Another Thing To Fall Read online

The third member of their party — definitely young, not so obviously a lady, not to Tess's eyes — peered over enormous sunglasses, very Jackie O, circa Ron Galella. The glasses weren't exactly the best way to travel incognito. She was attracting a lot of attention — or would have been, if there had been more people in Martick's for late-afternoon lunch. Tess had chosen this determinedly obscure restaurant on the grounds that Selene Waites would be charmed by what looked like a private club. From the outside, Martick's didn't even appear to be open for business. There was no sign, no way of knowing it existed, and one had to buzz for entry. Of course, anyone who buzzed was promptly admitted, but Selene didn't know that. Tess thought Selene might at least take off her sunglasses to inspect the black pressed-tin ceiling, the sturdy old bar, the stained-glass windows, all dating back to Martick's life as a speakeasy. But Selene kept staring fixedly at her spoon. Was it dirty?

  She said in a wispy monotone: "Venti half-caf frappuccino, please."

  "We don't make cold coffee drinks here, but I could do just about anything else — cappuccino, latte, Americano, even a good old-fashioned cup of joe."

  "Who's Captain Joe?" Selene asked, pursing her lips, eyes still trained on the spoon. She's using it as a little mirror, Tess realized. Selene even bared her teeth to check if there was lipstick on them.

  "Cup of joe," Tess said. "It's slang for coffee."

  "Why?"

  It was a reasonable question, albeit one more appropriate to a two-year-old. But then, Tess was quickly discovering that Selene Waites was not that far removed from toddlerhood — a mercurial being who was all id, focused on satisfying her desires as she experienced them, determined to control anything she could, because, on some level, she sensed that she controlled nothing. This explained why Flip had warned Tess to play out the charade of letting Selene believe that it was ultimately her decision to hire Tess as her bodyguard.

  Five seconds passed and Selene forgot her own question, or else grew bored with it. Her threshold for boredom was shockingly low. To call it attention deficit disorder would be inaccurate, because it wasn't clear that Selene was attentive enough to achieve a deficit in that area. In the ten minutes they had been in the restaurant, she had already arranged her hair three different ways and applied her lipstick twice, using two different colors.

  "Your order, miss?" This waiter was working hard for his tip.

  "The mussels to start," she said, her voice continuing thin and flat. Perhaps she only used inflections when she was being paid. "And the pâté, and the steak frites, with rolls. And a Bloody Mary, please. Do you have Effen?"

  The waiter, a Baltimore hipster — that is, an art student at MICA — was pretty quick on the uptake. "No, we've got something much better, beat all the other vodkas in a taste test, very smooth, hard to find. I can't even pronounce it."

  Selene nodded, and the waiter, aware that she wasn't looking at him, took the chance to mouth "Smirnoff" over her oblivious head. Tess enjoyed the joke, but their conspiratorial moment gave Flip a spasm of panic.

  "I admire your appetite," Tess said to Selene. "It's rare that I meet a woman who can match mine."

  "Well, I have a great metabolism," Selene said, stroking her hair, styled in a side ponytail. The motion seemed to soothe her, in the manner of a child clutching the remnant of a beloved blanket. "I eat all the time, constantly. That eating disorder stuff in the tabloids is bullshit. I'm naturally thin. I mean, if I blew up to a size six or eight, then maybe I would worry about it, but as long as I can maintain this weight—"

  Her cell phone rang, a mildly surreal moment, as Selene's ring was her own voice, doing a cover of Blondie's "Call Me."

  The waiter, slightly less relaxed, rushed back to the table. "We don't allow cell phones here, miss."

  "It's an iPhone," Selene said with elaborate patience. "Bill Gates gave it to me personally."

  "Do you mean Steve Jobs?" Tess asked.

  "Of course he has a job," Selene said. "I mean, he's pretty successful."

  The waiter persisted: "We don't let people talk on wireless devices here, and we ask that all patrons turn those devices to silent or vibrate."

  "Well, then," Selene said, "how am I going to take calls?"

  "You're not," Flip said, his voice kind yet authoritative, as he closed his hand over her iPhone. "You're here to talk to Miss Monaghan about your safety concerns."

