Another Thing to Fall

SUNDAY

Special to the Beacon-Light

Firefighters and police were summoned yet again to the production offices of Mann of Steel late Friday – for what turned out to be a homemade smoke bomb.

Only one person was on the premises, unit production manager Lottie MacKenzie, and no one was injured in the incident, which appears to be another in a series of pranks that have plagued the production.

Asked if she thought the smoke bomb had been planted by someone unhappy about Mann of Steel - the troubled production’s detractors include some community activists, local historians, and disgruntled steelworkers – MacKenzie said she was sure it was an isolated incident, “Probably a prank by kids, nothing more.”

Firefighters have been called three times before to the Mann of Steel set, although always when the production was filming in Mount Vernon and Fells Point.

More seriously, the production office was the site of a murder earlier this week, but police are adamant that there is no connection, given that the suspect, John “JJ” Meyerhoff, was killed early Friday in a standoff with police.

“Still, every incident like this is just another example of Mann of Steel’s drain on our resources,” said Mandy Stewart, a community activist who has complained about the inconveniences caused by the production when it’s on location in Fells Point. “They take and they take and they take, but they’re not putting anything back.”

Chapter 26

“And Greer said, in that terribly earnest way she had, ‘But it’s chartreuse, Mr. Tumulty.’”

The mourners laughed in that delayed rueful way common to memorial services, as if they needed a second to grant themselves permission. Tess had to admit – Flip was a good public speaker, and he had found the perfect tone for his eulogy. Thanks to him, the service was doing what a memorial or funeral should do, but so often didn’t: respecting the memory of the deceased while cheering people slightly, but not too much. In Flip’s experienced hands, Greer’s story became one of a hardworking local girl who hadn’t been afraid to reveal her ignorance if it meant doing her job better. It was a nice story. Tess wondered if any of it was true. She wondered if it mattered if it was true. Probably not. God forbid that anyone tell the truth at her funeral. Maybe she should write that down somewhere, leave it behind in a safe-deposit box with the will she had yet to write: No truth telling at my funeral!

Flip’s achievement was all the more remarkable when one considered how few genuine friends Greer had among the cast and crew of Mann of Steel. As for her family – there wasn’t much, not here, just her mother, two stocky men who appeared to be her brothers, and a few older women, aunts or cousins. And no high school friends, Tess decided, studying the crowd. No friends of any stripe? She glimpsed Alicia Farmer in the back, which seemed curious. She had been so candid about disliking Greer. Was she here to network? With Greer dead, would she try to persuade Lottie that it was Greer who had released the proprietary materials? A few months at Charm City Video could make a woman pretty desperate.

Flip paused, taking a sip of water, and Selene’s voice jumped into the silence – that is, the ring tone on Selene’s cell phone, blaring her pallid cover of “Call Me,” made its presence known, buried deep as it was in her huge leather bag, a designer brand Tess couldn’t identify, although she was fairly sure it cost as much as her first car, even after adjusting for inflation. Before Selene could grab the phone, Whitney literally slapped the girl’s hand, reached into the bag, turned it off, and then put it in her own purse. Tess had other reasons for wanting Whitney with her today, but chaperoning Selene through a memorial service had turned out to be a job that required both of them. Just getting her properly dressed had taken hours, as Selene’s idea of suitable garb ranged from a thigh-high skirt to an overly theatrical black Dior suit. The suit would have been appropriate under some circumstances, but it made Selene look like a little girl playing dress-up – a Eurotrash princess or the grieving widow of a president cut down in his prime. “No one has ever confused Tess or me with Diana Vreeland,” Whitney had hissed at one point, “but I think even Vogue agrees that funerals require panties.” In the end, they had managed to assemble a safe-for-Baltimore outfit of navy dress and cashmere cardigan.

“I can’t be photographed in this!” Selene had protested. “I’ll be on the ‘What was she thinking?’ list in the Star.” Tess pointed out that because the memorial was on private property, the landlord was within his rights to restrict press access, just as he had forced the steelworkers to hold their informational picket on the narrow strip of grass alongside the parking lot. As it turned out, press in this case was a lone Beacon-Light reporter, juggling a notebook and a video camera, and two of the local television crews, no reporters in tow. Would the memorial have attracted more attention if Greer’s homicide was still considered an open case? Or was Baltimore simply getting blasé about Hollywood? Tess wanted to believe it was the latter.

Flip finished with John Donne, his only misstep to Tess’s mind. It seemed a bit clichéd, and not at all central to Greer’s life. Whitney, on the other side of Selene, must have had the same thought, for she passed Tess a note: With Greer dead and no replacement, he probably doesn’t have anyone to look up appropriate poetry for memorial services. On Tess’s right, Lloyd frowned, embarrassed for them. Lloyd took funerals seriously.

Flip asked Greer’s mother if she wanted to say anything, but she shook her head. She looked so old. Based on Greer’s age, Tess calculated that Mrs. Sadowski could have been as young as forty-five, as old as sixty-five if Greer had been what was once called a change-of-life baby, but she definitely looked as if she fell into the high end of that range. Her hair was gray, the kind of faded, washed-out gray that appeared to have given up on color out of sheer exhaustion, her face weathered and haggard. She had an understandably shell-shocked expression, and although a handkerchief was balled up in her fist, she had yet to cry that Tess could see. She just kept squeezing the handkerchief tighter and tighter.

“Well,” Flip said, caught off guard by the mother’s refusal to speak, which he clearly had been counting on for his big finale. “I guess we should, um, eat.”

Next to the “chapel,” which had been created in one of the unused corners of the cavernous soundstage, a local caterer had set up an elaborate spread. Given the circumstances, someone – the set designer or art director – had made the impromptu catering hall pretty, draping dark cloths and hanging a large blowup of a photograph of Greer, bent over her clipboard. The photo had clearly been taken on set, as Selene was in the foreground, yet the eye was drawn to Greer, who was in sharper detail. The photo was, in fact, extraordinarily good, very well framed, arresting in a way that Tess couldn’t define for herself.

“Selene, who took that photo?” she asked.

“That guy. What’s-his-name. Somebody. I’m dying for a cigarette. Can I go outside?”

“In a few minutes,” Tess said, conscious of her other agenda. She, Whitney, and Selene needed to be conspicuously in the thick of things, at least for a while.

She continued to study Greer, mostly forehead and hair in the shot. Tess remembered the young woman who had fished her out of the water, a mere week ago. Like Alicia Farmer – who had slipped out as soon as the service was over, clearly anxious not to mingle – Tess couldn’t pretend that she cared for Greer. In fact, she had found her rather obnoxious. But, no, you wouldn’t wish someone dead for that, or even for the annoyance of being overly ambitious. The obvious answer is the obvious answer, she reminded herself. Greer broke up with her fiancé, and he killed her. Happened all the time.

Flip was steering Greer’s mother through the buffet line, helping her fill her plate. Whitney followed with Selene, picking the most fattening foods in the spread, which included miniature crab cakes, deviled eggs, and a ten-layer cake in the Smith Island style. Lottie, alone in a corner, looked miserable. Grieving Greer or the cost of this shindig? Tess immediately felt bad about her own snarky thoughts, remembering the scare that Lottie had experienced Friday night. It had turned out to be a smoke bomb, like two of the other incidents on location. But, innocuous as the homemade smoke bomb may have been, its presence meant someone had broken into the offices after hours. That was genuinely troubling. Tess thought they should change the code, but the management company didn’t want to inconvenience its long-term tenants for the sake of the short-term Mann of Steel. Lottie had admitted to Tess that she had been a hard-ass in negotiating the lease, and the management company couldn’t wait for them to vacate. If they did get a pickup, they wouldn’t be coming back to Tide Point.

Tess saw Lloyd across the warehouse, giving one of Greer’s relatives a tour of the set itself, explaining various technical details – the drops used to create views through “windows,” the lights that could mimic day or night. Tess was amazed at how much Lloyd had absorbed in his first week at work, but she was even more stunned at his unflagging enthusiasm. True, it had only been a week, but she had never seen Lloyd excited about anything, except certain action films and, on occasion, a chicken box from one of his old haunts.

The reception was breaking down now into its natural subsets – cast and crew in one cluster, Greer’s family in another, Ben off by himself, a can of soda clutched in his hand. Tess saw another gray, haggard-looking woman moving toward Greer’s mother and assumed it was one of the relatives, although she didn’t remember seeing this woman during the service. But when the woman spoke to Mrs. Sadowski, whatever she said caused Greer’s mother to reel back so quickly that Flip just missed having a plate of food smashed into his shirtfront.

“You have some nerve,” Mrs. Sadowski rasped at the woman. “Coming here, to ask me that.”

“You won’t talk to me on the phone, so what am I supposed to do? It was his property, plain and simple, should have been given back weeks ago. He owes on it. You want me to make payments on an engagement ring that your daughter wouldn’t give back, when everyone knows she should’ve? My son is dead, too.”

“He broke up with her,” Mrs. Sadowski shrilled. “You don’t have to give it back under those circumstances. Especially when he killed her.”

“He broke up with her because she was cheating on him. That’s different. And we’ll never know what really happened, will we?”

Even as Tess moved forward, anxious to help Flip keep order, her mind was stumbling over that fact. He broke up with her… but Greer had told everyone at work that it was the other way around. Saving face? Or had she lied to her mother? And, wait – cheating? Greer was cheating on her fiancé? With whom?

But she didn’t have the luxury of sorting out her thoughts just now, not with Mrs. Sadowski flinging a plate of food into the face of JJ Meyerhoff ’s mother, who let out a banshee wail and pushed back, so that Mrs. Sadowski was propelled into Flip, who landed backward on the buffet table, which went down in a heap under his weight, the ten-layer cake landing on his chest.

Ben had been looking for an opportunity to sneak out, and he couldn’t have asked for a sweeter moment than the mother melee. Man, it felt as if he had been waiting for this moment for weeks, although Greer had been dead barely four days. Well, he supposed he should be grateful it was a service, not an actual funeral or, worse, a viewing. He found those barbaric. But an open casket probably hadn’t been an option after what Greer’s ex had done to her.

And it was JJ, right? It had to be JJ. Because if it was someone else, then someone else knew.

Before the service began, Ben had made a point of introducing himself to Greer’s mother, clasping her shoulder. Put a housedress on Mrs. Sadowski, and she wouldn’t have been out of place in a Dorothea Lange portrait. Someone should show Selene this face, let her see what a lifetime of smoking could do to one’s complexion.

“Mrs. Sadowski,” he said, extending his hand. “Ben Marcus. I worked with Greer. We’re so sorry this happened.”

She gave him a look, but it was dull and glazed over. His name didn’t seem to mean anything to her. Greer hadn’t spoken of him to her mother. Good. For once, he had never been happier to be lost in Flip’s shadow, just the sidekick.

And now here he was, literally lost. He could never find his way in Baltimore, especially outside the Beltway. It took him almost an hour to locate the apartment that Greer had shared with her boyfriend up until a month ago. Luck was with him, for once – it was a so-called garden apartment on a split-level, the windows on the front barely above the ground, but with a small patio on the rear. Once, while researching a cop show, he had read that sliding doors could be rocked open. The information had seemed dubious, but he tried, and the door gave way with surprising ease.

Only maybe it wasn’t so surprising. Someone had already been here. The place was a wreck. Had the boyfriend stopped here on his way out of town? Drawers and cabinets had been pulled open, sofa cushions tossed. In the narrow galley kitchen, all the items from beneath the sink had been left on the floor.

Flip’s office had been ransacked, too – stop, don’t think about that, it’s crazy.

He found his way to the bedroom, which was even worse – the mattress flipped, clothing scattered everywhere. Whoever had been here seemed to have begun in a fairly systematic way, then become increasingly antic. The mother had said something about a ring, but Greer had worn the ring even after the breakup. Besides, JJ almost certainly hadn’t returned here after Greer was dead. Police would have been watching the place. Someone else had been here, looking for something. The same something that Ben wanted? How could that be? There was no one alive who knew of its existence – right? Greer had sworn to him that it was their secret, that no one else knew, not even her fiancé.

There was no percentage in staying here. He went out the way he had come in, realizing that the patio door had opened for him so magically because someone else had jimmied it before. When? Days ago, hours ago, minutes ago? He tried to walk nonchalantly to his car, just a guy in a suit, passing through a suburban parking lot. Jesus, that woman was morbidly obese. How do people get like that? And if you had the misfortune to weigh three hundred pounds, why would you wear a huge flowery dress with a purple belt emphasizing your nonexistent waist? He waved at her, figuring that the more attention you drew to yourself, the less likely people were to remember you.

