Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Eight

I wasn’t entirely surprised that John Melvin, formerly John Melvin, M.D., before he was stripped of his license, had agreed to see me.

He had always been a smug and arrogant bastard, one who had violated or ignored every canon of psychotherapy on his way to becoming a sexual predator and murderer, one obsessed with Melanie Joan. And with me before he was finally locked up. He’d also thought of himself as being more charming than a gigolo. Maybe it was a skill that served him well with the other inmates.

Were there even gigolos any longer? Maybe my father was right about me getting old.

He was still housed at the Massachusetts Correction Institution in Concord, known as MCI–Concord. Before I’d left Spike’s the day before, Spike had asked me if I really believed Melvin could be puppet-mastering another stalking of Melanie Joan, this time as a guest of the state. I told him that I wasn’t sure, but that he had once been obsessed with Melanie Joan and perhaps still was, had stalked her himself once, and seemed to have hated her the longest. Maybe old habits really did die hard.

When I’d first put eyes on him, at a book signing in Shaker Heights, Ohio, there was nothing memorable about him. He seemed harmless enough. Of course, he was anything but. The next time I had laid eyes on him he had used his own blood as an instrument of terror against Melanie Joan, sliding his bloody hands down a window outside another bookstore, this one, as I recalled, in Cincinnati.

There were still a lot of visitor protocols that had been put in place in prisons since COVID. So it took a fair amount of time and form-filling-out for me to end up in the visitors’ room for what was known as a contact visit. He was on one side of the table. I was on the other.

Since I had last seen him the day of his sentencing, he had aged, I was pleased to see, terribly. Long gone were the black-framed glasses he’d worn that first night in Ohio, and the square face. No longer Clark Kent. Maybe Father Time now, hair worn long and totally white. Wild, scraggly white beard. His face was a paler shade of gray than the gray jumpsuit he was wearing. As a child of television, I was hoping for orange. All in all, based purely on appearances, prison had not been kind to John Melvin. But in my experience, prison rarely was kind to anyone.

Somehow, though, once we started talking he acted as if he were still the knowing and confident therapist that he once had been, especially with the women he treated, before he tried to rape them. He still gave me the creeps.

“Ms. Randall,” he said in his deep voice. “What an unexpected pleasure for you to have reached out to me this way. You’ve aged well.”

“Wish I could say the same for you,” I said.

“And so we begin,” he said.

He smiled.

“I’m a changed man,” he said. “And one of these days, when the members of the parole board finally come to their senses, I fully expect to get the opportunity to prove that to society. Maybe even to my ex-wife. And you, of course. I finally have a good lawyer. Would you like to hear about him?”

“Not even a little bit.”

I waited. Waiting was always good. Especially with someone who loved the sound of his voice the way John Melvin did. Melanie Joan had once told me that he wouldn’t shut up in bed, either. I assumed it was true, even if that was way too much information.

“So to what do I owe this pleasure?” Melvin said.

“I was just curious, being a constantly curious person,” I said, “if after all this time you have decided to have another go at your ex-wife?”

He smiled again. “Go?” he said.

“Scare her,” I said. “Intimidate her. You know what they say. Once a sick bastard, always a sick bastard.”

“You think I am doing something like that out there from in here?” he said. “How could even a brilliant man like myself accomplish such a thing?”

“As I remember it,” I said, “you did have a way of being quite persuasive, at least when you weren’t drugging women as a way of trying to get into their pants.”

“Ancient history,” he said. “I have obviously had ample time to work through my issues, as a way of becoming my best self.”

“You don’t have a best self,” I said.

He shrugged.

“Do snakes feel that way about themselves when they shed their skin?” I said.

“We’re getting stuck here, something I often used to tell my patients,” he said. “Is there some specific offense of which you think I am guilty? I’d be fascinated to hear which one. My life in prison is an open book, if not one of Melanie Joan’s. Mail is monitored. Emails. Phone calls. There is simply no way for me to get anyone on the outside to do harm to Melanie Joan, someone for whom I still have genuine affection, as hard as that might be for you to believe.”

“Cell phones are frequently smuggled into prison,” I said, “and passed around. Arrangements can certainly be made, especially by a clever boy like you, John.”

Now he waited. Two could play that game. But he still didn’t do well with silence. My own therapist, Dr. Susan Silverman, could wait out a glacier.

“Now, I will admit,” he said, “that there were times, earlier in my incarceration, when I did hold on to, shall we say, certain old fantasies, until I realized they were just holding me back.”

“Care to say which ones?”

“Revenge, of course,” he said. “Against her. Against you. Even against your resourceful ex-husband.”

He made a gesture as if releasing a bird from the palm of his hand.

“But I’ve let them go,” he said, almost proudly.

He smiled again. “I’m even treating other patients, if unofficially.”

I said, “I see a future spike in recidivism on the horizon.”

“Did you come all this way to insult me,” he said, “or get the questions you have about me answered?”

“What, I can’t do both?”

“As much as I would love to flatter myself and think I still have my old power over dear Melanie Joan,” he said, “I have nothing to do with her any longer. My world is here within these walls, for now. And I think we’re done here.”

“Before you go,” I said, “I was wondering why you didn’t think the letter you sent to Melanie Joan a few months ago, about how the two of you would meet again someday, was worth mentioning.”

He seemed genuinely surprised. Or maybe this was just one more pose.

“I wasn’t being serious.”

“She says you sure sounded serious.”

“Well,” he said, “she does lie, you know, when it suits her.”

Melvin had me there. He abruptly stood up now, took a few steps toward the door, then turned around and came back.

“I forgot to ask,” he said, “about what Melanie Joan’s current problems actually are. Would you care to share?”

“Not so much.”

He titled his head to the side, his face looking quizzical.

“I mean, what’s going on with the old girl?” he said. “Somebody accusing her of stealing or something?”

There was something flickering in his eyes now. A snake indeed.

“Anyway, nice to see you, Sunny,” he said. “Even under these circumstances.” He paused and smiled one last time. “Please tell your ex-husband how pleased I am that his son has turned into a handsome young man.”

I stared at him.

“Oh, and one more thing,” he said. “Sorry that things didn’t work out for you and Chief Stone.”

Mic drop.

Then he was out the door.