Play It Again

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  “What time do you get in?”

  “In about two hours. Is your couch free?”

  R.J. looked over at Casey, who half opened her eyes, then rolled over, turning her perfect back to him. “Sure it is. Come on over.”

  “Hey, chico, no karate chops this time, huh?”

  “All right. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  “With some coffee, I hope. Hasta luego, R.J.”

  R.J. hung up. He looked at Casey’s back in the dimness of the room. He put out a hand and ran it lightly along her silky spine. She shivered lightly, said, “Mmm,” but did not wake up.

  They had spent an hour and a half in passionate lovemaking that was half combat. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, he still didn’t know where he stood with her.

  He had never been with a woman who ran so hot and cold. There were times when he was sure she was nuts about him. There were other times when he was just as sure she was only using him to kill time. It was starting to make him crazy, and he didn’t have a clue what to do about it.

  He moved his hand up to her side and ran it down over the rich swell of her hip. Whatever was going on, he didn’t want it to stop.

  R.J. got up and threw on his clothes. Then he went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee.

  CHAPTER 21

  “This is terrible coffee,” Henry Portillo said, halfway through his third cup. “And I speak as an expert. You should taste what the Federales call coffee.”

  “What’s wrong with the coffee?” R.J. asked him. He was slightly miffed; coffee was important to him, and this stuff came from fancy beans.

  Hank made a face. “Too strong. Also, you must have used some kind of fancy European coffee bean. And then, this New York water is terrible, R.J. So naturally the coffee is all wrong.”

  “You should have brought your own goddamned water, then. Along with the goddamned tortillas,” R.J. told him.

  Hank raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t like the tortillas? You ate enough of them.”

  R.J. opened his mouth to say something back and stopped. Instead, he looked long and hard at Henry Portillo. There were new lines on Uncle Hank’s face, lines that would not go away with a good night’s sleep. And they looked like they were brought on by more than just the years.

  “What’s with you, Uncle Hank? I haven’t heard you complain this much in fifteen years.”

  The older man raised a hand to his face and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “I’m tired, boy. I’m tired of chasing bad guys and catching lawyers.” He shook his head. “For too many years. Demasiado.”

  R.J. could see real signs of age in his uncle for the first time. True, his hair had been slowly turning white for many years—but that had just added character. Now, for the first time, Uncle Hank looked old.

  R.J. was sure it was not just cop burnout, no matter what Portillo might say. It was the strain of Belle’s death. He had loved her, and that love had gone unresolved and even unspoken.

  A lot like R.J.’s love, in fact.

  “Have some more terrible coffee, Uncle Hank,” R.J. said, hoping to throw off the mood.

  Portillo made a face. “What I need is some huevos rancheros.”

  R.J. grinned. “You’re nothing but a tio taco, Uncle Hank.”

  He nodded. “That may be,” he said. “But when I make it, it is a very good taco.”

  R.J. drained his coffee cup and set the cup down. “And when I make coffee, it’s very good coffee,” he said. “What have you got for me?”

  Hank flipped a thick manila folder onto the kitchen table.

  “This,” he said. He opened the folder and started to riffle through the thick stack of papers inside it.

  “As you know, I’ve been down at Quantico, working with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.” He waved a hand. “It’s just, you know. Una cosa politica. One of the things the LAPD sends me on every now and then. To keep the Department up to date, to network with other departments. Like that.

  “Anyway, I got some use out of the computer there, in my spare time. I ran their program for myself. I fed in everything we know about the killer, most of what we guess, details of the crime scene, that sort of thing. And the computer developed a profile of the killer.”

  R.J. felt his pulse quicken. In spite of the lateness of the hour, the lack of sleep, his confused emotions, this was something he could focus on. This made everything else unimportant.

  “Let’s have it,” he said.

  “Not so fast,” Portillo told him. “This is by no means complete, R.J. At the moment it’s kind of a patchwork outline, no more. It’s a starting place.”

