Another Thing to Fall (26 page)

“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?”

“Yes, but not in a way that counts. He waved at me, going to his car, but he clearly thought I was just some dumb lady who lived there. Then he drove back to the Tremont.” She laughed, and Mrs. Blossom’s laugh, even on her cumbersome, clunky cell phone, was a thing of wonder, a sweet, high bubble of sound that had been held captive far too long. “This was
fun
. I hope you have more things like this for me to do. I don’t even care about the extra credit.”

“Remember, Mrs. Blossom, you’re the only student who has qualified for extra assignments, so keep this to yourself when we meet tomorrow. I wouldn’t want the other students to get jealous.” Actually, Tess was trying to work out the ethics of using Mrs. Blossom this way. The woman was a surveillance prodigy. Maybe Tess should put her on the payroll when the semester was over.

Lloyd, who had been apprised of the setup, looked up expectantly. “So he left the viewing and went to Greer’s apartment, just as you thought he would.”

“The weird thing is — someone else had already been there.” Tess was thinking of her own trip to Wilbur Grace’s home, how she had found the window open. Yes, the neighborhood kids had been using it as a makeout pad, but there was still that rectangle of dust in the armoire, the VCR or DVD player that had gone missing, and maybe not because it was so easy to pawn. Then there was the office, ransacked the night of Greer’s death, and the smoke bomb Friday. “What is everyone looking for?”

“The black bird,” Lloyd said, in a remarkably good imitation of Kasper Gutman, as he had been embodied — so fully, magnificently embodied — by Sydney Greenstreet. “Or maybe it’s one of them Hitchcock MacMuffins.”

Tess took a sip of beer. Lloyd had failed the GED on his first attempt, but Crow had insisted at the time that it wasn’t lack of ability but a lack of interest that had undermined him.

“Are you saying a
MacGuffin
is irrelevant?” she asked, supplying the correct word without calling too much attention to it. That was how Crow corrected Lloyd.

“Of course, that’s what it always is,” Lloyd said, rolling his eyes at her ignorance. One week as an unpaid intern and he was Cecil B. De Mille. “Besides, Greer was killed by her boyfriend and he’s dead. So who cares what’s in her apartment?”

Out of the mouth of — well, not babes, but a pretty savvy seventeen-year-old. Lloyd had a point: If Greer was killed by her boyfriend, who was now dead, what possible treasure or item could have at least two people looking for it so frenziedly?

Two
people. Tess shuddered, realizing after the fact how heedlessly she had exposed Mrs. Blossom. Granted, she didn’t think Ben was a threat to anyone — except, perhaps, the television viewers of America. But she couldn’t be sure to what lengths a second person might go to find this thing, this object, this
MacMuffin
.

Marie was snoring — full-out, raucous snores, nothing delicate or ladylike. She would be horrified if she knew what she sounded like, but he found it endearing. Snoring was the kind of normal problem that other married couples had. Snoring, stealing the covers, leaving the seat up, nagging. These were the sorts of things a person could confide to a friend, over a beer at the local tavern. If a person actually had any friends. His only friend was dead. Besides, he never had been able to talk to Bob about Marie, the one drawback of marrying his best friend’s sister. He never even discussed her illness with Bob, which was strange, as Bob might have been one of the few sympathetic ears he could find in a world where almost everyone else thought Marie was simply a lazy good-for-nothing.

It was fifteen years since Marie was diagnosed, and he realized in hindsight that her problems went much further back. Probably all the way back to her childhood, he knew now, but he hadn’t been paying close attention to Bob’s kid sister back in the day.
High-strung,
they said then,
delicate,
and he found both terms more on point than the rather bland “panic attack” that the first doctor had scrawled on her chart. Now the official papers that flew back and forth read “APD” — avoidant personality disorder. He preferred the old-fashioned term
agoraphobia,
which translated literally as fear of the marketplace, because it seemed to be the best definition of what ailed Marie. She didn’t want to engage with the world of the market, i.e.,
work
.

