The Remake (26 page)

“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that,” she said.

Angelo looked at her like he couldn’t believe she’d said that. “Excuse me? For ten minutes?”

“That would be totally against all our regulations.”

“Ms. Helms—Julianne—we’re the
good
guys here. Goss can maybe help us solve a couple of murders.”

“I know,” she said with a sweet, regretful smile. “I’m
really
sorry. I wish there was some
other
way I could help.” And she actually reached across and patted Angelo’s hand.

“Julianne. Ten minutes of easy talk—that’s nothing. No matter how bad the guy is, ten minutes won’t kill him.”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s not a question of that. Mr. Goss is in excellent health. I simply can’t let you visit him without either his consent or proper authorization.”

“So how do I get proper authorization?”

She shook her head. “That’s
really
a drag. You have all these forms to fill out and it takes about six weeks to get them approved.”

“We don’t got six weeks, Julianne. We got a couple hours, tops.”

“Yeah. I’m really sorry. But…” She shrugged.

R.J. could see that Angelo was totally frustrated and about to blow. He could also see that although Ms. Helms probably would have gone home with Bertelli, she wasn’t about to cave in and let them see Goss. So he tapped Bertelli on the shoulder. “May I cut in?” he asked.

Angelo threw out his hands. “Be my guest.”

“Ms. Helms,” R.J. said. “My name is R.J. Brooks.”

She squinted prettily at him. “You look kind of familiar, too. Do I know you?”

“Some people say I look like my old man,” he said.

She squealed. “Whoa! Of
course
you do! Whoa! No wonder you look familiar!” She frowned slightly. “What are you doing with Angelo?”

“Angelo is a good friend of mine,” R.J. said.

Julianne looked at Angelo, if possible, with even more approval. “Wow,” she said. “And you really are—I mean
he
was really your father?”

“That’s right,” R.J. said. “But listen, Julianne—”

“I know I have no right to ask you this,” she said without hearing him. “But I wonder—I mean, it would mean so much to some of the wonderful old people here. Do you think— Would you possibly consider…?”

R.J. blinked. “Consider what?”

“Oh,” she said, “I wouldn’t even think about asking you normally. But with the budget cuts lately, you know. Most of the time they don’t have anything except TV.”

R.J. looked at Bertelli. He was looking back at R.J. with a huge grin. “Do you have any idea what she’s talking about?” he asked Angelo.

“Yes, I do,” Bertelli said. “You’re gonna love it.”

“It makes my flesh crawl when you say that, Angelo. Ms. Helms,” he said, turning back to her, “how about letting me in on the secret here? What exactly do you want from me?”

She gave R.J. her most radiant smile. “It would be so easy,” she said. “It would only take a few minutes.”

“It might take an extra ten minutes,” Angelo said, leaning in as close to her as he could get with the lights on.

Julianne’s eyes met Angelo’s. “All right,” she said.

And that’s how R.J. found himself patting approximately forty wrinkled old hands, gazing into some seventy-nine rheumy old eyes—one old guy, a veteran, had an eye patch—and saying forty times, “Hey, how are you doing?”

About half of them just stared at him. Twelve of them thought he was his own old man, which was all right. Three thought he was their son come for a visit. One man thought R.J. was his wife.

But in spite of the fact that Angelo had shoved him into doing it, greatly against his will, R.J. found he didn’t mind. Because the other half of the oldsters were glad to have somebody talk to them. Anybody. It didn’t have to be the celebrity R.J. felt like he was imitating. Just somebody who looked like he gave a damn.

And when he was finished an hour later, R.J. was surprised to discover that he did give a damn, that he would have done it again even if he hadn’t been forced into it.

Julianne Helms seemed satisfied with his performance, too.

“Mr. Goss is waiting for you,” she said with a contented smile.

