Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge)

by Frank Freudberg

  “That’s my music,” Valzmann said, raising his index finger.

  “Got to go, Anthony.” He rose and casually left through the front door. He walked to the truck, got in, rolled down the window, fastened his seat belt, and started the engine.

  He drove away at the posted speed limit.

  54

  Mary Dallaness opened the door that connected the garage to the kitchen and walked in. She kicked off her shoes on the mud mat and dropped her purse and briefcase on the Formica counter. She could hear the broadcast. She walked into the hallway and stood there. The television was flickering with Nick Pratt’s image.

  “Anthony?”

  No answer. She stepped forward into the living room. Her boss was on screen, delivering his prepared remarks.

  “… Eight days ago on October 5, the murderer who calls himself Virgil demanded that I read an excerpt from a document titled ‘The Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health.’ While it has always been contrary to the policy of my company and the tobacco industry to repeat rumor and inflammatory rhetoric of this kind, we at Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc. have decided to make an exception in this case in order to prevent any further deaths. Therefore, I will read the material specified by the killer, although I do so with no endorsement of the content.”

  She took a few more steps into the living room and stood behind the couch, directly opposite the television screen.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late again,” she said to Anthony, fixing her attention on the television. “Wow. How long has he been on?”

  Mary watched Pratt. He had begun to read the text from The Surgeon General’s Report. After a moment, she circled around the right side of the sofa, still watching raptly, and settled down next to her husband.

  She reached out with her hand and placed it affectionately on his knee. Something was terribly wrong. For an instant, all the muscles of her face twitched. Her head jerked from the television toward Anthony, and she shrieked.

  “Anthony! Anthony! Oh my dear Lord, help us!” She dove across him and grabbed for the telephone. The handset clattered on the end table. She punched the keys. “9-1-1! Please! My husband. He’s dying…”

  Mary sobbed and cradled her husband in her arms, her tears splashing down onto his face.

  On the television screen, Pratt had finished reading the excerpt and concluded his announcement with additional remarks.

  “… only to do our part in preventing more senseless slaughter of innocents. The terrible tragedies of recent days are the work of a sick, perverted animal, not the tobacco industry or the good people who work in it. Nothing should persuade us otherwise. Thank you, and good night.”

  55

  Philadelphia

  Dr. Trice had a consulting conference with the director of the Employee Assistance Program at a South Philadelphia Coca-Cola bottling facility, and it would be no trouble, she said, to meet Rhoads at Primo Pasta at Philadelphia International Airport.

  After her conference and a taxi ride to the airport, she hurried on her short legs to the restaurant. She took a seat at a booth with a window looking out onto the tarmac, told a waitress she was waiting for someone, ordered a cup of coffee, and went to work on the bag of hot roasted toffee-covered peanuts she had bought at the airport.

  Ten minutes later, Rhoads slid into the booth and shook Dr. Trice’s hand. The plate-glass window provided a view of the north light-craft runways. He watched Dr. Trice as she put four heaping teaspoons of sugar into her coffee.

  “I thought you doctors were supposed to know better than that.”

  “Why do I know what is right but do what is wrong? Who said that, Rhoads?”

  He shrugged.

  “Some so-called saint. I can’t remember, either. I love sugar.” She took a sip of her coffee and reached into the crumpled white paper bag holding the peanuts. “You’re back like a stray cat who once got milk at the alley door. I take it, therefore, that you’ve reason to believe there was validity to my prediction.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Old Carolina owns the StarCity hotels. Your star idea. The FBI set up surveillance at both StarCity properties. Virgil showed up at the gift shop in StarCity’s Princeton hotel, but he was too slick—and too lucky. Somehow, the FBI kept it from getting into the news. You couldn’t have been any more on the money. Needless to say, everyone was impressed as hell.”

  “Yes,” was all Dr. Trice said. Then she added, “Why is Virgil still free?”

  “He gave us the slip, and he’s not going to give us another chance like that again.”

  The waitress returned, set down two glasses of ice water, and took Rhoads’s coffee order.

  “Obviously,” Rhoads continued, “I’m interested in any more predictions you have.”

  “Good. But first I have to go out to short-term parking. I left the Ouija board in my trunk.” She laughed at the expression on Rhoads’s face. “Well, that is what you thought, isn’t it?”

  “I’m past that now, Dr. Trice.” The waitress brought the coffee, and he took a sip. “But you did have some trick up your sleeve. How’d you do it?”

  “Now it’s my turn to play dumb,” she said.

  “First of all, I don’t play dumb. I am dumb. If I ever have an expression on my face that makes you think I don’t get something, I probably don’t. There is one thing, though, that separates me from the mass of dumb men. I know I’m dumb. And dumb as I am, I’m just smart enough to know you weren’t completely straight with me. You didn’t use a Ouija board, so how did you figure out the star angle?”

  Dr. Trice went into the bag for more nuts. Her fingers stuck to the paper. She held the bag out toward Rhoads who simply shook his head. She chewed a handful and started speaking before they cleared her palate.