  "Okay," she said, falling back into an abstracted silence, stroking her hair so long that her first course arrived before she spoke again.

  "I wanted mussels," she said, wrinkling her nose. She had amazing control over her features, Tess noted; the movement was contained to the nostrils alone. The result of acting for film? Botox? But surely she was too young for such things.

  "These are mussels," the waiter said. Now he, too, had taken on the patient tone that Selene inspired in others. The whole world is her enabler, Tess thought.

  "No, mussels have, like, little legs and you suck their heads. It's fun."

  Tess counted very slowly to ten — not because she was angry, but because ridiculing a potential client was a bad business practice. Luckily, it turned out that Selene really didn't need anyone to participate in her conversations. "I know what mussels are. I was supposed to shoot a film in New Orleans, but it never happened. Stupid hurricane."

  "That's crawfish you're thinking of," the waiter said.

  "Oh. Well, can I have some of those?"

  "We don't have crawfish on the menu. We have mussels. They're quite good, especially prepared this way. And easier to eat than crawfish. Use the bread to sop up the sauce."

  "Could we have more bread? I'm ravenous."

  The waiter brought them more rolls, but Selene had already lost interest. For all her talk about her famous appetite and penchant for head sucking, Selene simply sniffed at the bread, leaving a whitish smear of flour beneath her nose. It looked rather natural to Tess. How strange Selene's world must be, where spoons were used for mirrors, and mirrors were used for—

  "The thing is, I don't feel, like, I need a bodyguard." Selene spoke as if she were picking up a thread that had been discussed at some length, when the topic had yet to be broached. "Nothing's happened to me, not even close. I don't think I'm the issue. I think the production is. It's jinxed."

  "You're part of the production," Flip said, "and if anything were to happen to you…."

  "You could write Betsy out, easy," Selene said. "The show is called Mann of Steel, after all. It's Johnny's show."

  Tess didn't know much about actors, but she didn't think it was common for them to argue against the primacy of their roles.

  "Yes, well, the man who died didn't have photographs of Johnny in his house," Flip said. "He had photographs of you."

  She preened a little, as if she had been complimented.

  "If I'm going to have a bodyguard, shouldn't it be a guy, like in the movie?" Selene asked. "Nobody has a girl bodyguard."

  "You'll be the first," Flip said. "After you do it, everyone will want to do it."

  Selene stroked her hair a little faster, clearly excited by the notion of setting a trend. "Could we design an outfit for her, a uniform, something like Angelina Jolie in the Lara Croft movies, only by Prada?" She regarded Tess. "You would look a little like Angelina if you had longer hair with a completely different face. And if you dropped some weight, of course, and got your lips plumped up."

  "Of course," said Tess, feeling a pang for the long braid she had worn most of her life. Her hair fell to her shoulders now, and she kept it loose most of the time, or pulled back in a ponytail when rowing. She realized these styles were more suitable, perhaps even more flattering, to a woman in her thirties. But she missed her braid. "Only this isn't a part, and I'm not going to lose weight for it, or wear a uniform, or do my hair a certain way. I'm going to be working for you, and I take my work seriously."

  "As do I," Selene said, a little heatedly.

  "Then you both should get along great," Flip said. "No fights
, no feuds, no egos."

  "Amigos!" Selene sang, although Tess was pretty sure that Flip had slightly mangled the lyrics to the old show tune. "I was Baby June at summer camp, which is funny that I then became Baby Jane. I wanted to be Louise, though. Stupid old June, she disappears by act two."

  Now that was more what Tess expected in an actress.

  "Well, Betsy has plenty to do in our production, more than we planned," Flip said, buttering a piece of bread and actually trying to press it into Selene's hand, as if he were her mother. Or nanny. "You know we've been rewriting the last three episodes of the season, because that was the only note the network gave us — more Selene, keep her story open-ended. More, more, more. They love you, and they're willing to spend extra money to keep you safe."

  Flip might seem overly solicitous of Selene, Tess realized, but he was smooth, too, steering her toward what he wanted. Was he manipulating Tess in the same way? But no, she had decided to take the job only for Lloyd's sake, and Flip couldn't have foreseen that. She was calling her own shots.

