Speak of the preppy devil – here was Whitney, Selene in tow, almost literally. She was dragging Selene by the elbow, piloting her into the bakery, as insistent as a tugboat guiding an ocean liner.
“You are going to eat something if I have to stand over you with a knife,” she hissed at the girl. “Sugar-free gum is not a food group.”
Johnny brightened, presumably at the sight of Whitney, then frowned when he realized she was here in her professional capacity as bodyguard/nutrition counselor.
“I eat,” Selene protested feebly. “I eat a lot when I’m on set. I just have a very high metabolism. And it was my idea to come here, remember?”
Whitney brought two croissants, almond and chocolate, over to the adjoining table, then went back to the counter to fetch a large glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Tess had assumed that Selene would poke the croissants and break them into ever-smaller flakes, but she dutifully forked up bite after bite, finishing the chocolate one and making it halfway through the almond under Whitney’s approving gaze. Tess found herself hoping that Whitney might actually feed Selene, zooming pieces of croissant into her mouth. “Here comes the Escalade. Here comes the Bentley. Here comes the Prius.” But such drastic measures were not needed, although Selene promptly excused herself to the restroom when she was finished.
“I should probably follow her, but I’m exhausted,” Whitney said. “She tried to sneak out twice last night.”
“She did? You should have called me at home.”
“I let you sleep, knowing you had this meeting with what’s-his-name. St. Pete, Tampa, whatever.”
Johnny, nonplussed in Whitney’s presence, simply nodded, smiling inanely.
“Besides, I don’t think she’s bulimic. And she’s probably telling the truth about her metabolism. Oh, if she let herself go, she might become a size four verging on six, but she doesn’t have to worry about her weight.”
“Actually, she does,” Johnny said. “A size six is way too big for a woman who wants to play romantic leads. Sorry, but that’s how it is.”
“Hmmmmph,” Whitney said, reaching into Selene’s bag and extracting her iPhone. “Might as well search her incoming and outgoing calls while she’s in there. Jesus, I can’t believe how many people she has in her address book. Oh, wait – I can check her e-mails, too. God, I love Mac.”
“That’s so… rude,” Johnny said, genuinely offended on Selene’s behalf. “Maybe illegal.”
“I don’t read anything, or listen to voice mail. I just check the senders. You know what I found under her bed this morning, when I was looking for alcohol?”
“Alcohol?” Tess asked, reaching for the iPhone and running her own check. Several calls from Ben – but nothing to him.
“No, not a drop, not even a can of malt liquor. I found two books – Edith Hamilton’s Greek mythology and a copy of Kristin Lavransdatter.”
“You might have sparked the interest in Hamilton,” Tess said. “When you told her that her name was from the goddess of the moon, as opposed to a Mormon soap opera.”
“Yeah, but Kristin Lavransdatter? And it was the third volume, to boot, The Cross. Could she possibly have read volumes one and two?”
“Maybe she thought Lavransdatter was Kirsten Dunst’s name before she changed it,” Tess offered.
“Just because she’s an actor doesn’t mean she’s stupid,” Johnny said with surprising heat. “Okay, well – Selene isn’t a raging intellectual. But you shouldn’t mock her for reading. Maybe that’s why the books were under the bed in the first place, because she thought you would make fun of her. For all Selene knows, this Lard-butter, or however you say it, is one of those books everyone has read, and she’s embarrassed not to know it.”
Whitney nodded. “And maybe monkeys will fly out my-”
Tess interrupted, hoping to placate Johnny. “At the very least, it could be for a film. The author was a Nobel Prize winner. Maybe someone’s interested in adapting it.”
“It’s already been adapted,” Johnny said. “By Liv Ullmann, back in the 1990s. But, you’re right, that wouldn’t rule out a Hollywood version, although I haven’t heard anything about that on the grapevine.”
Johnny was blushing furiously, his gaze downcast. His crush on Whitney must be really bad, Tess reasoned, if he couldn’t even make eye contact. Selene came trip-trapping back to the table in her ridiculously high heels, and Johnny muttered: “Gotta go.”
“God, he’s so jealous of me he can’t stand it,” Selene said cheerfully. “He’s even jealous that I had a stalker and he didn’t, that I was in most of the photographs and he wasn’t.”
A shred of conversation, a piece of unfinished business, came back to Tess. “The photograph at the memorial – was that one of the stalker’s?”
“I told you that,” Selene said, stroking her hair, oblivious to the fact that she was leaving little flakes of pastry behind. “I said it was the guy.”
“You said – oh, never mind. Was Greer in all the other photos as well? The ones taken by the dead man, Wilbur R. Grace?”
“Don’t be ridic. I mean, Greer was in some, but so was Ben. And Flip and Lottie. But I was in most of them. At least – I was in all the ones I saw. I don’t know, maybe there were others, but who’s going to be silly enough to stalk Greer?”
Chapter 29
The not-the-Meyerhoffs Meyerhoffs lived in Baltimore Highlands, a county neighborhood that people found mostly by accident, taking a wrong turn en route to the Harbor Tunnel. The streets here were named for states, but the pattern was maddeningly indecipherable to Tess – Louisiana led to Tennessee, then Alabama, which was followed, of course, by Pennsylvania, then Michigan and Florida. The Meyerhoffs lived in a brick semidetached on the bottom rung, Delaware Avenue, just north of the thruway to the tunnel, where traffic was a dull, roaring constant.
Before venturing here, Tess had run a quick computer check on Jeanette Meyerhoff. Or, more correctly, paid a premium to have her own ad hoc hacker search the court files and police records. Her suspicion was that a woman who felt comfortable starting a fight at a memorial service might be prone to other crimes of impulse. She was at once gratified and unnerved by how correct her hunch was. Jeanette had a pretty lengthy arrest record – public intoxication, resisting arrest, a string of assault charges. And three of her four sons had amassed similar records, with one currently serving real time down in Jessup, on a drug distro charge.
Yet the only paper on John “JJ” Meyerhoff was a warrant issued three years ago for failure to appear in traffic court. Based on public records, JJ was the white sheep of his family.
“He was the sweetest of my boys,” Jeanette Meyerhoff said, pouring Tess a generic grape soda. She had been surprisingly affable, almost eager to talk, when Tess showed up at the door. Perhaps it was the sheer novelty of finding someone who wanted to hear JJ’s side of the relationship with Greer.
“I know – that’s not saying much. We’re scrappers. But JJ was my baby. And smart. Not book smart, although he did good enough in school, but handy. When Mr. Meyerhoff stepped out ten years ago, it was JJ who kept the roof over our heads. And by that, I mean he got up there and patched the damn thing. Patched the roof, caulked the windows. He put this kitchen in hisself.”
There was nothing extraordinary about the kitchen in which they sat, a clean and simple space, but Tess supposed that was an achievement of a kind.
“He and Greer were high school sweethearts, right?”
“Yeah, but she wasn’t Greer then, but Gina. The Greer thing is some made-up name she gave herself, after she moved away. But even in high school her family thought she was too good for him.”