The Remake by Stephen Humphrey Bogart Page A

about five inches from R.J.’s shoe. “Not something a man ought to do.”
    And he dumped the carton onto the backseat, got into his car, and drove away.
    Jackson’s pals were at R.J.’s apartment and office, of course. Tony had flagged down a cab for R.J. and he’d gone to his home first. He was too late there. The detectives were already gone. The place had been searched thoroughly in a professional manner—in other words, trashed. It would take R.J. two days to clean up.
    Once again, his medicine chest had been cleaned out. Just when he really needed an aspirin.
    He went downtown to his office. He was just in time to see Detective Epstein come out and put one of those damned cardboard boxes into a car double-parked at the curb. Unfortunately, Epstein saw him, too.
    “Hey, Brooks!” Epstein shouted, waving him over.
    “Warrant and receipt, goddammit,” R.J. said, walking over to the skinny detective.
    “Sure, of course, naturally. And you can come upstairs with me and open up your safe.”
    “Fuck you.”
    Epstein waved the warrant around. “The warrant says.”
    “Fuck the warrant, too. I’ve had it with this crap.”
    Epstein sighed and tucked the paper into R.J.’s coat. “Come on, Brooksy, it’s legal and we’re all tired here. The sooner you open up, the sooner we can all go home and go to bed.”
    R.J. fought it for a few more minutes, but there was really nothing he could do and in the end he went up to his office and opened up his safe. He hated like hell to watch Epstein poking through the stuff inside, carefully picking everything up and looking it over from all sides.
    But it was finally over. Epstein didn’t find any poison, as far as R.J. could tell. That should have made him feel better, but he was too tired and mad to think about feeling better. There was nothing he could do about it, short of sitting in a jail cell while his lawyer ran up a big fee. It made him feel helpless on top of the mad and the tired, but that was all part of the package. That’s how it was when the cops got their teeth into you.
    R.J. went home to bed, just hoping it would all go away soon. Before he snapped and punched out a cop. Kates, for instance. Or Boggs. It meant a reserved seat in prison, but the longer this went on, the better that trade-off was going to look.
    R.J. was dragged down to Kates’s office maybe a dozen times over the next two weeks. That didn’t help his attitude, or his business. On the other hand, they always let him go afterward, which meant there was still some doubt in the tiny dark brains of Kates and Boggs. They were having fun playing with him, but they weren’t ready or able to make it stick.
    He still wasn’t worried enough to solve it himself, and the whole thing was starting to settle into an annoying noise in the background. Just like the mess that started it all, the business with the remake of As Time Goes By and that brass-bound bitch Janine Wright.
    Things were almost normal again for a day or two.
    Of course, that was too good to last.

CHAPTER 9
    “I’ve had a job offer,” Casey told him as they slipped into bed one night about two weeks after Boggs’s visit, and R.J. knew by the casual, lighthearted, why-should-you-care way she said it, he wasn’t going to like this much.
    “What kind of a job?” he asked her, shifting his weight up onto one elbow and pulling the covers around him a little tighter.
    “Associate producer,” she said. She slid one hand along his chest in an absentminded way that made his heart pound.
    “But you’re already a full producer,” R.J. said. “Why would you take a step down?”
    Her hand slid lower. “It’s not a step down. It’s not TV.”
    “Oh,” he said, already pretty distracted. “It’s not TV.”
    “No.”
    “I thought you did TV.”
    She brushed her fingertips lightly down his stomach. “I did. But this is too good to let it go.”
    R.J.’s mouth was dry. “So what is it?”
    “A movie.” Her hand circled his