Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Forty-Nine

I sat in the same room as before with Dr. John Melvin. It was turning into our place.

Melvin acted as if he were even more delighted to see me this time.

“Finding out that you wanted to visit me again was such a pleasant surprise, Sunny,” he said.

“Visit implies something social,” I said. “For me, this is about as pleasant as seeing my OB/GYN.”

He smiled.

“Does your ex-husband still find that bitch mouth of yours attractive?” he said.

“Endlessly,” I said.

“I actually look at our verbal sparring as foreplay,” Melvin said.

Now I smiled.

“Well, John,” I said, “you’re probably able to teach a master class in self-pleasuring.”

He’d kept his beard trimmed and gotten another haircut since the last time I visited. His old black-framed glasses were back.

“So what has brought us together again, other than destiny?” he said.

“Did you have someone try to kill Joe Doyle?”

“Now, that is such an interesting question,” he said. “And makes me want to ask a couple questions of my own.”

His voice was as soothing and melodious as ever. I imagined that the victims of his sexual assaults heard the same thing until the drugs he’d fed them began to kick in.

“My first question is why you think I would be involved in something as heinous as that with my old friend Joe?” he said. “And my second question goes something like this: Even if I had ordered a hit like that, why the fuck would I tell the person most responsible for me being in my current circumstances?”

I crossed my legs, carefully, because of the shortness of a skirt I had worn here for my own twisted amusement.

“Actually, John,” I said, “the person most responsible for you being in your current circumstances, the result of being a sexual freak, is you.”

“A debatable point,” he said.

“Only if you’re batshit crazy enough to actually believe that.”

He sighed.

“All I know about someone taking a shot at Joe Doyle is what I’ve heard,” he said.

“Who said somebody shot at him?”

Melvin shook his head.

“As I said, one hears things.”

His pallor hadn’t improved since the last time we’d been in this room together, to the point where it seemed to be the exact shade of his gray jumpsuit.

“Shame about your father getting caught in the crossfire,” he said. “How’s he doing?”

I ignored him.

“Joe Doyle says you continue to blame him for your most recent appeals being folded up into a party hat by the parole board,” I said.

“Things might have been different if he’d put forth his best effort,” Melvin said.

“I keep wondering,” I said, “what would an actual therapist say about a blamer like you.”

“Did you actually come here looking for some sort of full confession from me?” he said. “If so, we’re going to be here awhile.”

“They do say confession is good for the soul,” I said. “But that presupposes that you have a soul.”

“You know, Sunny,” he said, “the way dead bodies keep popping up around you, maybe you should consider yourself fortunate that your father is still among the living.”

I stared at him now. Even as we engaged in verbal cat-and-mouse, I never lost sight of the fact that he was both a monster and a predator.

“What sort of game are you playing here?” I said.

He seemed to brighten suddenly.

“Game?” he said. “Now, that would presuppose that there’s only one, wouldn’t it?”

He stood now, this aging jailhouse rat who still saw himself as some kind of dandy.

“You appear to have wasted today’s drive out to Concord,” he said.

“How so?”

“You wanted to find out if I had something to do with that man in black shooting your father,” he said. “And I’ve disappointed you.”

“Incidentally?” I said. “How’d you know the shooter was wearing black?”

He ignored me, started to shuffle toward the door. As the guard opened it for him, he stopped and turned back to me.

“I just worry sometimes that everything going on around my ex-wife,” he said, “is just a lot of shiny-object misdirection, and that the person in the most danger here might be you, Sunny.”

He laughed as the guard continued to hold the door open for him.

“I mean, wouldn’t that be a plot twist worthy of the great Melanie Joan Hall?” he said.

Then he was gone.

And I wondered, not for the first time, who gave Dr. John Melvin the creeps.