Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Four

We were back at The Newbury in her penthouse suite, having walked back from Davio’s, where I was afraid Armando might be considering a career change or perhaps even witness protection after seeing how little of our black cod each of us had eaten.

Now Melanie Joan was on her couch, feet up, sipping a brandy, telling me again how awful it all was.

“I feel as if that was well established before we left the restaurant,” I said.

“Don’t be snarky.”

I smiled. “Make me.”

At least she smiled back.

“I did not steal the idea for Cassandra!” she said, and not for the first time.

Cassandra Demeter, of course. The character Melanie Joan talked about as if she were quite real, and had made her quite famous. And stupidly rich.

“I believe you,” I said, also not for the first time, not that it seemed to provide any consolation.

Even with all of her theatrical starts and stops, I now knew Melanie Joan’s problem. Someone had contacted her via email, telling her that the novel that had put Melanie Joan on the literary map had originally been written by someone else.

“This awful person told me that Cassandra is somebody else’s work and he can prove it,” she said. “And that there would be no new character for the new TV show if I hadn’t stolen the idea for Cassandra in the first place.”

“The great-granddaughter,” I said. “That new character.”

“Destiny,” she said.

It was the name of the great-granddaughter, not an assessment of her current circumstances.

A sigh came out of Melanie Joan now that sounded more mournful than a country song. She might have started crying if she wasn’t worried about what it might do to her makeup.

“Has anybody ever accused you of plagiarism before?” I said.

“Don’t use that awful word!”

She took a big slug of brandy.

“Okay, let’s back up,” I said. “Whose content is it that you are supposed to have taken?”

“He won’t say,” I said. “Just that he has proof.”

“You know it’s a man who’s been contacting you?”

“I just assumed,” she said. “They’ve caused most of the problems in my life, haven’t they?”

Now I sighed.

“Don’t you use that tone with me,” she said.

The bottle of brandy was on the coffee table between us. I imagined myself grabbing it and drinking from it straight.

“Are you aware of something called Guerilla Mail?” Melanie Joan said.

Actually I was. It was an encrypted mail provider that had come up in a case I’d worked the previous year in Los Angeles involving a noted agent, and former boyfriend of sorts, named Tony Gault.

“And you got this email last week?” I said.

She nodded.

“May I see it?”

“I trashed it,” she said.

“Untrash it, please,” I said.

“I’m quite sure I deleted it after I trashed it.”

“I’ll go into your mail later and un-delete it,” I said. “For now, why don’t you just try to remember it as close to word for word as you can.”

Now she reached for the bottle of brandy. She had offered me some before. But I knew enough about myself to know that if I started drinking brandy with her, this might turn into a sleepover.

“This person said that they knew what I had done and that I knew what I had done,” Melanie Joan said. “And the pain I’d caused because of what I’d done, and not just to the original author.”

“And whoever this is,” I said, “they’re looking for money?”

She put her head back and closed her eyes and now looked every minute of the age I knew she was.

“I’m just assuming,” she said, “even if the turgid prose concluded with me being told that in the end, it was going to cost me more than money.”

She got up and walked to the window, glass in hand, and stared at the lights beyond the park.

“I simply cannot have this at this stage of my life,” she said. “Or, for that matter, any stage of my life. For a writer, even the suggestion that you might have done something like this really is a fate worse than death.”

“But you didn’t do it,” I said.

She wheeled to face me.

“It won’t matter!” she snapped. “It will be as if I’m wearing a scarlet letter.”

Then she told me the story of a noted romance novelist who had once been caught ripping off an even more famous and successful romance novelist. I was vaguely aware of both names.

“What happened?” I said.

“The woman who got caught had to write a big check is what happened,” Melanie Joan said. “She announced that a psychological disorder had made her do it, and got by with that well enough to resume her career, even though sales were never the same after that.” Melanie Joan seemed to sag. “And then she died.”

She sat back down on the couch.

“Please promise me that you’ll make this go away,” she said. “You must understand that for a writer, this is like being MeToo’ed.”

There were more questions that I knew needed to be asked. A lot more. I knew there was much she was not telling me. But I could see her starting to shut down. So I told her we would revisit this in the morning. She made me promise again that I would make it go away, the way I had once made her ex-husband go away, and for a long time. I told her I would try. She said that I had to do better than that.

I took the elevator down and walked around the park and up to Beacon before making a left on Charles, and then past the Charles Street Meeting House toward home. I stopped at one point and turned around, thinking that someone might be following me. But saw no one.

Probably just my imagination.

What happened when you hung around with a writer.

Occupational hazard, for both of us.