Another Thing To Fall

by Laura Lippman

  He reached into his briefcase and, after taking care to make sure there was nothing on the tabletop, opened his scrapbook. There were photographs and articles about every production that had ever come to Baltimore — not just Levinson's and Tumulty's films, but And Justice for All and Homicide and The Wire and Ladder 49 and Red Dragon and The Replacements and Step Up and, almost every year, like the groundhog, another John Waters film. He visited Waters's sets because he felt he had a duty to completeness, to see them all, but he didn't really care for the movies because they so seldom had real stars. What had Gloria Swanson said? She stayed big, the movies got small. He didn't get Waters, his insistence on making things look the way they actually were. Who needed movies for that?

  He flipped through the pages, stopping at the one instance when a newspaper photographer had caught the both of them, standing on the edge of everything. Their own mothers probably couldn't pick them out of the shot, but he knew they had been there, so he could identify the backs of their heads, then thick with hair. There they were down in Fells Point, the night the big fire scene in Avalon was filmed. That had been fascinating. And Levinson's people had been nice. When it came down to it, he might have preferred Tumulty's movies, but his people — Tumulty made very bad choices in his people, and now he had foisted those choices onto his son. Tumulty had forgotten where he came from, living out there… wherever. Tahoe? Santa Fe? Some suspect place, neither here nor Hollywood.

  His breakfast arrived — how did they do it so fast? He was almost skeptical at the speed with which diner food arrived. Given the time, past eleven, he had opted for a grilled cheese and french fries with gravy. Had he put gravy on his french fries before he saw Diner, or had the movie persuaded him that this was what people in Baltimore did? He could no longer remember. It wasn't that he had any trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality. He was as sane as the next guy, and had the tests to prove it, as the old joke went. They had made him talk to a psychiatrist as part of the exit interview, but that had been to cover their own asses. He had been in HRD; he knew the drill. He propped the local section of the Beacon-Light against the old-fashioned sugar dispenser, and read the latest litany of complaints about Mann of Steel. You reap what you sow, you reap what you sow. He wondered if Mandy Stewart could be of any use to him, but decided that she had been too open in her hostility. She probably couldn't get any closer to Tumulty Jr. and his minions than he could at this point. The steelworkers, too, were of little use. Besides, he didn't know any steelworkers.

  His cell phone rang, and he debated not answering. The french fries were at that divine, fleeting moment of perfect hotness. But ignoring Marie was never a good idea, under any circumstances, and she had been especially needy the past few months.

  "Where are you?" she said.

  "Having an early lunch."

  "Why aren't you at work?"

  "Holiday."

  "What holiday?"

  "Columbus Day." The lies were coming so easily now. The mark of an artist, he decided.

  "Isn't that the Monday that falls the same week as the twelfth?"

  "Used to be," he said agreeably. "But they had to start switching it around because people complained about the Italians getting their own holiday. So the federal holiday was last week, but the state-city holiday is today."

  "What does that have to do with the date? And why would they have more Columbus Days if people are angry about the one?" He could imagine her face — forehead creased, mouth turned down — panicking a little at this information, more proof that the world outside the house was going on without her. For some reason, she seemed to think that the world should have halted when she stopped participating in it.

  Then again, he was lying to her. He should factor that in. But it was out of consideration. Everything he did, he did for her.

  "No, there's only one, and it's today."

  "Oh…" Her voice trailed off.

  "Marie?"

  "Hmmmmm?"

  "Why did you call?"

  "Can't remember. I wanted you to bring me something from the grocery store… a magazine? Candy? Hey — if there's no work today, why did you put on your suit and everything, leave the house at the normal time?"

  Good question. He had to remind himself sometimes that while Marie may be odd, an ever-growing bundle of tics and neuroses, she wasn't simpleminded or unobservant. Given how little of the world she could see from her perch on the sofa, she tended to be extremely sharp-eyed about what was within her view.

  "Force of habit," he said. "It's kind of embarrassing, but — I didn't remember about the holiday until I showed up at North Avenue. Once I was all the way downtown, I thought I could do some work on my own, play catch-up. But there's no heat in the building."

  "Isn't it warm today?"

  "You'd think so, looking at the temperature." She was probably doing that just now, he calculated, pulling the draperies aside and squinting at the thermometer next to the bay window, or quickly punching through the channels on the remote to the Weather Channel. Stand-up comics were always making jokes about men and remote controls, but Marie wielded hers like a light saber. He didn't dare try to take it from her. "The nights have been getting cooler, and that old pile just holds in the cold, with all that marble and all. And the heat was off all weekend."

  "They never ought to have renovated that old school for the administration headquarters. They just love throwing the taxpayers' money away, don't they? But I guess I shouldn't complain, since that includes paying you." She made a funny sound, and he knew she had brought her fist up to her mouth. "I don't mean paying you is a waste."

  "I know," he said. "Look, Marie, I have to go. Our minutes—"

  "Then why do you tell me to call your cell instead of the office phone?"

