Vertical Burn (14 page)

30. MONAHAN’S MISSUS

Finney spent the next four days in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene looking for information on Patterson Cole, searching for irregularities concerning his properties. He learned that Cole owned thousands of acres of timber and most of one small sawmill town. He owned dozens of rental houses and apartment buildings in Coeur d’Alene and Spokane; one of the apartments had burned to the ground ten years earlier, a fire that had been judged accidental. Cole had collected a tidy little sum for a building he’d been having trouble keeping full. Finney was unable to contact either of the investigators. One had retired to Wyoming and the other had died in a car accident.

When Finney returned from Eastern Washington, one of his neighbors told him the fire department had interviewed him. By now G. A. Montgomery probably knew there was an hour Finney couldn’t account for the morning of the Riverside Drive fire. The only thing G. A. still needed in order to put the noose around Finney’s neck was for Annie or even a passing commuter to clearly identify Finney as the suspicious character outside the house before the fire took off.

On Tuesday C-shift worked a fairly typical shift. The chief in the Seventh Battalion gave them their monthly drill. Riding Engine 26 with Finney were Lieutenant Gary Sadler and Jerry Monahan. Their drill consisted of running a preconnect with supply and taking the hose line up a ladder to the roof of the station. The chief told them they’d done a good job and left while they were repacking dry hose and flaking the wet sections on racks for the hose dryer in the station. They cleaned up and went out to do building inspections before lunch. In the afternoon they fielded two alarms. One was to a single-family home where an infant’s head was wedged between the rungs of an antique crib. They lifted the squalling baby to the center and gently spread the slats with their hands. The other call was a false alarm to one of the Boeing plants off East Marginal Way.

At five-thirty Oscar Stillman showed up at the back door, squashing his face with its gap-toothed grin flat against the glass. Stillman, a born comic, worked downtown as a confidence testing officer and parked his private vehicle at Station 26 every weekday morning, leaving his department car in the lot each night. His habit was to drop in for a cup of coffee on his way home, making him an ongoing source of information for the members of Station 26. Now that he thought about it, Finney realized it was probably Stillman who gave Monahan the scoop about his not being promoted.

Wearing crumpled gray slacks and his department blazer, Oscar Stillman punched the coded lock box on the back door and sauntered into the beanery. Of average height, Stillman was in his mid-fifties, stocky, and hirsute everywhere except for his head, which was shiny on top but for a few long gray strands crossing from left to right. As always, he was as playful and friendly as a Christmas puppy.

Displaying teeth the size of baby corn, he stepped close and pumped Finney’s hand furiously. His glasses looked as if they’d been designed for a woman. His voice was deep and loud and cracked. “You really got
fucked
on that promotion, man. I don’t mind telling you. Nobody around here’s been
fucked
quite like that in a good while. Man, did you get
fucked
.”

“Thanks,” Finney said, trying to extricate his hand from Stillman’s tenacious grip.

“No. I really don’t know what he was thinking about. It’s hard to say. You know, when a guy gets that far off track . . . I want to go up there and give him a piece of my mind, even though everybody tells me he’d screw me next time he got the chance. But hell, I been screwed before and you know what?” Stillman winked. “I kind of liked it.” Stillman saw the look on Gary Sadler’s face and said, “Is that a little too homoerotic for you, Gary? It is, isn’t it? You know what your problem is? You’re scared to death of homosexuals. What you need is a big fat kiss.”

Stillman glanced at the others with a fiendish smirk, then started across the room. Sadler, afraid to run for fear he’d be chased, stood his ground and fended off Stillman’s grasping arms. In the end, Sadler let Oscar grab his face and give him a buss on the end of his nose.

“There’s nothing in the world warms my blood faster than a man in the throes of a full homoerotic panic,” Stillman said, smiling broadly and standing back to appraise a job well done.

“That wasn’t panic,” Sadler said.

“Hell, it wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t!”

“Maybe I should have given you a big wet one on the lips.” Sadler flew out of the room, laughter chasing him up the hallway.

Turning back to Finney, Stillman said, “Oh, man, you got fucked. I still don’t understand how Charlie scarfed up all that glory and that award for accomplishing basically nothing. Does that make sense? He goes into a building on a search, he comes out empty-handed, and they give him an award? Not to mention, three months later he’s sitting on the big Kahuna’s throne.”

