Hush Hush

by Lippman, Laura

“No, when it happened. The thing with Tyner’s client. It wasn’t on my shift, thank God. But it’s the kind of thing—Guys who could make jokes about anything, they didn’t joke about that. Cases like that, they can really screw you up. And it’s worse, in a way, when you don’t even have the adrenaline of the investigation or the interrogation to work out the bad energy. You’ve got this person who’s done a horrible thing and you’re being told she’s a delicate flower, that the usual rules are out the window.”

  “Do you have a problem with the insanity plea in general, or just the fact that it was accepted in this case?”

  “No. It’s fair. I guess. If you’re really crazy, you can’t be held responsible. And I’d like to think someone was crazy to do what she did. But—can you really get better if you’re that crazy? In sex crimes, there are these guys—they never stop wanting to do what they do. Remember when Depo-Provera was the thing? It wasn’t enough. You can take the starch out of the collar”—Tess was sure that collar was not Sandy’s first choice, but he had a touching, old-school gallantry—“but you can’t take the impulse away. It’s always there. So this lady—is she medicated these days? Forget medicated. Has she been sterilized? What if—”

  “I don’t know, Sandy. I have trouble with the idea of forced sterilization under any circumstances. And that’s one part of the female reproductive system the ultraconservatives haven’t tried to stake out. They’re all for freedom to conceive. In the missionary position, within a hetero-normative marriage.”

  “You know, I never know what you’re going to say next,” Sandy said. “Makes life interesting. See you tomorrow.”

  Tess felt flattered, then wondered if she had been insulted. Probably neither, just a simple statement of fact from a man who used words in the most utilitarian way possible, applying them to problems and needs. That was part of the reason she wanted him to take the lead in tomorrow’s meeting. The woman, Melisandre Harris Dawes, was supposed to be a big talker. A former lawyer, which was how Tyner had known her. Maybe still one? As far as Tess knew, a finding of temporary insanity was not a reason to be disbarred. She’d say as much to Tyner, adding “insert your own joke here.” For Tess was not only a talker, she was someone who sometimes planned to say funny things ahead. Forget l’esprit de l’escalier. Tess not only didn’t think of the perfect retort too late, she often prepared it in advance. Yes, she would make just that joke in front of Tyner. “I guess being insane isn’t a basis for being disbarred, or else there wouldn’t be a single working lawyer in all of Maryland.”

  She would not, however, make a joke about whether a lawyer should be disbarred for driving to the shores of the Patapsco on a searing August day, parking in a patch of sun, and then sitting on the grass beneath a tree while her two-month-old child essentially cooked inside the car.

  Tess looked again at the folded note, glanced around to find a trash can. None nearby. She imagined herself littering, something she would never do. She liked to imagine doing the unimaginable. What if I grabbed a Goldenberg’s Peanut Chew and ate it while shopping? What if I took money from that unsupervised tip jar? What if I sideswiped a car and just pretended to leave a note, for show, then drove away?

  Tess was reliably honest in her daily life, as opposed to her work one, which required some deceit. Still, she liked to think about being bad. She told herself it was part of her job to understand why other people broke rules that seemed inviolate to her. Insurance cheats, marriage cheats, embezzlers were part of her day-to-day life. But no one was truly pure. Tess had availed herself of office supplies and free long distance when she was a reporter. Long distance was no longer the perk it once was, but office supplies—oh, how she missed office supplies.

  Could she ever imagine the disordered mind of a woman capable of what Melisandre Dawes had done? Can the sane understand the crazy? Was it un-PC to call someone crazy? Modern life was way too complicated. Tess hadn’t even reached forty and she felt like a throwback. Then again, so did every true Baltimorean.

