Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [121]
PART FOUR
59. THURSDAYS WITH SHEILA
Patterson Cole watched Norris remove the contracts from the safe and pack them into the briefcases, musing that there was something about Norris that made him look like a poof, something about the way he used his hands. He’d had this thought before, and deep down he supposed it didn’t really matter whether Norris was a poof or not, but still, it bothered him. The bow ties bothered him. The manicured fingernails bothered him. Did he actually apply polish? Norris was using a cane today, had stubbed his toe walking to the pissoir in the middle of the night. Norris was always nursing some sort of ache. Just thinking about it made Patterson old. Maybe after this was all over, he’d send Norris to Sun Valley to oversee his Idaho holdings with Dithers. Maybe it was time Norris had a little change of scenery. Time he did, too, for that matter.
Norris Radford and Patterson Cole had taken a series of elevators to forty-two where they’d removed forty-seven thousand dollars in cash from the safe in the main office. Now they were on floor seventy-three in Patterson’s private hideaway. Nobody ever came up here but Norris and, every other Thursday, a woman named Sheila from the service. It was a luxury apartment with a desk, computer, fax, and in the back room, a double shower, a Jacuzzi, and a bed about half the size of a tennis court. When he wasn’t using the bed for his play time with Sheila, Patterson would sneak up after lunch to take a siesta, maybe twenty, thirty minutes of shut-eye. It was his guilty secret—well—one of them.
They’d planned this meticulously, and now all they had to do was empty the other safe and skedaddle. Everything else was taken care of. After tonight all of Patterson’s troubles would be over. He would pay off the damn bitch, sign the divorce papers, and in time, they would rebuild this tower with more safeguards than the original.
Why couldn’t they all be like Sheila? No fuss. No muss. He’d found her ad in the back of The Stranger: ALL THE COMFORT YOU WANT FROM A WOMAN, $175. NO EXTRA FEES. NO DISAPPOINTMENTS. She wore a little too much makeup, but her body was as advertised. And it didn’t hurt that she was fifty years younger than he was. The one thing he was going to miss about this building was Thursdays with Sheila. He’d have to find another cozy spot.
Looking around the office, Patterson saw several personal effects he wanted to take with him. Sure, the firemen had told him to leave everything, but there was a montage of photos on the desk he needed, photos of his first wife, Ruth, their two children when they were toddlers, and shots of himself as a young lumberjack. They’d worked his ass off at Weyerhauser, but he found more and more he was looking back on those days as the happiest of his life. He picked up the montage and stuffed it under his coat.
“What do you want out of this safe?” Norris asked, looking up at him from across the room.
“The bonds. There’s some jewelry in that black box. Any cash.”
Patterson sat in the leather office chair and rolled it over to the window. Four floors lower than the famous women’s rest room stalls with their panoramic view, it looked out over the same vista: the east portion of the city and, beyond that, Lake Washington, the growing city of Bellevue, and the bedroom community that was Mercer Island. The lake was fuzzy with fog, and most of the east side was already sketchy. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Six-fifteen. Plenty of time.
His eighty-fourth birthday would be coming around in March, and he knew he was slowing down. He’d thought about retirement, but then who would run things? He had two sons, in their sixties now, but they were both numbskulls. One, Hardy, hadn’t spoken to him in four years, not since he married the bimbo.
The whoop-de-whoop mechanical screeching in the corridor outside the office started without