Another Thing To Fall Page 16

  "If the problems stop now, you'll know."

  "Yes, or maybe someone else will have figured that out as well, and will use this as an opportunity." She was thinking of Selene. If she had been creating the problems on set, what would she do now? What if she had hired Greer's ex-boyfriend to be her private little troublemaker, and he had been sidetracked by whatever had happened between him and Greer? Selene's trip to New York could have been an elaborate alibi. Only — did it even count as an alibi? She could have left the restaurant anytime after Tess passed out. She was spotted at Penn Station at noon, but it had been a very conspicuous sighting, the kind of thing tailor-made for cell phone video cameras and TMZ.com. The gossip item put her at the SoHo Grand about 11 A.M. That was at least eleven hours — more than enough time to return to Baltimore, and go back to New York, with six hours in between. Do it in a private car without an E-ZPass, pay cash for whatever gas you need, avoid red-light cameras at intersections, and it was possible to make the trip without leaving a single electronic footprint.

  It was all very interesting, but Tess was working for Flip, and the last thing Flip wanted was for his star to be connected to Greer's death. Tess was supposed to be using her relationship with Tull to ensure that the production was shielded, as much as possible, from scandal. And based on what Tull was saying, she should be happy on that score. Yet she felt a mild, nagging discontent. Maybe it was nothing more than the cheese inside its deep-fried coat, growing rubbery and cold.

  Back in Selene's condo, Whitney poured Tess a glass of port.

  "Roomies again," she said, toasting her. "After all these years. But is this the future we envisioned for ourselves, babysitting a spoiled twenty-year-old?"

  "I can hear you." Selene's voice came from the living room, where she was watching a huge plasma television with the sound turned off. Selene used the television the way a baby interacted with the mobiles hung over a crib, lying back and letting the images wash over her, although without any evidence of intellectual stimulation.

  "I wanted you to," Whitney assured her. "I want you to hear every syllable that emanates from my mouth. I'm going to school you, girl."

  Tess snorted port. Whitney attempting the outmoded slang of school was too funny. She suspected Whitney knew as much.

  "So, who did we expect to be, all those years ago? How are we different?" Whitney asked. Tess didn't jump in. She knew Whitney had her own set of answers and would want to go first. "We've traded Coors for Taylor Fladgate. And instead of Kent House, our dorm, we're in a Baltimore high-rise that neither of us can afford."

  Tess was sure that her friend could afford such an apartment, but she had the WASP habit of cheapness when it came to big-ticket items. Whitney would probably live and die in the guesthouse at her parents' mildly run-down valley home because it was free.

  "We were both going to be journalists," Whitney continued. "You, a crusading investigator, part Nellie Bly, part Woodstein. Me, a globe-trotting foreign correspondent. Now you're the owner of your own business, and I run the family foundation. Upgrade?"

  "Downgrade, I would think," Selene snarked.

  "My uncle Toddy married an actress," Whitney said, addressing Tess in a stage whisper. "He was disinherited."

  Selene got up and flounced into her room, slamming the door behind her.

  "She hates me," Whitney said cheerfully.

  "Good, then you're doing your job. How was the day on set?"

  "Tedious. Why do people think it's glamorous, spending hours in a big drafty barn of a place, watching people say and do the same things over and over again?"

  "Did they give you one of those little headset thingies that allows you to listen to the scene?"

  "Yes, but I turned the sound off after the third take. I couldn't take listening to that dialogue. I felt like my IQ was dropping by the minute."

  "And the day was problem free?"

  "For our purposes. The tiny woman, Lottie, said the energy was a little off, because people are upset, but it seemed to be going well. Johnny Tampa was pissed because someone left an unflattering photo of him in his trailer. What a fat load he is. Remember how—"

  "No," Tess said quickly, knowing where her friend was heading and prepared to disavow it, three times if necessary, like Peter denying Jesus before the cock crowed. She was never going to admit to her youthful yearnings toward Johnny Tampa.

