Another Thing to Fall by Laura Lippman

Hochschild Kohn, she thought, but maybe Hecht’s — that had then been demoted to bargain chain status before settling into life as a members-only big lots store. It anchored the end of a sad and lonely strip mall, where at least half the stores were vacant. A small band of protesters — ah, the disgruntled steelworkers — marched along a grassy strip, earning a few halfhearted honks of support for their cause, but they looked pretty harmless to Tess. She parked and walked the perimeter of the freestanding building, noting the entrances. There was a fire door in the rear, but otherwise no way in and out of the building. That was good.
    The front, however, had no security — no lock on the door, no one sitting at the front desk just inside the doors. A worker tried to wave her in the direction of a sign that said EXTRAS HOLDING, even as Tess insisted she was here to meet with Greer. The young woman arrived just in time to save Tess from being shunted off to a wardrobe fitting.
    “Isn’t that a little slipshod?” Tess asked. “Anyone could get in, under the guise of being an extra.”
    “Oh, you wouldn’t get far,” Greer said. “Strangers are noticed pretty quickly.”
    “Still, it’s a risk, and I’m here to assess weaknesses. Remember, I’m watching Selene only during her nonwork hours. It’s up to the production to make the workplace as secure as possible. And most of the problems have happened at work, right?”
    Greer was turning out to be one of those people who simply didn’t answer questions not to her liking. “I suppose you want a tour of the set,” she said. “Flip said I should take you around, if that’s what you want.”
    Tess didn’t really care about a tour, but Greer sounded grudging, as if she resented being given this task, and her attitude made Tess perverse.
    “Love to.”
    The former store had been more or less stripped down to its concrete floors, with a labyrinth of plywood now taking up half of the space. Vast and high ceilinged, the building held the morning’s chill and then some.
    “I’ll take you to the sets we’re
not
using, first.” Greer headed toward the maze, and Tess had one brief paranoid fear that Greer was planning to lose her in it, that Tess would end up wandering for days among artificial rooms.
    “This is the Mann rowhouse,” Greer said, stopping in front of a living room that played to every stereotype of how blue-collar workers lived, replete with shag carpeting, velvet paintings, and a plaid La-Z-Boy. “We’re not using it in the current episode, because that’s set almost entirely in the nineteenth century.”
    “It looks a little wide,” Tess murmured. “But then, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Film isn’t very good at conveying narrow spaces like eleven-foot rowhouses.”
    “What do you mean?” Greer appeared to be offended by the mere suggestion that a film could fail to emulate real life.
    “My boyfriend and I went to New York this summer, and we toured this amazing museum in a former tenement, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the kind of place you saw in
The Godfather, Part II,
or
Once Upon a Time in America
.” Tess didn’t bother to add that she had been motivated to visit the museum because of memories of books like
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
or the
All-of-a-Kind Family
series. Film was the only language spoken here, the only cultural reference that anyone seemed to get. “And the thing is, the real tenements were so tiny, so claustrophobic and dark. Even in the best films, the tenement sets are too big, too filled with light. I’m guessing it’s going to be the same for this rowhouse.”
    “We have a very good DP,” Greer said, still haughty.
    “DP?”
    “Director of photography.”
    “Oh.” Tess decided not to suggest that Francis Ford Coppola and Sergio Leone might have had good directors of photography as well.
DPs
. She was a quick study. She would learn to talk the talk, if that’s what it took.
    The next set