Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Forty-Four

Charles (Chaz) Blackburn, gentleman editor, lived in an old Victorian — I sometimes wondered if there were young Victorians — in the Ash Street Historic District of Cambridge, between Brattle and Mount Auburn.

I called Melanie Joan when I got to the house. She said she had just arrived at the Public Library. I asked if Spike was with her. She said he was right next to her. Then I told her that Blackburn was dead, and how he’d gotten dead. She wailed in a way that I was sure startled the decent people at the library, and then began to sob.

The next voice I heard was Spike’s.

“I’ll meet you guys at home,” I said.

“On it,” he said.

Then I called Samantha Heller.

“First her lawyer, now her editor,” Samantha said. “I’m the agent. Do I need to worry?”

“There’s an old line a friend of mine uses,” I said. “ ‘I’m not paranoid, just extremely alert.’ ” And I told her to head over to River Street Place and I’d get there as soon as I could.

Belson was waiting for me inside the white picket fence surrounding what had been Chaz Blackburn’s front yard. The crime scene people were wrapping up their crime scening. There were just two squad cars left on the street along with Belson’s. His was halfway up the sidewalk. There were a few onlookers on Ash Place. But this was Cambridge. Residents probably thought they could get written up for gawking.

“ME figures it happened last night,” Belson said.

“Security cameras?” I said. “Doorbell cam?”

“No,” Belson said. “And no.”

He made an impatient gesture that took in the quaint, tree-lined street. Pretty to look at, understated, classy, expensive as hell. All the things I aspired to be.

“They probably think a security camera would fit in like a wart,” he said.

“Vivid imagery,” I said.

“Bite me,” he said.

He told me the housekeeper came twice a week, and had found the body slumped over the desk in the study that Charles had used as his home office.

“Eighty-two,” Belson said. “I looked him up. Still working. Now the poor bastard goes out like this.”

He opened the gate to the picket fence and leaned against his car and took a cigar out of his pocket and actually lit it.

“Don’t give me any shit about this,” he said. “I’ve got a wife for that.”

“Moi?”

“I hate to state the obvious,” he said once he had the cigar going, “but you appear to have a goddamn crime wave organizing around your client, one with lots and lots of blood.”

“Talk about an eye for detail,” I said.

“Just for the obvious,” he said.

He smoked and studied the outside of the house. He was still wearing his crime scene gloves. I was close enough to his air space to experience the full force of the cigar smoke.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” I said, “but do expensive cigars smell better than yours?”

“You ask me, they all smell like shit,” he said.

“Why do you still smoke them, then?” I said.

“Beats the shit out of me,” he said.

This was part of a familiar routine between us, the small talk that was a defense mechanism for moments like this, places like this, crimes like this. Belson took the cigar out of his mouth, studied it like it was a clue, and said, “What the hell is going on here?”

“I think somebody is trying to hurt her as much as they possibly can, and scare her to death, before they try to kill her to death,” I said.

“Why the editor?”

“He discovered her,” I said. “And helped her when nobody knew who she was. If he wasn’t a father figure, he was at least an uncle type.”

“You mean helped her become rich and famous,” Belson said.

“Helped her become Melanie Joan Hall,” I said.

“Nasty way to take people out, with a knife,” Belson said.

“We had this same conversation after somebody did Richard Gross,” I said.

“Whoever it is,” Belson said, “was allowed to get close enough to both of them to do it.”

“Or snuck up behind them,” I said, “like the fog coming in on little cat’s feet.”

“Carl Sandburg wrote that about cat’s feet,” Belson said proudly.

“You dog, Frank,” I said.

I was, I told myself again, surrounded by literary people.