DRIVEN: A Rita Mars Thriller

by Webster, Valerie

  Next stop was Record Masters where she snatched up CDs for her sister. Then it was Gymboree for her niece and nephew, Britches for her brother-in-law, and on it went for a whirlwind hour and a half. Mary Margaret was hard at her heels.

  “Voila.” Rita pivoted to face her friend when she had scribbled her name on the last charge of the afternoon.

  Mary Margaret checked her watch. “Ladies and gentlemen, a new world record.”

  “See, it wasn’t so bad.” Rita led the way back to the parking garage.

  “Uh, I would like to comment that I saw nothing purchased for your best pal of all time and the shining star of Baltimore City’s finest,” Mary Margaret said.

  “I ordered yours from a catalog, smarty.” Rita unlocked the Jeep.

  “You’d better not send me any more of those hundred-pound boxes of brownies either.”

  “Hey, they were good.” Rita deposited her gifts in the back seat.

  “And how would I know? You visited every day after Christmas and I got to eat one.”

  “What a friend I am. Keeping you from gaining weight by sacrificing myself.” Rita started the engine as Mary Margaret snapped her seat belt.

  “And you drank all my special blend coffee.”

  “Tis the season for sharing. I know what a good Catholic girl you are.”

  Rita jammed the Jeep into gear and rocked out of the parking lot.

  “I see your good doctor is headed across the Atlantic,” Mary Margaret said as they were on their way back to her condo.

  “Something’s not right about that,” Rita said.

  “You checked it out?”

  “To the nth degree. The I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed. Bev is tracking down where he’s supposed to be living and we are going to call there for the last confirmation.”

  “He’s a weird guy,” Mary Margaret said.

  “He’s more than that,” Rita said. “There’s an otherworldliness of evil about him.”

  “After all my years in Catholic school, even I don’t believe in the devil.”

  “Forget Catholic school, what about all your years on the force?”

  “I tend to think of the devil as poverty or ignorance. Pretty horrific results from those two, but I can’t say that I have ever met anyone who I thought personified Lucifer.”

  “Then I must introduce you to Douglas Sevier,” Rita said. “You’ll be able to hear Mick Jagger singing in the background.”

  Rita turned at the exit to Mary Margaret’s.

  “And speaking of necessary evils . . .” Mary Margaret said.

  “What a segue.”

  “I need to stop at Eddie’s for a few things on our way back.”

  “Not the grocery store. Please lord, not that,” Rita groaned.

  “Hey, I went Christmas shopping with you,” Mary Margaret said.

  “My God, I have to be home before I collect social security.”

  “Oh, stop whining.”

  “The last time you spent an hour and a half in the cereal section.”

  “I’m a careful shopper—and you grossly exaggerate.”

  Rita rounded the corner on to Charles Street. “Ok, maybe a half hour in the cereal, another half hour in the salad dressings. I was dying in there.”

  Mary Margaret snorted. “The hell you did. You went around the store three times and scarfed up all the free samples they put out. You ate so much you weren’t even hungry when we got back to my place.”

  Rita eased into Eddies’ parking lot. The hub of gourmet purveyance, this small market was always busy and every space was occupied. Rita let Mary Margaret out at the door. She made the rounds three times before a woman deposited a holiday party tray in her Volvo and departed.

  Rita found her friend in the frozen food section, studying the pizza selections.

  “Go for the grease or pick out some kind of organic thing?”

  “Smooth, this is a disease. Grab what tastes good for God’s sake.”

  “I have to think about this a minute.”

  “A minute, yeah. I’m going on patrol,” Rita said. “I certainly know where to find you.”

  “I’ll be getting some coffee ground after here.”

  “In an hour.”

  “Just go eat something and raise your blood sugar, will you?” Mary Margaret commanded.

  Rita made a face and headed for the deli counter. This was the premier territory in Eddie’s. As encouragement for patrons to buy, they provided lavish trays of cheese assortments and crackers, chips and dip, tidbits of ham or turkey and an assortment of other delicacies that could be purchased and taken home to enjoy.

