The Virgil Jones Mystery Thriller Boxed Set

by Thomas Scott

  Governor Hewitt (Mac) McConnell had approved of the lottery plan on the basis of simple economics. A buck was a buck, after all. He did, however, have deep misgivings about privately held corporations running the state’s penal system, and had vetoed every bill sent to him. But the legislature—McConnell being a blue governor in a deeply red state—had no trouble overriding the vetoes, and at the end of the day the resolution passed. Indiana was on its way to having one of the largest private prison systems in the country.

  It all fell apart though when Pearson and Pate colluded to scam the lottery. They both wound up dead, as did the lottery director herself, in a vicious gun fight that left Virgil, Murton, and Ed Donatti caught in the cross-fire. That same battle ultimately cost Donatti his life when he was stabbed in the throat.

  As tragic as it was—Virgil and Donatti had been close friends—that should have been the end of it. There was some damage control and clean up at the executive level, of course, but it was mostly for appearances because everyone who’d had their hand in the wrong end of the penal pie was dead.

  But the state legislators were more than slightly miffed. Not only was their prison deal dead, they were now on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in land, materials, cost overruns, and other expenditures that bloated the state’s budget and placed it severely in the red. Virgil speculated it didn’t help matters that over the past seven months the governor had been walking around with a smug ‘I told you so’ look on his face.

  The legislators, in a very demonstrative sort of way went into full circus mode. They demanded a thorough investigation and voted to bring in a special prosecutor to handle the subsequent smearing of the executive branch of their own state government. Pearson worked for the governor after all, not them. What they needed was a scapegoat for their own blunder…a way to humanize the tragedy of government run amok. But it wouldn’t fly. Pate and Pearson were dead. As far as Virgil was concerned it had been a witch hunt that lacked…well, a witch.

  He looked at the headline of The Star again.

  ISP UNION REP SAYS STRIKE IMMINENT

  Governor Set To Call In National Guard

  Clearly something else was at play because the governor wanted to meet. But why, Virgil had no idea. He was out of it and had been ever since Cora—at the direction of the governor himself—told him to pack up and ship out.

  No matter what was going on or about to happen, Virgil wanted Sandy there with him when Cora and Mac came by, brunch or no brunch. Sandy had a way with the governor. She knew how to…handle him. He picked up the phone to call her just as the doorbell rang.

  4

  Virgil checked his watch instead of the peephole and thought, early. He opened the door and found Murton holding a copy of The Star, a grim look on his usually smiling face.

  “We have what any reasonably intelligent person might describe as ‘a sticky situation.’” Murton wore jeans, and despite the cooler than normal fall air, a vintage short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt adorned with scantily clad women depicted in various stages of inebriation.

  “That’s one way to put it,” Virgil said. “Come on in. Where the hell do you find those shirts?”

  “I’m not saying. People with a certain sense of style know where to look. Others, well…” He spread his hands and let the implication hang.

  They settled in the kitchen, Virgil ignoring the hanging implication. “This is not something we want to get tangled up with, Murt. It’s pure politics.”

  Murton tipped his chair back and put his boots up on the table. Virgil saw the bottom of an ankle holster strapped to his right leg under the jeans. He knew from experience that there was a knife tucked into the other boot, and the loose fitting shirt covered a chrome-plated .45 holstered on his belt. “Of course it’s politics, Jonesy. Everything is politics. And like it or not, I suspect we’re going to be in the middle of it before it’s over.”

  “Why do I get the feeling that you’re already working an angle of some kind?”

  “I have no idea. But since you and the governor are sort of asshole buddies, I’m thinking he might be able to offer us some sort of guidance or something. Help us get our stories straight at least.”

  The middle of it, as outlined in The Star, was this: The state legislature had found a way to humanize the tragedy of government run amok, and in typical government fashion they did it by taking an aggressively passive stance. They simply waited for something else to go wrong. And with state government, they didn’t have to wait all that long.