Tess had set her cell on silent for the service and then forgotten about it, what with helping to clean ten-layer cake off Flip and trying to get the dueling mothers to a point where the police wouldn’t have to be called. The plan had been to let the reception take the place of a late lunch, but with most of the food on the floor, they ended up at Chili’s, Lloyd’s favorite restaurant. Crow had made a lot of headway with Lloyd’s taste in films but virtually none with his taste in food. Tess didn’t mind. She shared Lloyd’s love of Chili’s nachos. She was helping herself to the wonderfully cheesy, gooey concoction when she felt something vibrating close to her thigh.

“Yes, Mrs. Blossom?”

“You were right!” The woman screamed with such glee that Tess had to hold the phone away from her ear. “He left the soundstage and went to the girl’s apartment. But he didn’t stay long, not even five minutes. And I peeked in the windows after he left, and the place is trashed. Trashed. He couldn’t have possibly done it, not so quick. So someone else was there, too.”

“Did he see you?”

“Yes, but not in a way that counts. He waved at me, going to his car, but he clearly thought I was just some dumb lady who lived there. Then he drove back to the Tremont.” She laughed, and Mrs. Blossom’s laugh, even on her cumbersome, clunky cell phone, was a thing of wonder, a sweet, high bubble of sound that had been held captive far too long. “This was fun. I hope you have more things like this for me to do. I don’t even care about the extra credit.”

“Remember, Mrs. Blossom, you’re the only student who has qualified for extra assignments, so keep this to yourself when we meet tomorrow. I wouldn’t want the other students to get jealous.” Actually, Tess was trying to work out the ethics of using Mrs. Blossom this way. The woman was a surveillance prodigy. Maybe Tess should put her on the payroll when the semester was over.

Lloyd, who had been apprised of the setup, looked up expectantly. “So he left the viewing and went to Greer’s apartment, just as you thought he would.”

“The weird thing is – someone else had already been there.” Tess was thinking of her own trip to Wilbur Grace’s home, how she had found the window open. Yes, the neighborhood kids had been using it as a makeout pad, but there was still that rectangle of dust in the armoire, the VCR or DVD player that had gone missing, and maybe not because it was so easy to pawn. Then there was the office, ransacked the night of Greer’s death, and the smoke bomb Friday. “What is everyone looking for?”

“The black bird,” Lloyd said, in a remarkably good imitation of Kasper Gutman, as he had been embodied – so fully, magnificently embodied – by Sydney Greenstreet. “Or maybe it’s one of them Hitchcock MacMuffins.”

Tess took a sip of beer. Lloyd had failed the GED on his first attempt, but Crow had insisted at the time that it wasn’t lack of ability but a lack of interest that had undermined him.

“Are you saying a MacGuffin is irrelevant?” she asked, supplying the correct word without calling too much attention to it. That was how Crow corrected Lloyd.

“Of course, that’s what it always is,” Lloyd said, rolling his eyes at her ignorance. One week as an unpaid intern and he was Cecil B. De Mille. “Besides, Greer was killed by her boyfriend and he’s dead. So who cares what’s in her apartment?”

Out of the mouth of – well, not babes, but a pretty savvy seventeen-year-old. Lloyd had a point: If Greer was killed by her boyfriend, who was now dead, what possible treasure or item could have at least two people looking for it so frenziedly?

Two people. Tess shuddered, realizing after the fact how heedlessly she had exposed Mrs. Blossom. Granted, she didn’t think Ben was a threat to anyone – except, perhaps, the television viewers of America. But she couldn’t be sure to what lengths a second person might go to find this thing, this object, this MacMuffin.

Chapter 27

Marie was snoring – full-out, raucous snores, nothing delicate or ladylike. She would be horrified if she knew what she sounded like, but he found it endearing. Snoring was the kind of normal problem that other married couples had. Snoring, stealing the covers, leaving the seat up, nagging. These were the sorts of things a person could confide to a friend, over a beer at the local tavern. If a person actually had any friends. His only friend was dead. Besides, he never had been able to talk to Bob about Marie, the one drawback of marrying his best friend’s sister. He never even discussed her illness with Bob, which was strange, as Bob might have been one of the few sympathetic ears he could find in a world where almost everyone else thought Marie was simply a lazy good-for-nothing.

It was fifteen years since Marie was diagnosed, and he realized in hindsight that her problems went much further back. Probably all the way back to her childhood, he knew now, but he hadn’t been paying close attention to Bob’s kid sister back in the day. High-strung, they said then, delicate, and he found both terms more on point than the rather bland “panic attack” that the first doctor had scrawled on her chart. Now the official papers that flew back and forth read “APD” – avoidant personality disorder. He preferred the old-fashioned term agoraphobia, which translated literally as fear of the marketplace, because it seemed to be the best definition of what ailed Marie. She didn’t want to engage with the world of the market, i.e., work.

Maybe it was only fair. Marie, born in the early 1950s, had already formed her ideas of what a woman’s life should be when the concept of women’s liberation put everything up for grabs. She wanted none of it, and had explained as much to him, in their early days of going together. “Any woman who has ever snapped a garter is never going to burn her bra,” she said, utterly earnest. It had made him laugh. They had been sitting across from each other at the old Pimlico Hotel, having cocktails and feeling very grown up – he at twenty-four, she just twenty-two. He had liked the fact that she was old-fashioned, that she wanted to be a homemaker. Since graduating from UB, he and Bob had been sleeping with the early hippie girls around Mount Vernon, but he had known that was only temporary. Easy sex, no strings, empty as hell. When Marie graduated from Towson, teaching degree in hand, he realized she was a girl he would have to take seriously, and not just because she was Bob’s little sister. She was the Real Thing.

Marie didn’t actually like teaching, as it turned out. She didn’t like kids. She took a job at Social Security, and people assumed they were trying for a family that simply never arrived. People were kinder then, it seemed to him, with only parents and relatives daring to ask nosy questions about when they would hear the patter of little feet. With everyone but Bob, they had floated the impression that they were waiting patiently for fate to smile on them. And when Marie started visiting doctors about her growing little assembly of symptoms – dizziness, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, a reluctance to ride elevators, her fear of malls, her gnawing worry that she was going to black out while driving – people had assumed that the various specialists she consulted over at Johns Hopkins were going to help her conceive. They didn’t know that Marie was visiting the old wing, the home of the Phipps Clinic, where she was told for years that it was all in her head and all she needed was traditional psychotherapy and that would be seventy-five dollars, please.

And then, finally, her condition had a name, and an array of drugs that could treat it. Yet once she was told it wasn’t all in her head, that she had a legitimate disorder, Marie abandoned herself to the condition, growing ever anxious, ever more frightened. She quit her job, and it had hurt, losing that paycheck, especially when their disability claim was disallowed. That was a nice irony, Social Security denying one of its benefit programs to a longtime employee, but Marie didn’t have the stomach to go through the multiple appeals that everyone said were part of the game. That’s why he had left the classroom and moved into administration, trying to make up for the loss of Marie’s income. He wasn’t unhappy, as he told himself frequently. But he also knew that the double negative, not unhappy, didn’t equal happy.

Then he lost the very job he hated, axed unfairly in a house-cleaning staged by the new superintendent, one of those show-offy flourishes meant to establish what a tough, hands-on manager the guy was. Hadn’t anyone noticed that the new guy had eventually hired a fresh team of bureaucrats, cronies from his old system, and paid them even more? He had talked to a lawyer about a reverse discrimination suit, but the guy said it was a lost cause, and he was forced to take the severance package offered, or risk losing the health insurance.

That’s when he had gone to Bob for money, and Bob had told him there would be plenty of money soon, more than enough for both of them, but he needed legal assistance – a retainer for a lawyer, then more money for the so-called expert who was supposed to be their ace in the hole. But the lawyer and the expert disappeared when things went south, leaving nothing but their bills behind, and Bob had killed himself. Not so much because of the thousands he owed, but because of the dream that had been choked in its crib. That girl had killed Bob. She deserved to be dead.

Where had she put it? He had spent an hour in that tiny apartment, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t there. The office was still a possibility, but security there would be impossibly tight, thanks to the stupid smoke bomb incident. Had she confided in anyone what she knew? God – what if, after all this, it didn’t exist? But, no, she had seen it, and she was the one who had called Bob, after all those weeks of him getting dicked around by Alicia Farmer.

He left Marie and her buzz saw snoring and went back into the living room, putting another one of Bob’s videos in the VCR. He kept hoping that he might find what he needed among them, but that was silly, of course. If Bob had what he needed, he wouldn’t have killed himself. The title came up: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, DIRECTED BY WILBUR R. GRACE, WITH ADDITIONAL DIALOGUE BY GEORGE SYBERT. That was an inside joke, Bob’s tip to the apocryphal story about Sam Taylor and the Pickford-Fairbanks talkie. But it had been George’s idea to update the story to modern-day Baltimore. As Marie had said, George often tossed out an idea, half-formed at best, and Bob then ran with it. But he always gave George credit.

It was only this year, after seeing Bob’s strange passive reaction to defeat, that George had come to realize that Bob had some of the same problems as Marie. The difference was that Bob had coped by inserting a camera between himself and the world. He could function as long as he had a lens, as long as he was on the sidelines, framing the story. This year, for a few heady months, Bob had seen himself as the hero, in center frame, the little guy who was going to take on the Goliaths and win. But he was one of the ordinary folks that Goliath trampled, one of the people you never heard about. In the end, it was Bob’s dream that killed him. A case could be made that all George was doing now was trying to avenge his best friend’s death, by any means necessary, and in a movie, that would make him the hero.

In the bedroom, Marie’s snores roared on, a strange sound track to the dreamy, beautiful creations her brother had left behind.

MONDAY
Chapter 28

Tess’s reporting career may have been short-lived, but she still had met her share of famous people. Presidential candidates, Nobel Prize winners, a couple of minor movie stars, and, in a rather startling turn of events, Boris Yeltsin, who had mistaken her for a member of his welcoming party and swept her up in a vodka-infused bear hug. Tess had actually been on deathwatch, a morbid little reporting detail in which a junior staffer ensures that luminaries arrive and depart a city safely, but it had seemed more tactful to let Yeltsin have his version of the event.

Tess had enjoyed those encounters for the anecdotes they provided, but she had never gone civilian on a source, or felt the smallest whiff of fan-girl excitement. Until now, going for coffee with Johnny Tampa, something she had actually imagined when she was in middle school. Well, not coffee. She had probably envisioned an ice cream date or a romantic dinner in some candlelit venue. But she would settle for Bonaparte Bread, the high-end pastry shop only a few blocks from the high-rise where Selene lived. The request had seemed to unnerve Johnny, yet it apparently didn’t occur to him that he could say no. Tess knew from the call sheet that he wasn’t scheduled for pickup until noon.

He was waiting for her when she arrived, a true non-diva move. The lean, sharp features that she had idolized as a teenager were somewhat obscured by middle-age fleshiness, but when he smiled, he was the heartthrob that she recalled. Tess noticed that other women in the pastry shop also responded to Tampa ’s smile and manner.

“You’re the one in charge of guarding Selene, right?”

“I’m handling that detail with my friend, Whitney, yes.”

“Right, the scary blonde. So how come one of you didn’t catch her sending me that stupid magazine?” He brushed off Tess’s reply before she had a chance to formulate it. “Oh, she’s too smart to do it herself, but I know she put someone else up to it. Someone on the crew, or maybe even Ben Marcus.”

“Why do you think that one of the producers on the show would be willing to do that for Selene?” she countered, fishing. Maybe Ben’s relationship with Selene wasn’t the well-kept secret he believed it to be.

“Because he’s mean. He’s always teasing me about my weight. A young skinny guy like him, he probably thinks it’s funny that I have a… glandular problem.”

A glandular problem. Tess couldn’t remember the last time she had heard that euphemism. Then again, current science was on Tampa ’s side, making the case that willpower wasn’t enough for some people to lose weight.

“But Ben wants you to be happy, right? Ben and Flip. They see you as the linchpin of the show.”

“So they say.” He chewed thoughtfully on his chocolate croissant. “They say they wrote the show for me, and they can’t help that the network is hot for Selene. They talked pretty big, when they were trying to get me for this. Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have entertained some of the other offers I had. At least I wouldn’t have to live here. Sorry. No offense.”

It happened to be one of Tess’s least favorite phrases, a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too bit of rhetoric that demanded the listener forgive the speaker for saying something impossibly rude.

“If the show goes,” Tess said, “you’ll be here quite a bit.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And in winter yet. I don’t do winter.”

“It’s relatively mild.”

“No such thing to someone like me, who grew up in Florida and has lived in California since age sixteen.”

“How did you get into acting?” She knew, of course. She could recite much of Johnny Tampa’s biography from memory. But she was trying to get into a groove with him, find an innocuous topic that they both could enjoy, and she figured that Johnny Tampa was one of Johnny Tampa’s favorite subjects.

