushed, dropped his eyes to his coffee, began jiggling his foot as he had the other day.

“I would be really grateful,” he said, “if you didn’t mention this to Flip. Or Lottie, but only because she would tattle to Flip. I could give a fuck what Lottie thinks about my extracurricular activities.”

“But you don’t want Flip to know? I thought guys talked freely about such things.”

“We’ve been friends a long time, since grade school. It gets complicated. Do you have friends like that?”

Tess shrugged. Of course she did, everyone did. But she wanted Ben to keep talking, building up enough momentum to run into some inadvertent truths.

“I love the guy. Love. We’ve been there for each other all our lives. Look, he has the name, the connections, and no one can match him when it comes to the big picture for a show. But he can’t match me on the line-by-line writing. That’s just the way it is. Flip has never envied my ability to write, and I’ve never wanted to be the son of Phil Tumulty – God knows, I saw how that fucker neglected Flip through much of his childhood. I mean, yeah, I took a summer job from him when I was twenty-one – I wasn’t going to turn down my best connection in the business – but I was never blind to his flaws. Even so, it bugged Flip, that summer I worked on his dad’s last movie here in Baltimore. He considered it a betrayal. That was the last serious fight we ever had. The only one.”

“Would he really care about you and Selene? He keeps telling me how happily married he is.”

Ben’s jiggling foot, the tapping toe of denial, began working the floor beneath the table. “Flip got married at twenty-three, to his college girlfriend. And he’s determined to stay married to her, no matter what. It’s like a religion with him, not repeating his father’s mistakes. But that’s not to say it’s easy, saying no, especially when he has a partner, me, who’s free and unfettered. Usually, he eggs me on, encourages me to be a wild man, then asks for all the details. But every now and then, he makes an arbitrary ruling that someone is off-limits. And the minute he does that…”

Tess faked sympathy. “That’s the one person you have to sleep with. So Flip told you to stay away from Selene?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that why you’ve been so quick to defend her whenever someone suggests she might be the cause of problems on the production?”

“Yes. I mean – no, I’m not so blinded by sex that I can’t think rationally. But some of the stuff that happened – well, let’s just say I know she wasn’t involved. One time, when we had to evacuate set, because someone set a fire in a city garbage can? We were in my trailer. That was tricky, getting out and not being seen.”

“Maybe that’s not a coincidence. You being her alibi.”

Quick as Ben was, he needed a second to get Tess’s meaning. “Hey, I decided to pursue her, not the other way around.”

“That’s what men always believe.”

“Are you trying to say that Selene set her sights on me, and let me think it was all my doing? That’s pretty subtle for a twenty-year-old who can barely read a newspaper.”

Tess didn’t have a particularly high opinion of Selene’s book smarts, but she had a hunch that her boy-Q was in the genius stratosphere.

“Men always believe they’re in charge, the author of their own lives. But, in my experience, women make a lot of things that happen, and let men think it was their idea.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous.”

“The night that Greer was killed, Selene told you that she would find a way to dump me and meet you at your hotel room, right? Then she went to New York. She never had any intention of seeing you, but she made sure she knew where you were – alone, in your room, waiting. But what if the plan was to send someone to the offices that night to make some more mischief with the production? The file drawers were open, papers were strewn about. Police think that Greer’s missing boyfriend did that to make it look like a burglary, but what if Greer interrupted the set gremlin and the person panicked?”

“File drawers were open?” Beneath the table, Ben’s feet were tapping so hard that he was practically doing a Mr. Bojangles buck-and-wing. “But this was in Flip’s office, right?”

It seemed an odd detail to fixate on. “In Flip’s office and the anteroom where Greer worked. As I said, the theory is that someone tried to make it look like a burglary after the fact.”

“What kind of burglar goes through files in the writers’ office?”

“I didn’t say it was a good plan. The point is, if this was part of the ongoing campaign against the production, then Selene’s New York trip becomes a very visible alibi. Derek Nichole made a point of telling me he grew up in a tough part of Philadelphia, all but suggested that he was connected. And he did say that he wanted to help Selene.”

