The Remake

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  “That’s enough, asshole,” said Murray, and he stood up. R.J. took a step toward him and he sat down again.

  Janine Wright frowned. The girl giggled. Janine looked at her briefly, coldly, then looked back at R.J. She shook her head, just twice, and turned to the girl who had let him in. “You let him in. Get this shithead out of here.”

  “I’m not your fucking slave,” the girl said.

  “Don’t use that language with me,” Janine Wright said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, what language am I supposed to use? All I’ve ever heard from you is fuck this, shit on that, piss on you—”

  Janine Wright was up and across the floor in two steps. She slapped the girl once and the sound of it was loud enough to make R.J. jump. “I’m still your mother, you little bitch,” Janine Wright said.

  The girl took a step back, rubbing her cheek. “That’s my problem,” she said.

  Janine Wright hissed out a breath and raised her hand again. The girl didn’t flinch, just stared at her mother. Janine put her hand down.

  “Sometimes you’re so much like your father I could puke,” she said.

  The girl just looked at her. “Considering some of the things you’ve done,” she told her mother, “I doubt you could puke at all anymore, no matter what.” Then she looked once at R.J., and there was something funny going on in her eyes, a kind of idea or recognition that R.J. was being included in, but didn’t get. Then the girl turned and walked out of the room.

  Janine Wright watched her daughter go. “Murray,” she said.

  The terrier got up and scuttled away. “I’ll talk to her,” he said.

  “Do you have kids?” Janine Wright asked R.J., without looking at him. “If you don’t, stay lucky. Never have kids. They’re fucking awful. The whole thing is a—”

  Suddenly she turned and looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. “Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

  R.J. stepped forward and handed her his business card. “My name is R.J. Brooks,” he said.

  Janine Wright did a double take, looked at the card, and stared at him again. “Oh,” she said. “You’re that guy. That’s why you look like him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I thought you were an actor.”

  R.J. grinned at her. “Nope.”

  “I thought you were auditioning.”

  “No, I’m complaining.”

  She looked at him for a full thirty seconds. Once again, R.J. felt like he was a wrinkled drapery, or a chair with a stain on the slipcover. Finally she nodded and said, “Sit down.”

  She turned and moved back to the settee. R.J. perched on a chair that would probably make a down payment on a place in the Hamptons. He opened his mouth to start his pitch, but she cut him off.

  “How much do you make?” she asked him.

  R.J. blinked. “None of your goddamned business.”

  “You grew up in Hollywood, right? Why’d you leave?”

  “There’s no air and I hate the people,” he said, wondering where this was going.

  “Ever think about going back?”

  “Think about it? No, I have nightmares sometimes. Look, Ms. Wright, I’m not applying for a job—”

  “Then why the fuck should I care if you look just like him?”

  “I can’t imagine why the fuck. You brought it up, not me.”

  A door slammed and Murray came scuttling back rubbing his face. He slid into his place beside Janine Wright so fast, R.J. had to blink to be sure he wasn’t seeing things.

  “I’ll pay you two thousand a week to come work for me,” Janine Wright said.

  “I advise against that,” said Murray.

  “Twenty-two-fifty,” said Janine Wright.

  R.J. felt the breath leave him and for a few seconds he couldn’t get it back. Finally he managed to shake his head. “Can we start over? I don’t think we’ve been in the same conversation since I got here.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “I want to talk about this picture you’re making, the remake of As Time Goes By.”

  “You don’t have a leg to stand on!” Murray barked. “We own all worldwide rights to this remake and if you think—”

  “Shut up, Murray,” Janine Wright said.

  “I’m not going to sit here and—”

  “Yes you are,” she said, and looked at him briefly. He shut up. He seemed a little paler than he had been.

  Janine looked at R.J. and smiled; not like she was happy or amused, but like he was a brain-dead kid she had to talk to. “Twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “Jesus Christ, lady, for what?”

  “For looking like your father.”

  R.J. could feel something happening on his face, almost as if he was watching it, not like it was his face at all. It was somewhere between a snarl and a sneer. Everything about this woman and her pet lawyer made his skin crawl, made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, made him want to grab her by the lapels of her $500 bathrobe and shake her till her teeth rattled.

