“I’m within my rights,” she announced to the empty parking lot. “Stop bothering me. I don’t have to give it back, under the circumstances.”
It was, she realized, an all-purpose pronouncement, one that could work for all the problematic people in her life. She waited, watching for that hint of movement again, then decided she had imagined it. Even so, she ran toward her car, unlocking it with the remote and leaving the parking lot gate open behind her, too scared to get out of her car and close it. She would have to make a point of being the first at work tomorrow, so it wouldn’t get back to Lottie that she had left the gate up.
TUESDAY
Chapter 7
“The lamb,” Tess decided. “And – no, yes, no – yes, a glass of wine, whatever you think best.”
Flip Tumulty, who had ordered a salad and sparkling water, gave her a hard look. Tess wasn’t sure what shocked him more, the food or the beverage. Perhaps Hollywood had only two channels on its dial – abstemious self-denial and wretched excess.
“And what can I get for you, young lady?” the waiter asked.
The third member of their party – definitely young, not so obviously a lady, not to Tess’s eyes – peered over enormous sunglasses, very Jackie O, circa Ron Galella. The glasses weren’t exactly the best way to travel incognito. She was attracting a lot of attention – or would have been, if there had been more people in Martick’s for late-afternoon lunch. Tess had chosen this determinedly obscure restaurant on the grounds that Selene Waites would be charmed by what looked like a private club. From the outside, Martick’s didn’t even appear to be open for business. There was no sign, no way of knowing it existed, and one had to buzz for entry. Of course, anyone who buzzed was promptly admitted, but Selene didn’t know that. Tess thought Selene might at least take off her sunglasses to inspect the black pressed-tin ceiling, the sturdy old bar, the stained-glass windows, all dating back to Martick’s life as a speakeasy. But Selene kept staring fixedly at her spoon. Was it dirty?
She said in a wispy monotone: “Venti half-caf frappuccino, please.”
“We don’t make cold coffee drinks here, but I could do just about anything else – cappuccino, latte, Americano, even a good old-fashioned cup of joe.”
“Who’s Captain Joe?” Selene asked, pursing her lips, eyes still trained on the spoon. She’s using it as a little mirror, Tess realized. Selene even bared her teeth to check if there was lipstick on them.
“Cup of joe,” Tess said. “It’s slang for coffee.”
“Why?”
It was a reasonable question, albeit one more appropriate to a two-year-old. But then, Tess was quickly discovering that Selene Waites was not that far removed from toddlerhood – a mercurial being who was all id, focused on satisfying her desires as she experienced them, determined to control anything she could, because, on some level, she sensed that she controlled nothing. This explained why Flip had warned Tess to play out the charade of letting Selene believe that it was ultimately her decision to hire Tess as her bodyguard.
Five seconds passed and Selene forgot her own question, or else grew bored with it. Her threshold for boredom was shockingly low. To call it attention deficit disorder would be inaccurate, because it wasn’t clear that Selene was attentive enough to achieve a deficit in that area. In the ten minutes they had been in the restaurant, she had already arranged her hair three different ways and applied her lipstick twice, using two different colors.
“Your order, miss?” This waiter was working hard for his tip.
“The mussels to start,” she said, her voice continuing thin and flat. Perhaps she only used inflections when she was being paid. “And the pâté, and the steak frites, with rolls. And a Bloody Mary, please. Do you have Effen?”
The waiter, a Baltimore hipster – that is, an art student at MICA – was pretty quick on the uptake. “No, we’ve got something much better, beat all the other vodkas in a taste test, very smooth, hard to find. I can’t even pronounce it.”
Selene nodded, and the waiter, aware that she wasn’t looking at him, took the chance to mouth “Smirnoff” over her oblivious head. Tess enjoyed the joke, but their conspiratorial moment gave Flip a spasm of panic.
“I admire your appetite,” Tess said to Selene. “It’s rare that I meet a woman who can match mine.”
“Well, I have a great metabolism,” Selene said, stroking her hair, styled in a side ponytail. The motion seemed to soothe her, in the manner of a child clutching the remnant of a beloved blanket. “I eat all the time, constantly. That eating disorder stuff in the tabloids is bullshit. I’m naturally thin. I mean, if I blew up to a size six or eight, then maybe I would worry about it, but as long as I can maintain this weight-”
Her cell phone rang, a mildly surreal moment, as Selene’s ring was her own voice, doing a cover of Blondie’s “ Call Me. ”
The waiter, slightly less relaxed, rushed back to the table. “We don’t allow cell phones here, miss.”
“It’s an iPhone,” Selene said with elaborate patience. “Bill Gates gave it to me personally.”
“Do you mean Steve Jobs?” Tess asked.
“Of course he has a job,” Selene said. “I mean, he’s pretty successful.”
The waiter persisted: “We don’t let people talk on wireless devices here, and we ask that all patrons turn those devices to silent or vibrate.”
“Well, then,” Selene said, “how am I going to take calls?”
“You’re not,” Flip said, his voice kind yet authoritative, as he closed his hand over her iPhone. “You’re here to talk to Miss Monaghan about your safety concerns.”
“Okay,” she said, falling back into an abstracted silence, stroking her hair so long that her first course arrived before she spoke again.
“I wanted mussels,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She had amazing control over her features, Tess noted; the movement was contained to the nostrils alone. The result of acting for film? Botox? But surely she was too young for such things.
“These are mussels,” the waiter said. Now he, too, had taken on the patient tone that Selene inspired in others. The whole world is her enabler, Tess thought.
“No, mussels have, like, little legs and you suck their heads. It’s fun.”
Tess counted very slowly to ten – not because she was angry, but because ridiculing a potential client was a bad business practice. Luckily, it turned out that Selene really didn’t need anyone to participate in her conversations. “I know what mussels are. I was supposed to shoot a film in New Orleans, but it never happened. Stupid hurricane.”
“That’s crawfish you’re thinking of,” the waiter said.
“Oh. Well, can I have some of those?”
“We don’t have crawfish on the menu. We have mussels. They’re quite good, especially prepared this way. And easier to eat than crawfish. Use the bread to sop up the sauce.”
“Could we have more bread? I’m ravenous.”
The waiter brought them more rolls, but Selene had already lost interest. For all her talk about her famous appetite and penchant for head sucking, Selene simply sniffed at the bread, leaving a whitish smear of flour beneath her nose. It looked rather natural to Tess. How strange Selene’s world must be, where spoons were used for mirrors, and mirrors were used for-
“The thing is, I don’t feel, like, I need a bodyguard.” Selene spoke as if she were picking up a thread that had been discussed at some length, when the topic had yet to be broached. “Nothing’s happened to me, not even close. I don’t think I’m the issue. I think the production is. It’s jinxed.”