Play It Again

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  He opened the largest drawer, the one in the center.

  Inside sat a stack of old-looking letters, wrapped in a faded red ribbon.

  He slid the top letter out and opened it.

  Dear Belle,

  Well Christ almighty, it sure seems like you must have planned it. Don’t get so flustered, sister, you’re not the only one in the soup.

  I’m enclosing a check, a big one. Do what you think is right with it.

  I guess I’ll see you when you get back out here to the Coast.

  The scrawl at the bottom of the page was his father’s signature.

  More interesting was the date at the top: just six months before R.J. was born.

  He opened the next letter. Again, it was from his father to his mother.

  Glad you like your new apartment, although that’s not what I thought you’d do with the check.

  Some of the boys upstairs at the studio are very worried about you having this kid. They say it will kill your career, and do a lot of damage to mine. You don’t want that, any more than I do, kiddo.

  So the story they’ve come up with, after a long sitdown with your agent and my agent, is that we got married secretly last year while we were shooting Double Negative. Then we can secretly get married for real as soon as you can get your smooth pink rear end out here to Hollywood.

  I know it’s not exactly moonlight and roses, Belle, and I’m sure not going down on one knee, but the PR guys think this could be a terrific boost for both of us, and I’m all for that.

  How about it, kid?

  R.J. felt like he was rooted to the chair with a grand piano on his lap. He couldn’t stand up to save his life.

  There couldn’t be any doubt about it: His parents had gotten married as a PR move because his mother was already pregnant. With him.

  So much for the storybook romance crap he’d heard all his life. So much for the old issue of LIFE he still had, with the cover photo of the two of them, looking so lovey-dovey. Just another posed shot. Another scene played out like the studio wanted it.

  What was that like? An arranged marriage—arranged, not by parents who “only want the best,” but by a bunch of potbellied, cigar-smoking weasels with too many consonants in their names.

  They had married because of him. Jesus, had they even liked each other? Attracted to each other, sure. The rough, macho leading man, idol of millions; and the long-stemmed American beauty on her way to the top. Instant sack time.

  But had they liked each other? Cared about each other? Held hands when they were alone, or only for the cameras? Had they done everything just for the cameras and lived totally separate lives on their own? Had their whole life together just been an elaborate movie set?

  When it came down to that, then who the hell was he?

  His head was spinning. Christ, he’d come here looking for answers, and all he had was a whole truckload of new questions.

  He sat there for a long time, holding the letters in his hand.

  * * *

  It was getting dark outside when R.J. snapped out of it. He was left with the realization that he had never really known his mother.

  He was long used to not knowing his father, who had died too long ago, when R.J. was just a kid. They hadn’t had much time together, what with the old man’s busy work schedule and all.

  Sometimes R.J. thought he knew the old man better from his movies than from real life. But he was comfortable with that. It was just one of those things. Lots of people never knew their dads, especially in Hollywood.

  But now his mother was gone too. She’d been there, all the years of his life, and now she was dead and he didn’t really know who she had been.

  And that meant he didn’t really know who he was either.

  He ran a hand through his hair, rubbed his eyes. Get a grip, R.J., he told himself. All he had to do was throw some crap in a box, call Goodwill, and get out of here. He didn’t need to take a swan dive off the deep end of his soul. Not now. He had a murderer to catch.

  He put the letters back in the drawer.

  The next drawer held a flowered book. It was one of those blank-paged books they sell at stationery stores. He flipped it open.

  The book was about half filled with his mother’s neat, spidery handwriting. It was a diary.

  At least he could page through it, see if there was anything in it that might give him a hint about her killer. He started reading at a date three weeks back, when his mother had arrived in New York.

  He was surprised at how well she wrote. Not that she’d ever been ditzy or anything, but the entries showed a clear-thinking woman who knew who she was and what she wanted—and, more often than not, how to get it.

  There were some savagely funny drawings on the facing pages, pictures of people she knew, things she had seen that day. They were accompanied by very sharp comments.

  If only he’d known. This was a hell of a bright, funny lady.

  He found nothing in the diary that gave him even a faint clue to her death. She mentioned that she had a new boyfriend, Robert. That was the guy she was killed with. An analysis of his character that was only slightly flattering. Mentioned that he was miffed about going to a hell of a lot of trouble to exchange some hard-to-get tickets because she wouldn’t go—it conflicted with her AA meeting.

  R.J. put the book back where he found it.

  He tilted back in the chair, his fingers locked behind his neck. He wished he’d known this side of his mother. So often people get locked into parts and have to play-act them, no matter what. Mother. Son. Boss, lover, babysitter. Can’t break out and be yourself because you’re already somebody else as far as the other person is concerned.

  Play-acting. Like the killer. Deadly play-acting.

  A funny thought hit him and he sat up straight. The diary he had seen only went back about six months. But it was so easy, so well done, he couldn’t believe she had just started writing in a diary six months ago.

  There had to be more diaries, maybe dating all the way back to when he was a kid. Maybe even beyond.

  He got out of the chair and started looking around the room.

