Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [2]
Seeing the portrait reminded me again of Vivian. His first wife had had the same oval-shaped face and high cheekbones, the same liquid black hair. She had died in a car crash during the evacuation of Saigon. The Colonel brought Vivian back to the States while she was still in diapers, and a few years late married a wealthy socialite whose family had made its money in publishing. It was the family who’d provided the seed money for Pellucid Labs, the Colonel’s biotech-pharmaceuticals company. That marriage had also produced a son, Vivian’s half brother, Nick, a guy I had spent a long time trying to like before giving it up for easier hobbies.
Colonel Patterson had never spoken much of his second wife. The only thing I knew was that her name had been Mona, that her family owned Vermont, and that she was buried in Palm Beach County. If there was a portrait of her hanging anywhere in the house, I had never seen it. Maybe the Colonel kept a snapshot of her in his wallet, but then again, probably not. He was about as sentimental as a gangplank on a busy day. It was hard not to suspect that the marriage had been mostly about the money.
I turned for no particular reason and saw Rudolph Williams peering down at me from the second landing. He was the Colonel’s man, had served with him in the army, before and after Vietnam. He came down the winding staircase, moving with the ease of a man who knew very well how to move. Not once did he take his eyes off me. There had been few times during our previous meetings when in some way or other he hadn’t tried to intimidate me—in that half-friendly, overblown macho way of his. To him I was an intruder who didn’t belong anywhere near the family that had practically adopted him, and that fact hadn’t changed even when I was seeing Vivian, and everybody knew it.
Williams—no one but the Colonel ever called him Rudolph—had never understood why the Colonel had elected to work with a personal trainer instead of himself, a man who looked as though he’d been raised in Gold’s Gym, but the answer was simple: The two of them had been together for so long that the Colonel had decided he needed some variety in his life, someone with a new batch of stories, and he liked having an ex-cop for a trainer. And yes, he’d had me checked out thoroughly, and by the kind of people a man like the Colonel would know. By the time I showed up for the first appointment, he already had a file on me that went back to kindergarten, and he let me know about it, too. He also knew why I wasn’t with the NYPD anymore, but he never brought it up, though we had talked about everything else.
Williams looked about fifty, and the book on him was that he’d been too crazy for even the Green Berets, which is scary when you think about it. So the army stuck him on long-range reconnaissance patrol to keep him out of mischief. He would go off into the jungle for weeks at a time, cut off people’s ears and noses, then use them as receipts when he got back to base. The more ears, the more money he made. He was six-four and went about 260 or so, but without the ’roids he would have only been 240 at the most. He had a shaved head, the bright blue eyes of a Viking on a raid, and a red handlebar mustache flecked with gray. It wasn’t hard to imagine him wearing a necklace made of human ears. He’d been bred for war and was wound way too tight for civilian life.
He stared me up and down, then sneered. “You look soft,” he said. “What happened? You take up yoga or something?”
“Origami,” I said. “I’m a black belt now.”
We shook hands. His were so callused that if my eyes had been closed, I might have thought I was holding a piece of sanded-down driftwood. He squeezed a bit more than was necessary, but that was Williams for you: He never let an opportunity pass to show you how much more of a man he was than you were.
“I can still break five