The Remake

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  He hung the suit on the coat rack behind the door and stepped over to his desk, grabbing the telephone and dialing as he sat.

  Hookshot answered on the third ring. The only word R.J. could make out was “news.”

  “It’s RJ,” he said.

  “You owe me big-time, man,” Hookshot said mournfully.

  “For what?”

  “Waste my time, chasing some dead guy’s ass.”

  “I didn’t know he was dead, Hookshot,” R.J. said.

  “Well, he is. They got him at some farm town over there. Torrington. Horses in the street and shit.”

  “Sure, I know,” R.J. said. “They don’t even take money. You probably had to pay for everything in corn.”

  “Cost me five bushels for lunch,” Hookshot said, cackling.

  “Sounds like a nice lunch,” R.J. said. “Anyway, I guess that’s all over, so thanks.”

  “Thanks don’t cut it, man,” Hookshot said.

  “It never does,” R.J. said. “I’ll stop by and settle up when I have the time.”

  “What happened in L.A, R.J.?”

  “It’s not over. I have to go back. But first I got a funeral.” He looked at his watch. “And I’m running out of time to make it.”

  “He’ll wait, bubbe, believe me. That’s ’bout all he’s good at now.”

  “I gotta go, Hookshot.”

  “You look after that Casey, hear me?”

  “Easier said than done,” R.J. said as he hung up.

  He changed quickly, listening to Wanda grumbling in the next room about being too old to look for a new job if her damn boss couldn’t keep himself out of jail.

  He straightened the tie—it was still a little frayed from when Casey had torn it off so fast—and stepped into the outer office again.

  “Hold the fort, doll. I’ll be with my client.”

  He headed back out the door again, leaving Wanda fluttering the stack of message forms and muttering, “But boss…”

  Mary Kelley’s friend had a place in one of those East Seventies brick high-rise buildings that had been chic in the sixties. The building had gone co-op maybe ten years ago. It wasn’t chic anymore, but it was a lot easier to get a seat on the Supreme Court than it was to find a vacant apartment in the building.

  R.J. managed to get past the front door without being arrested, and was soon knocking on a door on the twenty-sixth floor. The door opened a crack, chain visible across the gap, and a mean voice snarled at him. “Yes?”

  “R.J. Brooks,” he said as meekly as he knew how. “To see Ms. Kelley.”

  The door slammed shut. There was a long pause. R.J. had just about decided to knock again when the door opened again and Mary Kelley stood there looking like Barbie on a real bad day.

  She looked frazzled. Her hair was dull and stringy, her makeup was smeared and blotched all over her puffy, pasty face, and she looked like she had lost ten pounds she couldn’t afford to lose.

  “R.J.?” she said in a voice worn down by crying.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  She looked at him. Her chin quivered, she sniffed, and then she was suddenly leaning against him, bawling uncontrollably. R.J. put an arm around her and just held on for a minute. Then he gently pulled away and led her inside.

  Through it all Mary’s friend stood watching without approval, her thick arms folded across an impressive chest. She had a pale face, pale close-set eyes, and her head was too small for her hairdo. As R.J. got Mary onto a bright yellow sofa and sat next to her, the friend made a loud tsk-ing sound and vanished down the hallway.

  Mary lunged for a box of tissues. “Don’t mind Roberta,” she sniffled, “she’s just being very protective.”

  “I don’t mind,” R.J. said. “How are you holding up, kid?”

  “Oh, R.J.” she said, and for a moment he thought she was going to do the fountain act again. But she recovered nicely and settled for a long, hard honk into a couple more tissues. “It just doesn’t seem fair,” she said after a while.

  “It never is, Mary.”

  She shook her head. “But this is—I mean, I never actually had a mother, except in the biological sense. She just kept me around for a tax deduction. The only real parent I ever had was William—Dad. And I never really knew him. And now… Now I never will,” she said, and she was off into tears again, leaning against R.J. and shaking with grief.

  R.J. let her go, patting her back, then stroking it, then finally just letting his hand rest on the small of her back, until she wound down.

