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“No, she’s notorious.” Greer used her clipboard to indicate Tess. “She’s been in the paper.”
“The local paper?” asked Mr. Natty Boh, suddenly all bright interest.
“Yes,” Greer said.
“No,” Tess said. “I mean, not really, not often. I started out as a reporter at the old Star, and I’ve worked for the Beacon-Light as a consultant, nothing more. Maybe that’s why she thinks I’ve been in the newspaper.”
A lie, but an expedient one, one she assumed would dull the man’s interest. Besides, how could a Hollywood director, assuming he was that, care who had been mentioned in a Baltimore newspaper?
But now he seemed even more focused on impressing her, extending his hand, something he hadn’t done even while she was treading water. “I’m Flip Tumulty.”
“Oh, right, the son of-”
At this near mention of his famous father, Flip’s features seemed to frost over, while Greer clutched her clipboard to her chest, as if to flatten the squeak of a gasp that escaped from her mouth. Tess was forced to correct her course for the second time that morning. “I had assumed you were the director on this project, but you’re a writer, right? Ben Hecht, Odets – those are the kinds of details a writer would know. Now that I think about it, I remember a Shouts and Murmur piece you wrote for the New Yorker a few years back. Very droll.”
That puffed him up with pride. “I am a writer, but here I’m the executive producer. That’s how it works in television, the writer is the boss. And you’re a rower who reads the New Yorker?”
Now it was Tess’s turn to be offended. “Rowing is my hobby, not my profession. Besides, rowers tend to be pretty intelligent.”
“Really? I don’t recall that from my days at Brown.” Oh, how Tess hated that kind of ploy, this seemingly casual mention of an Ivy League education. Shouldn’t the son of Phil Tumulty be a little more confident? Or did having a famous father make him more insecure than the average person?
“Well, Brown,” she said, trying to make it sound as if that school’s rowers were famously subpar.
“What do you do, when you’re not rowing or consulting for newspapers?”
It was a question that Tess had come to hate, because the answer prompted either a surfeit of curiosity or the same set of tired jokes, many of them centering on wordplay involving “female dick.” She hesitated, tempted to lie, but the opportunity was lost when Greer blurted out: “She’s a private investigator. That’s it. She shot a state senator who happened to be a killer, or something like that.”
“Something like that,” Tess said, almost relieved to see how the details of her life continued to morph and mutate in the public imagination. She had shot a man, once. He wasn’t a politician. If he had been, she probably would have been less haunted by the experience.
“Really?” Tumulty, who had been pacing restlessly, dropped in the makeup chair opposite Tess. “Do you do security work?”
“Sometimes. Preventive stuff, advising people about their… vulnerabilities.” Tess, naked inside the expanding pink robe, became acutely aware of her own vulnerabilities and checked to make sure that the belt was cinched. But the tighter she pulled the belt, the more the cloth seemed to expand. She was turning into a pouf of cotton candy. Or – worse – one of those Hostess Sno Balls, with the dyed coconut frosting.
“And you have an ongoing relationship with the local newspaper? Could you get them to back off us, cut us some slack?”
Tess smiled with half her mouth. “The Beacon-Light’s sort of like one of my ex-boyfriends. We’re civil to each other, but I’m not in a position to ask for any favors right now.”
“What about bodyguard work?”
“What about it?”
“Do you do it?”
“I’ve had enough trouble safeguarding my own body over the years.” If she could have found her hands within the robe’s voluminous sleeves, she might have snaked the left one down to her knee, fingered the scar she always stroked when reminded of her own mortality.
“Well, it wouldn’t be bodyguard work, per se. More like… babysitting.”
“You can get a nice college student to do that for ten dollars an hour.”
“Here’s the thing.” Tess was begi
“You’re making a historical miniseries about Betsy Patterson?”
“Not a miniseries – a short-order series, eight episodes that will be used midseason on Zylon, that new cable network. And Ma
As he outlined his story, Tumulty spoke with the flushed, excited air of a little boy enchanted with his own ideas, preposterous as they seemed to Tess. It wasn’t the concept of time travel via head injury that seemed most problematic to Tess, but the idea of a story centered on a steelworker in twenty-first-century Baltimore. Hadn’t these guys driven past the ghost town that was Sparrows Point? Didn’t they know that Bethlehem Steel had been sold and scavenged for its parts, leaving its retirees without so much as medical benefits or adequate pensions?
“Sounds like Quantum Leap meets Red Baker by way of The Dancing Cavalier,” she offered.
“I know Quantum Leap,” Tumulty said, his ma
He paused, and she realized that he would not admit not knowing something, but he would leave a space if she wanted to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.
“Red Baker is one of the seminal works of Baltimore fiction. It’s about a laid-off steelworker. Back in the 80s.”
Tumulty turned to the young woman. “Make a note on that, Greer. We might want to option it, if it’s available.”
Greer promptly began to scribble on her clipboard. Short and a little top-heavy, she was a pretty girl, although she seemed to be playing down her looks. Her dark hair was slicked back in a tight, unbecoming ponytail, her clothes frumpier than they needed to be. She had lovely hands, though, with a perfect French manicure, a fitting showcase for the ring, which she had turned back around at some point.
Tess asked: “You mean you’d make Red Baker, too?”
“No, but we like to hold the options on similar projects, so they don’t beat us out of the gate.”
“That seems a little… unsporting.”
“Common practice. What’s the other one you mentioned?”
“The Dancing Cavalier?” Tess could forgive Tumulty’s ignorance of literature, but shouldn’t this son of a famous director, born and bred in Los Angeles, recognize a reference to one of the greatest movie musicals ever made? “It’s the film within the film of Singin’ in the Rain. Remember? They salvage the footage from the disastrous attempt at a talkie and recast it as a musical in which a young man travels back in time.”
“Right. Of course. Well, ours is much more meta. It’s sort of like what Sofia was going for.”