Another Thing to Fall (24 page)

It was so odd, watching his young self. He was a better actor now, no doubt, and his face was more interesting. But who knew that age was so
thickening
? Not just the waistline, but everything — face, features, even his feet. Then again, some of his peers seemed to get thinner, and that wasn’t attractive either. They looked gaunt, dried up. Maybe it was just his imagination, but it seemed the previous generation of actors — Nicholson, Connery, Hackman — had aged much better.

Depressed, he grabbed the remote by the sink and clicked away, running through the channels rapid-fire. He rested for a moment on the news story about Greer’s boyfriend, getting killed when he wouldn’t surrender. Man, that was weird. But then, other people’s passions always struck Johnny as mildly ludicrous. In a movie or a television show, when both people were hot, you could get it. Besides, it was in the script. But just two ordinary people, getting all crazy over each other? Johnny had been married briefly in his twenties and taken a big financial hit in the divorce, and that had been enough to decide for him that he didn’t want anything long-term, ever again. In California, he used an escort service — very discreet, with nice girls, ones who weren’t too hard or used up, and he was careful to keep things relatively kink-free, lest he ever show up on a client list; you’d never catch him having to explain some girl dressed up like a Brownie. God, he would kill for a brownie. Maybe he should find someone, sublimate the hunger with sex. Here in Baltimore, he had assumed he would hook up with someone in the production, but it hadn’t happened. Yet. He still thought the scary blonde, the one who had pretended not to know who he was, had potential. Yes, she was kind of terrifying, but he found that attractive in a woman.

But she was assigned to watch Selene, and he would be crazy to try and get close to anyone who was part of Selene’s camp.

Fully oiled and moisturized, he slid into bed, switching the television back to his own marathon. The trivia box popped up beneath his chin, his beautifully sharp chin:
Where is he now
? The answer was provided after a string of commercials for erectile dysfunction cream and some magic stain remover. “Johnny Tampa has retired from Hollywood, but a comeback is rumored for 2008.”

You betcha,
he thought.

“That was fast,” Marie said sleepily, watching the ten o’clock news. “People will get mad, wait and see.”

“People will get mad because they solved a murder?”

“They’ll say that it was because it was a white girl, and she worked on that television show, that they never put that much effort into the drug murders. But it’s so obvious that the boyfriend must have done it.”

He shouldn’t ask any questions, shouldn’t draw the conversation out. Change the topic, change the channel. But he couldn’t help himself. “Obvious because he ran away and didn’t surrender?”

“Exactly. It would make a good
Law and Order
episode, only it would need more twists. On television, the boyfriend wouldn’t be guilty. It would be someone else.”

Change the topic, change the topic, change the topic
. “Who?”

“Why, someone with the production. Like, she’d be having an affair with her boss, and maybe his wife found out. Or that skinny little actress girl killed her because… she wouldn’t sell her urine so she could pass the contractual drug test.”

“The actress in the movie has a contractual drug test?” News to him, but Marie often knew such things, thanks to her steady diet of magazines.

“Not in real life. I’m making stuff up. Like you and Bob did, when we were younger. Remember? I never said anything out loud because you thought I was just the stupid little sister, but I would be doing my homework at the dining room table while you talked in the kitchen. You had the best ideas.”

“Bob did. I could barely keep up with him.”

“Bob added the flourishes, fleshed them out. But all the ideas started with you. Bob always gave you credit.”

“Talking about Bob makes me sad.”
And anxious, so very anxious
.

“I’m sorry.”

Only he was not thinking of Bob just now but of Marie, the Marie he re-met the summer he and Bob graduated from college, the Marie who had somehow outgrown her scabby knees and pigtails and turned into a really striking girl. Not exactly beautiful, but sexy. The early 1970s had suited her. He supposed he should have realized then that one dramatic transformation indicated there could always be another. If it had been hard to find little Marie in that long-haired girl, then it was impossible to see the traces of twenty-one-year-old Marie in the puffy features and swollen ankles of the woman lying next to him on the sofa. And yet, he didn’t love her any less. The case could be made that he loved her more than ever, especially since they had lost Bob.
Oh, Bob — why didn’t you come to me earlier, tell me the truth sooner? Why did you let it get so out of hand, why did you lie to me?

“
Law and Order
always has a second twist, in the second part,” he said to Marie. “A legal maneuver, a conflict of interest. So there would have to be a third thing, something really mysterious.”

“Like what?”

“I haven’t a clue. As you said, Bob was the one who made my ideas work.”

“But you had good ideas, too,” she said, her voice soft with sleep. She would be asleep before the weather forecast. He couldn’t carry her to bed anymore, but he would shake her gently, guide her there, as if she were a sleepwalker. “You always had the best ideas.”

