“Ma! Can I have this?”
“Where’d you get that? I told you no candy. You put that back.”
“This isn’t candy.”
“Put it back.”
The boy pointed toward a freezer in the rear of the store. “I can’t. It’s too high.”
“Stop it!” she screeched. “You got it out, you put it back. Now.”
The boy pouted and did not move.
“You got it out, you put it back,” his mother repeated through clenched teeth.
Rhoads watched as the boy slouched tragically back to the freezer. After a backward look at his mother, now busy paying the cashier, the boy managed to slide open the glass lid.
Unable to see in over the top, he stood on tiptoes and felt around in the cold.
Rhoads watched, fascinated by the boy’s determination. It wasn’t obedience that motivated him, Rhoads realized, but the challenge.
The boy clambered onto the edge of the freezer, leaned forward, and his head and shoulders disappeared inside.
He lost his balance momentarily, fell in another few inches, and flailed his legs wildly in the air to regain control. He found a place to drop the popsicle and tumbled out of the freezer, quietly proud of his effort. He returned to his mother empty-handed and breathing hard.
Something the boy’s mother said stood out, hard and cool, the way smooth stones do in a rushing stream. The words repeated themselves to Rhoads like a chant.
“You got it out, you put it back.”
Rhoads looked at the boy intently.
“You got it out, you put it back.”
He didn’t know why the words had such a pull. Another thought flew to him—Dr. Trice’s caveat. Thoughts or ideas that have a different texture about them, she had said. They are usually gifts from the universe.
Outside, he took out his notebook and wrote down the mother’s words.
Then he went looking for a telephone booth in a quiet place.
Rhoads hung up after talking to Dr. Trice fifteen minutes later. He took credit for figuring it out, but he knew he never would have even gotten close if it hadn’t been for Dr. Trice’s guidance.
She had steered him away from the mother’s words, though, when the puzzle was solved, it was the words that told the story. Dr. Trice had known somehow to focus on the boy. She had asked Rhoads to describe what stuck out in his mind’s eye about him.
“How much I liked him,” Rhoads had answered. “The boy forgot all about not being allowed to have the popsicle, and all of a sudden, he had this huge determination to find a way to put it back.”
“That was your emotional reaction to him,” Dr. Trice had said. “You admire him. Tell me about your mind’s eye image of him. What picture do you see?”
Rhoads had to think. Then he laughed. He came around to saying that when the kid slipped and fell further into the freezer, he just kicked and wriggled that much harder, fighting to regain his balance.
The kicking legs.
That’s how the police described finding Jeeter. Then Rhoads saw it.
All he said was, “Yes!” That was enough to spark loud laughter from Dr. Trice on her end of the line.
Earlier, the eel skin clue gave Rhoads the idea that Muntor had given the briefcase to Jeeter.
Now he knew why. Son of a bitch.
77
After an hour’s delay while detectives processed the paperwork, Jeeter left the police station. On his way home, he crossed the street to avoid walking past the dumpster and the two FBI agents who stood on the other side of the yellow tape that cordoned off a section of the alley.
He walked furtively, glancing backward frequently as he hurried along. When he got to a vacant building at the end of a certain block, he crouched down, raised a cardboard flap over a basement window, and crawled through headfirst.
Inside, he lighted a candle he had placed there earlier. He made his way through a series of collapsing, debris-laden rooms, rounded a corner, and lighted two more candles before sitting down on a bed made of wooden crates and plywood loading skids.
The only illumination Jeeter had in the dark rooms were wax candle stubs stuck into wine bottles. He regularly retrieved the stubs from the trash behind an Italian restaurant on State Street. Picture frames without pictures had been crudely nailed over photos carefully cut from National Geographic and glued with Elmer’s to the water-stained walls. Jeeter collected pictures of tropical beaches.
What served as his bed was a disarranged bedspread atop a stack of several coarse wooden skids. In one corner, a battered television set with a broken antenna sat on the case of a malfunctioning VCR. The lone table featured a standing frame filled with a generic print of a blonde woman and toddler. They both beamed.
