Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Thirty-Two

In better times, I could have talked all of this out with Jesse Stone.

He was as much of a cop as Frank Belson was, even as a small-town chief up in Paradise, Mass. As much of a cop as Phil Randall had been, and thought he still was. Jesse had proved it again not long ago when he’d solved the murder of the mayor of Paradise, and nearly died in a shootout because of it.

When Belson dropped me at home, I went upstairs to the room I had turned into my art studio. Melanie Joan and Spike were still out, having driven up to the North Shore, to Marblehead, where the opening scenes for the new series would eventually be shot. They said they’d be back in time for dinner, but I told Spike they were on their own, I had somewhere to be later with my father.

“Mind telling me where?” he said.

I told him.

“Could you possibly live-stream it?” Spike said.

I painted for a while, a piece I had put aside but recently returned to, passionately, working off a photograph of the harbor in Stonington, Maine. I’d taken the photograph when Jesse and I had spent a weekend at an inn there, before we’d broken up. I thought it perfect. The image, not the weekend, though the weekend wasn’t half bad, either. So much color everywhere, lobster boats at rest, the lobster traps on the pier, small row houses as background, a returning mailboat around which everything else seemed to organize, even the water.

I worked for about an hour in the late-afternoon light that I loved in this room. It was my way of escaping, if only briefly, Melanie Joan and Richard Gross and Dr. John Melvin and the new information that had come in on Joe Doyle. When finished I sat down at the small antique writing table I’d placed near the window and took out my trusty legal pad, and once again tried to create some sort of order out of chaos by writing things down.

There was Melanie Joan on one side of the page, and Richard Gross, and the two chapters of the manuscript, and the knife, and the blood. On the other side of the page, there was my father, and his encounters with Joe Doyle, and my own encounter with him. Even the death of Joe Jr.

And now, smack in the middle, there was the name of Dr. John Melvin, and the line I had drawn right through him, from Richard Gross to Joe Doyle Sr.

I looked at the page and thought once again of Jesse. The man whose position on coincidence had never changed, from the first time I’d met him.

“No way,” he said often, “that God would leave that much shit to chance.”

Belson said he wanted to interview Doyle before I did, not because he thought that being connected to Melvin connected him to the murder of Richard Gross, but because Belson wasn’t much of a believer in coincidence, either. He said he’d let me know when he found out whatever he could find out, and then if I wanted to make another run at Doyle, to have at it.

But whatever John Melvin said, I knew that one thing was not in dispute, whether he had come right out and said it or not: He wanted revenge against Melanie Joan, and probably against me. And Joe Doyle wanted revenge against my father, whom he blamed for the death of his son. In some ways, it made him as unhinged as Melvin.

And Doyle the lawyer, right before my father had popped him a good one, had intimated in a ham-handed way that something might happen to me.

Now he was connected to Melvin, if Melvin was telling the truth, knowing how easy it would be for us to find out if he was lying.

Was I giving Melvin too much credit, and was I making somebody sitting in a prison cell more dangerous than he really was?

Or was the sick bastard just still playing mind games, not just with Melanie Joan, and not just with me, but with a couple powerful lawyers like Gross and Doyle?

And was it too much of a leap, or plain crazy, that somehow Doyle and Gross could be connected to each other?

I finally put down my pen and left the pad on the table. I had already cleaned off my brushes. I realized I was still wearing an old paint-splattered Paradise PD sweatshirt that Jesse had once given me.

Jesse.

Him again.

I thought about calling him right now, assuring him that it was a business call, nothing more, making a joke out of it, but telling him that I really could use some help on a couple cases I was working. Cases that had just intersected, out of nowhere.

Knowing he would do it for me. Knowing that I would always be able to count on him the way I could count on Spike.

And Richie.

Whom I still loved the way I still loved Jesse.

Not that it was doing me any good at the moment, romantically speaking, with either one of them.

I tapped the phone icon on my phone and went to my contacts and there was Jesse, right at the top of the J’s where he had always been. Not under Stone.

Just Jesse.

Then I stuck the phone in the back pocket of my jeans and went downstairs to clean myself up for another big night out with my dad.