The Remake (8 page)

So as R.J. sat in his office that Thursday morning he was feeling about as low and mean as a guy can feel. At least, that’s what he thought until he decided to do something about it. And then he very quickly felt worse.

“Goddammit,” R.J. said aloud.

Wanda stuck her head in. “I’ve been keeping track,” she said. “I make a little mark on my scratch pad every time you say goddammit.” She held up a piece of paper. “You’re up to forty-nine.”

“Wanda, goddammit—”

“Fifty,” she said. “Do you want to look at the mail?”

“No,” he said.

“Good. Because Reverend Lake has apparently made up with his wife and their lawyer wants to sue you.”

“Sue me for what?”

Wanda gave him her best mean little smile. “Invasion of privacy.”

“Put me down for fifty-one,” R.J. told her. “Then just throw away the mail.”

“You’re the boss,” she said.

“It’s nice to think so.”

Wanda swished out, leaving R.J. a lingering trace of perfume and a slightly better mood. Here he was, sitting here
stewing instead of doing something. He was supposed to be a tough, active guy, and he was letting this damned L.A. Medusa and her dead lawyer ruin his life. “Like hell I will,” he said aloud and, as he reached for the telephone, he added, “Goddammit.”

“Fifty-two,” said Wanda from the next room.

He had just made up his mind to do a little digging around into Janine Wright’s background when the door swung open and Janine Wright’s daughter came in.

For a long moment she just stood in the doorway, looking like she wasn’t sure if gravity would work here. Then she finally took a hesitant step in. “Um,” she said. “Mr., uh, Brooks?”

“Sure,” R.J. said, glad to have a target for his bad mood. “And you must be, er, Miss, um, Wright.”

The girl bit her lip but didn’t say anything. For a moment R.J. felt bad about ribbing her. Then he remembered who she was. “What can I do for you, Miss Wright? Did you come to repossess my furniture? Steal my mail? Maybe just put red ants in the seat cushions? Or maybe sell me some poison?”

The kid bit her lip. “I don’t think you should joke about that. It—Murray was a jerk, but nobody should have to die like that. All the twitching and throwing up and—It really isn’t funny.”

“Okay,” R.J. said. “It wasn’t funny. And neither is trying to pin it on me. Which your old lady is definitely trying.”

She still didn’t make any move to come in and sit down. Instead she stood up straight in the doorway. “I’m not my mother, Mr. Brooks. I don’t like her any more than you do. Maybe even less.”

“That doesn’t seem possible,” R.J. said. “I don’t like her at all.”

“You’ve only met her once,” the girl said, and her face was twisted into a mask of bitterness. “Imagine what it would be like to see her every day, your whole life, and know that there’s
no way to escape, ever. And that…that there’s maybe some of that awful woman in you. That someday you might end up—like that.”

R.J. studied the girl. She seemed to be for real. She was upset, bitter. There was none of the brazen punk in her that she’d shown at the hotel. For no real reason R.J. found himself liking her a little bit. “Sit down, Miss Wright,” he said. “How can I help you?”

She slid uncertainly into a chair. “Thank you. It’s—I, um, actually. It’s Kelley? Mary Kelley. Mother doesn’t use Daddy’s name, but I—would like to.”

“All right. Miss Kelley. What’s on your mind?”

She was having some trouble looking him in the eye. She looked at her hands as she talked, moving them around nervously. “First, um, I wanted to tell you?”

“Yes?”

“Ah, that Mother. You know. She’s, um, I don’t know. Been checking into you or—and now she’s, um. Doing something? That would, you know. Really bother you?”

“Thanks for the warning,” R.J. said, thinking about Casey. “She’s already done it.”

“Oh,” said Mary.

“Was there something else?”

She looked up at him suddenly, and even though she almost immediately began to blush bright red, she held the look. “Yes,” she said, and looked away.

“You want to tell me what it is?”

Mary looked out the window, still blushing. Okay, R.J. thought, give the kid a hand.

