It was after eight when a woman not much younger than Tess parked a Chevrolet Caprice at the curb and trudged toward the door, head down, a single plastic sack of groceries dangling from her right hand. Tess let her get inside, then waited another ten minutes before knocking, allowing the woman to decompress a little – put her groceries away, make the transition from work to home. She wouldn’t have thought of such a tactic when she started this kind of work, but she knew how she felt at the end of a long day, and she saw no harm in letting this woman decompress before Tess peppered her with questions about a workplace she had left involuntarily.

“I’m from the state unemployment office,” she said exactly twelve minutes later, “and we’re doing spot checks of departmental efficiency. Do you know where we might find Alicia Farmer?”

“I’m Alicia Farmer,” the woman said, as if confessing to something unpleasant. “But I never put in for unemployment. I got another gig.” She indicated the insignia on her blouse. CHARM CITY VIDEO.

“So you’re still in the film business?”

“Yeah.” Alicia laughed, a little unwillingly. “For now, until Netflix or the idiot management puts us out of business. Now if you don’t mind-”

“I wasn’t exactly truthful,” Tess said, smiling in a way that she hoped would take the sting out of her confession, all the while positioning her body slightly forward, so the door couldn’t be closed without real force. Alicia seemed too downtrodden, too defeated, to slam a door on someone’s foot. Speaking swiftly now: “I’m an investigator working for Mann of Steel, and I’m looking into some of the security issues on set.”

“Security issues? Like the death of Greer Sadowski? Yeah, I guess that was a real security issue.”

Alicia had reddish brown hair, pulled back in a ponytail, and such dark shadows beneath her light eyes that they might have been bruises. She reminded Tess of someone she knew, although it took her a second to pin it down. She reminded Tess of herself, the woman she was on the verge of becoming after she lost her job at the Star. God, she had been lost for a while. If she hadn’t allowed Tyner to talk her into becoming a private investigator, if she hadn’t taken the risk of opening her own business, if she hadn’t met Crow and, yes, allowed him to woo and pursue her, this could be her, in a red CHARM CITY VIDEO smock, living in a safe, but not particularly desirable, Baltimore neighborhood, sarcasm her only defining trait.

“The police are looking into Greer’s death, not me.” Then, on a hunch. “Should I give them your name?”

“I didn’t hate her that much.” Tess liked the precision of Alicia’s candor. Not wanting the girl dead, but not pretending to care more than she did. “Look, I’m exhausted and all I want is to drink a beer, watch some stupid television. Can we sit down? I’ll even give you a beer.”

Tess took the offer, sitting with Alicia in a small den off the kitchen, an addition that appeared to have been made circa 1982, judging by the butternut squash-colored appliances, with a Formica breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the pine-paneled alcove. With only a few small tweaks, it could have passed for cheerfully funky, a retro gem. Instead, it seemed resigned to dowdiness.

“My folks’ place,” Alicia said. “My father died ten years ago, my mother just two years ago. When I have the time to renovate, I don’t have the funds. When I have the funds, I don’t have the time. I don’t know. I watch all those home improvement shows, but I think it’s decadent, the way we fetishize our homes. Or maybe that’s a convenient rationalization for my crap house.”

“It’s cozy,” Tess said, sucking up, but not completely insincere. “I’m guessing your parents died kind of young?”

“Dad had that cancer no one can pronounce, the one that steelworkers get from asbestos. Mom went out the old-fashioned way, good old lung cancer.” Alicia Farmer fired up a Lucky with a great deal of style and ceremony. “Me, I’m invincible. Or I don’t give a shit. I haven’t figured out which one it is yet.”

“Wasn’t it weird working on Mann of Steel when your dad had worked at Beth Steel?” Tess may have been trying to ingratiate herself, but she also was genuinely interested. “I mean, you had to realize how bogus it was, a thriving steel plant in modern-day Baltimore. Plus, you probably know some of the steelworkers who have raised a stink about it.”

The question seemed to catch Alicia by surprise. She blew smoke at the ceiling while she thought about it. “It’s a television show. A guy time-travels after he gets hit on the head. It wasn’t exactly a documentary. I have to say, though, you’re the first person who ever asked me that particular question about my job at Mann of Steel.”

“What do people usually ask?”

“What’s Johnny Tampa really like, do I ever get to ride in a limo. Shit like that.”

Tess smiled. “I’ve worked there less than a week, and I’ve been asked the Johnny Tampa question.”

“What do you say? I told people he had all the personality of particle board, and everyone thought I was kidding. Me, I thought it was kind of unfair to particle board.”

“How did you end up working for them?”

“The usual Baltimore thing – I know a girl who knows a girl who does the hair of an old friend of John Waters. John’s been working with the same people forever and didn’t have anything for me. But when his casting director, Pat Moran, heard that Mann of Steel was coming to town, she made inquiries on my behalf. I got hired as Flip’s assistant before the pilot was shot, and it was great… for a while.”

“What happened?”

Alicia looked to the ceiling again, blew more smoke. “Oh, the usual girl-on-girl action. Greer got hired, she wanted my job. Somehow she made it happen.”

Time to go straight at it, Tess decided.

“Lottie MacKenzie says you photocopied a script and gave it to someone outside the production, that you resigned when asked about it.”

“I resigned because I was so damn sick of Greer’s manipulations by then. Who do you think ran to Lottie, blaming me? She was going to get me one way or another. If I had been smarter, I would have gotten out of her way the first time we clashed, asked Lottie for another job in a different department. But by this time, Greer had trashed me so thoroughly that I didn’t have a chance. Besides, she had a protector. I never had a chance, once she got him on her side.”

“A protector? Flip?”

“Ben Marcus.”

Strange. Tess had the impression that Ben didn’t particularly like Greer. And then she wondered why she thought that. Perhaps it was just that Ben didn’t seem to like anyone, starting with himself. Or perhaps it was because Ben wanted her to think he wasn’t particularly fond of Greer, that he had taken every opportunity to run her down. Lottie had said that Greer seemed to be open to any kind of liaison that would give her career a boost.

“Are you saying…?”

“I can’t say anything for sure. Still, she wheedled her way into the writers’ office as an intern, when we really didn’t need anyone. Then, all of a sudden – bam, she’s got a paying gig, as the second assistant. She was very efficient, however. Meanwhile, phone messages were disappearing from my desk, I didn’t get e-mails that I was supposed to get. Penny-ante shit like that.”

“And the script? The one that was found in the dead man’s house?”

Alicia stubbed her cigarette out in a bright yellow ashtray that could probably fetch an outrageous price in some hip little secondhand store. “Truthfully? I don’t know shit about it. The guy’s name was in the phone log, but I don’t remember him, and I never said anything to him beyond ‘I’ll pass that on to Flip.’”

“Pass what on?”

“Who knows? He was one of a dozen people who called or e-mailed every day, claiming an urgent need to talk to the executive producer. My job was to be politely unhelpful – take the message, send a ‘Thank you for your inquiry’ e-mail, whatever. He was one name among many, Wilbur Grace. Hard to forget a name like that. But I sure as shit didn’t give him anything. All he ever got from me was ‘Hello,’ ‘I’ll tell him,’ ‘Yes, he’s got your number.’”