Drive Time

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  “Hartwell?” Zavala looks toward the officer guarding Skith, calling out across the Mustang. “We’ll need another moment here. You’re sure he has no car keys? Check again, Officer.”

  I see Officer Hartwell begin another pat down. But since I’m right here anyway, I lean over and run my hand under the left-front wheel well.

  Nothing.

  And then, something.

  I stand, pulling out my empty hand. I look at Franklin, then at Zavala.

  “I think you’re both going to want to see this,” I say.

  Minutes later, Skith is in handcuffs.

  I see Franklin is getting video of the whole arrest. I hope we’re not running out of tape.

  “So you found some car keys.” Skith is spitting fire. “Who the frig says they belong to me?”

  “Give it up, Skith,” Lieutenant Zavala says. “We’ll find your prints inside the car. Soon as we open it. Hartwell?”

  The officer is now carrying a flat black plastic box, size of an anchorwoman’s makeup kit. He puts the case on the garage floor and flips open two latches. The outside of the box is labeled PRINTS.

  Another officer is unlocking the passenger-side door with the keys they retrieved from the wheel well.

  “Plus, Miss McNally here says you tried to sell her this car.” Zavala’s voice is mocking, sardonic, as he gestures toward me. “And she tells me you let her get behind the wheel.”

  “Miss McWho?” Skith matches the sneer. “I never saw her before.”

  I hold back the supreme temptation to whip off my cap and fluff out my hair like the heroine in some romance thriller. “Now do you recognize me?” I’d demand. It would be even more dramatically effective if I used some sort of exotic accent. But I restrain myself. And Skith, or whatever his name really is, already recognized me anyway. I watched his face change when he saw me with the camera. That reaction, even he couldn’t keep secret.

  “Your odometer says 21,203 miles,” I say, keeping my voice calm.

  “You could have seen that through the window,” he retorts.

  “Your radio’s on Wixie,” I say.

  “Big deal, so’s everyone’s,” he replies.

  “And your car won’t start.” I can’t help smiling.

  “What?” Skith says, his voice rising. “How’d—” He stops. Clamps his mouth closed.

  “What?” Zavala says.

  “Yeah,” I say, drawing out the word. “Try it.”

  “Hartwell.” Zavala gestures to the officer who’s sitting in the front seat and dusting for prints. “Turn on the engine.”

  “Huh?” the cop replies.

  “Do it,” Zavala says.

  We hear the hiss as the exiting traffic behind us continues to leave the garage. We hear a few honks from annoyed drivers. We hear the sounds of a too-loud radio blaring through open car windows.

  But when Officer Hartwell turns the key, we hear nothing.

  Hartwell tries again.

  Nothing.

  “Pop the hood,” I say. “You’ll find one battery wire’s disconnected.”

  I dig into my pocket. And then I bring out a little silver hexagonal nut, offering it in the outstretched palm of my gloved hand.

  “You’ll need this to fix it.”

  I trot after Lieutenant Zavala as he heads back to his cruiser, stationed in a yellow-striped no-parking corner of the garage. The engine’s running, the blue wig-wags are flashing, there’s a cadet at the wheel.

  “Remember, Lieutenant, you wouldn’t have this story without me. You’d have let him go, right? So the least you can do is hold off.”

  Zavala stops. Turns around. Crosses his arms. And looks at me.

  “What?” I say. I stop, too. I can’t read his expression.

  “I’m sure you’re aware, Miss McNally, that a fraudulent 911 call is a misdemeanor, punishable by a two-hundred-dollar fine.”

  I actually do know that. And I see where he might be going with this. It’s not a good place. I stall. “So?”

  “Anything you’d like to confess?”

  “Heavens, no,” I say, doing my best innocent look. My fake phone voice was pretty high-quality. Then I remember the best defense is a good offense. “All I’m saying is, there are no other reporters here. We’re working on a big story. It’ll be on—soon. Really soon. And if you’d keep this to yourself? For, like, a few days?”

  Zavala’s expression hasn’t changed.

