The Remake

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  “—or by Christ I will toss you in the can and lose the key. You hear me, Fontaine?”

  “I hear you. And next time you come for me, you better have some paper, Freddy.” R.J. stood up and leaned into Kates’s face. “Or you’re going to find yourself in the same cell, sport. Do you hear me?”

  But Kates just glared at him. “Get him out of here, Boggs,” he said, and Boggs obligingly grabbed R.J.’s arm and led him out the door.

  Boggs didn’t offer him a ride home, not that R.J. expected him to. Still, he was plenty ticked off at being dragged down here in the middle of the night and then just dumped on the cold sidewalk.

  Worse, he still had no idea what the whole thing was about. He knew that given half a chance of getting away with it, Kates would frame him for anything handy. He was that kind of cop. He wanted his cases to be on the books as solved, and he didn’t care if he got the wrong guy as long as a jury might buy it.

  And on top of that, he didn’t like R.J. Never had. There weren’t that many rules Kates bothered with, but he would bend any that he had to to get at R.J.

  And he had something this time. Otherwise he wouldn’t have let R.J. go like that. If he was just fishing for something, he’d keep R.J., make him sweat, hope something dropped out. He was sure of himself this time, too sure. He was hoping R.J. really was guilty, and that was a big difference from just hoping somebody else in the media or on a jury might believe it. He really thinks he’s got me, R.J. thought.

  But who the fuck is Murray Belcher?

  CHAPTER 8

  The headline read MURRAY BELCHER SLAIN.

  It wasn’t a big headline, just a squib on page four. Three short columns, no picture. But the way it looked made it sound like everybody would know who Murray Belcher was.

  “It’s a goddamned conspiracy,” R.J. grumbled, slapping the newspaper against the counter.

  “Oh, yeah? Then it’s gonna cost you extra, my man,” Hookshot said over the rim of a cup of coffee. He slurped noisily, just because he knew the sound would bother R.J.

  Wallace Steigler, known as Hookshot, was one of R.J.’s closest friends and, outside of Bertelli and Henry Portillo, one of the only people in the world R.J. could really trust. Maybe because, like R.J., he had a couple of different strands of his background pulling at him.

  Hookshot was a Jewish black man, the product of a brief marriage between an Israeli officer serving at the U.N. and a Harlem beauty queen. His father had been killed by terrorists when young Wallace was a month old. Fifteen years later, Hookshot, a promising high school basketball star, lost his right hand by being on the wrong piece of turf at the wrong time. He wore a gleaming steel hook in its place and ran a newsstand in midtown Manhattan.

  The stand was a drop for discreet individuals on both sides of the law and an unofficial intelligence center for anybody who had the price and could persuade Hookshot they needed to know. Most of the hot items were gathered by Hookshot’s army of prepubescent street kids. He usually called them the Mini-mensch, and they were all over Manhattan on their skateboards and Rollerblades.

  “I got expenses, you know,” Hookshot was saying.

  R.J. ignored him and read the article.

  Well-known West Coast attorney Murray Belcher was found dead in his suite at a midtown hotel, an apparent victim of poisoning.

  “Poison!” said R.J. “Jesus Christ, they really think I would poison somebody?”

  “Never,” said Hookshot. “Only if the car bomb failed.” R.J. read on.

  Belcher, whose practice was limited to only one client lately, Andromeda Pictures, was in town to—

  “Son-of-a-bitch!” R.J. shouted. An elderly lady reaching in for a Times gave him a frosty look down her nose. “That Murray Belcher!” He remembered the little rat with his slicked-back hair and scruffy terrier attitude, threatening him at the door of Janine Wright’s suite. “Shut up, Murray,” she had said maybe a half dozen times. And he hadn’t put it together because she had never said, “Shut up, Murray Belcher, well-known West Coast attorney.”

  “Son-of-a-goddamn-bitch,” he muttered one more time.

  He finished reading about what a great guy Murray had been: tireless worker for charities, divorced father of three, on the board of this temple, that bank, right-hand man of Janine Wright in her meteoric rise to control of Andromeda.