“Mickey Mouse Club,” he said.

“So you were in the Mickey Mouse Club and then you went out to California to do” – she pretended to grope for the name of his first show – “High School Confidential.”

“I went out to California with nothing promised to me. But my mom believed in me, and she agreed to go out for a year, see what I could get started. The year was almost up when I landed the featured part on High School Confidential, then got the lead in The Boom Boom Room. And the rest is history.”

Of a sort, Tess thought. If one had very low standards for what constituted history. “But you’ve been taking some… time off, as of late?”

He had moved on from the chocolate croissant to a Napoleon. It was hard for Tess not to wonder if he was a bulimic, albeit one who had mastered the binge without learning how to purge. Tess hadn’t eaten this much even in her competitive rowing days. Or, come to think of it, her own bulimic teens.

“You’re very polite,” he said. “Everybody knows what happened to me. I left television to make movies, and not a single one of them hit. It wasn’t my fault – in every case, I could show you what rotten luck we had, none of it connected to me – but you get only so many chances. That is, if you were a star on television, you only get so many chances. Meg Ryan was on a soap. Julianne Moore, too. Hilary Swank did a bit part on my show. But they weren’t well known when they started making movies. I wonder if they have any juice here. I would love a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.”

He looked around with the expectation of someone who usually had a person at his beck and call, but then life on set was like that, in Tess’s limited exposure to it. For the leads, it was a magical world of enabling elves. Makeup people appeared to touch up the actors’ faces, food kept arriving, transportation was arranged. The theory seemed to be that the actors shouldn’t expend any energy on activities beyond their performances.

“What do you do with your downtime? Here in Baltimore, I mean.”

“Read, mainly. I like science fiction.” He sounded a little defensive, but Tess was charmed. In most actor interviews she had read, the oh-so-serious thespians were always claiming to be reading Faulkner or Pynchon, or the cool book of the moment. She never believed those actors, but she had a hunch Johnny Tampa was telling the truth.

“Have you made any friends on set?”

“I like the guys in the present-day scenes – but I’m not with them that much. Actually, it’s not a bad thing for my character – I’m isolated, the way he is, cut off from old friends and family, in a strange place. It’s good for my character,” he said, making the point a second time, as if trying to convince Tess – and himself. Tess couldn’t help noticing, however, that he omitted any mention of Selene, with whom he had the bulk of his scenes.

“Do the cast and crew interact much? Socially, I mean.”

He looked wary. “Some. There was a party when we came back this summer, after shooting the pilot in the spring. Sometimes, on a Friday night, there will be something impromptu. But the crew works too hard to socialize much, and most of the cast is pretty settled. Plus, they’re East Coast-based, mostly from New York, and they go running home the first chance they get.”

On a personal level, Tess liked him for not taking her up on the opportunity to gossip about Selene. But it wasn’t helping her job at all. Maybe she could kill two birds with one stone – or one little lie.

“Selene suggested to me that you had something going with Greer.”

His eyebrows shot up – no Botox in that forehead. “Something going with… that’s stupid. Why would Selene say that? Greer was engaged. And fifteen years younger than I am.”

More like twenty, Tess thought.

“But she knew something about the steel industry. Said her old man had worked in it, that she could help me fill in some things about what it was like.”

“That was-” Tess had been on the verge of saying, That was Alicia’s father, Greer’s father was a teamster. But she didn’t want to stop Johnny, now that he was beginning to open up. “That was nice of her. Did you learn about her family and come to her, or did she volunteer to help you?”

“It just came up one day, during the lunch break. She began bringing me books, even went to the library and printed out some newspaper articles on Beth Steel.” Tess resented the local shorthand for Bethlehem Steel in Johnny’s mouth. “She helped me a lot. Flip and Ben – look, no knock on them, they’re great writers, and they’ve given me an amazing opportunity – but all they know is Hollywood, and the kind of jobs people have there. They don’t know what other people do most of the day, if they don’t do it on a movie set. Oh, they think they do. They think that lawyers spend all their time in court making big speeches. They think doctors rush from emergency to emergency, in between banging nurses in the supply closet, and that reporters run around thrusting microphones in people’s faces.”

He had a point. True, every job needed to be dramatized in a film or a television show, but the real nature of work was something missing in much of what Tess watched, which had always puzzled her. She was fascinated by what other people did, how they spent their days. This may have been the consequence of an adult life spent as a professional observer – first as a reporter, now as an investigator.

Now that Johnny had gotten going, he was hard to stop. “I needed to know what this guy did with his days. Mann is like Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz. It’s not logical for him to want to go back to modern-day Baltimore – his industry is dying, there’s enormous pressure on his family, his job is drudgery. But it’s home, it’s what he knows, and not even Betsy Patterson, the beautiful belle of nineteenth-century Baltimore, is reason enough to stay.” He finished off his orange juice. “It was better. When they said good-bye in episode eight. And I’m not saying that just because they’re building up Selene’s part. That’s the show I signed up to make. Now that they’re dicking with it-”

Two women with strollers – hip moms, in stylish clothes and fresh makeup, their children tricked out like the accessories they were – had stopped on the sidewalk outside Bonaparte Bread and were peering inside the restaurant, their attention obviously focused on Johnny Tampa. They pointed at him, laughing and nodding, as if the plate glass that separated them was just another television screen, as if he couldn’t see them. He appeared – not oblivious, exactly, but resigned to such gawking.

“So Greer helped you, out of the goodness of her heart. And was there anything Greer wanted from you?”

He wasn’t dumb, not by a long shot. “She didn’t come on to me. Trust me, I know all the ways that women hit on guys.”

“Yet her boyfriend thought she was cheating on him.”

“He probably just didn’t buy the long hours she was working. Most civilians don’t have a clue as to what we do. But all that girl did was work. She was driven.”

“So her boyfriend comes by the office, confronts her – maybe over the ring, maybe over his belief that she’s two-timed him. But, if Greer was the eager little beaver everyone says she was, wouldn’t his late-night visit have affirmed that? He found her working late. How does that escalate into him beating her to death?”

Tampa rubbed his jaw, where there was a faint red mark and the beaded scab of a fresh scratch, left by a woman’s fingernail. He had been quick to wade into the fight yesterday, heedless of what many would consider his most valuable asset. He had, in fact, lived up to Tess’s teenage version of him, at least for that moment.

“You know what? I don’t know. It’s beyond me, why people do what they do. Hey – that friend of yours, the scary chick – does she have a boyfriend?”

And in that instant, any remnant of her crush was vanquished. Not out of jealousy over his interest in Whitney, but in his indifference to the story behind the death of someone he had known.

“Call her,” Tess said, sincere in her hope that he would. Because Whitney would swallow Johnny Tampa whole and spit out the bones, assuming there were any bones left in that doughy body.

Speak of the preppy devil – here was Whitney, Selene in tow, almost literally. She was dragging Selene by the elbow, piloting her into the bakery, as insistent as a tugboat guiding an ocean liner.

“You are going to eat something if I have to stand over you with a knife,” she hissed at the girl. “Sugar-free gum is not a food group.”

Johnny brightened, presumably at the sight of Whitney, then frowned when he realized she was here in her professional capacity as bodyguard/nutrition counselor.

“I eat,” Selene protested feebly. “I eat a lot when I’m on set. I just have a very high metabolism. And it was my idea to come here, remember?”

Whitney brought two croissants, almond and chocolate, over to the adjoining table, then went back to the counter to fetch a large glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Tess had assumed that Selene would poke the croissants and break them into ever-smaller flakes, but she dutifully forked up bite after bite, finishing the chocolate one and making it halfway through the almond under Whitney’s approving gaze. Tess found herself hoping that Whitney might actually feed Selene, zooming pieces of croissant into her mouth. “Here comes the Escalade. Here comes the Bentley. Here comes the Prius.” But such drastic measures were not needed, although Selene promptly excused herself to the restroom when she was finished.

“I should probably follow her, but I’m exhausted,” Whitney said. “She tried to sneak out twice last night.”

“She did? You should have called me at home.”

“I let you sleep, knowing you had this meeting with what’s-his-name. St. Pete, Tampa, whatever.”

Johnny, nonplussed in Whitney’s presence, simply nodded, smiling inanely.

“Besides, I don’t think she’s bulimic. And she’s probably telling the truth about her metabolism. Oh, if she let herself go, she might become a size four verging on six, but she doesn’t have to worry about her weight.”

“Actually, she does,” Johnny said. “A size six is way too big for a woman who wants to play romantic leads. Sorry, but that’s how it is.”

“Hmmmmph,” Whitney said, reaching into Selene’s bag and extracting her iPhone. “Might as well search her incoming and outgoing calls while she’s in there. Jesus, I can’t believe how many people she has in her address book. Oh, wait – I can check her e-mails, too. God, I love Mac.”

“That’s so… rude,” Johnny said, genuinely offended on Selene’s behalf. “Maybe illegal.”

“I don’t read anything, or listen to voice mail. I just check the senders. You know what I found under her bed this morning, when I was looking for alcohol?”

“Alcohol?” Tess asked, reaching for the iPhone and running her own check. Several calls from Ben – but nothing to him.

“No, not a drop, not even a can of malt liquor. I found two books – Edith Hamilton’s Greek mythology and a copy of Kristin Lavransdatter.”

“You might have sparked the interest in Hamilton,” Tess said. “When you told her that her name was from the goddess of the moon, as opposed to a Mormon soap opera.”

“Yeah, but Kristin Lavransdatter? And it was the third volume, to boot, The Cross. Could she possibly have read volumes one and two?”

“Maybe she thought Lavransdatter was Kirsten Dunst’s name before she changed it,” Tess offered.

“Just because she’s an actor doesn’t mean she’s stupid,” Johnny said with surprising heat. “Okay, well – Selene isn’t a raging intellectual. But you shouldn’t mock her for reading. Maybe that’s why the books were under the bed in the first place, because she thought you would make fun of her. For all Selene knows, this Lard-butter, or however you say it, is one of those books everyone has read, and she’s embarrassed not to know it.”

Whitney nodded. “And maybe monkeys will fly out my-”

Tess interrupted, hoping to placate Johnny. “At the very least, it could be for a film. The author was a Nobel Prize winner. Maybe someone’s interested in adapting it.”

“It’s already been adapted,” Johnny said. “By Liv Ullmann, back in the 1990s. But, you’re right, that wouldn’t rule out a Hollywood version, although I haven’t heard anything about that on the grapevine.”

Johnny was blushing furiously, his gaze downcast. His crush on Whitney must be really bad, Tess reasoned, if he couldn’t even make eye contact. Selene came trip-trapping back to the table in her ridiculously high heels, and Johnny muttered: “Gotta go.”

“God, he’s so jealous of me he can’t stand it,” Selene said cheerfully. “He’s even jealous that I had a stalker and he didn’t, that I was in most of the photographs and he wasn’t.”

A shred of conversation, a piece of unfinished business, came back to Tess. “The photograph at the memorial – was that one of the stalker’s?”

“I told you that,” Selene said, stroking her hair, oblivious to the fact that she was leaving little flakes of pastry behind. “I said it was the guy.”

“You said – oh, never mind. Was Greer in all the other photos as well? The ones taken by the dead man, Wilbur R. Grace?”

“Don’t be ridic. I mean, Greer was in some, but so was Ben. And Flip and Lottie. But I was in most of them. At least – I was in all the ones I saw. I don’t know, maybe there were others, but who’s going to be silly enough to stalk Greer?”

Chapter 29

The not-the-Meyerhoffs Meyerhoffs lived in Baltimore Highlands, a county neighborhood that people found mostly by accident, taking a wrong turn en route to the Harbor Tunnel. The streets here were named for states, but the pattern was maddeningly indecipherable to Tess – Louisiana led to Tennessee, then Alabama, which was followed, of course, by Pennsylvania, then Michigan and Florida. The Meyerhoffs lived in a brick semidetached on the bottom rung, Delaware Avenue, just north of the thruway to the tunnel, where traffic was a dull, roaring constant.

Before venturing here, Tess had run a quick computer check on Jeanette Meyerhoff. Or, more correctly, paid a premium to have her own ad hoc hacker search the court files and police records. Her suspicion was that a woman who felt comfortable starting a fight at a memorial service might be prone to other crimes of impulse. She was at once gratified and unnerved by how correct her hunch was. Jeanette had a pretty lengthy arrest record – public intoxication, resisting arrest, a string of assault charges. And three of her four sons had amassed similar records, with one currently serving real time down in Jessup, on a drug distro charge.

Yet the only paper on John “JJ” Meyerhoff was a warrant issued three years ago for failure to appear in traffic court. Based on public records, JJ was the white sheep of his family.

