Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge)

by Frank Freudberg

  Valzmann nodded that he understood.

  Pratt seemed satisfied with his plan and exhaled slowly through his nose. “Then he’ll talk.”

  “You want me to video it?”

  “Of course.”

  “And after they’ve had a chance to express themselves?”

  “‘And days of mourning shall follow.’”

  Pratt expected Valzmann to applaud the plan. Instead, there was an awkward silence.

  “You don’t like that approach?” Pratt asked.

  “No, I do like it. It’s excellent.”

  “Well? There’s something else?”

  “Sir, on my own time, I’ve been following Mrs. Dallaness via the security cameras.”

  “Yes?”

  The man kicked at the cement underfoot. “I find her lean little body very… very appealing.”

  Pratt nodded. “Be my guest.”

  “Thank you. Just getting prior approval.”

  Pratt nodded again, then had a thought and reached out and touched the man’s sleeve. “When it’s time for dessert, make sure you turn Rhoads’s chair around so he has a clear view.”

  “That’s SOP, sir.” The man sighed. “It’s a shame, though, that we have to give Rhoads Retirement Plan 86.”

  “You’re getting soft, old boy.”

  “I mean it’s a shame that we’ll never get to see the expression on his face when the police show up and tell him they just spent six hours digging up a dead scientist named Benedict behind his uncle’s cabin at Deer Mountain. I pulled a neck muscle planting him.”

  Pratt thought for a moment. “You’re right, Valzmann. It is too bad. But remember, nothing’s perfect.”

  Without saying another word, Pratt pressed the button that raised the window between them.

  Valzmann turned and began walking away when Pratt again lowered the window.

  “Valzmann, come here.”

  Valzmann returned, hands thrust into his coat pockets.

  Pratt grinned. “This guy’s feeling terrible for weeks and weeks and finally goes to see his doctor, right?”

  Valzmann nodded, masking his irritation at another joke.

  “So,” Pratt continues, “the doctor runs a battery of tests and tells the patient to come back to get the results the next day. So the next day, the patient comes back. The doctor calls him into his office, closes the door, and says, ‘Well, I have good news, and I have bad news.’ The patient says, ‘Give the bad news first.’ The doctors says, ‘Okay, you’ve got lung cancer from smoking three packs a day for thirty years. You have a month to live.’ The patient turns white. ‘Oh my God,’ he says. ‘What’s the good news?’ The doctor leans across the desk to the patient,’” Pratt leaned out the limo window, imitating the doctor, “‘and whispers, ‘Did you get a load of the red-headed receptionist out there—the one with the great legs and big tits?’ The patient says, ‘Yes… yes, I saw her.’ Now the doctor leans in even closer and grins proudly, ‘I’m screwing her!’”

  92

  After the meeting in Washington, Rhoads flew to Cincinnati with Brandon to check out the crime scene at the Trailways terminal.

  After less than ninety minutes there, he left for Asheville. Why he needed to accompany Brandon was a mystery to him.

  Probably Franklin’s idea of a joke. But no, Franklin was devoid of humor. They worked the scene and flew back that evening.

  He got to Mary’s house at midnight.

  She seemed strangely distant, worried about something she wouldn’t discuss. But by one in the morning, they were in bed, under a flannel sheet, glistening with the sweat of exertion. The day had exhausted Rhoads, and what little energy he had left, Mary wanted. He tried, but soon she realized how tired he was.

  She took over.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” she whispered. “Let me drive.”

  Later, he lay on his back, eyes open, staring into nowhere, and she on her side, against him, tracing the words “Mary and Tommy” on his abdomen. She formed the letters in an inexact way so he wouldn’t know what she was spelling.

  She was about to suggest they go again when his breathing told her he had fallen asleep

  An hour later, his beeper went off.

  “Do you have to get it?” Mary asked, as he got out of bed.

  He used the telephone downstairs in the kitchen for a long time, long enough for him to smoke three Camels. When he came back up and got into bed, he told Mary nothing.