  Found dead by poisoning.

  And now R.J. was ankle deep in sewage because somebody’d had the good sense to poison a Hollywood lawyer.

  R.J. threw the paper down with disgust.

  “Fifty cents,” Hookshot said.

  “Say what?” R.J. asked him.

  Hookshot shrugged. “Ain’t nobody gonna buy that paper now you messed it up. Fifty cents, man, and I throw in a doughnut.” And he used his bright steel hook to flip open a box of a dozen he kept under the counter for his street kids.

  R.J. laughed sourly. “Still the best offer I’ve had for a while.” He threw down two quarters, grabbed the doughnut, and leaned against the kiosk while he ate.

  The sun was coming up now, the dirty orange New York sunrise. It always seemed to make promises it wasn’t going to keep. Today will be different, it said. But today never was.

  “What else do you know about this?” R.J. asked his friend.

  Hookshot shrugged and sipped again. “Just what’s in the papers. And what’s not. It’s a little early yet for anything to be on the street.” He smiled, his teeth gleaming in the dim light from the rising sun. “And anyway, ain’t nobody else gives a shit about a dead Hollywood lawyer, ’cept you and the cops.”

  “All right, Hookshot. What’s not in the papers?”

  “Don’t say what kind of poison. Usually mean they trying to stick somebody with it and they think they’re close. Don’t say what midtown hotel—”

  “The Pierre,” R.J. said. “In the Presidential Suite.”

  “Uh-huh. Which probably means they got a good idea who went in and out.”

  “Which means they got me,” R.J. said with disgust.

  “You were in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you knew this guy enough to kill him?”

  “I just met him,” R.J. said. “And that was enough.”

  Hookshot shook his head. “You in the shit this time, R.J.”

  R.J. dropped the last chunk of doughnut onto the counter. It tasted like cardboard. “Tell me about it,” he said.

  And being in the shit didn’t stop there.

  R.J. headed for Belle’s apartment. It was close and he was so tired the extra twenty blocks to his own place were just too much to think about. But when he got there—

  “Big trouble, Mr. Brooks,” Tony the doorman told him. “There wasn’t nothing I could do to stop them.”

  “Stop who, Tony?” R.J. said, his need for sleep making it all seem kind of far away.

  Tony nodded as the door swung open. A black detective R.J. knew slightly came out, a cardboard box stuffed under one arm. “Them,” Tony said. “He had a warrant and everything.”

  “What the—” R.J. stepped over to the detective. “Say, Jackson, what gives here?” He nodded at the open carton the cop was carrying. “That looks like my stuff in there.”

  “Used to be your stuff,” Jackson said. “Evidence now.” He pushed past R.J. toward his car, double-parked at the curb.

  R.J. followed. “All right, let’s see the paper, goddammit.”

  Jackson dropped the carton onto the trunk of his car. R.J. heard rattling inside, like from pill bottles. “Here you go, Mr. Brooks,” Jackson said formally, holding out a piece of paper. It was a search warrant, all right. For the premises herein listed. Belle’s apartment.

  R.J. snarled and handed it back. “I’ll need a receipt for that stuff in the box.”

  Jackson looked sour. “My shift ended four and a half hours ago, Brooks. How about a break?”

  “A break!” R.J. demanded, outraged. “I got you goddamn storm troopers pounding on my door at three A.M
., and when I try to go to bed, you’re packing up my goddamned sheets, and now you want a break? Gimme the damn receipt, Jackson. And tell Kates if even one of you bastards bends the tiniest little rule I’m going to get my money’s worth out of my ACLU membership and have him making license plates up the river.”

  Jackson made a face, but he made out the receipt, too, itemizing all the stuff he had taken from Belle’s apartment. Mostly it was stuff from the medicine cabinet, which wasn’t any big surprise. R.J. was a poisoner now, and he guessed that’s where guys like him kept the tools of the trade. In the medicine chest, for Christ’s sake. Sure. Pepto Bismol, aspirin, and cyanide.

  “Here is your receipt, sir,” Jackson said with savage formality. He tore off the sheet and handed it to R.J. “Here you go, sir. Thank you, sir. Please shove this directly up your ass, motherfucker sir.”

