The Remake Read Online Free PDF Page B

a nice day,” said R.J. grimly, and headed back the way the uniform had pointed.
    I ought to move, R.J. thought. Tahiti, maybe. Or Sri Lanka. Anyplace where a clipboard is a free pass to be a bully is no place to live.
    Going through a large gray door, R.J. found himself in a hallway. At the far end he could see the glowing red letters of an Exit sign. It hung over a gray metal door. R.J. went through the door and found a flight of stairs next to a service elevator. He pushed the Up button, and a moment later the doors slid open.
    R.J. rode up to the top floor without interruption. He got out of the elevator, and looked around for a clue to the whereabouts of the Presidential Suite. The Pierre wasn’t the kind of place to put a brass plaque on the wall and let a hard-working guy know which room was the right one. Naw, they were way too tastefully discreet. R.J. would have to work at it.
    About halfway down the hall there were two large oak doors. They looked fairly presidential to R.J. The rest of the rooms on the floor had single doors.
    A large serving cart was parked to the side of the double door. The ruins of a presidential-looking breakfast were lying all over the cart. R.J. stepped forward to survey the contents. A bill was tucked under a plate of half-nibbled lox. There was an absurd total at the bottom, and next to it, a scrawled signature: J. Wagt , it looked like. But hell, a signature is a signature. R.J. was willing to bet the ranch that Wagt was really Wright.
    Some days, J. thought, being a detective was a lot easier than others. He knocked on the double door.
    Just as he was getting ready to knock for a second time, the door swung open. Inside stood a girl, no more than twenty-one. She was medium height, slender, with black hair that was obviously dyed from a lighter shade, and dressed in deliberately slashed, baggy clothes. The girl stared at R.J. with an empty expression. Then suddenly, a look of recognition swam into her pale blue eyes.
    “Oh,” she said.
    “Is Janine Wright here?” R.J. asked.
    The girl nodded. “Come on in,” she said, with an air of who-the-hell-cares that made R.J. certain Janine Wright wouldn’t like it.
    He went in, anyway.
    Janine Wright was sitting on a settee that probably cost more than any car R.J. had ever owned. She was an elegant-looking woman with short blond hair and the hardest eyes R.J. had ever seen. She was dressed in a two-inch-thick terry-cloth robe and had a telephone glued to her ear, and as he walked into the room she glanced up at him like he was a piece of second-hand furniture.
    “Fuck that,” she said into the phone, “and fuck you.” She looked away, to a sleazy-looking, mean-faced little guy in a three-piece suit sitting on the opposite end of the settee. She snapped her fingers at him and he delivered a cigarette, then lit it for her.
    Janine Wright looked back at R.J. And spoke into the phone. “No. You’re dead, you hear me? You don’t work, ever again. You want me to spell it? I own your balls now. Well, eat shit and die, asshole,” and she hung up. “Fix it, Murray,” she said to the weasel.
    Her eyes now locked onto R.J. “Well,” she said, and her voice was doing the same thing her eyes had done, talking to him as if he couldn’t really understand words. “You look just like him.”
    R.J. had expected to start off by telling her who he was. Now he hesitated. The way she had said that had boxed him in, dismissed him at the same time it identified him. He felt like a pet caught pissing on the rug.
    “Well?” she prompted.
    “A lot of people think I look just like him,” he said. “A little makeup, the right clothes, I would look just like him.” He was about to add, “And that could cause you some bad publicity,” but the weasel didn’t let him.
    “Do you know how much trouble you’re in, coming in here like this?” the little guy barked. R.J. corrected his first impression. Not a weasel; one of those scruffy, obnoxious