“I was surprised that the police let me leave the scene without giving a statement,” he said. “Your doing?”
“Luck of the draw,” Tess said. “If anyone other than Tull had been the primary, we’d all be down on Fayette Street right now. Tull trusts me to bring you in later for a more detailed debriefing. Relatively sober,” she added, after watching Flip chug the Burgundy that the waiter had left in an ice bucket.
“Don’t worry, this is just going to restore my equilibrium. Did you-”
“See her? No, fortunately. It sounds as if it was particularly… unsettling.”
“I’ve never seen Lottie that upset about anything,” Flip said. “I didn’t know she could get upset. The joke on Mann of Steel is that she’s the Woman of Steel, an absolute ice queen. We’re all a little terrified of her.”
Lottie was not the woman who interested Tess just now. She broke off a piece of bread and swished it through the little dish of olive oil and peppers. “And Selene? What kind of emotions does she engender?”
Flip let loose a sigh so long that it was almost a whistle. “Satanic spawn. A total nightmare. God, I wish the network would let us write her out of the show after the first season, have Mann continue on without Betsy Patterson.”
“And lose the whole blue-blood-meets-blue-collar thing? I thought that was the concept that made this whole thing go.”
She didn’t quite achieve the sincere tone she was trying for.
“Are you this obnoxious to all the people who hire you, or do you sometimes manage to fake enthusiasm for their enterprises?”
“It’s the nature of my business to work for people with different tastes, values. Essential, even. I wouldn’t work at all if I had to be gung ho about all my clients’ professional lives.”
“Still, do you have to be such an asshole?”
A fair question, under the circumstances.
“I don’t mean to be a jerk. The broad outlines of this show you’re doing – I’ll admit, I just don’t get it. It’s history, it’s time travel, it’s comedy, all set in the context of the never-never land of a thriving steel company in the twenty-first century.”
“Girl’s house gets swept up by tornado and she’s transported to a magical land where she expends all her power trying to get home again.”
“Okay, yeah, but The Wizard of Oz is a fantasy.”
“Billionaire media mogul whispers a mysterious name on his deathbed, launching a journalist’s attempt to understand the private man behind the public figure. Yet the truth about Rosebud doesn’t really solve any of those mysteries.”
“Although it was rumored to be William Randolph Hearst’s pet name for Marion Davies’s nether regions,” said Tess, grateful to have one of Crow’s bits of trivia so readily at hand. “Okay, when you reduce anything to a thumbnail description, it sounds a little silly, but-”
“Woman will do anything for the love of her ungrateful daughter – including confessing to the murder that the daughter committed.”
“Mildred Pierce and there’s no murder in the book, which is a thousand times better.”
“Man builds a baseball diamond in a cornfield behind his house and Shoeless Joe Jackson appears-”
But now Flip had gone too far. A bridge too far, a baseball diamond too far.
“I HATE THAT MOVIE!” Tess said, and the bare brick walls sent her voice bouncing into every corner of the restaurant. She regained her composure. “Sorry, but do not get me started on that cornball mush.”
“How can you hate Field of Dreams?”
“It’s a male weepie, as I think Pauline Kael or some other critic said. And, you know, I’m okay with the male weepie. We all deserve our weepies. My issue is that what makes men cry is elevated to profundity, while what makes women cry is denigrated as sentimental. When you take my corn seriously, I’ll grant yours equal respect.”
“What makes you cry? Beaches?”
“Major League, which is a better baseball movie than Field of Dreams, by the way.”
Even as Tess’s mouth provided that glib reply, her brain was thinking about what really did make her cry. There was a certain expression on her greyhound’s face, a wisp of a seeming smile. The Bromo-Seltzer Tower, glowing blue in the night. Old television footage of Brooks Robinson being inducted into the Hall of Fame. And there was the matter of a young woman, beaten to death just last night, but Tess wasn’t hypocrite enough to admit that she felt anything but shock and dismay over that. The only thing that resonated was the violence of the death. A fatal beating took time – and not a little passion.
Besides, Flip was talking about cinematic tears. Okay. Then – little Dominic dying in Noodles’s arms in Once Upon a Time in America, but also Noodles coming back through the bus station door, thirty years of time summed up in a single shot. The Wild Bunch. The memory of a carrot-haired man who had loved The Wild Bunch, living – and dying – by the codes distilled from his beloved westerns. Had it really been just a little over a year ago? She reached for her knee. Maybe one day the scar wouldn’t be there. Maybe one day, it would all be a dream. Just like in the movies.
“Strictly Ballroom,” Tess admitted. “When the music goes out, and the father starts to clap, and they show they can do the paso doble without any music at all…”
Her eyes started to mist, making her seem truthful, but she was still thinking of that carrot-haired man, dying on the cold cement of a parking lot, leaving her to fight for her own life – and avenge his.
“You haven’t shot down my central point. Anything sounds ludicrous when boiled down to the pitch. But it’s all in the execution. Why do you think Hollywood produces so much crap?”
“Because there’s seldom any economic penalty?”
“No. Well, yes. I mean, no. People’s careers do suffer from doing critically disdained work-”
“If it’s also commercially inert.”
“The point,” Flip said irritably, as if unused to being interrupted, and he probably was. “The point is that the writing, the performances, the visuals – those will combine to make this show something really special. That’s why we’re starting small, on a C-list cable network with only eight episodes. People forget, but there was a time when getting a series on HBO was considered second-rate. The Sopranos was pitched to the networks first, and they all passed. By the way, has anyone ever proposed adapting your life story?”
Food arrived – a house salad for Flip, a much heartier steak salad for Tess – and she was spared answering right away. “Last year – I was involved in a case of some notoriety, and some producers circled for a while.”
“You make them sound like vultures.”
Tess forked up a mouthful of steak and greens that required much judicious chewing.
“They were just doing their job,” he persisted. “Look, you go to the movies. You read newspapers and magazines, right? Well, the material has to come from somewhere.”
“A friend of mine was killed in front of me. I killed a man. I never thought of it as material. A woman you know was killed in your office last night. Are you going to make a miniseries about that?”
Flip blushed, and she warmed to him. She knew he was pure Hollywood, bred and buttered, as the old Baltimore saying went. Flip’s father was the one who had the claim to Charm City normalcy, a claim he had pretty much squandered years ago. But Flip did seem relatively down-to-earth.
“How-”
“Shot him.” Over and over again, until the clip was empty. Shot him, but only after gaining advantage by almost gouging his eye out with scissors. She withheld these details as a courtesy.