Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Fifty-Nine

Melanie Joan was asleep when I got back to River Street Place. My father was watching a Blue Bloods rerun in the living room.

“I think Tom Selleck is trying to look more like Theodore Roosevelt with that mustache and those little glasses,” he said. “You know Roosevelt was the first police commissioner in New York, right?”

“I do know that,” I said. “And I liked Selleck much better when he was Magnum.”

“You were too young when the old Magnum was on,” Phil Randall said, in the early stages of an exhaustive search for his car keys.

“When they’re as cute as he was,” I said, “age is just a number.”

I picked his car keys up off the sofa, hugged him, and said, “And when they’re as cute as you are.”

I walked Rosie, double-checked all the doors and windows on the ground floor when we got back, Rosie having successfully neighborhood-watched again. Then I picked Rosie up, dropped her off in my bed, and continued up to my studio, where I had spent hardly any time at all on my painting lately.

Art, I had explained to Spike the other day, always suffered when you were trying to figure shit out.

“I think I read where Monet said that one time,” he said.

Melanie Joan and Samantha Heller were on their way to New York City in a couple days for meetings with publishers ready and willing to throw money at her and try to get her to switch houses now that Chaz Blackburn was gone.

The plan was for Spike to take them to Logan Airport whenever they decided to leave. The Quill House had arranged to have two ex-NYPD guys they used sometimes for their most important authors to meet them at LaGuardia and take them to the Peninsula Hotel, where they would share a suite. Melanie Joan would audition the publishers in the same suite, they’d fly home, Spike would meet them at the airport.

“By which time,” Samantha said, “the ka-chinging will start.”

“Is that a literary expression?” I asked her.

“I think Dickens was the first to use it,” she said.

I hadn’t used an easel in years, having discovered what talent I had was better suited to watercolors. But there was an easel set up in the studio just in case I changed my mind and got tired of working flat.

The canvas was blank, as it had been since the day I’d bought the easel. I grabbed a Magic Marker from the desk, and set about making one of my world-class lists. I almost always write these lists on yellow legal pads. But tonight I was hopeful that with a much bigger blank page, one I was in the process of un-blanking, I might somehow bring more clarity to the big picture.

That was the plan, anyway.

Once more I went back to the beginning, the first chapter of the ghost book being delivered to Melanie Joan. Then I went through everything that had happened in Boston since, all the way to Melanie Joan and me being shot at.

Everything that had happened in Whitesboro.

My visits to John Melvin at MCI–Concord, which always sounded as if it should be the name of a cop show.

Had he been trying to get even with everyone he thought had wronged him before somebody got even with him?

Or had he been lying to the bitter end?

In a separate column I named the dead, in formation.

Then I remembered what Hawk had said before he was presumably off for a night of heavenly transport.

Or some such.

“Check your math,” he’d said.

And I realized I had left off one name.

The next morning Spike was at the house bright and early and I was back in my car, on my way to New Ashford, Massachusetts, where Jennifer Price had once lived, and died.