  “Thanks, Jackson. I suppose your pals are at my other place, and at my office?”

  Jackson gave him a mean grin. “If it was up to me, man, we’d have a guy taking a dump with you. I don’t like poison.” He spat into the gutter about five inches from R.J.’s shoe. “Not something a man ought to do.”

  And he dumped the carton onto the backseat, got into his car, and drove away.

  Jackson’s pals were at R.J.’s apartment and office, of course. Tony had flagged down a cab for R.J. and he’d gone to his home first. He was too late there. The detectives were already gone. The place had been searched thoroughly in a professional manner—in other words, trashed. It would take R.J. two days to clean up.

  Once again, his medicine chest had been cleaned out. Just when he really needed an aspirin.

  He went downtown to his office. He was just in time to see Detective Epstein come out and put one of those damned cardboard boxes into a car double-parked at the curb. Unfortunately, Epstein saw him, too.

  “Hey, Brooks!” Epstein shouted, waving him over.

  “Warrant and receipt, goddammit,” R.J. said, walking over to the skinny detective.

  “Sure, of course, naturally. And you can come upstairs with me and open up your safe.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Epstein waved the warrant around. “The warrant says.”

  “Fuck the warrant, too. I’ve had it with this crap.”

  Epstein sighed and tucked the paper into R.J.’s coat. “Come on, Brooksy, it’s legal and we’re all tired here. The sooner you open up, the sooner we can all go home and go to bed.”

  R.J. fought it for a few more minutes, but there was really nothing he could do and in the end he went up to his office and opened up his safe. He hated like hell to watch Epstein poking through the stuff inside, carefully picking everything up and looking it over from all sides.

  But it was finally over. Epstein didn’t find any poison, as far as R.J. could tell. That should have made him feel better, but he was too tired and mad to think about feeling better. There was nothing he could do about it, short of sitting in a jail cell while his lawyer ran up a big fee. It made him feel helpless on top of the mad and the tired, but that was all part of the package. That’s how it was when the cops got their teeth into you.

  R.J. went home to bed, just hoping it would all go away soon. Before he snapped and punched out a cop. Kates, for instance. Or Boggs. It meant a reserved seat in prison, but the longer this went on, the better that trade-off was going to look.

  R.J. was dragged down to Kates’s office maybe a dozen times over the next two weeks. That didn’t help his attitude, or his business. On the other hand, they always let him go afterward, which meant there was still some doubt in the tiny dark brains of Kates and Boggs. They were having fun playing with him, but they weren’t ready or able to make it stick.

  He still wasn’t worried enough to solve it himself, and the whole thing was starting to settle into an annoying noise in the background. Just like the mess that started it all, the business with the remake of As Time Goes By and that brass-bound bitch Janine Wright.

  Things were almost normal again for a day or two.

  Of course, that was too good to last.

  CHAPTER 9

  “I’ve had a job offer,” Casey told him as they slipped into bed one night about two weeks after Boggs’s visit, and R.J. knew by the casual, lighthearted, why-should-you-care way she said it, he wasn’t going to like this much.

  “What kind of a job?” he asked her, shifting his weight up onto one elbow and pulling the covers around him a little tighter.

  “Associate producer,” she said. She slid one hand along his chest in an absentminded way that made his heart pound.

  “But you’re already a full producer,” R.J. said. “Why would you take a step down?”

  Her hand slid lower. “It’s not a step down. It’s not TV.”

  “Oh,” he said, already pretty distracted. “It’s not TV.”

  “No.”

  “I thought you did TV.”

  She brushed her fingertips lightly down his stomach. “I did. But this is too good to let it go.”

  R.J.’s mouth was dry. “So what is it?”

  “A movie.” Her hand circled his hips, around back, and then softly coasted to the front again. “In Los Angeles,” she said.

  R.J. fell off his elbow. “What?”

  “Associate producer on a feature is a step up from what I’m doing,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding him. “A big step up.”

  “But it’s in Los Angeles,” he said, knowing how stupid that sounded.