CHAPTER 31

Goss was a cheerful, spry old bird. He didn’t look like he needed the wheelchair he lounged in with his legs crossed. “They make me sit in this thing,” he told R.J. in a voice that was dry, but surprisingly strong and cheerful. “They’re afraid I’ll slip on a cake of soap and sue them.”

He shrugged, holding up two hands that looked knotted and strong. “What the hell. I couldn’t afford to pay a lawyer a retainer. Who am I going to sue?”

“Janine Wright left you broke?” R.J. asked him. The old man shrugged.

“Yes, I guess so. I’m broke, anyway. Did Janine
leave
me broke? Well—If it wasn’t her it would have been someone else, I suppose.” He chuckled. “I guess I was just one of life’s victims.”

“Somebody did like that to me, I’d be pissed off,” Angelo said. Goss glanced over at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Maybe you would be. Italian, by the look of you, hmm?”

Angelo grinned. “Yeah. Just lucky,” he said.

Goss nodded. “I thought so. You people really go for the revenge thing. And you look it. As you get older you can tell. There’s a great deal of truth to some of the things we no longer put up with. Racial types and so forth.”

“Mr. Goss—,” R.J. said.

“You can call me Fred. I mean no harm, but there are differences. You can tell. Spotted your friend for Italian the second he walked in.” Goss frowned at R.J. “You’re a little tougher to figure. More typical of the racial mongrels we’re getting nowadays in this country. Can’t keep the bloodlines separate anymore.”

Angelo coughed to hide a laugh. R.J. shook his head, irritated. “I’m sure that’s interesting, Fred. But we’re here to talk about murder.”

“Somebody finally got her, did they? Well, I’m not surprised. She’s been begging for it for years. Any other business in the world and she would have been chopped into small pieces and fed to the dogs two decades ago.”

“Nobody got to her. They’ve got to some people around her, and I think they’re zeroing in on her.”

“Well, let them,” the old man said, totally unruffled.

“I can’t do that, Fred.”

“Why not? She paying you? I know it’s not because you like her—nobody likes Janine Wright. No one ever has, except that poor fool she married.” He shook his head and chuckled again. “By God, you can’t tell the Irish a damn thing, can you?”

“You knew William Kelley?”

“Of course I knew him. I was in business with his wife. In bed with her, too.”

R J. glanced at Angelo. But Goss went happily on.

“Now, you have to know that didn’t mean a thing. Everybody was in bed with Janine. That woman would sleep with the meter reader if it would get her a lower rate.”

“And Kelley knew about that?”

Goss laughed. It was a dry sound, bleak and lifeless. For the first time he looked like an old man. “He figured it out
eventually. My God, he’d have had to be deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid not to notice.” The old man shook his head. “There was a scene. He was going to divorce her, leave her without a penny. Lord knows he had proof of infidelity. So she framed him.”

R.J. blinked, thinking of the papers Pauly had given him. “Say that again?”

“She framed him. She set him up, blew the whistle, and had him sent away. So she got his money and he took the fall. And she made sure I was implicated so I wouldn’t say a word about it.” The old man’s hand trembled slightly and he looked far beyond R.J. for a minute, before snapping back to the present and meeting R.J.’s eyes again.

“If anybody is trying to kill Janine Wright, it’s Kelley. He’s big—and my God, he was strong—and I imagine he’s half crazy by now.” Goss leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Let him do it. She deserves it, he’s earned the right, paid for the crime ahead of time. Just let him do it. By Christ, I’d do it myself if I had the strength. The woman is evil, what she did to him. And me. To everybody. Let him kill her, Mr. Brooks. Please. Let him do it.”

There was something in the old man’s voice that was almost begging. As if he figured that he could get rid of his guilt if only Kelly killed Janine Wright. For a moment R.J. thought,
Why not?
But then he shook his head.

“I can’t do that, Fred,” he said. “Kelley is dead.”

