The Remake (14 page)

He put a hand on her arm. “Casey—” he said, but she pulled her arm away.

“This script thing is making me crazy,” she said. “Please, I’ve got to get this under control. It’s important.”

“So is your life.”

“R.J.,” she said, with that same I’ll-break-your-balls tone she had used on the elf, “I’d love to see you later, but right now I have a lot to do. This is my job. I’m at
work.
”

“You said that already.”

“You can’t just show up at my job and expect me to drop everything and have a nice chat, all right? I’ll see you later.” And she was off across the hangar and out the door at the far end.

R.J. watched her go, fighting down his feelings—anger with a touch of fear for her safety, shaken together with admiration at the way she was handling these Tinsel Town Turkeys—and him. And there was something else there, too, a softer feeling. Maybe he was just glad to see her. Even her back.

“There you are,” Uncle Hank said at his elbow.

“Yeah. I think so.” He turned to see a sour-looking guy with a goatee standing beside Portillo.

Portillo jerked his head at the sourpuss. “We’re in trouble,” Uncle Hank said. “Janine Wright wants us in her office right away.”

CHAPTER 16

Janine Wright’s office was on the top floor of the only building on the lot that wasn’t a remodeled hangar. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was a real building. It only had two floors, and Janine had herself a good-sized chunk of the second one.

Windows wrapped around two full walls of the office. On the other two walls there was enough brand-name modern art to start a pretty good little museum. A kumquat tree blossomed in a corner beside an L-shaped kid-leather sofa. In front of the sofa a coffee table stood on a Navajo rug. The coffee table looked to be a solid chunk of quartz crystal with a glass top. Except there were four or five live birds inside it, chirping miserably.

Janine herself sat behind a massive ebony desk in a high-backed black leather chair. The desk was a good twenty feet long and she sat right in the middle. Her hands were clasped in front of her, making what looked like one large fist, and she gave R.J. and Portillo a terrifying glare as they were shoved
through her door. “Sort of like Christians getting pushed in with the lion,” R.J. said to Portillo.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” demanded Janine.

“Just doing my job, Ms. Wright,” said Portillo mildly.

“Not you, greaseball. I mean that asshole. How dare you bring that son-of-a-bitch onto my lot? I told you he’s trying to kill me!”

R.J. pulled away from Portillo and walked calmly across the wide floor to Janine Wright’s desk. When he got there, he leaned slowly over and put one palm down on the ebony surface, just to the left of the blotter. Then he very carefully pushed sideways. The blotter, the solid marble pen holder, the telephone, the calendar, the In/Out basket, two large potted plants, and a huge stack of papers, printouts and scripts all slid the full width of the desk and onto the floor at the far side with a series of crashes, plops, thuds, bangs, and thumps. The trash can fell over and rolled back and forth in a quarter circle.

Then R.J. walked all the way back to the center of the desk and leaned in until his face was an inch from Janine Wright’s.

“You stink,” he said in a reasonable tone of voice. “There’s nothing about you that anybody could possibly like or admire. You just stink. Nobody tells you that because they’re afraid of you. Lieutenant Portillo doesn’t tell you because it’s part of his job to be polite, even to a scumbucket like you, because you are a scumbucket with political clout.

“But I don’t care. I don’t work here, I don’t live here, and I don’t give a good goddamn what goes on here. But I grew up here, and I know all about assholes like you and the crap you do to everybody around you because you think you can get away with it. Well, you can’t get away with it with me. You can’t buy me, threaten me, or persuade me to do jack shit I don’t want to do. So don’t pull any of your horseshit with me, lady. I’ll shove it right back down your throat.”

R.J. leaned in even closer. The tip of his nose touched hers. “And be polite to the lieutenant.”

She frowned at him. He had to give her credit. She didn’t even blink. But there was a little bit of uncertainty in her eyes now as she said, “Pick up my stuff.”

“No.” He moved back a few inches.