Maybe it was only fair. Marie, born in the early 1950s, had already formed her ideas of what a woman’s life should be when the concept of women’s liberation put everything up for grabs. She wanted none of it, and had explained as much to him, in their early days of going together. “Any woman who has ever snapped a garter is never going to burn her bra,” she said, utterly earnest. It had made him laugh. They had been sitting across from each other at the old Pimlico Hotel, having cocktails and feeling very grown up — he at twenty-four, she just twenty-two. He had liked the fact that she was old-fashioned, that she wanted to be a homemaker. Since graduating from UB, he and Bob had been sleeping with the early hippie girls around Mount Vernon, but he had known that was only temporary. Easy sex, no strings, empty as hell. When Marie graduated from Towson, teaching degree in hand, he realized she was a girl he would have to take seriously, and not just because she was Bob’s little sister. She was the Real Thing.

Marie didn’t actually like teaching, as it turned out. She didn’t like kids. She took a job at Social Security, and people assumed they were trying for a family that simply never arrived. People were kinder then, it seemed to him, with only parents and relatives daring to ask nosy questions about when they would hear the patter of little feet. With everyone but Bob, they had floated the impression that they were waiting patiently for fate to smile on them. And when Marie started visiting doctors about her growing little assembly of symptoms — dizziness, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, a reluctance to ride elevators, her fear of malls, her gnawing worry that she was going to black out while driving — people had assumed that the various specialists she consulted over at Johns Hopkins were going to help her conceive. They didn’t know that Marie was visiting the old wing, the home of the Phipps Clinic, where she was told for years that it was all in her head and all she needed was traditional psychotherapy and that would be seventy-five dollars, please.

And then, finally, her condition had a name, and an array of drugs that could treat it. Yet once she was told it
wasn’t
all in her head, that she had a legitimate disorder, Marie abandoned herself to the condition, growing ever anxious, ever more frightened. She quit her job, and it had hurt, losing that paycheck, especially when their disability claim was disallowed. That was a nice irony, Social Security denying one of its benefit programs to a longtime employee, but Marie didn’t have the stomach to go through the multiple appeals that everyone said were part of the game. That’s why
he
had left the classroom and moved into administration, trying to make up for the loss of Marie’s income. He wasn’t unhappy, as he told himself frequently. But he also knew that the double negative,
not unhappy,
didn’t equal happy.

Then he lost the very job he hated, axed unfairly in a house-cleaning staged by the new superintendent, one of those show-offy flourishes meant to establish what a tough, hands-on manager the guy was. Hadn’t anyone noticed that the new guy had eventually hired a fresh team of bureaucrats, cronies from his old system, and paid them even more? He had talked to a lawyer about a reverse discrimination suit, but the guy said it was a lost cause, and he was forced to take the severance package offered, or risk losing the health insurance.

That’s when he had gone to Bob for money, and Bob had told him there would be plenty of money soon, more than enough for both of them, but he needed legal assistance — a retainer for a lawyer, then more money for the so-called expert who was supposed to be their ace in the hole. But the lawyer and the expert disappeared when things went south, leaving nothing but their bills behind, and Bob had killed himself. Not so much because of the thousands he owed, but because of the dream that had been choked in its crib. That girl had killed Bob. She deserved to be dead.

Where had she put it?
He had spent an hour in that tiny apartment, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t there. The office was still a possibility, but security there would be impossibly tight, thanks to the stupid smoke bomb incident. Had she confided in anyone what she knew? God — what if, after all this, it didn’t exist? But, no, she had seen it, and she was the one who had called Bob, after all those weeks of him getting dicked around by Alicia Farmer.

