Another Thing to Fall (17 page)

“Was there a broken engagement, much less a threat? Lottie told police that you mentioned something to her yesterday, but no one else seems to know exactly where they stood.”

He crossed one leg over the other, resting his foot on his knee. He wore jeans and sneakers, with an Oxford shirt that he hadn’t bothered to tuck in, or maybe he just couldn’t keep his shirt tucked in for long.

“I was just inferring. Greer had been pretty jumpy the past couple of weeks. And there were other signs that seemed to indicate a breakup.”

“She was still wearing an engagement ring when I met her.”

“Yeah, well, Greer wasn’t one inclined to let go of anything once she got it in her grasp. I guess she persuaded herself that she was within her rights to keep the ring. Look, why do you care? This is what homicide detectives do, right?”

“I was hired because of problems on the set. This could be connected.”

“Then the problems will stop, won’t they, once they have the guy locked up.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Ben was getting irritated. “Fuckin’ Flip. Look, I know what he thinks. It’s
not
Selene.”

“How can you be so adamant?”

“Because, well…” He scratched his cheek. At least he shaved every day, didn’t cultivate the stubble look. “Because that girl doesn’t have the necessary IQ to organize a trip to the 7-Eleven, much less play these kind of pranks. As for murder—”

“Selene went to a lot of trouble last night to get out of town, establish an alibi.”

“She went to a lot of trouble to dump your ass the way I hear it, Sam Spade.”

“I fancy myself more as the Continental Op. After all, he has his roots in Baltimore.”

“Bullshit. Hammett wrote about San Francisco.”

“He was born in St. Mary’s County and grew up in Southwest Baltimore, and started work as a Pinkerton here. In the Continental Building at Baltimore and Calvert streets. Which, by the way, has two birds above the front door, birds that were once painted black.”

Now he was interested. “No shit?”

“Why would I make up something like that?”

“I live in a place where people tell a dozen lies before breakfast, just to stay in practice. Myself included.” He almost seemed to be boasting.

“Don’t lie to the cops when you talk to them,” Tess said. “Although, admittedly, almost everybody does.”

“Why would I lie to them?”

“Where were you last night?”

“In my hotel room. Alone. Oh, by the way,
fuck
you. I didn’t kill Greer. Why would I?”

He was staring straight out at the water. Tess was watching the suede Nike balanced on his left knee. He had been jiggling his foot from the first mention of Selene, although he had been the one who brought her name into the conversation. Or had the jiggling begun with Greer? It was tricky sometimes, not taking notes, but it made people so nervous that it wasn’t worth it.

“I don’t know. Why does anyone kill anyone? And yet they do, almost every day in this city.”

“I hate this place.”

Normally, Tess took such statements about her hometown about the same way she responded to imprecations against her mother. But she decided to play along.

“It’s not an easy town to be an outsider. A lot of Baltimoreans — they’ve never been anywhere, so they don’t know what it’s like to be new to a place, and they don’t reach out to newcomers. But won’t you have to live here if
Mann of Steel
gets picked up?”

“Probably. Makes it hard to know whether to root for a success.” He must have caught something in Tess’s face because he quickly added: “Kidding. I’m
kidding
. I don’t want to shut the production down. Frankly, Flip and I need a hit. We’ve been critical darlings and wunderkinds long enough. We’re older now, the rules have changed. We need to be straight-up
wunders,
and being beloved by the critics isn’t enough anymore. It’s time to make serious money for somebody.”

“But it does appear that someone wants to hamper the production. And now Greer is dead.”

“That stuff that’s been happening… it could just be bad luck. And if Greer’s fiancé killed her, that has bupkes to do with the production. I’m not big on conspiracy theories. Real life is simple.”

“Yes,” Tess said agreeably. “In real life, for example, sometimes people are just hanging out in their hotel rooms, alone, on nights when it would be nice to have an alibi.”

“You know, you’re the first woman I’ve ever wanted to call an asshole.”

It was the second time in two days a man had used this word to describe her. Tess decided it was a compliment of sorts. She’d rather be an asshole than a bitch.

“What about Lottie?”

“What about her?”

“My sense is that you’re not too fond of each other.”

“Look, Miss Marple—”

“She was an amateur. I’m paid to do what I do.”