  “I don’t care if it’s only a matchbook from the Holiday Inn,” R.J. said. “It’s more than we’ve had before, and more than the cops have. Let’s see it.”

  A sleep-filled voice came from behind them. “Let’s see what?”

  Henry Portillo whirled out of his chair and faced the direction of the new voice in a half crouch, one hand under his jacket for his gun before R.J. stopped him.

  “At ease, Uncle Hank. She’s one of us.”

  Casey stood in the doorway, wrapped in R.J.’s bathrobe. Her hair was tousled, and there were some traces of sleep in her voice, but her eyes were clear and alert. She looked fantastic, R.J. thought.

  Henry straightened slowly. “Of course I know Miss Wingate,” he said carefully. “But I didn’t know—”

  R.J. grinned. Uncle Hank was still a little bit of a prude, even after all those years on the LAPD. R.J. knew that the older man, who was visibly blushing beneath his dark, desert tan, had always been bothered by his “nephew’s” tendency to stray from the straight and narrow.

  “You didn’t know she was so low class and tasteless as to show up in the middle of the night wearing my bathrobe.”

  “I—That’s—” The older man spluttered helplessly, caught between gallantry and morality.

  “Well, relax, Uncle Hank. The killer made a try for Casey, trashed her place completely. She’s staying with me for a while. That’s all.” And as he said it, he wondered how true it was.

  Casey stepped forward and held her hand out, not realizing—or not caring—that the gesture caused the bathrobe to open a little more than was strictly proper. Portillo’s blush deepened and he looked away, even as he took her hand.

  “R.J. has told me an awful lot about you, Mr. Portillo,” she said.

  “Well, that’s, I,” he said, trying to recover. “I’m sure most of it is lies and exaggerations, Miss Wingate.”

  “I’m sure it must be,” said Casey. “I don’t see a big red S on your chest.”

  “Casey’s been working on this with me,” R.J. said, as much to have something to say to cover the older man’s embarrassment as anything else.

  “Oh,” said Portillo, still flustered. “Oh, well then.” He gave R.J. a glance that was not exactly full of approval.

  “Relax, Uncle Hank,” R.J. told him. “She’s legit, I promise.”

  “Well. Very well,” Portillo said. But he remained standing.

  R.J. laughed again; just one short bark. He was enjoying this. “Sit down, Casey. He won’t sit until you do.”

  Casey smiled and moved to the closest chair. “A real old-fashioned gentleman,” she said. “That’s a pleasant change.” She sat down gracefully, this time remembering to hold the robe closed.

  “Okay, Uncle Hank,” R.J. said. “Let’s have it.”

  “Yes,” Portillo said. He stepped back to his chair and sat down again. He slid a pair of rimless half-glasses from a black leather case, put them on his nose, and paged carefully through the file.

  “All right then,” he said and began to read down a page he pulled from the stack.

  “The first thing I did, after I fed in everything we had, was to ask the program to establish a pattern in the M.O. Then I asked if there were unsolved matches in the computer’s data banks.”

  “Did you find one?” R.J. butted in, excited.

 
Hank looked at him bleakly over the top of the paper. “I found a dozen,” he said, holding up a thick printout. “Chicago, Atlanta, San Diego, Houston, Sacramento—all over the damn country.”

  “But they all fit the pattern?” Casey asked.

  Portillo shrugged. “They seem to. But we have to ask what good it does us for them to fit a pattern if the pattern is popping up everywhere.”

  “Sure,” said R.J. “It’s more likely that the information you entered wasn’t detailed enough, and you got the computer to spit out a whole crop of different psychos, all over the country.”

  “That’s possible,” said Portillo, nodding.

  “What about the dates? Do any of them conflict?” Casey asked, leaning forward to look at the printout.

  Portillo looked at her with approval. “Good for you, Miss Wingate. It took me almost a full day before I asked that question. No, none of the dates conflict. In theory it could have been the same person, acting at different times in different spots.”