  The day that Pearson and Pate were killed was the same day that Virgil and Sandy were having a cookout with all their friends. Given the fact that Virgil and Sandy were cops—even though Virgil had been fired—most all of their friends were cops too, with the exception of Delroy Rouche and Robert Whyte, two Jamaicans who, a few years ago, emigrated to the U.S. and were now co-owners of Jonesy’s Bar. When Murton and his girlfriend, Becky Taylor, failed to show up for the party, Virgil and Ed Donatti went looking for them.

  What they found was Becky beaten to a pulp, and Murton tied to a chair with the business end of a shotgun pressed against his head. A gunfight ensued and Virgil killed Pate, all while Donatti—who’d gone in through the back—struggled with one of Pate’s henchmen, Hector Sigara, in the kitchen. During that struggle Donatti managed to pull his service weapon and kill Sigara, but not before he’d taken a fatal stab wound to the throat.

  Pam Donatti grieved in ways that Virgil had never seen. There was a burning anger underneath it all…some of it at herself—it had been her idea that Donatti go with Virgil to Murton’s house—and some of the anger was pointed squarely at Virgil. Ed might still be alive today if she’d have kept quiet, or if Virgil had been more careful. But what really went wrong was yet to come.

  It happened quietly, in the background over a period of months and now bubbled up—as outlined in The Star—in a very public way. Because Donatti was an investigator with the state’s MCU, and because his death was ruled a homicide, an autopsy was required by law. Except Pam didn’t understand why her beloved husband had to be cut up and have every inch of his body, both inside and out, examined in such a harsh and clinical way when it was clear how he’d been killed and why he had died. Both cause and manner of death were clear. Any idiot could see that.

  Something of a minor argument ensued between the grieving wife of a slain state police officer and the Marion County Coroner, who, by all accounts, was simply doing his job. But Pam wouldn’t let it go and said something to Sandy, who then said something to Virgil, and because Virgil and the governor were sort of asshole buddies, the governor took care of things. Blood samples were taken and stored, the autopsy issue was quietly buried, and so too was Ed Donatti. It should have ended there.

  But it didn’t.

  As Detective First-Grade with the state’s MCU, and as a career police officer, Donatti not only made enough money that Pam didn’t have to work, but he’d also dutifully contributed to the state-managed police pension fund. The fund would provide a more than adequate retirement for the Donatti’s, but it also stipulated that should any participant officer be killed in the line of duty, two things would happen: the amount would be doubled, and the payout would come as one tax-free, lump sum. It further stipulated that if the officer had children, an additional fifty-percent of the doubled amount (effectively one-third of the total payout) would be set aside in a trust, managed by the surviving parent on behalf of the child.

  So. As broken-hearted and angry as Pam was, she was also more than financially secure. Quite a bit more by almost any standard of measurement. Until, that is, it was time to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.

  The i-dotting and t-crossing came to a grinding halt when the plan administrator reviewed the paperwork. He was just about to grudgingly approve the payout to Pam Donatti, and her son, Jonas, when he noticed that an autopsy—a strict requirement before distribution of funds—had never been completed. He contacted the coroner to find out why.
The coroner, who was a politic only by way of an unopposed election, had no reason to lie. He told the plan administrator that the cause and manner of death were clear and an autopsy simply hadn’t been necessary, though when pressed, admitted that the governor had intervened on behalf of the surviving widow.

  When the plan administrator heard that, he immediately called an influential state senator. The senator just happened, quite un-coincidentally, to chair the committee looking into the misappropriation of funds by the executive branch on the privatization of the prisons. The administrator was told to sit on the check, a hasty committee meeting was called and the general consensus was unanimous. The legislators had the governor—that smug son of a bitch—by the balls.

  But it wasn’t the governor’s first day in office. Had he gotten the coroner to sign off on Donatti without doing an autopsy? Yes, and why not? The coroner himself said it wasn’t necessary and was only doing it as a matter of routine. The governor sought advice from his legal people who, after reviewing the appropriate laws and regulations, informed him that like most laws, it all came down to interpretation. “In Clinton-speak,” the lawyers had said, “it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.”