  I slump my shoulders and stare at an oil spot on the garage floor, sensing imminent journalism disaster. Maybe I sacrificed our story to let the cops arrest Skith. But I couldn’t just let him get away. My stupid conscience wouldn’t let me ignore that catching the bad guy and potentially stopping a deadly scam is more important than our exclusive story. Even though we solved the case, not Boston’s finest.

  A car zooms toward us, the last of the rush hour, then cuts its speed in half at the flashing blue lights. I watch it go by, dejected. I solved this. I uncovered a major criminal enterprise, got photos of the entire operation, figured out a pretty clever code and tricked the bad guy into giving himself away. And now, the cops will get all the credit.

  Zavala clears this throat. “Miss McNally?”

  “What?” I try to keep the petulance from my voice. After all, Zavala is on the side of justice. And I guess that’s what matters. Maybe they can get Doug to rat out the mastermind of this deal. Who that is, I admit, I still don’t have a clue.

  “Off the record?” He raises one eyebrow and doesn’t wait for me to agree to the deal. “We’ll need a few days to investigate this. And it would—perhaps—be beneficial to our case to keep the information about Mr. Skith under wraps from the press for, say, a week or so. Maybe more.”

  I see light at the end of the parking garage.

  Zavala puts a hand to his forehead, shading his eyes, and pretends to look back and forth, as if he’s scouting the area. “I don’t see any of your cohorts around here. Do you? And, I suppose, it’s not in the best interest of law enforcement for us to inform them of what transpired this afternoon.”

  I hold out my arms, so delighted my impulse is to hug him. Then I instantly drop them. There’s no hugging in journalism.

  “Thanks, Lieutenant,” I say. “I owe you.”

  “Nope,” he replies. “We owe you.”

  “So then Zavala promised he’d hold off,” I say to Kevin. The last of the Doug Skith arrest video has rolled by on the playback monitor in the news director’s office. I reach across him, push Eject and retrieve our prized cassette. “Great, huh? We have a week. Which is totally doable.”

  “We still have to move fast,” Franklin says. “We’ll bang out a draft script tomorrow.”

  “We can do it,” I add. “Of course, we still don’t know who’s behind the cloning conspiracy, but—”

  “‘Cloning Conspiracy.’ That’s a possible title,” Kevin interrupts. He pauses, looking between me and Franklin, apparently trying to read our expressions. He holds up both palms, admitting defeat. “Okay, fine. Maybe not.”

  “I’ll dub the minicam video to a regular tape tonight,” J.T. says, holding out his hand for the videotape. “Gimme that puppy.”

  I hand him the little yellow cassette, then plop down on Kevin’s tweed couch, my boots stretched out in front of me. I’m wiped. Josh and Penny will be waiting dinner. My feet hurt. And my brain hurts. I link my fingers on top of my head, thinking.

  “The blue Mustang and the red Explorer are both in police custody. So they’re not going anywhere.” I try to organize the elements of our story. “But, you know? There’s one more missing piece. Besides who’s in charge of it all.”

  The room is silent for a beat.

  “Oh. You’re right,” Franklin finally says.

  “As usual,” I say without looking at him.

  “What?” Kevin says.

  “Well, we know the original red Explorer belongs to us. We also know that’s safely downstairs in the station garage. But someone’s miss
ing a blue Mustang. Right? That car the cops impounded today at Fifty-Five Friend? The clone of Michael Borum’s car? It’s a stolen car. It belongs to someone. Where did it come from?”

  “Listen, Charlotte…” Franklin gets up from his chair and motions toward the door. “Let’s go back upstairs. I’ll see if I can get my cop source to check out the stolen-car reports. I think she’ll do it for me. And she’s on the late shift.”

  “And we need to find the owners of Beacon Trust,” I say. “Any news on that?”

  Kevin’s phone rings, interrupting Franklin’s response. He checks his watch. “Got to take this, team,” he says, picking up the receiver and swiveling his chair away from us. “Keep me posted.”

  “NewYork, I bet,” I whisper to Franklin. We push open the glass office door. And then I remember what happened this morning. And what else is going to happen soon.

  “Creep. Quitter. Short-timer.” I poke Franklin in the back as I follow him upstairs to our office.

  “You could come, too,” Franklin says over his shoulder.

  “Right.”