  When she did, he handed her the box of tissues again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just—”

  “I know it is,” R.J. said. “Go ahead and cry.”

  But she sat up, holding a handful of soggy tissue. “No. I’m all right now.” She gave her face a wipe and looked at the black streaks of mascara on the tissue. “I must look awful,” she said.

  “You look fine,” R.J. lied. “Mary, if you’re sure you’re okay now, I need to know about the arrangements.”

  She blinked, but she held up. “I don’t—I’m not sure. Roberta wrote everything down.”

  “Roberta?”

  She nodded toward the hallway. “My friend.”

  R.J. stood up. “I’ll talk to her.”

  He went down the short hallway. There were two doors along the hall. One stood open, showing a small room with a desk and a bed. A suitcase stood beside the bed. Guest room, occupied by Mary Kelley.

  At the end of the hall, next to the bathroom, the second door was closed. R.J. knocked.

  A moment later he got a repeat of the performance at the front door. The door opened a crack and Roberta stuck her face into the gap. “Yes?”

  “Sorry to bother you. I need to know about the funeral arrangements.”

  She glared at him for a moment, then closed the door. Thirty seconds later she reopened it and shoved a piece of paper at him. “Here,” she said. “You keep your goddamned paws off her.” And she slammed the door.

  R.J. was too stunned to do anything but stare at the door for two long minutes. Then he shook his head. He was too tired to laugh, but he sure felt like it. But instead, he just took the paper and headed back down the hall.

  The funeral home was a place called Cooper & Schmidt’s in Torrington. R.J. called them, found out they didn’t have a limo. So he called around Manhattan and found a place that just happened to have one on short notice that, for a consideration, the guy was willing to drive over to the wilds of Connecticut.

  He hung up the phone and looked over at Mary. She was still kind of huddled on the couch, but she looked like she might pull through after all. “If it’s all right with Bob,” he told her, “you might get yourself ready. The limo will be here in forty minutes.”

  “Limo?” she looked up. “Oh. I didn’t—Are we really going to need a limo?”

  He nodded. “I’m afraid it’s de rigueur. You can’t take a bus to a funeral, kid.” He nodded down the hall. “Go put your face on.”

  She stood, a little unsteadily, and took a deep breath. He went over to her and held her shoulders. “It gets hard for a while, Mary,” he told her. “But you can do it.”

  She sagged against him for a moment, took a ragged breath, then straightened. “Yes,” she said. “I think I’ll be all right.” And with a real good try at a smile she turned and went down the hall.

  CHAPTER 22

  The ride to Torrington was a long one. Maybe it just seemed longer to R.J. It wasn’t a lot of laughs being cooped up with a kid who couldn’t stop crying longer than five minutes and a hostile woman who wouldn’t talk to him.

  At least they got there in time for the service. Without them it wouldn’t have been much of a show. When they walked into the battered old funeral parlor, R.J. counted five people. One of them was the minister.

  It was a closed coffin funeral. The pale oily guy from the funeral home who appeared at their elbow as they stepped in had explained that it was best that way. The
re was “significant burn damage” over most of the body. The face, he whispered to R.J., was not recognizable.

  R.J. hated funerals. Even so, it seemed like he ended up going to an awful lot of them. Most of all he hated closed coffin funerals. He just didn’t see the point. The way he saw it, the whole idea of a funeral was to let everybody figure out that somebody really was dead. Let it sink in that the guy wasn’t going to show up for dinner anymore.

  With the lid down, that didn’t happen. People stood around and sniveled over the lid of a cheap pine box and for all anybody knew Salmon Rushdie could be hiding out inside, playing gin rummy with Elvis.

  But if the undertaker thought the burns were that bad, there was no point in an open lid. It was supposed to be a way to say good-bye, not a horror show.

  So he sat through the short, generic service. It was clear that the minister had no clue who or what was in the box. He rambled on for a while and then stopped without really coming to an ending. Then the handful of people sitting in the cheap folding chairs stood up and gawked at one another.

  A white-haired couple oozed over to Mary and stood talking. R.J. gathered that they had known the Kelleys in some happier time long ago. He caught a couple of stock words of condolence and a phrase or two like, “Never believed he did it,” and “He always said so, and we believed him.”