  “But what do all those cities have in common?” Casey mused.

  R.J. shrugged. “They’re American cities, all medium to large in size. So maybe the killer needs to stay in areas that offer something you can’t get in the sticks.”

  “Like what?” Portillo asked.

  R.J. grinned at him. “Like a good cup of coffee, Uncle Hank. How the hell would I know, like what?”

  “The important thing is, if we have that many kills we have a better chance of finding some clue at one of them,” Casey said.

  “Sure,” R.J. said, “if they’re all the same guy. If they’re not, anything we find might take us on a wild goose chase.”

  “The local cops have been over every one of those crime scenes,” Portillo said. “They found no more than what we did. A bizarre and grotesque scene, a handful of Polaroids—that’s it.”

  “Look,” said Casey, “we know more about this killer than all the local cops put together. Let’s go through each one of these and see if they add up.”

  “How would you like us to decide, Miss Wingate?” Portillo asked her with a touch of polite derision.

  She snorted. “Call me ‘Casey.’ And cut the crap.”

  Portillo flinched slightly. He had never gotten used to having women use words like crap. “Very well. Casey. How shall we decide?”

  “R.J. and I have both been over three of these kills in the New York area. I think we have a feel for the guy’s style, even in the absence of evidence. And don’t,” she said, cutting off the older man’s objections, “give me any shit about woman’s intuition, all right? Any half-decent cop works hunches all the time, and you know it.”

  Portillo shook his head and said something in Spanish under his breath.

  Casey turned to R.J. “What did he say?”

  R.J. laughed. “You don’t want to know. Let’s just do it, okay?”

  For the next few hours they sat together at the rickety kitchen table, hunched over the pages, passing them back and forth, marking a few spots, occasionally commenting to each other.

  When they were done, the sun was coming up. They had a stack of nine cases they agreed were the work of the same killer, three uncertain, and one they threw out.

  “All right then,” said Portillo, tapping the sheaf of papers on the table to get the edges even. “I will run these nine back into the computer and see what we come up with.”

  He placed the papers back into the manila folder and closed it.

  “And now,” Portillo said, standing up and stretching, “I believe there is just time for huevos rancheros before I must catch the shuttle.”

  CHAPTER 22

  R.J. stopped in at his office at noon. As he opened the outer door, Wanda met him with a look of cold petulance.

  “What’s that face?” he asked her.

  “Nothing, I’m sure,” she said. “After all, you’re the boss. You don’t even have to come in to the office if you don’t want to. You have an employee to take messages and run the office. Just stay in bed all day, if that’s what the two of you want to do.”

  R.J. stifled a laugh. “Is there more?”

  “You’re darn right, there’s more,” she said, not even pretending to be civil now. “Boss, I’ve worked here for three years—and not once in all that time did you see fit to tell me who you really are! R.J. Brooks—what a laugh! I have a right to know who I’m working for, at least, and I thought there was a little more to the relationship than that, but if you—”

  R.J. put his hands to his ears in an attempt to block out the torrent that was pouring out. “Whoa, whoa, for Christ’s sake, slow down. Jesus, Wanda!”

  “—can’t even give me one civil word of explanation, even when I ask you right out, then all I can say—”

  R.J. stepped over to Wanda and placed a hand gently but firmly over her mouth.

  “There’s lots of stuff I’ve never told you,” he said. “And I never will. That doesn’t mean anything. You’re my friend, and I’m glad you work here, but my private business is private, got it?”

  She made muffled sounds of protest and looked poison at him.

  “Now, I’m going to tell you this one time, and one time only. Yes, Belle Fontaine was my mother. I’ve spent the last ten years running from that. I never mentioned it because I didn’t want to think about it myself. I’ve been trying to forget it. I thought it wasn’t important.

  “I was wrong about that. I’m sorry she had to get killed for me to figure it out, but that’s water under the bridge. All that matters now is finding the guy who did it, okay?”

