Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Sixty-Five

Frank Belson said, “You buying this?”

“It’s his handwriting,” I said. “And the very last thing he said to me was that someday all of my questions would be answered.”

“What about that missing manuscript you’ve been chasing around?” Belson said. “The shitheel doesn’t address that in his letter.”

“Beats the hell out of me, Frank,” I said. “Maybe I had three cases going instead of one, and the book had nothing to do with murders and shootings and the whole damn thing.”

I was still in my office. Belson had said he’d come to me. Now he had read what I had read in Melvin’s letter. It didn’t address whom he’d hired to do the killings. Melvin said that was his gift to Frank Belson and me, leaving us one last puzzle to solve. But he wrote that he had made it his mission, as he had gotten older in prison and come to the realization, despite his series of appeals, that he was going to die there, to get even with everyone who had put him in that cell.

He decided to hurt Melanie Joan, he wrote, by hurting those close to her. He had sent the shooter after Melanie Joan and me when we were out in the open that day, as a way of ending things. Maybe, he wrote, because of a premonition that his days were numbered.

And he wrote that all of us who’d put him away would wonder if someone might be coming for us after he was gone, because the shooter had twice failed.

“The game continues” is the way the letter ended.

“Asking you again,” Belson said. “You believe him?”

“That hitters are going to keep coming?” I said. “I do not. Do I believe the rest of it? I have to say it’s a pretty convincing closing argument. Either way, I think he knew he was dying and wanted to get in his last licks before he did.”

Belson said, “He could’ve orchestrated it from inside. Been done before. Without a single goddamn thing showing up in his phone records.” He shrugged. “He had a way of knowing what was happening on the outside. Not crazy to think that the crazy bastard found out about somebody sending those chapters and thinking he had an opening to drive everyfuckingbody crazy.”

“Going back into the phone records wouldn’t give you a road map?” I said.

Belson snorted. “Are you shitting? There should be a new cell phone company for phones these guys manage to get their hands on in the joint.”

“I wouldn’t put any of this by him,” I said.

“A prison rat like him,” Belson said, “maybe he’d pissed off too many people in Concord. And needed to start settling scores before it was too late. Especially after those appeals kept getting slam-dunked. Or maybe it was Doyle finding a way to settle his own score with him.”

“A serial killer from behind bars,” I said.

Belson nodded. “I read about this guy in Arizona one time. Looking at the needle. I forget what the body count was out there. He wasn’t even using the same guy to settle his scores.”

I nodded at the letter, sitting there in a plastic baggie on my desk.

“What will you do with the letter?” I said.

“Give it to my immediate superior, bless her heart,” he said. “Who will give it to her superior, and so on and so forth. I doubt they’ll release it. Or maybe they’ll want people to know Melvin confessed. Who the fuck knows? But I think it’s enough for them to close the books on the lawyer and the editor.”

“And we might never know for sure,” I said. “You okay with that?”

He picked up the baggie. I grinned watching him stick the unlit cigar into the side pocket of his raincoat.

“Some old baseball manager said one time that you win some, you lose some, and sometimes you get rained out,” he said.

“You know how I love baseball expressions,” I said.

“I got more,” he said.

“Maybe next time,” I said.