Chapter Five
Five
Melanie Joan gave me a ride back to my office in her limo.
While she and Charles waited outside, I dropped Rosie off with my assistant.
Blake tried to engage her in a game of fetch—which, as usual, consisted of Blake throwing a stuffy toy across the room and Rosie taking it to a quiet corner and ripping it to shreds.
Meanwhile, I filled him in on our latest case.
Like me, Blake hadn’t heard of ReadAnon.
But it wasn’t because he was a Luddite. Before tragedy struck and he’d begun a new life working for me, Blake James had been an Instagram influencer with more than five hundred thousand followers and his own YouTube channel.
The reason he didn’t know ReadAnon was that he wasn’t a fan of books—or of any form of entertainment he couldn’t watch on a screen while working out.
He had, however, heard of Melanie Joan Hall. “My aunt loves her stories,” he said. “Loved, I mean.” Blake cleared his throat. He always got choked up when the topic of his aunt came up, and so I waited for it to pass.
“If Ms. Hall had told me who she was when she came here, I wouldn’t have been so freaked out,” he said.
“Yeah, well, she’s got reason to be anonymous.” I told him about Melanie Joan’s drunken decision to torpedo her own career.
“Yikes,” he said.
“She blamed it on her water pill,” I said.
“Doesn’t she have an assistant or a manager or someone to keep her from doing stupid things?”
“She tends to keep her entourage at a minimum,” I said.
Though it did make me think. Melanie Joan had been through at least four literary agents since I’d known her—the most recent amid highly unsavory circumstances.
And don’t even get me started on her significant others.
Outside of Spike and me, Melanie Joan seemed to have real difficulty finding people she could trust.
It made me remember her film agent, Tony Gault.
I was pretty sure she still had him on retainer.
Tony was equal parts sleazy and sexy, an alchemy that I’d once found irresistible.
Long before I’d recommitted to Richie—before my on-and-off relationship with Jesse Stone, even—I’d had something with Tony that could be described as an addiction.
I hadn’t seen or spoken to Tony in years, but Melanie Joan had never said anything about firing him. And as far as I knew, he’d never tried to kill her. So maybe she trusted him, too.
Outside the office, a car horn blared. Blake raised his eyebrows at me.
“Melanie Joan’s limo,” I said.
“Jeez,” Blake said. “Patient, much?”
“I know,” I said.
I told Blake to get acquainted with ReadAnon while I was gone, and to go through as many of Book Babe’s reviews as he could. “Flag anything that looks like it might reveal something personal,” I said.
“You got it,” he said.
Rosie yelped. She was sitting amid the remnants of her stuffy toy, tail thumping. Blake opened his desk drawer, grabbed a treat, and tossed it to her.
“I don’t know if she should be rewarded for that type of behavior,” I said.
“Rosie should be rewarded for everything,” Blake said.
“True,” I said.
Rosie trotted over to Blake. He picked her up and told her what a good girl she was. I left the office thinking about Rosie and how, unlike Melanie Joan, she was always in good hands.