Leaving the room with Jerry Monahan, Oscar winked and slapped Finney on the back. “Don’t worry, buddy. You’ll think of something. Every dog has his day.”

A few minutes later Gary Sadler poked his head out of the officer’s rest room in the hallway. “He gone?”

“Talking to Jerry on the apparatus floor,” said Finney.

“Christ, he’s crazy. I’ll be in my office till he leaves. Let me know when it’s safe to come out.”

Finney was washing spinach for the salad when another visitor appeared at the back door, Linda Monahan, Jerry’s wife. Finney let her in, offering her a seat and a cup of coffee, then called Jerry on the intercom to let him know she was here. Whatever else Jerry Monahan had done with his life, he’d certainly married a decent woman. They were Mormons, at least she was, and she’d presented him with five children, all boys, the youngest still at home. She’d worked through all of her pregnancies and had bailed Jerry out of financial difficulties several times during their marriage. Finney knew of three occasions in the last twenty years when, single-handed, she’d managed to save their home after Jerry went broke and the bank threatened to foreclose.

“How is it out there?” Finney asked. “Traffic bad?”

Linda Monahan was ten or eleven years older than Finney, and had dyed her hair black to complement her milky complexion. Her eyes were hazel and flitted away from his nervously at unpredictable moments as she spoke. Dressed in a plaid business suit, she was trim and tidy, sitting with her legs crossed at the ankles, her purse in her lap. “It’s so dark and gray out, that’s all.”

“It’s going to be worse next week when Daylight Saving Time ends.”

“Sometimes I wish for a whole year of sunshine. If we could have one year, maybe we could coast through this gray a little easier.”

“It gets to me, too.”

“Arizona was sunny. That’s where I met Jerry. He was on his mission. He was four years older than me, and it was love at first sight.”

It was hard for Finney to imagine Jerry Monahan inspiring love at first sight. But then, he did have that ingenuous smile.

“Jerry ever get that time off he needed?”

“Time off?”

“November seventh? Your anniversary?”

“We were married April twentieth. Whatever made you think it was in November? Jerry would never get that wrong.”

“I must have misunderstood. Maybe it was a birthday?”

“We don’t celebrate anything in November except Thanksgiving.”

Finney’s memory worked erratically these days, but he could have sworn Monahan told them he needed the shift off because it was his anniversary.

After Monahan showed up and walked her out to the parking lot, Finney went down the hallway to the officer’s room and peeked in at Sadler. “I was just wondering if it would cause a problem if I was off on the seventh of November.”

Tucking the phone under his chin, Sadler flipped open the captain’s journal. “Jerry’s already got it off. His anniversary.”

31. PATTERSON COLE

Late Monday morning, after calling Cole’s office for an appointment and getting the brush-off, Finney decided an impromptu visit was in order. He bluffed his way past a series of security guards in gray blazers, stepped off the elevator on forty-two, and glimpsed Cole and another man entering an office through tall glass doors at the end of the corridor. In person, Patterson Cole was a tall but stooped man who moved with the careful and precise gait of someone making his way through a room full of marbles.

The gold embossing on the office door proclaimed that the premises belonged to
COLE ENTERPRISES, LTD
.

Finney entered the waiting area through the glass doors, where he hoodwinked a receptionist and then, in the next room, an assistant with hennaed hair and a short black skirt. It was amazing to Finney how far a suit and tie and a manila envelope with
PATTERSON COLE
—
PERSONAL SIGNATURE REQUIRED
typed across the front could get him. So far it had been a badge of entry at each checkpoint.

He stepped into Cole’s gargantuan office just as the old man changed into a pair of ankle-high slippers.

“Pardon me?” It was Cole’s assistant, a dark-haired man in a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, and a manner about him that quickly proclaimed his superiority.

“I need to talk with Mr. Cole,” Finney said.

“And you are?”

“John Finney. I’m with the Seattle Fire Department.”

“I’m not aware of any appointments this morning.”

“It’s about the fire on Leary Way last June.”

The old man’s gravelly voice entertained a slight quaver. “What about the fire?”

“I have a few questions.”

“If you don’t have an appointment, you need to be leaving,” said the aide.

“Let him alone, Norris. I’ve always got a minute for the fire department.”

Norris remained close to Finney, and Finney had the feeling Norris was not only an aide but a de facto bodyguard, that he’d had martial arts training, perhaps at one of the corporate antiterrorist schools. He was a head shorter than Finney and soft enough to use for a pillow, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.