  “Institutions like the FBI tend to be categorical in their thinking,” she said. “In the FBI’s eyes, chemists know about chemistry. The Hair and Fiber Section experts know about the material tailors use. Pathologists know about cadavers. Psychiatrists know about psychology. In such organizations, intelligence outside one’s official area of expertise is distrusted mightily.”

  She took another nut and chewed it thoroughly.

  “My deduction,” she said, “was not psychiatric. It was literary.”

  “Literary? As in a book?”

  Dr. Trice resisted rolling her eyes. “Yes, handsome, from classical literature. You see, our friend calls himself Virgil. Virgil was a Roman poet who wrote…”

  “We already thought of that. The FBI looked up everything that guy wrote. Couldn’t find anything that clicked.”

  “There’s that categorical thinking again. Virgil, you see, was more than a poet. He was also a character in a work written by someone else. The greatest poem ever written, for my money. Written seven hundred years ago by Dante Alighieri. Called The Divine Comedy. In it, Virgil takes Dante on a grand tour of hell—the inferno. Well, what do you know? Our Virgil is giving us the same treatment.”

  “Oh, okay. I can see that,” Rhoads said nodding. “But what does that have to do with the StarBright gift shop?”

  “The Divine Comedy is a poem divided into three parts, three canticles. Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Each one ends with exactly the same word…”

  “Which is?” he asked.

  “You tell me.”

  He shrugged.

  “It’s an easy one, Rhoads. Take a guess.”

  Rhoads wouldn’t even make a serious try. “Mayonnaise?”

  “Close. The word is ‘star.;”

  Rhoads regretted the stupid joke. Then he imagined explaining to Franklin that the poem thing was the key to catching Virgil.

  “Do you think we can get some literature professors to study the poem and help us figure out what he’s going to do?”

  “That I don’t know,” Dr. Trice said. “This is where I become a psychiatrist a
gain. Your Virgil has a connection to Dante’s Virgil, who, in the Comedy, is already dead. He is merely the shadow of the man he once was, doomed to live in hell and guiding the education of Dante. Later, Dante will return to the world of the living and communicate what he’s learned about the penalties for misbehaving, for forgetting God.”

  “That super-personality thing?”

  “Whatever our Virgil once was, he now sees himself as dead, as a transformed spirit beyond the reach of mere mortals. He feels wise and invulnerable. And condemned. That’s why he is so incredibly dangerous. There’s a very good chance he has passed beyond the conception that what he’s doing is murder. In a sense, he no longer believes in death.”

  Rhoads nodded and whispered shit under his breath. That hundred-grand bonus was looking a long way off. “Would it be pressing my luck to ask you what you think he’s going to do next?”

  “This one isn’t a prediction, Rhoads, just a probability. Actually, nothing more than an educated guess.”

  Rhoads reached into an inside pocket and took out his notepad.

  “Our Virgil’s working on his own epic,” Dr. Trice said. “And in every good story, there is a continuous building of tension, drama, risk, and excitement. All that leads to some kind of a climax, the grand finale he’s mentioned in the few, very few,” she shot him a glance, “transcripts you’ve been willing to share with me. So, I don’t know if the grand finale is what he’s going to do next, I just have a strong feeling it’s what all this is leading up to. I have no idea what sort of surprise he has in mind.”

  “I think the Deputy Director might be prepared to relax his grip on those transcripts for you,” Rhoads said, making a note. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  56

  DALLANESS, ANTHONY A., on October 11, of Asheville, formerly of Vineland, New Jersey, passed away at age 46 after a lengthy illness. Beloved husband of Mary (née Steelman), brother of Michael. Friends and family are invited to funeral services to be held…

  57

  Anna Maria Trichina unlocked the door of her red Alfa Romeo Spider and got in. She pulled out of the main entrance of WHQ, drove half a mile, and entered the eastbound lanes of I-240.

  She tuned in to an oldies station and accelerated. Then, without warning, her rearview mirror began to pulse with red and blue lights from the police cruiser behind her.

  “Merde,” she whispered to herself when she realized the cop meant her. She pulled over on the shoulder. The cruiser pulled up close behind her. The officer exited his car and approached hers. She rolled down her window.

  “Officer, I …”

  “Please turn your ignition off, miss. Then let me see your license, registration, and insurance card.”

  Well, he’s no fun. She reached into her glove compartment and removed the leather folder that held the registration and insurance card. She handed them to the policeman, pulled her arm back in, and rummaged through her handbag for her driver’s license.

  “Hang on for my license. I know it’s here,” she said, flashing a thin smile. “Somewhere.”

  The policeman glanced at the documents. “I stopped you because you seem to have a couple of lights out in the rear. Both your brake lights are out. You know that?”

  “That’s weird. Both lights? Yes, here it is.” She had found the edge of the license in the card section of her wallet, plucked it out, and handed it to the policeman. “The car was just inspected a couple of weeks ago. Could be the electrical system blowing them out.”

  “Maybe you backed into something. They’re smashed.”

  Or maybe someone hit me, she thought.

