Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge)

by Frank Freudberg

  “I thought the boat was our Plan B.”

  “Plan C, then. Sorry you wasted your time, but I hope flying here cost Pratt a lot of money.”

  “All right, T.R., you want to know why I’m here?” Jack said. He took a newspaper out of his deep jumpsuit pocket, unfolded it to the headline, and held it for Rhoads to see.

  A giant headline screamed:

  CYANIDE CIGARETTES SLAY 341 ACROSS

  U.S. 200 MORE SERIOUSLY INJURED

  Doctors Say Many Are On Life Support.

  “World’s full of crazy people, Jack. What’s this got to do with me?”

  “This crazy must know you. He signed your name and Pratt’s name on the letters that went to the dead people.”

  “Like I said, if the FBI wants to talk to me, they can drive up.”

  “Yeah, they could do that, but they’re not going to buy you a boat.”

  “Quit screwing around, Jack. What are you talking about?”

  “Pratt wants you on the case. He says you’re one of the best, and he knows you can’t be bought off, so he says he can trust you. He’s offering $1,000 a day to run an internal investigation into why Old Carolina’s being targeted. And if he’s offering $1,000, you know you can drive him up to twice that, and there’s a bonus if you catch the guy. See what I’m saying? Boat money.”

  Rhoads ran his hands through his hair. “Shit. Let’s wake Teddy up. We need to make a stop on the way to see Pratt.”

  Two hours later they had landed at a small airfield in New Jersey. Linda was there to pick Teddy up and take him to rehab. She hugged him, crying a little. Teddy said, “I’m sorry.”

  Linda didn’t answer him.

  Rhoads kissed her on the cheek and said, “Try not to worry too much. We’re going to fix this.”

  “If you say so. This is the last time, Tommy, I mean it.”

  “I know,” he said. “Let’s just get through this and see where we are. I have a plan.”

  Teddy came over to him and before he could speak, Rhoads said, “I’m sorry, Teddy. I have to do this thing. Just keep your head down, do your time, and we’ll go boat shopping in a month.”

  “Thanks, man. I promise you I’m going to beat it this time.”

  “I know you will.”

  Jack waved to him and Rhoads got back into the helicopter. Jack had a short conversation with the tower and they were on their way to meet the company Learjet in Philadelphia.

  18

  Pensacola, Florida

  It had taken Muntor two hours to find Oscar’s, a coffee shop on the west side of town.

  Good. The last one on the list, Muntor thought when he saw it from his car. He was spelling out a five-letter word and had already taken care of the other four.

  He circled around and parked a block away.

  Before getting out of his car, he reached behind the driver’s seat and felt for the McDonald’s bag, ostensibly filled with litter. He used it as camouflage for the various packs of cigarettes he brought with him. He grabbed a pack and looked at it.

  Winstons. He slipped the pack into his jacket pocket, locked the car, and headed for Oscar’s.

  The short walk caused pain in his feet. He couldn’t wait to get out of the size twelve shoes he had purchased and padded with terrycloth to make him appear inches taller than his five-seven.

  Inside the busy little shop, a half-dozen customers sat at the counter. Most of the booths were occupied. Only one waitress and a cashier were visible. The cashier smiled at him.

  “Pay phone?” Muntor asked in a deep voice.

  “Sorry. Too many kids in here raising hell. We had to take it out.” She pointed through the plate-glass window onto the street. “One right outside, though.”

  Muntor spun to see, as if he really cared whether a telephone was there. “Okay. Thanks,” he nodded. He looked back and over her shoulder at a rack behind her. “How about a pack of Winstons then?” He pointed with his eyes.

  “That I can help you with,” she said and took down the white-and-red pack and set it on the counter for him. He paid her, said thanks, and picked up the pack with his right hand. As Muntor turned to leave, he made sure his left shoulder was blocking her view of his right jacket pocket. He dropped the pack into his pocket and, using only his Band-Aid-covered thumb and index finger, pulled out the other pack, the treated one he had brought in from the car.