  She tossed the note in Gladys’s backseat, where it did not lack for company. Tess had not been a reporter for more than a decade, but she still tended toward the filth-strewn car, something of a journalistic trope. The note fell on the floor among the fast-food detritus that Tess blamed on her toddler daughter. Who had not, to date, eaten a single Chicken McNugget or Whopper, but that was at her father’s insistence. Still, Carla Scout was a good fall guy for the messy car, although her vocabulary was such now that she could rat her mother out for certain transgressions. “Mommy bought me cheeseburger,” she had told Crow the other day, and he had promptly quizzed Tess about its origins, whether it had been locally sourced, grass fed. Tess said it was from the Abbey Burger Bistro, Roseda Farm. It had actually been from Five Guys, and Tess had no idea where the beef had originated, but she did know that day’s potato supply hailed from Wyoming. She did not consider this lying so much as a coping device, made essential by Crow’s mild nutritional lunacy, which had come on without warning after Carla Scout’s second birthday.

  Carla Scout—She had to remember to pick up the right shampoo today, and the leave-in conditioner. Otherwise, combing the girl’s hair after her bath was practically a violation of the Geneva Conventions. And they were out of milk, and it had to be the local, organic stuff in the glass bottles, which meant going to Eddie’s on Roland Avenue, not one of the big chains, which stocked that kind of shampoo.

  By the time Tess pulled away from the curb, the note was forgotten.

  12:30 P.M.

  Harmony Burns spent five minutes explaining the project to the restaurant manager, careful to play every professional card she had in her deck, paltry as her deck was. She mentioned her credits, all two of them, and noted they could be checked on IMDb, although she always hoped no one followed through. Oh, the credits were real enough, but IMDb had other information, too, links to articles and reviews she wished could be scrubbed from the Web.

  She patiently reiterated that she really was in charge, not a production assistant, as if this project had production assistants. At thirty-three, Harmony looked at least a decade younger. (“I’m the director, but also the writer. No, it happens. I graduated from film school, but I have a solid background in journalism. And, yes, some of it has to be scripted.”) She explained the film itself, how it had been commissioned and financed by the subject. This was the part that always made her queasy, yet the information had glided past everyone so far. How could a documentary be scrupulously fair when it was being financed by the subject? Harmony still had qualms about this, but Melisandre swore that nothing would be censored and Harmony believed her. She had no choice.

  “It’s about the criminal insanity plea, but we’re using this one high-profile case to explore all the facets,” she said, launching into her usual spiel, trying not to show her desperation to get the release signed, if only because the guy might shake her down. She began speaking faster and faster. She mentioned John Hinckley, still in St. Elizabeth’s, probably forever in St. Elizabeth’s, and Andrea Yates, the woman in Texas who had drowned all five of her children, although Melisandre disliked any comparison to Andrea Yates. She talked about the woman, also in Texas, who had been released from a psychiatric facility and taken a job at Walmart, only to lose it when a local television station outed her as the mother who had sawed her infant daughter’s arms off in what was later determined to be postpartum psychosis.

  The manager of the restaurant squinted at the form and said, “So, like a reality show?”

  He wasn’t the first one to ask this.

  “No, it’s a film. A documentary. Nothing like a reality show.”

  “But it’s real, right?”

  She wanted to sigh, but a sigh wouldn’t get her what she wanted. Nor would a tortured explanation of the gulf between “reality” television and documentaries. So she said: “It’s a film. Might go into theaters, might be on television.”

  “I thought you said it was real?”

  Harmony,
a native of a small town in southern Illinois, was not someone inclined to disdainful stereotypes about rubes and hicks and cultural backwaters. But Baltimore was really beginning to test her spirit.

  “It is. Real. All real. We just want to film someone having lunch with her kids. We’ll do it at the tail end of the serving hours, to be less obtrusive. We don’t hang lights, or put down track or do anything to alter the space. I’m the entire crew and there’s only one light.”

  “Why’d you choose Happy Casita? Did you find us on Yelp?”

  “I’m told it’s the girls’ favorite lunch spot.” What Harmony had been told was “No!” by every restaurant on the list provided by the girls’ father. This place, a forlorn Mexican cantina that wasn’t a chain but might as well have been, was the production’s last hope. It was one of those doomed restaurants that was all location, with a nice view of the Baltimore waterfront but nothing else going for it. Harmony had paid off a good chunk of her college debts working in similar places in Austin, Texas.