  The woman patted Mary’s hand. “He was so big and strong, and yet so gentle. Such a sweet man.”

  The man chimed in with, “Of course you never really knew him, did you, dear?”

  R.J. was about to step over and get rid of the oldsters before Mary decked them when Roberta steered the kid safely away. So R.J. turned away, trying not to listen to the sympathetic babble in the room.

  Just when R.J. was tuning it out and thinking about stepping outside, he felt a sharp tug on his elbow.

  He turned around to stare at a stick figure of a guy with a ferret’s face and a permanent stoop, the kind old secretaries get from leaning over the desk for fifty years.

  This guy was only around fifty himself, but he had a paleness to him that said he had never been outside during the daytime. He was so pale he almost glowed.

  “You’re that private investigator,” he said in a voice that was part wheeze and part whisper.

  R.J. shook his elbow free. “That’s right,” he said.

  The ferret nodded. “I thought that was you.” And he just nodded, looking at R.J. through thick glasses.

  “Yeah,” R.J. finally said. “It was me. Is that all right?”

  “Tryin’ ta figger, is all,” the guy rasped.

  “Great. Good luck to you, sport,” R.J. said, tired of whatever game the guy thought they were playing. He turned away.

  A surprisingly strong grip on his arm stopped him and he turned back around again.

  “Don’t get steamed,” the ferret said. “Just gimme a sec, is all.”

  “For what?”

  Ferret nodded. “No choice. Gotta be you. Well—” He shrugged, nodded, shrugged. “All right. Okay. Pauly Aponti,” he said, sticking out a pale, damp hand. R.J. could see strong tendons in it, but the grip was slack. “Well, okay, so what’s this about, right?”

  “Is this about something, Mr. Aponti?”

  Aponti blinked. “Call me Pauly. Mister, that’s my old man or something.” He gasped quickly. R.J. realized it was supposed to be a laugh.

  “Okay, Pauly. So?”

  Pauly’s eyes got even vaguer and shifted around the room. His voice lowered and his lips didn’t move when he spoke. R.J. realized suddenly the man was an ex-con; the paleness, the trick of lowering the voice and not seeming to speak. These were all old jailbird tricks.

  “What were you in for, Pauly?” R.J. said, riding his hunch.

  The eyes clicked back to his, looking huge behind the thick lenses. “Forgery,” he said softly. “Bearer bonds.”

  “And you knew Kelley?”

  Pauly nodded carefully, as if he didn’t want anyone to know he could move. “I knew Kelley pretty good,” he whispered. “Yeah, pretty good. I was in Somers with him. My cell mate.”

  The man broke off and carefully looked over the whole room before speaking again. “The thing is, he gave me something.”

  It was eerie watching the guy speak without seeming to, and it was getting on R.J.’s nerves. “I’m glad to hear it,” R.J. said through gritted teeth.

  Now the ferret eyes caught R.J.’s. “Thing is, I should prolly give it to you.”

  R.J. looked across the room at Mary. Roberta was trying to soothe her after what the white-haired couple had said, but she wasn’t having any luck. He was stuck in a tacky funeral parlor, at the funeral of someone he had never even met, and a weird ex-con was chewing off his damned ear.

  “Or maybe I shouldn’t,” Pauly said. “I don’t know.”

  “Listen,” R.J. finally snarled. “I don’t care if you give it to Dolly Parton. Just get it over with and get out of my face.”

  Pauly nodded like that made sense. “Thing is, Kelley said if anything should happen to him. Looks like something did. You get the picture.”

  Suddenly R.J. did. He got the picture loud and clear. Kelley must have suspected that Janine would try to get him. He’d left something behind with Pauly in case she succeeded.

  “Give it here,” R.J. said.

  “Can’t,” Pauly told him softly. R.J. wanted to smack him.

  “Why not?”

  “Gotta have your promise first. Cops don’t get this, and it won’t come back on me.”

  “Deal. Gimme.”