  “Listen,” he told her, fighting for control, “I’m not going to plug your remake for you. If I put on a fedora and call in the cameras, it will be because I want to stop the picture, not because you’re paying me to make people want to see a half-wit, brain-dead, watered-down, scummed-up, weak, sick, silly, stupid copy of something that’s more important to a hell of a lot of people than—”

  “Including you?” she asked. She hadn’t even blinked at the name calling. “It’s important to you?”

  “Including me,” R.J. said. “And since I do look like him, I think I can get you a lot of negative publicity if you go ahead with this thing.”

  She just looked. “Negative publicity?”

  “Yeah, you know. Look-alike son calls project a lame sack of shit, scion of great actor heaps scorn on greedy, brainless, soulless studio—that kind of thing. Get the fan magazines involved. Organize protests. Maybe a nuisance suit. Hell, lady, I haven’t even thought about it and I know ten ways to pee in your soup.”

  Janine Wright smiled. “Okay. Great. Do it.”

  “Gotcha,” said Murray.

  R.J. blinked. He had thought he was getting somewhere, really felt like he was on a roll. “What?”

  She leaned back. “I said, go ahead. Do it. Call your press conferences. Organize boycotts. Sue the shit out of me. You’re gonna do for free what I would have paid you for, shit-for-brains.”

  R.J. was surprised to see his hands were trembling. He’d never wanted to hit somebody so badly. “You would have paid me to sue the shit out of you?”

  “Absolutely. Including court costs. Now you can pay for it yourself. This is fucking great.”

  “Why?”

  She stood up. “I don’t have time to teach kindergarten to half-wits. You ever hear the expression, no such thing as bad publicity?” She moved toward the door.

  “I’ve heard it.”

  “Well, the way things are today, it goes even further. Bad publicity is the best kind. People hear you hate this movie, they’ll go see it just to find out why. They’ll buy a ticket just so they can agree with you.” She opened the door. “Assholes. And they say TV is stupid. I wonder why. Get out.”

  R.J.’s head was spinning. He felt like the private eye in an old movie, realizing somebody had slipped him a mickey. It was in the drink, he thought, except I didn’t have a drink.

  “Come on, get out,” Janine Wright repeated. “Before I have to call security. Forget the white gloves, those cocksuckers are mean. Move your ass, ace.”

  Murray jumped up and leaned around her, yapping at R.J. “Sue us, you dumb loser. You have to file in California, and that’s my private pissing grounds. I guarantee it’ll take you twenty years to see court, and you won’t have a penny left. And when you do get in court, it’ll be my court and my judge and you, you pathetic loser, you—”

  “That’s enough, Murray,” Janine Wright said.

  “Loser,” Murray yapped, and then he flin
ched away as if expecting a kick.

  R.J. found his way to the door. “You’re a tough lady,” he said.

  She gave him that look again, that used-furniture look. “You’re only half right, half-wit,” she said. She gave him a push and slammed the door.

  R.J. stood in the hall and looked at the beautiful oak door.

  She was right. She was no lady.

  R.J. made it back to his office in plenty of time for the session with Reverend Lake and it was as bad as he had figured. The reverend wept when he saw the pictures and fell to his knees on the office floor, yelling out pleas for forgiveness and blubbering like a baby. Then he looked at the pictures some more, a little too long, R J. thought, and a little too interested, before he caught himself and went back to praying and snuffling on the floor.

  R.J. sat through the whole performance without blinking. The check had already cleared. Even when the reverend got a little more specific than he should have about some of the things he wanted forgiveness for—something about one of the teenage boys in the youth group)—R.J. just sat and watched. He’d seen it before. Besides, he was still churning over the whole thing with Janine Wright. He was so burned up about it that he couldn’t really enjoy the reverend’s performance as much as he should have.