  She just sighed.

  Rhoads rolled away to sleep.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You tired of me already?”

  “No. Just tired.”

  “Thinking about Virgil?” she asked.

  “No. Just tired.”

  “I am,” she said.

  “Tired?”

  “No. Thinking about Virgil.”

  “Virgil himself? Or the whole Virgil mess?”

  “I can’t believe Pratt’s going to hand over a billion and a half dollars to a certified madman.”

  “Why are you talking like that? You know Virgil’s not getting a dime. It’s going to fund heart, lung, and cancer research grants. And secondly, Pratt’s only coughing up seven hundred and fifty million. The other tobacco companies are kicking in the other half. And nothing’s definite yet.”

  “It’s still negotiating with a terrorist in my book.”

  “Mary, tell me you don’t get a kick out of seeing Pratt’s face rubbed in it.”

  “You can’t know Pratt and not laugh at that.”

  “And tell me you don’t think Virgil has a point,” Rhoads said. “Maybe his etiquette needs a little tune-up, but the man’s got a point. It’s not that I sympathize with him. He’s a killer. But he’s got a point. He’s claimed the moral high ground, and plenty of the public’s with him. That’s something nobody counted on.”

  “Moral high ground! Virgil? Are you crazy?”

  “Yeah, Virgil. He’s raised the equivalent of a million dollars fifteen hundred times to heal the diseases Old Carolina sells by the pack. That’s a lot of money.”

  She wanted to turn away but stopped herself. “Don’t talk like that. Even to joke.”

  “Who’s joking? You’ve seen the news. Bastard’s got people quitting left and right. Clubs and seminars. Smokers Anonymous is the fastest growing self-help support group in the world. Free university-sponsored wholesale hypnosis sessions. Tobacco sales are down, especially in kids, the kids the tobacco business hopes are too stupid to see Virgil as their folk hero. If he doesn’t want them to smoke, plenty of them are going to play along. He’s created more converts than thirty years of surgeon general’s warnings.”

  Mary sat up, wrapped the sheet around her, and glared at him. “You make it sound like we’re the villains. Tobacco is a legal product, T.R.”

  “So is sodium cyanide.”

  For a few minutes, they were just there, next to each other, breathing. Then Mary started in again.

  “Hundreds of thousands of decent, hard-working men and women earn their daily bread working in our industry. Including me.”

  “Four hundred and thirty thousand decent, hard-working men and women drop dead annually from smoking-related diseases. Including a guy named Anthony Dallaness.”

  That did it. Mary got out of bed and stood over him pointing a trembling finger. “Maybe to you it’s nothing more than a bad case of rudeness, but to me, your friend Virgil would love nothing more than a news story about twelve-year-olds vomiting their lungs up all over the playground.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant. Get back in bed. Come on.”

  “You agree with Virgil!”

  “Come on, forget it. I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”

  “No, you’re not. You agree with Virgil! Admit it! You think he’s better than we are
. You’re sick to twist the situation that way. I’ve never killed anybody, but I’m not sure about…” She stopped herself.

  “About what?” Rhoads glared.

  “What about your trip to Denver? They sent you after Benedict and paid you two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “You think I had something to do with Benedict’s death?” Rhoads laughed at the idea that he’d kill for Pratt. He stopped. He didn’t want her to think he was laughing at her. “Where’d you get that idea?”

  She felt a chill.

  Rhoads lowered his voice. “Is that what Trichina told you?”

  She took a step forward and straightened up. “You’re sure he’s dead, so what am I supposed to think? I don’t know you well enough to know what you’re capable of, T.R. What about the two hundred thousand Pratt signed for, in cash, the day before you went to Denver? Where’s that money?”

  “That was to pay off Benedict, to shut him up. He was going to open his yap to the government about Midas. I was to offer him a fifty-thousand dollar-a-year consulting contract for the rest of his life plus the two hundred grand in cash plus Pratt’s promise that none of the data Benedict developed would ever be used to sell cigarettes. But by the time I got there, he was already gone.”

