The Remake Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  The Remake: As Time Goes By

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  The Remake: As Time Goes By

  By Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  Copyright 2013 by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1997.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Stephen Humphrey Bogart and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Bogart: In Search of My Father

  Play It Again

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  The Remake

  As Time Goes By

  Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  CHAPTER 1

  It was spring and there was a manic energy turned loose in the city, an energy that made everybody bounce a little when they walked. Even though it was still too cold for all the bad smells to thaw out, people were starting to unbutton the top buttons of their coats and look with a special spring gleam in their eyes for new ways to hurt each other.

  But it was spring, and R.J. didn’t mind. He liked the fact that all New Yorkers are predators. It was why he lived here. He’d grown up with the sun-tanned, veggie-loving mood-ring kissers on the West Coast, and he would just as soon take the knife in the front, New York–style.

  It was spring in New York and R.J. was alive, healthy, and he had enough dough tucked away that he could tell just about anybody to go to hell if he felt like it. Which he frequently did these days.

  The last six months had been hard. Especially for a guy trying to make a living by being tough. Ever since his mother, film legend Belle Fontaine, had been killed, he had been up to his neck in two of his least favorite types: lawyers and reporters. The lawyers would probably be with him for a while, at least until he got Belle’s estate squared away. The reporters—that was another matter.

  It had taken the media buzzards most of that six months to get the message: R.J. Brooks wasn’t talking. Didn’t want his picture on any magazine covers—although he’d been on eleven without his permission when he gave up counting. He didn’t want to appear on any TV shows, with their hysterically sincere hosts and brainlessly enthusiastic studio audiences. Wouldn’t give an exclusive to any of the network soft-news magazines. Wouldn’t cooperate in any Movie of the Week—although a couple had been made. Wouldn’t say anything to anybody with a press pass.

  Except Casey Wingate, of course.

  Casey. He sighed just thinking about her.

  Most of his life he’d been able to handle women with no problem. He could take ’em and leave ’em, and he’d done that with his fair share. More than his fair share. Enjoy them for what they could give, and when cling-itis developed, walk away with a smile, no hard feelings.

  Casey was different. And that was an understatement. Six months into their relationship, and there were days when he still didn’t know if they had a relationship.

  He tried like hell to get back to his old attitude. Accept whatever Casey offered, which was plenty, and let it go at that. Tried like hell, and failed miserably. She was under his skin and he was stuck with it. Worse, he wanted to stay stuck.

  And Casey was a TV producer. They had met when Belle died. Casey had been working on a story about Belle and she had ended up helping R.J. catch Belle’s killer.

  It had been hard to say no to Casey’s project on Belle. In fact, it had been so hard R.J. hadn’t even tried. He’d gone meekly in front of the camera and said his piece. Because that’s what Casey wanted. He was a tough guy in a tough job, but when Casey wanted something… Somehow he just wasn’t tough enough to say no to her.

  So there was his face, all over network TV. And the show got terrific ratings, which was great for Casey’s career. But for his, it was a kiss of death. Because every time he showed up to do surveillance lately, some bozo would light up with a goofy grin, point a finger, and shout, “Hey! You’re that guy on TV!” And there went the job.

  To be fair, he had to admit that Casey had been helpful finding a solution. Had helped him get ready for the job today, in fact, and so far everything was going smoothly.

  Until now.

  R.J. snapped out of his thoughts when he realized he was being followed. More accurately, he was being stalked. He stopped in front of a store window and looked inside for a moment. It was a butcher shop. R.J. pretended to be very interested in a duck and a pair of rabbits hanging in the window, headless and skinned. Of course he was really just looking in the glass. It was an old trick, but it still worked, especially on the kind of punk who seemed to be following R.J. right now.

  In R.J.’s business, if somebody was following you it was never good news, and it could get very bad. Outraged lovers have long memories, and R.J. was good at his job. He’d been a private investigator specializing in marital problems long enough that he’d made quite a few enemies. But this didn’t look like one of them.

  Reflected in the butcher shop window was a young guy with baggy clothes, baseball cap backwards—a real cliché. Probably hadn’t been watching MTV and didn’t know that New York punks weren’t wearing that stuff anymore. Very sad, no sense of being on the cutting edge of society’s deterioration. But this punk was definitely following him.

  R.J. hid a grin. The kid was in for a surprise.

  R.J. moved slowly down the street. What the hell, make it easy for the punk. Get it over with. And sure enough he was no more than half a block further when the little shit made his move.

  “Give it up, bitch,” came the voice. R.J. could tell the kid was fighting to keep his voice from cracking. He felt a tug on his shoulder bag, but held on hard. “Come on, old lady,” the kid said, “just give it up.”

