Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-three
Melanie Joan believed the Connecticut State Police were trying to pin a false narrative on her. She told me so. “I’d never kill anyone,” she said. “Not even her.”
“I hope you didn’t phrase it like that with Gleason.”
“I’m not stupid, Sunny.”
“I didn’t think so.”
I took a good look at Melanie Joan. She was wearing an oversized black T-shirt, black leggings, her hair tucked into a baseball cap, her eyes hidden behind her ever-present sunglasses.
Every part of her was shielded from view, save for her arms, which were noticeably bonier.
She looked thinner as a whole, those usually cultivated muscles suffering from neglect.
I wasn’t sure whether the change had been rapid or it had been going on for a while now and Melanie Joan had been dressing to hide it. Either way, it was startling.
“Are you getting a lawyer?” I asked.
She nodded. “I called my attorney in L.A. and he set up a meeting for me with Rita Fiore. Have you heard of her?”
I tried not to smirk. “I have.”
“She any good?”
“In my opinion, she’s the best criminal lawyer in New England.
” That was true. I didn’t mention that Rita also happened to be dating my ex, Jesse Stone.
At least she had been dating him the last time I’d asked around, which had been before my pre-engagement to Richie.
Back then, I used to have other opinions on Rita Fiore that were purely personal, probably unfair, and definitely irrelevant. “You’re in excellent hands,” I said.
“That’s good to know,” she said. “I’m hoping this will all just go away soon and I won’t even have to make use of her services.”
I frowned. The way things were looking, I doubted that. “Melanie Joan?” I said.
“Yes?”
“I need you to be honest with me.”
“I’m always honest with you.”
Charles cleared his throat.
“In this instance,” I said, “I consider an omission to be a lie.”
“What did I omit?”
Charles cleared his throat again.
“Are you all right, Charles?” Melanie Joan said. “Do you need a lozenge?”
Charles kept his eyes on the road. “Ms. Randall can’t help us if you keep things from her,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said.
Melanie Joan removed her sunglasses and put her head down. She pulled off her baseball cap and ran her hands through her hair and replaced it. I had the feeling she wanted to come clean with me and that she was just trying to work up the nerve.
I decided to give her a little push. “Why did you go back to Leila Donnelly’s?”
“How do you know I—”
“Please,” Charles said. “Just tell her.”
Melanie Joan’s gaze flitted to the front seat, then back to me.
“You’re among friends,” I said. “You’re not in the interview room.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
I waited.
“Okay,” she said again. “After you dropped me back at the hotel, I told Harold I was going to sleep. And I wanted to. Truly. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what Leila had said.
Not the awful things she’d called me. I’ve got a thicker skin than that.
It was more about how…dismissive she was of me.
My books. My career. My life. It tore at me, just like Book Babe’s review.
Which makes sense now, seeing as they were the same person. ”
“If it wasn’t for Melanie Joan Hall,” Charles said, “there’d be no Leila Donnelly.”
“Thank you, Charles,” Melanie Joan said.
“It’s the truth,” he said.
“Anyway, I…I suppose I wanted to make her feel the way she’d made me feel.”
“Disrespected,” Charles said.
“Yes. And I knew Charles would understand, so I called him. I asked him to go back to my town house and bring me that copy of My Last First Love I told you about. I looked through it again, and it was even worse than I remembered. I mean, the green highlighted parts alone…God, I should have brought that to Good Morning Boston.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Charles said. “That audience wouldn’t know true talent if it socked them in the jaw.”
“You’re probably right,” Melanie Joan said.
“So you decided to bring it to Leila Donnelly,” I said.
“It was my idea,” Charles said.
My eyes widened. “Really?”
“I thought it might make Ms. Hall feel better to have the last word.”
“Charles gets me,” Melanie Joan said.
I looked at Charles. His gloved hands resting on the wheel. A possible conspiracy-to-commit-murder charge was looming over him, all because he’d been outraged at the way his boss had been treated. And yet here he was, still concerned for Melanie Joan, still trying to build her up.
Charles did get her. He believed in her, just like Harold and Tony and Spike and I did. Melanie Joan Hall had a way of inspiring loyalty in people. It was why I’d found it surprising—and a little disgusting—that her publisher had been willing to dump her so easily.
“So you convinced Harold to leave his post, and then you escaped from the Ritz-Carlton,” I said. “Charles was waiting for you outside. You took the book with you, and you both drove back to Leila’s house in Union.”
“I had the address from our trip there,” Melanie Joan said. “Charles plugged it into his GPS.”
“We made good time,” Charles said. “Didn’t hit a lot of traffic.”
