The Remake (25 page)

“Jesus Christ,” Angelo said from his spot in the doorway. “Is this guy for real?”

The chair spun again, and then shot over to Angelo. R.J. had to jump back out of the way, or his toes would have been pulped.

“For real?” Minch said, coming to a stop practically in Angelo’s pocket. “For
real?
You think somebody could make this up? You’re stupider than star-boy here, and he’s dumber than a brick.”

R.J. stepped closer. “Minch, listen—”

Whee.
The chair whipped around so quickly R.J. didn’t jump in time. The footrest banged him hard in the shins.

“What I’ll
listen
to is your receding footsteps, Brooks. You and your pet dago monkey can just disappear. I have to work for a living. Not that this in any way resembles living.” He gave a kind of cough that might have been some sort of laugh, and the chair lurched forward, straight at R.J.

R.J. jumped back again as the chair sped past him.

“Good reflexes,” Minch said, “for somebody who couldn’t find his ass using both hands.”

“Goddammit,” R.J. snarled, “people are dying, Minch.”

“Our whole culture is dying, Brooks. Turning to shit, and we’re all just shoveling flies at it. These people dying doesn’t make a bit of difference either way. They’re just foot soldiers. Pawns in the struggle to tear down two thousand years of Western civilization.” He spun the chair again. As R.J. heard the
whee
he instinctively jumped back. “Besides,” Minch said with acid sweetness, “there are worse things than death, you know.”

He sat there in his motorized chair, unable to move except for one hand, and it occurred to R.J. that two large guys with a gun were helpless in front of him. The chair darted around as fast as this guy’s mind. R J. hadn’t taken one normal step or finished one sentence since he hit the door.

“Part of the decline of Western civilization,” R.J. said slowly, “comes from relaxing our moral values. And murder is not a moral thing, Minch.”

The guy in the chair practically smiled. “Good! Wonderful! That was almost human thought! I’m astounded, Brooks. Listen! The sound of one hand clapping!” And he flopped his one half-good hand on the metal tray attached to the front of his chair.

“The point is, however,” Minch said, lurching the chair closer to R.J. and looking up at him, “that this is not murder, but execution.
Justice.
It’s a dying society kicking back at its own murderers. This is totally justified self-defense. Naturally it’s too little too late—I’d like to see every studio in town running knee-deep
in
blood. Of course, I’d have to measure that with someone else’s knee.”

The chair lurched and R.J. jumped. Minch spun over to Angelo. “What about you, you dumb bag of bird droppings? Do you have any thoughts that didn’t come from the wop version of
GQ
?”

Bertelli looked down at Minch. “I’ve got one,” he said. “You might not like it much.”

Minch made the coughing noise again and spun away. “Oh, you never know what I might like, Rocky. Go ahead and slug me, that may be the only way I can get off.”

As Minch went zipping past, R.J. leaned forward. The batteries that powered the chair were perched on a shelf on the back side, about eight inches off the ground. R.J. yanked the power lead off the batteries’ terminals and the chair groaned to a halt.

“Hey! You stupid son-of-a-bitch, what are you doing?”

R.J. grabbed the handles of the chair and turned Minch around to face them. “I’m leveling the playing field,” he said. “We might be able to keep up with just your mouth.”

“Not likely,” Minch said. “Plug me back in, you scum-sucking Neanderthal orangutan.”

“Not until you answer a couple of questions,” R.J. said.

“Oh, this is great. This really is. Did you bring a sap? Besides the Guinea gorilla leaning in the doorway, I mean. We already know he’s a total sap. You could get him to hold my hand down so I can’t defend myself while you beat me.”

“Minch. Shut up. Please?”

“Shut up. Sure, I’ll shut up. Why the fuck shouldn’t I shut up? All I have left is my voice, but the great R.J. Brooks wants me to shut up, so I’ll shut up for the traitorous butt-licking son-of-a-bitch.”

