Chapter Four
Four
I caught up with Melanie Joan half a block away from Spike’s. She was just about to get into a Mercedes limo. I knew her driver, Charles. I asked him to wait. She told him not to listen to me. “She pities me, Charles,” Melanie Joan said. “Can you imagine? Moi. MJH. A charity case.”
She slid into the backseat and closed the door. She opened the window, though. That gave me hope. I pleaded with Charles not to start it up. “You know what I charge, Melanie Joan,” I said. “No one in their right mind would call that charity.”
After a little back-and-forth and a lot of cajoling on my part, she agreed to let me work for her. I wondered if that hadn’t been her aim all along—getting me to beg for the job I’d just turned down. If so, chalk one up to Melanie Joan Hall and her gold-medal-worthy manipulation skills.
She exited the limo. Together, we walked back into the restaurant, around the perimeter of the bar, and into Spike’s office, where he was sitting at his desk, hands folded, waiting for us.
She took off her hat and glasses and collapsed onto Spike’s couch.
I sat next to her. Rosie hopped up and settled in between us.
She rested her chin on Melanie Joan’s knee.
In a less fragile state, Melanie Joan might have complained about dog hair on her St. John slacks.
(I recognized them. Spring collection.) But now she gave Rosie a sad smile and patted her head.
We hammered out the specifics of this particular hire.
As I’d already hinted, money wasn’t an issue.
Melanie Joan always paid above and beyond what I charged.
The thing that concerned me was what might happen if I were to successfully unearth this anonymous critic.
I asked her what she was planning to do with the information.
“I just want to appeal to Book Babe’s sense of decency,” she said.
“How do you figure you’ll do that?” I said.
“You’re asking…what? Am I going to bribe Book Babe? Or threaten her?”
“Do you plan on breaking the law?”
“Come on, Sunny. You know me.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”
She gave me wide eyes. I said nothing. She turned to Spike. “Can you believe this?”
“It’s a fair question,” he said.
“I don’t know whether to be outraged or hurt or terribly disappointed in you both,” she said.
Tears sprung into her eyes. Spike handed her a Kleenex.
She spent some time deep-breathing. Composing herself.
Emotional as she was, Melanie Joan made it a rule not to cry.
She was doing everything she could not to break that rule.
After what felt like about an hour, she was able to speak. “Do you think you can find this person quickly, Sunny?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Melanie Joan explained that if I was unable to identify Book Babe within the next day or so, there wasn’t much point in going further. “When you’re talking about the situation I’m in, which is snowballing on the Internet as we speak,” she said, “even a few hours is a long time.”
“I’ll try my best,” I said.
“That’s all I can ask for,” she said. She put her hat and sunglasses back on. She stood up. So did Spike and I.
Melanie Joan gave us both quick, tight hugs. Then she smoothed her jacket and straightened her spine, like a soldier, readying for battle.
“You haven’t let me down yet, Sunny,” she said.
After Melanie Joan left, Spike and I watched the door for a while, as though we both expected her to come bursting back in.
“She’s right about the time frame,” he said. “A friend of Flynn’s had a few too many sakes one night and went online, just like Melanie Joan. He got into it with a commenter. Went to bed. By morning, there were death threats in his DMs. By afternoon, he’d lost twenty thousand followers.”
“Wow.”
“Right?”
“What was the fight about? Politics?”
“Nope,” he said.
“What, then?”
“Broccoli rabe.”
“Seriously?”
Spike shrugged. “People online love getting pissed off,” he said. “Politics, vegetables…Doesn’t matter. It all comes down to the adrenaline rush.”
“Like a bar brawl,” I said. “Only with keyboards.”
“Don’t insult bar brawls,” he said. “Every one I’ve been in has been completely justifiable.”
I smiled. “Sorry.” I reattached Rosie’s leash.
She skipped toward the office door. And then, as though Spike and I had wished it on ourselves, Melanie Joan did, in fact, come bursting back in.
“I forgot to ask you something, Sunny,” she said.
“Would you mind accompanying me to that meeting with my editor?”