Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Fifty-Five

Melanie Joan told me she wanted to hear everything about the memorial service, not to leave anything out. I’d spent two hours on the Mass Pike at a dead stop because of a tractor-trailer accident, and I was too tired right now for show-and-tell.

So I gave her a drive-thru version of the service and the scene in the gym. She said that she was sorry she’d missed what she called the bitch-off between Holly and Lisa. I told her I would elaborate tomorrow on an early-morning walk before the breakfast we’d scheduled with Samantha Heller, said good night to Spike before he left, poured myself a glass of Jameson, carried it and Rosie toward the stairs.

Even the conversation I wanted to have with her about the late Jennifer Price could wait until morning, when I expected to be far more alert than I presently was.

“I just want to leave you with one thought,” Melanie Joan said when I was halfway up the stairs. “Not only did Holly Hall hate me, she hated all of us.”

“Define us,” I said.

“All of us who were just as pretty as she was and way more talented, dear,” she said.

“I will keep that in mind,” I said.

“And by the way?” Melanie Joan continued. “She was the most jealous person I’ve ever known.”

I went upstairs, took a long, hot shower, did my brushing of teeth and hair and creaming of my face. But when I did get into bed, I dialed Holly Hall’s cell phone, not to share Melanie Joan’s withering assessment of her, but to ask a couple more questions about Jennifer Price.

I went straight to voicemail on the cell, then dialed the landline.

A woman answered.

“This is Sunny Randall,” I said. “To whom am I speaking?”

“This is Meg,” the woman said. “I was one of Charles’s caretakers.”

“Is Holly okay?” I said.

I was beginning to test high on paranoia.

“Oh, she’s perfectly fine,” Meg said. “She just decided on the spur of the moment, or so she said, to get away for a few days, and asked me to stay with the dog.”

“I wasn’t aware they had a dog,” I said.

“Some dogs bark when there are visitors,” Meg said. “Sammy generally hides under the bed.”

“I tried her cell,” I said. “She didn’t pick up.”

“It’s because the phone is right here on the kitchen table,” Meg said. “Holly said she was going rogue while she was away.”

“If she checks in with you,” I said, “would you tell her that I called?”

She said she would.

“You’re the private investigator, right?” Meg said.

“That is I.”

“Did you find what you came here looking for?” Meg said.

“Not so’s you’d notice,” I said.

In the morning, a few minutes after six, Melanie Joan and I were on our morning walk, undeterred when we stepped outside and a light rain began to fall. As it did, I stared up into a sky that was the color of pewter.

“It doesn’t look good up there,” I said to her.

“You’re not weaseling out on me because of a little rain,” she said. “Trust me. Someday when you’re my age, it will take more than rain to keep you from your appointed rounds.”

I grinned at her as I did some brief stretching.

“And what age is that, exactly?” I said.

“You continue to be not as funny as you think you are,” Melanie Joan said.

“I know,” I said sadly. “Oh, don’t I know.”

Then she announced we were going all the way to the Harvard Bridge, which she assured me was not going to be a bridge too far today. That if she were feeling it, we might make two trips to the bridge instead of one.

“Oh, joy,” I said.

And as we started off at a fairly brisk pace, I took her through the memorial service more fully than I had the night before. She was thrilled all over again to hear that Lisa Karlin had slapped Holly, and now chastised me for coming to Holly’s defense.

Melanie Joan said, “Lisa was another of his no-talent cuties.”

She turned her head slightly and said, “And before you make one of your smart comments, just remember that I was a cutie with talent. And have the sales to prove it.”

We walked in silence then for a few minutes until I said, “Why were you so generous with Charles Hall?”

“Did you ever date an older man?” she said.

“How old?”

“More than twice your age,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I was a fine arts major. But I could also count.”

“Looking back,” she said, “it may appear to you that Charles was using me. But the fact of things is that we were using each other.”

Now I turned and saw her frowning, as if conducting some interior debate about what to say next.

Or how much to say next.

“Another fact of things is that I could not have finished the first draft of that first novel without him,” she said. She hesitated, if briefly, and continued. “On so many different levels. There’s no book without him, even though the finished product was vastly different. And far better. He wasn’t much of a writer, and was honest enough with himself to know that. But he could turn someone like me into one. On that he was quite convincing, and persuasive.” She lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “So I slept with him. And then later I married him. Looking back, I almost think of myself as a literary courtesan.”

I grinned.

“Courtesan,” I said. “Not a word that pops up in conversation normally.”

“It does if the conversations are in my books,” she said.

We walked another couple hundred yards in silence, the rain beginning to pick up now, but we were close enough to the bridge that it was silly to turn back yet.

“Holly said that he never told her whatever it was that you didn’t want disclosed,” I said. “And which, I might point out, you’ve never disclosed to me.”

“I told you,” she said. “The money was my way of giving him his proper credit for the boost he gave me. But it was my insurance that he wouldn’t take too much credit.”

“And he never talked.”

“He wouldn’t,” she said. “He was the most gentlemanly man who ever violated all the norms about teachers and students, as contradictory as that might sound.”

“You want my honest opinion about that?” I said.

“Is there any other kind with you?” she said.

“It doesn’t just sound contradictory, it sounds like happy horseshit,” I said. “Charles Hall was a skeevy old man even before he was old.”

“I’m still sorry he’s dead,” she said. “And that he had such a sad ending.”

“I’d hoped he might be able to help us figure all of this out,” I said.

“So had I,” Melanie Joan said, with what I thought sounded like a thrilling lack of conviction.

“Tell me about Jennifer Price,” I said then.

She briefly stopped and turned to look at me.

“Now, there’s a name I haven’t heard in over thirty years,” she said. She grinned. “Or closer to forty, depending on who’s doing the counting.”

When we were walking again, I told her that I knew Jennifer Price had arrived at Whitesboro College before she did, and left early.

“When Charles did reference her,” Melanie Joan said, “he did so almost with melancholy, even before he learned of her passing. I remember one time, after he’d had too much wine, when he talked about how he had failed her.”

We had reached the bridge by now and were turning around. The rain came harder. There had been light traffic on the Esplanade on our way up here, from runners and walkers. But now the morning had gone almost completely dark, the path had emptied out, and we had no choice but to soldier our way back home.

“You want to run?” I shouted over the storm.

“No,” she said. “But let’s pick up the pace.”

We ducked our heads. The wind off the river was blowing directly at us now.

It was why I didn’t see the bike speeding toward us until it was about fifty yards away, and the rider was raising his gun.

I heard the sound of the gunshot quite clearly over the storm and shoved Melanie Joan to the side of the path as the shooter stopped the bike now and let it fall to the ground and took a couple steps in our direction.

He raised his gun, firing again, missing again as I rolled in front of Melanie Joan, reaching down for the .38 I had in the side pocket of my rain jacket. I knew the snub-nose wasn’t going to do much good for me from this distance. But I got myself into a kneeling position now, saw that there were no pedestrians behind the guy, returned fire anyway.

The man, dressed all in black, was silhouetted against the river behind him.

Like the black ninja my father had described, the one who had shot at Joe Doyle and shot my father instead.

Red bike.

He fired two more shots through the wind and rain and howl of the morning. I’d emptied my gun by now. But unless he’d been counting, he had no way of knowing that.

Somehow I heard the first siren in the distance, then saw him pick his bike up and get on and head back in the direction from which he’d come.

I briefly thought about sprinting after him.

Not with an empty gun.

So I just stood there and watched the bicycle disappear into the storm until it was completely out of view.