Another Thing to Fall (27 page)

“Yeah,” he said. “And in winter yet. I don’t do winter.”

“It’s relatively mild.”

“No such thing to someone like me, who grew up in Florida and has lived in California since age sixteen.”

“How did you get into acting?” She knew, of course. She could recite much of Johnny Tampa’s biography from memory. But she was trying to get into a groove with him, find an innocuous topic that they both could enjoy, and she figured that Johnny Tampa was one of Johnny Tampa’s favorite subjects.

“Mickey Mouse Club,” he said.

“So you were in the Mickey Mouse Club and then you went out to California to do” — she pretended to grope for the name of his first show — “
High School Confidential
.”

“I went out to California with nothing promised to me. But my mom believed in me, and she agreed to go out for a year, see what I could get started. The year was almost up when I landed the featured part on
High School Confidential,
then got the lead in
The Boom Boom Room
. And the rest is history.”

Of a sort,
Tess thought. If one had very low standards for what constituted history. “But you’ve been taking some… time off, as of late?”

He had moved on from the chocolate croissant to a Napoleon. It was hard for Tess not to wonder if he was a bulimic, albeit one who had mastered the binge without learning how to purge. Tess hadn’t eaten this much even in her competitive rowing days. Or, come to think of it, her own bulimic teens.

“You’re very polite,” he said. “Everybody knows what happened to me. I left television to make movies, and not a single one of them hit. It wasn’t my fault — in every case, I could show you what rotten luck we had, none of it connected to me — but you get only so many chances. That is, if you were a star on television, you only get so many chances. Meg Ryan was on a soap. Julianne Moore, too. Hilary Swank did a bit part on
my
show. But they weren’t well known when they started making movies. I wonder if they have any juice here. I would love a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.”

He looked around with the expectation of someone who usually had a person at his beck and call, but then life on set was like that, in Tess’s limited exposure to it. For the leads, it was a magical world of enabling elves. Makeup people appeared to touch up the actors’ faces, food kept arriving, transportation was arranged. The theory seemed to be that the actors shouldn’t expend any energy on activities beyond their performances.

“What do you do with your downtime? Here in Baltimore, I mean.”

“Read, mainly. I like science fiction.” He sounded a little defensive, but Tess was charmed. In most actor interviews she had read, the oh-so-serious thespians were always claiming to be reading Faulkner or Pynchon, or the cool book of the moment. She never believed those actors, but she had a hunch Johnny Tampa was telling the truth.

“Have you made any friends on set?”

“I like the guys in the present-day scenes — but I’m not with them that much. Actually, it’s not a bad thing for my character — I’m isolated, the way he is, cut off from old friends and family, in a strange place. It’s good for my character,” he said, making the point a second time, as if trying to convince Tess — and himself. Tess couldn’t help noticing, however, that he omitted any mention of Selene, with whom he had the bulk of his scenes.

“Do the cast and crew interact much? Socially, I mean.”

He looked wary. “Some. There was a party when we came back this summer, after shooting the pilot in the spring. Sometimes, on a Friday night, there will be something impromptu. But the crew works too hard to socialize much, and most of the cast is pretty settled. Plus, they’re East Coast–based, mostly from New York, and they go running home the first chance they get.”

On a personal level, Tess liked him for not taking her up on the opportunity to gossip about Selene. But it wasn’t helping her job at all. Maybe she could kill two birds with one stone — or one little lie.

“Selene suggested to me that you had something going with Greer.”

His eyebrows shot up — no Botox in that forehead. “Something going with… that’s
stupid
. Why would Selene say that? Greer was engaged. And fifteen years younger than I am.”

More like twenty,
Tess thought.

“But she knew something about the steel industry. Said her old man had worked in it, that she could help me fill in some things about what it was like.”

“That was—” Tess had been on the verge of saying,
That was Alicia’s father
,
Greer’s father was a teamster
. But she didn’t want to stop Johnny, now that he was beginning to open up. “That was nice of her. Did you learn about her family and come to her, or did she volunteer to help you?”