  “Here,” Pauly said suddenly, thrusting an envelope at R.J. “No cops,” he rasped, and then slid quietly away.

  It was a cheap envelope with nothing on the front. No writing, no smudges, nothing. Just a plain, white envelope. It wasn’t even sealed. Just had the flap tucked in.

  R.J. shook his head and looked around him. Mary was okay. She was standing beside the coffin, looking down, saying good-bye, with Roberta running interference for her.

  He turned back to the envelope in his hand and opened the flap. There were five or six pages folded together. He unfolded them and looked at the top.

  To whom it may concern,

  If you are reading this I am probably dead.

  I know that sounds corny, but I’ve always wanted to say it.

  R.J. laughed. He was standing at a funeral in a cheesy funeral parlor, reading a message from the stiff, but he laughed. This guy had a quirky sense of humor. R.J. was sorry he’d never met William Kelley.

  I have some very good reasons to think my ex-wife, Janine Wright, is trying to kill me. What you’re holding in your hands is proof that she succeeded.

  No, I can’t prove—yet—that she is behind these attempts on my life. But I can finally prove that she framed me those many years ago. She sent me to prison for her crimes. She stole my life away from me, kept me from the love of my daughter, and if there is a Hell there is a special place in it made just for her.

  I thought I had married a strong, ambitious woman. I found out too late what she really was. Ambitious, yes—to the point where I now know there is nothing she would not do to get what she wants. She has dealt in drugs and framed me for her crimes, taking away my life when it became inconvenient for her to have me around. God knows she has used her body when it would help. And now she has had me killed, literally this time, to keep all this from coming out.

  Here are the few pieces of evidence I have managed to collect. A trained investigator should be able to make something out of this. I was never a drug dealer—God damn her twice, for saying I was, and for dealing in the filthy stuff herself to finance her brainless movies.

  May God bless my daughter Mary.

  And may He rot the black empty heart of Janine Wright, the soulless monster who has now killed me twice.

  There was a scrawl across the bottom of the page that probably said William Kelley.

  R.J. looked at the other papers. They were photocopies of pages
from a ledger. Any investigator nowadays had to be able to read financial records. It took R.J. only a few minutes to unravel what he was holding.

  He gave a low whistle, then looked up, embarrassed. But no one appeared to have noticed. He looked down, flipped through the papers again.

  What he had were pages from Janine’s books, the financial records of her first movie, the one she had made after she sent her husband to prison. There was also a page of clippings from the local paper about Kelley’s trial.

  What the pages showed was that only a few weeks after his trial she had somehow gotten the large chunk of anonymous cash that let her begin shooting. Circled in red on one of the clippings was the date, and the sentence, “Police have never found any of the money Kelley is alleged to have made from the sale of the drugs,” then an arrow drawn to the page of the ledger that showed the chunk of anonymous cash.

  It was a pretty clear picture. She had sent him over, taken the money when the stink died down a little, and made herself a movie. The timing said it had to be deliberate. She didn’t have enough time to get the movie ready between the trial’s end and the movie’s beginning.

  Not unless she was already set to go. Not unless she had planned it, had deliberately framed Kelley in order to take the heat off her and make some money.

  This wouldn’t put her in jail, but Kelley was right. Any trained investigator could follow this trail, follow it all the way from the crummy funeral home in Torrington to a cozy cell at one of those country clubs the Feds set aside for executive tax frauds. Maybe she’d never do hard time for murder like she should, but she’d do time.

  R.J. could put Janine Wright in prison.

  He almost said yahoo out loud. At the last minute he remembered where he was and bit down on his lip. He looked around. Roberta was glaring at him from near the door, clearly ready to hustle Mary out and away.

  R.J. shoved the papers into his inside pocket, dropped the ratty envelope into an ashtray, and buttoned his coat as he headed out the door.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was a long ride back, too. Roberta had taken over the whole business of comforting Mary. That was okay with R.J. He had some heavy thinking to do. It would have been easier without the sniffling and the sharp glares from Roberta. She had apparently decided that the whole thing was R.J.’s fault and didn’t want him to forget it even for a second.