R.J. shook his head as if he could shake loose some of the poison pouring out of Minch. “What the hell have you got against me, anyway, Minch?”

“You could have stopped them and you didn’t.”

“I couldn’t stop them. Anything I tried would just give them more publicity. Sell more tickets. Nobody can stop them.”

“At least somebody is trying.”

R.J. looked down into Minch’s eyes. The light burning there was almost twice as bright as any R.J. had ever seen. But it wasn’t burning clear. Minch was about a half step out of a straight jacket. Maybe being in the chair had done it to him. Maybe he’d always been like this. It didn’t matter. The only thing they were going to get out of him was more of what they’d already had, and R.J. had had enough.

“All right, Minch,” he said.

“All right?
ALL RIGHT?
It damn well isn’t all right!” He waved his hand feebly. “You don’t get it, do you, Brooks? I didn’t think you would, but I was hoping. Well, there goes the optimist in me.”

He gave his dry hacking little laugh again and lurched sideways. “
As Time Goes By
means something, Brooks. Something special, pure,
good.
Not just to me, but to all of us, our whole culture. Millions of people, all around the world. Because it stood for something. It was a rallying cry for the last great moral battleground—and the good guys
won.
It was important, goddammit—maybe one of five or six movies in history that are really
important
.”

He slapped his hand on the tray. It was a feeble slap, but if the intention behind it counted for anything, it would have brought the building down. “And now those goddamned soulless leeches want to sodomize it! Like putting a Nike swoosh on the
Pieta,
for Christ’s sake! Can’t anybody else see that? See that it’s wrong, beyond wrong, it’s actually
EVIL
!”

He turned those burning eyes on R.J. again. “Can’t you at least see that, Brooks?”

“I see it,” R.J. said. “But you’re right. You’re an optimist. I’m not. You think you can save Western civilization by stopping this remake. I don’t believe that. I don’t even think I can stop the remake. But I can save a couple of lives if I stop this
killer. Maybe that’s not as much. It won’t take the mustache off any Mona Lisas. But it’s all I can do, Minch. So how about it? What can you tell me that might help?”

Minch stared at him for a long time. Then the light dimmed in his eyes and he flopped his head back down, away from R.J. “Go to hell,” he said. “Get the fuck out of my office.”

Feeling helpless, R.J. looked over at Angelo.

Bertelli shrugged. “Hey, what the fuck,” he said. “Sometimes you just crap out.”

“You ought to be used to it,” Minch muttered. “Plug me in on your way out, huh?”

R.J. shook his head. But he reattached the wires to Minch’s battery.

Then he headed for the door. He stopped in the doorway and looked back. But Minch was already wheeling back to the monitor and popping a tape in with practiced clumsiness.

As the sound came up—grand music mixed with explosions. R.J. closed the door behind him and walked down the five small steps behind Angelo, out into the bright sun of the parking lot.

CHAPTER 30

R.J. was busy the next few days. Still, he tried to call Casey a couple of times every day. She was always on another line. She left him a couple of messages with Portillo, but they never connected.

So R.J. tried to concentrate on catching the killer. There were other suspects. None of them seemed as promising going in as Minch had. Over the next few days, R.J. and Angelo checked them all out. And all of them fizzed out after only a couple of minutes of questioning.

There were people Janine had screwed over in personal and business matters, a lot of them. She left wounded bodies in her wake like a Sherman tank on a rampage. But most of the people in the business had that weird brand of Hollywood fatalism you only see in the industry.

Life goes on, they said. They’d shake their heads and say, Should have seen it coming. All part of the game. Besides, Janine’s big now, and she can do what she wants. Anyway, can’t afford to hold it against her. Some of these people, badly
mauled by Janine Wright once, were doing business with her again.

Then there were the personal ones. There were a number of jilted lovers. But most of these, once they were sure no word would ever get back to Janine, admitted they were relieved when she broke things off. She was, apparently, a demanding and unrewarding lover.