“It just came up one day, during the lunch break. She began bringing me books, even went to the library and printed out some newspaper articles on Beth Steel.” Tess resented the local shorthand for Bethlehem Steel in Johnny’s mouth. “She helped me a lot. Flip and Ben — look, no knock on them, they’re great writers, and they’ve given me an amazing opportunity — but all they know is Hollywood, and the kind of jobs people have there. They don’t know what other people do most of the day, if they don’t do it on a movie set. Oh, they think they do. They think that lawyers spend all their time in court making big speeches. They think doctors rush from emergency to emergency, in between banging nurses in the supply closet, and that reporters run around thrusting microphones in people’s faces.”

He had a point. True, every job needed to be dramatized in a film or a television show, but the real nature of work was something missing in much of what Tess watched, which had always puzzled her. She was fascinated by what other people did, how they spent their days. This may have been the consequence of an adult life spent as a professional observer — first as a reporter, now as an investigator.

Now that Johnny had gotten going, he was hard to stop. “I needed to know what this guy did with his days. Mann is like Dorothy, in
The Wizard of Oz
. It’s not logical for him to want to go back to modern-day Baltimore — his industry is dying, there’s enormous pressure on his family, his job is drudgery. But it’s home, it’s what he knows, and not even Betsy Patterson, the beautiful belle of nineteenth-century Baltimore, is reason enough to stay.” He finished off his orange juice. “It was better. When they said good-bye in episode eight. And I’m not saying that just because they’re building up Selene’s part. That’s the show I signed up to make. Now that they’re dicking with it—”

Two women with strollers — hip moms, in stylish clothes and fresh makeup, their children tricked out like the accessories they were — had stopped on the sidewalk outside Bonaparte Bread and were peering inside the restaurant, their attention obviously focused on Johnny Tampa. They pointed at him, laughing and nodding, as if the plate glass that separated them was just another television screen, as if he couldn’t see them. He appeared — not oblivious, exactly, but resigned to such gawking.

“So Greer helped you, out of the goodness of her heart. And was there anything Greer wanted from you?”

He wasn’t dumb, not by a long shot. “She didn’t come on to me. Trust me, I know all the ways that women hit on guys.”

“Yet her boyfriend thought she was cheating on him.”

“He probably just didn’t buy the long hours she was working. Most civilians don’t have a clue as to what we do. But all that girl did was work. She was driven.”

“So her boyfriend comes by the office, confronts her — maybe over the ring, maybe over his belief that she’s two-timed him. But, if Greer was the eager little beaver everyone says she was, wouldn’t his late-night visit have affirmed that? He found her working late. How does that escalate into him beating her to death?”

Tampa rubbed his jaw, where there was a faint red mark and the beaded scab of a fresh scratch, left by a woman’s fingernail. He had been quick to wade into the fight yesterday, heedless of what many would consider his most valuable asset. He had, in fact, lived up to Tess’s teenage version of him, at least for that moment.

“You know what? I don’t know. It’s beyond me, why people do what they do. Hey — that friend of yours, the scary chick — does she have a boyfriend?”

And in that instant, any remnant of her crush was vanquished. Not out of jealousy over his interest in Whitney, but in his indifference to the story behind the death of someone he had known.

“Call her,” Tess said, sincere in her hope that he would. Because Whitney would swallow Johnny Tampa whole and spit out the bones, assuming there were any bones left in that doughy body.

Speak of the preppy devil — here was Whitney, Selene in tow, almost literally. She was dragging Selene by the elbow, piloting her into the bakery, as insistent as a tugboat guiding an ocean liner.

“You are going to eat something if I have to stand over you with a knife,” she hissed at the girl. “Sugar-free gum is
not
a food group.”

Johnny brightened, presumably at the sight of Whitney, then frowned when he realized she was here in her professional capacity as bodyguard/nutrition counselor.

“I eat,” Selene protested feebly. “I eat a lot when I’m on set. I just have a very high metabolism. And it was my idea to come here, remember?”

Whitney brought two croissants, almond and chocolate, over to the adjoining table, then went back to the counter to fetch a large glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Tess had assumed that Selene would poke the croissants and break them into ever-smaller flakes, but she dutifully forked up bite after bite, finishing the chocolate one and making it halfway through the almond under Whitney’s approving gaze. Tess found herself hoping that Whitney might actually feed Selene, zooming pieces of croissant into her mouth.
“Here comes the Escalade. Here comes the Bentley. Here comes the Prius.”
But such drastic measures were not needed, although Selene promptly excused herself to the restroom when she was finished.