This makeshift residence, without heat, without running water, without electricity, was what, in his own mind, made Jeeter a class apart from the homeless.
Jeeter’s ears pricked up at quiet footsteps outside. In the near dark, he froze, listening. Another scuffle and the sound of someone lifting the cardboard flap. He held his breath, his eyes showing alarm.
He heard someone lower himself into the back room. Jeeter looked for a hiding place and stooped in a corner behind a corrugated box to pull the bedspread over himself. He knew he could look like the rest of the junk. There’s nothing wrong with you ‘cause God don’t make no junk, his big sister used to tell him a long time ago.
He heard a sound behind him, like a faint sigh. He was too frightened to stay hidden. He tore the bedspread off and whirled to look, his face knotted in fear.
There, leaning against the doorway, was one of the FBI men, somberly observing him and his dirty bedspread shawl.
Still fearful, but not quite so terrified, Jeeter stammered, “Who you?”
“Who did you think I was, Jeeter?”
“I didn’t think you was nobody.”
Rhoads just watched him, then spoke. “You thought I was him. Didn’t you?”
Jeeter wagged his head “no” with great force. “No. I don’t know who you talking about.”
Rhoads took half a step closer. Jeeter tried to move back but found himself against a wall. The candlelight flickered.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” Rhoads said. “I’m an investigator. I was on the other side of the glass in the police station. I saw that jerk from the FBI treating you disrespectfully. I just want to talk to you some more about what happened this morning at the dumpster.”
Rhoads calmly entered the room. Jeeter, still crouching with his skinny back pressed against the wall, remained still. Without approaching him, Rhoads moved around, looking at the few possessions on the walls and floor.
“You’re a cop. This is my home. You got a warrant?” Rhoads did not answer. Jeeter said, “I said all I got to about it this morning. I told it all already.”
Rhoads picked up the picture of the blonde mother and child and ran his finger along the frame picking up dust. “I don’t think so, Jeeter. You told them you found the case this morning. That isn’t true.”
“Is too. I was taking it out. They saw me taking it out.”
“When the cops grabbed you, you weren’t pulling it out, were you?”
“I sure was!” Jeeter shrugged off the silly bedspread, stood upright, and took a tentative half-step away from the wall. “They my witness! Go back and ask them. The sarge and that rookie Keith.”
“Jeeter. Tell me the truth.” Rhoads reached into his pocket and took out a rubber-banded clump of cash, driver’s license, credit cards, ATM card, and the assorted business cards he’d collected but never discarded.
“Jeeter, you’re not in any trouble. But I have to find the man who…” Rhoads flipped through the clump and found what he was looking for, a one hundred dollar bill. He removed it and put the rest of the money and cards back into his pocket.
&nb
sp; Jeeter’s eyes fixed on the bill. “I’d sure like that hundred dollars, but still, I’m not going to lie. Nobody told me where to look.”
Strike one, Rhoads thought.
He held up the bill by one corner and slowly crumpled it until it was a compressed wad completely concealed in his fist. “Ben Franklin’s in jail, Jeeter,” he said, “and only the truth can set him free.”
Jeeter shook his head. Whatever was frightening him was real, Rhoads saw.
“The truth, Jeeter. I need the truth.” Rhoads kept the bill hidden in his fist and extended his arm. “Whoever he was, Jeeter, you’re the last guy in the whole world he ever wants to see again. He won’t be back to bother you.”
“You know that minimum-wage black-assed security guard in Washington, D.C.?” said Jeeter. “The one who found the adhesive tape on the door at the Watergate back in the Nixon days?”
“Sure. The one man who all the ex-CIA burglars didn’t count on.”
“Yeah, him. What’d he ever get out of it?”
Strike two, baby.
“I imagine he’s a pretty proud man.”
“Dirt poor, too, I bet. I read about how he lives now.” Jeeter took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one.
