POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE yellow tape cordons off the crime scene of the Wisconsin Avenue Starbucks when Rodney shows up. Questioned and released by DC police, Rodney spends the rest of the day assuring everyone he was not brutally murdered after a local newscaster erroneously names him as one of the coffee baristas found face down on the floor, shot multiple times, with the female manager executed by a single bullet to the head. The next day newly-married Thør Rosenthal and Betsy Yarborough messenger him a shirt: “I Survived the Starbucks Murders and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.”
Rodney calls Maeve to say he is alive. Maeve is short with him, on the other line with her husband, explaining why the Secret Service is questioning her whereabouts on the morning of the Starbucks murders and quizzing her about the nature of her relationship with the lone survivor barista. Maeve calls Rodney back and blurts out she was parked outside the Starbucks hoping to see him before his shift started. The ambassador’s wife says she didn’t hear any gunshots and wonders if the robbers used silencers. Rodney is put off by her stalkerette confession when he is summoned by the Secret Service to explain his connection to an open investigation in Los Angeles involving a prostitute found bludgeoned to death in a backyard Koi pond.
During the interrogation, Secret Service agent Violet Rutledge mentions her screenwriter BFF Stefani Dupin and Rodney says he made an offer to buy her time-traveling serial killer script “Infamous” when he was at Fox but the lit manager Josh Makos sold the spec to MGM. Right then, Violet calls Dupin, who’s working on a TV pilot at Intelligentsia Coffee in Silver Lake and puts her BFF on the phone with Rodney. The call is brief and awkward; awkward because the former studio executive is involved with a triple homicide and the screenwriter is very aware of the Koi pond scandal; brief because they have precious little to say other than Rodney admiring her unproduced script and Dupin wishing him luck avoiding life in prison without possibility of parole.
For Rodney and Violet, there is intense mutual curiosity, not to mention sexual attraction, so they make plans to watch Netflix and hang out at Violet’s place in Old Town Alexandria. Rodney starts going to Violet’s place every night, sending Maeve to voicemail, ignoring the frantic emoji texts declaring her marriage is over; writing her off as too clingy.
Blasting “The Last Day Of Our Acquaintance” on repeat, Maeve tails Rodney leaving Starbucks down Thirty-Fourth Street in her black Range Rover, turning right on M Street, crossing Key Bridge into Roslyn, down Arlington Boulevard, taking George Washington Parkway to Slaters Lane, right on Henry Street, right on Cameron, left on Peyton, clicking off Sinead O’Connor at King Street, where she watches Rodney and Violet making out on the steps of an apartment complex. That night Maeve goes on-line and sends Rodney a T-shirt: “Sorry About What Happens Later.”