Another Thing To Fall Read online

  "If we get a pickup," Lottie said to him now, after checking in with both children, "we could live here. We could live like kings, in fact. You can buy a Victorian mansion for the price of a two-bedroom bungalow in Glendale."

  "It will all work out, even if the show doesn't go," Jason said. "You always find a gig. You're in demand."

  "I want a gig that allows me to live with my family full-time," she said. "I want to look after my own children, not tend to those who simply behave childishly. But — shit."

  "What, babe?"

  "Fire."

  "You had to fire someone again?"

  "No, there — I think — look, I have to go."

  Smoke was creeping under the door, lazily, almost prettily. Her mind detached briefly, as if she were watching an effect created for the screen. Nicely done. Sinister, yet not over the top. She willed herself to be calm and approached the door with a tentative hand. It wasn't warm to the touch. Cautiously, she opened it, peering out. The hallway was filled with smoke, although she couldn't pinpoint the origin. She groped her way toward the elevator, pushed the buttons, then remembered that she should take the stairs. Where was the stairwell? At the other end of the hallway. She crouched low, practically crawling. The smoke seemed to be thinning, but that could be wishful thinking on her part.

  Once outside, she gulped for air, and it was almost as if she could taste it, drink it down. She walked to the edge of the parking lot before she called 911 from the cell phone in her pocket. The fire station was mere blocks away, and it was a great comfort to be able to hear the sirens start seconds after she called, although it was also unnerving, standing alone in the parking lot. She couldn't see any flames, but where there was smoke…. What could be burning? Electrical malfunction? If the fire had been set — her mind didn't want to follow that train of thought, but she couldn't stop it — if the fire had been set, someone else was here, or had been here. Yet her car was the only one on the lot. She locked herself in it, but that didn't make her feel safe enough. She drove a few blocks away and parked in a busier, better-lit area, listening to the sirens drawing closer.

  PART THREE

  DESPERATE LIVING

  SUNDAY

  Special to the Beacon-Light

  Firefighters and police were summoned yet again to the production offices of Mann of Steel late Friday — for what turned out to be a homemade smoke bomb.

  Only one person was on the premises, unit production manager Lottie MacKenzie, and no one was injured in the incident, which appears to be another in a series of pranks that have plagued the production.

  Asked if she thought the smoke bomb had been planted by someone unhappy about Mann of Steel — the troubled production's detractors include some community activists, local historians, and disgruntled steelworkers — MacKenzie said she was sure it was an isolated incident, "Probably a prank by kids, nothing more."

  Firefighters have been called three times before to the Mann of Steel set, although always when the production was filming in Mount Vernon and Fells Point.

  More seriously, the production office was the site of a murder earlier this week, but police are adamant that there is no connection, given that the suspect, John "JJ" Meyerhoff, was killed early Friday in a standoff with police.

  "Still, every incident like this is just another example of Mann of Steel's drain on our resources," said Mandy Stewart, a community activist who has complained about the inconveniences caused by the production when it's on location in Fells Point. "They take and they take and they take, but they're not putting anything back."

  Chapter 26

  "And Greer said, in that terribly earnest way she had, ‘But it's chartreuse, Mr. Tumulty.'"

  The mourners laughed in that delayed rueful way common to memorial services, as if they needed a second to grant themselves permission. Tess had to admit — Flip was a good public speaker, and he had found the perfect tone for his eulogy. Thanks to him, the service was doing what a memorial or funeral should do, but so often didn't: respecting the memory of the deceased while cheering people slightly, but not too much. In Flip's experienced hands, Greer's story became one of a hardworking local girl who hadn't been afraid to reveal her ignorance if it meant doing her job better. It was a nice story. Tess wondered if any of it was true. She wondered if it mattered if it was true. Probably not. God forbid that anyone tell the truth at her funeral. Maybe she should write that down somewhere, leave it behind in a safe-deposit box with the will she had yet to write: No truth telling at my funeral!