He left Marie and her buzz saw snoring and went back into the living room, putting another one of Bob’s videos in the VCR. He kept hoping that he might find what he needed among them, but that was silly, of course. If Bob had what he needed, he wouldn’t have killed himself. The title came up:
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
, DIRECTED BY WILBUR R. GRACE, WITH ADDITIONAL DIALOGUE BY GEORGE SYBERT. That was an inside joke, Bob’s tip to the apocryphal story about Sam Taylor and the Pickford-Fairbanks talkie. But it had been George’s idea to update the story to modern-day Baltimore. As Marie had said, George often tossed out an idea, half-formed at best, and Bob then ran with it. But he always gave George credit.

It was only this year, after seeing Bob’s strange passive reaction to defeat, that George had come to realize that Bob had some of the same problems as Marie. The difference was that Bob had coped by inserting a camera between himself and the world. He could function as long as he had a lens, as long as he was on the sidelines, framing the story. This year, for a few heady months, Bob had seen himself as the hero, in center frame, the little guy who was going to take on the Goliaths and win. But he was one of the ordinary folks that Goliath trampled, one of the people you never heard about. In the end, it was Bob’s dream that killed him. A case could be made that all George was doing now was trying to avenge his best friend’s death, by any means necessary, and in a movie, that would make him the hero.

In the bedroom, Marie’s snores roared on, a strange sound track to the dreamy, beautiful creations her brother had left behind.

Tess’s reporting career may have been short-lived, but she still had met her share of famous people. Presidential candidates, Nobel Prize winners, a couple of minor movie stars, and, in a rather startling turn of events, Boris Yeltsin, who had mistaken her for a member of his welcoming party and swept her up in a vodka-infused bear hug. Tess had actually been on deathwatch, a morbid little reporting detail in which a junior staffer ensures that luminaries arrive and depart a city safely, but it had seemed more tactful to let Yeltsin have his version of the event.

Tess had enjoyed those encounters for the anecdotes they provided, but she had never gone civilian on a source, or felt the smallest whiff of fan-girl excitement. Until now, going for coffee with Johnny Tampa, something she had actually imagined when she was in middle school. Well, not coffee. She had probably envisioned an ice cream date or a romantic dinner in some candlelit venue. But she would settle for Bonaparte Bread, the high-end pastry shop only a few blocks from the high-rise where Selene lived. The request had seemed to unnerve Johnny, yet it apparently didn’t occur to him that he could say no. Tess knew from the call sheet that he wasn’t scheduled for pickup until noon.

He was waiting for her when she arrived, a true non-diva move. The lean, sharp features that she had idolized as a teenager were somewhat obscured by middle-age fleshiness, but when he smiled, he was the heartthrob that she recalled. Tess noticed that other women in the pastry shop also responded to Tampa’s smile and manner.

“You’re the one in charge of guarding Selene, right?”

“I’m handling that detail with my friend, Whitney, yes.”

“Right, the scary blonde. So how come one of you didn’t catch her sending me that stupid magazine?” He brushed off Tess’s reply before she had a chance to formulate it. “Oh, she’s too smart to do it herself, but I know she put someone else up to it. Someone on the crew, or maybe even Ben Marcus.”

“Why do you think that one of the producers on the show would be willing to do that for Selene?” she countered, fishing. Maybe Ben’s relationship with Selene wasn’t the well-kept secret he believed it to be.

“Because he’s
mean
. He’s always teasing me about my weight. A young skinny guy like him, he probably thinks it’s funny that I have a… glandular problem.”

A glandular problem
. Tess couldn’t remember the last time she had heard that euphemism. Then again, current science was on Tampa’s side, making the case that willpower wasn’t enough for some people to lose weight.

“But Ben wants you to be happy, right? Ben and Flip. They see you as the linchpin of the show.”

“So they say.” He chewed thoughtfully on his chocolate croissant. “They say they wrote the show for me, and they can’t help that the network is hot for Selene. They talked pretty big, when they were trying to get me for this. Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have entertained some of the other offers I had. At least I wouldn’t have to live
here
. Sorry. No offense.”

It happened to be one of Tess’s least favorite phrases, a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too bit of rhetoric that demanded the listener forgive the speaker for saying something impossibly rude.

“If the show goes,” Tess said, “you’ll be here quite a bit.”