Another Thing to Fall (5 page)

Ben popped a Nexium, which would help the reflux, but not the emotions beneath it. What was weighing him down? It wasn’t Selene, Ben decided. She was just another secret.

He found a diner tucked into a side street near the courthouse, but his appetite was gone. He drank black coffee and read
USA Today,
going over and over the weather info for California. Where, in fact, it was raining and there were mud slides, but he still would rather be there. Only four more weeks of shooting, and then he could go home. He didn’t belong here, and neither did Flip, much as he pretended to love it. If they got the pickup for a second season, Ben was going to actively lobby for Los Angeles or Vancouver. They could reproduce Baltimore on a soundstage. Hell, based on what he had seen, they could make a better one.

He stopped at the mock-retro diner on Eastern Avenue, the one he had come to think of as his base camp, a term he had picked up from one of the call sheets he had actually seen. They were on the soundstage later today, with the second unit on the water, which would make it difficult to get to her. But then, except for that one brief encounter, it had proven impossible to get to her, and he was beginning to suspect this was no mere coincidence. They were keeping her from him. If he could just get her alone, he was sure she would be understanding, even sympathetic. But he needed her alone.

Perhaps he should hire a pro, someone detached, but that was exactly the reason he didn’t want a pro. A pro had nothing on line but his fee. Besides, the pros used so far had done nothing but collect their fat checks. They hadn’t even bothered to apologize for their failures, their incompetence.

The diner, with its aluminum siding and leatherette booths, reminded him of
Diner,
although he knew this one was shiny new, a fake on many levels, its booths harboring video games instead of miniature jukeboxes. The real diner from
Diner
had been moved downtown after the movie wrapped, and staffed with juvenile delinquents as part of a training program. Funny to think how desolate East Baltimore and the waterfront had been then, how easy it was to create the illusion that a diner sat on a lonely little forkful of land in the middle of the old industrial base. That had been his first visit to a movie set, more than twenty-five years ago. No — wait, his memory was playing tricks on him. It was only
after
seeing
Diner
in the theater that he realized that a movie had been made here, in Baltimore. He had been almost sick over it. What were the odds that Hollywood would ever return? But Levinson had come back, several times over, and Phil Tumulty had followed with
his
version of Baltimore. Although he thought Tumulty the better filmmaker, he felt closer to Levinson’s world. He remembered the day that they closed Howard Street to film the collision outside the old Anderson Cadillac — that was Levinson’s
Tin Men
— and the balloon festival in Patterson Park, staged expressly for
Pit Beef,
the first in Tumulty’s trilogy about growing up in Highlandtown.

He reached into his briefcase and, after taking care to make sure there was nothing on the tabletop, opened his scrapbook. There were photographs and articles about every production that had ever come to Baltimore — not just Levinson’s and Tumulty’s films, but
And Justice for All
and
Homicide
and
The Wire
and
Ladder 49
and
Red Dragon
and
The Replacements
and
Step Up
and, almost every year, like the groundhog, another John Waters film. He visited Waters’s sets because he felt he had a duty to completeness, to see them all, but he didn’t really care for the movies because they so seldom had real stars. What had Gloria Swanson said? She stayed big, the movies got small. He didn’t get Waters, his insistence on making things look the way they actually were. Who needed movies for
that
?

He flipped through the pages, stopping at the one instance when a newspaper photographer had caught the both of them, standing on the edge of everything. Their own mothers probably couldn’t pick them out of the shot, but he knew they had been there, so he could identify the backs of their heads, then thick with hair. There they were down in Fells Point, the night the big fire scene in
Avalon
was filmed. That had been fascinating. And Levinson’s people had been
nice
. When it came down to it, he might have preferred Tumulty’s movies, but his people — Tumulty made very bad choices in his people, and now he had foisted those choices onto his son. Tumulty had forgotten where he came from, living out there… wherever. Tahoe? Santa Fe? Some suspect place, neither here nor Hollywood.