  The main courses arrived and Tess dug in, happy for the cover of chewing. Selene sliced and cut her steak into ever smaller pieces, spread pâté on the saltines provided, and twirled her frites in the mayonnaise she had demanded that the waiter bring, much to his barely concealed disgust. But Tess never observed a morsel of food going in.

  Meanwhile, Flip was studying Tess, and less covertly.

  "I've never seen a woman eat like that," he said, caught staring at her quickly cleaned plate. "It's…impressive."

  "I eat like that," Selene said. "I have a really high metabolism."

  "Of course you do," Flip said, buttering another roll and handing it to the young woman, who placed it on the bread plate with the other roll she had ignored.

  What kind of weird family am I joining? Tess decided to focus on the money she was going to be paid, twice her usual rate. In the fine tradition of private detectives, she told herself that she would believe the money, not the story.

  She then spent the rest of lunch trying to forget the kind of terms used for those who did things just for the money.

  "You a midget?" the homeless man asked Lottie MacKenzie. Or maybe he was a vagrant. She couldn't know that he was homeless, just that he was dirty. Lottie MacKenzie always tried to stick to the facts, things that could be quantified, even in her private thoughts.

  "No," she said. "I'm not a midget."

  "Then you a dwarf? There's a difference, ain't there? Whatever you are, you probably prefer to be called a little person, right?"

  "What I am," Lottie said, "is short. That's all. Just short. If you must put a word to it, that's the one."

  "Sheeeeeeeeeeeit. Short don't cover it. You pocket-size."

  "Depends on the pocket, I suppose."

  He laughed and used her rejoinder as a cue to pull his own pocket inside out, showing that it was empty — and filthy.

  Although she usually stiffed panhandlers, especially those who so much as alluded to her height, Lottie gave the man a dollar, rationalizing that it balanced her indulgence in a three-dollar latte from the Daily Grind, not to mention the five-dollar éclair from Bonaparte Bread across the street. Lottie had grown up listening to a lot of people lay a proprietary claim to guilt — Jews, Catholics — but she couldn't imagine that anyone felt the clutch of anxiety she did at the thought of her Scottish father finding out that she had spent three dollars on coffee and milk.

  But such extravagance was preferable to making the production pay for every goddamn beverage she bought herself during the course of a working day. That would make her no different from Ben, the moocher, the schnorrer — a word she had embraced since learning it from Flip, although he laughed at how it sounded in her mouth. Her family had arrived in California when Lottie was five, and she didn't have anything resembling a Scottish accent. But there was something clipped about her voice, an inability to wrap her mouth around the Yiddish terms so common to Hollywood and movie-making. Schnorrer. Ben was such a rip-off artist that he had tried to submit receipts for the music he downloaded from iTunes, claiming he listened to music while he wrote, so it was a production-related expense. "Try that shit on the tax man, not me," Lottie had snapped at him.

  In Lottie's experience — and she had almost twenty years of working in television, far more than the Wonder Boys; she was second generation like Flip, although her father had been a propmaster — there were two ways of looking at a production. You could treat it like carrion and pick its bones clean, or you could give it the respect of a small but solid nest egg that would keep producing income as long as people didn't get greedy. Movies were carrion. Mann of Steel had the potential to be a nest egg production, something that could provide them all steady work for three or four years if people didn't lose their heads. She had lectured Ben on this concept just last week, thinking she might actually convert him to being a team player.

  "Jesus, Lottie," he had said. "Why do you think so small?" There was an awkward pause, and he had apologized, but with a smirk that made it clear his words had been chosen in order to create that awkwardness. Here she was, going on forty, and still dealing with stupid jokes about her height. Four feet ten, she should have told the homeless man, singing the words out loud and clear. Four feet fucking ten, which is not a midget or a dwarf or a little person, just short, according to the clinical definition. Four feet ten, a full foot shorter than her father, and almost six inches shorter than her mother, for no reason that anyone had ever discerned. Her mother blamed the postwar shortages, but how could her father's poor nutrition have stunted Lottie's growth when it hadn't affected his? And her mother, an American studying abroad when she met Lottie's father, had never known any dietary lack greater than decent peanut butter. Certainly, food had been abundant for all of Lottie's life, especially after they moved to Los Angeles. Her new schoolmates, incapable of understanding the difference between Scotland and Ireland, had called her Lottie the leprechaun, mocked her size and her vowel sounds. The accent was vanquished quickly, but her small stature was one of the few things that remained beyond her control.

