Another Thing to Fall (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone but the viewers,
she had amended silently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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