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After a small delay, as if she needed time to process the fact that he had actually said something clever, she laughed. It was a rather metallic, rat-a-tat sound, but it seemed genuine enough. She had a hard, almost scary edge to her. He liked it.
“Whitney Talbot,” she said. “I’m here to-”
“I know. You follow her everywhere? To the bathroom and stuff?”
“I let her have her bathroom breaks in privacy.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“What?”
“I mean, this soundstage, it’s a big space. And it might seem secure, but who knows? I mean, you’re here to protect her, right?”
“Right,” she said, after a beat.
“If I were you, I’d never let her out of my sight. You never know what she’s going to be up to.” He turned his head to the side, in case his profile jogged her memory. Pride vanquished, he said: “The Boom Boom Room?”
She looked puzzled. “Is that one of the strip clubs still operating on the Block?”
“No, it was a television show, about kids put in a school-within-a-school on special detention, kind of like The Breakfast Club – oh never mind. A lot of people watched it, back in the day.”
“I didn’t watch a lot of television, growing up. I was kind of outdoorsy.” She said it nicely, apologetically, not in the snobby way some people had. He almost believed her, except he didn’t believe anyone who claimed not to watch television. Who didn’t watch television? It was like… not brushing your teeth, or refusing to shower, odd to the point of being uncivilized. Everybody watched television. There had been a time, around season four of Boom Boom, when he couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without being recognized. He hadn’t always enjoyed the attention, but he hadn’t been stupid enough to wish it away, and he had been genuinely surprised when it stopped. Since then, it was as if he couldn’t get quite enough oxygen in his blood, as if he were living at 75 percent. He had plenty of money, he had been smart that way, but his financial stability was scant comfort. He wanted another success in this business, and to get that, he had to pretend to be in love with some twenty-year-old twat. He hated her. He needed her. Well, that’s why they called it acting.
Di
The PAs were calling them back to work, but Joh
“Look what was in my trailer.”
Lottie glanced at the photos. “It’s not so bad, Joh
“That’s not the point. Someone sent it to me, to u
“You’ve got to start locking your door,” Lottie said. “I thought, after the Nair-”
“It came in the mail. And it proves the Nair wasn’t an isolated incident. You know who’s behind this. Why don’t you do something about it?”
“Selene’s got a bodyguard now,” Lottie said. “She can’t go anywhere without being seen.”
“Well, maybe the bodyguard is in on it, then. Someone’s doing her dirty work. We can’t go on like this. She doesn’t want to be here. I hate working with her. How are we going to get through this season, much less another one if we’re lucky enough to get picked up?”
“Joh
The stand-ins had cleared the set, and he and Selene took their places. In this scene, Ma
“Quiet on the set. Sound speed. Rolling… action.”
Selene, in character, gave him a flirtatious look. Sure enough, garlic fumes were everywhere. He gave her one back, topping it with a wink, and they ran their lines, building up to their big kiss in the La-Z-Boy. Joh
“Cut,” yelled the director, who then walked over to Joh
The crew was too professional to sigh, but Joh
Chapter 20
It was Tess’s nature to be suspicious of anything that came too easily, and finding Alicia Farmer fell into that category. With Lottie’s piece of paper in hand, all Tess had to do was drive to the address listed and wait for someone to show up. Was Lottie trying to manipulate her? “Trust no one” was begi
At least the address itself was surprising, a working-class neighborhood in Northeast Baltimore. Tess had assumed that someone in the television business would have settled into one of the hip, emerging areas favored by the postcollege crowd. Alicia Farmer lived in a small brick bungalow on a large, irregular plot, a diamond shape that looked as if it had been created by accident when the street was widened a few years back. The result was that the house sat slightly apart from the others, lonely and isolated, like the first kid to go in the stew pot in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose.
No one answered her knock, so Tess took a quick walk around the house, which looked well tended, although a new deck seemed to have been abandoned in midconstruction. She then took up residence on the bench at the bus stop across the street. Sitting in a car for long periods of time caught the attention of nosy neighbors, but one could sit at a bus stop all afternoon and no one would notice.