  "Oh you did too have a crush on him when you first got to school." Whitney spoke with the smugness of a true friend. "What were you thinking? Even thin, he wasn't that attractive."

  Tess looked out at the harbor, so beautiful at night. Her thoughts followed her eyes eastward, to the mouth of the bay and then across it, time-traveling to the pretty little college campus where two girls had met, two girls who were at once so much younger and older than the girl who had just closeted herself behind her bedroom door. "We thought that we would never get old, much less fat. Well, fatter, in my case. We thought our metabolisms would never change. We thought we would get everything we wanted. We were, in short, twenty."

  Whitney laughed in rueful agreement. "What if someone had made you a bargain, all those years ago, offered you all this? Not just the apartment, but the life, too? The money, the beauty, the attention. Would you have wanted it under these conditions — life in a fishbowl, a job at which you have very little control?"

  "Honestly? At twenty? I think I would have said yes. I think almost anyone would. At twenty. Not now."

  "Poor baby," Whitney said, looking at the closed bedroom door, sotto voce for once. "She's already beaten the million-to-one odds by becoming a successful actress. Now she has to face the ten million-to-one odds of becoming an actress who finds work past the age of thirty-five. Remember the silent stars whose careers ended when the talkies came along? For women, it hasn't really changed."

  "Marie… Dressler, the one whose dog ate her," Tess recalled.

  "Wrong Marie," Whitney said. "Marie Dressler was in Dinner at Eight. You're thinking of Marie Prevost. Remember, Nick Lowe had a song about her. He rhymed winner with doggie's dinner. And then there was Lupe Velez—"

  "She was in talkies," Tess said.

  "Right. But she went bankrupt and ended up drowning in her toilet when she vomited up all the Seconals she had taken in hopes of a slightly more, uh, picturesque suicide. Don't you know your Hollywood Babylon? Hollywood kills its own."

  "Well, there was Thelma Todd, whose murder was never solved," Tess said. "But I'm not sure that was actually Hollywood's fault."

  "You've forgotten the starlet who jumped from the thirteenth letter of the Hollywoodland sign — back when it had thirteen letters. Oh, and another one who immolated herself on a pyre of her own clippings. What a way to go."

  The two old friends fell silent, and Tess assumed that Whitney must be thinking, as she was, of the fates available to actresses of a certain age. To women of a certain age. The distinctive ring of Selene's cell phone broke the silence, followed by her side of the conversation — not the words, only the tone, which was suffused with a husky, flirtatious giggle.

  "I wonder who she's talking to," Tess said. "Then again, knowing Selene, she'd talk to the dry cleaners in that breathy little voice."

  "Easy enough to find out."

  "How?"

  "She has an eleven o'clock call tomorrow. Grab her cell while she's still asleep, check the received call log, make a note of it."

  As it happened, Tess didn't have to wait until morning. A few minutes later, the water started running in Selene's bathroom. Tess knocked softly on the bedroom door in a pretense of courtesy, then pushed inside, Whitney trailing her. While Whitney kept an eye on the closed bathroom door, Tess grabbed the iPhone. It took a second for her to figure out its protocols, and when she did find the received call log, the latest call wasn't particularly surprising: DEREK. He and Selene had probably shared one more laugh over drugging Tess; that gag never got old. The other calls were from her driver, Lottie, and Selene's mother. In fact, it looked
as if Selene's mother called every day about the same time, which surprised Tess. She hadn't thought the Waites family was particularly supportive of their daughter.

  The received call log exhausted, Tess was about to put the phone back on the nightstand when she remembered Selene's furiously tapping thumb, texting in the car on the way to New York. She found the text function and clicked back two days in time. Derek again, checking Selene's ETA. And, in between Derek's calls, one from a different number, a text that read simply: ACHING FOR YOU. WHERE ARE YOU? The absence of text shorthand — no 4 for for, no u for you, no r for are — might have been enough to tip Tess off to the sender — someone who had enough pride, or time, to use the language in full. But she didn't have to guess. The text was from someone named "Benny," who happened to have a number in Selene's phone book.