She frowned again, then looked beyond him to Henry Portillo. “Why did you bring him here—” Her eyes flicked to R.J., then back to Portillo. “—Lieutenant?”

“That’s better,” R.J. said, and stood up straight.

Portillo strolled across the big floor and stood beside R.J. “I brought him along,” said Portillo, “because I believe he may be able to assist me in the course of my investigation.”

Janine Wright stared at him. “Horseshit. He sent the fucking letters and you know it.”

Portillo shook his head. “I don’t know it. And you—”

She snorted. “Then explain
this
!” She held up an envelope. “He’s not here in L.A. ten minutes and another one of the fucking things shows up in my mail! With an L.A. postmark! What about that, huh?”

Portillo’s face was like an Aztec mask with two eyes carved from glittering gems. “May I see that, please?” He stepped forward and took the envelope. As he pulled the note out, R.J. leaned over his shoulder and read:

If you were just a little brighter

you wouldn’t need a brand new writer

I can do this lots more times

I got lots of tricks and rhymes

STOP THE REMAKE NOW

Portillo folded the note and put it in his pocket. “Does this mean anything to you, Ms. Wright?”

“No. We’re not looking for a new writer. Jason Levy has been on this project from day one. He’s cheap and dependable.”

“Then as far as you know—”

The door opened at the far end of the room. “Excuse me, Ms. Wright,” said the sour little dork with the goatee. “A Detective Sergeant Brannigan is on the line.” He managed to look even more disgusted as he nodded at Henry Portillo. “For the lieutenant.”

“Tell him to go fuck himself,” Wright snarled.

“I suggested something like that,” said the goatee tartly. “But he said you would probably want to know about this, too.”

“Know what?”

The goatee looked like he had a mouthful of rotten lemon. “Jason Levy is dead. Murdered.”

* * *

Jason Levy’s house was a small, neat wooden place stuck on a hillside in Coldwater Canyon. It had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a small carport, and probably cost a half-million bucks.

Jason Levy was waiting for them on the floor of the living room. He was a Cool Guy. You could tell he had thought so. He was about thirty and had an expensive shaggy haircut, an expensive leather jacket, and a pair of expensive silk pants. And right now, somebody had half-hacked off his head with a pair of expensive, walnut-handled scissors. They had left the scissors stuck into Levy’s neck. What was left of it. As if they thought they might come back later and finish the job.

R.J. had seen uglier deaths. He just couldn’t remember when. He turned away, moving to join Portillo over by the window.

A window had clearly been forced open: its screen was bent and flung on the floor. Portillo was looking carefully at the scratch marks on the window frame. Standing beside him was Detective Sergeant Brannigan, a large doughy guy with long sideburns.

“I gotta tell you, Sarge,” Brannigan was saying. “If you don’t got the note, I woulda said maybe we check this guy out
for gay.” He nodded at Levy’s body. “The scissors and all. Looks like what ya call homosexual rage.”

Brannigan said it like he wanted Portillo to pat him on the head, tell him he was a good boy. Instead, Portillo just glanced at him, and then turned to R.J. “What do you think?”

R.J. shook his head. “The script must be worse than I thought,” he said. “That’s one of the meanest edits I’ve ever seen.”

“Meaner than poison?” Portillo asked softly.

R.J. glanced over his shoulder at the nearly headless body of Jason Levy. “Yeah,” he said. “Meaner than poison.” He looked back at Portillo. “You connecting the two of them? Officially?”

“Officially? Not yet. Too much paper work. In my own mind, however—” He shrugged. “You can only believe in coincidence so far, hey?”

“Jeez, lookit this,” Brannigan said, and for a moment R.J. thought he was just p.o.’d at being ignored. But when he and Portillo turned, they saw Brannigan leaning out the window, looking down at the side of the house. Portillo leaned out.

“Well,” he said after a moment, and turned to Brannigan. “Get them.” Brannigan disappeared out the window, squeezing his doughy bulk through quickly for such a big guy.

