Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Five

Melanie Joan’s current agent, Samantha Heller, was in my office over P. F. Chang’s at ten the next morning, for the meeting she had requested and one to which I had readily agreed. It had been only one night with Melanie Joan, but I was already looking for as much backup as I could find.

Samantha was very pretty and if she was somewhere in my demographic, she was carrying it off very well. If I knew that Melanie Joan went through agents the way she did husbands, Ms. Heller had to be aware of that fact as well. But she seemed to be one sharp cookie.

Could even women call other women cookies anymore?

Maybe Samantha would know.

She was blond, and taller than me. I’d always wanted to be taller than me. She was wearing a short leather jacket and jeans and also had a better figure than I did. We hadn’t even started working together yet and I was wondering if I needed to hate her.

“Having known some of Melanie Joan’s previous representatives,” I said, “you’re not exactly what I expected.”

She only made things worse for herself, at least from where I was sitting, by smiling a winner of a cover-girl smile.

“I’m told I sound much older on the phone,” she said.

“Your predecessors were, ah, slightly more mature, as I recall,” I said.

She held the smile. “Spoiler alert,” she said. “They ended up being just more ugly divorces for MJ.”

“Kind of her thing.”

Samantha Heller said, “She thought I might be better suited to tap into the zeitgeist.”

“I’ve always wondered,” I said, “if that was something you could actually do.”

She laughed. Her Prada bag had been dropped casually next to one of my client chairs. Her Golden Goose sneakers had the proper worn-in look, as if they’d first been worn by her mother. Whether we could actually work comfortably together was yet to be determined. But I could see already we could shop together.

Forget about hating her. I was starting to think it might be love. I asked how she became an agent. She laughed again and said, “Practice, practice, practice,” then told me she had bounced around a bit after college, before taking an entry-level job at McArdle and Lowell, Melanie Joan’s publisher. She’d finally become an assistant to Melanie Joan’s editor, then when Melanie Joan had fired yet another agent, it seemed like a natural fit for her to make the switch.

“Forget about me,” she said. “MJ made you sound like some sort of superhero.”

“No,” I said, “but my best friend is. His name is Spike.”

“I think Melanie Joan mentioned him,” she said. “He’s gay, right?”

“He tries not to make a big thing out of it.”

“She says he has everything except a cape.”

“He brings the cape out for Halloween, unless I beg him not to.”

I asked her how she came to this moment. “At the agency or in life?” she said.

“Life,” I said.

“I am a child of the Upper East Side of New York City,” she said. She smiled again. “I’m almost proud to say.”

“Oh,” I said. “That old place.”

“Dalton,” she said. “NYU, because I didn’t make the cut at Columbia, but couldn’t bring myself to leave the big, bad city. Only moved to Boston because I had a shot at McArdle and Lowell. Finally did the agent thing at Quill. Our agency. Graduated from there to a master’s degree in Melanie Joan Hall.”

“What’s your ultimate goal?” I said.

“Other than world domination?” she said.

I offered her coffee. She said tea if I had some. I told her that she was in luck, I had tea pods for my Keurig. I made a cup for her and Dunkin’ decaf coffee for myself. I’d already had so much caffeine in me this morning I’d considered challenging my Peloton trainer to a fistfight.

I heard her phone chirp from inside the bag. She didn’t grab for it as if it might go off. Before long we’d be picking out furniture.

“How much did she tell you?” Samantha asked.

“Enough to know how frightened she is,” I said. “About somebody coming after her this way, even more about it getting out.”

“Even though she says it’s a lie,” Samantha said. “We both know it is a lie, right?”

“I think ‘know’ might be a bit strong,” I said. I put air quotes around know. “But I’m ever hopeful.”

Samantha smiled again. “For better or worse,” she said, “Melanie Joan swears she has always written her own breathless prose.”

“I thought it was deathless prose.”

“Have it your way,” she said.

She had blue eyes the color of sapphires. As hurtful as the notion was, I saw her as a younger version of me. Blonder. And taller. God damn it.

“What I’m trying to wrap my head around,” I said, “is that if she is being blackmailed, why no demand?”

“This has only been going on for a week or so,” Samantha said. “For now, MJ feels as if this person is more interested in scaring the living shit out of her. And succeeding, I might add.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Based off of my time with her last night, mission accomplished.”

“It really is as if she’s being stalked all over again,” she said, “before you rescued the fair maiden that time.”

“She told you about that?”

“She tells everybody,” Samantha said.

The phone chirped again. This time she reached in, looked at the screen, nodded, casually tossed it back into the bag. Obviously even her steely will had limits. Sometimes I could go as long as two or three minutes without checking from whom a missed call had come.

“Not important?” I said.

“Depends on who you ask,” she said. “The great and powerful Richard Gross is trying to reach me. MJ’s lawyer. And manager. You’ve heard of him.”

“I spent a lot of time on a case in Los Angeles last year,” I said. “They call him Gross Points out there, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I’m impressed.”

“I’ve been known to check out The Hollywood Reporter,” I said.

“Look at you,” she said.

“Richard Gross has only been repping Melanie Joan for a few years, right?” I said.

“For a while I was afraid she might marry him,” she said.

“What’s he like?” I said. “Gross.”

She laughed. “Gross,” she said.

“You two don’t get along?’

Samantha said, “Richard doesn’t think she needs an agent, having now been blessed to have him in her world.”

“I’ll bet he can tap into the zeitgeist,” I said.

“Only if he thinks there really are points for him on the back end,” she said.

The phone chirped again. She ignored it again, and drank more of her tea. “So what do you think you can do?” Samantha asked. “Before things escalate.”

“Sounds as if that happened as soon as she got the email,” I said. “And just so we’re clear. You are convinced there is no possible way that she stole material, even when she was just getting started.”

She ran a hand through her hair. Mine had been that color once, in a shade I thought of as the original Sunny.

“Is it possible that there is someone out there who conceived a character they think strongly resembles Cassandra Demeter?” she said. “Sure. Even when we send one of Melanie Joan’s books out in Hollywood, and even though it’s someone as well known as her, we sometimes hear there are three other people pitching something similar.”

“But if it is true,” I said, “the injured person waited a long time to get even, right?”

“And must think they have a good reason to somehow get even with her,” she said. “A very good reason.”

Now it was my phone, the landline on my desk, ringing. The noise was loud enough to startle us both.

“Sunny Randall,” I said when I answered.

“He’s been in my room!” Melanie Joan shouted from her end of the call, right before Samantha Heller and I were on our way to The Newbury.