  "They're sticklers about personal calls," he began, trying to talk over her, but she was hurtling down her own track of thought: "You always — Mounds bars! That's what I want. Mounds bars. I was watching television, and there was some commercial, and it reminded me of the old commercial, sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't. Well, I don't, so I want Mounds, okay?"

  Trust me, Marie. You feel like a nut every day. Then he felt bad, as he always did, for his sour interior monologue. Marie couldn't help how she was. "Mounds bars, got it."

  "The little ones. But not the ones in the bag. The ones that they line up in a row, on the cardboard."

  "You've got it, my sweet tooth Marie."

  He opened his wallet, and looked at the ATM slip from that morning's withdrawal: $17,922 in his account. There was another $55,000 in the IRAs, but they couldn't touch it for another five years. He had their regular expenses down to less than $2,500 a month, so they had a year before the money ran out, and then there was always a second mortgage, although that would require Marie's signature. But he didn't need a year. All he needed was to get that girl's attention, get her to fulfill the promises she had made, even if she acted as if she had never heard of him.

  The french fries had passed their peak, but he ate them anyway. Why was that? Why did fries lose their perfection so quickly, and why did people keep eating them once they had turned cold and mushy? If he were an inventor, he would come up with a way to produce ever-crisp, ever-hot french fries. Or maybe a restaurant that served only french fries, and not just the Thrasher's-in-a cup-on-the-boardwalk thing. He'd have french fries with gravy and hollandaise and mayonnaise and all kinds of sauces. That's what he would do, if he were an inventor. But he was a dreamer, in the best sense of the word. His head was filled with beautiful stories, stories that unfolded the way that How the West Was Won had raced across the screen at the Hillendale, back when he and Bob were no more than eleven, and you could see the lines on the print, breaking the picture into thirds, because the theater wasn't set up for the Cinerama technique.

  He remembered, too, how ancient Jimmy Stewart had looked to them, how they had cringed at the idea of that bony codger pitching woo to Carroll Baker, who made them f
eel vaguely strange inside, although they didn't want to admit it to each other, and didn't have the vocabulary to explain what they felt, not even to themselves.

  Now he was older than Jimmy Stewart was then. How had that happened?

  Chapter 5

  Tess's day was thrown off course much as her scull had been, and she never quite caught up, running late for every appointment, five in all. Autumn was turning into a reliably busy season, almost as good as February. It was as if back-to-school fever carried over into every aspect of people's lives. Summer gone, people got serious about their messy legal claims. Tess also had a booming business in background checks on nannies. She had told Flip Tumulty the truth: She had more business than she could handle.

  Besides, Tess, too, had gone back to school in a fashion, teaching a course through Johns Hopkins' noncredit division, the Odyssey program. To her amazement, there were a dozen people in Baltimore who thought they might want to be private investigators. More shockingly, they believed Tess Monaghan was the woman who could show them how. She had scoffed at the idea when the program's director first proposed it — her own career path had been highly unorthodox, perhaps even mildly illegal — but her network of PI friends had been so openly covetous of the offer that she had been forced to reconsider. The only downside was that it made for a very long Monday, and today's disruptions meant she barely had time to fortify herself with a Luna bar before the three-hour session started at 6:30.

  For this, the fourth meeting in the ten-week course, the students had been asked to bring laptops with wireless access. Eleven of her Charles Street Irregulars, as she had begun to think of them, had their computers open and ready to go. The twelfth, Felicia Blossom, had a cell phone on her desk, a cell phone so ancient and relatively massive that it could be a candidate for a Smithsonian exhibit on early mobile telecommunications.

  "Do you not have a laptop, Mrs. Blossom?" The woman was in her sixties and given, perhaps inevitably, to wearing flowery dresses. Had she dressed that way after she became Mrs. Blossom, or had her riotous prints of peonies and cabbage roses attracted Mr. Blossom to her?

  She nodded, brandishing the phone.

  "That's a phone," Tess said, trying to mask her irritation.

  "Yes, but don't phones have all the same geegaws as computers?"

  "Geegaws?"

  "You know, the bells and whistles? Whatever. My son's phone can take pictures and send e-mails — he sends me photos of my grandbabies from Phoenix — so I figure mine could, too, if someone showed me how. I couldn't find the instruction booklet."

  Tess was aware of the rest of the class's simmering impatience, an almost Colosseum-like lust for a little Blossom blood on the floor. The woman was never prepared, and she had a habit of asking questions that were achingly off point. But Tess wanted to believe that she would never be one of those teachers who won over the majority by exploiting the class pariah.

  True, Mrs. Blossom was never going to be a private investigator — but then, neither were the others in the class. She was simply the only one who was honest about it, writing on her orientation form, under "What do you hope to achieve through this class?" Something to do on Monday nights until NBC stops running those weird shows I don't understand. In some ways, Tess even preferred Mrs. Blossom to the three wannabe crime novelists, who believed themselves undercover in the class. They thought they were so stealthy, but they didn't know that Odyssey provided teachers with all the students' previous coursework in the program, and this trio of thirty-something men had taken two semesters of creative writing and one survey, Writing Wrongs: The Crime Novel in the Twenty-first Century. But even if Tess hadn't seen their records, she would be onto them by now, with their endless questions about the quotidian details of an investigator's life. One had even asked what she ate for breakfast.