  Trichina had cautioned Mary about confronting Rhoads. He was a convincing liar, she said. She knew that, she said, from personal experience.

  Mary looked at Rhoads and realized how much she really didn’t know him. She wanted to believe him, but the money concerned her. And now that he was siding with Virgil, she thought that his sense of right and wrong might be very different from hers.

  “I think you’d better go,” she said, her voice colder and more distant than he had ever heard it before. She took a step back and her warm skin shuddered against the cool tile of the bathroom wall. “This was all a mistake. You and me.” She turned her back.

  “You don’t believe me? Don’t you know yet I would never, ever lie to you?”

  She stared straight at the wall in front of her. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

  He tried to turn her around, to look into her eyes. When he touched her, she jerked away, as if she was about to be attacked.

  He dropped his arms submissively.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You have to go.”

  “Fine with me,” he said. He got into his clothes as fast as he could and tore down the stairs. Mary winced when the door slammed.

  PART THREE

  93

  Wednesday, October 25

  Asheville

  “T.R.?” Mary Dallaness’s voice said hesitantly as it crackled over the speaker on Rhoads’s answering machine. “Listen, I know I was upset last night. And I know I shouldn’t be talking to you on your answering machine. But I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who to turn to. I just got a call from Corporate Travel. They’re having a courier deliver plane tickets and a memo that sends me and a few others from Documentation to some investor relations meeting in New York. They want me to leave right away, tomorrow. I think it’s an excuse to get us out of here so they can, uh, you know, adjust the computers. I’d better talk to you in person, T.R. Call me as soon as you can. Please. I’m scared. Really scared.”

  94

  The Royal Carland Hotel

  New York

  “I go to bed early, very early,” Valzmann said to the registration clerk. He registered at the Royal Carland under the name of Jonathan Conrad. “Eight p.m. And I get up early, very early. Four a.m. I don’t want to be hearing elevators banging and clanging.”

  “No sir, that’s why we gave you 2502, the room you asked for. Very, very quiet there, sir.”

  “And who did you put me next to? The percussion section of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass?”

  “No sir. On one side of your room, there’s a linen closet. The housekeepers use it only during the day. The guest room on the other side has been reserved by a woman who won’t be arriving until tomorrow. And once she does check in, I’m sure she’ll be very quiet, sir. She’s here on business.”

  “The kind of business where she’ll be bringing customers in and out all night long, probably.”

  “No sir. She’s here for a tobacco industry meeting. Serious people.”

  “Well, you just make sure. You won’t like it if I have to call down here and speak to your superior.”

  “No sir. You’ll see, sir. There’ll be nothing to disturb you. You’ll get quality sleep here at the Royal Carland, sir.”

  95

  Baltimore

  Without the knowledge of Franklin or Pratt, Rhoads met Dr. Trice at the Inner Harbor Aquarium in Baltimore. She had called and said she wanted to show him something. She took the Metroliner down from 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.

  They walked through the exhibits, stopping twice at refreshment stands. Rhoads ordered nothing. At the first stand Dr. Trice bought soft pretzels that left splotches of yellow mustard at the corners of her mouth. The stain remained visible until the second stop, where the doctor ordered a large cola, insisting that no ice be added to the cup, and an ice cream sandwich in the shape of a taco.

  When they got to the crustacean tanks, Trice winked at Rhoads, stretching her arm in the direction of the large glass wall that separated them from the sea creatures.

  “Observe, if you will, the primitive Cordozo,” she said, cutting the air with a wide wave of her arm, directing Rhoads’s attention to something moving on the other side of a brilliant red coral—a glistening, silvery fish that appeared to him to be a large, bulky version of a minnow. Dr. Trice had the demeanor now not of a respected academic, but of a stage magician. “This species has few physical advantages to recommend it for natural selection. It is large, weak, and slow, though note its substantial set of incisor-like teeth and protruding lower jaw. What it does have going for it is its ability to apply stealth and deception to mislead predators. This fish, when under apprehension of attack, will rub itself against an abrasive object, a rock or piece of coral, leaving a trace of its own blood, even bits of its own flesh.