  Flip's achievement was all the more remarkable when one considered how few genuine friends Greer had among the cast and crew of Mann of Steel. As for her family — there wasn't much, not here, just her mother, two stocky men who appeared to be her brothers, and a few older women, aunts or cousins. And no high school friends, Tess decided, studying the crowd. No friends of any stripe? She glimpsed Alicia Farmer in the back, which seemed curious. She had been so candid about disliking Greer. Was she here to network? With Greer dead, would she try to persuade Lottie that it was Greer who had released the proprietary materials? A few months at Charm City Video could make a woman pretty desperate.

  Flip paused, taking a sip of water, and Selene's voice jumped into the silence — that is, the ring tone on Selene's cell phone, blaring her pallid cover of "Call Me," made its presence known, buried deep as it was in her huge leather bag, a designer brand Tess couldn't identify, although she was fairly sure it cost as much as her first car, even after adjusting for inflation. Before Selene could grab the phone, Whitney literally slapped the girl's hand, reached into the bag, turned it off, and then put it in her own purse. Tess had other reasons for wanting Whitney with her today, but chaperoning Selene through a memorial service had turned out to be a job that required both of them. Just getting her properly dressed had taken hours, as Selene's idea of suitable garb ranged from a thigh-high skirt to an overly theatrical black Dior suit. The suit would have been appropriate under some circumstances, but it made Selene look like a little girl playing dress-up — a Eurotrash princess or the grieving widow of a president cut down in his prime. "No one has ever confused Tess or me with Diana Vreeland," Whitney had hissed at one point, "but I think even Vogue agrees that funerals require panties." In the end, they had managed to assemble a safe-for-Baltimore outfit of navy dress and cashmere cardigan.

  "I can't be photographed in this!" Selene had protested. "I'll be on the ‘What was she thinking?' list in the Star." Tess pointed out that because the memorial was on private property, the landlord was within his rights to restrict press access, just as he had forced the steelworkers to hold their informational picket on the narrow strip of grass alongside the parking lot. As it turned out, press in this case was a lone Beacon-Light reporter, juggling a notebook and a video camera, and two of the local television crews, no reporters in tow. Would the memorial have attracted more attention if Greer's homicide was still considered an open case? Or was Baltimore simply getting blasé about Hollywood? Tess wanted to believe it was the latter.

  Flip finished with John Donne, his only misstep to Tess's mind. It seemed a bit clichéd, and not at all central to Greer's life. Whitney, on the other side of Selene, must have had the same thought, for she passed Tess a note: With Greer dead and no replacement, he probably doesn't have anyone to look up appropriate poetry for memorial services. On Tess's right, Lloyd frowned, embarrassed for them. Lloyd took funerals seriously.

  Flip asked Greer's mother if she wanted to say anything, but she shook her head. She looked so old. Based on Greer's age, Tess calculated that Mrs. Sadowski could have been as young as forty-five, as old as sixty-five if Greer had been what was once called a change-of-life baby, but she definitely looked as if she fell into the high end of that range. Her hair was gray, the kind of faded, washed-out gray that appeared to have given up on color out of sheer exhaustion, her face weathered and haggard. She had an understandably shell-shocked expression, and although a handkerchief was balled up in her
fist, she had yet to cry that Tess could see. She just kept squeezing the handkerchief tighter and tighter.

  "Well," Flip said, caught off guard by the mother's refusal to speak, which he clearly had been counting on for his big finale. "I guess we should, um, eat."

  Next to the "chapel," which had been created in one of the unused corners of the cavernous soundstage, a local caterer had set up an elaborate spread. Given the circumstances, someone — the set designer or art director — had made the impromptu catering hall pretty, draping dark cloths and hanging a large blowup of a photograph of Greer, bent over her clipboard. The photo had clearly been taken on set, as Selene was in the foreground, yet the eye was drawn to Greer, who was in sharper detail. The photo was, in fact, extraordinarily good, very well framed, arresting in a way that Tess couldn't define for herself.

