Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Seventy

I sat with Melanie Joan in what could only be described as our living room at this point. Her right wrist was still bandaged. She was already talking about having her plastic surgeon do something about the scar when the bandage came off. She had survived Samantha Heller’s attack, but barely, the EMTs getting to her in time from the Berkshire Medical Center about ten miles away.

Samantha Heller was dead before the ambulance got there, effectively gone by the time she hit the floor.

Now Melanie Joan’s suitcases were once again lined up near the front door like good soldiers, while she waited for the limousine that would take her to Hanscom Field, where she would board the private jet that had really been ordered this time.

She had been telling me about the things Samantha had told her before I had arrived, about her being raped by one of her stepfathers, and the life she had fabricated for herself once she was old enough, the one about growing up as a child of privilege in Manhattan when in fact she had spent two of her teenage years there in a group home.

She told me again about the razor being held to her throat as she read the things Samantha had wanted her to say to me on the phone, after Samantha had drugged her.

“There are reasons,” I said, “and there are excuses. Those are reasons why she snapped when she found out about Jennifer Price.”

She sipped some coffee. The car would be here soon. She stared at the bandage as she did.

“I’m sorry I lied to you about the book,” she said.

“We’ve gone over this,” I said.

“But you need to know how sorry I am that I did lie to the person I’d come running to for protection,” she said.

“It wasn’t just me you lied to,” I said. “You lied to yourself, for a long time.”

“But I did believe he was the one who wrote it,” she said. “That’s the real reason I sent him money for all those years.”

She had spent a fair amount of time in tears over the past few days, since I’d driven her back from the Berkshire Medical Center. I was afraid now that she was about to start crying all over again.

“She hated me even more than John Melvin did,” Melanie Joan said. “If such a thing is even possible.” She sighed and shook her head. “Over a crime she only thought I had committed.”

She was on the couch. I was in a chair on the other side of the coffee table, one of hers, with Rosie the dog in my lap.

“I’m very fond of you, Melanie Joan,” I said. “I am. I keep telling you that. Rosie and I are living here because of your generosity. But while you may have been, ah, acquitted here, it doesn’t mean you’re innocent of all charges.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“In the end,” I said, “it wasn’t your work, and it wasn’t your story, no matter how much you may have improved it. It was hers. Samantha was right about that, however the material ended up in your hands in the first place.”

“I’m not a thief,” she said.

I smiled. Couldn’t help it.

“Of course not,” I said. “You’re Melanie Joan Hall.”

There was a ping on her phone. The driver was probably close.

“Who had John Melvin killed?” she said.

“Joe Doyle,” I said, without even a hint of hesitation.

“My God,” she said. “Can you prove that?”

“Not in a million years,” I said.

I smiled.

“But my father thinks he can,” I said.

“Do you believe John sent that shooter to kill me when we were at the river that day?”

“Yes,” I said.

“The only thing that saved us was luck,” she said.

“It’s the residue of design,” I said.

“Who said that?”

I smiled again, at a private joke, at my own expense.

“An old baseball guy,” I said.

“I thought you didn’t like baseball,” she said.

“I don’t,” I said.

The stretch limousine arrived a few minutes later. I hugged her goodbye, again. She said she’d see me when she was back in Boston, once principal photography began on the new series about the granddaughter of a character born in the imagination of the late Jennifer Price.

“Look forward to it,” I lied.

The driver loaded the bags. The car pulled away up River Street Place. I watched it until it disappeared around the corner of Charles, just to make sure she was really leaving. And called Jet Linx ninety minutes later to make sure, as the fancy people say, that the private plane was wheels-up.

I left Susan Silverman a phone message after that, telling her I needed to reschedule tomorrow’s appointment because I was headed out of town, but thanking her, profusely, for introducing me to Hawk.

I called Hawk then, but before I could thank him again, he said, “In the middle of something here, missy,” and heard a woman giggle as he ended the call.

Finally I called Spike and asked him if he could take care of Rosie while I was away. He asked where I was going. I told him.

“Didn’t see that coming,” he said.

“Nor did I,” I said.

I took the mid-afternoon Jet Blue flight to New York, got into an Uber at LaGuardia. I was staying at The Carlyle, which I could afford, and mightily, thanks to the largesse of the famous author Melanie Joan Hall.

He was waiting for me at the 76th Street entrance.

“Were you surprised to hear from me?” I said.

“Very,” he said.

“Are you really as fun a date as you keep saying you are?” I said. “Because I could use one.”

“Just watch me,” Tom Gorman said.

“You’re sure that’s not fake news?” I said to the editor of the Utica Observer-Dispatch. He’d already told me on the phone that the reason he’d been at the Cape was to meet with the publisher of The Boston Globe, who’d offered him a columnist’s job.

For now he smiled at me. The smile was still working for him. Back at the start of this, at The Street Bar that night, I had told my father I was ready for something new.

Or somebody.

“Why don’t we go inside and have a martini at Bemelmans Bar and talk about it?” he said.

“We’d be fools not to,” I said.