  “I guess so,” the manager said. “But no one better flip a table or throw a drink in anyone’s face. That’s not the kind of trade I’m looking for.”

  Glancing around the almost empty restaurant, Harmony had to wonder that the manager wasn’t salivating for any exposure, even a local feature on how bad the cleanliness standards were. But she had gotten what she wanted, what she required—a public place to film Melisandre’s reunion with her teenage daughters.

  Of course, she would have preferred it to be somewhere more private, but Melisandre’s ex had been adamant. He had fought the idea that the girls should be on film at all, and he had the legal right to block it: they were underage and he was their sole guardian. But Melisandre had played him expertly, just as she had told Harmony she would. She readily agreed to defer to his wishes, saying he knew best, of course, then asked: “But shouldn’t you consult them? They are seventeen and fifteen now and it seems only fair to ask what they think.”

  The girls said yes. They said yes! They would participate in the documentary and they would allow the reunion to be filmed. Harmony had been torn—getting the girls on film by themselves, in one-on-ones, was probably more important. But then Melisandre had dangled the bait of the reunion, allowing Harmony to film her first meeting with her daughters in almost ten years.

  Now Harmony wondered if Melisandre had manipulated her. Since the day they met, in a suite at Claridge’s four months ago, Harmony had felt as if she were in a circle with a snake charmer, swaying to her tune.

  It had begun with flattery. Doesn’t every seduction? Melisandre had contacted Harmony through Harmony’s former agent, claiming to be a huge fan of the documentary of which no one was a huge fan, Harmony’s second one, the one that had frittered away all the promise and potential of her first. It still hurt, the reaction to her second film. One thing to have her technique and storytelling critiqued; that was par for the course. Her small triumph with her first film had set her up to be savaged on the second. But to be called a racist, to be accused of pandering and manipulation, presenting a portrait that would allow better-off folks to laugh and jeer at the poor—that had been humiliating and unfair. No one understood that the studio had final cut, that the horrible mishmash was not Harmony’s edit. In a world where every reality show participant blamed editing for her woes, Harmony’s sincere protestations were meaningless.

  And suddenly there was a woman on the phone, telling Harmony how much she loved her work, speaking in the most charming voice, full of tiny inflections and unusual cadences that came, Harmony assumed, from living abroad for almost a decade. She had to assume a lot during that phone call, because Melisandre Dawes was someone who expected people to know everything about her. Yet her name had meant nothing to Harmony.

  “Oh, just Google me and then we’ll talk,” she told Harmony. “Face-to-face, I hope. I’m in London, closing down my mother’s affairs here. Although she lived in Cape Town the last few years, she had an apartment she was renting, and a place in the Cotswolds that I’m going to sell.”

  “I’m in New York,” Harmony said. She did not add: in Inwood, broke and about to go back to waiting tables if I can’t figure out what to do. (She had turned down several reality shows, the only jobs offered.) She hung up, Googled Melisandre Dawes, and was on the verge of pawning her one nice necklace when a ticket was wired to her. Business class. Not to mention a comped room at the hotel, although not one as grand as Melisandre’s suite. And Melisandre had set up reservations for most of their meals, relieving Harmony of the panic she felt about her maxed-out credit cards, her utter lack of liquidity. She could not believe how much things cost in London, even more than in New York.

  Best of all, she liked the project. Loved it. She might have chosen it for herself. But Harmony hadn’t chosen it. Melisandre Harris Dawes had chosen her. The project would always have that taint, even if Melisandre lived up to her promises, which included Harmony having a contractual final cut—unless the film did not find distribution within twenty-four months of completion. That was a cagey clause, a reminder that Melisandre had been a lawyer and knew her way around a contract. She also insisted on a confidentiality agreement, which Harmony found insulting. Having Melisandre tell her it was “pro forma” didn’t make it any less insulting.

  “We’ve both been treated unfairly,” Melisandre said at their first meeting. “We have both been misunderstood.”