“He was the sweetest of my boys,” Jeanette Meyerhoff said, pouring Tess a generic grape soda. She had been surprisingly affable, almost eager to talk, when Tess showed up at the door. Perhaps it was the sheer novelty of finding someone who wanted to hear JJ’s side of the relationship with Greer.

“I know – that’s not saying much. We’re scrappers. But JJ was my baby. And smart. Not book smart, although he did good enough in school, but handy. When Mr. Meyerhoff stepped out ten years ago, it was JJ who kept the roof over our heads. And by that, I mean he got up there and patched the damn thing. Patched the roof, caulked the windows. He put this kitchen in hisself.”

There was nothing extraordinary about the kitchen in which they sat, a clean and simple space, but Tess supposed that was an achievement of a kind.

“He and Greer were high school sweethearts, right?”

“Yeah, but she wasn’t Greer then, but Gina. The Greer thing is some made-up name she gave herself, after she moved away. But even in high school her family thought she was too good for him.”

“Greer’s – Gina’s – father was a teamster, right?”

“Who told you that? He drove a bread truck for H and S.” But Greer had claimed to be the daughter of a teamster when she first inquired about a job with the production. The girl had been scheming from jump. “They were always full of themselves, the Sadowskis, living west of the boulevard, over toward Linthicum.”

Baltimore was full of such arbitrary geographic distinctions. East or west of the boulevard, above or below the avenue, north or south of the water tower.

“How did they get back together, then?”

“Well, Miss Hoity-Toity had gone out to Hollywood, but her father got sick. Emphysema. And her mother said she had to come home, help her through, because she had to take a second job to pay for everything, and her old man couldn’t be left alone. JJ saw Greer at the Checkers on Belle Grove and it started all over again. He was crazy for her.”

She paused, as if regretting her choice of words. “I mean to say, he loved her no matter what she did. She could feed him a shit sandwich, and he would ask for a chaser of piss. He thought the sun and the moon rose in her. He proposed, she said yes. Then she got her promotion and had less and less time for him. I could see the writing on the wall, even if JJ couldn’t.”

Mrs. Meyerhoff had put out a package of Hydrox cookies with the grape soda, and Tess had to concentrate fiercely not to wolf down the entire package. Hydrox had disappeared from the snack food chain at least a decade ago, but such items often lived on in the tiny groceries and delis of Baltimore. Those corner stores were like archaeological treasure troves of discontinued food items. Every now and then, she unearthed a dusty bottle of Wink from deep in the cooler of such places, and it felt as thrilling as if she had found evidence of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

“You said she was cheating on him.”

Mrs. Meyerhoff examined the backs of her hands. They were sinewy, with knobby, ringless fingers. Had it hurt, watching her beloved youngest son purchase a ring for someone else, while her own hands went bare?

“I didn’t have stone-cold proof,” she admitted. “But I kept telling JJ, add it up. There was a man who called their apartment at all hours, demanding to talk to Greer.”

“Did he hang up when JJ answered?”

“No, but he wouldn’t give his name. Sometimes Greer took the calls, sometimes she didn’t, and she would say to him, ‘Don’t call me here.’ She started working longer and longer hours.”

“I think the long hours were legitimate,” Tess said. “The one thing that everyone agrees on is that she was truly a hard worker.”

“What I think,” Mrs. Meyerhoff said, sliding a Pall Mall out of its maroon pack, “is that she had set her cap for that boss of hers.”

“Flip? He’s married. Happily, I hear.” And seemingly oblivious to Greer, but it didn’t seem polite to mention that. Tess didn’t want to tell a grieving mother that the woman who had been such a prize to her son was nothing but a factotum to her boss.

“Yes, but that girl had patience to burn. I’ll give her that. When Greer wanted something, she found a way to get it.”

“Greer told people at work that she broke up with JJ. Her mother said it was the other way around, and you say it was all because he thought she was cheating. What happened?”

“I don’t really know. We can’t know now, can we? A few weeks ago, they had a fight. You know how it goes – she was late, he complained that he had waited for her for over an hour, and next thing you know, he’s saying, Well, if you feel that way, maybe you don’t want to marry me, and she says, Okay I won’t. He didn’t think it was permanent. I guess that’s why he went to see her that night. She wasn’t taking his calls, she had changed the locks at their apartment. It was like – how do I put this? It was like she tricked him into breaking up with her, just so she could keep the ring. She was a greedy girl.”

Tess sipped her grape soda, ate another Hydrox. Mindful of the fact that Mrs. Meyerhoff had a short fuse, she searched carefully for the right words. “All these things – the breakup, Greer’s refusal to speak to him, the disagreement over the ring – they tend to support the police’s version of events. He went to see her, maybe with the best intentions of the world, but she angered him, and well…”

Mrs. Meyerhoff nodded. “I know. And then he gets out of his car when the police pull him over, doesn’t stop when they yell at him – I know what it looks like. But what if the reason he was crazy is that he had just heard Greer was dead? I know the police thought I was lying, but he really did go off fishing. It’s what he did when he felt bad. He woke me up that night, asking me to call in sick for him the next morning, and he headed out. I saw him, Miss Monaghan. He didn’t have no blood on his clothes or hands, and he didn’t leave no bloody clothes behind. He was upset – she had told him there was no way she would get back with him and she wouldn’t give the ring back either, because the breakup had been his idea, even if she agreed to it. He drove west, spent a couple of days in the woods, sorting out his thoughts, then headed home. He might not have done it.”

Her tone was that of a woman trying to persuade herself. Four sons, and this was the fate of the “good” one, the one who had tended to her in his father’s absence. Tess was beginning to understand why Mrs. Meyerhoff had crashed the funeral service. One mother had lost a daughter, and it was a tragedy. Mrs. Meyerhoff had lost a son, but that was supposed to be justice. And maybe it was, but didn’t that make it only harder to grieve? Tess could see how Mrs. Meyerhoff had become fixated on the ring, for which she was stuck with the payments. The ring was the closest thing she had to a legitimate grievance.

“Look, if you really want to pursue the thing about the ring – I think you might have some standing. You might not get it back, but if Greer’s mother insists on keeping it, there may be some way to make her take over the payments. I have a lawyer friend who owes me a favor. He’d do it pro bono.” It felt good, volunteering the services of her aunt’s husband, who had never been shy about volunteering her for things.

“It’s all mute,” Mrs. Meyerhoff said, and Tess needed a second to catch the Bawlmer malaprop. In some ways, the phrase was more elegant than the one Mrs. Meyerhoff actually wanted. All the parties to the dispute had been silenced. “There ain’t no ring. It wasn’t on Greer’s body when they found her. Police say JJ took it. If that’s so, where is it?”

“He would have thrown it away,” Tess said. “He couldn’t hold on to it, much less try to return it or hock it. The ring would have been key to convicting him. And the murder weapon is missing, too, so that’s consistent.”

“Yeah,” Mrs. Meyerhoff said, sighing and exhaling at the same time. “It all fits. And if it were one of my other boys, I’d say, ‘I knew this day was coming.’ Do you think my temper is something they inherited? Were my boys doomed to be the way they are because of how I am?”

It was a big question, far too large to be answered in a kitchen on Delaware Avenue, over grape soda and Hydrox. Perhaps too large to be answered anywhere, under any circumstances.

Leaving Mrs. Meyerhoff ’s house, Tess decided to call Tull.

“Have you closed Greer’s murder officially yet?”

“No,” he said. “We have to be careful on these things, not rush, even when the outcome seems likely.”

“So when will JJ Meyerhoff ’s things be released? Will his mother get his truck? How does that work?” She wasn’t sure if killers got to keep their property, or if their possessions passed to the state.

“Eventually.”

“Did you go over the truck pretty carefully?”

“Of course we did.”

“And you didn’t find the ring, much less the murder weapon. Right?”

“How do you know the ring was missing? We held that back.”

“The two mothers had… words at the funeral. So, no ring? Are you sure?”

“Look, Tess, this is the least of my problems right now.” A pause. “I mean, it’s not that I have problems, it’s just I don’t have time for this kind of trivia.”

Tull was an interesting case. Face-to-face, he could lie to anyone, about anything. It was the nature of his job after all. But on the phone, without his handsome stone face to carry his game, his words sometimes betrayed him.

“What’s going wrong? I thought the case was a dunker.”

“It is.”

She didn’t say anything, waiting him out. Then, when he didn’t crack, she added: “You owe me. The last time I tried to tell you something important, you blew me off, and someone I loved almost got killed.”

That was a sore point and it seemed to anger Tull – because it was true. “I don’t owe you shit. It doesn’t work that way. You come in here, solve a couple of my open ones, and maybe then I’ll be in your debt. But I’m not accountable to you, or your Hollywood bosses. I know they want this to be all wrapped up. I do, too. But there’s… a complication.”

“About the ring?”

“Not about the fucking ring!” A pause. “Okay, I’m sorry, it’s just you call me in the middle of the shit storm of shit storms, and you have to promise me that this goes no further. I know you got friends at the newspaper-”

“Not too many at this point.”

“Yeah, well if I read this in the paper tomorrow, you’ll never be able to get back in my good graces. The deputy, who brought Meyerhoff down? He’s got a bad habit of shooting too fast. Third time he’s shot someone in two years, although he’s never killed anyone before. I still like Meyerhoff for the Sadowski death, but now we have to wait for Garrett County to investigate his shooting before I can close this out. That’s all.”

“That’s a lot,” Tess said. “Look – pull his clothes. Go through all the pockets again. It’s not like it was the Hope diamond. It could have gotten stuck in a pocket, snagged on a thread.”

“It would make my life… more interesting if we could find it,” Tull admitted.

Good, they were on the same page. The presence of the ring in JJ Meyerhoff ’s effects was the one thing that could persuade police that he didn’t kill Greer, just had a very ill-timed confrontation with her the night she died. No blood on his clothes, his mother had said, although she could be lying. And breaking up with the love of your life was reason enough to disappear for a few days – assuming one was very young.

Chapter 30

Ben stared at his screen, pretending to write. “So you’ve deigned to join us today,” Lottie had said when he arrived at eleven. “I’ve already completed a third of the script,” he had lied, smoothly and automatically. “Besides, I thought you would be grateful for the company.” Lottie blushed, and he almost felt bad, reminding her of the scare she had experienced Friday night, stupid prank though it appeared to be.

Now, after eight grinding long hours, he was just trying to wait everyone out, get a few moments alone. As the evening wore on, he realized Lottie was waiting for him, hoping to walk out together. Even when he logged long hours on a script, he seldom burned the midnight oil in the office, preferring to work in his hotel room. But that was back when there was a chance that Selene might visit. No, there was no reason to be there – and every reason to be here.

“Lloyd,” he said, trying to sound casual, “why don’t you walk Ms. MacKenzie to her car, then head home yourself. There’s no reason for you to be staying this late.”

“But the script supervisor asked for my help.” Lloyd said this as if it were on a par with being asked to storm SS headquarters and rescue a POW general. “We have to get ready for the minipub for one-oh-eight, and Flip is way behind.”

“Well, take a break at least. Walk Ms. MacKenzie to her car-”

“I don’t need an escort,” Lottie said.

“ – and then go to Nasu Blanca and get me some takeout.” How much time would that give him? Hell, he should have thought of some place farther afield, sent Lloyd on a true scavenger hunt for dinner, but now he was stuck. “I want the edamame, the spicy tuna tempura roll, and the Kobe beef hamburger. But what I really want is one of those teas you brought the other day. What did you call it, half and half?”

“I got that over in East Baltimore, near where we was on location for the cemetery. I don’t know no place around here that serves it. You find those at Chinese joints, mostly.”

“Don’t haze him,” Lottie snapped. “Fetching your dinner is enough.”

“Okay, dinner from Nasu Blanca, but get me an espresso from Vaccaro’s, too. I’m going to be working late and need some legal stimulants.”

He watched them leave the parking lot from his office window, then went into the open area where the assistants worked. It was hard to believe that someone had been killed here, not even a week ago. But the police had finished what they needed to do, returning the scattered papers in cardboard boxes that Lloyd was supposed to sort and file, poor kid. No wonder he was excited to be working on the minipub, something actually of consequence to the movie.

Greer’s desk had been left unoccupied for the time being, although that bit of respect would probably disappear the moment Flip found a new assistant. Lottie had suggested – tentatively, deferentially, because it was Flip – that he make it through the final weeks without one, which would be good for the budget, but Flip had said he couldn’t possibly cope without a personal assistant, and Lottie had acquiesced, as she always did with Flip. Ben began opening Greer’s desk drawers, but they were all empty. Of course – Greer’s desk had been plundered the night she was killed, its contents scattered far and wide, along with papers from several filing cabinets. Those, too, were among the papers that Lloyd would have to sort. Hey, maybe Ben should give the kid a head start, begin working on those papers now. He could chalk it up to the procrastination of a blocked writer. And him being such an all-around good guy.

