The Remake (6 page)

Even more amazing, it was different from the one he’d been wearing last time they’d met, which until then had been the ugliest R.J. had ever seen.

R.J. had met Boggs on several occasions and they would never be doubles partners at the country-club tennis tournament. In fact, R.J. would cheerfully spit on Boggs’s grave and he knew the detective felt the same about him.

So it wasn’t a pleasant surprise to see him, especially with that righteous scowl on his face.

“What the hell took you so long?”

“Gee, I’m sorry I didn’t hear you,” said R.J. “I was reading Tennyson and just lost myself.”

Boggs frowned. “Is that funny?”

“No, Don, Tennyson is very serious stuff. I think it’s poetry. You want to come in and I’ll read it to you?”

Boggs pushed past him and into the apartment. “You’ll have plenty of time to read poetry where you’re going. It’ll make you real popular.”

Annoyed, R.J. closed the door. “Where am I going, Don? And what couch cover did you make that suit out of?”

Boggs turned and glared at him, then shook his head and looked righteous again. “I’ve waited a long time for this, Brooks. Get dressed. You’re coming with me.”

“Didn’t I hear a rumor about a law somewhere that said you need a warrant or due cause or something?”

“This time I can get the warrant, Brooks. I can have it here in half an hour. But it might go easier on you if you cooperate. Maybe we can get your sentence reduced.”

“That would be swell, Don, I appreciate it. By the way, what did I do this time?”

Boggs smiled like it was his favorite crime. “Murder One, Brooks. And this time we got you dead to rights.”

R.J. sat on the arm of his sofa. On top of that dream, this was just a little bit too much. He knew it was serious, but if he wasn’t careful he was going to bust out laughing. “Who’d I kill? I forget.”

“Murray Belcher, smart-ass. Like you didn’t know. Now get dressed or I’ll take you in your goddamn robe.”

Murray Belcher. Murray Belcher. Who the hell was Murray Belcher? Whoever he was, he was dead now, and the cops had to have a pretty good reason to think R.J. killed him. Otherwise they would have waited until morning and sent Angelo to get him.

R J. got dressed, with Boggs hovering nearby to make sure he didn’t slip a howitzer into his shoe. They left the apartment a few minutes later and R.J. still didn’t have a clue who Murray Belcher was.

He still didn’t know when they got down to Lieutenant Kates’s office.

If there was one guy on the NYPD that R.J. got along with less than Boggs, it was Lieutenant Kates. They’d never actually swung at each other, but R.J. figured that was just a matter of time.

“Sit down, Fontaine,” Kates greeted him. The lieutenant liked to needle him by calling him Fontaine, after R.J.’s famous mother. He thought it showed wit, and R.J. figured he was half right.

“Thanks, Freddy,” R.J. said. “Say, the office looks real classy. Who’s your decorator?”

Kates came around the battered desk and perched on the front of it so he was only a few inches away from R.J. “You’re going to answer some questions, Fontaine, and your smart mouth is not going to get you anywhere this time. Except maybe Attica.” He crossed his arms and sneered at R.J. “Your high-priced show-biz lawyers aren’t getting you off the hook, either, Fontaine.”

R.J. was getting annoyed enough to wish that he had really killed this Murray Belcher, whoever he was. “Sure, Freddy, that’s a beautiful speech. I know how hard you must have practiced it. You didn’t even stutter once. But I got some bad news for you.”

“I’ll bet you do,” Kates sneered. “But not as bad as what I got for you.”

“Number one,” said R.J., ignoring Kates’s interruption, “as a matter of fact, unless you’re going to file charges or suspend the Bill of Rights, I’m afraid my high-priced show-biz lawyer
will
get me off the hook. There’s a bunch of stuff like unlawful confinement, habeas corpus, all of that. I can explain it when you’re done trampling on it. Number two—” He held up two fingers and wiggled them for Kates so he wouldn’t lose count. “I don’t have a clue who this guy Belcher is, and I make it a rule never to kill strangers.”

R.J. stood up and leaned into Kates’s face. “And number three, lieutenant, you can cut the crap right now and tell me what I’m supposed to know about this, and what gives you the right to drag me down here in the middle of the night and keep me here without arrest and without a lawyer, or I’ll sit in a cell and see you in Hell before I answer a question from either you or this low-grade moron you keep for a pet. So get polite, or read me my rights, or I’m done for the night, Freddy.”

“First, you’ll answer me one question,” Kates said. “And I’ll like your answer or I stick you in a cell with a fag bodybuilder until I remember to call your lawyer. Which might not be for a couple of days.”

R.J. knew he’d do it, too—and maybe even get away with it. So he let out a big breath and nodded his head. “One question, Freddy. Then I start playing hardball, too.”

Kates nodded. R.J. had never noticed before how small and beady his eyes were. They were gleaming now. Kates looked like he was about to drool. “Where were you last night?”

“It’s still last night now, Freddy,” R.J. told him. “Can you pin it down a little better?”

“Yeah, I can pin it down, Fontaine. Let’s say where were you between the hours of ten and one?”

R.J. frowned. This wasn’t going to be very good. “I was home, Freddy. Mostly in bed.”

The beady little eyes got brighter. “In bed alone?”

“That’s right, Freddy. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Can you prove it?”

“That’s three questions, Lieutenant. But just to show I’m cooperating—No, I can’t prove it. No phone calls, no deliveries, no chance acquaintances dropping by for badminton. Just me. Stop drooling for Christ’s sake.”

“This just gets better,” stuck in Boggs. He was leaning in the doorway trying to make his face a copy of Kates’s, and more than halfway succeeding. “Shall I book him?”

“Not yet,” said Kates. “I think we should just hold him for a while.”

“Now look, I’ve done my duty,” R.J. said. “I haven’t even threatened to sue you two-bit sleazy bastards. I’m a good citizen, okay? Now it’s your turn. Arrest me or let me go. So what’s gonna be, Freddy? Miranda or The Flesh Man?”

“What the hell is The Flesh Man?” Boggs wanted to know.

R.J. grinned at him. “My dog-bite lawyer. He always gets his pound of flesh. He doesn’t win cases—he just makes such a pain-in-the-ass of himself that the cases never go to trial. And I’m going to end up owning that ugly damn suit and everything else you’ve got.”

Kates snarled and shook out a cigarette. “I got enough to hold you,” he said through a cloud of smoke. “I can get a judge who agrees with me.”

“Then read me my rights and shove me in a cell,” R.J. said. “I’m sick of you, I’m sick of King Kong over there, and I’m through cooperating.”

Kates bit a piece off the filter of his cigarette and spat it on the floor beside R.J.’s foot. He glanced up at Boggs. Boggs shrugged. Kates dropped his cigarette on the floor. “You can go. But we’re not done with you. Keep yourself available for questioning—”

“Sure, Freddy,” R.J. said tiredly.

“—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—”