  It was hard, sitting at her table, eating the amazing tea that had been prepared for them, not to say: “I just made a film that was critically pilloried. I didn’t leave my child to die in a car.” Then again, Harmony had seduced every person she had put on film. Why shouldn’t the subjects seduce back? In the months since her second film had tanked, when she had an unhealthy amount of time to think about her early promise and how she had wasted it, she would lie in bed and imagine the pitches that other doc directors had made to their subjects. What had the director said to the woman featured in The Queen of Versailles, for example? Flattery had always been part of the mix, always. Even here, in a third-rate Mexican restaurant in Baltimore, Harmony had to use flattery. And it had gotten the job done. They would return at 3:30, when the restaurant would almost surely be empty, and film the girls arriving.

  She went back to the hotel—the Four Seasons, at Melisandre’s insistence. “All for one, and one for all. If I stay here, you should, too. And there’s only one of you, after all.”

  Harmony had decided to do this on her own, rationalizing that it was the chorus of enablers on her second film that had led her astray. If she hadn’t had so many people around her telling her how brilliant she was, she might have seen how things were going wrong. She had to go back to the stripped-down ethos of her first doc—just her, not even a sound or lighting person, running and gunning. But with only one camera and her aversion to staging anything, Harmony had to make dozens of strategic choices every day. Take this lunch: Should she set up inside the restaurant, or try to film the girls’ entrance, then set her one light? She thought it made the most sense to have the camera in the restaurant, trained on Melisandre, waiting for the girls. Melisandre would be miked beforehand, but that meant stopping and fixing up the girls, which would disrupt the flow of the meeting. Balance was always being struck between reality—she smiled to herself at the term, its meaning so perverted now—and technical considerations. If one more person quoted to Harmony that a thing observed was changed by observation, she might finally ask: And how does anyone see what is not observed?

  She sat cross-legged on her bed, taking notes, eating takeout from Whole Foods. Melisandre had given her a free hand to create the budget, even oversight of Melisandre’s bills. There was a per diem in the budget, but Harmony tried to pocket as much of it as possible. She had become a real schnorrer, a word she hadn’t known in southern Illinois, where she had had the happiest of childhoods. Harmony probably should have moved back to her nonjudgmental hometown after the debacle of The Western Slopes. If family an
d friends there had never really grasped how successful she had been, briefly, then they also didn’t understand how far she had fallen. She was just Harmony there, funny Harmony who wore black all the time and talked a little faster now, but still Harmony. Home would have treated her kindly.

  But Harmony had no use for kindness. She wasn’t going to learn from kindness.

  Her phone tinkled, Melisandre’s assigned ringtone, the sound of breaking glass. But when Harmony picked up, it was the bodyguard, not Melisandre.

  “What’s up, Brian?”

  “No meeting today. With the girls.”

  “Did something happen?”

  “Oldest says she has a migraine. Youngest won’t come without her.”

  Shit. She should have set up the one-on-ones. They were backpedaling, she was sure of it. They were going to lose the girls. Melisandre had less control over her ex than she imagined.

  “How’s Melisandre? May I speak to her?”

  “She’s lying down.” Brian was very protective of Melisandre. Too protective, in Harmony’s view, and she had asked Melisandre, as the doc’s executive producer, to remind him that he had to stay out of the way, that there would be moments in this that would be hard on Melisandre and he had to let them happen. Thank God Melisandre didn’t want to see the dailies or read the files from the transcription service, although she was entitled to. That interview with the smug young woman from the summer camp would have devastated her. Harmony shouldn’t have been sarcastic with her, at the end. But something about that self-possessed young woman had driven Harmony nuts. Carolyn Sanders would never end up in a studio apartment in Inwood, no matter how she screwed up.

  “Did the girls reschedule?”

  “I don’t know. I just know it’s not happening today. And if you don’t mind my saying so, I would find another location. I looked at the Mexican place after you texted me. I didn’t like the layout there at all. It’s very exposed.”