Another Thing To Fall

by Laura Lippman

  "I wouldn't be working on the movie, Lloyd. I'd be babysitting a spoiled actress."

  "Still…" He groaned in frustration at her stupidity, her obtuseness at rejecting this golden ticket into a rarefied world.

  "Lloyd, buddy, why don't you get a head start on the dishes?" Crow asked. Lloyd slumped back in a sullen teen pout, and Crow added: "You promised. I said you could bunk here tonight, and you said you would clean up the kitchen. Remember?"

  "He has his own apartment," Tess said, waiting until Lloyd was in the kitchen and out of earshot, where odds were that one in ten pieces of crockery wouldn't make it out alive. "You went to a lot of trouble to set him up, get him to establish some independence, but he seems to be here more and more."

  "He had his own apartment," Crow said. "That didn't work out so well."

  "Don't tell me…"

  In the six months since Lloyd Jupiter had invaded their lives — and Tess could not help thinking of it as a criminal act, given that it had begun with a series of misdemeanors and felonies — Crow had done everything he could to help the teenager stand on his own two feet, but it was proving far more difficult than even Tess had anticipated.

  "He started letting some old friends flop there. Drugs followed, although I'm pretty sure that Lloyd's not using. He's content with smoking a blunt now and then, and I'm not a big enough hypocrite to lecture him on that. But when the landlord got wind of what was happening, he evicted him."

  "You can't evict someone just because you suspect illegal activity."

  "You can if your tenant is an inexperienced seventeen-year-old who doesn't know his rights. Anyway, Lloyd tried going back to his mom's. That lasted all of a week."

  "His stepfather?"

  "Yeah, there's no bridging that gap. Lloyd called me today, asked for bus fare, thought he could go back to the Delaware shore and stay with the friends he made there over the summer. But there's not enough work to keep him busy off-season, and an idle Lloyd is a dangerous Lloyd, at least to himself."

  "So he's staying with us — and you're heading out of town tomorrow to scout polka bands. Wow, I just gave birth to a seventeen-year-old and I didn't even know I was knocked up."

  "It's only temporary. And you know money's not the issue." Lloyd did have a small trust, controlled by Crow, who doled out living expenses while trying to goad him into getting ready for college. "Finding a way to fill his days is. He's bored, Tess. As long as he's bored, he's going to be in trouble."

  The phone rang. "Ten-thirty," Crow said. "You could set your watch by this woman."

  "I'll tell her no tomorrow," Tess said. "I don't have the energy to talk to her tonight."

  "You know, if you said yes — well, it's my understanding that a film crew is kind of elastic. There's always some place where they could use an extra body."

  It took her a moment to get it, but then — it had been a long day. Tess had risen before the sun, more than seventeen hours ago.

  "You're suggesting I make it a twofer? I'll do whatever you want, if you find a spot for my young friend? That would be double the stress, Crow. I'd be doing a job I didn't want to do, while worrying about what havoc Lloyd was wreaking."

  "Lloyd would be so thrilled to work on a set that he would be on his best behavior."

  "Lloyd's best behavior isn't exactly the gold standard." Tess fell back on the rug. She was having her second psychic episode of the day, seeing the next hour in vivid detail. She could argue with Crow, eventually giving in, and he would rub her back as a reward. Or she could give in now and cut straight to the back rub.

  "I'll call tomorrow," she said. "I'll have to inflate my usual price, to make it worth farming out some of the other gigs I have lined up, but if they agree to my price and a place for Lloyd, I'll do it."

  "I owe you," Crow said, leaving the sofa to lie next to her, working his fingers into her hair.

  "I lost track of who owed whom in our relationship long ago," Tess said.

  Actually, she hadn't. But it sounded healthy.

  Chapter 6

  Greer put the phone back in its cradle and looked at the clock on her computer, which she knew to be accurate to the second. That was one of her jobs, making sure that every time device in the office — the wall clocks, the phones, the computers — was synced. Ten-thirty. Flip had told her to continue trying to reach Tess Monaghan every half hour until the news came on. Until the news came on — those had been his very words. She had puzzled over those instructions. If the news came on at eleven and she was to call exactly on the half hour, did that mean she wasn't to call at eleven? Did Flip know that Baltimore had a ten o'clock newscast? Didn't most cities have ten o'clock newscasts? And then, in those cities on midwestern time, or whatever it was called, Greer believed they had nine o'clock newscasts. Not that the Midwest was relevant to this situation, but it was interesting to think about, how even seemingly precise instructions can end up being pretty vague. Yet Greer's attention to detail was almost irrelevant, given how scattered Flip could be.

  When Lottie had talked to Greer about her desire to move into the job as Flip's assistant — interrogated her, really, in that skeptical, suspicious way she had — she had told Greer that the biggest challenge would be knowing what Flip wanted. "Even when he doesn't. And that's often." Greer had chalked the warning up to jealousy. Lottie, who had "discovered" Greer, couldn't get over the fact that Greer wanted to stay in the writers' office instead of training to be an assistant director. Lottie, like most would-be mentors, needed her protégée to mirror her exactly.

  But Greer had no intention of leaving the writers' office, despite Lottie's assertion that a job as Flip's assistant was more of a cul-de-sac than a promotion. Writers were the bosses in television. And here she was in only her second industry job, working for one of the best, Flip Tumulty, the kind of person that others deferred to, sucked up to. People all over Hollywood, people whose names left Greer a little breathless, were constantly checking in with him, sending him gifts, currying favor.

  "Aw, the old Tumulty charisma," Ben had said, when she tried to feel him out on this topic, discover why people yearned for Flip's approval. She didn't think that was the whole story, not quite. You could argue that Ben had more charm, while there was a hint of the — what was the word Ben had used in a different context? A hint of the nebbish about Flip, that was it, and it served him well. Disorganized as he was when it came to his life, he never lost sight of the tiniest detail in the work. He also put in longer hours than anyone else, a trial for Greer, given that she was trying to impress Flip by being the first to arrive and the last to leave every day. Not that he noticed. There were moments where Greer stood silently in the office, assuming Flip was deep in thought, waiting for him to acknowledge her and what she had just said, only to realize that it hadn't occurred to him that her presence required any acknowledgment whatsoever.

  He wasn't mean, though. Greer knew from mean. When she had gone to California right after college, Greer had worked for the King of Mean, an entertainment lawyer-slash-manager-slash-thrower, specializing in tantrums and staplers. He had burned through golden boys and girls with better alma maters and more sterling connections, but Greer was tougher. She quickly developed a way of coping, a strategy drawn, as most of her strategies were, from the movies. She imagined that the lawyer was the Stay Puft marshmallow man from Ghostbusters, marching down the streets of New York. He could grimace, he could wave his big puffy arms, he could threaten all sorts of things, but what could a man made of sugar and water really do to her, ultimately? She developed her own stoic marshmallow-ness, an outward manner so soft and placid that he couldn't find a hold or a weak spot, and it wasn't for lack of trying. She hadn't returned to Baltimore because she couldn't cut it out there. Her father had gotten ill, and her parents had insisted that it was a daughter's responsibility to help out at home, even though she had two brothers closer by, one in Pennsylvania, the other in Delaware.

  As it turned out, her father had died in less th
an 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. Eve
n 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.

  TUESDAY

  Chapter 7

  "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.