Shrink Rap

by Robert B. Parker

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what frightened you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s me.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not you.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Melanie Joan said.

  “He looked at me,” I said. “I saw his eyes.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s nothing human in there,” I said.

  It was dark on the highway and there was a strong wind behind the rain.

  “No,” Melanie Joan said so softly I could barely hear her, “nothing.”

  The highway ahead of us was black and slick and shiny. Melanie Joan stared at it silently. We were the only car on the road. The wipers struggled rhythmically with the downpour.

  “Tell me about him,” I said.

  “I don’t like to talk about him.”

  “You need to tell me about him,” I said. “I need to know what I’m dealing with.”

  “I suppose I’m ashamed of myself for marrying him. Talking about him embarrasses me. I don’t quite know where to start.”

  “What does he do for work?” I said.

  “He’s a psychiatrist,” Melanie Joan said.

  “In Boston.”

  “Yes.”

  “Private practice?”

  “He’s on the faculty at Taft Medical School, and he has a private practice in Chestnut Hill.”

  Melanie Joan looked ahead at the wet highway and almost smiled.

  “His practice is largely women,” she said.

  “How does that happen?” I said.

  “I think he prefers women patients.”

  “And his shingle says ‘girls are us’?”

  Melanie Joan still couldn’t quite smile.

  She said, “No. I think he just accepts more women than men for treatment.”

  “Is he successful?”

  “Do you mean has he a big practice? Yes.”

  “Is he a good psychiatrist?”

  “He understands human behavior,” Melanie Joan said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning he can manipulate people.”

  “And does?”

  “Yes.”

  “Including you?” I said.

  “Especially me,” she said.

  “How does he manipulate you?”

  The rain had stopped and there was a gap in the dark clouds through which sunlight shone. The wind seemed to have died. I could hear the sounds of the tires on the highway now.

  “With love,” Melanie Joan said.

  “Giving and withholding?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mother used to do that,” I said. “Still does.”

  “So did my father.”

  “Ohhh?” I said.

  “Yes,” Melanie Joan said, “ohhh.”

  “I will avoid the obvious,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  I glanced over at her, in the passenger seat, wearing the full Melanie Joan. Her appearance didn’t go with the conversation.

  “John appears to have no interest,” she said, “in a woman he can’t manipulate.”

  “To what purpose?” I said.

  “I think the manipulation is its own reward,” she said.

  “His name is John?” I said.

  “John Melvin,” Melanie Joan said. Her voice was harsh. “M.D.”

  The rain started again, coming straight in at us now, blown by the reinvigorated wind, as we drove across the unfamiliar Ohio landscape. I felt a long way from home. I missed Rosie. I thought about her, probably sleeping happily in her little bed behind the bar in the tavern Richie’s family owned. That evening he’d take her for a walk and they’d play ball and she’d sleep in bed with him in the room that looked out over the harbor, and filled with light when the sun came up.

  Chapter 8

  We were in our suite at the hotel in Louisville. The living room door was bolted and chained. Melanie Joan was in her bedroom. I was in mine. I had taken off my face, had a bath, washed my hair and now, lying on the bed in my jammies, with my gun on the bedside table, I called Richie.

  “Is this a good time?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “You’re alone?”

  “No, Rosie’s here,” he said.

  I could hear the smile in Richie’s voice.

  “How is my baby?” I said.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You know who I mean.”

  “Yes,” Richie said. “I do. She’s asleep on the bed beside me. She’s leaning sideways against one of the pillows with her feet in the air and her tongue hanging out one side of her mouth.”

  “How beautiful does she look?” I said.

  “As beautiful as she always looks,” Richie said.

  “Is she missing her mommy?”

  “Probably,” Richie said. “But she’s perky in spite of it.”

  “And you’re walking her?”

  “Yep.”

  “She go with you during the day?”

  “Everywhere,” Richie said. “To the bar, calling on customers, everywhere.”

  “What customers do you call on?” I said.

  “Customers,” he said.

  “In the family business.”

  “Yes.”

  “Richie, the family business is crime.”

  “Not my part of it,” Richie said.

  “I don’t understand how you can separate it so precisely,” I said.

  “I do.”

  We were quiet, listening to the non-sound the open phone line made.

  “How is your trip?” Richie said after a while.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Where are you now?”

  “Louisville,” I said. “Has the future Ms. Burke been around?”

  “Carrie,” Richie said gently. “Yes. She’s been around.”

  “Is she nice to Rosie?”

  “She likes Rosie very much,” Richie said.

  Again the empty noise of the phone.

  “I trust you,” I said finally. “I know you would make sure that Rosie was all right.”

  “Of course,” Richie said. “You recall that I love Rosie.”

  “I recall that you once loved me,” I said.

  Why the hell did I go there?

  “Still do,” Richie said.

  “And Ms. Right?”

  “Carrie,” he said. “I think so.”

  “So you can love two women at the same time?”

  “That’s how it seems,” Richie said.

  “So where does that leave us?”