  R.J. struggled for a minute, getting real pleasure thinking of the surprise this creep was going to get. Then the pulls on his shoulder bag got to be too much and R.J. spu
n on the balls of his feet and planted his fingertips in the punk’s gut, right under the rib cage. The creep grunted, “Uhhk,” and collapsed onto the sidewalk.

  The people on the street had been moving casually around them. R.J. pulled out The Big E, his .357 Magnum, from its resting place in the waistband of his dress, and the people gave them a slightly wider berth, but traffic moved on undisturbed. Nobody screamed, nobody yelled for a cop, nobody tried to wrestle him to the ground—nothing. Just a quick glance and a slightly faster pace.

  I love this town, R.J. thought. He knelt and put the nose of the huge gun into the punk’s earhole. “Us old ladies are getting tired of punks like you,” he said in the quavery little voice he’d been practicing. “We’re learning to fight back.”

  R.J. pulled the hammer back on his pistol. It sounded loud even to him. To the kid it must have sounded like God’s footsteps. “Pass the word, punk,” R.J. quavered. “Old ladies are off-limits. Next time I pull the trigger.”

  The kid’s eyes were basketball-sized when R.J. stood up. Just for luck, he planted a hard kick in the punk’s crotch and watched him shrivel up, writhing on the sidewalk like a worm on a hot plate. “Remember: Hands off old ladies, or else,” R.J. said, and walked away grinning.

  It was good to know the disguise worked well enough to fool a punk like that. It would be plenty good enough for his job this afternoon, too. And even better, it had been fun to put it on.

  Casey had sat him in a chair and worked on his face for over an hour, using all the little makeup tricks she’d picked up in a career in TV. When she was done and showed him his reflection, R.J. was stunned.

  “Holy shit,” he’d said.

  “Why so surprised?” Casey had asked him.

  “I look like a little old lady, for Christ’s sake.”

  She took the mirror away. “There’s a little old lady in all of us, just waiting to get out. Stand up.”

  She’d dressed him in a housedress, padded out with stuff she’d borrowed from a friend in a costume-rental house who owed her a few favors.

  And just like that, he looked like an old lady.

  He stepped to the big mirror to take a look. He stopped after two steps when he heard Casey groan. “What?”

  She shook her head. “Not like that. Jesus, R.J., you walk like Lawrence Taylor.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because you’re an old lady, schmuck. Here—”

  She’d put her hands on him, bending him over.

  “You’re old. This whole area hurts. So you walk like this. Yeah. Now the legs—knees are shot, keep ’em locked. Better. Walk across the room. Again.”

  And he’d practiced. After about forty minutes, she nodded. “All right. That’s pretty close.”

  “Jesus,” he complained. “I didn’t know you were Method.”

  “I don’t want you to get caught.”

  R.J. grinned. “Thinking of me in a holding cell dressed like this?”

  “No. It might hurt my career if they knew I hung out with a cross-dresser,” she said.

  “Thanks, Wingate. I’ll remember this.”

  “Just remember how to walk. Hmmp,” she said.

  “Hmmp what?”

  She shook her head. “In a really weird kind of way—it’s very…attractive,” Casey said, her tongue resting on her lip.

  And before he really knew what was happening the costume was all over the floor, and he was an hour later than he thought he would be to his stakeout.

  It was worth it. Something had gotten into Casey, into both of them, and they had been all over the floor, completely wild. Maybe it really was the costume, and maybe the costume was just an excuse. For whatever else was going on—the moon, or maybe Aquarius was in Jupiter or something. Maybe it was just the weather. Sure, that was probably it; the change in weather. It was spring, goddammit.

  R.J. grinned. Spring in New York. He loved it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Reverend Lake was terribly afraid his wife might be “seeing” someone.

  He sat in the chair across from R.J.’s desk, shaking hands with himself and knotting his fingers as he tried to think of how to say it.

  “She’s somewhat younger than I,” said the preacher. He self-consciously jerked a hand up to his salt-and-pepper hair, more salt than pepper. “And I’m afraid that I, well—” He shrugged. “It is sometimes hard to be as attentive as one might think ideal. I am shepherd of a large flock, all with their own problems, which are my problems. And Cassandra…”

  “Cassandra would be your wife?” R.J. prompted.

  The reverend looked away. “I’m sure it’s all very innocent. I just worry about her so very much. She is not too much of the world,” the good reverend said. “Many of us Baptists have the same failing, of being somewhat otherworldly,” he said with a modest smile. “My wife is one such. I should like to know that she is all right. That’s all.”

  “That’s not quite the way I work it,” R.J. told him. “What I can do is keep an eye on her, and get some photographs of who she’s seeing and what she’s doing.”