“Is she sleeping with him?”

“What?” Tess asked, even as she realized that Ben Marcus, for all his flippancy, was far more interested in Selene Waites than he wanted to admit, perhaps even to himself. “Look, Ben – as I keep telling you, it’s not my job to look into Greer’s murder. But if there is an organized campaign of vandalism against the production, and Selene is involved – I think it would be a good idea for you to come clean with Flip about the relationship.”

He shook his head. “I can’t, I just can’t.”

Tess remembered the online sexual harassment course she had been required to take as a condition of her contractual employment at Johns Hopkins night school. She had gotten a 93 percent and blamed her less-than-perfect score on a poorly worded question. “Is it a firing offense? Sleeping with an actor?”

“Is – God, no, I’m not sure it’s even possible to sexually harass an actor. Especially one who wants to get written out of the show. That’s the one thing I can’t do for Selene, and I made that clear early on. Although, I have to say, the networks are fucking the show over by switching the emphasis to her and making us keep Betsy as a character. Screwed up a lot of stuff we had planned for season two, if we get a pickup. Then again – without Selene, we won’t have a season two or three. It’s a real Hobson’s choice.”

“Were your plans for the show in the” – she needed a second to pull up the jargon – “the bible?”

He seemed to find her use of the lingo amusing. “Certainly, it was spelled out that Betsy would be left behind in the nineteenth century, where she belongs. Now she’s going to follow Mann wherever time travel takes him. Sort of like Mary Steenburgen’s character jumping into the time machine with H. G. Wells in Time after Time.”

“And there’s only one bible?”

“One copy? God no.”

“One version, I mean. It’s not a document that gets revised?”

“No, not really. It’s a planning document, a blueprint for the pitch. Next season – if there is a next season – we’ll take on some new writers, spread the work around, and we’ll have to work up some pretty detailed beat sheets for them. But the bible’s mainly for the network, when you’re trying to sell the show. There’s no reason to go back and change it. Why the interest in this kind of insider knowledge? You want to write for television?”

“God no,” she said reflexively.

“Then you’re the only one.” He flapped a hand at the people sitting around them, as if they were so many flies he’d like to swat. “I bet at least half the people here think they have a television show or a movie inside them. Of course, they don’t want to do the grubby work of actually writing it. They just want to tell someone their idea and share the money, fifty-fifty. Which, by the way, they believe is incredibly generous on their part, because their idea, as they’ll be the first to tell you, is a million-dollar idea. But here’s the thing that civilians don’t get – ideas are worthless.”

“I don’t know,” Tess said. “Some ideas have value. E equals mc squared, gravity. Those were kind of important.”

“It’s the application of ideas that have value, even in the sciences. They don’t give you a patent for the idea, they give you a patent for the execution of the invention. Television is the same way. It’s not the idea behind Mann of Steel that got us a deal-”

That was easy enough for Tess to believe.

“ – but our ability to execute it. Flip is an experienced show runner. I’m a writer with producing experience. We know how to make a television show. The idea is the easiest thing to have.”

Tess could see his point, although she was startled by Ben’s fervency on the topic. He smacked his hands against the table as he spoke, creating a counterpoint to his still-dancing feet.

“At any rate, I’ve seen enough of television production to know it’s not for me,” Tess said. “You guys work longer days than anyone I know, and the tedium – I wouldn’t have the patience for it. It’s worse than surveillance.”

Ben seemed mollified, or at least calmed by Tess’s token respect. “Sorry, I just thought – I mean, given the questions you were asking, about the bible and everything, I thought you were another screenwriting wannabe.”

“To throw some movie dialogue back at you – who would admit to being that?”

He continued to drum the table, but with less hostility. “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, don’t tell me – The Untouchables. Sean Connery to Kevin Costner, when he says he’s an ATF guy. You didn’t get it word for word, though.”

