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Flip finished with John Do
Flip asked Greer’s mother if she wanted to say anything, but she shook her head. She looked so old. Based on Greer’s age, Tess calculated that Mrs. Sadowski could have been as young as forty-five, as old as sixty-five if Greer had been what was once called a change-of-life baby, but she definitely looked as if she fell into the high end of that range. Her hair was gray, the kind of faded, washed-out gray that appeared to have given up on color out of sheer exhaustion, her face weathered and haggard. She had an understandably shell-shocked expression, and although a handkerchief was balled up in her fist, she had yet to cry that Tess could see. She just kept squeezing the handkerchief tighter and tighter.
“Well,” Flip said, caught off guard by the mother’s refusal to speak, which he clearly had been counting on for his big finale. “I guess we should, um, eat.”
Next to the “chapel,” which had been created in one of the unused corners of the cavernous soundstage, a local caterer had set up an elaborate spread. Given the circumstances, someone – the set designer or art director – had made the impromptu catering hall pretty, draping dark cloths and hanging a large blowup of a photograph of Greer, bent over her clipboard. The photo had clearly been taken on set, as Selene was in the foreground, yet the eye was drawn to Greer, who was in sharper detail. The photo was, in fact, extraordinarily good, very well framed, arresting in a way that Tess couldn’t define for herself.
“Selene, who took that photo?” she asked.
“That guy. What’s-his-name. Somebody. I’m dying for a cigarette. Can I go outside?”
“In a few minutes,” Tess said, conscious of her other agenda. She, Whitney, and Selene needed to be conspicuously in the thick of things, at least for a while.
She continued to study Greer, mostly forehead and hair in the shot. Tess remembered the young woman who had fished her out of the water, a mere week ago. Like Alicia Farmer – who had slipped out as soon as the service was over, clearly anxious not to mingle – Tess couldn’t pretend that she cared for Greer. In fact, she had found her rather obnoxious. But, no, you wouldn’t wish someone dead for that, or even for the a
Flip was steering Greer’s mother through the buffet line, helping her fill her plate. Whitney followed with Selene, picking the most fattening foods in the spread, which included miniature crab cakes, deviled eggs, and a ten-layer cake in the Smith Island style. Lottie, alone in a corner, looked miserable. Grieving Greer or the cost of this shindig? Tess immediately felt bad about her own snarky thoughts, remembering the scare that Lottie had experienced Friday night. It had turned out to be a smoke bomb, like two of the other incidents on location. But, i
Tess saw Lloyd across the warehouse, giving one of Greer’s relatives a tour of the set itself, explaining various technical details – the drops used to create views through “windows,” the lights that could mimic day or night. Tess was amazed at how much Lloyd had absorbed in his first week at work, but she was even more stu
The reception was breaking down now into its natural subsets – cast and crew in one cluster, Greer’s family in another, Ben off by himself, a can of soda clutched in his hand. Tess saw another gray, haggard-looking woman moving toward Greer’s mother and assumed it was one of the relatives, although she didn’t remember seeing this woman during the service. But when the woman spoke to Mrs. Sadowski, whatever she said caused Greer’s mother to reel back so quickly that Flip just missed having a plate of food smashed into his shirtfront.
“You have some nerve,” Mrs. Sadowski rasped at the woman. “Coming here, to ask me that.”
“You won’t talk to me on the phone, so what am I supposed to do? It was his property, plain and simple, should have been given back weeks ago. He owes on it. You want me to make payments on an engagement ring that your daughter wouldn’t give back, when everyone knows she should’ve? My son is dead, too.”
“He broke up with her,” Mrs. Sadowski shrilled. “You don’t have to give it back under those circumstances. Especially when he killed her.”
“He broke up with her because she was cheating on him. That’s different. And we’ll never know what really happened, will we?”
Even as Tess moved forward, anxious to help Flip keep order, her mind was stumbling over that fact. He broke up with her… but Greer had told everyone at work that it was the other way around. Saving face? Or had she lied to her mother? And, wait – cheating? Greer was cheating on her fiancé? With whom?
But she didn’t have the luxury of sorting out her thoughts just now, not with Mrs. Sadowski flinging a plate of food into the face of JJ Meyerhoff ’s mother, who let out a banshee wail and pushed back, so that Mrs. Sadowski was propelled into Flip, who landed backward on the buffet table, which went down in a heap under his weight, the ten-layer cake landing on his chest.
Ben had been looking for an opportunity to sneak out, and he couldn’t have asked for a sweeter moment than the mother melee. Man, it felt as if he had been waiting for this moment for weeks, although Greer had been dead barely four days. Well, he supposed he should be grateful it was a service, not an actual funeral or, worse, a viewing. He found those barbaric. But an open casket probably hadn’t been an option after what Greer’s ex had done to her.
And it was JJ, right? It had to be JJ. Because if it was someone else, then someone else knew.
Before the service began, Ben had made a point of introducing himself to Greer’s mother, clasping her shoulder. Put a housedress on Mrs. Sadowski, and she wouldn’t have been out of place in a Dorothea Lange portrait. Someone should show Selene this face, let her see what a lifetime of smoking could do to one’s complexion.
“Mrs. Sadowski,” he said, extending his hand. “Ben Marcus. I worked with Greer. We’re so sorry this happened.”
She gave him a look, but it was dull and glazed over. His name didn’t seem to mean anything to her. Greer hadn’t spoken of him to her mother. Good. For once, he had never been happier to be lost in Flip’s shadow, just the sidekick.
And now here he was, literally lost. He could never find his way in Baltimore, especially outside the Beltway. It took him almost an hour to locate the apartment that Greer had shared with her boyfriend up until a month ago. Luck was with him, for once – it was a so-called garden apartment on a split-level, the windows on the front barely above the ground, but with a small patio on the rear. Once, while researching a cop show, he had read that sliding doors could be rocked open. The information had seemed dubious, but he tried, and the door gave way with surprising ease.