“How long are you going to be in town?” he asked her.

She answered without looking. “I—I’m not sure. Mother’s already gone back to L.A. I told her—I said I was staying here for a while.”

“Did you tell her why?”

Mary shook her head.

“Why not?”

A shrug.

“You doing anything she wouldn’t want you to do, Miss Kelley?”

A nod this time.

“What is it?”

She finally looked at him. Her face was pinched, as if she had taken a bite of something that cut the inside of her mouth. “Can you find my father, Mr. Brooks?”

R.J. gave her a small smile. Points for effort. “I don’t know. Is he lost, Miss Kelley?”

She looked away, then looked back. “Could we stop this, you know, Mr. Brooks, Miss Kelley stuff? It’s really, you know. Like in one of those old movies?”

R.J. laughed. He was really starting to like this kid. She was showing spunk. She would have needed that to survive life with a mother like Janine Wright, but it was nice to see it out in the open. “Sure, Mary. Call me R.J. Tell me about your father.”

She looked away again. “I haven’t seen him since I was little. He was, um. In jail. Prison.”

“What did he do?”

Her eyes snapped back to his. “Nothing. He was innocent. I mean, I don’t think he did anything. I think Mother framed him. For drugs.” She looked away. “I can’t prove that. I just—She’s so awful. She really would do anything if it, you know. Helped her in some way. Helped her get ahead.”

“Where was your father last time you heard from him?”

“I haven’t really heard from him. Mother got total custody, of course. Not that she gives a shit about me, but Daddy does, and she knew it would hurt him even more if he couldn’t even send me a birthday card. So that’s the way she had her lawyers set it up. So he can’t even write to me.” She looked at her hands again. “They sent him to the penitentiary. The one in Connecticut.”

“Somers Penitentiary?”

“Yes, I think that’s it.”

“But he’s out now.”

“Yes. On parole.”

“So he’s still in Connecticut?”

She chewed on her lip. “I—think so. I mean, he likes it there and all, and…I mean where else would he go?”

“If he’s still on parole, he probably has to stay in Connecticut. And you would like to find him?”

“Yes. I would.”

He gave her a hard look. “Why haven’t you tried to see him before this?”

She looked away. A tear glittered in the corner of her eye. “I know,” she said. “I feel like a total—” She shrugged, letting him fill in the blank. “But I was just a kid, and I was in L.A. He was three thousand miles away, and in prison. You don’t know what Mother
c
an be like.”

“Yes, I do,” R.J. said with a snort.

“I couldn’t even leave the house. Let alone come all the way across the country, and—” She shook her head and kept looking away.

“All right, I get the picture.” R.J. sighed. He was actually thinking about it, actually considering helping this kid. But hell, why not? If it had half a chance of infuriating Janine Wright, he’d pay for the privilege.

He gave the kid a grin. “All right, Mary. I’ll take a look.”

CHAPTER 10

That night, Casey’s last night in town, R.J. tried one more time. He dressed up in his suit, the same one he had worn to his mother’s funeral. Hell, it was his only suit. He braved the crosstown traffic at rush hour and picked Casey up at her office. He took her to a quiet place in the Village and fed her grouper with raspberry sauce, a $100 bottle of wine, hothouse asparagus with hollandaise sauce and peach cobbler.

Then he took her uptown to Belle’s apartment, which he hadn’t sold yet. It had a fireplace, and R.J. wanted a fireplace for what he had in mind.

R.J. led Casey into the apartment and sat her in front of the fire on one of Belle’s elegant settees. He’d paid Tony, the doorman, forty bucks to light the fire and have the place ready. Tony, an ex-cop with a strong sense of romantic whimsy, had even put a spray of fresh roses on the table. They must have set him back at least forty bucks.

R.J. looked at Casey. She was watching the flames flicker. Her profile looked so perfect in the firelight it was almost like
he could hear it shouting his name. She looked up and smiled and he sat beside her.

