Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

“Quiet on the set. Sound speed. Rolling… action .”

Selene, in character, gave him a flirtatious look. Sure enough, garlic fumes were everywhere. He gave her one back, topping it with a wink, and they ran their lines, building up to their big kiss in the La-Z-Boy. Johnny Tampa could kiss, he knew that much about himself. There was no one he couldn’t kiss, under any circumstances. He could tongue a dog, a real one, or even French a potato if that was what he had to do. He was a great kisser, on camera. Off camera, it didn’t interest him that much. He preferred it impersonal because he had grown tired of girls staring at his face, as if they couldn’t believe they were with Johnny Tampa. And then there were those who hadn’t known they were with Johnny Tampa, and that had been even worse.

“Cut,” yelled the director, who then walked over to Johnny. He lowered his voice, his style when giving notes. “Lose the wink, okay, Johnny? It’s way too lecherous for Mann.” As usual, Wes had no notes for Selene.

The crew was too professional to sigh, but Johnny could feel everyone slumping. After all, they were now three hours over the day. Meanwhile, Selene, who had set him up to flub the scene, could barely suppress her smile as she threw herself back into the La-Z-Boy.

It was Tess’s nature to be suspicious of anything that came too easily, and finding Alicia Farmer fell into that category. With Lottie’s piece of paper in hand, all Tess had to do was drive to the address listed and wait for someone to show up. Was Lottie trying to manipulate her? “Trust no one” was beginning to seem a very apt motto for this job.

At least the address itself was surprising, a working-class neighborhood in Northeast Baltimore. Tess had assumed that someone in the television business would have settled into one of the hip, emerging areas favored by the postcollege crowd. Alicia Farmer lived in a small brick bungalow on a large, irregular plot, a diamond shape that looked as if it had been created by accident when the street was widened a few years back. The result was that the house sat slightly apart from the others, lonely and isolated, like the first kid to go in the stew pot in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose.

No one answered her knock, so Tess took a quick walk around the house, which looked well tended, although a new deck seemed to have been abandoned in midconstruction. She then took up residence on the bench at the bus stop across the street. Sitting in a car for long periods of time caught the attention of nosy neighbors, but one could sit at a bus stop all afternoon and no one would notice.

It was after eight when a woman not much younger than Tess parked a Chevrolet Caprice at the curb and trudged toward the door, head down, a single plastic sack of groceries dangling from her right hand. Tess let her get inside, then waited another ten minutes before knocking, allowing the woman to decompress a little – put her groceries away, make the transition from work to home. She wouldn’t have thought of such a tactic when she started this kind of work, but she knew how she felt at the end of a long day, and she saw no harm in letting this woman decompress before Tess peppered her with questions about a workplace she had left involuntarily.

“I’m from the state unemployment office,” she said exactly twelve minutes later, “and we’re doing spot checks of departmental efficiency. Do you know where we might find Alicia Farmer?”

“I’m Alicia Farmer,” the woman said, as if confessing to something unpleasant. “But I never put in for unemployment. I got another gig.” She indicated the insignia on her blouse. CHARM CITY VIDEO.

“So you’re still in the film business?”

“Yeah.” Alicia laughed, a little unwillingly. “For now, until Netflix or the idiot management puts us out of business. Now if you don’t mind-”

“I wasn’t exactly truthful,” Tess said, smiling in a way that she hoped would take the sting out of her confession, all the while positioning her body slightly forward, so the door couldn’t be closed without real force. Alicia seemed too downtrodden, too defeated, to slam a door on someone’s foot. Speaking swiftly now: “I’m an investigator working for Mann of Steel, and I’m looking into some of the security issues on set.”

“Security issues? Like the death of Greer Sadowski? Yeah, I guess that was a real security issue .”

Alicia had reddish brown hair, pulled back in a ponytail, and such dark shadows beneath her light eyes that they might have been bruises. She reminded Tess of someone she knew, although it took her a second to pin it down. She reminded Tess of herself, the woman she was on the verge of becoming after she lost her job at the Star . God, she had been lost for a while. If she hadn’t allowed Tyner to talk her into becoming a private investigator, if she hadn’t taken the risk of opening her own business, if she hadn’t met Crow and, yes, allowed him to woo and pursue her, this could be her, in a red CHARM CITY VIDEO smock, living in a safe, but not particularly desirable, Baltimore neighborhood, sarcasm her only defining trait.

“The police are looking into Greer’s death, not me.” Then, on a hunch. “Should I give them your name?”

“I didn’t hate her that much.” Tess liked the precision of Alicia’s candor. Not wanting the girl dead, but not pretending to care more than she did. “Look, I’m exhausted and all I want is to drink a beer, watch some stupid television. Can we sit down? I’ll even give you a beer.”

Tess took the offer, sitting with Alicia in a small den off the kitchen, an addition that appeared to have been made circa 1982, judging by the butternut squash-colored appliances, with a Formica breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the pine-paneled alcove. With only a few small tweaks, it could have passed for cheerfully funky, a retro gem. Instead, it seemed resigned to dowdiness.

“My folks’ place,” Alicia said. “My father died ten years ago, my mother just two years ago. When I have the time to renovate, I don’t have the funds. When I have the funds, I don’t have the time. I don’t know. I watch all those home improvement shows, but I think it’s decadent, the way we fetishize our homes. Or maybe that’s a convenient rationalization for my crap house.”

“It’s cozy,” Tess said, sucking up, but not completely insincere. “I’m guessing your parents died kind of young?”

“Dad had that cancer no one can pronounce, the one that steelworkers get from asbestos. Mom went out the old-fashioned way, good old lung cancer.” Alicia Farmer fired up a Lucky with a great deal of style and ceremony. “Me, I’m invincible. Or I don’t give a shit. I haven’t figured out which one it is yet.”

“Wasn’t it weird working on Mann of Steel when your dad had worked at Beth Steel?” Tess may have been trying to ingratiate herself, but she also was genuinely interested. “I mean, you had to realize how bogus it was, a thriving steel plant in modern-day Baltimore. Plus, you probably know some of the steelworkers who have raised a stink about it.”

The question seemed to catch Alicia by surprise. She blew smoke at the ceiling while she thought about it. “It’s a television show. A guy time-travels after he gets hit on the head. It wasn’t exactly a documentary . I have to say, though, you’re the first person who ever asked me that particular question about my job at Mann of Steel .”

“What do people usually ask?”

“What’s Johnny Tampa really like, do I ever get to ride in a limo. Shit like that.”

Tess smiled. “I’ve worked there less than a week, and I’ve been asked the Johnny Tampa question.”