  He examined the documents more closely. When he got to the driver’s license, he wrinkled his brow.

  “Miss? Is your name Dallaness?”

  Oh, good, she thought. He noticed the Old Carolina parking sticker, and he knows Mary Dallaness. I’ll milk this and get away without a ticket.

  “Dallaness? No. It’s Trichina. Anna Maria Trichina. Do you know Mary? She reports to me at Old Carolina. I love having her work for me. If you know her, then you must know her husband Anthony passed away.”

  The cop took half a step back in order to see into the car better. He looked Trichina in the face. “Say that again.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. You hadn’t heard. Anthony succumbed to emphysema last night. It was sad.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss. But I think you need to tell me why you just handed me a driver’s license in the name of… Anthony Dallaness.”

  Like someone who’s been shot but isn’t yet aware of the wound, Trichina didn’t understand. “Anthony Dallaness? What? Can I see that?”

  The policeman showed her the license but didn’t let go of it. She squinted, trying to read it. The policeman switched on a flashlight and shone the beam onto the license.

  Now she got it.

  She gasped and heard her heartbeat in her ears.

  “What I’d really like is to see your driver’s license. Do you have it in the vehicle?”

  She dived into her handbag and rooted feverishly with shaking hands. The purse slipped from her lap and its contents spilled between her legs and onto the floor. She sat back in her seat, panting, staring.

  “Are you all right in there, Miss?”

  Trichina didn’t respond.

  “Miss, I said are you all right?”

  58

  Friday, October 13

  Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

  “Wow. Look at this place,” one of the FBI agents said as their unmarked van pulled up in front of Dr. Trice’s Main Line residence. Autumn leaves stood in several huge piles on the full-acre front lawn. Ivy climbed up the stone face of the mansion and the glass-framed greenhouse next to it. “It’s like the Ponderosa.”

  Two agents exited the van, each carrying a large cardboard box filled with copies of files and transcripts, interviews, audiotapes, and behavioral assessments.

  Dr. Trice, still in her bathrobe, watched at the open front door. She showed the men in. They entered her home and put the boxes on the dining-room table. Neither of the agents had eaten yet, and they both sniffed the air. Something spicy and garlicky filled the house.

  “Please sign the receipt right there, Dr. Trice,” one of the agents said, pointing to the signature line with the pen he was handing her. “And the Deputy Director said that for your convenience, a sealed, duplicate set of this information will be delivered to your office at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Is someone there to accept the delivery?”

  She looked at her watch. “No, not this early.”

  “When, then?”

  “Usually by eight forty-five. Ask for Carol Frederick. She’ll lock them up.”

  “Fine. Thank you. We’ll deliver them then. Eight forty-five.”

  “Thank you.”

  “One last detail, Dr. Trice.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’ve been informed that these documents are confidential and sensitive, and that by accepting them, you agree not to discuss them, now or at any time in the future, with anyone other than FBI personnel.”

  “This is the third time I’ve been advised.”

  “Okay,” the agent said. “Thank you.”

  Dr. Trice watched the two men get back into the van. She shook her head and hummed. Nobody loves you when you’re right, she thought.

  59

  Asheville

  In the Dallaness kitchen, Rhoads and Mary sat at an oak table drinking coffee. Rain streamed down the windows and drummed on the glass. Mary had intended to make copies of the Midas files for Rhoads, but she had forgotten in the aftermath of Anthony’s death. “I’ll get those to you tomorrow, okay?” she said.

  “When you can,” he said. “It can wait.”

  Mary’s head was tilted slightly up, like she was trying to remember
something. “They said he could go at any moment, but I thought it would be so much more gradually.”

  “Emphysema’s tricky. I had a granduncle and great grandfather who both had it. They went fast.”

  “Smokers?”

  “What do you think?”

  She shook her head mournfully. “All those hateful, endless details of dying. Any minute, I keep thinking I’m going to have to run upstairs and make sure he’s taken his medication. Like when our beagle ran away. I kept thinking he was curled up next to the couch.”

  “The phantom limb idea, Mary. That will pass.” He reached across the table and put his hand on hers.

  “I never should have married. It didn’t work from the beginning.”

  “Don’t do that to yourself,” Rhoads said.

  “You’re not married. You’re smart.”

  “The loneliness stays with you like an old bathrobe,” he said “That’s the fine print you don’t bother to read when they tell you all about the exhilarating freedom of flying solo.”

  Mary turned to watch the raindrops hit the window above the sink. “Well, still, I’m not sorry he’s gone. Though I did love him.”

  “You know, once I was on business in Chicago and stopped into Dalesford’s and bought a wallet. You know those stupid pictures of models they put in new wallets? I walked around for a month with a woman’s picture in my wallet, the woman who came with the wallet. It wasn’t to fool the guys, it was to fool me. I told myself that if I had someone I loved, that’s where she’d be, right there in the wallet. I wanted to see what it felt like.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “It felt like my life was counterfeit. That’s what it’s felt like ever since my wife died. Until I met you.”