Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(41)
“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 anti-biotic 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.