He’d gone to a lot of trouble to set the mood just right, and he’d thought for several days about the right thing to say and the way to say it, but when he sat down and took Casey’s hand it all flew out of his head and what he said was, “I wish you didn’t have to go.”

And Casey looked at him, amusement showing in those cool blue eyes, and she said, “Well, I do have to go.”

“Well, but I wish you didn’t have to.”

She patted his knee and let her hand rest there on his thigh.

“Are you going to give me your address out there?” he asked her and she pretended to look surprised.

“Do you want it?” she asked.

He nodded and put a hand on top of hers. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

She looked back at the fire and gave a very small shrug. “All right,” she said. “I’ll let you know. When I get settled.”

“Thanks.”

She began to move her hand on his thigh, just a slight, warm caress. “Now that you’re rich, maybe you’ll fly out and see me sometime. When I’m not too busy.”

“Yeah. I could do that.”

“Well,” she said softly, “that might be nice.”

It was the closest she had ever come to saying how she felt about him and R.J. melted. He leaned over and kissed her.

Afterward, R.J. thought it was maybe the cleanest, purest, best kiss he’d ever had in his life. None of that, though, explained how they ended up on the floor in front of the fire, with the flickering light playing off all the beautiful curves and hollows of Casey’s body.

His suit was trashed, thrown all over the room, tangled up with panty hose and a high heel. At least one button on his only good dress shirt had popped off, and the silk tie his mother had given him would never be the same again.

None of that mattered. Their lovemaking was gentle and
crazed at the same time. There was a flavor of good-bye to it, and at the same time the discovery of something new between them.

And it was only after that, when Casey was asleep beside him, that R.J. remembered he hadn’t had a chance to say any of the things he’d planned so carefully to tell Casey. He drifted off to sleep thinking he’d wake up early, make her a big breakfast, and tell her then.

But before he knew it morning was on them and it was late. They had to rush downstairs without breakfast, and R.J. stood shivering on the sidewalk in a bathrobe as Tony called a cab for Casey. He kissed her one time, a quick brush of his lips against her cheek, and she was gone, off into the morning traffic, to the airport, to California.

R.J. stood and watched until he couldn’t see her cab anymore.

“Yo, hey, Mr. Brooks,” he heard behind him. He turned. Tony was holding the door to the apartment building for him. “It’s kinda cold this morning for how you’re dressed,” Tony told him. “Whyntcha get inside?”

“I kinda feel like standing here in the rain, Tony.”

The doorman blinked at him, rubbing one large finger at the corner of his eye. “It ain’t raining, Mr. Brooks.”

R.J. looked down toward Central Park where the cab had disappeared. “Then I might as well come in,” he said.

The day dragged on and R.J. couldn’t seem to concentrate or get anything at all done. He went to the office and went through the motions, but by four o’clock he hadn’t done anything except sign a few pieces of paper that Wanda shoved under his nose. He was glad he trusted Wanda so completely; he had no idea what any of the papers said. He might have been signing everything he owned over to her kid in Buffalo. It didn’t seem to matter too much if he was.

R.J. knew he was supposed to be doing things—like finding Mary Kelley’s father. That would probably be pretty easy. If only he could start feeling like doing it. If the guy was out
on parole, he’d have a parole officer. The parole officer would know where Kelley was, had to know according to the law. So all he had to do was make a couple of phone calls.

It took him two and a half hours, but he finally made the first telephone call, to the Department of Corrections in Connecticut. He found out the name of Kelley’s parole officer. Then he just stared at the name and number where he’d written it on the pad. It seemed like an awful lot of work to make another phone call. The last one had worn him out completely.

R.J. looked out the window. The day was cool but clear. The sky was blue. Casey was up in that sky somewhere. Trapped in a little metal tube at a great height, moving at a fantastic speed toward a terrible place.

Maybe she would hate California. Maybe she’d get fired. Probably not; she was too damn good. Maybe she’d quit. Up close Casey would see Janine Wright for what she was. Casey would never work for somebody like that. Never.