“I wish,” Milo says. “But it’s a two-person cast. Hopefully we’ll be back up this way for a sequel though, yeah?”
Fincher swallows. “I was kidding,” he says, and he narrows his small blue eyes at me. “I popped by as part of a courtesy. We’re just cruising through the area, addressing a theft situation,” he says. “A couple places nearby have been robbed and we see you’re rigged up pretty good here. We just wanted to make sure you lock down tight tonight.”
Milo shakes his hand. “A horror movie within a movie, right?”
I touch Love’s arm and tell her I have to go to the bathroom but what I really have to do is figure out why the fuck Fincher is here. I sneak out of the house through a side door and run around to the front where I see Fincher’s car. He has headshots in the front seat but before I can explore further, I hear footsteps and turn around. Fincher lowers his sunglasses and I wish I had a pair.
“Officer,” I say, sweat beading the back of my neck. “I’m a little confused.”
“Did you get a California license yet?”
“No,” I say. “I’ve been here.”
“Hmm. So you haven’t been back to your apartment?” he says. “Because neither has your neighbor.”
Delilah. Fuck. “Which neighbor?”
He takes off his sunglasses and wipes them down with a handkerchief. “You know, your friend Delilah. She has a California state ID, lives in the same building as you. Well, not that you’re official yet.”
“She’s missing?” I play dumb.
He nods. “You know anything about that?”
“I barely know her,” I insist.
He punches me in the stomach and he is not allowed to do that and I buckle. I am in the dirt. My gut is nothing but muscles and I have no fat there, no padding to soften the blow. The fucker spits and his loogie lands next to my face. “Get the fuck up,” he says. “I went easy on you just now.”
I haven’t been punched since Nanny Rachel and I don’t like the feeling, the way my muscles are all individual things again with singular nerve endings. He kicks my knee. “I said, get the fuck up.”
I stand. I will not give in. I will not reveal anything and his steely little eyes can’t possibly hold anything important. “You’re a fucker,” he says. And it’s a generic word, fucker.
“I don’t know what you think,” I say. “But I didn’t do anything.”
“Except kill Delilah,” he says, and we have a problem. I can’t allow those words to come out of that mouth where someone might hear them. “You did that. So you know, that matters to me, an officer of the law. I imagine it matters to your little fuck doll in there and I am sure that it matters to Delilah’s parents. Jim and Regina, by the way. You ever think about that, Goldberg?”
He steps closer. If he hits me again I will kill him. I turn my head.
“Jim and Regina,” he seethes. “Jim and Regina, Mom and Dad. They love their baby.”
I turn my head and I meet his eyes head on. “I barely know Delilah,” I say. “And I’m sure her parents will do everything they can to find her.”
“You barely know her?” he asks, squinting at me.
“She’s a neighbor,” I say.
He raises a fist and he comes at me and I cower and he backs off. He laughs. “According to your neighbor Dez, you actually knew Delilah pretty well.”
That drug dealer fucker. I will not be unnerved. “If you mean that I slept with her, yes,” I say. “But I didn’t know her very well.”
“Phone records, Joe,” he says. “Do you forget that I’m an officer of the law and that I have access to the missing persons database? Do you think her parents don’t go out there and see to it that the LAPD talk to each and every individual who communicated with their daughter? The State of California cares about its residents. This isn’t Bed-Stuy. We give a fuck here. We care.”
He pronounces it incorrectly, Bed-Stooey, and I hate this kind of Californian, the type who doesn’t know anything about the East Coast, the type who thinks Rhode Island is adjacent to Maine.
“I knew her a little bit,” I say again. “But I didn’t even know she was missing.”
“I was surprised to learn that you’re an opiate man,” he says, assessing me. “You with the early morning jaywalking. You seem jacked up now, if I were to guess, I would have said coke. Speed. Maybe juice, but then no. You’d be a hell of a lot bigger if you were juicing.”
This is taking too long and Love is going to wonder where I am. “What do you want?”
He sighs. “I want to know how to work the headphones you gave me,” he says. “Do you have the instructions?”
“No,” I say, and now I’m sweating. But it’s not possible that the police linked me to Henderson through those headphones. Every asshole in Los Angeles has Beats headphones.
“That’s too bad,” he says. “Do you know how to adjust them? See, my head’s bigger than yours. You have a tiny head. I bet you hear that a lot.”
“I don’t know how to adjust them.” I give him nothing.
“You don’t know how to work your own headphones?” he asks. “Don’t you think that’s kind of funny, Bed-Stuy? I mean, they’re pretty worn in. You’ve had them for a while. You don’t know how to work them?”
“I should get back in there,” I say, edging away.
He smiles. “No, you shouldn’t,” he says. “You’re not on the IMDb page. You’re not doing anything in there but hanging out. The only way I even knew you were on set is because your buddy Calvin showed me your girlfriend’s Instagram page.”
Fucking social media and he is jealous and he drove all the way here from LA, working himself up. This is probably illegal but it doesn’t matter. The police protect their own. “So,” he says. “I’m asking everyone in the Lawns, particularly those who were close with Delilah, you haven’t heard from her?”
“No,” I say. It’s the truth.
“You haven’t reached out to her?”
“No,” I say. It’s the truth.
“When’s the last time you bumped into her?”
And it is with great joy that I tell him more truth. “The night of the Henderson memorial I was at the UCB,” I say. “I had a fight with my girlfriend. I left the UCB. I went to La Pou. I saw Delilah at the bar. I sat down with her. She was waiting for her boyfriend to get there. She wouldn’t tell me his name. She said he’s famous. She made it sound like he lives in the neighborhood. He didn’t show up. She was inebriated. I helped her get home.”
He is deflated, like a fat kid who just got told the Oreos are all gone. And I bet he was a fat kid. I bet he got picked on but what they don’t want to tell you about bullying is that sometimes, the kid deserves it.
He tries again. “You helped her get home.”
“We live in the same building,” I remind him. I love it when the facts are on my fucking side. He, however, does not.
He walks up to me and gets in my face. “I don’t like your attitude, Bed-Stuy. And I don’t like the fact that you’ve failed to apply for legal residency in this great state.”
“I will,” I say. “I promise.”
“I don’t think a promise from a piece of shit New Yorker means anything.”
“Are we done here?”
“No,” he says, and he should have said yes. “But you can go back inside.”
I turn and walk up the driveway toward the house. My stomach is pounding and he had no right to hit me. He had no right to accuse me of anything either. He has no evidence. All he has is hate and he will pay for that.
I feel his eyes burning into the back of my head, stronger and more cancer-causing than the sun above. I’ll have to get rid of him, there’s no other option. You just can’t have a fair shot at life if there’s a cop out there who wants your ass behind bars.