Free Another Thing to Fall by Laura Lippman

remnant of a beloved blanket. “I eat all the time, constantly. That eating disorder stuff in the tabloids is bullshit. I’m naturally thin. I mean, if I blew up to a size six or eight, then maybe I would worry about it, but as long as I can maintain this weight—”
    Her cell phone rang, a mildly surreal moment, as Selene’s ring was her own voice, doing a cover of Blondie’s “Call Me.”
    The waiter, slightly less relaxed, rushed back to the table. “We don’t allow cell phones here, miss.”
    “It’s an iPhone,” Selene said with elaborate patience. “Bill Gates gave it to me personally.”
    “Do you mean Steve Jobs?” Tess asked.
    “Of course he has a job,” Selene said. “I mean, he’s pretty successful.”
    The waiter persisted: “We don’t let people talk on wireless devices here, and we ask that all patrons turn those devices to silent or vibrate.”
    “Well, then,” Selene said, “how am I going to take calls?”
    “You’re not,” Flip said, his voice kind yet authoritative, as he closed his hand over her iPhone. “You’re here to talk to Miss Monaghan about your safety concerns.”
    “Okay,” she said, falling back into an abstracted silence, stroking her hair so long that her first course arrived before she spoke again.
    “I wanted mussels,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She had amazing control over her features, Tess noted; the movement was contained to the nostrils alone. The result of acting for film? Botox? But surely she was too young for such things.
    “These are mussels,” the waiter said. Now he, too, had taken on the patient tone that Selene inspired in others.
The whole world is her enabler,
Tess thought.
    “No, mussels have, like, little legs and you suck their heads. It’s fun.”
    Tess counted very slowly to ten — not because she was angry, but because ridiculing a potential client was a bad business practice. Luckily, it turned out that Selene really didn’t need anyone to participate in her conversations. “I know what mussels are. I was supposed to shoot a film in New Orleans, but it never happened. Stupid hurricane.”
    “That’s crawfish you’re thinking of,” the waiter said.
    “Oh. Well, can I have some of those?”
    “We don’t have crawfish on the menu. We have mussels. They’re quite good, especially prepared this way. And easier to eat than crawfish. Use the bread to sop up the sauce.”
    “Could we have more bread? I’m ravenous.”
    The waiter brought them more rolls, but Selene had already lost interest. For all her talk about her famous appetite and penchant for head sucking, Selene simply sniffed at the bread, leaving a whitish smear of flour beneath her nose. It looked rather natural to Tess. How strange Selene’s world must be, where spoons were used for mirrors, and mirrors were used for—
    “The thing is, I don’t feel, like, I need a bodyguard.” Selene spoke as if she were picking up a thread that had been discussed at some length, when the topic had yet to be broached. “Nothing’s happened to me, not even close. I don’t think I’m the issue. I think the production is. It’s jinxed.”
    “You’re part of the production,” Flip said, “and if anything were to happen to you….”
    “You could write Betsy out, easy,” Selene said. “The show is called
Mann of Steel,
after all. It’s Johnny’s show.”
    Tess didn’t know much about actors, but she didn’t think it was common for them to argue against the primacy of their roles.
    “Yes, well, the man who died didn’t have photographs of Johnny in his house,” Flip said. “He had photographs of
you
.”
    She preened a little, as if she had been complimented.
    “If I’m going to have a bodyguard, shouldn’t it be a guy, like in the movie?” Selene asked. “Nobody has a
girl
bodyguard.”
    “You’ll be the first,” Flip said. “After you do it, everyone will want to do it.”
    Selene stroked her hair a little faster, clearly excited by the notion of