  Goddamn it.

  “I care about Carrie,” Richie said. “And you and I can’t seem to live together.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  “So far,” Richie said.

  “So maybe I should just get on with my life,” I said.

  “I thought that’s what we were both doing,” Richie said. “I thought that was why we got divorced.”

  “Is that how you want it?”

  “Is what how I want it?”

  “You wander off into the sunset with whatshername, and we go our separate ways?”

  “You know her name is Carrie.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  We were quiet again. I looked at my gun lying near me on the nightstand. Outside my window the rain still came down, sometimes gently, sometimes hard.

  “No,” Richie said. “That’s not how I want it.”

  I could feel the air begin to stir again in my chest.

  “I guess,” I said finally, “that neither of us quite knows how we want it.”

  “Not quite,” Richie said. “Not yet.”

  Chapter 9

  We were in a bookstore in a mall in suburban Cincinnati. Melanie Joan was facing the front of the store at a lectern set in the center of a large circle of folding chairs filled with fans. She was taking questions.

  A slender woman with short black hair, dressed in a pink cashmere sweater set, raised her
hand with a question.

  “Even though they’re a little sex-crazed,” she said, “your characters seem so real. Are they based on people you know?”

  Melanie Joan smiled. “Honey,” Melanie Joan said and let the word languish for a moment, “they’re all based on me.”

  The audience laughed. Already, three cities into my first book tour, I had come to understand that most fans came eager to approve.

  A small old woman with big eyes and a small sharp nose in the front row said, “Is that true?”

  “I kiss and tell,” Melanie Joan said and smiled again. It was an impressive smile, wide and warm and apparently spontaneous. “No, not really. When you begin writing I think you probably do use people you know, and clever things you’ve heard people say. But you use all that up pretty quickly, and you are forced to start imagining the rest.”

  “How do you work?” a man asked. “Are you a morning person? Do you use a computer?”

  “I use a computer,” Melanie Joan said, “And normally I…”

  I was standing behind the circle of fans. Melanie Joan was looking past me at the front of the store. I turned. John Melvin was outside the big front window of the store, pressed against the glass with his arms outstretched above his head. Slowly he brought them down toward his waist and as he did two bright smears of blood followed them. I looked back at Melanie Joan. Without a sound or a change of expression, she put her hands on the lectern for a moment as if to steady herself. Then her hand dropped from the lectern and she slid loosely to the floor and lay still.

  “Cops,” I said to the store manager. “Ambulance.”

  I pushed up to Melanie Joan where she lay, and knelt beside her. Her eyes had rolled back in her head. No convulsions. She hadn’t swallowed her tongue. Her breath was shallow and a little fast but regular enough. Her pulse was fast, too. As I took her pulse her eyes rolled back down. She looked at me without focus. Her eyelids fluttered.

  “Melanie Joan,” I said.

  Her eyes moved toward me but still without focus. I took her hand.

  “Melanie Joan.”

  A pretty blond woman knelt beside me.

  “I’m a nurse,” she said. “Has she ever done this before?”

  “Not that I know,” I said. “She saw something through the front window that shocked her.”

  The nurse glanced back at the front window with the two dark smears of blood on it.

  “What the hell is that?” she said.

  “I think she fainted when she saw it,” I said.

  The nurse nodded. Melanie Joan’s eyes began to focus.

  “Can you see my hand?” the nurse said to Melanie Joan.

  “Of course I can.”

  Melanie Joan spoke in the over ordinary way we speak when we’re awakened suddenly and don’t want to admit we were sleeping.

  “How many fingers?”

  “Three.”

  “How do you feel?” the nurse said.

  “I’m fine,” Melanie Joan said. “I’m perfectly fine.”

  The audience sat as if painted on the backs of its chairs. They didn’t know what else to do. In the distance I heard the first siren.

  “Can you sit up?” the nurse said.

  Melanie Joan nodded. I put a hand under her back, and the nurse took her hand and we raised her to a sitting position. Her short skirt was up high around her thighs. She pulled it down and smoothed it.

  “Would you like to sit in a chair?” I said.

  Melanie Joan nodded. I jerked my head at the front row and several people vacated their chairs. We got her to her feet and into one of the empty chairs. The sirens were right on top of us now. Through the blood-smeared front window I saw the flashing lights in the parking lot.

  “Where is he?” Melanie Joan said to me.

  “He’s not here,” I said. “I’m sure he’s run off.”

  I wasn’t so sure he’d run off. That would depend on how much he was bleeding. If it was really his blood, he might be lying in a pallid heap outside the store. But he wasn’t. He had in fact run off.

  Chapter 10

  When I got home from Cincinnati and dropped Melanie Joan off at her house, I went to pick up Rosie. Rosie was so glad to see me that she tucked her rear end under and raced around Richie’s apartment bouncing off walls, bounding onto and off of couches, pausing sometimes to spin in tight pursuit of her own tail. When that was finally over, I got her to settle in with me on the couch in Richie’s living room, where I could rub her belly and slowly drink a martini.