  “On second thought,” he said, turning fully toward her, “mind if I get a pack of Carltons instead?” He put the Winstons on the counter. “They cost the same?”

  “They’re all the same except the generics,” she said, handing him a pack of Carltons and returning the Winstons to the rack.

  Muntor nodded again, pocketed the Carltons, walked outside, and faked a fast call at the pay phone.

  19

  FBI Headquarters

  Tenth and Pennsylvania

  Washington, D.C.

  Brandon waited until the others left Franklin’s office. “May I close the door, Oak?”

  Franklin looked up from the stack of messages on his desk and nodded.

  “I always thought Rhoads’s personnel file from Old Carolina looked a little too clean,” Brandon said.

  “So you thought you’d dig up something negative.”

  “I did some research. There was a problem when he was a Philly cop. They kept it quiet, but some of it made the papers. Thing is, there’s two stories. Sources in Philly P.D. say Rhoads was crooked and some people think he killed another cop, one Michael Flynn, who was going to turn him in.”

  “What’s the media say? It’s going to be a balmy day in hell before I trust Philly P.D.”

  “The paper said Rhoads was clean, and Flynn died in ‘mysterious circumstances.’ The investigation said suicide, but there are doubts.”

  “What did Rhoads say about it?”

  “Nothing. He took his pension and went private. Some kind of deal was made, but it’s hard to say if it was to protect the department or Rhoads, or both. A few years later he landed a consulting job with Old Carolina, worked there for three years and abruptly quit. I talked to some cops I know in Philadelphia. Rhoads was an exemplary cop before it happened. Supposedly a decent man, but it’s hard to imagine that based on what we know about Rhoads today. Word is he’s an alcoholic, shows up, does the job, and then goes home and drinks himself stupid.”

  “What’s that about?”

  Brandon said, “Looks like it runs in the family. He’s got a younger brother, Theodore, and the guy’s a mess. A couple DUIs and he just got fired from his job. Rhoads had a wife, and after she died, it sounds like he never got over it. A couple guys I talked to said before his wife died Rhoads spent every weekend as a Big Brother.”

  “Volunteer work for fatherless kids. I had a Big Brother when I was growing up in Columbus.” Franklin pointed to the clipping. “What do you want to do with this?”

  “Bury it in the back of the file?”

  Franklin nodded and handed the clipping back to Brandon with an inward smile. He had never before seen any evidence that his subordinate had a heart.

  20

  Fully dressed and reclining on a saggy king-sized bed in the Beachwood of Pensacola Motel, Muntor snacked on nuts and celery while he watched CNN. The news anchor announced that the network was preparing a special report to air in half an hour on developments in the cigarette-tampering story.

  “Courtesy of one Martin Muntor,” Muntor added to the announcer’s statement. He’d tune in then. He had seen all he needed to see for now.

  Yet, he kept watching.

  Then, a thought, a joyous, uplifting thought came out of nowhere. Even if I drop dead here and now, they’ll soon learn who did it and why. I’ve already succeeded. The rest of what I’m going to do? It’s just icing. And now that the FBI’s involved, they’ll dig deep enough to find out wha
t Big Tobacco’s really been up to. He smirked. Killing people who were killing themselves with cigarettes was justified—and a lesson the world needed to learn. But using an arm of the government that had protected the tobacco companies for decades to destroy them was an entirely different level of satisfaction.

  Exhilarated, he flipped through the channels until he found another network working the story.

  The images and sounds that came from the screen, the newspaper articles, the conversations he’d be overhearing in restaurants and in line at the supermarkets were the world’s acknowledgment of his might. He tried to control the agitated thrill that rushed through him, excited as a kid running home from school on the last day of classes.

  While he daydreamed, the television image switched from the head-and-shoulders shot of a news reader to a recorded shot of a swarm of reporters in a residential neighborhood.

  “He’s gone. He was the one who cared about me,” cried an elderly woman grieving over a lost grandson. “Of all my grandchildren, he was the only one who visited.” A crowd of reporters and cameramen hovered around her on a lawn.