  And when that was over, he didn’t even enjoy banking the fat bonus check Reverend Lake left with him in exchange for the envelope with the pictures. The good man left, clutching the envelope like he would have paid even more for something that good. R.J. should have enjoyed the way the man’s sweaty knuckles turned white as he gripped that envelope, but he didn’t.

  In fact, although he didn’t know it then, it would be a good long time before R.J. really enjoyed anything again.

  CHAPTER 7

  R.J. was in a long hallway lined with doors. There had to be a couple thousand doors, and his father was behind one of them. But inside the one he opened there was just a pile of bones, and then the door slammed shut behind him and he knew the bones were his father’s and as he tried to back off, the bones got up and danced and the door started to slam open and shut to set the beat for the dancing bones—

  —and he woke up covered with sweat and somebody was pounding on the door of his apartment.

  R.J. shook his head to clear it. It didn’t work. The pounding on the door didn’t stop, either. He got up and splashed some water on his face. Anybody who pounded on the goddamn door like that at—what was it, 3:45? Hell, let ’em wait.

  He let them wait until he got a bathrobe on. Then he opened the door. There stood Detective Don Boggs.

  Boggs was a square guy with a low forehead and a lower IQ. He had a widow’s peak that almost touched his eyebrows and was wearing one of the ugliest suits R.J. had ever seen.

  Even more amazing, it was different from the one he’d been wearing last time they’d met, which until then had been the ugliest R.J. had ever seen.

  R.J. had met Boggs on several occasions and they would never be doubles partners at the country-club tennis tournament. In fact, R.J. would cheerfully spit on Boggs’s grave and he knew the detective felt the same about him.

  So it wasn’t a pleasant surprise to see him, especially with that righteous scowl on his face.

  “What the hell took you so long?”

  “Gee, I’m sorry I didn’t hear you,” said R.J. “I was reading Tennyson and just lost myself.”

  Boggs frowned. “Is that funny?”

  “No, Don, Tennyson is very serious stuff. I think it’s poetry. You want to come in and I’ll read it to you?”

  Boggs pushed past him and into the apartment. “You’ll have plenty of time to read poetry where you’re going. It’ll make you real popular.”

  Annoyed, R.J. closed the door. “Where am I going, Don? And what couch cover did you make that suit out of?”

  Boggs turned and glared at him, then shook his head and looked righteous again. “I’ve waited a long time for this, Brooks. Get dressed. You’re coming with me.”

  “Didn’t I hear a rumor about a law somewhere that said you need a warrant or due cause or something?”

  “This time I can get the warrant, Brooks. I can have it here in half an hour. But it might go easier on you if you cooperate. Maybe we can get your sentence reduced.”

  “That would be swell, Don, I appreciate it. By the way, what did I do this time?”

  Boggs smiled like it was his favorite crime. “Murder One, Brooks. And this time we got you dead to rights.”

  R.J. sat on the arm of his sofa. On top of that dream, this was just a little bit too much. He knew it was serious, but if he wasn’t careful he was going to bust out laughing. “Who’d I kill? I forget.”

  “Murray Belcher, smart-ass. Like you didn’t know. Now get dressed or I’ll take you in your goddamn robe.”

  Murray Belcher. Murray Belcher. Who the hell was Murray Belcher? Whoever he was, he was dead now, and the cops had to have a pretty good reason to think R.J. killed him. Otherwise they would have waited until morning and sent Angelo to get him.

  R J. got dressed, with Boggs hovering nearby to make sure he didn’t slip a howitzer into his shoe. They left the apartment a few minutes later and R.J. still didn’t have a clue who Murray Belcher was.

  He still didn’t know when they got down to Lieutenant Kates’s office.

  If there was one guy on the NYPD that R.J. got along with less than Boggs, it was Lieutenant Kates. They’d never actually swung at each other, but R.J. figured that was just a matter of time.

  “Sit down, Fontaine,” Kates greeted him. The lieutenant liked to needle him by calling him Fontaine, after R.J.’s famous mother. He thought it showed wit, and R.J. figured he was half right.

  “Thanks, Freddy,” R.J. said. “Say, the office looks real classy. Who’s your decorator?”

