Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

“She was in talkies,” Tess said.

“Right. But she went bankrupt and ended up drowning in her toilet when she vomited up all the Seconals she had taken in hopes of a slightly more, uh, picturesque suicide. Don’t you know your Hollywood Babylon ? Hollywood kills its own.”

“Well, there was Thelma Todd, whose murder was never solved,” Tess said. “But I’m not sure that was actually Hollywood ’s fault.”

“You’ve forgotten the starlet who jumped from the thirteenth letter of the Hollywoodland sign – back when it had thirteen letters. Oh, and another one who immolated herself on a pyre of her own clippings. What a way to go.”

The two old friends fell silent, and Tess assumed that Whitney must be thinking, as she was, of the fates available to actresses of a certain age. To women of a certain age. The distinctive ring of Selene’s cell phone broke the silence, followed by her side of the conversation – not the words, only the tone, which was suffused with a husky, flirtatious giggle.

“I wonder who she’s talking to,” Tess said. “Then again, knowing Selene, she’d talk to the dry cleaners in that breathy little voice.”

“Easy enough to find out.”

“How?”

“She has an eleven o’clock call tomorrow. Grab her cell while she’s still asleep, check the received call log, make a note of it.”

As it happened, Tess didn’t have to wait until morning. A few minutes later, the water started running in Selene’s bathroom. Tess knocked softly on the bedroom door in a pretense of courtesy, then pushed inside, Whitney trailing her. While Whitney kept an eye on the closed bathroom door, Tess grabbed the iPhone. It took a second for her to figure out its protocols, and when she did find the received call log, the latest call wasn’t particularly surprising: DEREK. He and Selene had probably shared one more laugh over drugging Tess; that gag never got old. The other calls were from her driver, Lottie, and Selene’s mother. In fact, it looked as if Selene’s mother called every day about the same time, which surprised Tess. She hadn’t thought the Waites family was particularly supportive of their daughter.

The received call log exhausted, Tess was about to put the phone back on the nightstand when she remembered Selene’s furiously tapping thumb, texting in the car on the way to New York. She found the text function and clicked back two days in time. Derek again, checking Selene’s ETA. And, in between Derek’s calls, one from a different number, a text that read simply: ACHING FOR YOU. WHERE ARE YOU? The absence of text shorthand – no 4 for for, no u for you, no r for are – might have been enough to tip Tess off to the sender – someone who had enough pride, or time, to use the language in full. But she didn’t have to guess. The text was from someone named “Benny,” who happened to have a number in Selene’s phone book.

She pressed the call button, hanging up when Ben Marcus picked up breathlessly on the second ring: “Have you figured out a way to get rid of them?”

He waited until Marie was asleep to put in one of Bob’s movies. Marie knew about the stash of VHS tapes, of course, and the old VCR that had suddenly materialized. He could never hide anything in this house. Marie knew their home the way some people knew their bodies – she could detect any change in it, no matter how small. The house was her body, in a sense; she inhabited it the way a hermit crab lived in its shell, only she never outgrew it. She could be resting on the sofa in the evening, yet tell by sound alone if he put something away in the wrong place in the kitchen. Where would he hide her Christmas gifts this year, now that he didn’t have an office? But everything should be solved by Christmas, one way or another. It had to be. Bob’s estate would be settled, the other matter resolved as well, and he could tell Marie everything. Well, not everything, but he could tell her that he had decided to take early retirement, thanks to this windfall that Bob had engineered for them before he died. Even then, Marie probably wouldn’t want to watch the films. They always made her cry, even the silly ones.

When he brought the VHS tapes home, he had told a semitruth, as he liked to think of it. It was hard for him to think of anything he said as a lie, because then he would be a liar, and that didn’t fit with his sense of himself. He told Marie that while Bob’s estate was held up in probate, the Orphans’ Court had determined that certain items of no financial value could be removed from the premises. And a judge might have ruled that way, if a judge had been asked. In reality, he had made the ruling, after a fashion, entering and leaving with the set of keys that Bob had given him years ago – the same keys he had used to unlock the back door that day, after a week of Bob not answering his phone.

In his mind, he framed the memory as Bob might have framed the scene in his viewfinder. He did not see the kitchen through his own eyes but saw it as if the camera was watching him from the other side of the room – the door opening, his eyes moving slowly upward, only Bob’s feet and ankles on view. It was a clichéd way of seeing, a scene stolen from someone else – but then, he didn’t have Bob’s eye.

He had wanted to believe it was despair, nothing more, Bob finally laid low by some variant of the same odd brain chemistry that affected his only sister, Marie. But then he discovered what a mess Bob had left behind – the debts, the second mortgage, the refinance on the first mortgage, a balloon that was going to come due in a year, kicking up to a disastrously high rate. Then there was the lawyer, saying he was still owed money, even though it was his bills that had driven Bob to near bankruptcy in the first place, and that he planned to attach the house. Who cared if some VHS tapes disappeared? Even a grasping lawyer wouldn’t assign them any value.

Still, they might try to take the movies from him, if they knew. He wouldn’t put anything past these people. Thinking about them, thinking about all the people who were allied against him, made his face grow hot, then anger and humiliation overtook him again, just as it had the other night. Quickly, he pushed the play button, desperate to lose himself in Bob’s meticulous fantasy world.

The film opened on a shot of a castle – this would be the decrepit old mansion on St. Lo Drive, but it looked so elegant on film, so much better than it did in life. Most things did. A knight and his squire entered the frame. Don Quixote ? Ivanhoe ? While some of Bob’s movies had dialogue, this one had only a musical score, and it quickly burst into a choreographed battle, with other knights emerging from the forest to challenge the hero. Ivanhoe . He and Bob were infants when that film was first released, the version with the two Taylors, Elizabeth and Robert, but they had probably caught it in reruns, on the old Picture for a Sunday Afternoon . Had that been Channel 2 or Channel 11? He could no longer remember, but he did recall that there were two movies, at most, on Sunday afternoons, and people waited years for a big movie to make its way from the cinema to the television. Now movies were everywhere, all the time, available with one click of a computer mouse, on sale at the grocery store, in rental bins at McDonald’s. This easy accessibility should cheapen the experience, but it somehow never did. Nothing could break the spell of a good movie.

On his screen, the eleven-year-old versions of Ivanhoe and his squire broke free and ran across the undulating hills of Clifton Park. Okay, he wasn’t objective, but it seemed to him that Bob’s camerawork was outstanding.