“You get to the house,” I said.
“Could use a good reno, that place,” Charles said.
“I thought so, too,” I said.
“Sweet ride, though. Porsche 911 Carrera. You see that?”
“I did,” I said.
“What a honey. A nineties model, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Anyway,” I said. “You both walk to the door. You have the book with you.”
“No,” Melanie Joan said.
“No?”
“I went alone. I felt bad enough the last time we were at her house, with you fighting my battle for me, Sunny. I wasn’t going to return accompanied by a big, imposing man in a uniform.”
“So Charles dropped you off,” I said. “What time?”
“Maybe three-thirty? Four at the latest,” Charles said.
“I asked him to come back in twenty minutes,” Melanie Joan said.
“Then what did you do?”
“I rang the bell,” she said. “There was no answer. I rang it again. Still no answer.”
“Did you hear anybody in there? Voices?”
“Not voices,” she said. “I thought…maybe I heard some movement in there.”
“What type of movement?”
“Like someone was dragging something across the floor.”
“Interesting.”
“It’s interesting now,” Melanie Joan said. “But I didn’t think so then. Anyway, it stopped when I rang the bell.”
“What did you do?”
“I was so frustrated and angry, I just started yelling at Leila Donnelly through the door,” she said.
“I told her I didn’t appreciate what she’d said to me, and that at least I put effort into my books.
At least they didn’t read like a million other pieces of trash out there, filled with sexist tropes.
I told her that she’s the hack. Not me. And I told her I had proof. ”
“Proof?” I said.
“The book,” Melanie Joan said. “All the highlights. On the way there, I’d written a key on the title page—the meaning behind each color.”
It was more of a visual aid than proof. But that wasn’t the part I was concerned about. “So your handwriting was in that book.”
“Yes.”
“And you left it at her house.”
“Yes,” she said. “Leila Donnelly wouldn’t answer, so I put it on her doorstep. Another stupid, impulsive thing to do.”
“Melanie Joan,” I said. “Were you ever inside the house?”
“No.”
“You swear you are telling me the truth?”
“I swear on everything and everyone that’s ever been important to me,” she said.
“When I came back twenty minutes later, she was still on the front porch,” Charles said.
“What did you do next?”
Charles said he’d taken Melanie Joan to the Whiskey Rocks Bar and Rodeo steakhouse in Dudley, Massachusetts. She drank. He ordered a Coke and kept her company.
“I had a couple gin and tonics,” Melanie Joan said. “I was very, very depressed.”
“Why?”
“I just kept repeating the whole scene in my mind. Yelling at her through her door. Screaming, really. The desperation in my voice. The fact that she didn’t respond, even to tell me to leave.
I just felt so…inconsequential. I talked to Charles about it.
I told him that instead of going to Leila’s with that book, I should have started planning a new life for myself.
Leave the writing to the Leila Donnellys of the world, you know?
He had a clearer head than me since he was the designated driver, but he seemed to understand what was bothering me so much.
He thought, too, that maybe it was time for me to hang it up. ”
“That isn’t true,” Charles said.
“You even said—”
“Sleep it off. That’s what I said. Not hang it up. That’s two different things.”
“So you weren’t inside the house,” I said.
Melanie Joan looked at me. “Why do you keep asking that?”
“Because the book was inside the house, Melanie Joan. The police found it next to Leila’s body.”
Melanie Joan gawked at me.
“Jesus,” Charles said.
“So…at some point, someone must have opened that door and taken the book inside,” Melanie Joan said.
“Somebody did,” I said. “Yes.”
“And it’s got my handwriting on it.”
“Yes,” I said.
Melanie Joan’s phone dinged at the same time as mine did. We both looked at our screens. It was a text from Tony—a link to an article on a website called Real Crime Daily. I clicked on the link and read it.
“Oh my God,” Melanie Joan whispered.
“What’s going on now?” Charles said.
I couldn’t say anything. Not right away.
The article was about Leila’s murder. There was no mention of the highlighted book.
The police were probably keeping that under wraps for now.
But there was another detail—one that Gleason had never bothered to mention when he was questioning me.
There had been a message scrawled on Leila Donnelly’s wall in what appeared to be her own blood.
It read: Justice for MJH
“My God,” Melanie Joan said.
“What’s going on?” Charles said again.
“We’re fucked, Charles, that’s what’s going on,” Melanie Joan said. “We are utterly, thoroughly fucked out loud.”
Our phones pinged again. It was another text from Tony, telling us that he just heard from Evan. In twenty minutes, he said, Greg Scepter would be holding a press conference.