  She spotted her favorites, the small thick Italian crackers that were a perfect foil to the Boursin and several other high flavor cheeses, which accompanied it on the plate. She helped herself to several of these, each—to be fair—with a different cheese selection.

  The crackers had made her thirsty. Rita headed into the produce section where in the winter they handed out samples of fresh squeezed orange juice.

  “Perfect,” she said after she’d thanked the produce manager for her ration.

  Rita checked back at the frozen foods. Mary Margaret was comparing ingredients lists from Mama Celeste and Healthy Choice pizza. She decided caffeine might be a good idea. Eddie’s had a coffee bar near the front of the store.

  “Hazelnut, please,” she said to the smiling young woman behind the counter, “and throw in a dash of chocolate syrup.”

  “Rita.”

  The voice was quiet. Still it sent a chill through Rita and she felt her muscles tighten. Diane.

  The woman at the deli handed a container to Rita who put three dollars on the counter. Without waiting for change, she turned away from the voice and started walking.

  “Rita, don’t do this.”

  Rita could feel the presence following, but she kept on walking. If she looked back now, she would turn into a pillar of salt.

  “Please,” Diane said.

  Rita stopped. “Respect our agreement,” she said still facing forward.

  “I just want to talk.”

  Rita could feel the approach and her hands clenched the hot coffee container. She swallowed hard and imagined herself on a beach, alone, far away where she breathed deeply and evenly.

  “We’ve said everything there is to say.”

  “But you don’t understand,” Diane pleaded.

  “The problem is not that I don’t, but that I do understand,” she said carefully. “That’s why we have an agreement not to see or speak to one another.”

  Rita started walking away. She knew Diane was not following her.

  At the frozen foods, she made a sharp turn. Mary Margaret had put a large pizza in her basket. She’d moved on now to peruse other potential entrees.

  “I’m going to the car.” Rita shivered as she spoke.

  “Come on, I ran that entire mall.” Mary Margaret turned to her. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I have to go to the car.”

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Mary Margaret said.

  “Maybe. The Jeep is parked near the back.” Rita started away.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “I can’t stay in here.”

  Mary Margaret grabbed her arm. “Diane. You saw her. She’s in this store, isn’t she?”

  Rita nodded and rolled the hot coffee cup between her freezing palms.

  “I can do this later.” Mary Margaret plucked the pizza package from her basket and walked down the aisle to return it.

  “No, don’t. I’m fine. I’ll wait in the car. Take your time.”

  Mary Margaret put her arm around Rita and hugged her tight for a long time. Shoppers stared or rolled their carts too quickly past.

  “I’m ok. Honest.”

  “I won’t be long,” Mary Margaret said.

  In the car, Rita sat with her coffee. The hazelnut flavor was weak and the woman hadn’t put in much chocolate.
It was getting cold. Rita opened the door and poured it under the Jeep. She turned the ignition so that she could have heat. Too dangerous to turn on the radio. Too many chances for memory invoking songs.

  Chapter 16

  Joggers were everywhere in D.C. Like errant flies at the end of the season, they threaded your field of vision, now and too many times again. Each new runner reminded Rita she had a five-miler ahead of her when she got home. Fat never slept; you had to be on your toes to outrun it.

  “Hey, get in your own lane,” she yelled out the window at a caroming taxi. God, how she hated driving in this town. Getting behind the wheel with other idiots on the road was bad enough, but inner-city Washington lay on a jigsaw traffic pattern designed in hell. The circles were the worst.

  Dupont Circle, where Bobby had lived, was one of the five points of the Great Inverted Pentagram of Washington, DC. To the south-southeast, Connecticut Avenue runs directly into the back corner of Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. To the north-northwest, Connecticut ran all of the way out into Montgomery County, Maryland, finally dead-ending in the overbuilt residential neighborhood of Aspen Hill. Massachusetts Avenue, better known as Embassy Row, was a long elegant boulevard, which ran from the District Line in far Northwest to slant all of the way down into Southeast Capitol Hill.