  "I'm afraid I'm not much good with phones, either," Tess said to Mrs. Blossom. "I know how to use mine, but not others. Why don't you come up front and sit next to me, as I talk the class through public record searches, online and off-line?"

  Beaming as if she had been anointed teacher's pet, Mrs. Blossom bustled up front and pulled her chair so close that Tess was overwhelmed by her perfume, a sickly sweet gardenia.

  "Let's start with land records," Tess said, trying to reach past Mrs. Blossom and type. The lyrics from the old Police song "Don't Stand So Close to Me" popped into her head, and she had to lose herself in the byways of the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation to stifle her giggles. This woman had paid six hundred dollars because NBC's Monday night lineup had failed her. She deserved the pretense of respect at the very least. "In Maryland, you can research the history of ownership with just the address, using the assessor's Web site, but you still might have to go to the courthouse for additional information. Your address, Mrs. Blossom?"

  The woman looked around the class, then whispered into Tess's ear. "University One, at the corner of St. Paul. But only for six months. Before that, we lived on Hawthorne."

  "Let's use the house on Hawthorne," Tess said. "Apartments are tricky, and you haven't been there a year."

  "It's a condo," Mrs. Blossom said, "and the house on Hawthorne isn't mine anymore."

  There was a world of sorrow in that sentence, but Tess couldn't stop for it. She had eleven Encyclopedia Browns chomping at the bit.

  Although the Hopkins campus was not even a mile from where Tess lived, it was almost ten before she disentangled herself from the last student, one of the undercover writers, who kept trying to inveigle her to go to the Charles Village Pub. Her body was so divided between fatigue and hunger that it was her plan to eat dinner while lying down, the prescribed Passover posture, but Crow was on the sofa with Lloyd Jupiter. How could she have forgotten Monday was movie night?

  A seventeen-year-old West Baltimore kid, Lloyd was fast becoming Crow's ward, the young Dick Grayson to Crow's Bruce Wayne of semistately Monaghan manor. But had Batman and Robin's relationship flourished after Robin had tried repeatedly to rip Batman off, con him, and inadvertently almost get him killed? Tess thought not. Still, the always forgiving Crow had taken a serious interest in every facet of the young dropout's education, supervising not only his peripatetic march toward a GED but also his exposure to serious cinema. Tonight's selection was Once Upon a Time in the West, clearly chosen to counterbalance last week's Children of Paradise, which had received one finger up from Lloyd Jupiter, but not a very nice one.

  Crow had paused the movie for a talking point, as was his habit. "You see, throughout his career Henry Fonda always played good guys — hey, Tess — so Sergio Leone really messed with people's heads when he cast him in this part."

  Tess sank to the rug, relieved to see that there was plenty of homemade guacamole left. Crow was trying to broaden Lloyd's palate, too, but that was a much tougher battle.

  "That other guy — he was the Tunnel King, right, from The Great Escape?"

  "Right!" Crow's enthusiastic affirmation reminded Tess of her own cheerleading for Mrs. Blossom's timid trek across the steppes of the Internet. "He also starred in a series of vigilante films in the 1970s, which were very politically divisive—"

  Just out of Crow's eye line, Tess pretended to slump in catatonia at this pedantic discussion of Death Wish, and Lloyd began giggling, a high-pitched bubble of sound that reminded Tess he was at once a very young and very old seventeen. Crow, catching on to their mockery, threw a pillow at her head.

  "While you've been here, communing with the end product of Hollywood, I had an encounter with the real thing," Tess said, regaling them with the story of her accidental set visit, although it was slightly changed now, with her saying out loud many of the things she had merely thought.

  "Tumulty?" Crow said. "That might explain the series of phone messages we've been getting tonight, which I've been trying to ignore. The phone had been ringing every half hour, to the minute, but I didn't recognize the caller ID so I didn't pick up. After the fifth message or so, I checked, and the message
s were identical. ‘This is Greer Sadowski, calling Tess Monaghan for Mr. Tumulty. Are you there? Will you pick up? Please call me back at your convenience.'"

  Crow was a good mimic, catching the young woman's not quite suppressed o sounds, the mechanical flatness of her voice.

  "He wants me to work for him."

  "Really?" Lloyd's eyes lit up. It was, quite possibly, the only time that Tess had ever managed to impress Lloyd, who was consistently underwhelmed by the mundaneness of her life as a private investigator. That, and the fact that she didn't know tae kwon do, or how to use nunchakus.

  "Yeah, but it's not my sort of gig, Lloyd. More security than investigation or paper trails, and I'm a one-woman agency. I simply don't have the personnel."

  "But you would be working on a movie. A movie made by the son of Philip Tumulty, the guy who made The Beast."

  Given his youth, Lloyd had no use for the gentle, nostalgic — and, truth be told, very, very white — comedies made by Tumulty senior. Tess wondered how Tumulty would feel to learn that there were, in fact, some Baltimoreans who preferred the special effects epics that had made him rich while destroying his artistic cred.