Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Thirty-Five

Spike offered to make the road trip with me to upstate New York, saying he bet Molly Crane could watch Melanie Joan for a couple days. I told him that as much as we both loved Molly, and knew she’d do it if asked, that he needed to stay behind and watch Rosie and Melanie Joan, in that order.

“Oh, poo,” he said.

“ ‘Poo’?”

“I told you I was spending too much time with her,” Spike said. “Hence my generous offer to travel with you to the heartland.”

“Central New York is hardly the heartland,” I said.

“To me it is,” Spike said.

My father offered to go with me as well. I told him I didn’t require a partner for this one, as great a partner as he had once been with the cops. Richie also offered to go with me, telling me it would be like the good old days, the two of us being a team again.

“You know what the kids say?” I said. “The good old days are now.”

“What kids?” he said.

I told him I’d call if I needed him. Richie said I always said that, but rarely called.

“I did in the good old days,” I said.

As I got closer to leaving, Melanie Joan became more adamant that I would be wasting my time, she couldn’t see the point of poking around in what she said would have been a misspent youth, except she wasn’t spending much of anything at that point in her life. But I kept pointing out that she actually seemed to have done pretty well for herself, considering that she’d written the best seller that would change everything for her.

“All work and no play, and I mean no play, made Mellie — Good Lord, that’s what they called me in those days — a very dull girl,” she said.

“Perhaps you made an enemy you didn’t know about,” I said. “Someone you might have thought was a friend.”

“I didn’t have time for friends,” she said. “I was too busy working.”

“You did have time to marry one of your former professors,” I said.

She waved her hand dismissively.

“I should have just bought a night-light,” she said. “It would have been much cheaper.”

I was packed by now, my overnight canvas bag near the front door, reservation made at the Hampton Inn on Genesee Street in Utica, where, among other things, they advertised a fresh duvet every day.

“No one voluntarily makes a trip there,” Melanie Joan said. “I’ve frequently told people that if I ever went back it would be because I took the wrong plane.”

“When I was in college,” I said, “I briefly dated a boy from Syracuse. I kind of liked the area.”

“I liked putting it in my rearview mirror.”

“Is there anybody from that period with whom you have stayed in touch?” I said.

“Not hardly.”

“Not even your first husband?”

“Especially my first husband,” she said.

“You must have some good memories,” I said.

“If you find one,” she said, “let me know, by all means.”

I headed down to Mass Ave. and got on the Mass Pike there, heading west. Waze said the trip would take four hours without any unexpected delays. Fine with me. The last time I had put any real miles on my car was with Jesse, a weekend trip up to Bar Harbor, a little more than a year ago, in a much better time for both of us. And a much better space, not just in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Now he said he needed a different kind of space. So did I. Dr. Susan Silverman said that people always talked about finding their truth, but that the reality was that most of the time it found you. Being apart from Jesse was my truth with him now. His truth was the same with me.

I wasn’t sure how Rita Fiore, the redheaded she-wolf, fit into that ideal. Richie Burke, in his endless quest to make me both understand and appreciate hockey, had explained once when he’d taken me to a Bruins game that the key to good offense was simply filling open spaces.

Well, I thought, Ms. Rita Fiore had sure done that with Jesse Stone. The last time I had spoken to Jesse I had informed him that she wasn’t his type.

“You’re right,” he said.

“I am?”

“You’re my type,” he said. “But how’s that working out for us?”

Before that particular conversation had ended he’d said, “Who’s your type, Richie or me? And you can only pick one.”

“You don’t get to make the rules,” I’d said.

“No shit,” Jesse had said.

I drove and tried not to think about the men in my life and listened to loud music instead. When I was with Rosie at night, alone with a book or a case or a glass of Irish whiskey, I loved listening to jazz. Today I started with the Stones, in honor of the great Charlie Watts, who’d just passed, the coolest and most laid-back drummer in rock-and-roll history. Maybe I should call Jesse and tell him that after much consideration, I’d decided that neither he nor Richie was my type, but that Charlie Watts likely had been.

He’d always seemed to know who he was. The guy who some thought was the true rock of the Rolling Stones, someone who sat back there and set the beat, whatever the beat needed to be, neatly dressed, barely changing expression. Self-contained. Clearly knowing who he was.

Like Jesse and Richie.

“Would you be more attracted to either one of them if they shared more of themselves with you?” Susan Silverman had asked me once, in her own self-contained way.

“Yes!” I said.

“No,” she said quietly.

“Agree to disagree,” I said.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” she said in her office that day, “that the one holding back too much in these relationships is you?”

I’d smiled at her.

“Here we go with the dime-store psychology,” I said.

“Hardly the going rate in Cambridge,” she’d said.

I crossed into New York State. By now I was listening to Keith Urban, that cutie. I was particular about what country music I listened to, but I liked him. If I could get him away from Nicole, he could hold back as much of himself as he wanted.

Was Melanie Joan frightened of what I might find out if I started poking around at Whitesboro College? Or was she simply frightened right now, period, because of what was happening to her and what had just happened to Richard Gross?

Maybe a little of both.

If she had indeed stolen somebody else’s work, then why had she hired me in the first place? I kept coming back to that.

I called Frank Belson on his office number and asked about Gross’s murder and if there were any new developments.

“No,” he snapped.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No,” Belson said. “I’m sorry. I meant to say fuck no.”

And hung up on me.

I stopped about a half-hour into New York. These turnpike rest areas all looked the same to me, the way shopping malls did. I used the ladies’ room and bought a Coke Zero and a guilty-pleasure Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, knowing that some might say that the combination of candy and a diet soft drink was counterintuitive. I thought of it as establishing a crucial and delicate balance to my personal nutrition.

I didn’t even check Waze now to pinpoint my estimated time of arrival. I’d get to Utica when I got there. I was, I decided, having a very nice day. There were no calls from my father. None from Spike, or Melanie Joan.

It actually might have been fun to have Richie along, now that I thought about it. The last time the two of us had taken a long car ride together was when we had decided to skip the car ferry from New London to Orient Point as a way of getting out to eastern Long Island and driven all the way out to Montauk, even spending one night at the Memory Motel, but just one, in honor of the Stones.

We were together then. Just not together together. Before we were apart again.

On the ride back to Boston he’d said, “Why isn’t loving each other the way we do, and the way we always will, not enough?”

It wasn’t just late at night that you thought about things. Sometimes on I-90, heading west.

I told him if I ever figured that one out, he’d be the first to know.

I was listening to Gaga when I finally got off at exit 31 in Utica, then let Waze help me make my way to North Genesee Street, and my Hampton Inn.

I checked in, dropped my bag in a surprisingly spacious room. It was still only the middle of the afternoon, which gave me plenty of time to drive over to Whitesboro College, located on the Utica/Whitesboro line.

No music now.

Just Sunny Randall, ace detective, thinking out loud.

“Mellie Krause,” I said. “Where you at, girl?”