His breakfast arrived — how did they do it so fast? He was almost skeptical at the speed with which diner food arrived. Given the time, past eleven, he had opted for a grilled cheese and french fries with gravy. Had he put gravy on his french fries before he saw
Diner,
or had the movie persuaded him that this was what people in Baltimore did? He could no longer remember. It wasn’t that he had any trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality. He was as sane as the next guy, and had the tests to prove it, as the old joke went. They had made him talk to a psychiatrist as part of the exit interview, but that had been to cover their own asses. He had been in HRD; he knew the drill. He propped the local section of the
Beacon-Light
against the old-fashioned sugar dispenser, and read the latest litany of complaints about
Mann of Steel
.
You reap what you sow, you reap what you sow.
He wondered if Mandy Stewart could be of any use to him, but decided that she had been too open in her hostility. She probably couldn’t get any closer to Tumulty Jr. and his minions than he could at this point. The steelworkers, too, were of little use. Besides, he didn’t know any steelworkers.

His cell phone rang, and he debated not answering. The french fries were at that divine, fleeting moment of perfect hotness. But ignoring Marie was never a good idea, under any circumstances, and she had been especially needy the past few months.

“Where are you?” she said.

“Having an early lunch.”

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“Holiday.”

“What holiday?”

“Columbus Day.” The lies were coming so easily now. The mark of an artist, he decided.

“Isn’t that the Monday that falls the same week as the twelfth?”

“Used to be,” he said agreeably. “But they had to start switching it around because people complained about the Italians getting their own holiday. So the federal holiday was last week, but the state-city holiday is today.”

“What does that have to do with the date? And why would they have more Columbus Days if people are angry about the one?” He could imagine her face — forehead creased, mouth turned down — panicking a little at this information, more proof that the world outside the house was going on without her. For some reason, she seemed to think that the world should have halted when she stopped participating in it.

Then again, he
was
lying to her. He should factor that in. But it was out of consideration. Everything he did, he did for her.

“No, there’s only one, and it’s today.”

“Oh…” Her voice trailed off.

“Marie?”

“Hmmmmm?”

“Why did you call?”

“Can’t remember. I wanted you to bring me something from the grocery store… a magazine? Candy? Hey — if there’s no work today, why did you put on your suit and everything, leave the house at the normal time?”

Good question. He had to remind himself sometimes that while Marie may be odd, an ever-growing bundle of tics and neuroses, she wasn’t simpleminded or unobservant. Given how little of the world she could see from her perch on the sofa, she tended to be extremely sharp-eyed about what was within her view.

“Force of habit,” he said. “It’s kind of embarrassing, but — I didn’t remember about the holiday until I showed up at North Avenue. Once I was all the way downtown, I thought I could do some work on my own, play catch-up. But there’s no heat in the building.”

“Isn’t it warm today?”

“You’d think so, looking at the temperature.” She was probably doing that just now, he calculated, pulling the draperies aside and squinting at the thermometer next to the bay window, or quickly punching through the channels on the remote to the Weather Channel. Stand-up comics were always making jokes about men and remote controls, but Marie wielded hers like a light saber. He didn’t dare try to take it from her. “The nights have been getting cooler, and that old pile just holds in the cold, with all that marble and all. And the heat was off all weekend.”

“They never ought to have renovated that old school for the administration headquarters. They just love throwing the taxpayers’ money away, don’t they? But I guess I shouldn’t complain, since that includes paying you.” She made a funny sound, and he knew she had brought her fist up to her mouth. “I don’t mean paying you is a waste.”

“I know,” he said. “Look, Marie, I have to go. Our minutes—”

“Then why do you tell me to call your cell instead of the office phone?”

“They’re sticklers about personal calls,” he began, trying to talk over her, but she was hurtling down her own track of thought: “You always — Mounds bars! That’s what I want. Mounds bars. I was watching television, and there was some commercial, and it reminded me of the old commercial, sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. Well, I don’t, so I want Mounds, okay?”