  Kates came around the battered desk and perched on the front of it so he was only a few inches away from R.J. “You’re going to answer some questions, Fontaine, and your smart mouth is not going to get you anywhere this time. Except maybe Attica.” He crossed his arms and sneered at R.J. “Your high-priced show-biz lawyers aren’t getting you off the hook, either, Fontaine.”

  R.J. was getting annoyed enough to wish that he had really killed this Murray Belcher, whoever he was. “Sure, Freddy, that’s a beautiful speech. I know how hard you must have practiced it. You didn’t even stutter once. But I got some bad news for you.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” Kates sneered. “But not as bad as what I got for you.”

  “Number one,” said R.J., ignoring Kates’s interruption, “as a matter of fact, unless you’re going to file charges or suspend the Bill of Rights, I’m afraid my high-priced show-biz lawyer will get me off the hook. There’s a bunch of stuff like unlawful confinement, habeas corpus, all of that. I can explain it when you’re done trampling on it. Number two—” He held up two fingers and wiggled them for Kates so he wouldn’t lose count. “I don’t have a clue who this guy Belcher is, and I make it a rule never to kill strangers.”

  R.J. stood up and leaned into Kates’s face. “And number three, lieutenant, you can cut the crap right now and tell me what I’m supposed to know about this, and what gives you the right to drag me down here in the middle of the night and keep me here without arrest and without a lawyer, or I’ll sit in a cell and see you in Hell before I answer a question from either you or this low-grade moron you keep for a pet. So get polite, or read me my rights, or I’m done for the night, Freddy.”

  “First, you’ll answer me one question,” Kates said. “And I’ll like your answer or I stick you in a cell with a fag bodybuilder until I remember to call your lawyer. Which might not be for a couple of days.”

  R.J. knew he’d do it, too—and maybe even get away with it. So he let out a big breath and nodded his head. “One question, Freddy. Then I start playing hardball, too.”

  Kates nodded. R.J. had never noticed before how small and beady his eyes were. They were gleaming now. Kates looked like he was about t
o drool. “Where were you last night?”

  “It’s still last night now, Freddy,” R.J. told him. “Can you pin it down a little better?”

  “Yeah, I can pin it down, Fontaine. Let’s say where were you between the hours of ten and one?”

  R.J. frowned. This wasn’t going to be very good. “I was home, Freddy. Mostly in bed.”

  The beady little eyes got brighter. “In bed alone?”

  “That’s right, Freddy. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “That’s three questions, Lieutenant. But just to show I’m cooperating—No, I can’t prove it. No phone calls, no deliveries, no chance acquaintances dropping by for badminton. Just me. Stop drooling for Christ’s sake.”

  “This just gets better,” stuck in Boggs. He was leaning in the doorway trying to make his face a copy of Kates’s, and more than halfway succeeding. “Shall I book him?”

  “Not yet,” said Kates. “I think we should just hold him for a while.”

  “Now look, I’ve done my duty,” R.J. said. “I haven’t even threatened to sue you two-bit sleazy bastards. I’m a good citizen, okay? Now it’s your turn. Arrest me or let me go. So what’s gonna be, Freddy? Miranda or The Flesh Man?”

  “What the hell is The Flesh Man?” Boggs wanted to know.

  R.J. grinned at him. “My dog-bite lawyer. He always gets his pound of flesh. He doesn’t win cases—he just makes such a pain-in-the-ass of himself that the cases never go to trial. And I’m going to end up owning that ugly damn suit and everything else you’ve got.”

  Kates snarled and shook out a cigarette. “I got enough to hold you,” he said through a cloud of smoke. “I can get a judge who agrees with me.”

  “Then read me my rights and shove me in a cell,” R.J. said. “I’m sick of you, I’m sick of King Kong over there, and I’m through cooperating.”

  Kates bit a piece off the filter of his cigarette and spat it on the floor beside R.J.’s foot. He glanced up at Boggs. Boggs shrugged. Kates dropped his cigarette on the floor. “You can go. But we’re not done with you. Keep yourself available for questioning—”

  “Sure, Freddy,” R.J. said tiredly.