  Even from down the hall, I can see the red message light on my phone is blinking. Probably Josh, wondering where the heck I am. Happily, I’ll be able to tell him I’ll be home in half an hour. And I’ll be able to share the blazingly good news about our story.

  Franklin clicks onto his computer, pulling up his enviable compilation of alphabetically indexed phone numbers and e-mails.

  I’ll also be able to share the blazingly bad news about Franklin. I sit in my own desk chair, one ankle propped on my knee, staring at Franklin’s back. Wondering who’ll take his place. Some burned-out hotshot from the network, ready to rest on his laurels in local TV? Or a twentysomething up-and-comer, all ego and self-importance, burbling about Edward R. Murrow but clueless about the real world? I pick at the zipper of my boot, yanking it aimlessly up and down. I’m doomed.

  I stare at my leg. A white thing is sticking out of my left boot.

  Oh. Right. My paycheck from WWXI. I pull the now almost-damp folded white envelope from inside my boot. It’s been there for the last four hours or so and it’s somewhat the worse for wear. The edges of the little clear window are beginning to fray. But I guess the bank will still cash the check inside.

  “Hey. Charlotte.” Franklin swivels around, his eyes shining. “Listen to this.”

  “What?” I say, peeling back the envelope’s flap. It sticks, so I get just a corner. Yanking open my desk drawer, I search through the salt-and-pepper packets, pennies and dimes, and loose Advils for a letter opener. Do I even have a letter opener?

  “Here,” Franklin says. He hands me a thin silver point set into a leather handle.

  Of course. “Thanks.”

  “But wait, before you open that. Look here. It’s major.” He points to his monitor. He’s got an e-mail open. “My guy at the AG’s office is tracking down the real owner of Beacon Trust. He tells me all the legal documents are carefully set up to hide who it is. But for grins, he decides to look up what else the trust owns besides the valet company. Check it out, my little Emmy winner.”

  He points to the screen. “See? Beacon Trust also owns…?”

  I squint at the screen, scooting my chair closer. Then my eyes widen. I turn to Franklin. The blue-and-white e-mail is reflected in his glasses. His smile is unending.

  “The Garage at Fifty-Five Friend Street?” I say. “Whoa.”

  “Yup,” he says. “They own the valet company. They own the garage.”

  “Fantastic.” I nod. “Two for two. And that’s no coincidence, Franko. That’s a link in the chain.”

  “They swipe the cars through the valet service. They clone them in the Newtonville garage,” he says. “And then they stash ’em in their own parking lot while they wait to sell them.”

  “No pesky traceable tickets from Bubble-Gum Girl’s machine, no parking fees, just stolen cars hidden in plain sight.” I think back over what I discovered today, the phone numbers as directions.

  “And giving that fake phone number on the radio,” Franklin adds, reading my mind. “Everything they did was boring, ordinary and mundane.”

  “Until they got sloppy. And got nailed by a leftover parking pass.”

  “Poetic justice,” Franklin says, nodding.

  “Karma.” I smile at my lame joke. “You know, with a C. Bad car-ma.”

  I slide the point of the letter opener under a little gap in the WWXI envelope. With a flourish, I slit open my paycheck and wave the pale blue paper in Franklin’s direction. “At least we know our last story will be a memorable one. You can come back for the Emmys. And hey, this paycheck from Wixie will buy your farewell dinner.”

  “You rich?” Franklin asks. “Lots of money in radio? We finally going to splurge at Rialto?”

  “Not the way Maysie tells it,” I say. “This’ll probably be enough for Burger City.”

  I look at the little box with the dollar amount. And then I stare at the check.

  “That bad?” Franklin says. “I’m going to have to buy the burgers myself?”

  But it’s not the amount that’s got me speechless. It’s the imprint on the check.

  WWXI Radio, it says in the upper left corner.

  And beneath that, the name of the station’s parent company.

  I turn the check toward Franklin, pointing at the corner.

  And now Franklin’s speechless, too.

  I turn the check back to me. “Beacon Trust. Owns the valet company. And the garage. And, according to this, it also owns Wixie radio.”

  “Wow,” Franklin says. “The trifecta.”