“I should probably follow her, but I’m exhausted,” Whitney said. “She tried to sneak out twice last night.”

“She did? You should have called me at home.”

“I let you sleep, knowing you had this meeting with what’s-his-name. St. Pete, Tampa, whatever.”

Johnny, nonplussed in Whitney’s presence, simply nodded, smiling inanely.

“Besides, I don’t think she’s bulimic. And she’s probably telling the truth about her metabolism. Oh, if she let herself go, she might become a size four verging on six, but she doesn’t have to worry about her weight.”

“Actually, she does,” Johnny said. “A size six is way too big for a woman who wants to play romantic leads. Sorry, but that’s how it is.”

“Hmmmmph,” Whitney said, reaching into Selene’s bag and extracting her iPhone. “Might as well search her incoming and outgoing calls while she’s in there. Jesus, I can’t believe how many people she has in her address book. Oh, wait — I can check her e-mails, too. God, I love Mac.”

“That’s so… rude,” Johnny said, genuinely offended on Selene’s behalf. “Maybe illegal.”

“I don’t read anything, or listen to voice mail. I just check the senders. You know what I found under her bed this morning, when I was looking for alcohol?”

“Alcohol?” Tess asked, reaching for the iPhone and running her own check. Several calls from Ben — but nothing
to
him.

“No, not a drop, not even a can of malt liquor. I found two books — Edith Hamilton’s Greek mythology and a copy of
Kristin Lavransdatter.
”

“You might have sparked the interest in Hamilton,” Tess said. “When you told her that her name was from the goddess of the moon, as opposed to a Mormon soap opera.”

“Yeah, but
Kristin Lavransdatter
? And it was the third volume, to boot,
The Cross
. Could she possibly have read volumes one and two?”

“Maybe she thought Lavransdatter was Kirsten Dunst’s name before she changed it,” Tess offered.

“Just because she’s an actor doesn’t mean she’s stupid,” Johnny said with surprising heat. “Okay, well — Selene isn’t a raging intellectual. But you shouldn’t mock her for reading. Maybe that’s why the books were under the bed in the first place, because she thought you would make fun of her. For all Selene knows, this Lard-butter, or however you say it, is one of those books everyone has read, and she’s embarrassed not to know it.”

Whitney nodded. “And maybe monkeys will fly out my—”

Tess interrupted, hoping to placate Johnny. “At the very least, it could be for a film. The author was a Nobel Prize winner. Maybe someone’s interested in adapting it.”

“It’s already been adapted,” Johnny said. “By Liv Ullmann, back in the 1990s. But, you’re right, that wouldn’t rule out a Hollywood version, although I haven’t heard anything about that on the grapevine.”

Johnny was blushing furiously, his gaze downcast. His crush on Whitney must be really bad, Tess reasoned, if he couldn’t even make eye contact. Selene came trip-trapping back to the table in her ridiculously high heels, and Johnny muttered: “Gotta go.”

“God, he’s so jealous of me he can’t stand it,” Selene said cheerfully. “He’s even jealous that I had a stalker and he didn’t, that I was in most of the photographs and he wasn’t.”

A shred of conversation, a piece of unfinished business, came back to Tess. “The photograph at the memorial — was that one of the stalker’s?”

“I
told
you that,” Selene said, stroking her hair, oblivious to the fact that she was leaving little flakes of pastry behind. “I said it was the guy.”

“You said — oh, never mind. Was Greer in all the other photos as well? The ones taken by the dead man, Wilbur R. Grace?”

“Don’t be ridic. I mean, Greer was in some, but so was Ben. And Flip and Lottie. But I was in most of them. At least — I was in all the ones I saw. I don’t know, maybe there were others, but who’s going to be silly enough to stalk Greer?”

The not-
the
-Meyerhoffs Meyerhoffs lived in Baltimore Highlands, a county neighborhood that people found mostly by accident, taking a wrong turn en route to the Harbor Tunnel. The streets here were named for states, but the pattern was maddeningly indecipherable to Tess — Louisiana led to Tennessee, then Alabama, which was followed, of course, by Pennsylvania, then Michigan and Florida. The Meyerhoffs lived in a brick semidetached on the bottom rung, Delaware Avenue, just north of the thruway to the tunnel, where traffic was a dull, roaring constant.