The Remake (20 page)

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.

Still, R.J. managed to think. He had to get out from under a couple of murder charges, and that meant getting back to California. But he couldn’t chase down Janine Wright’s tax records from there, and he had to do that, too. He had said he would, and anyway he wanted to see her in the slammer.

Rooting for records was something Wanda could do. Probably do it better than he could, in fact. She was amazing with bureaucrats. Where R.J. would lose his temper and start yelling, she could drip honey or acid, whichever would work, and she got results he could only dream about.

Sure, Wanda was the answer for that. Give him a chance
to wrap up the other thing, find the killer. And just incidentally, while he was at it, keep Casey safe.

Casey. Jesus Christ. R.J. sighed.

In spite of everything else that was happening, R.J. couldn’t keep his mind off Casey. She had always run hot and cold, driving him crazy. But now he didn’t even know where to start, which end to pick up and look at. He only knew everything else was going to be a lot harder to do until he had figured out what Casey wanted. And whatever it was, he would find a way to want it, too.

But hell, first he had to keep her alive.

For the rest of the trip back to the city he tried to keep his thoughts on the killer. It worked for the most part. Mary would sob every now and then, and Roberta would murmur to her. Casey shoved her way into his thoughts every five or ten minutes, but he kept at it, adding up what he knew about the two murders.

Two killings, in two cities, with two very different MOs. The lawyer poisoned in Manhattan. The writer with his head hacked off in L.A. All they had in common was the remake. Could it be two killers? It was almost fun to think about a secret organization dedicated to stopping the remake. Guys in black hoods taking secret oaths in the basement, pricking their fingers and swearing on an upside-down Bible.

Sure, a secret society. And R.J. was really Doc Savage, cutting through the underworld like a bronze blade.

It had to be one killer. One guy, and R.J. tallied up what he knew about him.

He was smart—he’d figured the way into the Hotel Pierre, which was not easy. He was strong enough to climb up the outside of Levy’s house, strong enough to overcome the writer and cut his head off with a pair of scissors. And he thought he was funny, with the cute rhymes in the letters he sent. The lettering said he was probably a show-biz insider.

It really wasn’t much to go on. It’s simple, R.J. thought.

Strong, funny, show-biz insider…. The killer is Joe Piscopo.

He needed something more, some angle that would give him a starting point. Otherwise…R J. hated the thought, but he was getting the idea that the killer would do it again long before R.J. managed to figure out who he was. And he could kill everybody on both coasts, one at a time, before those goddamned paper-shuffling cops figured it out.

It was dark by the time they got back to the city. R.J. rode the limo to the door of Roberta’s building and climbed out onto the sidewalk, holding the door for Mary. She was still crying, and Roberta still had an arm around her.

R.J. paid off the driver and walked Mary to the elevator, in spite of Roberta’s glare.

“Listen, Mary,” he told her. “I’ve got to get back to the coast.”

She looked up at him with red eyes. “That’s—You’re not giving up?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not giving up. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”

The bell clunked and the elevator arrived. R.J. patted the kid’s arm. “You just take your time, and don’t worry,” he told her.

“All right,” Mary sniffled. “But R.J.? You’re going to get her, aren’t you? You’ll find something about Mother?”

“I just might,” R.J. said. “Take care of yourself, kid.”

R.J. left her there with Roberta. He was already on the sidewalk by the time the elevator doors slid shut.

He walked across town, taking the time to think. R.J. always thought better with New York in the background. But by the time he got to his apartment he hadn’t come up with much new. What there was, Ilsa drove out of his head right away.

R.J. had a neighbor who fed the cat while he was away. He fed her again anyway, but Ilsa still went into a two-hour gymnastic routine, complaining that she was hungry, lonely, and bored, and where the hell had he been, anyway?

By the time he made himself a small steak and some broccoli from the freezer, the cat had calmed down. She went back to ignoring him, but from closer than usual.

After dinner, R.J. realized he was beat. Whether it was jet lag, or the funeral, or the combined weight of the last few days, he could barely keep his eyes open. So he didn’t even try. He washed up the dishes and went to bed.