  “Oh, my!” Muntor said in falsetto, putting his hands up to his face in mockery. “If only he hadn’t thrown his life away on cigarettes!”

  The network cut to a reporter posing in the dusky light on the steps of the Lexington, Kentucky Federal Courthouse. He summarized what was known thus far in the investigation, but Muntor was too distracted by his own thoughts to hear it. The reporter then introduced a Kentucky State Police commander. Muntor listened attentively. The commander said tersely, “We can’t say very much until our laboratory analysis identifies the substance we recovered from the crime scene.”

  “Oh, go ahead, tell us anyway!” Muntor said to the screen. “We’re dying to know.” He caught himself again.

  The reporter promised more information as soon as it was available. Muntor’s heart rate picked up when he heard that a press conference was scheduled in Washington later that day at 3:00 p.m.

  Then the report ended and the network cut to commercials. Muntor’s face fell.

  He turned one of the shabby armchairs toward the picture window. Beyond the glass, his room afforded a view of Pensacola Bay, obscured in part by a Texaco station and its revolving sign. He watched the sun reflect a prism of color on the water. A humid breeze blew in from the Gulf of Mexico and jangled the wind chimes not far from Muntor’s room. He was tired. The chimes annoyed him.

  He dozed off for a moment, but his slouching position caused his chest to compress, and that made it nearly impossible to breathe. He straightened up, and his head cleared. The events of the preceding twenty-four hours marched through his mind like troops returning on a soggy road.

  Muntor had taken a red-eye just after midnight from Philadelphia to Mobile. There he rented a car and drove the hour to Pensacola. The fake ID he used had worked perfectly, and paying cash for the airline ticket, car rental, food, and fuel wouldn’t leave much of a trail.

  The flying and driving, and finally the running around once he arrived in Pensacola, exhausted him. He had spent the hours after daybreak walking in and out of convenience stores and restaurants, dive bars, and supermarkets. The “W” and “Y,” contrary to what his research led him to expect, were easy enough to find. He knew from the Free Library of Philadelphia’s telephone book collection that there’d be plenty of “H”s and “D”s. The stumper, at least for most of the morning, had turned out to be the “O.” When he finally met with success at Oscar’s, he knew his salutation would soon be heard around the world.

  Muntor was enjoying the mental travelogue and regretted not taping some of it for the documentary. Then yammering from some talk show that had replaced the news on television intruded on his thoughts. He got up, found the remote, and tapped a button a few times to lower the volume. He dropped onto the bed, rolled onto his side, and reached down underneath. His hand found the McDonald’s bag containing his cigarettes and other supplies. He patted it like he’d pet his cat. Reassured, he rolled over again onto his back.

  Fatigue tugged at him like an undercurrent, but he fought sleep. He wanted to be awake when the CNN report came on. He closed his eyes, hoping he’d rest a bit, but even rest wasn’t available. Muntor could not stop thinking about what had happened at the office a few weeks earlier.

  It had been a Tuesday. Tuesday was payday, and the New York brass of the American News Syndicate, Muntor’s employer then, had decided to close its Philadelphia operation, laying off Muntor, who had served as an editor and beat reporter, and the rest of the five-person staff. Rumors had been circulating for months. Creditors pressured the company to close six of its thirty-six U.S. offices. New York assigned Philadelphia’s responsibilities to the Harrisburg bureau.

  The bad news came by telephone from the Information Services vice president.

  “Marty, I’m calling you unofficially,” Cal Timonowski said. “I have some bad news. Although we hate like hell to do it, we have to close the Philadelphia bureau. You’ll be getting formal notice sometime next week. We know you’ve done one hell of a job, but we’re in big trouble. Just this morning the Denver Post and Sacramento Bee both non-renewed us. I’m truly sorry, Marty.”

  Muntor listened and made no other comment than a deep rasping cough for a moment. He could picture runty Timonowski sitting in his office on Forty-Seventh Street with a list of calls that he needed to make before he could go home. He said, “I almost won a Pulitzer, you know.”