  "Selene, who took that photo?" she asked.

  "That guy. What's-his-name. Somebody. I'm dying for a cigarette. Can I go outside?"

  "In a few minutes," Tess said, conscious of her other agenda. She, Whitney, and Selene needed to be conspicuously in the thick of things, at least for a while.

  She continued to study Greer, mostly forehead and hair in the shot. Tess remembered the young woman who had fished her out of the water, a mere week ago. Like Alicia Farmer — who had slipped out as soon as the service was over, clearly anxious not to mingle — Tess couldn't pretend that she cared for Greer. In fact, she had found her rather obnoxious. But, no, you wouldn't wish someone dead for that, or even for the annoyance of being overly ambitious. The obvious answer is the obvious answer, she reminded herself. Greer broke up with her fiancé, and he killed her. Happened all the time.

  Flip was steering Greer's mother through the buffet line, helping her fill her plate. Whitney followed with Selene, picking the most fattening foods in the spread, which included miniature crab cakes, deviled eggs, and a ten-layer cake in the Smith Island style. Lottie, alone in a corner, looked miserable. Grieving Greer or the cost of this shindig? Tess immediately felt bad about her own snarky thoughts, remembering the scare that Lottie had experienced Friday night. It had turned out to be a smoke bomb, like two of the other incidents on location. But, innocuous as the homemade smoke bomb may have been, its presence meant someone had broken into the offices after hours. That was genuinely troubling. Tess thought they should change the code, but the management company didn't want to inconvenience its long-term tenants for the sake of the short-term Mann of Steel. Lottie had admitted to Tess that she had been a hard-ass in negotiating the lease, and the management company couldn't wait for them to vacate. If they did get a pickup, they wouldn't be coming back to Tide Point.

  Tess saw Lloyd across the warehouse, giving one of Greer's relatives a tour of the set itself, explaining various technical details — the drops used to create views through "windows," the lights that could mimic day or night. Tess was amazed at how much Lloyd had absorbed in his first week at work, but she was even more stunned at his unflagging enthusiasm. True, it had only been a week, but she had never seen Lloyd excited about anything, except certain action films and, on occasion, a chicken box from one of his old haunts.

  The reception was breaking down now into its natural subsets — cast and crew in one cluster, Greer's family in another, Ben off by himself, a can of soda clutched in his hand. Tess saw another gray, haggard-looking woman moving toward Greer's mother and assumed it was one of the relatives, although she didn't remember seeing this woman during the service. But when the woman spoke to Mrs. Sadowski, whatever she said caused Greer's mother to reel back so quickly that Flip just missed having a plate of food smashed into his shirtfront.

  "You have some nerve," Mrs. Sadowski rasped at the woman. "Coming here, to ask me that."

  "You won't talk to me on the phone, so what am I supposed to do? It was his property, plain and simple, should have been given back weeks ago. He owes on it. You want me to make payments on an engagement ring that your daughter wouldn't give back, when everyone knows she should've? My son is dead, too."

  "He broke up with her," Mrs. Sadowski shrilled. "You don't have to give it back under those circumstances. Especially when he killed her."

  "He broke up with her because she was cheating on him. That's different. And we'll never know what really happened, will we?"

  Even as Tess moved forward, anxious to help Flip keep order, her mind was stumbling over that fact. He broke up with her… but Greer had told everyone at work that it was the other way around. Saving face? Or had she lied to her mother? And, wait — cheating? Greer was cheating on her fiancé? With whom?

  But she didn't have the luxury of sorting out her thoughts just now, not with Mrs. Sadowski flinging a plate of food into the face of JJ Meyerhoff 's mother, who let out a banshee wail and pushed back, so that Mrs. Sadowski was propelled into Flip, who landed backward on the buffet table, which went down in a heap under his weight, the ten-layer cake landing on his chest.