Trust me, Marie. You feel like a nut every day.
Then he felt bad, as he always did, for his sour interior monologue. Marie couldn’t help how she was. “Mounds bars, got it.”

“The little ones. But not the ones in the bag. The ones that they line up in a row, on the cardboard.”

“You’ve got it, my sweet tooth Marie.”

He opened his wallet, and looked at the ATM slip from that morning’s withdrawal: $17,922 in his account. There was another $55,000 in the IRAs, but they couldn’t touch it for another five years. He had their regular expenses down to less than $2,500 a month, so they had a year before the money ran out, and then there was always a second mortgage, although that would require Marie’s signature. But he didn’t need a year. All he needed was to get that girl’s attention, get her to fulfill the promises she had made, even if she acted as if she had never heard of him.

The french fries had passed their peak, but he ate them anyway. Why was that? Why did fries lose their perfection so quickly, and why did people keep eating them once they had turned cold and mushy? If he were an inventor, he would come up with a way to produce ever-crisp, ever-hot french fries. Or maybe a restaurant that served only french fries, and not just the Thrasher’s-in-a cup-on-the-boardwalk thing. He’d have french fries with gravy and hollandaise and mayonnaise and all kinds of sauces. That’s what he would do, if he were an inventor. But he was a dreamer, in the best sense of the word. His head was filled with beautiful stories, stories that unfolded the way that
How the West Was Won
had raced across the screen at the Hillendale, back when he and Bob were no more than eleven, and you could see the lines on the print, breaking the picture into thirds, because the theater wasn’t set up for the Cinerama technique.

He remembered, too, how ancient Jimmy Stewart had looked to them, how they had cringed at the idea of that bony codger pitching woo to Carroll Baker, who made them feel vaguely strange inside, although they didn’t want to admit it to each other, and didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what they felt, not even to themselves.

Now he was older than Jimmy Stewart was then. How had that happened?

Tess’s day was thrown off course much as her scull had been, and she never quite caught up, running late for every appointment, five in all. Autumn was turning into a reliably busy season, almost as good as February. It was as if back-to-school fever carried over into every aspect of people’s lives. Summer gone, people got serious about their messy legal claims. Tess also had a booming business in background checks on nannies. She had told Flip Tumulty the truth: She had more business than she could handle.

Besides, Tess, too, had gone back to school in a fashion, teaching a course through Johns Hopkins’ noncredit division, the Odyssey program. To her amazement, there were a dozen people in Baltimore who thought they might want to be private investigators. More shockingly, they believed Tess Monaghan was the woman who could show them how. She had scoffed at the idea when the program’s director first proposed it — her own career path had been highly unorthodox, perhaps even mildly illegal — but her network of PI friends had been so openly covetous of the offer that she had been forced to reconsider. The only downside was that it made for a very long Monday, and today’s disruptions meant she barely had time to fortify herself with a Luna bar before the three-hour session started at 6:30.

For this, the fourth meeting in the ten-week course, the students had been asked to bring laptops with wireless access. Eleven of her Charles Street Irregulars, as she had begun to think of them, had their computers open and ready to go. The twelfth, Felicia Blossom, had a cell phone on her desk, a cell phone so ancient and relatively massive that it could be a candidate for a Smithsonian exhibit on early mobile telecommunications.

“Do you not have a laptop, Mrs. Blossom?” The woman was in her sixties and given, perhaps inevitably, to wearing flowery dresses. Had she dressed that way after she became Mrs. Blossom, or had her riotous prints of peonies and cabbage roses attracted Mr. Blossom to her?

She nodded, brandishing the phone.

“That’s a phone,” Tess said, trying to mask her irritation.

“Yes, but don’t phones have all the same geegaws as computers?”

“Geegaws?”

“You know, the bells and whistles? Whatever. My son’s phone can take pictures and send e-mails — he sends me photos of my grandbabies from Phoenix — so I figure mine could, too, if someone showed me how. I couldn’t find the instruction booklet.”