  P Street between Dupont Circle and Rock Creek Park was prime cruising territory. The P Street Beach, at the southeastern part of the S-curve of Rock Creek, gained notoriety over the years as a hangout for gay body builders. To the west of Rock Creek Park was Georgetown. Walk a few blocks west and there stretched along R Street the Oak Hill Cemetery.

  Rita steeled herself for a merry-go-round session on a parking tour. But as she rounded the circle, an aging Mercedes edged away from a curb packed tight with other vehicles.

  The old Georgian brick front was painted white with rusted wrought iron railing across the porch and lining the tiny patch of front lawn. Rita fingered the extra keys Edmund Ellis had given her—Bobby’s had not turned up in his returned personal items. She unlocked the outer door to the foyer; Ellis’ apartment was the first door on the right.

  Rita touched the key to the lock, took a deep breath, then plunged. Quickly she was in, the door closed behind her. She was shut in a dead man’s house. She looked left and right. What did she think she was going to see?

  She had rifled people’s garbage, bribed gatekeepers for entrance, lied about invitations and connections, but this was different. She had to overcome her sense of intrusion.

  Bus brakes screeched. The outside door opened and emitted a tenant from the floor above.

  “Ok, get a grip here.” From the door, Rita sur­veyed the small combined living room, dining room area.

  To her right was a big airy space, brightened on the outside wall with a many-paned bay window. The sill was a repository for magazines and books. In front of the window, and arranged so the user could see out while he was working, was a PC on a desk constructed by laying a blank door across two metal file cabinets. Also on the door were a coffee cup full of pencils and pens, a legal pad, and a calendar open across a plastic typing easel.

  Bobby apparently did not expect guests. He had no dining table. He had so sofa. He had a television, old and small, sitting on a cheap white five-drawer chest. For viewing, he probably watched from the red canvas director’s chair at the PC or pulled that chair toward an old vinyl hassock to prop up his feet in front of the screen.

  On the far wall was a fireplace, its mouth blackened with use, but probably never stoked over the last many years. It had no screen and the andirons were sooty and dusty. On the mantel were photographs, all of Bobby with Trisha and his son.

  To the left of the door where Rita entered was a minuscule kitchen with barely enough room to turn from the stove to the refrigerator and doorways beyond to a bedroom and bathroom.

  “Is there anything wrong with this picture?” Rita said. The file cabinets were closed, nothing sticking out. Still the wastebasket beside the desk had not been emptied. Satisfied that the big picture yielded no clue, Rita moved to the more detailed work.

  At the PC desk, she lowered herself into Bobby’s chair and flicked on his machine. It booted into a control screen with icons for word processing, communications and a game of solitaire. A smaller icon at the bottom provided only standard PC management programs.

  Rita clicked to file information to scan the directories and individual files on Ellis’ hard drive. Everything was a directory for a software program, no individual files. She looked in every directory—still no individual files. Either someone had erased all individual files or Bobby used the same system as she did. She maintained programs only on the hard drive and saved her special info on thumb drives for safety.

  Rita looked under the makeshift desk. She pulled out the drawers of the file cabinets on either side. She went into the bedroom and methodically—so that she could search again without having disturbed things—went through every drawer and cubbyhole.

  She checked the refrigerator, the freezer, the oven, under the sink. She patted the carpet for loose patches, tapped the walls at suspicious seams. Bobby Ellis had nothing in this apartment on which he had saved stories or data. Rita made a note that she would check his machine at the newspaper. She went back to the PC in the apartment.

  Rita went through the file cabinets. She found notes and documentation for the first four stories in Bobby’s series on government influence buying. They were in separate manila folders in a single hanging folder.

  She flipped through everything else—nothing that fit into the series format or subject matter. One drawer was dedi­cated to personal papers: six months of bank statements and cancelled checks, insurance policies, payroll receipts. Rita picked through all of these, particularly the cancelled checks. She made note of two made to individuals rather than companies.

