Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  “Well, I’d be happy to talk to him.”

  “I don’t mind giving you his number, but be careful. He doesn’t know about fey or the Project. Think you can manage that minefield?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  Berenbaum moved to the computer desk and scribbled on a sticky note, then handed it to me.

  I felt a private satisfaction at having ferreted out a new lead on my own (not to mention scored the phone number of a major movie producer), but I wasn’t about to let it rest there. “Have you been in touch with Inaya yet?”

  “I haven’t; I’m sorry.”

  “Has Vivian said anything to you that might give you the slightest clue what Johnny’s up to?”

  Berenbaum shook his head slowly, looking thoughtful. “He has to be staying somewhere, though. I wish I had time to call around.”

  “I’m not sure anyone has time to call every hotel in Southern California.” I thought for a moment. “You and Johnny are close, right? Do you share any bank accounts or anything?”

  Berenbaum did his little snap-and-point gesture again. “At home, I have all his passwords written somewhere. Online banking, credit cards, everything. Linda will know where. Can I call you later tonight?”

  “Sure.”

  “It might be really late.”

  “Anytime, I mean it. Three a.m., that’s fine.” Assuming I wasn’t fired by then.

  I gave him my new number, and I felt absurdly gleeful as he programmed it into his phone.

  “Hey,” he said as he punched it in, “what do you think about keeping all this just between us for a while?”

  “You mean the investigation?”

  “Just until we know more. Vivian and your boss have history I’m not privy to, and it makes me uneasy. Not sure what I’m walking into there.”

  As much as I loved the idea of having a secret with David Berenbaum, I had good reason to be suspicious of the words “Just Between Us.” Professor Scott had used them, a lot.

  I gave him an apologetic grimace. “I have to tell Teo and Caryl about anything I work on. Especially since I’m sort of on a trial period right now.”

  “Of course,” Berenbaum said immediately, looking abashed. “I keep forgetting you’re a newbie. I’ll trust you to know who to trust. Let’s talk tonight, all right? And we’ll see what we can patch together from his transactions.”

  I carefully rose from the couch, ignoring the disturbing crescendo of pain in the skin of my left thigh, and held my hand out for him to shake. He reached for my shoulders, catching me off guard. Just as I was about to freak out, he turned me toward the wall, so that I was facing the collection of Black Powder stills.

  “Speaking of confidential information,” he said, “what do you think?”

  I looked at the images. Black Powder appeared to be a Western with a tight color palette and a lot of wide shots. A quick scan showed me four instances of the exact same composition in different settings. Was it a motif, or had he simply not noticed the redundancy? It bothered me that I wasn’t sure. Was I not as sharp as I’d been before my injuries, or was he the one who was losing his touch?

  I knew I should be impressing him with my knowledge of cinematography. If I wanted to hitch a ride on his coattails, he had just given me a gold-embossed invitation. But something about the idea felt tasteless. We’d managed to connect on some level without me mentioning my aspirations, and I didn’t want to trade that in for something every other director wannabe in the city would be trying.

  “Looks great!” I said, and left it at that.

  As he walked me back to the golf cart, I saw him eyeing my prosthetics, which he’d never done before.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re walking funny today,” he said. “Something hurt?”

  “Oh, I uh . . . just a skin irritation.”

  “Is there something you need to do for it?”

  I hesitated, but he seemed genuinely curious. “If it’s bad,” I said, “I have to use the wheelchair for a bit, air it out. So in other words, I’m going to ignore it.”

  “Hey,” he said firmly. “I’d rather have you on wheels than getting gangrene or something.”

  “Jesus,” I said with a laugh, “your imagination is worse than mine.” I approached the cart and turned back to him with a grin. “Who’s driving?”

  • • •

  During the cab ride home I tried to get through to Aaron Susman by giving my name and saying it was personal, but all that got me was voice mail, so I hung up and decided to call back when I had a better idea. After paying the driver, I had exactly fourteen dollars and eighteen cents left in cash.

  A couple of blocks from Residence Four was a small cluster of shops providing such urgent necessities as brow waxing, ice cream, and dry cleaning. It also boasted a staggeringly surcharged ATM, so after pausing to open the windows, close the shades, and otherwise try to make my room less like a sauna, I changed into some baggy knit shorts and took off my AK prosthetic to see if my wounds were going to allow me to walk.

  I didn’t like what I saw. The cuts were shallow, but the deepest of the bunch had gone red and puffy around the edges. I had been trained too well in the signs of a nascent infection, and the sight of it made me flash back to that first hospital: chills, fever, misery. It had taken three tries to find an anti­biotic that my infection wasn’t resistant to, and at one point I had been sure that I was just going to finally get my wish and die.

  Now, dying was not on the menu. I grabbed supplies and some crutches so I could make my one-legged way down the hall to the bathroom. I washed the cuts carefully, applied Neosporin, covered the area lightly with gauze, and then headed toward Teo’s room for help getting my wheelchair down the stairs.

