Chapter 25

Ben should be happy. Well, not happy – Greer was dead, and now her fiancé, poor fucker, God bless him, had gone down in a hail of bullets. But it tied everything up, neat as a bow, and Ben was in the clear. Which was only fair, because he hadn’t actually done anything.

But what if someone else materialized? What if Greer had confided in someone? What if he was, in fact, in some sort of fiendishly creative hell where he had to live forever with the idea of someone else popping up, full of… insights. That had been Greer’s airy-fairy term. “I had the most interesting insight.” Even Greer had seen his side of things, though. Then again, it was in Greer’s interest to be persuaded, because it meant she could collect endless bennies from him with a relatively free conscience. It was a relief that she was gone. Like all blackmailers, she had already started angling for what she wanted next. The last few weeks, Greer had reminded Ben of The Leech Woman, a B horror film in which a woman found the elixir to eternal youth. The trick was that it required killing a man and harvesting some gland, and each hit of the youth juice provided a shorter lease on wrinkle-free immortality, so the woman had to kill more and more frequently, until she finally killed a woman in desperation, which turned out to accelerate the aging process. Greer had been getting greedy that way, insatiable.

But that wasn’t what killed her, Ben reminded himself. She had been killed, fittingly enough, by one of the people she had stepped on as she climbed her little ladder.

“If Mann of Steel gets a pickup for season two,” she had said in the car just the other day, on the way to set, “do you think an associate producer credit would be appropriate?” Then quickly, before he could answer, she conceded the impossibility of her own ambition. “Oh, never mind, I guess I’m being silly.” Ben would have been charmed if he hadn’t remembered, in vivid, glaring detail, how she had played the same trick with her current position. “I know I just got promoted to the writers’ office, but I wonder – could I be considered to fill Alicia’s job, now that she’s been let go? I guess not, that’s silly, although I am the only one who’s been on board since preproduction, and I’m the one who knows all of Lottie’s systems – no, it’s ludicrous, forget I ever said anything.”

Ben hadn’t forgotten exactly, but he had thought that Greer had talked herself into seeing that she was pushing too hard, too fast. He had been shocked when Greer became more pointed a few days later: “Look, you’ll see that I get an interview, right? With Flip? And you’ll put in a good word for me? I mean, that’s not too much to ask, is it? After – well, I just thought I had demonstrated to you what a conscientious employee I am, that I am absolutely loyal to the production.”

God, it had probably been only a matter of time before he was one of the bodies who fell under those sensibly shod size seven feet.

He should be happy. Or something. Whatever he felt, he had to start revising Flip’s version of 107, the penultimate ep. Flip had brought it in at sixty pages, twelve too long, knowing that Ben would fix it. Yassuh, yes, Master Flip, I’ll tighten up your flabby-ass script. He sighed, glancing at the bedside clock radio, thinking about the all-nighter ahead. Now that Monaghan knew about his affair with Selene, what did he have to lose? Why couldn’t Selene just come over here, while Monaghan or her cohort waited in the lobby? Isn’t that what a real bodyguard would do? Sure, he had implied that he would stop if Monaghan wouldn’t rat him out to Flip, but he hadn’t promised. Okay, the idea was crazy, but he could call Selene, flirt with her. Maybe phone sex? He selected her name from his address book but ended up going straight to voice mail. When had they spoken last, outside work? He couldn’t remember. When had she last called or texted him? It was the night Greer was killed, the night she went to New York. Since then – nothing.

Suddenly, it seemed essential to walk to Little Italy, the littlest Little Italy he had ever seen, and grab a cup of real espresso to power him through the night of writing ahead. Vaccaro’s was only a mile or so, and it was a nice night for a walk – crisp, autumnal. The fact that Vaccaro’s was blocks away from Selene’s apartment – well, that was mere coincidence, didn’t enter into his decision at all.

Within an hour, he found himself standing on the sidewalk across the street from her building, feeling like the most pathetic sap that ever lived. He wanted to scream her name, hold a boom box above his head in the pouring rain, all the clichés. Instead, he stood there, blowing on his espresso, wordless. And what could be more impotent than a writer without words?

Johnny Tampa’s bedtime ritual took almost an hour, but he was proud of the fact that he used inexpensive products – cold cream on his face, generic shampoo, the drugstore knockoff of Oil of Olay. His mother had raised him to believe in thrift, and he had never broken faith with her ways. Some of his peers had, and where were they now? Johnny may have endured a long dry spell, workwise, but he would never have to worry about money. The hardest part had always been reconciling his private habits with his public image, which demanded a certain amount of extravagance. It killed him, buying a first-class ticket with his own money, but he had to do it from time to time, lest he be seen flying coach. He couldn’t afford being marked as a loser. He had to keep up the pretense that he had been waiting for the right job all these years.

The television droned in the background, keeping him company. One of the cable channels was doing an all-weekend marathon of The Boom Boom Room with “extras” – shopworn trivia that would be old news to diehard fans, and who but diehard fans would watch a marathon of The Boom Boom Room? Besides, some of the so-called trivia was just plain lies. He and his mom had not lived in their car when they first went out to Los Angeles. They had a perfectly nice apartment, in a building favored by lots of young actors. And, yes, he had been in the Mickey Mouse Club, but not the cool one, which spawned Britney, Justin, Christina, et al. He had been in the lame 1970s version. But no reason to sweat that inaccuracy, given that it made people think he was a lot younger than he was. Then again, if people thought he was doing the Mickey Mouse Club back in the early 1990s, they might conclude he had aged horribly.

It was so odd, watching his young self. He was a better actor now, no doubt, and his face was more interesting. But who knew that age was so thickening? Not just the waistline, but everything – face, features, even his feet. Then again, some of his peers seemed to get thinner, and that wasn’t attractive either. They looked gaunt, dried up. Maybe it was just his imagination, but it seemed the previous generation of actors – Nicholson, Connery, Hackman – had aged much better.

Depressed, he grabbed the remote by the sink and clicked away, running through the channels rapid-fire. He rested for a moment on the news story about Greer’s boyfriend, getting killed when he wouldn’t surrender. Man, that was weird. But then, other people’s passions always struck Johnny as mildly ludicrous. In a movie or a television show, when both people were hot, you could get it. Besides, it was in the script. But just two ordinary people, getting all crazy over each other? Johnny had been married briefly in his twenties and taken a big financial hit in the divorce, and that had been enough to decide for him that he didn’t want anything long-term, ever again. In California, he used an escort service – very discreet, with nice girls, ones who weren’t too hard or used up, and he was careful to keep things relatively kink-free, lest he ever show up on a client list; you’d never catch him having to explain some girl dressed up like a Brownie. God, he would kill for a brownie. Maybe he should find someone, sublimate the hunger with sex. Here in Baltimore, he had assumed he would hook up with someone in the production, but it hadn’t happened. Yet. He still thought the scary blonde, the one who had pretended not to know who he was, had potential. Yes, she was kind of terrifying, but he found that attractive in a woman.