The first cardboard box was filled with the very archival stuff where all the trouble had begun – scripts and stories and correspondence from their early years. Ben had thought Flip was insanely egotistical to think that USC, where they had attended grad school, would want these papers, but he hadn’t seen any reason to object when Flip asked Greer, then just an intern, to start organizing them.

He moved on to the second box, but it seemed to be connected to the production itself – call sheets, beat sheets, Flip’s schedule, memos, phone logs… phone logs. As Lloyd had been instructed on his first day of work, Lottie’s system required that every call be recorded with date, time, and a brief description, even if it was something as innocuous as “Mrs. Flip for Flip. RE: Jewish holidays.” He turned back to July. Yes, in that final month, the poor guy had called constantly, first for Alicia, who had been expert in dodging such kooks, but then it had been Greer who started taking his messages for Flip. Ben wondered that Greer hadn’t been tempted to tamper with these records, but the guy’s death had been a suicide, straight up, and both girls had readily told the police that the guy was a nut job who called the office, trying to get face time with Flip. Actually, it was Ben he wanted. But he hadn’t known that, and Greer hadn’t told him. That one small lie – a lie he had never asked anyone to tell, a lie he wouldn’t have thought to use to cover his own ass, because he didn’t know it needed covering – had changed everything.

But the thing that gnawed at Ben was that he really couldn’t remember if he had ever met the guy. The guy said he had, and there was the envelope, stuck among Ben’s old papers. And he had sent a photocopy of a photograph, as if that proved anything – twenty-year-old Ben, looking bored and sweaty on the set of Phil Tumulty Sr.’s last Baltimore-based film, an ill-advised attempt to reconnect with the light, whimsical touch he had before he started making megabucks pictures like The Beast and Gunsmoke: The Movie. Flip had been pissed that Ben wanted to work for his old man, but what other connection did Ben have if he wanted a P.A. job? Flip was the one who met all the big guys, as a little kid, who could drop names like Steve and Barry and Penny and Rob and Francis and Marty. Ben knew one guy, and that guy was Phil Sr., the father of his best friend. So what if Flip hated his dad? It was Ben’s foot in the door.

And the job had proved educational in a way Ben never could have predicted. Working on The Last Pagoda, he had found out what it was like to be part of a big, fat, stinking flop where everyone was utterly deluded about what they were doing, where everyone kept insisting it was great, genius, a return to form. God, in hindsight, it had been so obviously snake-bit. Start with the title. Locals might have understood that the pagoda was a well-known Baltimore landmark, but everyone else thought the movie was some thirteenth-century shogun shit. As for the script – even at the age of twenty, Ben could see that Phil Sr. had lost touch with everything in his work that a mere ten years earlier had made it original and fun. The question that had plagued him, even at twenty, but now, especially, at thirty-five, was: But does he know? Does he know that he’s squandered his magic? He had wondered the same things about other directors he once loved. Because if they could lose their instincts about their work – couldn’t anyone? Even Ben?

Where was the fucking letter? Goddammit, Greer, where did you hide it, you thieving, scheming cunt?

He returned to the phone logs, going forward now. The strange happenings around the set had started after the suicide of Wilbur Grace. He didn’t want to connect the two things – he still believed that the production was simply having a run of bad luck – but someone else had been in Greer’s apartment. Someone else knew.

“Got your food,” Lloyd said, coming through the door, then stopping short, a frightened look on his face when he saw Ben rooting through the boxes. “Hey – I know I’m supposed to go through those things, but I thought it was okay to help on the script first, do the boxes in my downtime. Is that okay? I was just trying to be helpful.”

Greer had said those very words: I was just trying to be helpful. Ben stared absently at Lloyd, then shook his head. “I was procrastinating. The script’s not coming. I think I’m going to be here all night.”

“The security guard that the building hired leaves at eleven,” Lloyd said. “But I’ll stay, if you like. Lottie says no one’s supposed to be alone here anymore, not if the building won’t change the security code.”

“I can’t keep you that long. Tell you what – I’ll eat my dinner, see if I get a second wind. If I’m still not feeling it, we’ll both go. Sometimes, part of doing a job is knowing when to stop for a while.”

“I’ve got a lot to do,” Lloyd protested. “I really need to stay until I finish.”

You’re killing me, Lloyd. But what the hell, he could always come back.

“Tomorrow, Lloyd. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. One day, we’ll all be dead and none of this will matter anyway.”

“Okay. Can I grab my knapsack? I left it in Flip’s office.”

“Enjoying the big man’s digs while he was out today?”

Lloyd’s discomfiture was almost comic. “Well, he has a computer, and Greer’s is password protected and it was easier for me to work there until an IT guy could come in, and Lottie said it was okay-”

“Whoa, settle down. I was just teasing. Do whatever you have to do, and we’ll both head out when I’ve finished my dinner. You want some?”

Lloyd made a face. “That weird-ass hamburger? No, thank you. I grabbed a sub from Mustang’s.” Again, he looked guilty. “I hope that was okay, getting something while I was out-”

“Don’t sweat it, Lloyd.” Ben wished his own conscience could be weighed down by something so inconsequential as a sub.

Chapter 31

A soft rain had started, a gloomy harbinger of the days to come. It always seemed to rain on her days off, not that it really affected Alicia, given that her primary day-off activity was smoking. Still, she objected on principle; the weather didn’t know that smoking was her only hobby. Oh, she did other things, too. Read – and smoked. Watched television – and smoked. Sat at the computer, paging through home decor sites, a cigarette burning almost constantly. Ran errands, smoking on the drive to and from. Some nights, when she tired of her own company, she would walk down to one of the local bars, buy a draft – and smoke. Maryland was one of the last holdouts, with smoking still permitted in its bars and restaurants, although that was said to be changing by next year. Until then – she was going to smoke every chance she got.

She looked at the piece of paper on the coffee table. Was it really so valuable? Without Greer, could anyone swear to its – what was that word, the one used for the antiques and rare objects that she studied covetously in the windows down at Gaines McHale? Provenance. Greer, who thought she was so clever, had been stupid to remove it from the envelope, but then – if she hadn’t opened the envelope, she never would have known what she had. What if the envelope had been sealed, after all those years? That wouldn’t have buttressed anyone’s position. Perhaps that was why Greer had gotten rid of the envelope. Plus, it would have been too bulky to hide in her choice spot, especially with that other sheet, which Alicia had left where she found it. She had debated that with herself, leaving the other document behind, but she decided to take only what she needed.

When she drove down to the production offices Friday night, her only thought was to be helpful. As she had told Mr. Sybert, she knew Greer, and if she thought things through, she would figure out her hiding place eventually. Greer couldn’t destroy the document, because that would end her power. So she had to put it someplace where it was unlikely to be discovered, but also in a location where, if it should be found, Greer couldn’t be blamed. That was Greer’s MO, avoiding blame, and she had to know that what she was doing was illegal. You couldn’t hide documents, because lawyers might want them, much less then swear they never existed. Greer had been willing to risk perjury, and for what? A job in the writers’ office, a job as Flip’s assistant, maybe a shot as a script supervisor or associate producer down the road.

Greer thought so small.

Alicia didn’t. And even as she told herself that she was just trying to help Mr. Sybert out, once she had the document, she couldn’t ignore its value. Oh, she would give Mr. Sybert a chance to make his best offer, but shouldn’t Ben and Flip have a chance, perhaps even Tumulty Sr.? He had the real deep pockets. He would probably be willing to put up a lot of money to bail out his own son – and avoid being tainted by the implication that he was somehow involved. Then there were her other… clients, as she liked to think of them. Was this item of use to them? Possibly, but that was harder to gauge. No, she wouldn’t bring them into this negotiation, and she didn’t owe it to them to do so. She had been paid to do specific things, create disruptions on the set, and she had. That account was in good standing. She was a freelance worker, not exclusive to anyone.

How much should she ask for? And – not to be a total geek, but she had to think everything through – what would be the tax implications? She should probably set it up as a contract, with her providing unspecified services to Tumulty’s production company. Quarterly payments for, say, up to five years. Too much? Not enough? A million dollars sounded like a lot, but it wasn’t enough to support her for the rest of her life, even if she checked out as early as her parents had. Maybe she should ask for a yearly stipend, some phantom job in Tumulty’s production company?

The phone rang, and she jumped, stabbing out her cigarette as if she had just been caught by one of the nuns, smoking in the girls’ room at St. Ursula’s. But it was just the contractor, pointing out the obvious: He couldn’t work on the deck tomorrow if the rain continued. No shit, Sherlock. Well, that suited her anyway. She had meetings set up for tomorrow morning, and it would be better if no one was there.

“Of course,” she said. “But it would be nice if you could get it installed in time for the Christmas holidays.”

“You use your deck at Christmas?”

Shit, didn’t anyone understand sarcasm anymore? She wanted to slam the phone down on him, but her contractor was one man she never risked offending. He was too much in demand. Instead, she told him to get to the job when he could – and she would pay the balance when the work was done. That should get results. Money was the universal language.

Speaking of which – she really should give Mr. Sybert a chance to counter before she approached Tumulty Sr. She didn’t think he could be competitive, but she owed him the courtesy of making his case, the sad old schlub. She felt almost guilty, taking his money all these weeks, and giving him nothing in return but the information on the e-mailed call sheets and memos, and the code to the security door, which he had never even used.

Instead, Alicia had used it. It seemed as if an eternity passed in that split second while she waited for the front door to buzz Friday night – could they have changed it, after all? – but once in the building, it couldn’t have been simpler to set off the homemade smoke bomb, then hide in a ladies’ room on the first floor. She had stayed there, in fact, until almost two in the morning, which had been unnerving. And wouldn’t it have been a bitch if Lottie had remembered to lock the office door after all that?

But, of course, Lottie didn’t. Because Lottie would have thought it through, even as she fled, and worried that firefighters would break the door down if she locked it. Careful Lottie, prudent Lottie, always two steps ahead of everyone. It had been a bonus, getting one over on Lottie with that smoke bomb, tricking her to leave the office with the door unlocked. Okay, Lottie had been in the right to fire Alicia, but she couldn’t possibly have known that at the time. No one could prove that Alicia had given those things to Wilbur Grace. God, imagine what Lottie would have done if she had figured out that Alicia had sold him the things he wanted. But all they had were Greer’s meticulous telephone logs, showing that he had called for Alicia several times. They could prove the connection, nothing more. It was easier, in the end, to cop to being naïve, instead of admitting to being greedy.

She felt a pang for Greer, strange to say, even though she had sacrificed Alicia so willingly, screwed her the first chance she got. Two local girls from similar backgrounds – they should have been friends, not competitors. They had their moments of solidarity, laughing behind Lottie’s – or Ben’s or Flip’s – back. You couldn’t work next to someone, day in and day out, and not feel something. Poor, stupid Greer, who thought she was the winner because she got Alicia’s shit job, only to be killed by her crazy-jealous boyfriend. At least she had a boyfriend. Alicia was in a two-year dating slump, although that was in part because she couldn’t respect anyone who was attracted to the current Alicia, the loser at the video store. She wondered if she might find someone to her liking, once she was rich. She wondered if she could ever know if a man loved her for herself, or her money.

She decided that was a dilemma she could tolerate.

“Tess.”

Her name surprised her out of sleep, and she realized that part of the reason was that Lloyd so seldom used her name. But here he was, standing at her bedside, whispering her name, which seemed counterproductive. He either wanted her to wake up or not, she thought crankily, glancing at her clock. Almost 1 A.M.

“What?”

“Tess, I fucked up awful bad. Awful bad. I broke something.”

She struggled to a sitting position. “Lloyd, I know I always said I would kill you if you broke one of my commemorative plates, but I was kidding.”

“No, I broke something at the office, and I thought I could fix it, and no one would have to know, but I can’t – and, oh shit, they’re going to fire me, Tess, and it’s all my fault, but I don’t know what to do.”

She followed him groggily to the kitchen, aware that Lloyd must believe himself to be in dire straits if he was coming to her for help. His inclination had always been to bluff his way through.

There on the table were the contents of Crow’s toolbox, a tube of superglue – and an Emmy. Tess rubbed her eyes. The Emmy was still there, although it looked intact to her eyes – the globe aloft in the woman’s upraised arms, both pointy wings still capable of putting someone’s eyes out.

“Is that Flip’s?”

Lloyd nodded. “I… broke it. I didn’t mean to, but I was in his office and I just couldn’t help myself. I picked it up and then I heard someone coming, or thought I did, and I kinda dropped it and this band popped off, the one with his name attached.”

“And you brought it home?” That error in judgment struck Tess as potentially more problematic than dropping the thing. “If the band popped off, I’m sure someone can put it back on. Someone had to put it on in the first place, right?”

