The Remake by Stephen Humphrey Bogart Read Free Book Online Page B

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