Patterson Cole walked behind his glass desk and sat heavily in a high-backed leather chair. A brace of windows on the side wall looked out over a sunny Elliott Bay. In one corner stood a glass sculpture of a naked woman crouched to throw a discus. The room had several other sculptures on stands, all glass, all nudes.

“What can I do for the fire department, young man?”

“Did you receive any threats against that building in the past few years? Any disputes with the tenants?”

“You know of anything, Norris?”

“Nothing.”

“Any problem employees?”

“Only person holds a grudge against me is Bibi, my wife.” The skin under Cole’s chin hung like a paper bag with an apple core in it. He had penetrating, pale blue eyes that had probably made him handsome in his youth and a shock of white hair that needed trimming around the collar.

“I’m trying to figure out who might have had a motive to burn it down.”

“Your own man showed me the electrical socket. Scorched all to hell. Cut it right out of the wall and showed it to me.”

“I know there was an electrical socket. But supposing that wasn’t the cause of the fire? Supposing it wasn’t an accident?”

Cole glanced at his assistant. “We’ve already collected from the insurance. You want to go back over all this? What’s the point?”

“How much was it insured for?”

“Who are you?” Norris asked, stepping forward.

Cole tipped his chair back and held the arms of the chair with a steely grip. “That’s a good question. Who the hell are you?”

“John Finney. I’m a Seattle—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Norris. “You said all that. You got any ID?”

Before Finney could fish for his wallet, the receptionist burst through the door. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Cole, but this man slipped past me. I thought he was delivering something for the divorce, but I called your wife’s attorneys and they haven’t sent anything over.”

“That’s okay, Doris,” Cole said. “You can close the door on your way out. And call security.”

“I’ve already sent for them.”

“Good girl.”

Norris placed himself squarely between his boss and Finney and said, “You’d better leave now.”

“A man named Bill Cordifis died in that fire. He was my partner.”

“I’m sure he was,” Norris said.

Cole scratched the back of one hand, his fingernails as long as a woman’s, his hands mottled with age spots. “What’d you say his name was?”

“Cordifis,” repeated his assistant.

“I remember. We sent a wreath. I remember the night of the fire, too. That was the night Bibi told me she was seeing that bartender.”

“Apparently the dead man was this man’s partner,” Norris said. “I suppose he’s here for some sort of settlement.”

“In this state, a firefighter dies in an arson fire and whoever set it is guilty of murder,” said Finney.

“The fire was an accident, boy,” Patterson Cole said.

“Maybe the building wasn’t generating enough revenue? Or one of your other businesses needed an infusion of cash?”

“Out,” said the assistant.

“I believe it was arson, and if it wasn’t somebody with a grudge, it was you.”

The old man’s face darkened. “You’re accusing me of arson?”

“If the shoe fits . . .”

Placing the knuckles of either hand on his desk, the old man rose ponderously. “Your own people called it an accident.”

“You know anything about a fire in Tacoma ten years ago? Or another one in Coeur d’Alene twelve years ago?”

“Norris?”

“I assume he’s talking about the Grapested Apartments in Idaho and the mill in Tacoma. Herb Jensen ran the mill for you. Remember?”

“But that place burned down in . . . I don’t know. Must have been eight years ago.”

“Ten,” Finney said.

“You think because my properties had fires that I had something to do with this? I own a lot of property. All kinds of things happen. I fought fire in the Wenatchee National Forest when I was a youngster. Hardest work I ever did. The city’s probably a little different, but I expect from time to time you see somebody die. You lost your friend, I’m sorry. But there’s not much anybody can do now. You got a college scholarship fund for his kids or something, you tell Doris on your way out and we’ll put our nickels in the jar. Happy to do it. Otherwise you just scoot on outta here. I don’t know what you’re saying to people, but you hear this and you hear it good. You slander me and I’ll slap you with a lawsuit so severe you won’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.”

Before Finney could reply, the tall oak double doors opened and three men in gray blazers rushed in, each with a portable radio in his hand. Keeping their hands on his shoulders, they walked Finney to the elevator.

In the hallway two more blazers joined the group, then on forty all six of them transferred to another down car. En masse, they walked Finney down the escalators to the Fourth Avenue entrance and told him not to come back. Ever.