  She pressed the call button, hanging up when Ben Marcus picked up breathlessly on the second ring: "Have you figured out a way to get rid of them?"

  Chapter 22

  He waited until Marie was asleep to put in one of Bob's movies. Marie knew about the stash of VHS tapes, of course, and the old VCR that had suddenly materialized. He could never hide anything in this house. Marie knew their home the way some people knew their bodies — she could detect any change in it, no matter how small. The house was her body, in a sense; she inhabited it the way a hermit crab lived in its shell, only she never outgrew it. She could be resting on the sofa in the evening, yet tell by sound alone if he put something away in the wrong place in the kitchen. Where would he hide her Christmas gifts this year, now that he didn't have an office? But everything should be solved by Christmas, one way or another. It had to be. Bob's estate would be settled, the other matter resolved as well, and he could tell Marie everything. Well, not everything, but he could tell her that he had decided to take early retirement, thanks to this windfall that Bob had engineered for them before he died. Even then, Marie probably wouldn't want to watch the films. They always made her cry, even the silly ones.

  When he brought the VHS tapes home, he had told a semitruth, as he liked to think of it. It was hard for him to think of anything he said as a lie, because then he would be a liar, and that didn't fit with his sense of himself. He told Marie that while Bob's estate was held up in probate, the Orphans' Court had determined that certain items of no financial value could be removed from the premises. And a judge might have ruled that way, if a judge had been asked. In reality, he had made the ruling, after a fashion, entering and leaving with the set of keys that Bob had given him years ago — the same keys he had used to unlock the back door that day, after a week of Bob not answering his phone.

  In his mind, he framed the memory as Bob might have framed the scene in his viewfinder. He did not see the kitchen through his own eyes but saw it as if the camera was watching him from the other side of the room — the door opening, his eyes moving slowly upward, only Bob's feet and ankles on view. It was a clichéd way of seeing, a scene stolen from someone else — but then, he didn't have Bob's eye.

  He had wanted to believe it was despair, nothing more, Bob finally laid low by some variant of the same odd brain chemistry that affected his only sister, Marie. But then he discovered what a mess Bob had left behind — the debts, the second mortgage, the refinance on the first mortgage, a balloon that was going to come due in a year, kicking up to a disastrously high rate. Then there was the lawyer, saying he was still owed money, even though it was his bills that had driven Bob to near bankruptcy in the first place, and that he planned to attach the house. Who cared if some VHS tapes disappeared? Even a grasping lawyer wouldn't assign them any value.

  Still, they might try to take the movies from him, if they knew. He wouldn't put anything past these people. Thinking about them, thinking about all the people who were allied against him, made his face grow hot, then anger and humiliation overtook him again, just as it had the other night. Quickly, he pushed the play button, desperate to lose himself in Bob's meticulous fantasy world.

  The film opened on a shot of a castle — this would be the decrepit old mansion on St. Lo Drive, but it looked so elegant on film, so much better than it did in life. Most things did. A knight and his squire entered the frame. Don Quixote? Ivanhoe? While some of Bob's movies had dialogue, this one had only a musical score, and it quickly burst into a choreographed battle, with other knights emerging from the forest to challenge the hero. Ivanhoe. He and Bob were infants when that film was first released, the version with the two Taylors, Elizabeth and Robert, but they had probably caught it in reruns, on the old Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. Had that been Channel 2 or Channel 11? He could no longer remember, but he did recall that there were two movies, at most, on Sunday afternoons, and people waited years for a big movie to make its way from the cinema to the television. Now movies were everywhere, all the time, available with one click of a computer mouse, on sale at the grocery store, in rental bins at McDonald's. This easy accessibility should cheapen the experience, but it somehow never did. Nothing could break the spell of a good movie.

  On his screen, the eleven-year-old versions of Ivanhoe and his squire broke free and ran across the undulating hills of Clifton Park. Okay, he wasn't objective, but it seemed to him that Bob's camerawork was outstanding.