  His door was shut and locked, and no one answered my knock, so I got to experience the fun of descending stairs on crutches without any feeling in my prosthetic right foot to tell me where the edges of the steps were. Falling off another roof would have been less scary. Halfway down, I noticed the man I’d seen restraining Gloria Wednesday afternoon. He was sitting on the couch, petting Monty and reading a battered paperback, utterly unmoved by my plight.

  When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I noticed the smell of curry and heard some muffled cursing from the kitchen. Not a good time to ask Teo for help. But I couldn’t get the wheelchair on my own, and I wasn’t comfortable rolling around by myself in South L.A. looking vulnerable anyway.

  I looked back at the man on the sofa. He was dressed in a faded, mustard-yellow T-shirt and threadbare jeans. I felt intimidated, then guilty about being intimidated, torn between the white liberal fantasy of color-blindness and the stereotypes I’d been fed my whole sheltered life. For God’s sake, Millie. He’s reading a book and petting a cat. How much less scary can a person be?

  “Hi,” I said. “Do you think you could help me get my wheelchair down the stairs?”

  He lowered the book and fixed me with a flat look. “What did you take it up the stairs for?”

  I found myself momentarily floored by the question. “Well—that’s where my room is,” I said lamely. “But I need to go to that ATM over by the ice cream place, and one of my legs is too messed up for a prosthetic today.”

  He sighed, set aside the book, and headed for the stairs with an air of resignation. I wasn’t sure of his age, but there was a world-weary quality to his annoyance. Monty moved to sit in the warm spot he’d left, and I tilted my head to read the title of the discarded book: Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman.

  Aspiring screenwriter, then. Now there was a stereotype I was comfortable with. They say in L.A. you can ask anyone on the street, “What’s your screenplay about?” and get a polished sales pitch.

  I called up the stairs after him. “I’m in the room that used to be—”

  “I know where you are,” he called back.
In a few minutes he came back down carrying the chair and even helped me unfold it.

  “I don’t suppose you’d walk with me to the ATM,” I said.

  “In case you run into some black people?”

  My mouth went dry. “No.”

  He looked me over, one brow lifting. “Nobody’s gonna bother you. Dressed like that, with that castoff-looking wheelchair, all you’re missing is a cardboard sign.”

  “I might look a little less like a bag lady when they see me taking fistfuls of twenties out of the ATM. Will you please come with me? I’m Millie.”

  “Tjuan,” he said, pronouncing it like the last half of Antoine. “I’ll go if you get me some ice cream.”

  “Uh, okay.”

  “I’m just fucking with you. I’ll go.”

  “Okay then.”

  Although his long legs could have eaten up the distance between the house and the shopping center in about two bites, he kept pace with me as I wheeled myself along. The silence started to get to me; I remembered I wasn’t supposed to ask him anything about himself, which meant he couldn’t ask me any of the usual small talk stuff either.

  “So!” I volunteered. “This is my third day. So far everyone seems pretty nice. But I get the feeling Gloria doesn’t like me very much.”

  “You are not wrong.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, not without asking a question, so I floundered for a bit. When we got to the intersection across from the shopping center, he hit the button and we waited for the light.

  “You were reading a book on screenwriting,” I said. I figured a declarative statement was within the letter of the law.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m a director. I’ve done a few features. One of them, The Stone Guest, was screened at the Seattle Film Festival. It’s about a retired porn star who abandoned her daughter as a baby, and then the girl shows up—”

  “I know. I’ve seen it.”

  Christ. Had they had a special screening or what?

  I shifted my weight. Somewhere in the distance, a car horn blared out the opening notes of “La Cucaracha.”

  “I’m curious about you,” I said, “but I’m not supposed to ask anything.”

  “That’s right.” I waited for more, but he just turned in a slow, casual circle, as though taking in the scenery.

  “If you’re wondering about my legs, I fell off a seven-story building. They say a tree partly broke my fall and I dropped from it feetfirst. I guess I hit at just the right angle for my legs to act as a crumple zone and save the rest of me.”

  He didn’t say anything. The light changed, and I shoved the chair across the street as fast as I could while a column of drivers glared at me, waiting to turn left. When we got to the parking lot of the shopping center, Tjuan scanned the area, that same slow circle, and something in his wary expression paradoxically made me feel safe.

  “Did you really want ice cream?” I said as I wheeled over to the ATM. “I’ll get you some if you want.”

  “Nah.”

  I glanced at him before entering my PIN, but he had his back to me. There was a tension in his stance that I couldn’t interpret until I’d taken a couple hundred out of the machine, stuffed the bills into my shorts pocket, and wheeled back close enough to hear him murmur under his breath.

  “Look right at me,” he said. “Just keep looking at me and keep smiling when I say this.”

  My gut knotted up. “When you say what?”

  “Somebody followed us.”

  20

  I had never been further from a smile in my life, but I managed to locate one after an exhaustive search. “Who is it?” I said under my breath.

  “Young white guy, late twenties, maybe thirty. He was standing around on the sidewalk near the house and followed us across the street. He’s coming right over here now, so go ahead and look.”