  He finally found them at the back of the closet. There was a small bookshelf shoved all the way back, behind some old fur coats on hangers. There were about forty volumes, each with a small label on the spine telling the dates.

  Don’t be a snoop, he thought. Leave her some privacy. But this was all he had of her now, all he would ever have, and he wanted to know her better. He took down a volume from when he was about eleven and went back to the chair.

  That year started to come back to him. It had been a hard year for R.J., but there were harder ones yet to come.

  “The kid had that dream again last night,” he read on a page as he flipped through. He stopped turning pages and read the entry:

  He’d been having it almost every night back around the time of the accident, but I thought we were past all that now. I guess not.

  He says The Scary Guy is trying to get him again. He’s very sure about that “again” part. He says it’s The Scary Guy that wrecked his bike, come back to kill him….

  The accident. It all came back to him. The year before, when he was ten, some maniac in a car had run over him, crushed his bike, broken his wrist, and left him with the funny scar in the dimple on his chin.

  R.J. was so positive about seeing The Scary Guy all over, everywhere we went, for a couple of weeks before the accident. It’s funny how his little mind works. I’m sure it was just some drunk who got scared and took off when he saw he’d hit a kid. But R.J. is convinced it’s some kind of plot, that the guy had been following him for two weeks first.

  But he hadn’t been following R.J.—he’d been following Belle! And damn it, he was still sure about that.

  He’d seen that same face, everywhere they went together, for two weeks. His mother had been cast in a picture at the time, but it hadn’t started shooting. They were still casting the other parts, so she’d had some
time. Even taken him to the park once.

  And The Scary Guy had been there too! All dressed up as an ice-cream vendor, wearing a big fake mustache, but it had been him, no doubt about it.

  Just a stalker, probably. A celebrity stalker. They didn’t have a name for it back then. Now they were all over the place. Even the local TV weatherman had one.

  R.J. hadn’t thought about The Scary Guy for years. But he remembered him now. He remembered the dreams too.

  In the dreams The Scary Guy would be coming at him from everywhere. Every face he saw, even faces he knew like Mom and his teachers, would suddenly melt into the blank, ordinary face of The Scary Guy. And somehow that everyday face was more frightening than all the bogeymen he had ever dreamed up before. Something in the eyes, maybe, like they were bland gray caves where an animal was crouching, ready to spring out at him.

  The Scary Guy. Geez. R.J. shook his head. Then he read some more.

  CHAPTER 13

  In the middle of the night he sat straight up in his mother’s bed covered with sweat. He could still hear the echo of his own gasping.

  He’d had the dream again, the one he used to have when he was a kid. The Scary Guy was back, trying to kill him. Only this time his face swam into focus in more recent form. He was the drunk and the priest, the people R.J. had been looking at on Casey’s tapes.

  R.J. turned on the bedside light and swung his feet onto the floor. He rubbed his face, hoping to get some blood flowing. What a schmuck, scared out of his wits by a dream he used to have when he was ten. Seeing that face again, in the drunk, the priest, the newsman. He was letting the strain get to him.

  He stood up and walked toward the bathroom and stopped cold halfway there.

  What newsman?

  He played the dream back in his head. It was already fading, the way dreams do once you’re awake and out of bed. R.J. grabbed hard at the wisps of it that were left.

  At the funeral, the priest turned away from the grave and looked at him, and it was The Scary Guy. He ran. Nightmare running, where you don’t go anywhere. Tombstones moving past with terrible, deadly slowness. A man leaning on one of them. He runs to the man for help—it’s The Scary Guy again. He turns around to run—and there’s The Scary Guy, swinging a microphone at him like a broadsword. About to lop his head off.

  And R.J. woke up, yelling.

  Where had he seen that reporter? Was he making it up, creating a figure out of his anger and frustration with the jackals that had been on him all day at the funeral?

  No. He’d seen the guy, actually seen him. Where?

  The funeral home.

  It came to him in a bright flash of memory. Stepping out of the funeral home toward the limo. The crowd surging at him. One reporter in particular shoving brutally forward, ramming the microphone into his face. Something wrong with the face, something not reporterlike—what?

  The eyes.

  That was it. The eyes, those same terrible gray eyes, like some evil, diseased animal’s eyes, in that bland, ordinary face. He hadn’t noticed it consciously, but his subconscious had taken note and brought it back up in the dream.

  It was him.

  It was The Scary Guy.

  The Scary Guy had killed his mother.

  He tried to laugh it off, make it into the funny quirk of an overworked, emotionally exhausted brain trying to turn tragedy into something that made sense.

  Tried like hell. Couldn’t do it.

  The Scary Guy had killed his mother.

  * * *

  “Jesus Christ, R.J.,” Casey Wingate said, “do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “I’ve got to see the tapes,” R.J. said. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what time it is. I’ve got to see them now.”

  He could hear her blow a heavy stream of air through pursed lips. “Come on over,” she said and hung up.

  It was easier to flag a taxi from the swank neighborhood of Central Park West than it had ever been from his own apartment. In half an hour from the time he called he was down at Casey’s in the Village.