“Still…” Rhoads began.
Jeeter cut him off.
“Look, I just found it, man. I just found the damned case.” Jeeter sat down on the bed. Boards creaked. “Now, I told you the truth. Give me the money.”
“Not until you tell me what you were really doing back at that dumpster, Jeeter.”
“I just did.”
“No.”
“I just found it.”
“You were putting it back,” Rhoads whispered.
Jeeter shivered. “Oh, no. No sir! I was taking it out. They even saw me. You can ask them.”
“You used that one already.”
Rhoads uncrumpled the bill, then slowly crumpled it in his fist again. “Let me help you get old Ben out of the can,” he said. “You just nod when I tell you how it really was.”
Jeeter shook his head “no,” but Rhoads continued.
“He approached you two or three days ago. Right?”
Jeeter wouldn’t nod.
“He told you what to look for, a brown eel skin briefcase.”
Jeeter looked away.
That’s as good as a nod, Rhoads thought.
“He told you where to look for it, or maybe you suggested the dumpster. I mean it’s your dumpster, right?”
Jeeter gave a tentative nod coupled with a small shrug.
“And he told you when it would be there. And he gave you money, and he promised you more, didn’t he?”
Another tiny nod.
“He also told you if you brought it to the cops, you could get a few bucks from them, too, didn’t he? He was the one who told you they’d part with one hundred dollars.”
Jeeter averted his eyes and looked down at his two mismatched shoes.
Strike three.
“Then you heard all the excitement last night at Bob Diner, all the commotion. And you couldn’t wait. Maybe somebody else, some homeless bum, was going to poach on your dumpster. So you went to the dumpster, and you got the briefcase out, sooner than the man told you to. Right?”
Jeeter looked up at the ceiling like a kid getting a lecture.
“You brought it back here. Right? But you didn’t think it would matter, because you were going to put it back and then find it later when he wanted you to.”
Jeeter lowered his eyes, looked over at Rhoads, and nodded again, even more slowly. Rhoads let a small smile play across his face as he moved about the room, casually examining things.
“Good, Jeeter. Thank you. This is between us, Jeeter. Now, there are just three simple things I need from you,” Rhoads said. He handed Jeeter the $100 bill.
“One, a description of the guy, as detailed as you can. And two, as much as you can remember about what he said to you, word for word. And three, whatever it was that you took from the briefcase.”
Rhoads had worked his way over to the fractured television and VCR near Jeeter’s bed. He looked at them closely. Neither had worked in years, but next to them there was a stack of six or eight dusty, sun-warped videocassettes waiting to be played someday when things were better.
“I didn’t take nothing, man,” Jeeter said. “Just kept the suitcase here so nobody else’d get it. Just like you said.”
Rhoads looked through the stack of cassettes.
Jeeter pointed a finger at Rhoads and shouted. “Hey!” That startled Rhoads.
“Hey!” Jeeter said. “I got a idea. How ‘bout a drink, man? Gooood stuff.” He went toward a wooden cabinet. “Special stuff for a special occasion. And real clean glasses, too.”
Jeeter moved a box and from behind it retrieved a dirty shopping bag, but inside the bag was a wooden gift box. When he opened it, Rhoads saw it was lined in red felt. Two spotless crystal long-stemmed goblets and a bottle of Wild Turkey sat nestled inside.
Nice try. Rhoads could spot a decoy maneuver a mile away.
Where was I when he interrupted? Rhoads thought. He furrowed his brow. I was at the stack of videos. He went back, reached out, and took one cassette from the middle of the stack, the clean, new cassette. It had a label, hand-lettered, that read, “Six-minute scene from Paradiso, shot Bucks County, Oct. 20.”
Jeeter’s face twitched. He swallowed hard and moistened his thick chapped lips. He looked away.
“Okay,” Rhoads said. “Let’s have that drink, Mr. Jeeter. And you can tell me all about it.”