“Yeah, but I can’t get the band back on with the piece of paper folded up inside, the way it was.”

“Piece of… paper?” She held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

“Don’t unfold it,” Lloyd said. “It’s like a piece of organic-ami.” She knew he meant origami. “If you unfold it, we’ll never get it back together. I think it’s the certificate or something.”

Ignoring Lloyd’s anxiety, Tess carefully unfolded the piece of paper. It was a photocopy, yellowed from age, but the creases seemed relatively new. It may be old, but it hadn’t been folded until recently.

But what was it? What did it signify? As far as Tess could tell, it was nothing more than a list, almost like something from an IQ test in which one was asked to explain the relationship between a series of items.

Small Catholic college- Small Catholic college (Catholic colleges traditionally have strong basketball programs.)

Priests – Priests (Priests tend to be found at Catholic colleges.)

Nuns – Nuns (Nuns are often found in proximity to priests.)

The two columns continued in this baffling vein – similarities conceded, but always with a duh-obvious rationalization. There was a handwritten note at the bottom, in a rather fussy hand:

This document was one of the key pieces of evidence presented in Zervitz v. Hollywood Pictures, where a judgment of a million dollars was awarded to the plaintiff. I am working on my own list but have been advised that I need the letter about which we spoke to proceed. Yours, Wilbur R. “Bob” Grace.

Tess examined the base of the Emmy. Perhaps the band had popped off with such ease because it had been removed recently and not replaced as it should be. What had Ben said about Greer? She loves to buff Flip’s Emmy. She just took it to a local jeweler to have it all shined up.

“You’re getting fingerprints on it,” Lloyd said frantically. “We need to fold it up and put it back the way it was, and I gotta get to the office before everyone else tomorrow, even Lottie.”

“I don’t think so,” Tess said. “In fact, I think you’ve done a good thing, finding this.”

“Yeah? What is it?”

“Possibly the MacMuffin.”

“MacGuffin,” Lloyd said.

TUESDAY
Chapter 32

While Tess often lamented the colliding spheres that had made her sometimes rowing coach and erstwhile employer into her uncle, there were advantages to having Tyner Gray in the family. After all, few other lawyers would manage to get the details on Zervitz v. Hollywood Pictures while she was on the water, her first rowing session since she collided with Hollywood a mere eight days ago. And fewer still would then meet at the boathouse to brief her – and not charge her a dime for any of it.

“You could have found most of what you needed to know from the Beacon-Light archives,” Tyner scolded her. It was his style to be perpetually disappointed in her, but Tess had come to realize it was how he expressed affection. “But I hunted down the judge and got an overview.”

“And?” Tess asked, hosing down her shell, taking care to avoid Tyner. She wouldn’t have minded splashing him, but the water was hell on his wheelchair.

“There was this Kevin Bacon movie, The Air Up There, about a basketball coach who goes to Africa to recruit players. Think what’s-his-name.”

“Manute Bol.” Tess had seen the impossibly tall, impossibly thin Sudanese native play for the Washington team years ago, so long ago it was still known as the Bullets. “Was that movie even successful?”

“A movie doesn’t have to be successful to be plagiarized. Zervitz, a local man, said he gave Barry Levinson’s assistant a two-page treatment for a college basketball film. Later, Levinson’s literary agent happened to be one of the producers on The Air Up There, along with her husband. They never proved that anyone saw Zervitz’s treatment, other than Levinson’s assistant, who swore she didn’t pass it along. The credited writer even produced notebooks that purportedly showed he started working on the idea before any of this happened. But a local jury awarded the guy a million bucks, and the Hollywood Pictures people decided not to appeal it.”

“So they did steal it,” Tess said.

“Don’t be unsophisticated, Tess. No one will ever know exactly what happened to that two-page treatment, and the defendants may have decided it was cheaper, in the end, to pay the guy off. The plaintiff had expert witnesses saying it was too similar, it had to be stolen. But there also is a school of thought that writers, working independently, can produce strikingly similar stories, especially if they’re working in a conventional vein.”

“‘Nuns are often found in proximity to priests,’” Tess said, quoting from the document she had found last night.

“Yes, the list you saw was part of the defense, taken from the case file, a side-by-side comparison of the two projects.”

Tess was now in sync with Tyner, her mind speeding along a parallel track. “Wilbur R. Grace showed the list to someone – presumably Greer – because he thought he had a similar claim against Mann of Steel. But he mentioned a letter that he had to have as well. Greer had the letter that Grace wanted, but instead of giving it to him, she used it to leverage her position in the production. This is what Ben has been looking for, but who else? Who else wants that letter, now that Grace is dead? And where is it?”

“Maybe Greer was playing more than one person. Aren’t there a lot of people who would be upset to see Mann of Steel undone by a legal claim?”

Tess thought about that. Flip and Ben would be devastated, of course. They believed this was their chance to have a commercial success. Lottie, too, would be disappointed. The local crews wanted the show as well, in hopes that it would provide steady work.

And then there was one person who would be thrilled to see it all fall apart – Selene. But Selene didn’t have the power to give Greer anything she wanted.

“Thanks, unc,” she said, raising her shell over her head, preparatory to putting it away. She used the nickname because she knew he found it doubly infuriating. Tyner didn’t want to be called uncle, and he found “unc” loathsome. “You’re a gem.”

“I can’t believe that you think that was even an adequate washing,” he said. “You know better than that, Tess. Why bother to hose it off at all if you’re not going to do the job right?”

“Love you!” she called out from under the shell. One half-assed wash job wouldn’t destroy her scull, and she was keen to talk to Ben, find out what he knew about Wilbur R. Grace.

Ben wasn’t at the office when Tess arrived at nine, but almost everyone else was – including several Baltimore detectives. Tess, who had told Lloyd to let her keep the Emmy for now, worried that its absence had already been noted, prompting Lottie or Flip to report a burglary to the police. Tess should have remembered how jumpy everyone was about any breach of security at the production office.

“Is this about Flip’s Emmy?” she asked. “Because I have it, but there’s a reason-”

“Flip’s Emmy?” Lottie asked blankly. “No – God, no. I wish, it’s just-” And with that, tough little Lottie broke down and began to cry, while Flip tried to comfort her, although Flip’s idea of comforting someone seemed to consist of soft punches to the shoulder.

“Johnny Tampa,” Lloyd said. “He was kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped?”

“Grabbed right out in front of his condo this morning,” Flip said. “His driver saw the whole thing as he was arriving. Two guys came out of nowhere, dragged him into a car.”

“Has there been a ransom demand?”

Flip shook his head. “Not yet.”

“And Selene?”

“Safe and sound. Thanks to your detail, no one can get close to her. We told her to stay in the condo until we hear something. We’ve had to suspend shooting, of course. When the West Coast wakes up, they’re going to ream me about this.”

Tess turned to the nearest detective. “How are you handling this? Do you have to call the feds in because it’s a kidnapping?”

“We’re keeping them out of it for now. This happened only an hour ago, and there’s been no communication. It seems that Tampa went to a bar last night and flirted with a local, pissed off her husband. This could be related. But that makes it more of a mobile beat-down than a kidnapping.”

This didn’t sound like the Johnny Tampa whom Tess had observed over the past week. Lottie, too, looked surprised, but Flip was nodding.

“I was there. He invited me out last night, after we finished, and I thought I should go, in the interest of, you know, male bonding. We went to this place in Fells Point, near where he lives, and he was chatting up a woman in there, and it clearly bugged the guy she was with.”

It was bugging Tess, too – but not for the same reasons. “Flip, I think we should both go check on Selene. You know how high-strung she is. You don’t want her flaking out because she feels vulnerable. Let’s go over there and assure her that everything is being done to find Johnny, and that we’re ready to order extra security for her.”

“God, the budget-” Lottie began, then caught Tess’s gaze. In that moment, Tess could tell, Lottie decided she could trust her, that Tess was not another local trying to shake her down at every opportunity. She also seemed to get that Tess had an insight into this that no one else had. “No, you’re right, of course. I’ll stay here, wait for updates. You go take care of Selene.”

Flip didn’t speak a word on the short drive to Selene’s condo, just sat in the front seat of Tess’s car, twisting the brim of his Natty Boh hat. He broke his silence only after Tess parked.

“Maybe this project is cursed,” he said. “Maybe I’ve been stupid not to heed the warnings. A murder, and now a kidnapping. What next?”

“Flip, you’ve got problems we haven’t even discussed yet, but I think Johnny Tampa’s disappearance is the least of them.”

In her living room, Selene was stretched out on the sofa, watching television and toying with her iPhone, a kid enjoying an unexpected snow day. Whitney was in Selene’s closet, a walk-in the size of the guest bedroom at Tess’s house, going through Selene’s clothes.

“Hey, I got your voice mail about what’s going on. I’m sorting,” she said, pointing to the various piles around her. “Dirty and clean – Miss Waites seems a little confused about how laundry works. Then, we further subdivide into ‘whore’ and ‘not whore.’ Yes, in case you’re wondering – I’m bored out of my mind. I’d be cataloging her books – if she owned more than two.”

“Well, if we’re lucky, Miss Talbot’s Boarding School for Spoiled Actresses may be able to close down today.”

“I don’t see how-” Flip began.

“Trust us,” Tess said, leading him back to the living room, Whitney trailing. Selene was smiling at something on her phone’s screen, although the smile disappeared when Whitney snatched the phone away from her. In fact, this time Selene actually dared to grab for the phone, but Whitney swatted her away. Selene then tried to climb Whitney, reaching for the phone the whole time, but Whitney simply tossed the iPhone to Tess.

“‘Whassup?’” Tess read. “Would it have been so hard to write it as two words? Who’s this from? Oh, it’s from Pete. Should I answer him?”

Selene was a scrapper. She leaped off Whitney and tried to charge Tess, but Whitney caught her by the arm and held her fast. U R BUSTED, Tess typed back, once she figured out how to make the iPhone’s keyboard appear. Then, to Selene: “So where is Johnny while he’s pretending to be kidnapped?”

“Shut up!” Selene yelled, putting her hands over her ears. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“Selene, you know I went through your phone the other night. That’s how I found out about you and Ben. And that’s why Whitney has been checking your phone at every opportunity, to see who else calls you on a regular basis. And, thanks to the wonders of the iPhone, she’s also had easy access to your e-mail.”

“Ben?” Flip squeaked. “What about Selene and Ben?”

Tess didn’t have time for that side trip. “Whitney noticed that a large volume of your e-mail came from someone named Pete. I didn’t think about it twice, until I remembered that Whitney called Johnny ‘St. Pete’ at breakfast the other morning. Apparently, Johnny thinks that’s too funny, the joke about his real name being St. Petersburg but he shortened it to Tampa. He uses it every chance he gets. So this guy – the man who says he hates you, and you say you hate him – has been in constant contact with you. What’s that about?”

Selene burst into tears. Damn, she’s good, Tess thought.

“Oh, stop it, Selene. It’s clear that you and Johnny were in on this together, but once you got a security detail, more of the dirty work fell to Johnny. We know why you want out of Mann of Steel, but what’s Johnny’s angle? This is supposed to be his big comeback.”

Selene, realizing her tears were having no effect, not even on Flip – who still seemed stuck on the reference to Ben – slouched her way over to one of the overstuffed chairs. “Derek wanted Johnny for the other lead in that movie he’s developing, the one about the gay chaplains in World War I. They share a manager, and he asked Flip and Ben to work around Johnny’s schedule if he got a movie, and they said no, they had to have him in first position. It was unfair, if you think about it. They wanted it both ways – they were cutting Johnny’s part to build up mine, but they still insisted he was the lead. The linchpin.”

A part of Tess’s mind registered the correct use of linchpin. The Selene she knew – or thought she knew – would have said clothespin. Oh, what a fine actress she was. Actor.

“What about Greer’s murder? Do you know anything about that?”

“No,” Selene said. “It was just that Johnny couldn’t make waves. He’s been out of work too long to risk a reputation as difficult. Whereas for me – the crazier I am, the higher my quote goes, the more in demand I am. So we agreed that I would be the difficult one, make life hell for everybody.”

“What was in it for you?”

“Derek’s company has the rights to a biopic of Sigrid Undset, the Nobel Prize winner. That and the biopic of Debbie Harry of Blondie, but I heard she didn’t think I could play her. Which pisses me off, given how hard I’ve been practicing.”

Well, that cleared up one mystery – the presence of Kristin Lavransdatter beneath Selene’s bed. And, having heard Selene’s version of “Call Me,” Tess could understand Deborah Harry’s reluctance.

“So the little fires, the disgruntled steelworkers, the angry community activist – that was all you?”

“Only the first two,” Selene said. “The production managed to piss off the neighborhood lady on its own. That was pure lagniappe.”

