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Tess remained calm, but she didn’t bother to hide her exasperation at Lottie’s logic. “Greer isn’t dead because I came to work here.”
Lottie didn’t blush when embarrassed, not exactly, but color rose slightly in her face, two freakishly perfect round dots of red. Tess would bet anything that older people had grabbed those cheeks once upon a time, pinched them, and told Lottie how cute she was. How she must have loathed it.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” she conceded. “But it’s hard not to consider the… juxtaposition. The other things, before, were relatively minor. Trash can fires when we filmed outside. The sudden flak from the community people and the steelworkers. Nair in cold cream. This – murder, ransacking the office – is something different.”
“And, as far as the police can tell, probably unrelated. They’re looking for Greer’s ex-fiancé.”
Lottie resumed testing the pencil points against her palm.
“Did you ever meet him?” It was a hunch, but Tess was no enemy of hunches.
“Once. Greer tried to get him a job here. He has some carpentry skills, he thought he could work with the art department, but we have a full complement. The guy who’s doing our set is a local, a veteran who came up with John Waters, and he has all the people he needs. I wasn’t going to force some nepotism hire on him to make an intern happy.”
“So Greer put her fiancé up to it?”
Lottie suddenly seemed to become aware of her own strange behavior and put the pencils back in the holder, brushing her palms together. “That’s what I thought at the time. But, later, I wondered if it was his idea, if he wanted a job here so he could keep an eye on Greer.”
“Was Greer involved with someone on the production?”
Lottie didn’t speak right away, and Tess willed herself to wait it out, let the silence work on Lottie. The person who speaks next is a loser, she chanted in her thoughts. The person who speaks next is a loser.
“No, but-”
Loser! I win, I win. High-five me. It’s my birthday, it’s my birthday. Yes, it was ridiculous, but Tess wasn’t above a little end-zone celebrating in her head.
“I think she aspired to be.”
“With whom?”
“Anyone. Anyone, that is, who could help her. Greer would have initiated a relationship with me, if she thought that would be beneficial to her career goals.”
Lottie’s gaze dared Tess to ask the question. But she had a different tack in mind.
“Interesting, that she would think that a married woman with kids might be open to that. She must have been casting a wide net.”
Lottie, surprised, held out her hands, as if to check that her ring finger was, in fact, quite bare.
“I noticed you don’t wear any jewelry,” Tess said. “No earrings, no necklaces, not even a watch. Perhaps your skin doesn’t do well with any metal, even gold? Or maybe it’s just part of the androgynous look you cultivate. And while there may not be photos of your family here in the office, your leather satchel is a mom’s bag, and that ceramic mug you use as a pencil holder – a child made that.”
Lottie eyed her skeptically. “Flip told you.”
Having won the point, Tess didn’t mind revealing her source. “Yeah, he did. But I like to think that I’m not the sort of person who assumes a woman is gay just because she wears overalls and painter’s pants. Okay, so Greer was putting out the vibe that she was open to – we’ll call it off-the-books overtime. Did anyone take her up on it?”
“Not to my knowledge. The crew is too tired at this point to get anything going. Flip’s almost as happily married as he says he is, and Ben always says he doesn’t shit where he eats. Still – have you ever seen All About Eve?”
Tess nodded, fighting the urge to sigh. After just two days among the Hollywood crowd, she longed for a good nature analogy, a food metaphor, or even a reference to one of Aesop’s fables.
“Greer was shaping up to be quite the little manipulator. I gave her the original internship. I was impressed that a teamster’s daughter had made it to L.A., gotten a toehold in the business. It wasn’t her fault she had to come home when her father got sick. In the begi
They had circled back to what Tess wanted to discuss all along.
“Alicia was the one who gave the materials to the man who killed himself?”
“Wilbur Grace,” Lottie said, and Tess realized she was the first person in the production to concede the man had a name, that he was something more than just a link in their chain of bad luck. “She swore she didn’t, that she had never heard of the guy, but when the phone logs showed he had called her repeatedly, she offered to resign. I told her that she could at least collect unemployment if she was fired, and she agreed. And who would admit to doing something they hadn’t done, just to get benefits?”
Flip had all but said the same thing. Hollywood must be a charmed place, where no one was ever wrongly accused of anything, never forced to choose between principles and pocketbooks.
“Why would the guy have wanted those things in the first place?”
“Fans are obsessive. There’s nothing they don’t want, and there’s no show or actor that doesn’t have its own set of fan-boys and fan-girls. Joh
“But, to be precise – she never admitted to being the person who gave the documents away? She tried to resign when it became clear no one believed her and agreed to be fired so she could collect unemployment.”
“Who else could have done it?”
“Lottie, you’re the one who said Greer was a schemer. And she’s the one who benefited when Alicia was fired, getting her job.”
Lottie eyed Tess thoughtfully.
“I’m still not sure I like you,” she said in her blunt way, “but I like the way you think. Only here’s something else for you to consider – we only found out about the scripts after the guy killed himself and the police notified us. So was that part of Greer’s plan, too? Goad the guy into killing himself, in order to get Alicia fired? Or maybe you think Greer hunted this guy down, hung him from his own ceiling fan?”
The two women shared a look, the kind of grudgingly respectful gaze more often seen between two adversaries in a western – oh, crap. Now Tess was falling into the habit.
“I’m guessing someone has Alicia’s particulars? Home address, phones?”
Lottie detached a Post-it from a hot pink pad and handed it to Tess.
“You had this ready, all along?”
She nodded.
“I’m always three steps ahead. I have to be. I know tomorrow’s weather forecast and every actor’s call time and what kind of sandwiches they’re going to hand out at break tomorrow. I know Saturday’s schedule and how the set designers are going to create a faux chapel on the soundstage, for Sunday’s memorial service, and how much the catering is going to run us, and if I have to put that against our budget or can get accounting to keep it outside the line costs. I know everything.”