Tess nodded. “We watched it recently. Part of Lloyd’s continuing education, although I’m not sure De Palma is the best influence on a kid we’re trying to keep on the straight and narrow.”

“I like Lloyd,” Ben said. He seemed vaguely surprised by the concept. “I’ll help him, anyway I can. He really should be working with Lottie – he’s clearly got more aptitude for the visuals than the words – but if I make that suggestion, she’ll shoot it down as if it were skeet. So I’m going to plant that idea in Flip’s head. Lloyd should be a P.A., work his way up on the production side of things, where his lack of a formal education won’t matter as much. Television and film are still democratic that way. If you can do the job, no one cares about your degree or pedigree. I knew a kid, started as a P.A. in high school, and he’s directing episodes of network television now. Ditto, if you can’t do the job – a big-deal degree is worthless.”

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

“Ben?”

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 24

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

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

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

“The other night?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Name of the hotel?”

“The SoHo Grand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was so odd, watching his young self. He was a better actor now, no doubt, and his face was more interesting. But who knew that age was so thickening? Not just the waistline, but everything – face, features, even his feet. Then again, some of his peers seemed to get thinner, and that wasn’t attractive either. They looked gaunt, dried up. Maybe it was just his imagination, but it seemed the previous generation of actors – Nicholson, Connery, Hackman – had aged much better.

Depressed, he grabbed the remote by the sink and clicked away, running through the channels rapid-fire. He rested for a moment on the news story about Greer’s boyfriend, getting killed when he wouldn’t surrender. Man, that was weird. But then, other people’s passions always struck Johnny as mildly ludicrous. In a movie or a television show, when both people were hot, you could get it. Besides, it was in the script. But just two ordinary people, getting all crazy over each other? Johnny had been married briefly in his twenties and taken a big financial hit in the divorce, and that had been enough to decide for him that he didn’t want anything long-term, ever again. In California, he used an escort service – very discreet, with nice girls, ones who weren’t too hard or used up, and he was careful to keep things relatively kink-free, lest he ever show up on a client list; you’d never catch him having to explain some girl dressed up like a Brownie. God, he would kill for a brownie. Maybe he should find someone, sublimate the hunger with sex. Here in Baltimore, he had assumed he would hook up with someone in the production, but it hadn’t happened. Yet. He still thought the scary blonde, the one who had pretended not to know who he was, had potential. Yes, she was kind of terrifying, but he found that attractive in a woman.

But she was assigned to watch Selene, and he would be crazy to try and get close to anyone who was part of Selene’s camp.

Fully oiled and moisturized, he slid into bed, switching the television back to his own marathon. The trivia box popped up beneath his chin, his beautifully sharp chin: Where is he now? The answer was provided after a string of commercials for erectile dysfunction cream and some magic stain remover. “Johnny Tampa has retired from Hollywood, but a comeback is rumored for 2008.”

You betcha, he thought.

“That was fast,” Marie said sleepily, watching the ten o’clock news. “People will get mad, wait and see.”

“People will get mad because they solved a murder?”

“They’ll say that it was because it was a white girl, and she worked on that television show, that they never put that much effort into the drug murders. But it’s so obvious that the boyfriend must have done it.”

He shouldn’t ask any questions, shouldn’t draw the conversation out. Change the topic, change the channel. But he couldn’t help himself. “Obvious because he ran away and didn’t surrender?”

“Exactly. It would make a good Law and Order episode, only it would need more twists. On television, the boyfriend wouldn’t be guilty. It would be someone else.”

Change the topic, change the topic, change the topic. “Who?”

“Why, someone with the production. Like, she’d be having an affair with her boss, and maybe his wife found out. Or that skinny little actress girl killed her because… she wouldn’t sell her urine so she could pass the contractual drug test.”

“The actress in the movie has a contractual drug test?” News to him, but Marie often knew such things, thanks to her steady diet of magazines.