“What?” R.J. asked.

“Don’t touch them,” Portillo said out the window.

“Don’t worry,” came Brannigan’s strained reply. A moment later his hand came up, holding a Ziploc bag with a pair of black-framed reading glasses in it.

“They’re not Levy’s,” R.J. said. “They’re too cheap looking. And he was too young—those are the kind of cheaters a middle-aged guy would wear.”

“Maybe the gardener dropped ’em,” Brannigan offered, struggling back through the window. “Except there’s no garden down there. Nothing but dirt and a eucalyptus tree.” He brushed himself off. “They were wedged into the support beam,” he told R.J. “The beams that hold up the house. Right
where you’d have to climb to reach this window. So if a guy had them in his pocket—”

“Good work, Detective,” Portillo cut him off. “Very good.” Brannigan looked so pleased he didn’t seem to mind when Portillo turned away from him again. “There’s some kind of serial number on the frame,” he said to R.J.

R.J. glanced at the black plastic frames. They looked like the kind of cheap reading glasses anybody might wear—anybody who was a little broke and not too picky. The odds against this being a real clue, dropped by a killer, were long—but it did happen. Still, R.J.’s money was on the gardener.

“Hey, Lieutenant, you in there?” R.J. turned to see a heavy-set woman with round glasses peering in the front door.

Portillo waved her in. “Come on in, Gilbert.” To R.J. he added, “Crime Scene Unit. Let’s get out of here. We’ll just be in the way now.”

They drove down the canyon and into the valley. R.J. turned it over in his head, trying to make the connections. It made sense that the two murders were connected—except that poisoners usually stayed with poison, slashers got their thrills using their blades. Somebody who did both—

It didn’t make sense. But it was scary as hell.

Either the guy was a totally out-of-control maniac, or the kind of cold killer who killed for effect, picking his method like a flavor of the month. Either way, this wasn’t going to be easy. Or fun.

“Did that note look like the others?” R.J. asked as they came off Coldwater Canyon and onto Ventura.

“I think so, yes,” said Portillo absentmindedly. “The pasted-on letters look the same. It’s a funny thing.”

“What is?”

“In the previous notes, all the letters were cut from movie industry magazines.”

“You mean the fan magazines?”

“No, that’s the funny part. They are all from what you might call insider magazines. The ones all the executives have
on their coffee tables and in their waiting rooms. Not too many people outside the business even know about them, but they sell a lot of copies here.”

“So whoever is doing this is an insider.”

Portillo shrugged. “Or wants us to think so, and is smart enough to know how.”

R.J. laughed. “Sure. Or they really are an insider, and want us to think they’re an
outsider
trying to
look
like an insider. Come on, Uncle Hank. Take the clue or you’ll go nuts.”

Portillo shook his head and sighed. “I have been on the LAPD for twenty-seven years,
hijo.
I am no longer able to go nuts. But I tend to think as you do. It’s an insider. Motive is easier that way.”

“Yeah. Janine Wright makes enemies the way other people make breakfast.”

“True enough,” Portillo said with a shrug. “Probably three quarters of this town hates her, and the other quarter is afraid of her but would like to hate her if they could.”

“Uh-huh,” said R.J. “Where do you fit?”

The older man turned and looked at R.J. with a huge smile. “If I have to arrest her, that would be okay,” he said.

They arrived back at Uncle Hank’s house and R.J. went back to his room, intending to unpack and think a little. But he had barely got his suitcase open when he heard the phone ring in the living room and, a moment later, a knock came on the door. “R.J.? The telephone is for you.”

“Coming, Uncle Hank.”

Nobody knew he was here, except Wanda. So it had to be important. He followed Portillo down the hall to the living room and picked up the receiver. “Hello, Wanda. Give me the good news first.”

“Okay, boss. A Ms. Gillam from Connecticut Department of Corrections wants a word with you, and she didn’t sound happy.”