Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Twenty-Six

I considered my options on how to tell Melanie Joan, and when, but finally decided that there was nothing to be gained by waiting, and went upstairs and gave her the news about Richard Gross as gently as I could. It was like awakening someone and walking them straight into a nightmare.

Gentle didn’t work, as I knew it wouldn’t.

“Nooooooo!” she wailed.

She got herself upright on the bed, hugging herself, making me repeat the news, crying hysterically, rocking from side to side, her hysteria only becoming worse when I then told her how Gross had died, and where, and that I was on my way over to the playground, only a few blocks away, to find out more.

I then called and woke Samantha Heller and gave her the news about Gross and asked her to get over to the house as quickly as she could. I told her to sit with Melanie Joan while I went over to the crime scene, and to bring any good drugs she might have with her. She told me Melanie Joan’s drugs were much, much better, and that I could trust her on that.

Samantha was still staying at The Newbury. I heard her at the front door about fifteen minutes after I called. By then, the only medication I’d given Melanie Joan was brandy. If she was going to medicate on top of that, Samantha and God could sort it all out.

Samantha looked a lot more put together than I felt considering the hour. As I walked out the door, I heard another long, mournful wail from upstairs.

I’d put on running shoes, knowing I could jog to the Myrtle Street Playground as quickly as I could get in the car and drive over there and try to find a place to park even at the fringes of the police activity I knew I’d encounter when I got there.

I quickly made my way up Charles to Joy to Myrtle. As I ran it occurred to me that the neighborhood wasn’t so far from where Alex Drysdale, the hedge-fund guy who had tried to steal Spike’s, had been shot to death. Beacon Hill, I decided, was clearly going to hell in a handbasket.

I saw all the flashing cop lights as I approached the playground. I knew the block well, because sometimes Rosie and I would take an extended walk and I would let her run around unleashed, and frolic a bit with other dogs, preferably smallish ones. I also knew that the Myrtle Street Playground closed at 11:30.

Just not tonight, apparently.

Belson spotted me as the first uniform I encountered at the entrance tried to stop me. Frank was standing near where there had once been a turtle sculpture, until the parents in the neighborhood decided the bronze got too dangerously hot in the summer. The headlines had called it Myrtle the Killer Turtle at the time. Jesse Stone used to talk all the time about the kind of shit you managed to remember in the night.

“Let her pass,” Belson said.

“Friend of yours, Lieutenant?” the uniform guy said.

“Depends on the occasion,” Frank Belson said.

It had been a cool evening. Belson would have been wearing his raincoat even if it had not been. As always, he had an unlit cigar in his hand, which he carried around with him like it was a security blanket. As I made my way to him, he was making small turns and looking around at the playground. The long circular bench. The stone wall behind it. The red-brick buildings that formed the real perimeter. The playground itself, with slides and monkey bars and the rest of it. The wrought-iron fencing, and gate through which I’d just entered. There were enough squad cars, lights continuing to flash, to accelerate night getting closer to dawn. Truly the whole area was lit as if a movie were being shot here, this one about murder. Always the main event, in the movies and in real life.

I knew that in an hour or two, whenever Belson was back in his office at Schroeder Plaza, beginning to unpack everything he’d seen here, he would remember every detail of his crime scene, right down to the colors of the swing set and slides, as if he’d been snapping one picture after another with his phone.

He had, I noted, grown a beard since I’d last seen him. But then he’d always looked as if he needed a shave, day or night.

“A beard, Frank?”

“Lisa thinks it makes me look younger, even with the gray.”

“Does it tickle her when the two of you make out?”

He deftly used the cigar to give me the finger, then quickly got down to business.

“Whoever did it knew how to do it,” Belson said.

I knew he was going to tell me how, in more detail than I required, nothing I could do to stop him.

“Severed the windpipe below the larynx,” he said. He made a slashing motion with his index finger. “That way there was no screaming. You do it right, and it looks like this guy did, once the carotid artery gets cut, no blood can reach the brain. But it sure can make a goddamn mess.”

“Glad I didn’t arrive sooner,” I said.

“The whole thing, end to end so to speak, takes about half a minute, if you get the right spot first try,” Belson said. “Which our killer did.”

He chewed on the cigar a bit, took it out. I often wondered how many he went through in a day, and when he decided to break out a new one, and why.