  “I know Marty, for the tobacco company piece. It was great reporting.”

  “For all the good it did. I handed them the truth, and nobody gave a shit. No trial, not even an inquiry. You think they don’t know they’re killing people?”

  “I know it Marty, I hear you. It was a crime, but —”

  Muntor knew this was why he didn’t have friends at work, but once he started in, he couldn’t stop. “They’re killing people, and nobody cares. Not even the papers. All they care about is celebrity and political scandal.”

  “Well, look, Marty,” Timonowski said, “I just wanted to call and tell you myself. You’ve done good work, and I didn’t want you to find out in a letter. So look, I have some other calls —”

  Muntor had almost hung up on him. He said, “Yes, I know.” He knew the call, the one that savaged the only real accomplishment of Muntor’s life, an exposé on tobacco companies that demonstrated they had known all along their products caused cancer, was just one minor item on that list.

  At fifty-six they do this to me. Buggerers. He clenched his teeth. A tiny ripple of pain radiated along his jaw and up into his temples. He put his tongue between his teeth to force himself to relax the muscles in his face.

  Timonowski kept talking. Muntor wasn’t listening. Muntor had been the odd man out forever.

  The best that Timonowski could offer was a take-it-or-leave-it early retirement package. In his case, with only seven years on the job, the deal amounted to monthly income of about $600 until age sixty-five. Then, good luck and Social Security.

  “Sure. Sure, Mr. T,” Muntor said, coughing again. “Whatever you say.” Muntor had heard a rumor that ANS was in default of its health insurance premiums and that everyone was walking around without coverage. With what Timonowski was telling him now, maybe there was something to the gossip.

  Timonowski wished him well. Muntor laughed and hung up. He cleared his throat and stared off into space.

  It had been a struggle for his grandparents to send him to college. Although Muntor barely made it out with his journalism degree, he did it, and his grandparents were proud. His father, on the other hand, didn’t bother showing up for graduation. It was probably for the best. Muntor was spared the embarrassment of what surely would have been the only boisterously drunk parent in attendance.

  Muntor leaned out of the window thinking. Two weeks’ notice. I’ll see them in hell. He went into the
break room, grabbed an empty cardboard box, and packed his things. He looked at the framed picture of his mother. Why didn’t I run for help? Why didn’t I pick up the phone? Loading it carefully on top of his other belongings, Muntor tried to shake the guilt.

  He sealed the box with a few strips of tape and took one last look around. Well, you were right daddy-o, I’m a loser. An unemployed loser. Muntor hadn’t attended his father’s burial. There was no need to. They had been estranged for years. Muntor learned of his father’s death when the obit came across his desk. Survived by his only son, Martin, of Philadelphia, and two grandchildren. Muntor had red-lined the sentence and replaced it with No known survivors.

  Muntor had no idea where he would get a job or what he would do. He did a quick calculation. He owned the row house. It wasn’t worth much in the deteriorating neighborhood, maybe $40,000 or $50,000, then again, actually selling it was a different matter. And thanks to his lifelong, grandfather-instilled habit of putting a few bucks from every paycheck into one mutual fund or another, he had almost another $40,000. Getting a job wasn’t something he had to worry about right away. Realizing that, he relaxed.

  Before he went to bed, he made a telephone call. He reached an acquaintance who supposedly knew about layoffs and health insurance and employee’s rights. The man told him that it wasn’t possible for ANS simply to terminate his health insurance with only thirty days’ notice. The COBRA rules protected employees. But, the man warned, if Muntor had been procrastinating seeing a doctor, even for something minor, he had better get an appointment pronto.

  “Get it checked out and onto the books,” the man said. “Then, no matter what happens, your insurance company will have to take care of it.”

  Muntor had been coughing with increasing frequency, and something ached in his chest. Why not run up a bit of a tab while he still could? Stick it to American News Syndicate while he still could.