“Not in real life. I’m making stuff up. Like you and Bob did, when we were younger. Remember? I never said anything out loud because you thought I was just the stupid little sister, but I would be doing my homework at the dining room table while you talked in the kitchen. You had the best ideas.”

“Bob did. I could barely keep up with him.”

“Bob added the flourishes, fleshed them out. But all the ideas started with you. Bob always gave you credit.”

“Talking about Bob makes me sad.” And anxious, so very anxious.

“I’m sorry.”

Only he was not thinking of Bob just now but of Marie, the Marie he re-met the summer he and Bob graduated from college, the Marie who had somehow outgrown her scabby knees and pigtails and turned into a really striking girl. Not exactly beautiful, but sexy. The early 1970s had suited her. He supposed he should have realized then that one dramatic transformation indicated there could always be another. If it had been hard to find little Marie in that long-haired girl, then it was impossible to see the traces of twenty-one-year-old Marie in the puffy features and swollen ankles of the woman lying next to him on the sofa. And yet, he didn’t love her any less. The case could be made that he loved her more than ever, especially since they had lost Bob. Oh, Bob – why didn’t you come to me earlier, tell me the truth sooner? Why did you let it get so out of hand, why did you lie to me?

“Law and Order always has a second twist, in the second part,” he said to Marie. “A legal maneuver, a conflict of interest. So there would have to be a third thing, something really mysterious.”

“Like what?”

“I haven’t a clue. As you said, Bob was the one who made my ideas work.”

“But you had good ideas, too,” she said, her voice soft with sleep. She would be asleep before the weather forecast. He couldn’t carry her to bed anymore, but he would shake her gently, guide her there, as if she were a sleepwalker. “You always had the best ideas.”

Oh, yes, he was just teeming with good ideas. They were in this fix because of his good ideas, because he thought he knew better than Bob how to go about things.

Stop, his mind advised him, in the cadence of a telegram. Had he ever received a telegram, or did he know of them only via the movies and cartoons? Had he ever lived a life, or was he still waiting for life to start? Fate had given him a chance to make things all right. Stop. Stop. Stop.

Why was it taking so long for Marie to fall asleep tonight?

Lottie sat in her office, free at last to still her mind and try to absorb the news. Alone, she allowed her legs to swing free, kicking against her chair, a little-kid habit she was careful to police around others, because she knew it made her look cute, precious. But it was going on eleven-thirty, the end of a long and turbulent day. She should feel relieved, not anxious. Not only was Greer’s murder essentially solved, but there hadn’t been an incident on set for almost a week – unless you counted Johnny Tampa’s complaint that someone had mailed him an unflattering tabloid article, and no one was taking that seriously – except Johnny. No fires, literal or figurative, to put out, no locals trying to State-and-Main them, no snafus with permits. Even the weather had been kind, beautiful October day after beautiful October day. The production had been blissfully uneventful – except, of course, for Greer’s death, and the police had removed that from the movie’s moral balance sheet as well.

Lottie wished she could be as quick to absolve the production. If she had hired JJ, would that have made a difference? She told herself that a man who would kill his ex-fiancée – or girlfriend, or wife – wasn’t susceptible to cause and effect. A violent man would always find a reason to act violently. Still, Lottie couldn’t help thinking that the production had changed Greer. The young woman who had volunteered to work for free on the pilot had been so eager, so sweet. Had she been changed by her proximity to Flip, by her glimpses into the money and perks provided by such a lifestyle?

They hadn’t found the murder weapon, but that didn’t seem to bother the police. It bothered Lottie, though, as did the memory of Flip’s trashed office. Why hadn’t JJ taken anything if he wanted to make the incident look like a burglary? Flip’s Emmy, for example. It wasn’t hockable, but you could imagine someone trying to sell it on eBay. Flip’s iPod, in the dock next to his computer. Okay, so the killer wasn’t really a burglar, and he hadn’t thought like a burglar. He was an unstable young man, hopped up on adrenaline, desperate to cover his tracks.

