Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [115]
“I read in the paper that Leary Way thing was an accident. You can prove it wasn’t?”
“Not so it would hold up in court.”
“But you think Patterson Cole is trying to convert the Columbia Tower into cash?”
Finney nodded.
“He’d have to be awful desperate.”
“He’s getting divorced. And he’s a skinflint. My guess is his wife is taking him to the cleaners and he doesn’t have the ready cash to buy her off. He gets a large insurance settlement, he’ll have the cash.”
Freeman swiveled his dark eyes onto Finney and said, “Look, we’re trying to keep this on a friendly basis, but when a firefighter comes in saying he knows there’s going to be an arson at a specific place on a specific date, we get a little worried. Why don’t you read back your notes, Stu?”
“The Columbia Tower. Oscar Stillman, Gerald Monahan, G. A. Montgomery, and Marion Balitnikoff. He any relation to the football player?”
“I don’t know.”
“God, he could hit. You ever see him play?”
“A few times.” He’d been one of his father’s favorites, his father, who always admired the toughest players on the field. Finney was not planning to mention his own surname had been on the list, or that he had a brother in the department, or a father who’d retired just weeks after Leary Way. He didn’t mention Kub either. There had been a question mark after Kub’s name.
“Why didn’t you take this to your fire investigation unit?” Rosemont asked.
“Politics.”
Rosemont gave Freeman a dubious look, not his first.
Since Tuesday morning he’d been unable to recall familiar phone numbers, routes of travel he’d used for years, all sorts of simple words, even the name of his cat. The phrase “it’s on the tip of my tongue” applied hourly. He wondered if anything he’d said to these two made sense. Already he’d caught himself in a couple of embarrassing misapplications of language, though neither Rosemont nor Freeman bothered to correct him, practiced as they were at letting people hang themselves with their own words.
When a uniformed officer came to the door with a note, both men exited the room. The officer gave Finney a snaggletoothed smile and blocked the doorway, arms folded. A large woman, she looked as if she played rugby—with the guys.
After a few minutes of silence, Finney said, “Am I under arrest?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then I can leave?”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
Finney had thought about relating this tale to the police for so long that now he was acutely aware that he had only one shot. And they weren’t buying it. He wasn’t sure he would have believed it himself. The more he explained, the more he realized he was spinning a classic tale of paranoid delusion.
Five minutes later, when Rosemont reentered the room, Charlie Reese stepped through the door behind him. It surprised Finney, until he realized Reese had been called in not only as the resident expert on fire operations in the city, but as an authority on Finney.
“Morning, John,” Reese said, as amicably as if they were meeting for coffee. “I understand you’ve been entertaining these gentlemen. The Columbia Tower. Is that what we’re talking about?”
“That’s it,” Rosemont said.
All eyes were on Reese now, who took his time with it, his voice silky smooth, his dark eyes unwavering.
“Gentlemen. One of our people had already brought up the possibility that something was going to happen at the Columbia Tower. I don’t know why that particular building has become so popular with conspiracy theorists, but I can assure you we’ve checked it six ways from Sunday. There’s no way we’re going to let so much as a cigarette burn unattended in that place.”
“You already checked it?” Finney asked. “Who told you about it?”
“I can only give that out on a need-to-know basis.”
“Diana Moore?”
“I had Chief Murray check it for me. After he was finished, I sent in a second team, and they spent most of yesterday examining every nut and bolt. Then we had the building engineers go around behind and double-check one more time. Right now the Columbia Tower is probably the safest building in the state.”
Rosemont, Freeman,