In the morning he barely dragged himself out of bed. A long hot shower, three cups of coffee and R.J. still didn’t feel at the top of his form, but he thought he might manage to make it through the day. He threw on some clothes, buttoned his coat, and staggered off to his office. He needed to catch up on a little paperwork, and there was a direct flight back to L.A. in the afternoon.

“Boss!” Wanda yelled at him as he walked in.

“That’s me,” he admitted.

“The lieutenant has called four times this morning! You’re to call him the second you’re in!”

The lieutenant was Henry Portillo. Wanda had almost no respect for policemen. Lieutenant Kates was just Kates to her; Detective Boggs was Boggs or That Dumb Gorilla. But Uncle Hank she approved of, and as a mark of her approval, she called him by his rank.

R.J. grunted. If Uncle Hank had called four times, he wasn’t just checking up. Something had happened. Maybe there’s been a break in the case. Maybe they’d gotten lucky with the glasses they’d found at Levy’s house.

“I’ll call him in a minute. Let me go over this with you first.”

“Boss, it’s important enough to keep the lieutenant waiting?”

“If you’ll pay attention, he won’t have to wait long.”

She stuck out her tongue, and R.J. pulled the papers Pauly Aponti had given him from his coat.

Wanda was fast. She caught on to what was there, and what needed to be done a lot quicker than R.J. had.

“No problem, boss,” she told him, and R.J. put it out of his mind. Wanda would take care of it.

He turned back to the other thing, the reason Portillo had called. He hoped it was a break in the case, but it occurred to him as he sat in his chair and dialed Portillo’s number that he had only been thinking about the situation from one side, the cop’s side, where he usually worked. He was a suspect now, maybe
the
suspect, and a break in the case could just as easily mean he was headed for the slammer.

It was a good thought. It was right, too.

“R.J.,” Portillo said when he picked up the phone, and R.J. knew from his tone that it was bad. “We have had another letter.”

“Hell, Uncle Hank, I couldn’t have done it. I’m in New York.”

He could hear Portillo breathing out, attempting control. “Can you tell me
exactly
where you have been,
hijo
?”

“Sure. To my office, to a funeral, back to my office. That’s it.”

“And where was the funeral?”

“In Connecticut, Uncle Hank. Relax, nobody would ever go up there. A little place called Torrington.”

There was a long silence on the line, very long.

“You there, Uncle Hank?”

“You had better come back at once, R.J.,” Portillo said, and there was great weariness in his voice.

“I’m on my way,” R.J. said. “What’s up?”

“The new letter,” Portillo said slowly, “was yet another death threat against the movie.”

“I figured it would be. So?”

“So,
hijo,
it arrived this morning by Express Mail. And it was postmarked from Torrington, Connecticut.”

CHAPTER 24

It felt to R.J. as if jet lag was finally catching up to him. He had kidded himself that he had ducked it by coming back to New York so soon after flying to L.A. But going back again, just like that, was too much for his system. He felt like hell, and he was starting to worry about something new.

Somebody was out to get him.

Oh, sure, he knew he had a cop on each coast who wanted to see him in prison and didn’t care how it happened. And he’d made plenty of enemies in his life who would just as soon see him suffer if they could arrange it. This was something else, something more. Something that had trickled into his brain when he hung up the phone on Henry Portillo.

It had sprouted on the way to the airport, and during the long flight back to L.A. it had grown big enough to build a tree house in.

Somebody was out to get him.

Adding up all that had happened, capped with the letter postmarked from Torrington—it was just too much to be coincidence. Every time R.J. was in New York the killer was in New York. When R.J. was in L.A., so was the killer. It was okay to believe that it was all coincidental—up to a point. The last letter, from Torrington, had passed that point.

He didn’t have any proof, but he was sure. Somebody was getting ready to kill again, and they wanted R.J. to take the fall for it.

It was almost funny. R.J. could even feel a small, savage laugh growing inside him. Very funny, he thought. I’m the only guy who can catch you, so you’re working with the cops to put me away. Killer and cops on the same side. Har-de-har-har.

Sure. A real laugh-riot. Just keep chuckling and watching the bodies pile up. What was it they called it in the movie business? The Body Count. They said to have a big picture you had to have a big body count.

The remake was shaping up to be a really big picture.