Without exception, the people on the list would be happy to hear Janine Wright was dead. But all of them, like victims of a terrible beating, were too cowed to do anything about it.

By the end of the week the list was finished. Most of the interviews blended into one ugly sketch of Janine Wright. She was ruthless, dominating, vindictive, coarse, and almost evil. But they had known that. And no matter how much she seemed to deserve to be murdered, R.J. was no closer to finding who was killing those around her.

One interview stuck out in R.J.’s mind. He and Angelo, in a rental car paid for by the NYPD, had driven far out into the Valley to an address in Thousand Oaks. It turned out to be a retirement home.

The man they had come to see, Fred Goss, had known Janine Wright since her start. He had been her partner at first—it was Goss who had the experience in movies and had interested Janine in doing them. And then, when Janine Wright was on her way up, she had dumped him, cut him off without a nickel, and tossed him away like an old newspaper.

They knew all that before driving to Thousand Oaks. It seemed like a pretty good motive for murder, worth the hour’s drive out the Golden State Freeway to see Goss. Until they pulled into the parking lot of Golden Hills Retirement Home.

R.J. put the car into a slot in the lot, but left the motor running. He turned to Angelo in the passenger seat beside him. “What do you think?” he asked.

Bertelli shrugged. “Who knew? So the guy is old. I’ve known lots of mean old guys.”

“Mean enough to hack off Jason Levy’s head?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. They get brooding on something, it turns ’em all sour inside.” He looked out the window. “Of course, this would have to be an exceptionally
strong
mean old man.”

R.J. looked up the walkway to the home. A pair of nurses leaned against a doorway, keeping half an eye on a cluster of unmoving oldsters sitting in the sun. One of the nurses puffed on a cigarette. Still life with smoke.

“Well, hell,” R.J. said. “We drove an hour to see this guy, and it’s an hour back. We might as well talk to him.”

“Uh-huh. And maybe they got a restroom in there, too.”

R.J. laughed. “You drink red wine with lunch, Angelo, you have to plan your afternoon around pit stops.”

Bertelli spread his hands. “Hey. It’s all part of the price I pay for being Italian.” He shrugged and ran a hand through his hair. “It’s worth it.”

They locked up the car and followed the arrow on a sign that said
OFFICE.
The office was cool, carpeted, and decorated in muted colors. There they found Ms. Helms, a cheerful woman of about forty-five, who had the look of an ex-hippie.

Ms. Helms was a member of the wonderful subspecies of California bureaucrat. She did her best to frustrate them and send them away without seeing Goss, but she did it so cheerfully, acting the whole time like a happy, helpful victim of regulations, that she clearly wanted R.J. and Bertelli to leave with a pleasant memory of a woman who just couldn’t say yes, no matter how much she had wanted to.

Bertelli showed his badge. “Wow,” said Ms. Helms. “New York, huh? What a great place. You are so lucky to live there.” She flashed them a beautiful smile. “Of course, you’re kind of out of your jurisdiction here. And California statutes are a little different. I can’t let you see Mr. Goss without a court order. It would mean my job. Sorry, Detective.”

“Call me Angelo,” he said, with his best seductive smile.

She blinked, then blushed. “Angelo,” she said.

R.J. sat on the urge to smile. Watching Angelo in action was always a treat. He had a big nose, and lord knows he didn’t
have a Fabio-style body. But something about him just seemed to radiate sexy charm.

He gave Ms. Helms both barrels. “You know, Ms. Helms—” he said it with a funny hesitation, like he wanted her first name but was too shy to ask.

“Julianne,” she said with another blush.

“Julianne. Hey, that’s a beautiful name, Julianne.”

“Oh,” she said, “…thank you.”

“Julianne, you know we come like three thousand miles to see this guy?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Yeah, well, listen, don’t be sorry. Just let us see him for ten minutes.” He gave her his best wink. “Nobody has to know, and then we’re outta here, huh?”