Another Thing To Fall

by Laura Lippman

  Tess cinched the belt of the bathrobe they had loaned her. The garment was Pepto-Bismol pink and made of a fluffy chenillelike material that seemed to expand the longer she wore it, so she felt quite lost and shapeless within it. Still, she did have a waist and a respectably solid body somewhere inside this pink mass.

  The man in the Natty Boh cap, who had been on his cell phone almost constantly since they arrived at the trailer — banger — suddenly barked: "Arrange for her clothes to go to the nearest coin laundry, Greer." Then, to Tess, picking up a conversation that he had started perhaps twenty minutes earlier, during one of the lulls between phone calls: "You see the irony, right? During the Civil War, Francis Scott Key's descendant was held as a prisoner here, in the very fort where Key was kept when he wrote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.'"

  "Well, Key was on a British ship, stationed in the harbor. But I guess I—"

  "Key was on a ship?" He looked dubious. "Greer, check that out, will you? I think we have a reference to it in one-oh-three. We may have to save that with looping."

  His girl Friday dutifully jotted some notes on her clipboard. "Should I use the Internet or—"

  "Just check it out. And do something about her clothes, okay?" Greer scurried away, even as Tess marveled at the man's ability to switch from bossy-brittle to seductive-supplicant and back again without missing a beat. She wondered if he ever got confused, used the imperious tone on those he was trying to impress, then spoke beguilingly to those he meant to dominate. "On the boat or on the shore, it's the larger irony that concerns me. ‘Everything connects,' like it says in Howards End."

  Tess didn't have the heart to tell him that the epigraph for E. M. Forster's novel was only connect. Everyone made mistakes. She just wished the man would stop trying so hard to impress her and perhaps do something as rudimentary as introduce himself.

  Mr. Natty Boh's cell phone rang for what Tess estimated was the seventy-fifth time since they had left the boat. The ring tone was the brrrrrrring-brrrrrrring of an old-fashioned desk phone, something black and solid. It was a ring tone that Tess particularly hated, even more than the one on her friend Whitney's phone, which played "Ride of the Valkyries."

  "What? WHAT? You're breaking up, let me go outside."

  Greer returned as soon as her boss left. They seemed determined to keep an eye on Tess at all times, although they had let her shower alone. "I sent your clothes off with the P.A., Brad."

  "P.A.?"

  "The production assistant from the boat. And I realized something — I know you." The rounded O sound — knOOOOOOHw — marked her as a native Baltimorean, although one who seemed to be trying to control her os and keep her rs where they belonged.

  "I don't think so," Tess countered.

  "I've seen you," she insisted, eyes narrowed until they almost disappeared in her apple-cheeked face. "You've been in the paper."

  "Oh, well, who hasn't? I'm sure you've ended up in the paper yourself, a time or two. Engagement announcement, perhaps?" The girl wore a simple, pear-shaped diamond on a gold band, and she reached for it instinctively at Tess's mention, but not with the expected tenderness or pride. She twisted it, so the stone faced inward, the way a woman might wear a ring on public transportation, or in a dangerous neighborhood.

  Tess babbled on: "Like Andy Warhol said — in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. Actually, he didn't say it, he wrote that, in the notes on a gallery exhibit at the University of Maryland of all places. And most people get it wrong, refer to so-and-so's fifteen minutes of fame, which isn't the same, not at all…."

  She hoped her prattling might derail the woman's chain of thought, but this Greer had a pointer's fixity of purpose.

  "You weren't in the paper in a normal way," Greer said. "It was something odd, kind of notorious."

  "One of my favorite Hitchcock films," her boss said, returning to the trailer. "Written by Ben Hecht, with uncredited dialogue by Odets."

  "No, she's notorious." Greer used her clipboard to indicate Tess. "She's been in the paper."

  "The local paper?" asked Mr. Natty Boh, suddenly all bright interest.

  "Yes," Greer said.

  "No," Tess said. "I mean, not really, not often. I started out as a reporter at the old Star, and I've worked for the Beacon-Light as a consultant, nothing more. Maybe that's why she thinks I've been in the newspaper."

  A lie, but an expedient one, one she assumed would dull the man's interest. Besides, how could a Hollywood director, assuming he was that, care who had been mentioned in a Baltimore newspaper?

  But now he seemed even more focused on impressing her, extending his hand, something he hadn't done even while she was treading water. "I'm Flip Tumulty."

  "Oh, right, the son of—"

  At this near mention of his famous father, Flip's features seemed to frost over, while Greer clutched her clipboard to her chest, as if to flatten the squeak of a gasp that escaped from her mouth. Tess was forced to correct her course for the second time that morning. "I had assumed you were the director on this project, but you're a writer, right? Ben Hecht, Odets — those are the kinds of details a writer would know. Now that I think about it, I remember a Shouts and Murmur piece you wrote for the New Yorker a few years back. Very droll."

  That puffed him up with pride. "I am a writer, but here I'm the executive producer. That's how it works in television, the writer is the boss. And you're a rower who reads the New Yorker?"

  Now it was Tess's turn to be offended. "Rowing is my hobby, not my profession. Besides, rowers tend to be pretty intelligent."

  "Really? I don't recall that from my days at Brown." Oh, how Tess hated that kind of ploy, this seemingly casual mention of an Ivy League education. Shouldn't the son of Phil Tumulty be a little more confident? Or did having a famous father make him more insecure than the average person?

  "Well, Brown," she said, trying to make it sound as if that school's rowers were famously subpar.

  "What do you do, when you're not rowing or consulting for newspapers?"

  It was a question that Tess had come to hate, because the answer prompted either a surfeit of curiosity or the same set of tired jokes, many of them centering on wordplay involving "female dick." She hesitated, tempted to lie, but the opportunity was lost when Greer blurted out: "She's a private investigator. That's it. She shot a state senator who happened to be a killer, or something like that."

  "Something like that," Tess said, almost relieved to see how the details of her life continued to morph and mutate in the public imagination. She had shot a man, once. He wasn't a politician. If he had been, she probably would have been less haunted by the experience.

  "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.