  “Photographs? I don’t—Is that really necessary?”

  “Yeah, it is,” R.J. said. “Otherwise, you won’t believe me. You won’t know what I’ve been doing for your money, and you won’t like that, because it’s going to be a lot of money.”

  “What do you mean by a lot?” he asked, and R.J. knew from the way he said it that the guy would pay.

  Sure enough, the check had cleared, and R.J. had been tailing Mrs. Lake for a week. The reverend had been afraid Mrs. Lake might be seeing somebody, and after two days R.J. knew the reverend was wrong. Mrs. Lake wasn’t seeing anybody. She was, however, screwing everything that moved, including the albino dwarf she was with this afternoon.

  It had taken R.J. two days of surveillance in his old-lady outfit before he could believe what he was seeing. The woman was definitely not normal. Either she was a full-fledged clinical nymphomaniac or—

  Or what? Hell, it wasn’t any of his business, or what. He would take the pictures this afternoon and that would be the end of it. But if this daily afternoon orgy stuff had started recently, the woman was no nympho. That kind of thing didn’t start suddenly, like from a bump on the head or something. It was a lifelong pattern. No, if Mrs. Lake had suddenly developed a taste for sex—more sex every day than most people have in a month—it probably meant she had found the good reverend cheating and was getting her revenge. That’s just the way people were.

  But Reverend Lake was the client, so it didn’t matter who or what he was screwing. Just so long as the check cleared, the reverend could be getting it on with the whole cast of Tommy. He wasn’t in this business to moralize or make people better. He was in this business to take a guy’s money for snapping pictures of the guy’s wife with no clothes on, doing the wild thing with a stranger.

  Life was funny.

  Maybe because it was so full of people.

  R.J. stopped outside the small hotel in the East Twenties where Mrs. Lake had taken her “dates” every afternoon this week. A nighttime photo session was easier. He could just sneak in, flash the pictures, and be off. Everybody was half-asleep, a little stunned, confused by the bright flash.

  But in the afternoon, just getting past the desk could be tricky. And then when he took the pictures people were more likely to object, try to grab the camera, hit him with a chair. Maybe they were more full of adrenaline in daylight. Who knew? Still, a lot of people seemed to check into cheap hotels with strangers in the afternoon, so there really wasn’t any choice.

  To avoid the desk, R.J. took the service stairs in the alley beside the hotel. He had wedged a wad of tinfoil into the lock yesterday so the door would open. He waddled up to the third floor, holding his skirts out to one side. No wonder old ladies walked so slowly. How did they move at all dressed like this?

  He got to the third floor landing and almost tripped as he dropped his skirts. He caught himself and staggered quietly down
the hall, pulling his camera from his shoulder bag and checking it over one last time. He paused at 304 and listened. Yeah, that was passion going on inside. He’d heard it often enough. Even felt it once or twice. He moved on to the end of the hall, where through the window, he could reach the fire escape.

  Glancing back to make sure nobody was watching—Look, mom, that old lady is jumping out the window!—R.J. slid the window up and stepped down onto the fire escape.

  Room 304 was about halfway back the way he’d come. The fire escape was an old one, and rickety. The hotel was probably paying off the inspector. Cheaper than replacing the thing.

  As R.J. made it about halfway to 304 the fire escape gave a terrible dry creak and swung out from the wall several feet.

  It hung there, swaying like a spastic dinosaur for what seemed like hours, but was probably more like thirty seconds. R.J. held his breath, waited for it to hold still again, then moved on, swearing. Once he got to the next steel section, the thing behaved itself.

  R.J. counted windows along the wall, hoping not to be seen but not really caring, until he came to 304. Then he flattened himself against the wall to the side of the window and reached into his shoulder bag. He pulled out a kid’s toy, a small plastic periscope made of bright yellow plastic. The thing made him look and feel stupid, but it worked.

  He poked the head of the periscope around to peek into the window. The window looked unlatched—why not? It was on the third floor. And they’d want to let some air in between rounds.

  Over on the bed there was a dim shape and R.J. squinted through the cheap lens to make out the details. Sure enough, the beast with two backs. Except one of the backs was small, white, and stuck up like a camel’s. The dwarf.

  R.J. tucked away the periscope and got the camera ready. Holding it in his right hand with one finger on the trigger, he slid the window up with his left hand, swung around into the room, and started shooting.

  “Hiya, folks,” he called out cheerily, snapping pictures. “Everybody ready? Okay, remake of The Wizard of Oz, take one.”

  Long experience had taught R.J. not to try to guess how people would react when they were caught, literally, with their pants down. Even so, he hadn’t expected trouble. Not from a preacher’s wife and a dwarf.