  “Predators’ olfactory glands draw them to the blood while the Cordozo circles back around the object from the rear and attacks the distracted pursuer, restating the terms of engagement,” she continued.

  Rhoads tapped on the glass with his knuckle. None of the sea creatures seemed to notice.

  Dr. Trice rolled her eyes. Everyone knows not to disturb the fish by banging on the aquarium.

  “For the first time,” she said, “you find yourselves able to predict Virgil’s movement. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Or, has the bureau suddenly gotten a whole lot cleverer? Because with men like Franklin near the top of the heap, I doubt it. Is that what they think, that they know this man? I think otherwise. You think you’ve gotten smarter, and he’s gotten weaker. I don’t think so. I think he’s going to circle back on you.”

  Rhoads listened carefully and stared into the tank. The three or four Cordozo swam lazily over a bed of crawling black lobsters. “What’s he done that makes you think that?” Rhoads asked.

  “He is moving steadily west. And he’s moving slowly. That may be because he is tiring. He is most likely out of breath. Literally. He knows he hasn’t much time left, despite his stated ambition of four hundred and thirty victims. I say he never intended to make that number, although he’s gotten shockingly close. If he is truly seeking glory, nothing more than the attention he sought but never received from his mother or father, then you can be assured he will stage his ‘grand finale’ before the cancer and emphysema take much more strength out of him.”

  Rhoads withdrew a folded piece of printer paper, a list of the FBI’s Likely Vectors analysis of Virgil’s potential geographical targets and the most probable, most vulnerable upcoming events. Anything the FBI thought might interest Virgil. Rhoads took the list from Brandon’s desk and made a copy. He scann
ed the page now.

  “He seems to be heading toward a Specialty Retailers Symposium at the Brasilia Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Nick Pratt’s going to speak there. That’s confidential, doctor. They know that from a schedule of retail marketing events they found with newspaper articles in the briefcase recovered in Harrisburg. At least that’s what they’re all figuring. And, from what I know, it makes sense. If he is headed there, then it will be all over. That is where we will grab him. They’ve got the Mother of All Stakeouts planned for Las Vegas.”

  “What else is on that list?” Trice demanded as she snatched the confidential memorandum from Rhoads’s hand. She ran her eyes over it quickly before Rhoads pulled it back.

  Then he read to her. “The American Advertising Association meeting, that’s today in Los Angeles. Either of the StarCity properties, even though he’s been to one already. They’re both currently under constant surveillance. The American Vending Service Association, San Francisco. Their members operate vending machines. And the PAM Technologies seminar in Seattle, whatever that is.”

  “PAM? I think they’re involved in the development of smokeless tobacco products and cleaner-burning cigarette paper.”

  Rhoads looked as if he thought she made that up. “Now how would you know that, doctor?”

  “I follow the stock market, buster. They’ve been losing money for five or six years, running around patenting everything their engineers dream up. Too much development, not enough marketing. Now it looks as if they’re a bit more organized.” She pointed to the paper in his hand. “What else do you have there?”

  “Nothing else in the next few weeks.”

  “Your list mentions events in the east. Name them.”

  “They don’t count, Dr. Trice. Virgil’s moving west now. That’s documented.”

  “What’s on the list out east?”

  Rhoads shook his head. “Okay. A special investor relations meeting set up by Old Carolina this Friday in New York. A nicotine patch medical seminar for family practice physicians in Boston on November 2. An EPA conference on office environment health issues in Washington on November 5 and 6… but, given what’s known about Virgil’s whereabouts, put together with the retailers meeting in Vegas, the events in the east have just about been ruled out.”