  Once again she made a muffled noise, but not a violent one this time, and the look in her eyes had softened.

  R.J. nodded. “Good. I’m going to take my hand away now, and I don’t want to hear another word about this, all right?”

  He slowly took his hand away.

  Wanda stared at him, watching him inch his hand back. When he finally dropped it to his side, she said one word.

  “Asshole.” She returned to her desk. “Here’s a list of your calls. You’ll notice most of them are from Tina Burkette. She wants to ‘Finalize the schedule of payments,’ which I think means the hot tub again.”

  “Oh, brother.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you got yourself into hot water, you can get yourself out.”

  “Pretty funny. Anything else?”

  “A couple of other calls, nothing important: Gloria wants to see you. Your accountant called; he says he needs about four hours of your time—”

  “Jesus Christ,” R.J. said. “I don’t spend four hours with him in five years!”

  Wanda gave him a mean smile. “You will, now you’re rich. I think you’ll be spending a lot of time with Fender, Bean, and Weinstock.”

  “Hell, I can’t do it. Bean has breath that could knock a vulture off an outhouse.”

  “It can wait until next week,” Wanda said sweetly.

  “Quit your damn gloating. What else?”

  “Why do you think there’s more?”

  “Isn’t there?”

  “Yes. A handful of prospective clients. I told them you weren’t taking any new jobs right now.”

  “One of these days, you’ll go too far and I’ll spank you.”

  “Promises, promises,” she said, and R.J. went on into his office, letting her have the last word.

  R.J. spent about forty minutes with some routine paperwork and then called Wanda in to dictate a letter.

  She settled into the chair beside his desk, smoothing down her skirt over her crossed legs.

  “Ready, boss,” she said, poised with her pen and pad.

  “Dear Mrs. Burkette,” R.J. began, sticking a cigar in his mouth as he leaned back in his chair, almost to a full horizontal.

  “Oh, boy,” muttered Wanda, “here it comes.”

  “Sorry I have not responded to your recent calls. I’ve been away from the office on a very complicated and time-consuming new case. Paragraph. I can’t see that we have anything further
to finalize, but if I have overlooked some small detail, please feel free to discuss it with my confidential assistant, Wanda Groz.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Wanda.

  “You’re welcome. Paragraph. I hope you are as satisfied with the outcome of my work for you as I am. If I can be of any future assistance, please don’t hesitate to call. Sincerely, et cetera.”

  “Old Mr. Fuller’s got nothing on you, boss,” Wanda said, slapping shut her notebook.

  “How’s that?”

  She gave him a shark’s smile, which meant she was back to normal again. “You give a great brush-off,” she said, and she swished out of his office.

  R.J. leaned back in his chair again, letting his mind drift.

  He thought about Casey for a good long time. He still didn’t know what to make of her hot-and-cold act. The hot was the best he’d ever had. But the cold was killing him.

  He threw the soggy, mangled cigar at the trash can. With an effort he put Casey out of his head and thought instead about what Henry Portillo had learned about the killer. Chicago, Atlanta, San Diego, Houston, Sacramento: all over the damned country.

  What the hell did any of them have in common?

  * * *

  The man sitting in the dim, midtown bar knows the answer to that one. In fact, he knows the answer to a lot of puzzling questions.

  For instance: How much horrible, permanently mutilating pain can a human being stand before going completely mad?

  That’s one of his favorite questions.

  He asks it frequently.

  In Chicago, Atlanta, San Diego, Houston, Sacramento. And of course, Manhattan.

  He loves to explore the answer to that one. It is always different. He never gets tired of helping someone stretch beyond that red line they thought marked the end of the world and show them, oh no, there’s more.

  See? You can go just a little bit further.

  See? A little further again.

  Of course, they all do go mad, sooner or later. At that point they’re no longer very much fun.

  The woman had surprised him. She had been much stronger than he had thought she would be. She had lasted for several hours.