  Behind the wheel of her car — a midsize rental, because a small car made her feel doll-like and an SUV would seem so compensatory — she fastened on her headset and began running through her calls with furious efficiency. A long lunch in the middle of a brutal day, what was Flip thinking? He would be logy and cranky for much of the afternoon. Ben wasn't answering his phone, per usual. They may have been hailed as geniuses, but Flip had trouble seeing the bigger picture outside the script, while Ben… Ben! He was simply one of the most undisciplined men she had ever worked with, and she had known some real fuckups in her time. He procrastinated, got behind, ended up with too much on his plate, and then went into hiding, like a little kid late on his homework. So many people mistook speed for urgency. Lottie was slow and methodical in her movements and her speech, but she almost never had to redo anything. She got things right the first time.

  Of course, the most frustrating thing about Ben was that the work, once done, was stellar. Not that Lottie had any intention of letting him know that.

  Besides, she had bigger worries. Something was rotten in the city of Baltimore. Throughout her career, Lottie had battled government interference, various actors' addictions, and nepotism. She had weathered weather, gone toe-to-toe with God and won the argument. But this production was off in a way that Lottie couldn't define, and it troubled her. They were making their days more often than not, Flip was dealing pretty well with the network demands for more Selene, and no one in the cast had been arrested. Yet.

  Still, there was someone in the production who couldn't be trusted, although she wasn't sure who it was. Lottie had never worked with any of these bozos before — not Flip or Ben, but also not the string of second-rate directors that the network had foisted on them, and definitely none of the union locals here in Baltimore. The last, at least, had been a pleasant surprise. The crew was disciplined and professional, honed
by years of steady work. Even the Teamsters were a joy, relatively. But no spring ran forever, and Mann of Steel was now the city's only shot at getting something up and running for a few years. Movies spent more by the day, but a successful television series spent it longer. Even a two-season run for Mann of Steel would be a godsend for the city, make its little slice of Diehard 4 look anemic.

  So why did it feel as if someone was actively rooting against the project, orchestrating its problems? Ever since that night in August, when the police had come to them with those photographs and the story of that poor man, hanging from his ceiling fan, Lottie had felt a sickening thump in her stomach, the sense that the production was somehow outside her control, an unfamiliar sensation for her.

  And she had been right — that was the beginning of their troubles, more or less, although Johnny Tampa had been whining from almost day one. Flip had his theories, but Lottie thought he was cracked. Take Mandy Stewart, the so-called community activist who was always spouting off to the newspapers. Lottie knew exactly why Mandy Stewart had become such a vocal critic, and it didn't have shit to do with the neighborhood. A local baker, she had approached Lottie about getting the production to use her goods. Lottie would have worked it out, too, if the woman had been even semireasonable, but she had quintupled her normal prices. Lottie knew this for a fact, because she had asked her assistant to call and pretend he was looking for pastries for an event at the local library, and gotten the real quote. Then there were the retired steelworkers, who had nothing better to do than drum up bad press. Again, they would go away if Lottie would hire one of them as a consultant, but she refused to be bullied that way. Why did locals try to kill the goose that laid the golden egg? Well, not kill it exactly. No, it was more like fattening a goose for pâté, only in this case, they squeezed everything out. Everyone seemed to think that Hollywood minted its own money, that it produced currency the same way it produced stories.

  One thing she knew for sure: This Theresa Esther Monaghan of Keyes Investigations was crazy if she thought she could bid a security job so high. They could get twenty-four-hour rent-a-cops for not much more. Flip could promise anything he liked, but all the paper moved through Lottie's office, and she had the final say on expenditures. She would knock Monaghan's price down and insist that the kid, the one she was forcing on them, take an unpaid internship. The specter of that small victory lifted her spirits and carried over to her conversation with the locations manager, whom she proceeded to ream with the quiet, no-nonsense tone that everyone on the crew had learned to fear. Flip yelled, Ben blustered, but it was Lottie's quiet voice that got things done.