  I turned, feeling cold all over, but when I spotted the guy he was talking about, my fear turned into something more like vertigo. It was the same goateed guy I’d seen at the resort, in the bar at Regazo de Lujo.

  “What the hell,” I said, loud enough for the approaching man to hear.

  He stopped a respectful conversational distance away and hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. He was dressed in a short-sleeved blue button-down, open over a gray T-shirt. I caught a hint of aftershave, something woody and macho.

  “Hi,” he said. “We keep running into each other.”

  “Maybe because you’re following me.”

  He showed us a badge: LAPD. “Do you mind if I ask you a couple questions?”

  Hello, paradigm shift.

  “You do not have to talk to him,” Tjuan said.

  “Actually,” I said slowly, “I suspect we’re looking for the same person.”

  The cop squinted at me as though my wheelchair were parked in front of the sun. “Would you be looking for an actor by the name of John Riven?”

  “That’s right. What’s he done to get the law after him?”

  “I can’t go into the details,” he said. “How well do you know him?”

  “We’ve never met.”

  “May I ask why you’ve been looking for him?”

  “A friend of mine is concerned about him.”

  He frowned. “Is your friend David Berenbaum?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think Berenbaum knows where he is.”

  “I think you’re wrong about that, but I don’t have much information to give you except that Johnny’s not at Regazo de Lujo. That much you know.”

  “It’s very important I find him,” the cop said firmly.

  “I need more than that,” I said.

  He seemed to think for a moment, then said flatly, “A young woman has disappeared, and there’s evidence he may have abducted her.”

  He couldn’t have surprised me more if he had clubbed me over the head.

  “Who is it that’s missing?”

  “I can’t go into that.”

  I searched the officer’s eyes. They were dark as motor oil, old in his boyish face. He seemed earnest, but there was something else there too: anger. Not my brand of fast-rising flame that exhausts itself within the hour, but something that burned slow and cool. I suddenly really wanted him to be on my side.

  “You want me to contact you if I hear anything?”

  “That would be great,” he said. He pulled out a business card and handed it to Tjuan, who was closer. Tjuan handed the card immediately to me as though it had peed on him.

  I glanced at the card—it simply said BRIAN CLAY and gave a number—then tucked it into the pocket of my shorts. When I looked up again, Clay was giving me that where do I know you from look. Now that I knew he was a cop, I could narrow it down. I didn’t exactly have a rap sheet.

  “I remember you,” I said. “At least I think I do. I’m Millicent Roper.”

  He shook his head slowly, searching my face.

  “The film student who tried to kill herself by jumping off a building at UCLA last year. Big news for a couple of minutes.”

  His expression went tight and blank like I’d sucker punched him. “Oh,” he said.

  “Did I . . . ?” I trailed off, ready with a stab of guilt without needing to know quite why. “What is it? Is there something I don’t remember?”

  He looked as out of sorts as I felt; I almost felt sorry for him. He combed a hand back through his hair, then mussed it again. “Are you all right now?” he said.

  I looked down at my wheelchair.

  He flinched a little. “I mean besides—I’m sorry, that was—”

  “No, I know what you meant. I’m fine. It’s okay. I think some cops spoke to me early on, in the hospital, when I first woke up. You were one of them?”

  He shifted his weight, shook his
head. “I was the guy who showed up too late to save you.”

  You think you’ve given yourself forty lashes for everyone you hurt, and then you realize you’ll never know the numbers.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. The improbability of it all hadn’t hit me yet; I was too busy looking into those too-old eyes and realizing I was just one more reason for the shadows in them.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “A lot worse has happened to me since.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Does it?”

  “Kind of.”

  To my surprise he laughed, a weird short burst like a dog lunging for an open door. “Well . . . Well, good,” he drawled. He jammed his hands in his pockets and nodded to me, and to Tjuan, who had apparently turned his back on the two of us some time ago. “Give me a call if you find out anything,” said Officer Clay, and then he took off down the sidewalk like it was pouring rain.

  As soon as Clay was out of earshot, Tjuan spoke in a dire tone. “Never let a cop near a fey,” he said.

  “What?” I said distractedly, still staring after Clay.

  “Put steel handcuffs on a fey, you’ve got a problem. Give one a nosebleed and you’ve got an even worse problem.”

  That blood thing again. But I was barely listening, because it had just hit me. I turned to Tjuan and gaped at him.

  “What are the odds?” I said. “I mean, what are the fucking odds? That cop and me, both after Rivenholt?”

  Tjuan stared off where the man had disappeared around the corner of the ice cream shop, slowly shaking his head. “Odds have got nothing to do with it,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do this job long enough, you stop believing in coincidence. Somebody’s always pulling the strings.”

  • • •

  It was close to two a.m. when Berenbaum finally called. I’d figured I’d be tossing and turning all night waiting, but somehow the phone caught me in the deepest part of my sleep cycle and by the time I woke up I had already been talking to him for a second or two. The first thing I was completely aware of was his laughter.

  “Are you high?” he said.