Still, something tugged at Lottie’s logical, meticulous mind. Part of the reason that Lottie hadn’t hired JJ was because he was so obviously pussy-whipped. He hadn’t wanted the job, he all but admitted, but Greer had pushed him into applying for it. He had smiled goofily at the mere mention of Greer’s name, and it was clear that he thought her a tremendous prize, that he was the luckiest man in the world to have her as his future wife. It had been cute, if unfathomable. Really, if you had asked Lottie then where she thought the relationship was headed, she would have predicted that Greer was more likely to kill him one day. Or, more correctly, shed him for his lack of ambition, his limited potential – which was exactly what happened, she reminded herself now. Greer, dazzled by Hollywood, broke up with her loser boyfriend, and he lost it. End of story.

Well, the good news was that their troubles were over. They could probably fire the Monaghan woman, save that expense. It had been ridiculous, hiring a watcher for Selene, given how much they already paid for security on set.

Checking her computer clock, she used her office phone to call home, where it was only eight-thirty. She couldn’t bear to talk to her children over the unreliable cutting-in, cutting-out buzz of a cell phone. It was hard enough to have a conversation with four-year-old Angela, the younger one. She could never decide which was worse – Angela’s distant, distracted mode, when she prattled about the day’s events and seemed slightly vague about who Lottie was, or the dramatic, melancholic wail: When are you coming home, Mommy? I miss you. Tonight, Angela told her a long, hard-to-follow story about preschool and a goldfish, but Lottie had hung on to every word. Her seven-year-old, Topper, was stoic, inured to her absences – and that was more painful still.

“They’re fine,” Jason assured her, taking the phone. Perfect Jason, as he was known among her friends and family, P.J. for short – good-looking and strong and capable. One of Lottie’s more tactless friends had even wondered if it was fair of Lottie to take a six-footer out of the dating pool. “That’s a foot more than you need.” Of course, Lottie saw it differently – she had to marry up, literally, so her children would have a fighting chance to escape the curse of her genes. How she had worried, every year, over the height percentiles. So far, both children were reliably above the eightieth percentile, but she had been fairly normal, too, until puberty. Jason said she worried too much, but show her a unit production manager who didn’t. It was practically the job description.

“If we get a pickup,” Lottie said to him now, after checking in with both children, “we could live here. We could live like kings, in fact. You can buy a Victorian mansion for the price of a two-bedroom bungalow in Glendale.”

“It will all work out, even if the show doesn’t go,” Jason said. “You always find a gig. You’re in demand.”

“I want a gig that allows me to live with my family full-time,” she said. “I want to look after my own children, not tend to those who simply behave childishly. But – shit.”

“What, babe?”

“Fire.”

“You had to fire someone again?”

“No, there – I think – look, I have to go.”

Smoke was creeping under the door, lazily, almost prettily. Her mind detached briefly, as if she were watching an effect created for the screen. Nicely done. Sinister, yet not over the top. She willed herself to be calm and approached the door with a tentative hand. It wasn’t warm to the touch. Cautiously, she opened it, peering out. The hallway was filled with smoke, although she couldn’t pinpoint the origin. She groped her way toward the elevator, pushed the buttons, then remembered that she should take the stairs. Where was the stairwell? At the other end of the hallway. She crouched low, practically crawling. The smoke seemed to be thinning, but that could be wishful thinking on her part.

Once outside, she gulped for air, and it was almost as if she could taste it, drink it down. She walked to the edge of the parking lot before she called 911 from the cell phone in her pocket. The fire station was mere blocks away, and it was a great comfort to be able to hear the sirens start seconds after she called, although it was also unnerving, standing alone in the parking lot. She couldn’t see any flames, but where there was smoke… What could be burning? Electrical malfunction? If the fire had been set – her mind didn’t want to follow that train of thought, but she couldn’t stop it – if the fire had been set, someone else was here, or had been here. Yet her car was the only one on the lot. She locked herself in it, but that didn’t make her feel safe enough. She drove a few blocks away and parked in a busier, better-lit area, listening to the sirens drawing closer.