Laura Lippman: Another Thing to Fall

“At any rate, even though she’s second on the call sheet, Selene has more than her share of downtime. And she gets… bored. Rather easily.”

“She wasn’t there for pickup this morning,” Greer put in. Her face was bland, but Tess thought she caught a flicker of spiteful enjoyment in the timid voice.

“What? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I just found out. I got a cell call that Selene had shown up in makeup. Two hours late, but she’s there.”

“Where was she? How did she get to set if she missed her driver?”

Greer raised one shoulder, a timid halfhearted shrug. “Taxi, I think. Meanwhile, there was another one of those… incidents. A trash can fire on Fort Avenue, which closed the street down when firefighters responded, which is part of the reason she was so late. Or so she said. Apparently, it didn’t occur to Selene that she could get out of the cab and walk the last block here.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He grabbed his phone from an interior pocket of his fleece vest even as it started to ring again. “I’m losing you, you’re breaking up,” he shouted as he ran from the trailer.

“Tough gig,” Tess said.

“Oh, he loves what he does.”

“No, I mean for you, being his assistant.”

“Are you kidding?” Greer’s eyes widened for once, and they turned out to be quite pretty, a vivid pale blue set off by dark lashes and brows. “I’m really lucky. I started off as an intern during the preproduction phase for the pilot, opening mail and doing other odd jobs, then got promoted to the writer’s office assistant when the network picked up the show. I jumped at the chance to be Mr. Tumulty’s assistant when the job opened up.”

“What happened to his last assistant?”

“She left. She was a local.” The latter said with great derision.

“Aren’t you from here?”

“How could you tell?” She seemed at once insulted and shocked.

Tess considered what would be the kindest way to reply. “Because I am. Like knows like, right?”

“Well, I may have been born here, but I’m not going to be stuck here,” Greer said.

“What about-” Tess gestured at the ring.

“Everything can be negotiated. That’s one of the first things I learned, working for Fli – Mr. Tumulty. If you know what you want, you can get it. The trick is you have to know what you want.” She gave Tess an appraising look, and it was disconcerting to see that calculated, pragmatic gaze in such a young face. “And I know that-”

The door to the trailer opened, and Greer let the conversation drop.

“Don’t you think you should check to see if Miss Monaghan’s clothes are ready?” Flip asked, and Greer rushed out before Tess could say that nothing, not even Under Armour, could possibly dry that fast. Scurried, actually. She reminded Tess of a mouse, one of the animated ones that had been so devoted to Cinderella. Tess had always wondered what was in it for the mice. Did they really think they were going to get to live in the palace once all was said and done?

“I wanted a moment with you in private,” Flip said.

Tess nodded. The monstrous pink bathrobe had now risen up to her jawline, so her chin disappeared for a moment, catching in the collar.

“The thing about Selene – Greer doesn’t know this – only the other producers and I are aware of this, but… there was an incident when we returned here to film this summer. A suicide.”

“Selene attempted suicide?”

“No, no, no. It was a local man, Wilbur Grace, with no known connection to the production. He hung himself in his kitchen. Hung? Hanged?” Tess let Flip work out the grammatical possibilities for himself. “Hung,” he decided. “Police came to me, the other exec producer, Ben Marcus, and my unit production manager, Lottie MacKenzie. The man had some things in his possession, things that appeared to come from digging through the trash at the production office. He also had multiple photographs of Selene, taken during location shooting on the pilot, last winter.”

“A stalker?”

“Possibly. And a bit of a creep, based on some other things police found.”

“Creep?”

“Let’s just say he had an eye for the kiddies. As I said, no one knew him, and we hadn’t been aware of a problem. The problems started after he died. Small fires, set near our locations. A power outage, the result of someone vandalizing a transformer. Then there are the complaints from neighbors, who had been delighted to have us when the production was first announced. And now the steelworkers caterwauling. I’m not worried about Selene from a public relations standpoint. I’m worried that she’s vulnerable, when she’s out in public.”

“But you just said the man was dead, a suicide.”

“Right. Yet all this strangeness now.”

“Maybe he’s haunting you.”

Famously smart-alecky Flip Tumulty didn’t seem to enjoy flippancy in others.

“We have an order to film eight episodes of Mann of Steel in Baltimore, budgeted for three point two million per ep. If we get a pickup for a full second season, we’ll be here almost forty weeks out of the year, pumping money into the local economy. But if these petty annoyances continue, we’re going to have to rethink our commitment to the city.”

“But you want me to watch Selene, not your set?” Tess had an unerring instinct for when a story didn’t quite hang together, but she couldn’t pinpoint the logical flaw here, the missing link. She knew only that there was a lie lurking somewhere.

“Yes. Because wherever we film, whatever happens, Selene is the linchpin, our star. She’ll make or break us.”

“The show is called Mann of Steel .”

Flip glanced around, as if to be sure there was no one else who could hear him. “The program was built around Johnny Tampa, originally.”

He paused, as if waiting for Tess to squeal with excitement, but she could not bear to admit that she did know Johnny Tampa. She was, in fact, far more familiar than she wished with the entire cast of the long-ago teen nighttime soap opera The Boom Boom Room, in which Tampa had starred. In her defense, she had been an actual teenager when the show was in its heyday, which wasn’t true of Tampa, playing a high school senior with a receding hairline and crow’s-feet.

“He must be pretty long in the tooth now.”

“Only in his forties, and Tampa is actually a good actor,” Flip said. “Great comic timing. He worked with Ben and me on our first show, No Human Involved. ” Again, there was a pause, as if waiting for a gasp of recognition, but Tess didn’t have to fake her ignorance this time. She remembered a terrific novel by that name, but not a television show.

“It ran for only two seasons, and it never got the ratings it deserved, but the critics loved us. Loved. Ahead of its time, a one-camera show done with voice-over. And Johnny won an Emmy for his guest shot. He was our first choice to play Mann. Like I said, he’s really good. But Selene – Selene’s got all the heat since Baby Jane. ”

“A remake of the Bette Davis movie?”

“No, this was really gritty, done in the style of Requiem for a Dream, about a fourteen-year-old prostitute. The studio that bought it at Sundance had decided it was a stinker and they dumped it in theaters on Memorial Day weekend last year, a sacrificial lamb opposite X-Men . It almost disappeared, but then she got nominated for a Golden Globe. Did you see it?”

Tess decided not to volunteer that she had been part of the rabble flocking to X-Men with her boyfriend, instead of dutifully paying eight dollars to watch yet another young actress prove her Serious Thespian Chops by pretending to be a prostitute. The only cinematic cliché that bothered her more was high-spirited white guys, à la Ferris Bueller or the Blues Brothers, proving their innate soulfulness by inspiring black people to dance.