frost over, while Greer clutched her clipboard to her chest, as if to flatten the squeak of a gasp that escaped from her mouth. Tess was forced to correct her course for the second time that morning. “I had assumed you were the director on this project, but you’re a writer, right? Ben Hecht, Odets — those are the kinds of details a writer would know. Now that I think about it, I remember a Shouts and Murmur piece you wrote for the
New Yorker
a few years back. Very droll.”
That puffed him up with pride. “I
am
a writer, but here I’m the executive producer. That’s how it works in television, the writer is the boss. And you’re a rower who reads the
New Yorker
?”
Now it was Tess’s turn to be offended. “Rowing is my hobby, not my profession. Besides, rowers tend to be pretty intelligent.”
“Really? I don’t recall that from my days at Brown.” Oh, how Tess hated that kind of ploy, this seemingly casual mention of an Ivy League education. Shouldn’t the son of Phil Tumulty be a little more confident? Or did having a famous father make him more insecure than the average person?
“Well,
Brown,
” she said, trying to make it sound as if that school’s rowers were famously subpar.
“What do you do, when you’re not rowing or consulting for newspapers?”
It was a question that Tess had come to hate, because the answer prompted either a surfeit of curiosity or the same set of tired jokes, many of them centering on wordplay involving “female dick.” She hesitated, tempted to lie, but the opportunity was lost when Greer blurted out: “She’s a private investigator.
That’s
it. She shot a state senator who happened to be a killer, or something like that.”
“Something like that,” Tess said, almost relieved to see how the details of her life continued to morph and mutate in the public imagination. She had shot a man, once. He wasn’t a politician. If he had been, she probably would have been less haunted by the experience.
“Really?” Tumulty, who had been pacing restlessly, dropped in the makeup chair opposite Tess. “Do you do security work?”
“Sometimes. Preventive stuff, advising people about their… vulnerabilities.” Tess, naked inside the expanding pink robe, became acutely aware of her own vulnerabilities and checked to make sure that the belt was cinched. But the tighter she pulled the belt, the more the cloth seemed to expand. She was turning into a pouf of cotton candy. Or — worse — one of those Hostess Sno Balls, with the dyed coconut frosting.
“And you have an ongoing relationship with the local newspaper? Could you get them to back off us, cut us some slack?”
Tess smiled with half her mouth. “The
Beacon-Light
’s sort of like one of my ex-boyfriends. We’re civil to each other, but I’m not in a position to ask for any favors right now.”
“What about bodyguard work?”
“What about it?”
“Do you do it?”
“I’ve had enough trouble safeguarding my own body over the years.” If she could have found her hands within the robe’s voluminous sleeves, she might have snaked the left one down to her knee, fingered the scar she always stroked when reminded of her own mortality.
“Well, it wouldn’t be bodyguard work, per se. More like… babysitting.”
“You can get a nice college student to do that for ten dollars an hour.”
“Here’s the thing.” Tess was beginning to notice something odd about Flip: He paused during a conversation and allowed others to speak, but he didn’t necessarily hear anything that was said to him. Perhaps even his face-to-face exchanges were beset by the static and dropped words of a cell phone conversation. “We have this young actor, Selene Waites. Beautiful. And the real thing, as a talent, but very raw. Young, just twenty. She’s playing Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, one of the leads.”
“You’re making a historical miniseries about Betsy Patterson?”
“Not a miniseries — a short-order series,