Another Thing to Fall (3 page)

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

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

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

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

“What about bodyguard work?”

“What about it?”

“Do you do it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That seems a little… unsporting.”

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

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

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

“Sofia?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tough gig,” Tess said.

“Oh, he loves what he does.”

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

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

“What happened to his last assistant?”

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

“Aren’t you from here?”

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

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

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

“What about—” Tess gestured at the ring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Selene attempted suicide?”

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

“A stalker?”

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

“Creep?”

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

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

“Right. Yet all this strangeness now.”

“Maybe he’s haunting you.”

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

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

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

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

“The show is called
Mann of Steel
.”

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

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

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

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

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

“A remake of the Bette Davis movie?”

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

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

“It’s in my Netflix queue,” she lied.

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

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

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

“Why?”