This from a girl who had pretended not to know the difference between crawfish and mussels.

“But how did you-” Flip began.

“After you fired Alicia, Johnny went to her, asked for her help. She was happy to do it. She was pissed at being fired. She had an in with the local steelworkers, her dad being one and all. Plus, we paid her, and Alicia liked money.”

Alicia. Everyone had been focused on the suicide as the seminal incident, but Alicia had been fired subsequent to Wilbur Grace’s suicide. Tess had a sudden memory of the decking material stacked in Alicia’s backyard, the shelter magazines in the bathroom. When I have time, I don’t have money; when I have money, I don’t have time. Tess had assumed Alicia had run out of funds. But, no, she was just too busy with her two full-time jobs, video store clerk and set gremlin, to work on her house.

“Did she arrange the abduction of Johnny Tampa?”

“We set that up with some friends of Derek. After the smoke bomb Friday – not one that we planned, by the way, and Alicia said it wasn’t her – and the fight at the funeral, we thought it could tip the balance. Who could blame Johnny if he didn’t want to come back to Baltimore for season two? He’d be traumatized.”

“Selene,” Tess said, still using the slow, patient voice that she had always used with the girl, although she realized now it was far from necessary. “The things you’ve done – they’re not practical jokes. You’re in felony territory. Arson, making a false report.”

“I didn’t report anything,” she pointed out. “Johnny’s driver did, and he was utterly sincere. He saw two guys grab Johnny. It’s not our fault if he inferred something was going on.”

Tess sighed, even as part of her mind registered Selene’s correct usage of inferred. “Look, you’re a smart girl, smarter than any of us knew. Maybe I can make this go away, but only if everything ends now. Where’s Johnny?”

Selene gave Flip one last through-the-lashes look, one last trembling pout, but he wouldn’t even meet her gaze. “He’s up in Philadelphia, playing cards and hanging out,” she said. “The plan is for him to take the train home tonight and be found wandering in East Baltimore.”

“You were right,” Tess said to Flip, who looked absolutely stricken. “It was Selene and Johnny all along, with the help of one disgruntled employee.”

“Who cares?” Flip said. “It was one thing for Selene to be such a bitch-”

“Hey!” Selene objected. She probably wasn’t used to being called that, at least not to her face.

Flip didn’t care. “But Johnny fucking Tampa. No one wanted to hire him when we picked him up. He only has heat because of this project. That guy is a fuckin’ backstabber.” He looked as if he wanted to shake Selene. “Do you two morons realize this wasn’t just about you? That Ben and Lottie and I have careers, too? Not to mention the crew, which worked sixteen-, eighteen-hour days? Or the money – Jesus fuckin’ Christ, the money. We’re spending twenty-five million dollars, just to make eight episodes. Didn’t any of that matter?”

Selene shrugged, lifting her tiny shoulders ever so slightly, making her shoulder blades stand out like bony, immature wings – not that anyone in this room would mistake her for an angel.

“You know what?” Whitney said. “I liked you better when I thought you were stupid.”

It took much of the afternoon and pretty much all Tess’s accumulated credits with various local law enforcement agencies to clean up Selene and Johnny’s mess. The U.S. attorney’s office, mindful of the fact that one of its own had once ruthlessly hounded Tess not so long ago, decided to ignore the whole thing. After all, the FBI hadn’t been brought into it officially. The police and firefighters also calmed down, especially after Flip promised generous donations to their fraternal organizations. Tull got on the phone, too, largely to be assured that Selene and Johnny’s reign of terror hadn’t extended to Greer’s murder.

“No,” Tess told him. “One thing that they were clear on was that they had nothing to do with the incidents at the production office, not even Friday’s smoke bomb. Didn’t fit their strategy, which was to make the production look like a public nuisance. Hey – did you find Greer’s engagement ring?”

“No,” Tull said.

“Have you closed the case?”

“Getting there.”

She wanted to argue, although today’s events made it more likely that JJ Meyerhoff had killed Greer. Selene had been genuinely mystified when Tess asked if Greer might have information that could harm Mann of Steel. “By the way, there was a local girl tangled up in this mess, but I’d like to give her a bye. You see a problem there?”

“No, but then – none of this is my problem, thank God. Look, if there’s no charges, there’s no story. The problems go away, the production finishes up, and everyone goes back to fuckin’ California. Looks like you actually managed to do what they wanted all along, protect them from the local media – and themselves.”

Tess hung up the phone. It was going on 3 P.M. and she hadn’t found time to talk to Flip about his broken Emmy. It seemed almost too much. Maybe she should track down Ben, arrange to meet with him, confront him with the information she had about Zervitz.

Only – where was Ben? He had never shown up at the office, and no one had heard from him.

“He doesn’t always come in or call,” Lloyd said when Tess asked if he knew where Ben was. “He likes to write at Starbucks. But we have a deal – he always answers my messages, because I call only if it’s important, shit-hit-the-fan time.”

“Call him now.”

“But, Tess-”

“Lloyd, the shit has hit.”

He did as he was told, sighing and shrugging. Somehow, it was more appealing on Lloyd than it had been on Selene. But then, Selene had been playing a part. Lloyd really was a peevish adolescent, sure that all the adults around him were idiots.

“He ain’t answering,” he said, puzzled. “But the phone’s not off. If it was off, it wouldn’t ring at all, just send me straight to voice mail. Let me try a text.”

The text, too, went unanswered.

“He should be calling back,” Lloyd said. “He knows I only call if he’s in trouble.”

“Work was called off,” Tess said.

“Ben might not know,” Lloyd pointed out. “He don’t check e-mail either.”

But maybe Ben did know the secret of the Emmy and what it held. Maybe Ben had the mystery letter all along. Tess was suddenly very tired of Hollywood people and their machinations. She decided to call Alicia Farmer, tell her that the jig was up, that Tess had protected her out of homegirl loyalty, misplaced as it might have been. Johnny and Selene reminded her of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, although she would never have described them as careless. They had been meticulous in the way they had tried to smash up things. True, local girl Alicia might have been a little money hungry, but she hadn’t stood a chance with those slicksters.

Tess tried the video store first, only to be told that Alicia hadn’t come in today.

“Didn’t come in, or wasn’t scheduled to come in?”

“Didn’t show for her shift, which started at noon. Boss is pissed.”

“Is this typical? Alicia not showing up?”

Impossible to know over the phone, but Tess sensed she had just been shunted off with a shrug for the third time that day.

“Not my problem. Although, I guess it is, because now I have to work to close and-”

Tess was not unsympathetic to the Charm City Video employee’s plight, but she didn’t have time for the rest of the story. She hung up, grabbed her keys and her purse, and raced out.

When she reached Alicia’s house twenty-five long minutes later, she was relieved to hear footsteps heading to the door promptly upon her knock.

And surprised to be greeted by a very pale, drawn-looking man, circles under his eyes and a tremor in his limbs.

“Hey,” Ben Marcus said, his voice thin and flat. “There’s a guy just behind me, with a gun in my back, and he would like you to come inside, too, or he’s going to kill me.”

Ben must have seen in Tess’s face that she was quickly running through the possible options, wondering what would happen if she simply ran or began to scream. Or produced the gun from her own purse.

“He’s already killed Alicia,” Ben said. “He really doesn’t have a lot to lose.”

Chapter 33

Alicia’s body was on the floor of her den, facedown. Tess didn’t know from forensics – she had never even seen an episode of CSI – but she was reliably sure that Alicia had been there for several hours, possibly overnight. She had been shot from behind, in the base of the head, presumably after turning her back on the man who now sat in one of the club chairs, a gun pointed at Ben.

Thoughts zinged through Tess’s head like so many errant pinballs, and she managed to keep one ball in play longer than usual, banging it against various pockets of memory: whap, whap, whap. Who, who, who.

“You can’t be Wilbur R. Grace,” she said at last to the man. “But I think you must be connected to him.”

“He was my brother-in-law for thirty years and my best friend since I could remember,” said the man. How old? Fifties was the best Tess could do. Thin brown hair. Two eyes, yes, although you’d be hard-pressed to put a color to them. It was a face made to be forgotten. A local man, judging by his accent, the kind of man her Uncle Donald knew from his work in various state bureaucracies.

“And he killed himself, and you blame…?”

Ben, who usually thrummed with excess energy, looked catatonic. How long had he been here? Since last morning? Since last night? Lloyd said he had been at the office with him until eleven. The older man, by contrast, looked fresh, composed.

“He hung himself in despair,” the man said, “after Greer Sadowski reversed herself and claimed she had no memory of finding his treatment for our movie, The Duchess of Windsor Hills.”

“Ah,” Tess said, smiling more broadly than this weak bit of local wordplay deserved. Windsor Hills was a neighborhood in Northwest Baltimore; the woman who had persuaded the Prince of Wales to forsake the British crown was a Baltimore girl, Wallis Warfield Simpson. “Very clever.”

“We thought so,” the man said defensively, unsure if he was being mocked. Perhaps he had been ridiculed a lot, or felt that way. “You see, the Duke of Windsor was something of a Nazi sympathizer. If he hadn’t married Simpson, he would have become king, and who knows what kind of world we would be living in now?”

“You have something there,” Tess said, falling back on one of her generically truthful phrases. You have something there. That’s an idea.

“It was my concept, although Bob was the one who fleshed it out. He was the writer. Also the cinematographer. But the ideas often started with me, some offhand observation I might make. That’s how we worked.”

“Sure,” said Tess, trying not to look at the body on the floor. One shot, two shots, three shots, a dollar. Once you’re in for capital murder, stand up and holler. “I bet.”

“Don’t patronize me,” the man said, now pointing his gun at Tess. It was a small thing, not at all formidable, but at this range, it didn’t have to be.

“I’m not,” Tess said. “I’m piecing together what I know. You had an idea, one similar to Mann of Steel, and you believe that someone from the production saw that idea-”

“I know,” the man said. “I did it. I walked right up to this gentleman on the set of The Last Pagoda and handed him our idea, in a sealed envelope. I have a photo in my scrapbook, of me on set, and you can see this Ben Marcus right there in the background. That’s a much more definitive link than anything that Zervitz put up, and he won a million dollars.”

He slapped a fabric-covered album on the coffee table with his left hand, holding fast to his gun with the right. So that was the scrapbook, the repository of his dreams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay, Mr. Sybert.”

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A factory worker,” Mr. Sybert clarified.

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

“Don’t I get to speak?” Ben asked.

“Keep it brief,” Tess admonished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And that’s when she became Flip’s assistant,” Tess said, still trying to work out the timeline.

“No, that was a few weeks later, after Alicia was fired for letting go of the pilot script. Remember, Greer was an unpaid intern at first, going through boxes of crap, same as Lloyd is doing now. God knows what he’ll find on me, given enough time. When she came back for the second favor, I saw I was never going to be free of her.”

“So you killed her,” Mr. Sybert said.

“What the fuck are you talking about? I wasn’t even there that night.” Ben’s confusion was genuine, but Tess realized that Mr. Sybert was sophisticated enough to realize that a defense attorney could offer conflicting theories if he were tried in Greer’s death – the boyfriend did it, the blackmailed writer did it. But Mr. Sybert was still going to have to explain how Alicia had ended up dead at his feet.

“This is about money,” she said. “Plain and simple. Mr. Grace’s idea was used, and he was entitled to payment. Mr. Sybert, as his heir-”

“Well, my wife, Marie, is his heir, but she’s helpless about money matters,” he said. The warm, wry affection inspired by his wife was so normal, so endearing that Tess almost forgot the gun in his hand, the one, maybe two people he had killed.

“What if we paid you a half million and gave your brother-in-law a created-by credit?”

“No fucking way,” Ben fumed, but Tess could tell he was playing along now, that he realized he shouldn’t cave too easily. “I could have optioned the last three Pulitzer Prize winners for that kind of money. And I’ve got the created-by credit on this. You’re taking money out of my pocket.”

“Well,” Tess said, “that’s how damages work. Someone has been hurt. Someone has to make up for that. And I know from the background checks that I performed on the production that you have that much cash in your Fidelity account alone. You could probably run up to the local branch right now and get a cashier’s check in that amount. I’ll stay here, for insurance as they say.”

“It’s almost five now,” Mr. Sybert objected, “and he’d never make it in time, not in rush hour.”

“Not even if he took Northern Parkway to Perring, then took that back way over to Providence Road?”

“Oh, I know a better shortcut than that,” Mr. Sybert said.

“No way. How would you go?”

And that was all it took, the Achilles’ heel of the born, bread-and-buttered Baltimorean, his – or her – certainty of the city’s geography, the parochial pride in knowing the best shortcuts. Mr. Sybert put his gun down on the coffee table, ready to show Tess on the back of one of Alicia’s magazines how to drive to Towson in rush hour – and she head-butted him, threw herself into his soft, round stomach so hard that she tipped over the chair in which he was sitting.