  Richie was wearing loafers with no socks, faded blue jeans with no belt, and a black polo shirt with short sleeves. His arms were muscular.

  “So was it in fact this guy’s blood?” Richie said. “On the window?”

  “I don’t know if it was Melvin’s,” I said. “But the Cincinnati crime lab says it’s human blood. Type A.”

  “Is that Melvin’s blood type?”

  “Melanie Joan doesn’t know.”

  “Well, who else’s blood would it be?” Richie said.

  “It would be hard to imagine,” I said.

  “He’s a psychiatrist?” Richie said.

  “Yes.”

  “That means he’s an M.D.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he’d probably be able to come by some human blood.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’d also probably be able to cut himself superficially so as to provide enough of his own.”

  “So why would he do that?” Richie said.

  “Maybe to get the effect he got.”

  “Make his ex-wife faint?”

  “It’s a kind of control,” I said.

  Richie nodded. “How did he know where to find you?” Richie said. “I mean he found you in Cleveland. He found you in Cincinnati.”

  “I raised that question,” I said. “Melanie Joan’s publisher, like most of them, puts her tour schedule on their website.”

  “Book tour over?”

  “No. She’s going to do some stuff around here. Then we go to the West Coast.”

  Rosie had a ratty-looking teddy bear she carried around when she felt like it. She had it now and dropped it in my lap and looked at me with her tail wagging. She wanted me to throw it for her so she could get it and bring it back and I’d hold it and she’d tug one end and growl fearsomely. No matter how long I played that game she would outlast me and eventually I would have to say no. Logic suggested that I might just as well say no now and spare myself. She was giving me her impenetrable black-eyed stare. I threw the teddy bear. She exploded across the room and grabbed it and brought it back and dropped it in my lap and wagged her tail and looked at me with her impenetrable black-eyed stare.

  “You squiring her around while she’s here?” Richie said.

  “I take her to her book signings and return her. If she wants to go someplace other times, she calls me.”

  I picked up the teddy bear and Rosie immediately clamped onto the other end. She was very strong for a thirty-pound dog, and very enthusiastic. She yanked and tugged and shook her head and I finally let the teddy bear go. Rosie immediately dropped it into my lap again.

  “And you sit around between times and wait for her to call?” Richie said.

  “Sounds like my dating patterns,” I said. “No. I thought in my spare time I’d look into John Melvin a little.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I want to find some way to get him away from Melanie Joan.”

  “Anything in mind?”

  Rosie was yanking on the teddy bear again, all four feet braced stiffly, head down, neck stretched, growling loudly. I let go, she kept her balance and jumped up and put her forefeet on my thighs and dropped the teddy in my lap again.

  “Rosie,” I said, “could you for God’s sake give it a rest.”

  Rosie wagged her tail and smiled at me.

  “I could ask Felix to speak with him,” Richie said.

  I was quiet for a moment, trying to stare Rosie down. Then I shook my
head.

  “I know,” I said. “I thought of that.”

  “But?”

  “I can’t use your uncle to solve my problems.”

  “Actually he’d be solving Melanie Joan’s problems,” Richie said.

  “Permanently?”

  “I think you’d be able to specify.”

  “Whether I wanted him killed or only crippled?”

  “Might not have to be that drastic,” Richie said. “He might scare easily.”

  “I can’t, Richie.”

  “Want me to talk with him?”

  “I thought you weren’t part of that,” I said.

  “I’m not. But I could do you a favor, couldn’t I?”

  I shook my head.

  “How about Spike,” Richie said. “He could talk to Melvin for you.”

  I shook my head again.

  “I don’t mean to sound like an old joke,” I said. “But I need to do this myself.”

  In annoyance Rosie gave me a small nasty yap, and shook the teddy bear in my lap. I patted her. She turned suddenly with her teddy and went over to Richie and dropped the teddy bear in his lap. Richie took one end and she began to tug happily at her end of it.

  “You don’t sound like a joke,” Richie said. “I understand why you need to do it yourself.”

  We were quiet for a bit, watching Rosie tug on the teddy bear.

  “It was sweet of you to offer to have your uncle beat someone up for me.”

  “We Burkes are a sweet bunch of guys,” Richie said.

  “Has Ms. Right met your family?”

  “Carrie’s met my father,” Richie said. “I haven’t exposed her to Uncle Felix yet.”

  “And?”

  “And she thinks he’s sweet.”

  “How about him?”

  “He thinks she’s sweet.”

  “We’re all sweet,” I said. “Aren’t we? You, me, Ms. Right, your hoodlum family, everybody is so fucking sweet.”

  Richie didn’t say anything. I stood much more suddenly than I had intended to, and hooked Rosie’s leash on her collar and headed for the door. Rosie seemed a bit puzzled.

  “Thanks for offering to kill Melvin,” I said.

  “Or injure or intimidate,” Richie said.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Thanks for it.”

  “You’re welcome,” Richie said.

  I went out and slammed the door.