  In the bedroom, Marie was snoring. He picked up the phone, called his contact.

  "Have you seen the call sheet for tomorrow?"

  "Yes, only — look, I'm not sure I should be doing this anymore. Someone was killed. There's a lot more attention."

  "I know," he said. "But that has nothing to do with us, does it?"

  A short silence, as if the question was being considered. "You had the code, to get into the building. I gave that to you weeks ago."

  "I never used it," he said swiftly. "As you pointed out to me, access to the building wasn't worth anything, if I couldn't get into the offices, and you said they were always locked tighter than a drum."

  "Of course, yeah, but — you can see why I'm creeped out. What if they find out I'm the one who gives you the information about the call sheet?"

  "You told me the list is set up on a bcc, so they don't even see the addresses. Even if someone goes looking for it, they'll just think it was a mistake, an oversight."

  "I suppose…."

  He turned off the video player, and watched the CNN crawl on mute, relying on silence to get him what he wanted, an old teacher's trick. He could bring his classes to order simply by staring at the students, back in the day, although that had gotten more difficult toward the end of his time in the classroom. The children became so hard, so mean.

  A resigned sigh. "They're going to be at Green Mount Cemetery most of the day. With both Mann and Betsy."

  "Thank you—"

  "Also, there's something else, something extra."

  "You already told me they'll be shooting Saturday to make up for the missed day. But I don't think I'm going to worry about that." It was hard for him to get away on weekends. Besides, the person he needed was dead now.

  "No, not shooting. Something else."

  "Yes?"

  "You see, it's extra. Outside our agreement, which covers only the information on the call sheets and other production-related e-mails. So…"

  A childhood taunt came back to him — greedy guts. "How much do you want?"

  "Fifty?"

  The matter was open to negotiation, but he was too tired to barter. The fact was, when you were going broke, small sums became less urgent, paradoxical as that might seem. With only a few months between him and an abyss of debt, he couldn't worry about the stray fifty here or there, especially if it led to his windfall. "Fifty it is."

  "There's a memorial service Sunday, on the soundstage. For Greer. Everyone will be there. There's going to be security — they don't want any press — but I don't think they'll question anyone who claims to be family, and she's got some uncles and cousins. You could blend right in."

  This was good information, although not in the way she thoug
ht. He could definitely use this. "Okay, look for an extra fifty in your pay envelope Monday."

  "I've been thinking — what will you do now? Without Greer, I mean. Didn't everything depend on her?"

  "You let me worry about that."

  "I might figure out a solution to your problem. I might be able to help."

  The impudence! So now it was to be a partnership — and he didn't need or want a partner. He might not resent an extra fifty dollars here or there, but he wasn't sharing the jackpot with anyone.

  "I really don't want you to worry. Good night, and look for your bonus, come Monday."

  FRIDAY

  Chapter 23

  The Starbucks barista seemed to know Ben Marcus, at least by sight and coffee preference, calling out his order before he reached the cash register. Hidden in a corner, Tess watched him, happy for the chance to observe an unwary Ben. He was always so on during their encounters — picking even his most sarcastic words with care. But maybe that was Ben's way of speaking to everyone. Although she couldn't hear what he was saying to the peppy young barista, Tess could tell from his expression that he was his usual arch self. If he was nervous about this meeting, it wasn't apparent. Last night, when Tess had called him on her own phone for a more substantive conversation, he had been caught off guard and had even stammered in a place or two. But in the intervening nine hours since he agreed to this meeting, he would have had time to think about what he wanted to say, to shape his story. He was, after all, a professional storyteller.

  He doctored his mocha with extra sugar, then plopped down in the upholstered chair opposite Tess.

  "Thanks," he said, although neither his tone nor his expression indicated gratitude. "For meeting me here, instead of the office. There's not much privacy there."

  "Is that how Greer found out you were sleeping with Selene?"

  He seemed surprised that she was so direct — and a little relieved. Ben was probably used to meetings that began with more smoke blowing and ass kissing.