  Casey knew it, too. “That’s where they make movies, R.J.,” she said.

  “But, but—It’s three thousand miles away.”

  “I know,” she said. “I saw a map once.”

  R.J. took a deep breath and pushed her hand away. “Tell me about this job.”

  She gave a half shrug, all she could manage lying down on her side like that. Her breasts shimmered and R.J. had trouble concentrating. “It’s a major feature at a major studio. What’s to tell? Professionally, it could really make me. It’s what I’ve been wanting for ten years. I’d be a giant step closer to the top. Also, it’s the only first-class production facility in the world where a woman can get a top job based on ability.”

  R.J.’s stomach had been slowly sinking. Now it lurched straight up in the air, did a double somersault, and smacked at his heart before flopping down like a soggy pancake. “What picture, Casey?” he asked, although he already knew the answer. “What studio?”

  “Andromeda Studios,” she said. “The remake.”

  All the breath left him. He felt like he might never breathe again. “Jesus Christ, Casey.”

  “It’s my career, R.J. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “It damned well does have to do with me.”

  “R.J., it’s my life. If I have a shot at improving it a friend won’t stand in my way.”

  “But you know how I feel about that movie.”

  Now she came up on one elbow. “No, I don’t. You haven’t said a word to me. About that or anything else.”

  It was true. He had been churning the whole thing around in his guts, but he hadn’t talked to her about how much it was bothering him. But still—

  “Casey, wait a minute—”

  “No, damn it, you wait. This isn’t about you, it’s about my career. This is what I’ve always wanted, R.J. If you had said anything to me about how much it bothered you it might have been different—”

  “Casey, you were there. You heard what I said.”

  “To me, R.J. You never said anything to me.”

  “I’m saying it now, Casey.”

  “Now is a little late, R.J.”

  He looked into her eyes. They were the same beautiful eyes they had always been, the ones he found it so easy to get lost in, but there was something new going on in there, something she wasn’t saying because he was supposed to get it, and he didn’t get it. He didn’t get it at all.

  “From what I said to the reporters you might have guessed what I thought about that g
oddamned remake, Casey.”

  “Maybe I thought I shouldn’t have to guess,” she said.

  R.J. felt the whole thing slipping away from him—as if he’d ever had a handle on it at all. “Listen,” he said, “the only reason that goddamned harpy offered you a job is to get at me. You—”

  “Really,” said Casey, suddenly very cold. “So besides sleeping with you I’m just no damn good for anything, is that it?”

  “Casey, goddammit—”

  “Because I know it will surprise you, but there are plenty of people who think I’m pretty good at what I do.”

  R.J. took a deep breath and counted to ten. “Casey, I don’t want to have this argument.”

  “Well then,” she said.

  “You are very goddamned good at what you do. I know that, everybody knows that. But there’s two things going on here. First, the timing on this job offer is kind of suspicious, don’t you think? And second, there’s the way I feel about this picture.”

  “The job offer was for me, R.J. I’m sorry about your feelings, I really am. I didn’t think they were that overwhelming—”

  “They’re not over—”

  “—and if I’d known, if you’d only told me, I would have considered that when I made my decision,” she said.

  “For Christ’s sake, you sound like Rupert Murdoch making a hostile takeover bid.”

  “It doesn’t have to be hostile, R.J. But this is a career decision that’s about me.”

  “Isn’t it a little bit about me, too, Casey?”

  “Is it?” she asked, and they were both quiet for a minute. She seemed to be waiting for him to say something, but he was damned if he could think of what.

  “R.J.,” she said finally, “this was a very tough decision for me. You have to understand, I had to make it by myself, thinking about what was right for me.” She reached a hand out again, touching him. “But I did think about you. I thought that if I was there, working on this picture, I could help make sure it was done right. Because it’s going to get done one way or another, you have to know that.”

  “I know that.”

  “That may be lying to myself,” she admitted. “So I just had to make myself think career. And this is absolutely the best move I can make right now. Of course it might be a different story if—” She stopped suddenly, almost as if somebody had slapped a hand over her mouth.