Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Forty-Three

Melanie Joan didn’t fire me when we got back to the house. She showered and went through the process of remaking her face and Spike picked her up to go shopping, before she was scheduled to have a late breakfast with the showrunner for the new series at the Courtyard Tea Room, inside the Public Library. I knew what a showrunner was by now. I had briefly dated a Hollywood agent, after all.

“Shopping always seems to pick up her spirits,” Spike whispered to me on his way out the door.

I whispered back that Melanie Joan appeared to need shopping the way the rest of us needed oxygen.

“And that’s supposed to be a bad thing?” Spike said.

Before I walked to my office I called Tom Gorman at the Utica newspaper.

“Emma Stone!” he said.

“Sad,” I said.

“I know I can make this right,” he said, and then I told him how he could start trying.

He said he’d get back to me when he knew something.

“I feel like this is a do-over for us,” he said.

“Stop talking,” I said. “Start digging.”

“Out of the hole I put myself in?”

“Reporter-type digging,” I said.

A half-hour later I was happily in my office, indulging in a second cup of coffee, reviewing the notes I’d made about my conversations with Holly Hall, when Belson called.

He skipped the preliminaries, as always.

“You know a guy named Chaz Blackburn?” he said.

“He’s Melanie Joan’s editor,” I said. “But you already know that.”

“His housekeeper found him about two hours ago,” Frank Belson said.

I knew there was more. He never called with good news.

“Somebody cut his throat,” Belson said.