  The governor’s definition of the law sided with Pam Donatti. Her husband, Ed had been a valued member of the MCU almost since its inception, an inception by the way, that had been the governor’s idea when he first took office. So the actual autopsy was waved, Donatti was buried and everyone dug in for the fight.

  It was a slow fight, as fights went. Eventually, after months of back and forth between the governor’s office, the plan administrator’s office, the sub-committee, and Pam Donatti’s lawyer, everyone agreed that a distribution of funds would be in the best interests of all parties. But how to make that happen? There had been a significant amount of press surrounding the entire affair and with election time right around the corner there was quite a bit of face-saving to attend to.

  The Governor wanted the check cut…period. The pension fund administrator wanted the letter and spirit of the law followed, which meant an exhumation and full autopsy. The sub-committee wanted a public statement from the governor’s office declaring that he’d stepped over the line by intervening on Pam Donatti’s behalf, along with full and complete testimony regarding the prison deal and anything else the committee deemed ‘necessary and relevant’ to their ongoing investigation.

  Pam landed somewhere in the middle of the fray. She wanted the check, but there was no way in hell they were going to dig up Ed.

  The coroner didn’t quite give a shit one way or the other. He’d do the autopsy or he wouldn’t once the lawyers were done arguing.

  In the end, the governor agreed that he would testify before the committee, but only if they would limit their questions to details specific to his own involvement of the prison plan, and instead of a full autopsy, limit the coroner to his relevant record of events. The administrator tried to have a say in the matter, but no one really cared what he thought. He was just an accountant, after all.

  So Pam Donatti would get her check and after almost eight months it looked like everything would be fine.

  Except the plan administrator was more than slightly perturbed. He wasn’t just an accountant…he was in charge of a multi-million-dollar police pension fund, and he had an agenda of his own, one he took seriously.

  Very seriously.

  According to the article in The Star, the plan administrator went through the entire agreement word by word in an effort to ensure that all the legal, moral, and ethical requirements had been met. What wasn’t mentioned—but seemed fairly obvious—was a palpable sense that he was doing what administrators do best: He was covering his own ass.

  The agreement between all parties stated that in lieu of an autopsy the distribution of funds would be approved based on the relevant record of events as listed in the police reports and from the coroner’s record of findings prior to and in lieu of a full autopsy. It occurred to him that blood samples had been taken, but there were no toxicology results listed. When he asked the coroner about it, the coroner said nothing had been done with the blood because of the dust-up surrounding the exhumation and autopsy, or lack thereof.

  Shouldn’t the toxicology results be accounted for? The administrator certainly thought they should. Wasn’t that the meaning of the word relevant?

  The coroner was a medical doctor, not a politician. He worked with cops and investigators all the time. Many of them he knew on a first name basis. He was even friends with a few of them. In this case, he didn’t much care if there’d been an autopsy or not, but there was a gaping hole on the form…a form that needed his signature if Pam Donatti was going to get her money. The administrator convinced the coroner that the fastest way to get the grieving widow her much needed money was to order up the toxicology and then everyone could just get on with their lives. In reality he was hoping for a miracle.

  The coroner wanted the damned thing to be over, wanted the Donatti woman and her kid to get the money, and mostly wanted the plan administrator out of his life. So he ordered up the toxicology.

  And that’s when everything went south, because miracles do happen.

  The state of Indiana considers an individual intoxicated when their blood alcohol level as a percentage of the whole reaches .08 or above. Ed Donatti’s level came back at .0797, and while that technically put him under the limit, it showed, according to a quote from the sub-committee chair, “A significant impairment that clearly affected Detective Donatti’s judgment and his decision-making ability. The negligent actions of a drunken Indiana State police officer can be tied directly to the deaths of Augustus Pate and Hector Sigara, a situation that cannot and will not be tolerated. Detective Donatti’s actions have been deemed suspect after the fact, and may very well end up being defined as criminal in nature. As such, and according to the provisions outlined in the police officer’s pension fund, no amount of monies will be paid or made available to the surviving family members of Officer Donatti until the situation has been resolved. The state’s attorney general is meeting with the members of this committee next week to determine…”

  Like that.