“Did you know there has never been a successful television show about a female private investigator?” Ben asked abruptly. “Spies, yes. Amateurs, yes. Straight-up cops, sure. But no
female
private investigators. I know, it’s what killed
Ottoman’s Empire.
What does that tell you about your chosen profession?”

“It tells me,” Tess said, “that you’ll go a long way out of your way to change the subject, rather than talk about last night, or Greer. Or Selene.”

“I don’t care what time it is,” he said, rising to his feet. “I need coffee.
And
vodka. Right now, what I really want is coffee with vodka in it. You think I can find that in this godforsaken peninsula?”

He walked away but didn’t stop at the Daily Grind, just kept going toward Fort Avenue. It was almost as if he planned to turn right and start walking westward, all the way home to California. And that was fine with Tess.

Lottie MacKenzie held up one finger — one tiny, rigid index finger — and Tess froze on the threshold of her office like a well-trained dog at the edge of an invisible fence.
I could learn things from this woman,
she thought. Tess had yet to hear Lottie raise her voice or threaten anyone, yet she somehow managed the trick of being formidable. The fact that she didn’t try to fight her size only served to make her more intimidating, even in her overalls and voguish Skechers. No heels for Lottie, which was shrewd. If she had attempted a more grown-up outfit, a suit and heels, she would have looked like a doll, or a child playing dress up. Instead, she appeared to be a precocious sixth-grader who happened to be in charge of a $25 million production.

Her office furnishings did make one concession to her height — a footstool next to her Herman Miller chair, but she wasn’t using that just now. She sat with her legs crossed, in the style that the un-PC still called “Indian fashion,” and her body sang with such palpable energy that Tess wouldn’t be surprised if she could levitate from that position. She reminded Tess of a hummingbird, a very industrious one, hovering in the air with so much to do, so much to accomplish.

A hummingbird — and Tess was scared to death of her.

“I thought,” Lottie said, when she hung up the phone, “that your job was to watch Selene, not hang around here. Although, if I had my way, you wouldn’t have that job anymore.”

“I’ve added personnel. At no extra cost,” Tess added swiftly when Lottie’s eyes narrowed. “Someone will be with her at all times now, even during filming. But Flip also has given me latitude to look into the other problems you’ve had on set.”

“You think Greer’s murder…”

“I don’t
think
anything. My job is to have an open mind. However, if I find a connection, I’m obligated to go to the police.”

“But you’ll talk to us first.” Lottie tried to make it sound like an order, but there was the tiniest hesitation in her voice, the hint of a question mark. “I mean, we pay you, so whatever you learn is proprietary to us, I assume.”

“Maybe,” Tess said, determined not to have that fight until it was necessary. “Right now, I’m more interested in how proprietary
materials
— the pilot script, the show’s bible — ended up in the home of that man who committed suicide. A man who might have been stalking Selene.”

Lottie had a pencil holder filled with actual pencils, old-fashioned yellow no. 2s, uniformly, lethally sharp. When did she find the time to sharpen them all, how did she maintain them at the same length? She pulled one out of the lumpy ceramic mug that held them and pressed the point into her palm. Tess was reminded of the old story about G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate burglar, passing his hand through a flame to show how tough he was, and she relaxed a little. If Lottie needed to make a show of strength for Tess’s sake, then she wasn’t that strong.

“That’s a personnel matter, and I can’t discuss it with you. Liability issues.”

Tess took a moment. She didn’t count to ten — experience had taught her there was no number, whether it was ten, a hundred, or a billion — that could reverse her temper’s trajectory. Instead, she studied her surroundings, thought about what she wanted, and how saying something rude or snappish, while providing a fleeting satisfaction, would not get her any closer to that goal.

“Lottie, I work for you. For the production. We’re on the same team.”

“You were hired by Flip, who didn’t even consult me beforehand. I was against this from the start, and given what’s happened, I wasn’t wrong.”

Tess remained calm, but she didn’t bother to hide her exasperation at Lottie’s logic. “Greer isn’t dead because I came to work here.”