  “Better,” I say. Although I have no idea what’s better than whatever a trifecta is. I do have an idea who the person is who owns WWXI radio, and who, as a result, must be a kingpin in Beacon Trust. In fact, I know it perfectly well.

  Loudon Fielder. Bexter bigwig Loudon Fielder.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  T he blinking red message light on my phone might as well be my conscience. I know it’s Josh. He and Penny will be waiting for me. He’ll be wondering where I am. But problem is, no way I’m going home in half an hour. I’ve got to track down Loudon Fielder.

  “You think Fielder knows Beacon Trust has turned into a triple-threat rip-off machine?” I reach for the receiver, my engagement ring taking over the conscience role. The receiver doesn’t quite make it to my ear as I see Franklin clicking off his computer.

  “Hey, Franko, what’s with the log-off?” I point the phone at him. “Don’t we have to track down the mastermind? See what the elegant Mr. Fielder has to say for himself? I say we head out to his house and—”

  “Tomorrow, maybe,” Franklin says, shaking his head. “Nothing gained by doing it now. You’re tired. I’m tired. A lot happened today.”

  Now who’s tuned out? I don’t say that out loud.

  The phone makes a bee-bah noise, reminding me I haven’t retrieved my message from Josh. I hold down the hang-up button with one finger. I stare at Franklin, waiting.

  Franklin looks at the floor. Then at his watch.

  “I’ve got to meet with the New York people,” he says.

  “Oh, ho. Now the truth comes out.” I can’t resist teasing him. But I have to admit, even though I’m eager to take down Loudon Fielder, nailing our big scoop really can wait until tomorrow. And I should let him be excited about his new job. Dear Franklin deserves his success. Tough as it is to lose him, I’m proud of him.

  “See you tomorrow, Big Apple Man,” I say, turning back to the phone. I punch in my message-retrieval code. In twenty minutes, it’ll be me, Josh, Penny, Botox, wine, a fire and carryout sushi. I can look at the wedding magazines Mom sent. Check on baby Maddee. Start my own new life, which is just as exciting. The message begins.

  It’s not from Josh.

  After I hear the message, I hit the code to replay it yet again. Maybe this time I’ll understand it.

  “This is Carter, the temp secretary at Headmaster Byr
on Forrestal’s office?”

  Okay, that’s the easy part. I guess they hired a new Dorothy. A midwestern-sounding, youngish-sounding man.

  “The Headmaster would like to chat with you, Ms. McNally? Perhaps this evening at his home?”

  The first time through, this part sent me into a panic. I’d grabbed my cell, ready to call Josh and make sure nothing was wrong with him. Or Penny. But I put the phone away by the end of the next sentence.

  “He’s heard about your ‘where are they now’ project? And he’d like to discuss it with you.”

  Damn. I’m summoned to the principal’s office. I’m forty-seven years old, and being summoned to the principal’s office. Because he found out I was lying. Why did I ever think telling Harrison Ebling I was doing a feature story was such a brilliant idea? I’ve talked myself into a very awkward corner. And I hope I haven’t put Josh into an embarrassing or job-threatening situation. All I need.

  “Say, eight-thirty tonight? At the cottage? He’ll expect you.”

  I push the code for save, even though the stupid message is now imprinted in my brain, and slowly hang up the phone. Did Ebling rat me out? To get me in trouble? Or was he chitchatting with the Head and happened to mention my so-called project?

  Or maybe. Maybe he was warning the Head about something he might want to keep covered up.

  I lean back in my chair, lifting one boot, then the other, onto the top of my desk.

  I’m an idiot.

  I close my eyes, remembering the Head’s elaborately furnished cottage, the dimly soft sconce lighting, the hazy glow of flickering candles. The museum-quality antiques. The expensive heirlooms. A modestly paid school administrator, after all, living in a “cottage” full of treasures? He knew exactly which students left Bexter. And when. And, maybe, why. Maybe he’s been extorting the students’ families for years. That’s how he bankrolls his patrician lifestyle. It would be a snap for him to make threatening calls. Just close the door of his sumptuous office and pick up the phone.

  He killed Dorothy when she somehow found out. She died the night of his party. He probably drugged her. Maybe with his own brandy and those sleeping pills.