Then he lost the very job he hated, axed unfairly in a house-cleaning staged by the new superintendent, one of those show-offy flourishes meant to establish what a tough, hands-on manager the guy was. Hadn’t anyone noticed that the new guy had eventually hired a fresh team of bureaucrats, cronies from his old system, and paid them even more? He had talked to a lawyer about a reverse discrimination suit, but the guy said it was a lost cause, and he was forced to take the severance package offered, or risk losing the health insurance.
That’s when he had gone to Bob for money, and Bob had told him there would be plenty of money soon, more than enough for both of them, but he needed legal assistance – a retainer for a lawyer, then more money for the so-called expert who was supposed to be their ace in the hole. But the lawyer and the expert disappeared when things went south, leaving nothing but their bills behind, and Bob had killed himself. Not so much because of the thousands he owed, but because of the dream that had been choked in its crib. That girl had killed Bob. She deserved to be dead.
Where had she put it? He had spent an hour in that tiny apartment, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t there. The office was still a possibility, but security there would be impossibly tight, thanks to the stupid smoke bomb incident. Had she confided in anyone what she knew? God – what if, after all this, it didn’t exist? But, no, she had seen it, and she was the one who had called Bob, after all those weeks of him getting dicked around by Alicia Farmer.
He left Marie and her buzz saw snoring and went back into the living room, putting another one of Bob’s videos in the VCR. He kept hoping that he might find what he needed among them, but that was silly, of course. If Bob had what he needed, he wouldn’t have killed himself. The title came up: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, DIRECTED BY WILBUR R. GRACE, WITH ADDITIONAL DIALOGUE BY GEORGE SYBERT. That was an inside joke, Bob’s tip to the apocryphal story about Sam Taylor and the Pickford-Fairbanks talkie. But it had been George’s idea to update the story to modern-day Baltimore. As Marie had said, George often tossed out an idea, half-formed at best, and Bob then ran with it. But he always gave George credit.
It was only this year, after seeing Bob’s strange passive reaction to defeat, that George had come to realize that Bob had some of the same problems as Marie. The difference was that Bob had coped by inserting a camera between himself and the world. He could function as long as he had a lens, as long as he was on the sidelines, framing the story. This year, for a few heady months, Bob had seen himself as the hero, in center frame, the little guy who was going to take on the Goliaths and win. But he was one of the ordinary folks that Goliath trampled, one of the people you never heard about. In the end, it was Bob’s dream that killed him. A case could be made that all George was doing now was trying to avenge his best friend’s death, by any means necessary, and in a movie, that would make him the hero.
In the bedroom, Marie’s snores roared on, a strange sound track to the dreamy, beautiful creations her brother had left behind.
MONDAY
Chapter 28
Tess’s reporting career may have been short-lived, but she still had met her share of famous people. Presidential candidates, Nobel Prize winners, a couple of minor movie stars, and, in a rather startling turn of events, Boris Yeltsin, who had mistaken her for a member of his welcoming party and swept her up in a vodka-infused bear hug. Tess had actually been on deathwatch, a morbid little reporting detail in which a junior staffer ensures that luminaries arrive and depart a city safely, but it had seemed more tactful to let Yeltsin have his version of the event.
Tess had enjoyed those encounters for the anecdotes they provided, but she had never gone civilian on a source, or felt the smallest whiff of fan-girl excitement. Until now, going for coffee with Johnny Tampa, something she had actually imagined when she was in middle school. Well, not coffee. She had probably envisioned an ice cream date or a romantic dinner in some candlelit venue. But she would settle for Bonaparte Bread, the high-end pastry shop only a few blocks from the high-rise where Selene lived. The request had seemed to unnerve Johnny, yet it apparently didn’t occur to him that he could say no. Tess knew from the call sheet that he wasn’t scheduled for pickup until noon.
He was waiting for her when she arrived, a true non-diva move. The lean, sharp features that she had idolized as a teenager were somewhat obscured by middle-age fleshiness, but when he smiled, he was the heartthrob that she recalled. Tess noticed that other women in the pastry shop also responded to Tampa ’s smile and manner.
“You’re the one in charge of guarding Selene, right?”
“I’m handling that detail with my friend, Whitney, yes.”
“Right, the scary blonde. So how come one of you didn’t catch her sending me that stupid magazine?” He brushed off Tess’s reply before she had a chance to formulate it. “Oh, she’s too smart to do it herself, but I know she put someone else up to it. Someone on the crew, or maybe even Ben Marcus.”
“Why do you think that one of the producers on the show would be willing to do that for Selene?” she countered, fishing. Maybe Ben’s relationship with Selene wasn’t the well-kept secret he believed it to be.
“Because he’s mean. He’s always teasing me about my weight. A young skinny guy like him, he probably thinks it’s funny that I have a… glandular problem.”
A glandular problem. Tess couldn’t remember the last time she had heard that euphemism. Then again, current science was on Tampa ’s side, making the case that willpower wasn’t enough for some people to lose weight.
“But Ben wants you to be happy, right? Ben and Flip. They see you as the linchpin of the show.”
“So they say.” He chewed thoughtfully on his chocolate croissant. “They say they wrote the show for me, and they can’t help that the network is hot for Selene. They talked pretty big, when they were trying to get me for this. Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have entertained some of the other offers I had. At least I wouldn’t have to live here. Sorry. No offense.”
It happened to be one of Tess’s least favorite phrases, a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too bit of rhetoric that demanded the listener forgive the speaker for saying something impossibly rude.
“If the show goes,” Tess said, “you’ll be here quite a bit.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And in winter yet. I don’t do winter.”
“It’s relatively mild.”
“No such thing to someone like me, who grew up in Florida and has lived in California since age sixteen.”
“How did you get into acting?” She knew, of course. She could recite much of Johnny Tampa’s biography from memory. But she was trying to get into a groove with him, find an innocuous topic that they both could enjoy, and she figured that Johnny Tampa was one of Johnny Tampa’s favorite subjects.
“Mickey Mouse Club,” he said.
“So you were in the Mickey Mouse Club and then you went out to California to do” – she pretended to grope for the name of his first show – “High School Confidential.”
“I went out to California with nothing promised to me. But my mom believed in me, and she agreed to go out for a year, see what I could get started. The year was almost up when I landed the featured part on High School Confidential, then got the lead in The Boom Boom Room. And the rest is history.”