Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Twenty-Five

A few minutes after six, Melanie Joan came walking into what was still her house, unannounced and unapologetic for having not contacted me, nor Spike, all the live long day, even though we both just assumed she’d been with Richard Gross.

I immediately went with an old standby.

“We need to talk,” I said.

You find a good line, stay with it, and hope that it will eventually produce results.

Rosie and I were in the living room watching Maria Stephanos do the news on Channel 5.

I muted her.

“Talk, talk, talk!” Melanie Joan said. “All you ever want to do is talk!”

“You sound like Eliza Doolittle,” I said.

She ignored that one. Or it simply went right over her head.

“Can’t we just have a glass of wine and then go have a nice dinner and have some fun for a change?” she said.

“Without talking?” I said.

“Cute,” she said.

“Aw, shucks,” I said.

“What is it we need to talk about now?” she said.

“Your past,” I suggested.

“Which part?”

“The part after college.”

“Melanie Joan,” she said, lapsing into the third person as she occasionally did, “was such a dull girl in those days.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

“Well,” she said, “you’d be wrong. Nothing to see there, move along.”

“So you say.”

“Only because it’s true.”

From the time I had first met her, she had seen the world as she wanted it to be, not as it really was.

“Maybe if I had a better understanding of where you come from,” I said, “I could get a sense of how we got to where we are.”

“Oh, Sunny, don’t you know by now that my life is an open book?” she said.

I fought the urge to ask if she were discussing original material, or adapted.

“We can talk at dinner,” she said. “You pick the place.”

I stood down, telling her I’d make us a reservation, though I didn’t feel much like going out. But I decided to hedge my bets just slightly, asking her if she minded if I invited my father and Lee Farrell to join us along with Spike. She asked if they were both cute. I told her that the cuteness factor, with both of them, was through the roof. Particularly with my old man.

“But before you get any ideas,” I said, “my father’s the most married man in America, and Lee’s also gay.”

“Well,” she said, “nobody’s perfect.”

My father and Lee agreed to dinner. They met us about ninety minutes later, after what I thought was extended prep time for Melanie Joan, at a big round upstairs table at Abe & Louie’s overlooking Boylston. My father was courtly, kissing Melanie Joan’s hand when I introduced them. Spike lied his ass off and told Melanie Joan he missed her even though they’d been apart for just one day. Lee reminded Melanie Joan that he was an active member of the Boston Police Department, in case anybody stepped out of line.

“Finally,” Melanie Joan said, “I’ve got cops around when I need them.”

I couldn’t help smiling at the sight of Phil Randall and Lee seated next to each other on the other side of the table. An Odd Couple if there ever was one. The retired Homicide cop and the young gay one. I was already imagining the possibilities in Hollywood for a series.

After we’d all gorged on steak, we were sharing key lime pie and Abe & Louie’s skillet cookie and seven-layer chocolate cake.

“What the hell,” Spike said. “My feeling is that cholesterol can only kill you once.”

I’d asked Melanie Joan where Richard Gross was. She said he was taking a night flight back to Los Angeles.

“I miss him already,” she said.

“Who wouldn’t?” I said.

She had poured the brandy she’d just ordered into her coffee and took a drink.

I said to Melanie Joan, “I’ve done some new reading on the life and times of the girl formerly known as Melanie Joan Krause.”

“Borrrring,” she said in a singsong voice.

“Not to me,” I said. “I want to hear more about what it was like when you were writing your first novel.”

“Ah, my salad days,” she said. “And not just because we are talking about various eateries.”

She drank more of her brandy-laced coffee and said, “Yum.”

“Was there anybody helping you?” I said.

“Helping me write?” she said in a snappish tone. “Helping me come up with ideas? No, that was all me, Sunny. Somebody once wrote that writing was easy. All you had to do was open a vein and bleed.”

She smiled at me, completely without warmth, and held out her wrists.

“Want to see my scars?” she said.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “I’m no writer myself, but I’ve heard that most writers have a first and trusted reader. Sometimes more than one. I was just curious about who yours might have been. Maybe your first husband?”

“He was more a mentor than a teacher,” she said. She giggled. “But that was in bed.”

She had the coffee cup in both hands, and stared at me over it. I didn’t know why I felt as if I was about to be lied to, but somehow knew I was. I wasn’t a writer. But considered myself to be a pretty great reader. Of people, mostly.

“But the person who really turned me into a writer,” she said, “was my first editor, after all my years of writing and rewriting, and after he agreed to publish me.” She finished the coffee and put the cup down. “He took my first draft and sent me back to work. More hard, lonely work, just with him looking over my shoulder this time. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Spike decided to lighten the moment, musically.

“She did it her way,” he sang, as if his fist were a microphone.

Melanie Joan insisted on paying the check. I let her. I got a glimpse of the total, before tip, when the waiter placed it in front of her, and wanted to ask the kid if we’d broken a window. Or maybe we’d been at the table so long that it was like some sort of time-share.

My father and Lee called an Uber. Melanie Joan suggested we walk off the wine and steaks and desserts. Spike and I were game for going the distance if she was. Melanie Joan said she hadn’t walked this morning, feeling the need to inform me that she and Richard Gross had been otherwise occupied.

“Too much information,” I said.

“But I thought gathering information was your business,” she said.

“She likes to pick her spots,” Spike said.

We walked up Boylston to Arlington, made the left, cut diagonally across the Public Garden to Charles, then finally to the end of River Street Place. Spike said he was calling his own Uber now and heading over to Spike’s just to see if they were having any fun there without him.

I took Rosie out for her final tour of the neighborhood. Melanie Joan stayed behind to have what she called a grand finale of a nightcap.

When Rosie and I were back she said, “See, we managed to get through almost an entire evening without talking too much business.”

“It’s your business that’s at risk,” I said. “Which is why we need to talk more in the morning.”

“Damn it,” she said, “I was afraid of that.”

It was two in the morning when Frank Belson woke me up and asked if it was true what he’d heard, and that I was working with Melanie Joan Hall again. I told him he wouldn’t be calling if he didn’t already know that was true.

“But just to be sporting,” I said, “why do you ask, Frank?”

I was sitting up, wide awake. So was Rosie the dog.

“Because somebody just cut her manager’s throat at the Myrtle Street Playground,” Belson said.