Another Thing to Fall (22 page)

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

“You let me worry about that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s what men always believe.”

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

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

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

“Now
you’re
being ridiculous.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Is she sleeping with him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And there’s only one bible?”

“One copy? God no.”

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

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

“God no,” she said reflexively.

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

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

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

That was easy enough for Tess to believe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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