Lottie didn’t blush when embarrassed, not exactly, but color rose slightly in her face, two freakishly perfect round dots of red. Tess would bet anything that older people had grabbed those cheeks once upon a time, pinched them, and told Lottie how cute she was. How she must have loathed it.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” she conceded. “But it’s hard not to consider the… juxtaposition. The other things, before, were relatively minor. Trash can fires when we filmed outside. The sudden flak from the community people and the steelworkers. Nair in cold cream. This — murder, ransacking the office — is something different.”

“And, as far as the police can tell, probably unrelated. They’re looking for Greer’s ex-fiancé.”

Lottie resumed testing the pencil points against her palm.

“Did you ever meet him?” It was a hunch, but Tess was no enemy of hunches.

“Once. Greer tried to get him a job here. He has some carpentry skills, he thought he could work with the art department, but we have a full complement. The guy who’s doing our set is a local, a veteran who came up with John Waters, and he has all the people he needs. I wasn’t going to force some nepotism hire on him to make an intern happy.”

“So Greer put her fiancé up to it?”

Lottie suddenly seemed to become aware of her own strange behavior and put the pencils back in the holder, brushing her palms together. “That’s what I thought at the time. But, later, I wondered if it was his idea, if he wanted a job here so he could keep an eye on Greer.”

“Was Greer involved with someone on the production?”

Lottie didn’t speak right away, and Tess willed herself to wait it out, let the silence work on Lottie.
The person who speaks next is a loser,
she chanted in her thoughts.
The person who speaks next is a loser.

“No, but—”

Loser! I win, I win. High-five me. It’s my birthday, it’s my birthday.
Yes, it was ridiculous, but Tess wasn’t above a little end-zone celebrating in her head.

“I think she aspired to be.”

“With whom?”

“Anyone. Anyone, that is, who could help her. Greer would have initiated a relationship with me, if she thought that would be beneficial to her career goals.”

Lottie’s gaze dared Tess to ask the question. But she had a different tack in mind.

“Interesting, that she would think that a married woman with kids might be open to that. She must have been casting a wide net.”

Lottie, surprised, held out her hands, as if to check that her ring finger was, in fact, quite bare.

“I noticed you don’t wear any jewelry,” Tess said. “No earrings, no necklaces, not even a watch. Perhaps your skin doesn’t do well with any metal, even gold? Or maybe it’s just part of the androgynous look you cultivate. And while there may not be photos of your family here in the office, your leather satchel is a mom’s bag, and that ceramic mug you use as a pencil holder — a child made that.”

Lottie eyed her skeptically. “Flip told you.”

Having won the point, Tess didn’t mind revealing her source. “Yeah, he did. But I like to think that I’m not the sort of person who assumes a woman is gay just because she wears overalls and painter’s pants. Okay, so Greer was putting out the vibe that she was open to — we’ll call it off-the-books overtime. Did anyone take her up on it?”

“Not to my knowledge. The crew is too tired at this point to get anything going. Flip’s almost as happily married as he says he is, and Ben always says he doesn’t shit where he eats. Still — have you ever seen
All About Eve
?”

Tess nodded, fighting the urge to sigh. After just two days among the Hollywood crowd, she longed for a good nature analogy, a food metaphor, or even a reference to one of Aesop’s fables.

“Greer was shaping up to be quite the little manipulator. I gave her the original internship. I was impressed that a teamster’s daughter had made it to L.A., gotten a toehold in the business. It wasn’t her fault she had to come home when her father got sick. In the beginning, she sucked up to me big-time, and I thought I might train her to be an A.D., but she didn’t have the patience to work her way up that way. She decided the writers’ office was a faster fast track, so she put in for the assistant’s job after the pilot was picked up. Then, when Alicia was fired, the job as Flip’s assistant fell into her lap. Greer was very good at being in the right place at the right time.” Lottie’s face crumpled a little. “Until the other night.”

They had circled back to what Tess wanted to discuss all along.

“Alicia was the one who gave the materials to the man who killed himself?”

“Wilbur Grace,” Lottie said, and Tess realized she was the first person in the production to concede the man had a name, that he was something more than just a link in their chain of bad luck. “She swore she didn’t, that she had never heard of the guy, but when the phone logs showed he had called her repeatedly, she offered to resign. I told her that she could at least collect unemployment if she was fired, and she agreed. And who would admit to doing something they hadn’t done, just to get benefits?”