Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

“I wish you had killed me that night,” George Sybert said the last time that Tess saw him, a week before Christmas. “My life insurance would have been sufficient to take care of Marie.”

“Are you sure?” Tess asked.

“Oh yes, I know all the ins and outs of my policies.”

“No, I mean – are you sure that you’d like to be dead?”

“Marie would be better off.”

“Does Marie think so?”

His eyes moistened, and Tess had to remind herself that this disarmingly devoted husband had killed two women. The problem with George Sybert – the problem with most of humankind – was that the only pain that mattered to him was his own. He mourned his brother-in-law and best friend. He would go to any lengths to take care of his Marie. But what about Greer? What about Alicia? Neither one deserved to be dead.

Boy meets girl . Bob Grace gets to Alicia, then Greer gets to him, promising him the document he thinks will prove everything. Boy loses girl . Greer recants, and Bob Grace, despairing of seeing his dream realized, kills himself. His brother-in-law takes over his quest. Boy gets girl . George Sybert kills Greer, then Alicia.

“Popcorn?” Crow asked.

“Of course,” Tess said.

Tess, Crow, and Lloyd had been given reserved seats, far better than Lloyd’s status would normally confer, just two rows behind the producers. Ben motioned Tess to join him in the aisle.

“Can you keep a secret?” Ben asked.

“I would think that my track record speaks for itself.”

The old Ben might have had a comeback for that. The new one said:

“We’re getting a pickup, even before the first episode airs. It’s not exactly the vote of confidence it seems – they just don’t have enough in the production pipeline, so they’re using the pickup to create heat for the show. You know – a show so good we didn’t even wait for ratings . That kind of crap. But they were really excited by the reaction at T.C.A.”

“T.C.A.?”

“The television critics. They meet twice a year, preview stuff. We got great buzz.”

“Congratulations. So Mann of Steel returns to Baltimore. I’ll try to keep the glorious news to myself.”

Ben glanced over his shoulder to see who was nearby. “That’s the thing – we’re not coming back here. The network gave us an early pickup, in part, so we could figure out a way to work around everyone’s schedule. Johnny’s going to do his film this winter, while we’ve agreed to keep Selene light during the season so she can go make her vanity biopic. But the trade-off is we have to do it closer to home, probably Vancouver. It simplifies things, especially now that Johnny’s new wife has decided she wants to live in Hawaii part of the year. Besides, the Maryland Film Commission’s budget was slashed. No more givebacks.”

“So everyone gets what they want, and Baltimore is left empty-handed?”

“Most of Baltimore. How many people live here? Six hundred thousand or so? Well, five hundred ninety thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine get bupkes. But if Lloyd settles down, earns his GED? Flip and I are committed to paying his way through school. USC, NYU, community college, a technical school if that’s what he wants – he gets in, we pay. And we’ll do whatever we can to find him work when he gets out.”

Tess was stunned – happily, for once. “That could be a lot of money, four years of college.”

“Yeah, it’s about what I make a month, since we negotiated our new deal.” The man who had once called her an asshole waited, clearly expecting Tess to say something cutting or sarcastic, but she was at a loss.

“Well… thanks. That’s huge.”

Ben seemed a little disappointed that rudeness had failed her for once. “The movie’s starting. We should go back to our seats.”

“It’s a television show.”

“Well, we call it the movie sometimes.”

“And actresses are actors. Sorry, I’ve been out of the loop.”

Before the screening of the pilot, Flip took the stage and made a little speech, thanking the crew and the city, hitting all the right self-deprecatory notes. Tess remembered him at Greer’s memorial service, how well he had spoken there, too. Yes, Flip had the knack of saying the right words in the right way, but did he ever mean any of them? Here he was, praising his father’s hometown to the skies, knowing that he wouldn’t be returning. He had gotten what he needed out of the city and was moving on. The people who were laughing appreciatively at his jokes and witticisms would have to find new gigs, perhaps move to other cities for work.

Flip returned to his seat to enthusiastic applause, and Mann of Steel began with a bright, peppy credit sequence that made Baltimore look like the Disney version of a working-class town. Tess watched, absorbed in spite of herself. It was actually pretty good. But as the show wore on, she couldn’t help noticing that something had changed. She had changed. Aware now of what happened behind the camera, she couldn’t stop breaking down the effects required by each scene. There was Mann in the union office, but all Tess could focus on was pudgy, vain Johnny Tampa and the view through the window, which she now knew to be translights, computer digitized images lighted for daytime. She watched Selene float into the frame, and she thought about how the camera must have rolled along a track to create that giddy, gliding sensation. She listened to the sounds of a modern port, knowing much of it had been overlaid later, in a studio. She saw the moon rise and wondered if that had been easier or more difficult to capture than a sunrise, or if some stupid local girl had blundered into that shot as well.

And then, just like that, it was over.

With the crew present, the credits were one of the indisputable highlights, applause and shouts greeting each name. Even Tess found herself applauding one small line of type – based on a short story by Bob Grace . With eight episodes this season and a pickup for next, that credit was better than an annuity for Marie Sybert, Bob’s heir. That had been Flip’s idea, but it hadn’t been done out of kindness, or even a belief that George Sybert had a legitimate claim. It was simply the cheapest way to buy Sybert’s silence, to end any embarrassing talk of theft and plagiarism. More important to Flip, it kept his father out of things. For the thing that bugged Flip the most, Ben had told Tess, was not the possibility that someone would think his idea was stolen, but that it had been offered to his father first.

Lloyd’s credit – assistant to Mr. Marcus – was at the very end, one of a long list. Tess and Crow hooted, pumping their fists, while Lloyd pretended to be profoundly humiliated. Or maybe he wasn’t pretending. Tess noticed that others in the crew had cheered, too, and felt encouraged. Maybe Lloyd had found his place in the world, a place where he could succeed.

“It’s so much better than I thought it would be,” she whispered to Crow as the lights came up.

“Well,” he said, gathering up the debris at their feet, “based on everything you ever told me, it would have to be.”

“No, I mean it’s good, really good. When I could forget how they did things – and when I could forget that the leads were played by two people I loathe – it was really affecting, and surprisingly funny. They got Baltimore right. Sort of.”

She wondered if she would ever be able to watch a television show or a film in the same way again, now that she knew too much. She wondered if it was even possible to know too much about something – or someone – that you had once loved. And she had loved movies, once upon a time, not even a decade ago, when it was unthinkable not to be in line at the multiplex every weekend, when it was urgent and essential to see movies the very night they opened. In college, she had once driven to a Philadelphia art house, a distance of more than a hundred miles, to see – well, what was it that she had driven almost two hours to see? A German film, possibly Herzog, maybe Wenders. The American Friend ? Aguirre, The Wrath of God ? That was it – Aguirre, a film in which a character clutched something secret and vital in his hand, yet died without ever revealing what it was. Tess had left the theater almost in a swoon, so dazed and rapt by Herzog’s images that she forgot to get a cheese steak on her way out of town.