78
Forty-five minutes later, Rhoads left Jeeter’s, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and walked back toward the police station.
He stopped before he arrived there. He wanted to see the video before the FBI did. He turned and walked in another direction. He had no idea where he was going. He walked past a liquor store, a pawnshop, a grocery store with a Korean name, a couple of abandoned storefronts. He stopped in front of a sign that read “Beaverly Hills Video.” A porno arcade.
He went in and faced the clerk. “Do you have a booth here where you can watch full-length videos?” Rhoads half-hoped no such booths were available. He worried about sitting in something sticky.
The place reeked of disinfectant and smoke. The clerk nodded to a row of freshly painted booths at the far end of the store.
“Five bucks an hour for the booth, five ninety-five for a full-length adult film,” the clerk said. “You can pick any one of those.” He pointed toward a wall of shelves holding hundreds of porno films classified alphabetically by perversion.
“I brought my own tape.”
“Nope. You can’t do it.”
“I’ll give you the extra five ninety-five anyway.”
“I said no.” He stood up from the bar stool he had been on.
“What’s the difference? I’m paying the same as if I rented one.”
“Because last year some asshole comes in here with the same story and I say okay. Next thing I know, I’m closed down for thirty days. Asshole’s watching some imported kiddie porn, and that’s the same day the state’s got some undercover inspector in here. So that’s why.”
Rhoads put thirty dollars on the counter.
“Ten for the shop, twenty for you. This isn’t even porno. I’m a cop.”
Inside the musty booth, after some fancy footwork explaining why he didn’t have his badge, Rhoads slid the videocassette into the VCR. Rhoads could hear the machine running, and he could see the counter on the VCR clicking away, but the screen remained blank.
Virgil’s idea of a joke?
Then a sputter of white static and something not quite discernible.
Roiling clouds of gray. Thick, turbulent, opaque. Then, gradually, like an image appearing in a film
developer’s tray, Rhoads began to see the shape and features of a human figure becoming visible among the clouds. The ambient light increased steadily. At last Rhoads was able to make out the details of a fireman’s helmet, a full-face gas mask, a fluorescent yellow tent-like parka, and the long curved snout of an orchard-fogger belching gas from the green-and-white-tank strapped onto a man’s back.
The scene was interrupted by a break and sputter of static. Another shot.
From one hundred yards back, a dilapidated building, perhaps an old school or hospital building in the countryside. Broken windows and a partially caved-in roof. At the near end of the building, everywhere, between the shattered panes of glass and the broken slats of the roof, the gray fog escaped, bleeding heavily into the sky.
What was it? Some kind of smoke? Steam?
Oh Lord, no, Rhoads realized.
It was gas.
Rhoads found himself walking on the street, his mind reeling.
He sighed when he realized he’d have to turn the video over to the FBI. He hated having to lose his advantage, but he thought that what he had found would go a long way towards earning the bonus from Pratt.
79
Monday, October 23
Associated Press Bureau
Washington, D.C.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ATTN.: ALL EDITORS, ALL MEDIA
BREAKING STORY UPDATE MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2:15 P.M. EST.
HARRISBURG, PA.
SLUG: VIRGIL BRIEFCASE RECOVERED?
ART AVAILABLE: 2 COLOR PIX.
1: Crime scene. Dumpster in Harrisburg, PA, where briefcase was recovered.
2: Close-up of briefcase that may have been abandoned by ‘Virgil’ in Harrisburg, PA.
(Xmit of FBI photo)
FBI: “VIRGIL EVIDENCE FOUND
IN HARRISBURG, PA.”
By Fred Bird
Associated Press Staff Reporter
[Sunday, October 22-Harrisburg, PA.] In what may be the most significant evidence recovered so far in the cigarette-tampering investigation, the FBI today announced that technicians are analyzing an eel skin briefcase that may have been abandoned by a skittish “Virgil” who is suspected of fleeing from a diner here. A pack of tainted cigarettes was also recovered from the diner.
Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge) Page 21