Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

Flip had all but said the same thing. Hollywood must be a charmed place, where no one was ever wrongly accused of anything, never forced to choose between principles and pocketbooks.

“Why would the guy have wanted those things in the first place?”

“Fans are obsessive. There’s nothing they don’t want, and there’s no show or actor that doesn’t have its own set of fan-boys and fan-girls. Johnny and Selene have lots of fans, and there’s even a cultish sect for Flip and Ben. Plus, with the advent of eBay, a lot of stuff is making its way to the Internet. There’s always been a small tradition of graft on sets, as there is in any office, and I’ll turn a blind eye to some props walking off. But scripts – look, it’s not as if Mann of Steel is the final episode of The Sopranos . Still, we can’t have our scripts floating around out there. That was a serious transgression, and Alicia had to go.”

“But, to be precise – she never admitted to being the person who gave the documents away? She tried to resign when it became clear no one believed her and agreed to be fired so she could collect unemployment.”

“Who else could have done it?”

“Lottie, you’re the one who said Greer was a schemer. And she’s the one who benefited when Alicia was fired, getting her job.”

Lottie eyed Tess thoughtfully.

“I’m still not sure I like you,” she said in her blunt way, “but I like the way you think. Only here’s something else for you to consider – we only found out about the scripts after the guy killed himself and the police notified us. So was that part of Greer’s plan, too? Goad the guy into killing himself, in order to get Alicia fired? Or maybe you think Greer hunted this guy down, hung him from his own ceiling fan?”

The two women shared a look, the kind of grudgingly respectful gaze more often seen between two adversaries in a western – oh, crap. Now Tess was falling into the habit.

“I’m guessing someone has Alicia’s particulars? Home address, phones?”

Lottie detached a Post-it from a hot pink pad and handed it to Tess.

“You had this ready, all along?”

She nodded.

“I’m always three steps ahead. I have to be. I know tomorrow’s weather forecast and every actor’s call time and what kind of sandwiches they’re going to hand out at break tomorrow. I know Saturday’s schedule and how the set designers are going to create a faux chapel on the soundstage, for Sunday’s memorial service, and how much the catering is going to run us, and if I have to put that against our budget or can get accounting to keep it outside the line costs. I know everything .”

Tess believed her. That is, she believed that Lottie thought she knew everything. There was a difference.

No one said outright that it was Johnny Tampa’s fault that they had to have second meal that night, but he knew they were blaming him. The crew seemed to have fallen into the habit of believing everything that went wrong was Johnny’s fault, which was so unfair. He was in almost every scene of this goddamn thing, and he was always meticulously prepared – had his lines cold and was even making a good run at a Baltimore accent before Flip and Ben decreed that he shouldn’t. But he needed to understand the mechanics of this time-travel gig, why his character seemed to move between present and past in ways he couldn’t control or predict. Until that was made clear, he was going to have trouble in certain scenes.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ben had said tonight, clearly exasperated that Johnny wouldn’t let the subject drop. “Mann doesn’t know how it works, so why should you know?”

“Mann also doesn’t know that he’s going to end up living in the present, with Betsy as his wife, and I do, so it’s clearly okay for me to be privy to information that Mann doesn’t have,” Johnny countered. “This is about the implicit integrity of the show, whether viewers will feel cheated. If the time travel doesn’t have a logical explanation, even if it’s never spelled out for the viewer, then the character, the world, won’t feel real. People will reject it instinctively, sensing you’re not playing fair.”

Ben had sighed, and gone to summon Flip, the great soother and smoother. But Johnny wasn’t looking for an ego stroke, or even assurance that it was his part that really mattered, that the show was called Mann of Steel, and it wasn’t likely to change. Likely – wait, had Flip said likely the last time they spoke? Likely meant it could change. Was the network going to build up Selene’s part even more? There had been a lot of changes in the last script; they had gone all the way to buff pages. Johnny couldn’t remember a single episode in his career that had gone even as far as cherry.

Second meal was pizza from a local place called Matthew’s, and it was pretty much the best pizza in Baltimore. Johnny circled the table sadly, knowing he should skip it. A year ago, he had hired a life coach who had put him on an intuitive eating program, dictating that Johnny should eat what he wanted when he wanted it. The result was that Johnny had intuitively eaten his way up to almost two hundred and thirty pounds. He watched Selene take a single slice of the crab pizza, which was kind of like a soufflé on a crust, rich and creamy and cheesy… She took exactly one bite, then left the slice on her plate, which only affirmed his belief that she wasn’t human. A succubus, maybe, or were women incubuses? Incubi? Borg?

Ben and Flip could tell themselves all they wanted that they weren’t trying to make a time-travel show, but they would need that sci-fi core audience to get a second season. Johnny Tampa knew this because he was the core audience, a diehard science fiction fan. Over the last five years, when he had been on what he now called his hiatus, he had spent most of his time in his Santa Monica condo, reading fantasy and science fiction. It was the time-travel angle that had interested him most in Mann of Steel, not that beggars could be choosers. Truthfully, his dream gig was that vampire show that HBO was doing, but they hadn’t even given him a courtesy audition. “Not ethereal enough,” they had said, and everyone knew what that was code for: too fat.

He decided to retreat to his banger, away from the temptations of second meal. He realized Selene had nibbled just enough pizza so that her breath would be all crab-and-cheese stink in their next scene, when they were supposed to kiss. Very clever, Selene, but had anyone else noticed? Flip and Ben melted in her presence. Lottie didn’t seem quite as impressed, but then Lottie didn’t like anyone. The fact was, it probably didn’t matter if everyone saw through Selene, if everyone realized what a phony and a bitch she was. It was understood that Mann of Steel had a shot only because Ben and Flip had been lucky enough to sign Selene before Baby Jane earned her that Golden Globe nomination.

Johnny wondered if they still considered themselves lucky, or if they had stopped to consider why Selene had been so convincing as an amoral, scheming teen whore. Johnny, who read the trades and the tabloids as obsessively as he read science fiction, knew all the rumors about Baby Jane. Moreover, he believed them, too. It was said that Selene had an affair with the director, which had been dicey, given that Selene was barely legal at the time. The bigger sticking point, however, Hollywood being Hollywood, was that the director was married to the screenwriter, and she tried to block the release. At least, they were married when the project started. Part of the reason the film had languished for two years was that its distribution rights had to be divvied up in the divorce. The screenwriter couldn’t decide, for a while, what she wanted more – to destroy Selene’s career or make a bundle off a low-budget movie with a star-making performance. Ultimately, she had chosen the bundle. Didn’t everyone?