  Ben had been looking for an opportunity to sneak out, and he couldn't have asked for a sweeter moment than the mother melee. Man, it felt as if he had been waiting for this moment for weeks, although Greer had been dead barely four days. Well, he supposed he should be grateful it was a service, not an actual funeral or, worse, a viewing. He found those barbaric. But an open casket probably hadn't been an option after what Greer's ex had done to her.

  And it was JJ, right? It had to be JJ. Because if it was someone else, then someone else knew.

  Before the service began, Ben had made a point of introducing himself to Greer's mother, clasping her shoulder. Put a housedress on Mrs. Sadowski, and she wouldn't have been out of place in a Dorothea Lange portrait. Someone should show Selene this face, let her see what a lifetime of smoking could do to one's complexion.

  "Mrs. Sadowski," he said, extending his hand. "Ben Marcus. I worked with Greer. We're so sorry this happened."

  She gave him a look, but it was dull and glazed over. His name didn't seem to mean anything to her. Greer hadn't spoken of him to her mother. Good. For once, he had never been happier to be lost in Flip's shadow, just the sidekick.

  And now here he was, literally lost. He could never find his way in Baltimore, especially outside the Beltway. It took him almost an hour to locate the apartment that Greer had shared with her boyfriend up until a month ago. Luck was with him, for once — it was a so-called garden apartment on a split-level, the windows on the front barely above the ground, but with a small patio on the rear. Once, while researching a cop show, he had read that sliding doors could be rocked open. The information had seemed dubious, but he tried, and the door gave way with surprising ease.

  Only maybe it wasn't so surprising. Someone had already been here. The place was a wreck. Had the boyfriend stopped here on his way out of town? Drawers and cabinets had been pulled open, sofa cushions tossed. In the narrow galley kitchen, all the items from beneath the sink had been left on the floor.

  Flip's office had been ransacked, too — stop, don't think about that, it's crazy.

  He found his way to the bedroom, which was even worse — the mattress flipped, clothing scattered everywhere. Whoever had been here seemed to have begun in a fairly systematic way, then become increasingly antic. The mother had said something about a ring, but Greer had worn the ring even after the breakup. Besides, JJ almost certainly hadn't returned here after Greer was dead. Police would have been watching the place. Someone else had been here, looking for something. The same something that Ben wanted? How could that be? There was no one alive who knew of its existence — right? Greer had sworn to him that it was their secret, that no one else knew, not even her fiancé.

  There was no percentage in staying here. He went out the way he had come in, realizing that the patio door had opened for him so magically because someone else had jimmied it before. When? Days ago, hours ago, minutes ago? He tried to walk nonchalantly to his car, just a guy in a suit, passing through a suburban parking lot. Jesus, that woman was morbidly obese. How do p
eople get like that? And if you had the misfortune to weigh three hundred pounds, why would you wear a huge flowery dress with a purple belt emphasizing your nonexistent waist? He waved at her, figuring that the more attention you drew to yourself, the less likely people were to remember you.

  Tess had set her cell on silent for the service and then forgotten about it, what with helping to clean ten-layer cake off Flip and trying to get the dueling mothers to a point where the police wouldn't have to be called. The plan had been to let the reception take the place of a late lunch, but with most of the food on the floor, they ended up at Chili's, Lloyd's favorite restaurant. Crow had made a lot of headway with Lloyd's taste in films but virtually none with his taste in food. Tess didn't mind. She shared Lloyd's love of Chili's nachos. She was helping herself to the wonderfully cheesy, gooey concoction when she felt something vibrating close to her thigh.

  "Yes, Mrs. Blossom?"

  "You were right!" The woman screamed with such glee that Tess had to hold the phone away from her ear. "He left the soundstage and went to the girl's apartment. But he didn't stay long, not even five minutes. And I peeked in the windows after he left, and the place is trashed. Trashed. He couldn't have possibly done it, not so quick. So someone else was there, too."

  "Did he see you?"