“No one cares who Selene sleeps with,” she repeated. “Does anyone care who Ben sleeps with?”
Bingo. He flushed, dropped his eyes to his coffee, began jiggling his foot as he had the other day.
“I would be really grateful,” he said, “if you didn’t mention this to Flip. Or Lottie, but only because she would tattle to Flip. I could give a fuck what Lottie thinks about my extracurricular activities.”
“But you don’t want Flip to know? I thought guys talked freely about such things.”
“We’ve been friends a long time, since grade school. It gets complicated. Do you have friends like that?”
Tess shrugged. Of course she did, everyone did. But she wanted Ben to keep talking, building up enough momentum to run into some inadvertent truths.
“I love the guy. Love. We’ve been there for each other all our lives. Look, he has the name, the connections, and no one can match him when it comes to the big picture for a show. But he can’t match me on the line-by-line writing. That’s just the way it is. Flip has never envied my ability to write, and I’ve never wanted to be the son of Phil Tumulty – God knows, I saw how that fucker neglected Flip through much of his childhood. I mean, yeah, I took a summer job from him when I was twenty-one – I wasn’t going to turn down my best connection in the business – but I was never blind to his flaws. Even so, it bugged Flip, that summer I worked on his dad’s last movie here in Baltimore. He considered it a betrayal. That was the last serious fight we ever had. The only one.”
“Would he really care about you and Selene? He keeps telling me how happily married he is.”
Ben’s jiggling foot, the tapping toe of denial, began working the floor beneath the table. “Flip got married at twenty-three, to his college girlfriend. And he’s determined to stay married to her, no matter what. It’s like a religion with him, not repeating his father’s mistakes. But that’s not to say it’s easy, saying no, especially when he has a partner, me, who’s free and unfettered. Usually, he eggs me on, encourages me to be a wild man, then asks for all the details. But every now and then, he makes an arbitrary ruling that someone is off-limits. And the minute he does that…”
Tess faked sympathy. “That’s the one person you have to sleep with. So Flip told you to stay away from Selene?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that why you’ve been so quick to defend her whenever someone suggests she might be the cause of problems on the production?”
“Yes. I mean – no, I’m not so blinded by sex that I can’t think rationally. But some of the stuff that happened – well, let’s just say I know she wasn’t involved. One time, when we had to evacuate set, because someone set a fire in a city garbage can? We were in my trailer. That was tricky, getting out and not being seen.”
“Maybe that’s not a coincidence. You being her alibi.”
Quick as Ben was, he needed a second to get Tess’s meaning. “Hey, I decided to pursue her, not the other way around.”
“That’s what men always believe.”
“Are you trying to say that Selene set her sights on me, and let me think it was all my doing? That’s pretty subtle for a twenty-year-old who can barely read a newspaper.”
Tess didn’t have a particularly high opinion of Selene’s book smarts, but she had a hunch that her boy-Q was in the genius stratosphere.
“Men always believe they’re in charge, the author of their own lives. But, in my experience, women make a lot of things that happen, and let men think it was their idea.”
“Now you’re being ridiculous.”
“The night that Greer was killed, Selene told you that she would find a way to dump me and meet you at your hotel room, right? Then she went to New York. She never had any intention of seeing you, but she made sure she knew where you were – alone, in your room, waiting. But what if the plan was to send someone to the offices that night to make some more mischief with the production? The file drawers were open, papers were strewn about. Police think that Greer’s missing boyfriend did that to make it look like a burglary, but what if Greer interrupted the set gremlin and the person panicked?”
“File drawers were open?” Beneath the table, Ben’s feet were tapping so hard that he was practically doing a Mr. Bojangles buck-and-wing. “But this was in Flip’s office, right?”
It seemed an odd detail to fixate on. “In Flip’s office and the anteroom where Greer worked. As I said, the theory is that someone tried to make it look like a burglary after the fact.”
“What kind of burglar goes through files in the writers’ office?”
“I didn’t say it was a good plan. The point is, if this was part of the ongoing campaign against the production, then Selene’s New York trip becomes a very visible alibi. Derek Nichole made a point of telling me he grew up in a tough part of Philadelphia, all but suggested that he was connected. And he did say that he wanted to help Selene.”
“Is she sleeping with him?”
“What?” Tess asked, even as she realized that Ben Marcus, for all his flippancy, was far more interested in Selene Waites than he wanted to admit, perhaps even to himself. “Look, Ben – as I keep telling you, it’s not my job to look into Greer’s murder. But if there is an organized campaign of vandalism against the production, and Selene is involved – I think it would be a good idea for you to come clean with Flip about the relationship.”
He shook his head. “I can’t, I just can’t.”
Tess remembered the online sexual harassment course she had been required to take as a condition of her contractual employment at Johns Hopkins night school. She had gotten a 93 percent and blamed her less-than-perfect score on a poorly worded question. “Is it a firing offense? Sleeping with an actor?”
“Is – God, no, I’m not sure it’s even possible to sexually harass an actor. Especially one who wants to get written out of the show. That’s the one thing I can’t do for Selene, and I made that clear early on. Although, I have to say, the networks are fucking the show over by switching the emphasis to her and making us keep Betsy as a character. Screwed up a lot of stuff we had planned for season two, if we get a pickup. Then again – without Selene, we won’t have a season two or three. It’s a real Hobson’s choice.”
“Were your plans for the show in the” – she needed a second to pull up the jargon – “the bible?”
He seemed to find her use of the lingo amusing. “Certainly, it was spelled out that Betsy would be left behind in the nineteenth century, where she belongs. Now she’s going to follow Mann wherever time travel takes him. Sort of like Mary Steenburgen’s character jumping into the time machine with H. G. Wells in Time after Time.”
“And there’s only one bible?”
“One copy? God no.”
“One version, I mean. It’s not a document that gets revised?”
“No, not really. It’s a planning document, a blueprint for the pitch. Next season – if there is a next season – we’ll take on some new writers, spread the work around, and we’ll have to work up some pretty detailed beat sheets for them. But the bible’s mainly for the network, when you’re trying to sell the show. There’s no reason to go back and change it. Why the interest in this kind of insider knowledge? You want to write for television?”