Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

“No,” Tess told him. “One thing that they were clear on was that they had nothing to do with the incidents at the production office, not even Friday’s smoke bomb. Didn’t fit their strategy, which was to make the production look like a public nuisance. Hey – did you find Greer’s engagement ring?”

“No,” Tull said.

“Have you closed the case?”

“Getting there.”

She wanted to argue, although today’s events made it more likely that JJ Meyerhoff had killed Greer. Selene had been genuinely mystified when Tess asked if Greer might have information that could harm Mann of Steel . “By the way, there was a local girl tangled up in this mess, but I’d like to give her a bye. You see a problem there?”

“No, but then – none of this is my problem, thank God. Look, if there’s no charges, there’s no story. The problems go away, the production finishes up, and everyone goes back to fuckin’ California. Looks like you actually managed to do what they wanted all along, protect them from the local media – and themselves.”

Tess hung up the phone. It was going on 3 P.M. and she hadn’t found time to talk to Flip about his broken Emmy. It seemed almost too much. Maybe she should track down Ben, arrange to meet with him, confront him with the information she had about Zervitz .

Only – where was Ben? He had never shown up at the office, and no one had heard from him.

“He doesn’t always come in or call,” Lloyd said when Tess asked if he knew where Ben was. “He likes to write at Starbucks. But we have a deal – he always answers my messages, because I call only if it’s important, shit-hit-the-fan time.”

“Call him now.”

“But, Tess-”

“Lloyd, the shit has hit.”

He did as he was told, sighing and shrugging. Somehow, it was more appealing on Lloyd than it had been on Selene. But then, Selene had been playing a part. Lloyd really was a peevish adolescent, sure that all the adults around him were idiots.

“He ain’t answering,” he said, puzzled. “But the phone’s not off. If it was off, it wouldn’t ring at all, just send me straight to voice mail. Let me try a text.”

The text, too, went unanswered.

“He should be calling back,” Lloyd said. “He knows I only call if he’s in trouble.”

“Work was called off,” Tess said.

“Ben might not know,” Lloyd pointed out. “He don’t check e-mail either.”

But maybe Ben did know the secret of the Emmy and what it held. Maybe Ben had the mystery letter all along. Tess was suddenly very tired of Hollywood people and their machinations. She decided to call Alicia Farmer, tell her that the jig was up, that Tess had protected her out of homegirl loyalty, misplaced as it might have been. Johnny and Selene reminded her of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, although she would never have described them as careless. They had been meticulous in the way they had tried to smash up things. True, local girl Alicia might have been a little money hungry, but she hadn’t stood a chance with those slicksters.

Tess tried the video store first, only to be told that Alicia hadn’t come in today.

“Didn’t come in, or wasn’t scheduled to come in?”

“Didn’t show for her shift, which started at noon. Boss is pissed.”

“Is this typical? Alicia not showing up?”

Impossible to know over the phone, but Tess sensed she had just been shunted off with a shrug for the third time that day.

“Not my problem. Although, I guess it is, because now I have to work to close and-”

Tess was not unsympathetic to the Charm City Video employee’s plight, but she didn’t have time for the rest of the story. She hung up, grabbed her keys and her purse, and raced out.

When she reached Alicia’s house twenty-five long minutes later, she was relieved to hear footsteps heading to the door promptly upon her knock.

And surprised to be greeted by a very pale, drawn-looking man, circles under his eyes and a tremor in his limbs.

“Hey,” Ben Marcus said, his voice thin and flat. “There’s a guy just behind me, with a gun in my back, and he would like you to come inside, too, or he’s going to kill me.”

Ben must have seen in Tess’s face that she was quickly running through the possible options, wondering what would happen if she simply ran or began to scream. Or produced the gun from her own purse.

“He’s already killed Alicia,” Ben said. “He really doesn’t have a lot to lose.”

Alicia’s body was on the floor of her den, facedown. Tess didn’t know from forensics – she had never even seen an episode of CSI – but she was reliably sure that Alicia had been there for several hours, possibly overnight. She had been shot from behind, in the base of the head, presumably after turning her back on the man who now sat in one of the club chairs, a gun pointed at Ben.

Thoughts zinged through Tess’s head like so many errant pinballs, and she managed to keep one ball in play longer than usual, banging it against various pockets of memory: whap, whap, whap. Who, who, who .

“You can’t be Wilbur R. Grace,” she said at last to the man. “But I think you must be connected to him.”

“He was my brother-in-law for thirty years and my best friend since I could remember,” said the man. How old? Fifties was the best Tess could do. Thin brown hair. Two eyes, yes, although you’d be hard-pressed to put a color to them. It was a face made to be forgotten. A local man, judging by his accent, the kind of man her Uncle Donald knew from his work in various state bureaucracies.

“And he killed himself, and you blame…?”

Ben, who usually thrummed with excess energy, looked catatonic. How long had he been here? Since last morning? Since last night? Lloyd said he had been at the office with him until eleven. The older man, by contrast, looked fresh, composed.

“He hung himself in despair,” the man said, “after Greer Sadowski reversed herself and claimed she had no memory of finding his treatment for our movie, The Duchess of Windsor Hills .”

“Ah,” Tess said, smiling more broadly than this weak bit of local wordplay deserved. Windsor Hills was a neighborhood in Northwest Baltimore; the woman who had persuaded the Prince of Wales to forsake the British crown was a Baltimore girl, Wallis Warfield Simpson. “Very clever.”

“ We thought so,” the man said defensively, unsure if he was being mocked. Perhaps he had been ridiculed a lot, or felt that way. “You see, the Duke of Windsor was something of a Nazi sympathizer. If he hadn’t married Simpson, he would have become king, and who knows what kind of world we would be living in now?”

“You have something there,” Tess said, falling back on one of her generically truthful phrases. You have something there. That’s an idea .

“It was my concept, although Bob was the one who fleshed it out. He was the writer. Also the cinematographer. But the ideas often started with me, some offhand observation I might make. That’s how we worked.”

“Sure,” said Tess, trying not to look at the body on the floor. One shot, two shots, three shots, a dollar. Once you’re in for capital murder, stand up and holler. “I bet.”

“ Don’t patronize me,” the man said, now pointing his gun at Tess. It was a small thing, not at all formidable, but at this range, it didn’t have to be.

“I’m not,” Tess said. “I’m piecing together what I know. You had an idea, one similar to Mann of Steel, and you believe that someone from the production saw that idea-”

“I know, ” the man said. “I did it. I walked right up to this gentleman on the set of The Last Pagoda and handed him our idea, in a sealed envelope. I have a photo in my scrapbook, of me on set, and you can see this Ben Marcus right there in the background. That’s a much more definitive link than anything that Zervitz put up, and he won a million dollars.”