“How long ago do you think it happened?” I said.

“ME is only guessing for now,” he said. “But she thinks it might have been around one in the morning, or thereabouts.”

“Nobody saw or heard anything?” I said.

He shook his head.

“It happened over there, far end of the bench, right in front of the wall.” He pointed at the red-brick building over my shoulder, one higher than most in the neighborhood. “Even if somebody had heard something, there’s no clear line of sight, almost from any direction. So whoever did it also knew where they wanted him sitting. Angle of the wound says it got done from behind.”

“You think he knew the person who did it?” I said.

“Or came here to meet whoever did it,” Belson said. “Like I said, when it happened it had to have happened fast. And quiet. Then no oxygen to the brain. Adios.”

“The only thing that makes sense to me,” I said, “as if there’s any sense to be made here, is that Gross must have come here thinking he could find out something about who’s been harassing Melanie Joan.”

“Somebody’s been harassing her?” Belson said.

I told him.

“So somebody thinks your dear friend, the one who writes the hot-sheets books, actually stole that shit?” he said.

“You can’t possibly have read one,” I said.

“Lisa,” he said. He shook his head. “Don’t judge.”

“Well,” I said, “Melanie Joan thinks of them as romance novels set against a world of adventure and even mystery.”

“You read that somewhere.”

“So I did.”

We both were seated on the bench by now, the other end of it from where Gross had been found. A guy taking a late-night walk with his dog was the one who had called it in. He saw Gross on the bench and thought he might be a drunk, or a homeless person. Or both. The gate was open. The dog walker didn’t like that. People who lived in buildings surrounding the playground, Belson had already learned, had keys. Like a club they joined. The last one out was supposed to lock up. The first one in the morning opened the gate back up. The guy was going over to roust the slumped figure on the bench when the dog went crazy.

Then the guy saw all the blood.

“Where’s the knife you told me about?” Belson said. “The one stuck in the book?”

“My office,” I said, telling him I’d had Lee Farrell dust it for me.

“Nice to have the BPD on twenty-four-hour call,” Belson said. “Must streamline things for you considerably.”

“Can I help it if people want to help me?” I said.

“I’m gonna need to see that knife,” Belson said. “Maybe it’s part of some freak’s collection.”

I knew cops were already canvassing the neighborhood. I had done the same thing when I was a rookie, fanning out along with everybody else. Pictures were still being taken of the playground. Playground as crime scene. I got up and walked to the other end of the bench and saw a sickening amount of dried blood. Richard Gross’s.

He’d told me he could take care of Melanie Joan and hadn’t realized that what he really needed was somebody to take care of him. Watch his back. Literally.

I saw Belson scribbling in one of his spiral notebooks.

“He was supposed to be flying to L.A. tonight,” I said. “Gross.”

Belson said, “I already checked with the Mandarin. Looking for incoming calls. He got one about seven o’clock, about the time he should have been leaving for the airport. Then another at midnight.”

“You able to get the number?”

Belson snorted. “You’re not gonna believe this,” he said. “But both calls were placed from a bank of pay phones at the bus terminal at South Station.”

“There’s still pay phones?” I said. “I thought they disappeared about the same time boom boxes did.”

Belson put away his notebook. “Why does a guy come to this spot in the middle of the night?”

“He and Melanie Joan were sleeping together,” I said. “Maybe he really did want to be her hero.”

“Maybe he thought he was a character in one of her goddamn books,” Belson said. “Poor bastard didn’t know that you’re the one who wants to be the hero of every drama.”

“I prefer to think of it as progressive feminist advocacy,” I said.

Belson squinted at me. “You talk an amazing amount of shit. You know that, right?” he said.

“Sadly,” I said, “I do know.”

“You think there’s more going on here than someone looking to get even for Melanie Joan copying off somebody else’s paper?” he said.

“My father told me one time that murder’s not just about motive,” I said. “It’s about stakes, too. And that the sooner you identify them, the sooner you can crack the case.”

“So what are the stakes here?” Belson said.

“Wish I knew,” I said.

I stood up. Looked at my watch. Past three in the morning. I was hoping that Melanie Joan would be asleep when I got back to River Street Place.

“But I’ve got to level, Lieutenant,” I said. “I’m starting to think that the things I don’t know about this case could fill a book.”

“Book reference,” Belson said, nodding. “Got it.”