  “My neck.” Rita leaned back as best she could for support in the director’s chair. “Bobby, how in the hell did you sit at this thing and work?”

  Her eyes drifted across the room as she rested. This is what Bobby Ellis saw as he sat as his computer. Through the bay window was a sparse patch of yard hemmed by aging sidewalk and shaded today by the sweet yellow fullness of a silver maple. The walls in his house were bare; faded cream paint with picture holes from previous tenants. He could stare at the blank grey eye of his television.

  Rita shivered. She got up and wandered back to the bedroom where she stood in the doorway a moment before entering. She felt like a thief.

  This room at least conveyed some sense of the personal. On the dresser mirror, two photos stuck in the frame—Bobby and Trisha when they were first married and Bobby and Trisha just home from the hospital holding a new son. Rita touched the one of Bobby and his wife. It was much creased as if he had taken it from its place many times to hold it.

  She had such photographs. She remembered those rare happy moments of childhood through these. Childhood was a faraway place for her, a no-man’s land surrounded by a safety wall of forgetfulness. She removed her hand from Bobby’s picture.

  Rita searched every inch of the bedroom, went through clothes and bed coverings and around and behind every piece of furniture. Finding nothing, she went to the closet and groaned when she saw the packing boxes piled on top of one another.

  In the first box were albums of Bobby’s press clippings. She went through them all, from his days as a stringer for the AP to Gulf War correspondent to the Washington Star years. She had her own cache of writing memories in her attic. Who would someday find and open that private treasure and would it mean anything to them?

  The next box contained books. On top were some Richard Bach, under that were expensive erotic picture books, a paperback on restoring hair loss with herbal medicines, a manual for picking up women, J.D. Salinger works. Rita felt a lump in her throat.

  She sat at the edge of the closet pulling the boxes out into the bedroom for examination. She stopped for a moment
and rested her head on this box. She didn’t want to know the secrets of vulnerability and desire Bobby Ellis had packed away from prying curiosity.

  After an hour Rita reached the last box, tucked far in the back corner of the closet. Though she was short, she had to stoop to retrieve this box. It was heavy and she struggled to get it out into the room.

  The National Press Club Award. The Associated Press Award for Distinguished Writing. The nominating letter from the Pulitzer committee. Tarnished brass plaques, oversized crystal paperweights, letters from big names.

  Rita slammed the box flaps and lay back on the floor. She bit hard on her lower lip and squeezed her eyes shut tight against a tide of loss.

  “Bobby Ellis,” she whispered to herself, “why did this happen to you?”

  Rita took in a deep calming breath and opened her eyes. The ceiling bore a rippling brown watermark where maybe the tub from upstairs had overflowed. She turned from the ugly stain and lay with her cheek scratchy on the cheap worn carpet.

  A dull gleam under the dresser caught her eye. She tilted her head to squint for a better look. Something metal. On hands and knees, she scrambled over.

  With a sweep of her hand, she jerked a set of keys from beneath the bureau. Sitting up she inspected the aging leather tab with slots for rings at either end. One ring was missing; from the other dangled a car key, a house key, a deadbolt key, and two lockbox keys.

  A quick poke in the deadbolt at the front door confirmed these were Bobby Ellis’ keys. Why weren’t they on him when he died, and how had they gotten under the dresser? Too late, Rita thought of fingerprints, but she dropped them into her jacket pocket. Maybe some trace could be salvaged.

  She took a last look around the room, eyeing every piece of furniture and appliance to make sure she had been thorough. Her eyes fell on the wastebasket beside the homemade desk. Papers peeped just to the top.

  Rita dumped the plastic can on the carpet. The contents were mostly paper, though a Coke can did roll out across the room. A form letter from a credit card company, Rita balled that up and threw it into the can. Scribbled grocery list, solicitation for a book club, more credit card offers. Rita jammed these back into the can too.