  He was so hot to see the tapes that he barely noticed how good Casey looked in the old terrycloth bathrobe she’d thrown on. Holding the robe closed with one hand, she led him over to her ministudio and turned on the first tape.

  “What is all this, R.J.?” she asked. “Why does it have to be now? At three-thirty in the morning, for God’s sake?”

  “I think I remembered where I know the guy from,” he said, staring at the screen. “I have to check—stop!”

  Once again he looked at the drunk, at the haunting familiarity of his fleshy face. Mentally, R.J. stripped away the jowls, the red, bulbous nose. It could be. It could be him.

  “Next tape.”

  She slammed in number two and wound it forward with the joystick.

  “Stop.”

  And there was the priest. Again he tried to be sure, and he couldn’t, but he was almost sure. Almost.

  “What do you have from today?”

  Casey blinked, still not fully awake.

  “Footage,” he told her impatiently. “From today.”

  “Today?” she said. “What would you like?”

  “The mob scene, coming out of the funeral home. Did you get any of that?”

  “I was right behind you,” she said.

  “Let’s see it,” he said.

  She moved over to the counter and went through a stack of six or seven tapes in hard black plastic covers, checking numbers on the sides. “Got it,” she said, opening one of the cases and pushing it into a three-quarter deck.

  The tape started with background shots of the funeral home, the crowd outside, the mob scene in the street. It moved inside past the coffin and around the room before cutting to R.J. coming in the door, flanked by Hookshot and Portillo.

  The tape went on to the service without a break, and Casey ran it forward at its fastest speed. The tape hit the end, and she rewound it a bit.

  “Let’s try here,” she said, putting it up on screen again.

  R.J. was walking toward the outside door, and then he was outside. The crowd surged up at him; Portillo and Hookshot helped him push toward the—

  “Stop! Right there, back it up a little. Now freeze.”

  The tape jerked to a halt and R.J. leaned forward, not even breathing.

  It was him. The microphone held out, the blazer with the patch just barely visible: CABLE INDEPENDENT NEWS.

  Same face, no doubt about that. Disguised a little, subtly changed—the guy was very good at that, very fucking good. It was the same guy as the drunk, the priest, he was almost positive.

  Almost.

  But even that wasn’t as hard to believe as the other. How could it possibly be the face out of his boyhood nightmares? It was not even remotely conceivable that that same face was back, that it had killed his mother and now wanted to kill him. It just wasn’t possible.

  Was it?

  “What is it?”

  He almost jerked up out of his seat at Casey’s question. He’d forgotten where he was, forgotten she was there. And that’s a very bad sign, he thought, to forget legs like those.

  “What is it, R.J.?” she repeated.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I think I know the guy.”

  “Who is he?” she rasped, leaning forward, her eyes burning. As she leaned forward she showed a little more cleavage than she might have liked.

  “Uh—” He stopped cold, took a deep breath. “I think—he’s the guy that gave me this,” he said, fingering the scar on his chin.

  She didn’t say anything for a minute, which he thought was pretty decent of her, considering what he was asking her to believe. “Go on,” she said finally, sitting back again.

  He told her the whole thing, the whole story of The Scary Guy, how it had come back to him reading the diaries, and how he couldn’t shake the idea now that this was the same guy, come out of the past, out of his nightmares, to kill his mother.

  When he was done, sh
e didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “You think I’m nuts,” he said.

  She tossed her hair back. “I don’t know you well enough to think that,” she said. “But even if you’re right, I don’t see what good it does you. You didn’t know who the guy was then, and you still don’t.”

  “Yeah, I know. But it’s more than I knew before. Maybe the cops have something that can help.”

  Casey snorted. “If they do, they probably don’t know they have it. But I’ll tell you one thing interesting,” she said, recrossing her legs.

  “What’s that?” asked R.J., trying hard not to look.

  She flashed a smile. “There’s no such thing as Cable Independent News.”

  CHAPTER 14

  It was only a little after seven o’clock in the morning when R.J. climbed the steps into NYPD headquarters. No way he could sleep, and he was gambling that Angelo Bertelli was the kind of cop who came early and stayed late. R.J. was sure that in spite of the flashy suit and the easy smile, Bertelli was a hardworking cop.

  But Bertelli wasn’t in yet, according to the tough-looking woman in the sergeant’s uniform who was sitting behind the front desk. So R.J. went out to the newspaper box just outside the station and grabbed a paper. He sat down on a hard chair inside and started to read.

  The goddamn Mets. They couldn’t beat a Little League team. And a couple of them probably ought to be in jail. What the hell was the game coming to?

  “This is a pleasant surprise,” sneered an unpleasant voice, and R.J. looked up to see Kates giving him a cold glare.

  “Lieutenant,” said R.J. affably. “What brings you down here? Didn’t think there were any butts around to kiss at this hour.”

  Kates flushed bright red. “Listen, Mr. Fontaine—or whatever you’re calling yourself nowadays—you’re gonna need a favor before too long, and when you do—”

  “Don’t come crawling to you, Freddy?” R.J. finished for him. “Thanks for the tip. I’ll see if I can stay alive without you.” And he flipped the newspaper back open again.