Oh, yes, he was just teeming with good ideas. They were in this fix because of his good ideas, because he thought he knew better than Bob how to go about things.

Stop,
his mind advised him, in the cadence of a telegram. Had he ever received a telegram, or did he know of them only via the movies and cartoons? Had he ever lived a life, or was he still waiting for life to start? Fate had given him a chance to make things all right. Stop. Stop. Stop.

Why was it taking so long for Marie to fall asleep tonight?

Lottie sat in her office, free at last to still her mind and try to absorb the news. Alone, she allowed her legs to swing free, kicking against her chair, a little-kid habit she was careful to police around others, because she knew it made her look cute, precious. But it was going on eleven-thirty, the end of a long and turbulent day. She should feel relieved, not anxious. Not only was Greer’s murder essentially solved, but there hadn’t been an incident on set for almost a week — unless you counted Johnny Tampa’s complaint that someone had mailed him an unflattering tabloid article, and no one was taking that seriously — except Johnny. No fires, literal or figurative, to put out, no locals trying to State-and-Main them, no snafus with permits. Even the weather had been kind, beautiful October day after beautiful October day. The production had been blissfully uneventful — except, of course, for Greer’s death, and the police had removed that from the movie’s moral balance sheet as well.

Lottie wished she could be as quick to absolve the production. If she had hired JJ, would that have made a difference? She told herself that a man who would kill his ex-fiancée — or girlfriend, or wife — wasn’t susceptible to cause and effect. A violent man would always find a reason to act violently. Still, Lottie couldn’t help thinking that the production had changed Greer. The young woman who had volunteered to work for free on the pilot had been so eager, so sweet. Had she been changed by her proximity to Flip, by her glimpses into the money and perks provided by such a lifestyle?

They hadn’t found the murder weapon, but that didn’t seem to bother the police. It bothered Lottie, though, as did the memory of Flip’s trashed office. Why hadn’t JJ taken anything if he wanted to make the incident look like a burglary? Flip’s Emmy, for example. It wasn’t hockable, but you could imagine someone trying to sell it on eBay. Flip’s iPod, in the dock next to his computer. Okay, so the killer wasn’t really a burglar, and he hadn’t thought like a burglar. He was an unstable young man, hopped up on adrenaline, desperate to cover his tracks.

Still, something tugged at Lottie’s logical, meticulous mind. Part of the reason that Lottie hadn’t hired JJ was because he was so obviously pussy-whipped. He hadn’t wanted the job, he all but admitted, but Greer had pushed him into applying for it. He had smiled goofily at the mere mention of Greer’s name, and it was clear that he thought her a tremendous prize, that he was the luckiest man in the world to have her as his future wife. It had been cute, if unfathomable. Really, if you had asked Lottie then where she thought the relationship was headed, she would have predicted that Greer was more likely to kill
him
one day. Or, more correctly, shed him for his lack of ambition, his limited potential — which was exactly what happened, she reminded herself now. Greer, dazzled by Hollywood, broke up with her loser boyfriend, and he lost it. End of story.

Well, the good news was that their troubles were over. They could probably fire the Monaghan woman, save that expense. It had been ridiculous, hiring a watcher for Selene, given how much they already paid for security on set.

Checking her computer clock, she used her office phone to call home, where it was only eight-thirty. She couldn’t bear to talk to her children over the unreliable cutting-in, cutting-out buzz of a cell phone. It was hard enough to have a conversation with four-year-old Angela, the younger one. She could never decide which was worse — Angela’s distant, distracted mode, when she prattled about the day’s events and seemed slightly vague about who Lottie was, or the dramatic, melancholic wail:
When are you coming home, Mommy? I miss you.
Tonight, Angela told her a long, hard-to-follow story about preschool and a goldfish, but Lottie had hung on to every word. Her seven-year-old, Topper, was stoic, inured to her absences — and that was more painful still.

“They’re fine,” Jason assured her, taking the phone. Perfect Jason, as he was known among her friends and family, P.J. for short — good-looking and strong and capable. One of Lottie’s more tactless friends had even wondered if it was fair of Lottie to take a six-footer out of the dating pool. “That’s a foot more than you need.” Of course, Lottie saw it differently — she had to marry up, literally, so her children would have a fighting chance to escape the curse of her genes. How she had worried, every year, over the height percentiles. So far, both children were reliably above the eightieth percentile, but she had been fairly normal, too, until puberty. Jason said she worried too much, but show her a unit production manager who didn’t. It was practically the job description.

“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.

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.