There was much thrashing of limbs and grunting on both their parts, more than Tess had anticipated. He was stronger than he looked, but then – he would have to be. After all, she was now certain that he had beaten a woman to death, which required considerable stamina and commitment. All Tess could do was hope that Ben Marcus had seen enough goddamn movies to realize he should grab the gun left on the table.

In fact, Ben had the posture down – legs braced, if a little quivery, both hands holding the gun. Yes, he had the posture down, but not, thank God, the patter. In fact, Ben didn’t utter a single syllable in the endless two minutes it took for Tess to retrieve her own gun and call 911.

Not that Mr. Sybert was fighting anymore, either. He sat placidly on the floor, reading and rereading his brother-in-law’s letter. He wasn’t smiling – he wasn’t so crazy that he couldn’t realize how much trouble he was in – but the letter clearly brought him some comfort. He had proof, and someone had finally listened to him. On some level, he believed himself vindicated.

“He was really so very clever,” he said when the sirens began echoing down Walther Avenue. “My brother-in-law, I mean. Bob. He could have made a beautiful movie, as good as anything you’d see in Hollywood, if only someone had given him a chance.”

“I suppose,” Tess said, as kindly as she could to a man who had killed two women, “that it really does come down to who you know.”

Ben opened his mouth, as if to contradict her, then stopped. His instincts were good. If he had said something argumentative or tried a bit of snappy banter just now, Tess might have pistol-whipped him, too.

LAST LOOKS
JANUARY
Chapter 34

The Mann of Steel premiere – really, more a onetime showing for the Baltimore-based crew and their families, as the real premiere was to be in Los Angeles two days later – was held at the Senator Theater. The grand old movie house had screened many of Baltimore ’s homegrown projects and had its own Grauman-style sidewalk devoted to the various productions. The squares didn’t come cheap, and Tess knew that Lottie had wanted to forgo the tradition. But Flip was keen to have one, even if it did end up in what Ben called the “Tumulty ghetto,” just beyond the area devoted to his father’s work.

There was even a red carpet of sorts, although no real stars to walk it. Selene Waites was in Prague, working on an independent film, while Johnny Tampa refused to attend when the production – Lottie again – balked at sending him four first-class tickets – one for him, one for his mother, one for the newly minted Mrs. Tampa, and one for her mother. Lottie was willing to go as high as three but drew the line at Tampa ’s mother-in-law. The new Mrs. Tampa, a former Miss Hawaiian Tropic Tan, had been met and married in a whirlwind courtship over the Christmas holidays. But the courtship was not so heady, according to gossip, that Johnny had neglected a prenup.

Good old Johnny, Tess thought, studying one of the posters outside the theater, where Johnny had been given the benefit of a much tighter jawline than he had in real life. He thinks everything through.

A local television reporter tried to catch Tess’s eye when she stopped, but she managed to get inside before he could approach her. She and Ben had agreed not to talk publicly about what happened in Alicia Farmer’s house, and George Sybert was remaining silent as well. As far as the public knew, a city man had killed a city woman in some sort of personal dispute, then agreed to a plea bargain that the beleaguered state’s attorney’s office was happy to make. Some details couldn’t be kept back – George Sybert’s name, the fact that he had been fired from the school district a few months earlier and was increasingly desperate to provide for his invalid wife – but those facts only confused the situation more. A deal had been struck, and there would be no jailhouse interviews about stolen scenarios and The Duchess of Windsor Hills, no accusations of plagiarism.

And no charge against Sybert for the murder of Greer Sadowski. That one remained on JJ Meyerhoff ’s scorecard. Sybert could not be shaken in his story: He went to the office that night to confront Greer, and she was already dead. Yes, he was the one who had opened drawers, but he hadn’t taken her ring, didn’t even remember seeing a ring. Tess had been scouring pawnshops and less-than-meticulous antique dealers all fall and into the winter, looking for the simple pear-shaped diamond she remembered, but nothing had shown up. She had even asked Marie Sybert if she had received the gift of a ring last fall, but the poor woman had denied it, and Tess didn’t have the heart to press her. Marie Sybert had enough worries, with her brother dead and her husband in prison.

Tess understood the police indifference to breaking Sybert’s story down. There was no percentage in letting citizens know that they had killed the wrong suspect while the real killer had remained at large, only to kill again. She understood – the first rule of bureaucracy is “Cover your ass,” as her father might say – but she didn’t have to like it. The only consolation was that the decision had been made far above Tull’s head, and she believed that this particular closed case would remain forever open to the conscientious detective. If he got a chance to clear Meyerhoff, he would. Would a ring in a pawnshop prove anything? Only if someone at the store could swear that it was Sybert who had brought it in. Even then, that might not be enough. She was chasing her own MacGuffin, but it seemed more productive than trying to persuade Sybert to confess. Still, she kept visiting him, in hopes he might come clean.

“I wish you had killed me that night,” George Sybert said the last time that Tess saw him, a week before Christmas. “My life insurance would have been sufficient to take care of Marie.”

“Are you sure?” Tess asked.

“Oh yes, I know all the ins and outs of my policies.”

“No, I mean – are you sure that you’d like to be dead?”

“Marie would be better off.”

“Does Marie think so?”

His eyes moistened, and Tess had to remind herself that this disarmingly devoted husband had killed two women. The problem with George Sybert – the problem with most of humankind – was that the only pain that mattered to him was his own. He mourned his brother-in-law and best friend. He would go to any lengths to take care of his Marie. But what about Greer? What about Alicia? Neither one deserved to be dead.

Boy meets girl. Bob Grace gets to Alicia, then Greer gets to him, promising him the document he thinks will prove everything. Boy loses girl. Greer recants, and Bob Grace, despairing of seeing his dream realized, kills himself. His brother-in-law takes over his quest. Boy gets girl. George Sybert kills Greer, then Alicia.

“Popcorn?” Crow asked.

“Of course,” Tess said.

Tess, Crow, and Lloyd had been given reserved seats, far better than Lloyd’s status would normally confer, just two rows behind the producers. Ben motioned Tess to join him in the aisle.

“Can you keep a secret?” Ben asked.

“I would think that my track record speaks for itself.”

The old Ben might have had a comeback for that. The new one said:

“We’re getting a pickup, even before the first episode airs. It’s not exactly the vote of confidence it seems – they just don’t have enough in the production pipeline, so they’re using the pickup to create heat for the show. You know – a show so good we didn’t even wait for ratings. That kind of crap. But they were really excited by the reaction at T.C.A.”

“T.C.A.?”

“The television critics. They meet twice a year, preview stuff. We got great buzz.”

“Congratulations. So Mann of Steel returns to Baltimore. I’ll try to keep the glorious news to myself.”

Ben glanced over his shoulder to see who was nearby. “That’s the thing – we’re not coming back here. The network gave us an early pickup, in part, so we could figure out a way to work around everyone’s schedule. Johnny’s going to do his film this winter, while we’ve agreed to keep Selene light during the season so she can go make her vanity biopic. But the trade-off is we have to do it closer to home, probably Vancouver. It simplifies things, especially now that Johnny’s new wife has decided she wants to live in Hawaii part of the year. Besides, the Maryland Film Commission’s budget was slashed. No more givebacks.”

“So everyone gets what they want, and Baltimore is left empty-handed?”

“Most of Baltimore. How many people live here? Six hundred thousand or so? Well, five hundred ninety thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine get bupkes. But if Lloyd settles down, earns his GED? Flip and I are committed to paying his way through school. USC, NYU, community college, a technical school if that’s what he wants – he gets in, we pay. And we’ll do whatever we can to find him work when he gets out.”

Tess was stunned – happily, for once. “That could be a lot of money, four years of college.”

“Yeah, it’s about what I make a month, since we negotiated our new deal.” The man who had once called her an asshole waited, clearly expecting Tess to say something cutting or sarcastic, but she was at a loss.

“Well… thanks. That’s huge.”

Ben seemed a little disappointed that rudeness had failed her for once. “The movie’s starting. We should go back to our seats.”

“It’s a television show.”

“Well, we call it the movie sometimes.”

“And actresses are actors. Sorry, I’ve been out of the loop.”

Before the screening of the pilot, Flip took the stage and made a little speech, thanking the crew and the city, hitting all the right self-deprecatory notes. Tess remembered him at Greer’s memorial service, how well he had spoken there, too. Yes, Flip had the knack of saying the right words in the right way, but did he ever mean any of them? Here he was, praising his father’s hometown to the skies, knowing that he wouldn’t be returning. He had gotten what he needed out of the city and was moving on. The people who were laughing appreciatively at his jokes and witticisms would have to find new gigs, perhaps move to other cities for work.

Flip returned to his seat to enthusiastic applause, and Mann of Steel began with a bright, peppy credit sequence that made Baltimore look like the Disney version of a working-class town. Tess watched, absorbed in spite of herself. It was actually pretty good. But as the show wore on, she couldn’t help noticing that something had changed. She had changed. Aware now of what happened behind the camera, she couldn’t stop breaking down the effects required by each scene. There was Mann in the union office, but all Tess could focus on was pudgy, vain Johnny Tampa and the view through the window, which she now knew to be translights, computer digitized images lighted for daytime. She watched Selene float into the frame, and she thought about how the camera must have rolled along a track to create that giddy, gliding sensation. She listened to the sounds of a modern port, knowing much of it had been overlaid later, in a studio. She saw the moon rise and wondered if that had been easier or more difficult to capture than a sunrise, or if some stupid local girl had blundered into that shot as well.

And then, just like that, it was over.

With the crew present, the credits were one of the indisputable highlights, applause and shouts greeting each name. Even Tess found herself applauding one small line of type – based on a short story by Bob Grace. With eight episodes this season and a pickup for next, that credit was better than an annuity for Marie Sybert, Bob’s heir. That had been Flip’s idea, but it hadn’t been done out of kindness, or even a belief that George Sybert had a legitimate claim. It was simply the cheapest way to buy Sybert’s silence, to end any embarrassing talk of theft and plagiarism. More important to Flip, it kept his father out of things. For the thing that bugged Flip the most, Ben had told Tess, was not the possibility that someone would think his idea was stolen, but that it had been offered to his father first.

Lloyd’s credit – assistant to Mr. Marcus – was at the very end, one of a long list. Tess and Crow hooted, pumping their fists, while Lloyd pretended to be profoundly humiliated. Or maybe he wasn’t pretending. Tess noticed that others in the crew had cheered, too, and felt encouraged. Maybe Lloyd had found his place in the world, a place where he could succeed.

“It’s so much better than I thought it would be,” she whispered to Crow as the lights came up.

“Well,” he said, gathering up the debris at their feet, “based on everything you ever told me, it would have to be.”

“No, I mean it’s good, really good. When I could forget how they did things – and when I could forget that the leads were played by two people I loathe – it was really affecting, and surprisingly funny. They got Baltimore right. Sort of.”

She wondered if she would ever be able to watch a television show or a film in the same way again, now that she knew too much. She wondered if it was even possible to know too much about something – or someone – that you had once loved. And she had loved movies, once upon a time, not even a decade ago, when it was unthinkable not to be in line at the multiplex every weekend, when it was urgent and essential to see movies the very night they opened. In college, she had once driven to a Philadelphia art house, a distance of more than a hundred miles, to see – well, what was it that she had driven almost two hours to see? A German film, possibly Herzog, maybe Wenders. The American Friend? Aguirre, The Wrath of God? That was it – Aguirre, a film in which a character clutched something secret and vital in his hand, yet died without ever revealing what it was. Tess had left the theater almost in a swoon, so dazed and rapt by Herzog’s images that she forgot to get a cheese steak on her way out of town.

Yet here was Lloyd, who knew far more about what happened behind the scenes than she did, and it was still magical for him. In fact, the movies might just save Lloyd’s life.

“Dinner?” Crow asked.

“Sure,” Tess said. “Lloyd’s choice. It’s his night, after all.” So what if he picked some lowbrow franchise? A little grease was probably good for the stomach and the soul.

She glanced back at Flip and Ben, surrounded by well-wishers and sycophants, all those little moths beating their wings against the bright promise embodied in the two friends’ careers. Tess could all but read their thoughts: If only they had a contact, an in, a friend of a friend of a friend. If only they could tell someone of their amazing ideas, they would be rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Someone – an older man, the kind of person who seldom attracted a second glance, whether alone or in a crowd – appeared to be thrusting an envelope toward Ben, but he was much too slick for that now. He raised his hands, as if to surrender – then shoved them back into his pockets and quickly walked away, motioning Flip to follow. The man rescued his envelope from the theater’s sticky floor and watched them go, his face still weary with hope.