Goss looked at him for a moment, then straightened up and took a deep breath. Whatever had been eating him, he put it away again. He looked more like the strong, dry old man he had seemed to be when R.J. came in. “That’s a shame,” he said. “He was a nice man who got an ugly deal. Always smiling, great sense of humor. He deserved better.”

“We all deserve better, Fred. But it’s the Janine Wrights who get it.”

Goss chuckled. “Maybe so. Still, it seems a shame.”

“Can you think of anybody else who might have wanted to kill her?”

“Oh, sure. Dozens. Almost anybody would have wanted to kill her. But Kelley was the most likely.”

And for five minutes he rattled off a list of people and their very good reasons for wanting to kill Janine Wright. Angelo wrote it all down, occasionally glancing up at Goss as if he couldn’t really believe what he was hearing.

R.J. wasn’t sure he could believe it, either. But when the list was done, he was even more sympathetic with Goss’s plea. Janine Wright deserved to die if anybody did.

When Goss finally wound down, R.J. stood up to go. The old man looked up at him and shook his head. “You’re sure he’s dead?” he asked with just a hint of something old and still raw in his voice.

“I’m sure,” R.J. said. “I was at the funeral.”

“A shame,” Goss said. “A very great shame.”

They left him sitting there with his memories and regrets and walked out to their rented car.

CHAPTER 32

They took the hour-long drive back to L.A. and neither one of them had much to say. They were both hard guys in a tough profession, and neither one of them would admit that they were bothered by what was happening, but they were.

Janine Wright had left a trail of broken lives behind her like a tornado cutting through a trailer park. And she had done it without a second thought. She got no pleasure from it, she just did it, like you would swat at a fly. By reflex.

And now somebody was coming at her from the back trail and leaving dead bodies the same way. And although R.J. and Bertelli had both seen plenty of ugly death before, this time it all seemed uglier. While they were both trying to stop the killer, they were both secretly hoping they might be just a minute too late, because Janine Wright deserved to die. Especially after talking to somebody like Fred Goss.

They started to hit a little traffic around Encino and it slowed them down some. R.J. pulled into the lot of a coffee shop and parked the car. As R.J. slid into a booth, Angelo nodded toward the back. “I’ll call Portillo and see what’s up,” he said.

R.J. nodded, already lost in the menu. “Yeah, okay. I’ll order you coffee.”

Angelo ambled off toward the restroom, where the phone was visible between two doors marked
MEN
and
WOMEN.
R.J. stared at the menu, but his thoughts were not on bacon and eggs.

The last few days had taken a lot out of him, more than he had realized until now, and he needed the coffee the waitress had brought over without asking. He felt like he was shut out all along the line. Couldn’t figure out the simple things anymore. Like who was stalking Janine Wright. Like where the hell he stood with Casey.

Couldn’t even figure out whether to order a burger or an omelet, or skip it altogether and just have coffee and a toasted bagel. Except L.A. bagels didn’t taste right, so forget that. There—that was one thing he’d figured out. The rest ought to be easy now.

It was. It got a lot easier a moment later when Angelo came back to the table. “Let’s go, goombah,” he said, pulling out some money and throwing it onto the table. Something about his tone of voice made R.J. look up sharply.

“Go where? What’s up, Angelo?”

Bertelli was already heading for the front door. “We got another one,” he said over his shoulder. “At the studio this time.”

R.J. got up and followed.

They arrived at the studio fifteen minutes later. The young kid with the smile was not at the gate. Instead, a large, crew-cut motorcycle cop blocked their way in and examined Bertelli’s badge carefully before waving them on.

A cluster of official vehicles was already parked haphazardly by the main building. Angelo angled the car in sloppily. He got out and R.J. followed him into the building.

Portillo hadn’t said who the victim was, and as they went
upstairs and down the hall toward Janine Wright’s office R.J. felt an indecent flutter of hope. He didn’t wish anybody dead, hardly. But if somebody had to die and they asked him for his choice—well, Janine Wright was right at the top of the list.