Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

Lottie wished she could be as quick to absolve the production. If she had hired JJ, would that have made a difference? She told herself that a man who would kill his ex-fiancée – or girlfriend, or wife – wasn’t susceptible to cause and effect. A violent man would always find a reason to act violently. Still, Lottie couldn’t help thinking that the production had changed Greer. The young woman who had volunteered to work for free on the pilot had been so eager, so sweet. Had she been changed by her proximity to Flip, by her glimpses into the money and perks provided by such a lifestyle?

They hadn’t found the murder weapon, but that didn’t seem to bother the police. It bothered Lottie, though, as did the memory of Flip’s trashed office. Why hadn’t JJ taken anything if he wanted to make the incident look like a burglary? Flip’s Emmy, for example. It wasn’t hockable, but you could imagine someone trying to sell it on eBay. Flip’s iPod, in the dock next to his computer. Okay, so the killer wasn’t really a burglar, and he hadn’t thought like a burglar. He was an unstable young man, hopped up on adrenaline, desperate to cover his tracks.

Still, something tugged at Lottie’s logical, meticulous mind. Part of the reason that Lottie hadn’t hired JJ was because he was so obviously pussy-whipped. He hadn’t wanted the job, he all but admitted, but Greer had pushed him into applying for it. He had smiled goofily at the mere mention of Greer’s name, and it was clear that he thought her a tremendous prize, that he was the luckiest man in the world to have her as his future wife. It had been cute, if unfathomable. Really, if you had asked Lottie then where she thought the relationship was headed, she would have predicted that Greer was more likely to kill him one day. Or, more correctly, shed him for his lack of ambition, his limited potential – which was exactly what happened, she reminded herself now. Greer, dazzled by Hollywood, broke up with her loser boyfriend, and he lost it. End of story.

Well, the good news was that their troubles were over. They could probably fire the Monaghan woman, save that expense. It had been ridiculous, hiring a watcher for Selene, given how much they already paid for security on set.

Checking her computer clock, she used her office phone to call home, where it was only eight-thirty. She couldn’t bear to talk to her children over the unreliable cutting-in, cutting-out buzz of a cell phone. It was hard enough to have a conversation with four-year-old Angela, the younger one. She could never decide which was worse – Angela’s distant, distracted mode, when she prattled about the day’s events and seemed slightly vague about who Lottie was, or the dramatic, melancholic wail: When are you coming home, Mommy? I miss you. Tonight, Angela told her a long, hard-to-follow story about preschool and a goldfish, but Lottie had hung on to every word. Her seven-year-old, Topper, was stoic, inured to her absences – and that was more painful still.

“They’re fine,” Jason assured her, taking the phone. Perfect Jason, as he was known among her friends and family, P.J. for short – good-looking and strong and capable. One of Lottie’s more tactless friends had even wondered if it was fair of Lottie to take a six-footer out of the dating pool. “That’s a foot more than you need.” Of course, Lottie saw it differently – she had to marry up, literally, so her children would have a fighting chance to escape the curse of her genes. How she had worried, every year, over the height percentiles. So far, both children were reliably above the eightieth percentile, but she had been fairly normal, too, until puberty. Jason said she worried too much, but show her a unit production manager who didn’t. It was practically the job description.

“If we get a pickup,” Lottie said to him now, after checking in with both children, “we could live here. We could live like kings, in fact. You can buy a Victorian mansion for the price of a two-bedroom bungalow in Glendale.”

“It will all work out, even if the show doesn’t go,” Jason said. “You always find a gig. You’re in demand.”

“I want a gig that allows me to live with my family full-time,” she said. “I want to look after my own children, not tend to those who simply behave childishly. But – shit .”

“What, babe?”

“Fire.”

“You had to fire someone again ?”

“No, there – I think – look, I have to go.”

Smoke was creeping under the door, lazily, almost prettily. Her mind detached briefly, as if she were watching an effect created for the screen. Nicely done. Sinister, yet not over the top. She willed herself to be calm and approached the door with a tentative hand. It wasn’t warm to the touch. Cautiously, she opened it, peering out. The hallway was filled with smoke, although she couldn’t pinpoint the origin. She groped her way toward the elevator, pushed the buttons, then remembered that she should take the stairs. Where was the stairwell? At the other end of the hallway. She crouched low, practically crawling. The smoke seemed to be thinning, but that could be wishful thinking on her part.

Once outside, she gulped for air, and it was almost as if she could taste it, drink it down. She walked to the edge of the parking lot before she called 911 from the cell phone in her pocket. The fire station was mere blocks away, and it was a great comfort to be able to hear the sirens start seconds after she called, although it was also unnerving, standing alone in the parking lot. She couldn’t see any flames, but where there was smoke… What could be burning? Electrical malfunction? If the fire had been set – her mind didn’t want to follow that train of thought, but she couldn’t stop it – if the fire had been set, someone else was here, or had been here. Yet her car was the only one on the lot. She locked herself in it, but that didn’t make her feel safe enough. She drove a few blocks away and parked in a busier, better-lit area, listening to the sirens drawing closer.

Special to the Beacon-Light

Firefighters and police were summoned yet again to the production offices of Mann of Steel late Friday – for what turned out to be a homemade smoke bomb.

Only one person was on the premises, unit production manager Lottie MacKenzie, and no one was injured in the incident, which appears to be another in a series of pranks that have plagued the production.

Asked if she thought the smoke bomb had been planted by someone unhappy about Mann of Steel - the troubled production’s detractors include some community activists, local historians, and disgruntled steelworkers – MacKenzie said she was sure it was an isolated incident, “Probably a prank by kids, nothing more.”

Firefighters have been called three times before to the Mann of Steel set, although always when the production was filming in Mount Vernon and Fells Point.

More seriously, the production office was the site of a murder earlier this week, but police are adamant that there is no connection, given that the suspect, John “JJ” Meyerhoff, was killed early Friday in a standoff with police.

“Still, every incident like this is just another example of Mann of Steel ’s drain on our resources,” said Mandy Stewart, a community activist who has complained about the inconveniences caused by the production when it’s on location in Fells Point. “They take and they take and they take, but they’re not putting anything back.”

“And Greer said, in that terribly earnest way she had, ‘But it’s chartreuse, Mr. Tumulty.’”