“What are you saying?” I asked.
“I think she was going to pass me information I could use for my testimony,” he said. “And I think she got caught. That’s why she sent the postcards. In case something went wrong.”
Something had gone wrong. Rebecca was missing. “What about the story that she was robbed and killed by whoever took her jewelry and that wine cooler? What about her folded clothes in the rowboat?”
“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to cover their tracks. Threw in a little of everything. Let people wonder if maybe it was a robbery or maybe she committed suicide.” He shrugged.
“She still could have set this up,” I said. “Left you the information you needed and then disappeared because she knew it was like handing over a lighted stick of dynamite.”
“And be on the lam for the rest of her life? No way. Not our girl. Rebecca’s too high profile, too flash, to ever do something like that. Can you see her working as a waitress in some diner in Podunk to stay off the grid?”
“Well …”
Ian’s phone rang from somewhere inside his jacket. He answered and spoke in monosyllables while I tried to remember the name of the piece of music he used as a ring tone. Something my father used to listen to.
Finally he said, “Yeah, sure. Not tonight, unfortunately. I’m … with someone. How about tomorrow? Right. Later.”
“What’s that ring tone?” I asked as he shoved the phone back in his pocket.
He raised an eyebrow. “You like it? It’s Mozart.
Day of Wrath. Judgment Day and the Second Coming. How fitting. I’d nearly forgotten it. Leland had liked it, too.
“Suits you.”
He laughed. “How about a drink?”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Oh, come on. We still have things to discuss and it’s getting cold. Besides, we’re a team now. Whatever Rebecca wanted me to know, she brought you into it, too.”
We trudged in silence to my car on Ohio Drive.
Maybe Rebecca had tied me to Ian, but she’d also written each of us a quote from a poem by Alexander Pope, which, it seemed to me, warned us about what we were getting into:
And especially for me:
What mistake had she made?
Exactly what was I supposed to forgive?
Chapter 11
I expected Ian to take me to a relatively secluded restaurant, someplace where we could talk quietly about Rebecca and what she’d dragged us into. Instead we went to the Tune Inn.
The Tune is located a few blocks from the Capitol at the end of a strip of Pennsylvania Avenue populated by crowded bars and ethnic restaurants catering to the appetite and thirst of a young Hill crowd, along with Library of Congress researchers and Supreme Court clerks. As bars go, it’s in a class by itself: dark, earthy, noisy, a taxidermist’s paradise where dozens of stuffed animal heads—and one derriere—line paneled walls and look down on an eclectic clientele. Locals who claim their own seats at the bar, off-duty marines from the nearby barracks, and Hill staffers jammed like sardines in the scarred-up booths drinking pitchers of Miller as if the brewery was going out of business forever—these are the Tune’s habitués. The only music on the jukebox is break-your-heart country; the wide-screen televisions are all sports. A sign by the cash register says, IF YOU’RE DRINKING TO FORGET, PLEASE PAY IN ADVANCE. The place is as comfortable as a ratty old sweatshirt, as familiar as family.
When we walked in, the bartender waved at Ian and said, “Hey, man, how’s it going?” Obviously, Ian was a regular. When he flirted with the waitress who showed us to a booth and called her by name, I knew for sure this was his hangout.
I slid into a cracked leather banquette across from him. “I haven’t been here for years. This place never changes. What do you suppose that animal is above our booth?”
“Dead,” he said. “If the place changed, people would riot. How about a pitcher and some fried pickles?”
“I’ve got to drive home,” I said. “Maybe just a glass of white wine. I’m not much of a beer drinker.”
He ordered the pitcher anyway, and my wine. When our ponytailed gum-chewing waitress brought our drinks, he poured himself a glass and clinked it against my wine.
“Mud in your eye. Why did Rebecca send us each postcards with pithy quotes from Alexander Pope?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but she also planned to give me a book of Pope’s poetry,” I said. “She’d signed the flyleaf and left the book on the desk in our hotel suite in the Willard. Unfortunately, the police now have it.”
I decided to leave out the part about the other dedication and that the book had originally been a gift from a previous lover.
Ian leaned back against his seat and narrowed his eyes. “Don’t tell me you think she left another message to go with the postcards? What is this, a treasure hunt? I don’t get why she’s jerking our chains.”
“I don’t know, either, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something we’re supposed to find in that book.”
“Beautiful. A hidden message in a poem written by an English guy who died a couple centuries ago. And we don’t even have the goddamn book anymore.” He threw up his hands. “Did you see anything when you looked through it before the cops took it? A piece of paper? List of names, phone numbers, bank accounts— something?”
“Come to think of it, I did. It was neon and had blinking lights.” I glared at him. “Don’t you think I would have told you already? No, I didn’t find anything—though that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something to find.”
“We’ve got to get hold of that book,” Ian said.
“The police won’t let it go until they’re ready to,” I said.
Our waitress was back. “You guys want anything to eat besides the pickles?”
Ian looked at me. “Hungry?”
I nodded. “I missed lunch. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
Ian grinned. “I wouldn’t say that in this place or you may get the tail end of Trigger up there.”
“Aren’t you the wise guy,” the waitress said.
We ordered burgers and their famous basket of fries.
“How are we going to find out what she meant without that book?” Ian said. “Maybe there’s something else. Maybe she told you something you didn’t realize at the time was important.”
I sipped my wine. “I was only with her for about an hour. We met at the Lincoln Memorial, where she bought the postcards. Then we went to the Wall.”
“Why did she pick the Lincoln Memorial to meet? That could be significant.” He looked hopeful. “Some kind of hidden symbolism.”
“You mean, like people claiming the face of Robert E. Lee is secretly carved in the hair on the back of Lincoln’s head? I doubt it. It would have to be something tangible.”
“Why’d you visit the Wall?”
Our burgers arrived. Ian drowned his fries in ketchup and his sorrows in alcohol. He was halfway through his second beer. I’d drunk about half a glass of wine. Rebecca had asked me not to share with anyone why we’d visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but that was then. Now she was gone—dead? on the run?—and I’d already had my doubts about the veracity of her story about her “biological” father whose name I never found.
“Rebecca wanted to leave a bouquet of flowers for a man she said was her real father. Told me her mother had an affair out of wedlock and then he died at the end of the war before they could marry. She claimed she only found out about him recently,” I said. “She left the flowers where the first and last tablets meet, and that was that. Didn’t look for him because she was in a rush to get to Georgetown. After she was gone, I checked the
