Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

The mourners laughed in that delayed rueful way common to memorial services, as if they needed a second to grant themselves permission. Tess had to admit – Flip was a good public speaker, and he had found the perfect tone for his eulogy. Thanks to him, the service was doing what a memorial or funeral should do, but so often didn’t: respecting the memory of the deceased while cheering people slightly, but not too much. In Flip’s experienced hands, Greer’s story became one of a hardworking local girl who hadn’t been afraid to reveal her ignorance if it meant doing her job better. It was a nice story. Tess wondered if any of it was true. She wondered if it mattered if it was true. Probably not. God forbid that anyone tell the truth at her funeral. Maybe she should write that down somewhere, leave it behind in a safe-deposit box with the will she had yet to write: No truth telling at my funeral!

Flip’s achievement was all the more remarkable when one considered how few genuine friends Greer had among the cast and crew of Mann of Steel . As for her family – there wasn’t much, not here, just her mother, two stocky men who appeared to be her brothers, and a few older women, aunts or cousins. And no high school friends, Tess decided, studying the crowd. No friends of any stripe? She glimpsed Alicia Farmer in the back, which seemed curious. She had been so candid about disliking Greer. Was she here to network ? With Greer dead, would she try to persuade Lottie that it was Greer who had released the proprietary materials? A few months at Charm City Video could make a woman pretty desperate.

Flip paused, taking a sip of water, and Selene’s voice jumped into the silence – that is, the ring tone on Selene’s cell phone, blaring her pallid cover of “Call Me,” made its presence known, buried deep as it was in her huge leather bag, a designer brand Tess couldn’t identify, although she was fairly sure it cost as much as her first car, even after adjusting for inflation. Before Selene could grab the phone, Whitney literally slapped the girl’s hand, reached into the bag, turned it off, and then put it in her own purse. Tess had other reasons for wanting Whitney with her today, but chaperoning Selene through a memorial service had turned out to be a job that required both of them. Just getting her properly dressed had taken hours, as Selene’s idea of suitable garb ranged from a thigh-high skirt to an overly theatrical black Dior suit. The suit would have been appropriate under some circumstances, but it made Selene look like a little girl playing dress-up – a Eurotrash princess or the grieving widow of a president cut down in his prime. “No one has ever confused Tess or me with Diana Vreeland,” Whitney had hissed at one point, “but I think even Vogue agrees that funerals require panties .” In the end, they had managed to assemble a safe-for-Baltimore outfit of navy dress and cashmere cardigan.

“I can’t be photographed in this!” Selene had protested. “I’ll be on the ‘What was she thinking?’ list in the Star .” Tess pointed out that because the memorial was on private property, the landlord was within his rights to restrict press access, just as he had forced the steelworkers to hold their informational picket on the narrow strip of grass alongside the parking lot. As it turned out, press in this case was a lone Beacon-Light reporter, juggling a notebook and a video camera, and two of the local television crews, no reporters in tow. Would the memorial have attracted more attention if Greer’s homicide was still considered an open case? Or was Baltimore simply getting blasé about Hollywood? Tess wanted to believe it was the latter.

Flip finished with John Donne, his only misstep to Tess’s mind. It seemed a bit clichéd, and not at all central to Greer’s life. Whitney, on the other side of Selene, must have had the same thought, for she passed Tess a note: With Greer dead and no replacement, he probably doesn’t have anyone to look up appropriate poetry for memorial services. On Tess’s right, Lloyd frowned, embarrassed for them. Lloyd took funerals seriously.

Flip asked Greer’s mother if she wanted to say anything, but she shook her head. She looked so old . Based on Greer’s age, Tess calculated that Mrs. Sadowski could have been as young as forty-five, as old as sixty-five if Greer had been what was once called a change-of-life baby, but she definitely looked as if she fell into the high end of that range. Her hair was gray, the kind of faded, washed-out gray that appeared to have given up on color out of sheer exhaustion, her face weathered and haggard. She had an understandably shell-shocked expression, and although a handkerchief was balled up in her fist, she had yet to cry that Tess could see. She just kept squeezing the handkerchief tighter and tighter.

“Well,” Flip said, caught off guard by the mother’s refusal to speak, which he clearly had been counting on for his big finale. “I guess we should, um, eat.”

Next to the “chapel,” which had been created in one of the unused corners of the cavernous soundstage, a local caterer had set up an elaborate spread. Given the circumstances, someone – the set designer or art director – had made the impromptu catering hall pretty, draping dark cloths and hanging a large blowup of a photograph of Greer, bent over her clipboard. The photo had clearly been taken on set, as Selene was in the foreground, yet the eye was drawn to Greer, who was in sharper detail. The photo was, in fact, extraordinarily good, very well framed, arresting in a way that Tess couldn’t define for herself.

“Selene, who took that photo?” she asked.

“That guy. What’s-his-name. Somebody. I’m dying for a cigarette. Can I go outside?”

“In a few minutes,” Tess said, conscious of her other agenda. She, Whitney, and Selene needed to be conspicuously in the thick of things, at least for a while.

She continued to study Greer, mostly forehead and hair in the shot. Tess remembered the young woman who had fished her out of the water, a mere week ago. Like Alicia Farmer – who had slipped out as soon as the service was over, clearly anxious not to mingle – Tess couldn’t pretend that she cared for Greer. In fact, she had found her rather obnoxious. But, no, you wouldn’t wish someone dead for that, or even for the annoyance of being overly ambitious. The obvious answer is the obvious answer, she reminded herself. Greer broke up with her fiancé, and he killed her. Happened all the time.

Flip was steering Greer’s mother through the buffet line, helping her fill her plate. Whitney followed with Selene, picking the most fattening foods in the spread, which included miniature crab cakes, deviled eggs, and a ten-layer cake in the Smith Island style. Lottie, alone in a corner, looked miserable. Grieving Greer or the cost of this shindig? Tess immediately felt bad about her own snarky thoughts, remembering the scare that Lottie had experienced Friday night. It had turned out to be a smoke bomb, like two of the other incidents on location. But, innocuous as the homemade smoke bomb may have been, its presence meant someone had broken into the offices after hours. That was genuinely troubling. Tess thought they should change the code, but the management company didn’t want to inconvenience its long-term tenants for the sake of the short-term Mann of Steel. Lottie had admitted to Tess that she had been a hard-ass in negotiating the lease, and the management company couldn’t wait for them to vacate. If they did get a pickup, they wouldn’t be coming back to Tide Point.

Tess saw Lloyd across the warehouse, giving one of Greer’s relatives a tour of the set itself, explaining various technical details – the drops used to create views through “windows,” the lights that could mimic day or night. Tess was amazed at how much Lloyd had absorbed in his first week at work, but she was even more stunned at his unflagging enthusiasm. True, it had only been a week, but she had never seen Lloyd excited about anything, except certain action films and, on occasion, a chicken box from one of his old haunts.