  Politics.

  “Right in the middle of it might be something of an understatement,” Murton said. “They’re going to want to talk to us you know. The state’s A.G., probably the sub-committee too. We’re going to need a lawyer. Maybe lawyers…plural. Could get expensive.”

  “We didn’t do anything wrong, Murt. I shot and killed Pate in self-defense after he shot at me. You were tied to a chair with a shotgun pointed at your head. We’re in the middle of it, but we’re also in the clear. Hell, we were cleared eight months ago and it was all based on the facts. None of the facts have changed and they aren’t going to either. They can’t un-clear us.”

  “That’s all true,” Murton said. “But it doesn’t explain why the governor wants a meeting with us.”

  Virgil had been looking through the kitchen window at his backyard, the high gray clouds reflecting off the black pond water. He snapped his head back toward Murton. “Us?”

  “That’s what I said. Cora called me about forty-five minutes ago and told me to get my ass over here. She can be pretty direct sometimes. You ever notice that?”

  Then they heard the rotor blades as the governor’s helicopter buzzed the top of Virgil’s house. It made a sweeping pass out over the water before the pilot pivoted the craft into the wind and landed right in the middle of the backyard between the house and the pond.

  And Virgil thought: Ah, the airport.

  5

  Sandy thought Pam Donatti was as close to a mental break as anyone could get without sailing right over the edge. Her face was gray and waxy, there were bags under her eyes, and her hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed—much less washed—in days. Brunch, Sandy discovered as she was led inside, was off. The women sat next to each other on the sofa in the living room. The vodka, orange juice, and ice sat next to
each other on the coffee table. Pam, the still-grieving widow, had started her day with the breakfast of champions.

  “Is this about the news this morning?” Sandy asked her. She’d caught a segment of it on the radio during her drive over.

  Pam seemed to not hear the question, or if she did, she chose to ignore it. After a moment she looked at Sandy and said, “I owe your husband an apology. I’ve been too hard on him.” Her words weren’t yet slurred, but they sounded, Sandy thought, like they had to be carefully placed in the right order before they were spoken.

  “Virgil’s a good man. Ed worshiped him, and I’ve spent the last seven months hating his guts.” She held up her glass before taking a large drink. A small belch escaped her lips after she swallowed. “Hell of a way to honor your dead husband, huh? I’m sorry for that.”

  “Pam, no one blames you for the way you’ve been…handling things. Especially Virgil. He doesn’t hold a grudge. You were forgiven a long time ago. Do you think I’d be here, that I’d be your friend if either of us thought this was about anything other than grief?”

  “They’re not going to pay…the pension or the life insurance. Our savings is gone. I’m unemployed and haven’t worked for years. I’m going to lose the house. The foreclosure notice was in yesterday’s mail.”

  “What? Why haven’t you said anything? What does your lawyer say?”

  “I’m filing for bankruptcy protection next week. I still won’t be able to keep the house, but it’ll slow them down. A little, anyway. Six months maybe. I don’t know.” She freshened her breakfast by adding some vodka to her glass. “Have you seen Jonas? He’s been awfully quiet all morning.”

  “Pam, I just got here.” Sandy said, then felt her chest tighten a little. She left Pam on the sofa and hurried down the hall. She found Jonas sitting on the floor next to his bed. He was dressed in a pair of dirty undershorts and one brown sock. He held a toy truck in his hands, but he wasn’t playing with it. Sandy sat on the bed and patted the mattress next to her. “Hey buddy. Come sit with me for a minute. Are you doing okay?”