Hillerman, Tony (16 page)

Cotton walked to the window and stood behind the closed drapes, wanting a cigarette. What would this X decide to do? Watch Cotton’s apartment and the capitol against his return? Logically, he would. And stake out whatever sources of information Cotton would have to tap to expose whatever X was doing? That, too, was logical. Cotton felt a sense of frustrated urgency. He should be moving fast today—making headway before this unknown person could adjust his plans. Instead he was wasting the day in another fruitless hunt through McDaniels’s notes.

He turned abruptly, picked up the telephone and called Danilov.

“I need two things,” Cotton said. “Will you get the morgue to see if they’ve got anything filed on a guy named A. J. Linington, and if we don’t have much, would you see what the city desk can find out. He’s a lawyer. Represented the Amalgamated Haulers and Handlers Union a couple of years ago.”

“Somebody will know him,” Danilov said. “What else?”

“Who’s on the business beat now? Could you see if he can find out who owns Midcentral Surety? It’s incorporated, but it probably has some principal stockholders. And see if they can find out how it handles its reinsurance.”

“Midcentral Surety? O.K.”

“And one other thing. I may need to know whose money is behind an outfit called Wit’s End, Inc. Operates a restaurant, I think, and has state-park concessions.”

“What are you finding out? Sounds like you’re getting somewhere.”

“Nowhere,” Cotton said. “I’m still guessing.”

“Got the memo written yet?”

The question irritated. “No. Would you have somebody call me if they find out anything?”

He hung up and sat for a moment, thinking. Next he should call Tom Rickner at the pressroom. But there was a good chance that one of the other reporters would answer. If that happened, he could tell them he was calling from Santa Fe, or Los Angeles, or somewhere. Or maybe he could disguise his voice. He thought about it. His associates would have missed him since yesterday. They would have seen the box on today’s editorial page, and they would be speculating at full steam. He wanted no risk of starting gossip that he was still in the city.

The knock at the door was no more than a tap—three quick, thudding sounds barely heard over the mindless background chatter of the television set. But it awoke in Cotton what he had kept sleeping all day—a wild, primeval, trapped-animal fright. He stared at the door, overcome by sudden enervating nausea, without the will to move. Behind him, the television speaker changed its voice to soprano: “Yooo’ve got a lot to live, aaand Pepsi’s got a lot to give.”

The tap came again, louder now. “Cotton. You at home? This is Whan.”

The voice was Whan’s—clipped, abruptly cutting off the sound of each word. Cotton drew in a deep breath.

“Just a minute.” His voice sounded natural but his legs were weak.

Whan glanced at Cotton and then looked past him into the room. “Everything O.K.?” A small man, neat, trimmed, washed, in a neat, trim, pressed gray suit.

“Fine. You startled me.”

“I’ve been to see Mrs. McDaniels—the widow. He’d left these copies of letters in a file case with his personal papers.” Whan placed three sheets of paper beside the TV set on the motel-room table and looked at them, his expression pensive. “Maybe they’ll mean something to you. The first one is dated twenty-two days before McDaniels died.” He handed it to Cotton. “And the second one the following week, and the last one four days before it happened.” The sheets were Xerox copies.

Mr. McDaniels:

Some facts, questions—and a suggested answer.

First the facts:

The chairmanship of the Highway Commission pays no salary. Traditionally the job is sought as a launching platform for a statewide political candidacy. Since his unsuccessful race for reelection as Attorney General six years ago, Jason Flowers has shown no ambition to re-enter politics as a candidate. He has, in fact, no such ambitions. Flowers built the connections he made as Attorney General into a lucrative corporate law practice. Since he took the time-consuming commission chairmanship, his law firm has farmed out legal work for several clients—including General Utilities and Rowe, Beane and Pierce. This is expensive.

Now the question:

Why did Jason Flowers want this unpaid chairmanship?

And a suggested answer:

Rule out disinterested public service. Your paper knows Flowers.

But don’t rule out the following peculiar chain of circumstances. There were rumors during the last year of Flowers’s term as A.G. They were that Gov. W. L. Newton and Flowers joined forces to hush up a scandal in the Highway Department. Reports current at that time were that Sixth Division Construction Engineer Herman Gay and two project engineers were taking payoffs from contractors. The records will show that Gay was transferred into the Right of Way Division, one of the project supervisors resigned and the other was shifted into the drafting office. However, reporters trying to work the story ran into denials from all sources and the story didn’t break. But the rumors were true. Gay, for example, was “leasing” trucks to contractors under his jurisdiction.

Now, the personnel records will show that the same Herman Gay was promoted to State Construction Engineer a month after the appointment of Flowers to the commission chairmanship. They will show that the vacancy was created artificially when the new Executive Engineer, Delos Armstrong, moved Larry Houghton out of the job and made him Second District Maintenance Engineer. The records will also show that others whose names were linked to the affair of seven years ago have been promoted since Flowers and Armstrong took office.

Flowers is losing at least $18,000 in shared fees since he took the chairmanship. Why? Because he has found a way to make the job pay him substantially more than that.

There was no signature.

“Well,” Cotton said. “Flowers has an enemy.”

The letter was typed flawlessly with a modern electric typewriter face. There was something obscene about it. The right thing done for the wrong reason. Public service based on hate. The blow struck from the dark.

The second letter was shorter.

Mr. McDaniels:

The grapevine informs me you are checking the leads suggested last week. So here’s another one. Within a month after Flowers’s appointment to the Highway Commission a Harold L. Singer was hired in the Construction Division. Shortly thereafter, the department instituted what it calls the “Quality Experiment” on certain secondary highways. Mr. Singer seems to have been supervising project engineer on all such projects since the inception of this program. His background is interesting. Less than a year before he was hired by the Flowers administration, a Cook County grand jury in Chicago indicted four of Mr. Singer’s associates for grand fraud and falsification of records in a case involving kickbacks in Chicago construction projects. Although the circumstances implicated Mr. Singer, he was no-billed by the jury.

It is also interesting that Reevis-Smith, Constructors, Inc., has been awarded all of these “Quality Experiments” projects. Who owns Reevis-Smith?

Again no signature.

The last one was a single paragraph.

Mr. McDaniels:

I was pleased to notice you talked to Houghton. I trust he cooperated. But I gather from other feedback that you have some doubts about the reliability of this correspondent. I am reliable. My sources are sound. To prove it, here’s a tip to be held in confidence. Within four or five days Governor Roark will ask the legislature to authorize a highway bond issue in the range of 150 million. I don’t want this printed because it could close off one of my leaks. If you use it in advance of the actions, I will have to discontinue this assistance.

Cotton frowned, letting these new bits and pieces find their places in the puzzle. When he had first found Mac’s notebook, these letters would have been immensely useful. Now, at first thought, they only seemed to help a little—helping complete a pattern that was already taking shape. Reinforcing his educated guesses. He grinned suddenly, thinking of how McDaniels had handled the last letter. It was an interesting reaction. By confirming the tip of the bond plan in advance at the Governor’s office—and then agreeing not to break the story—he had killed two birds. He earned a favor from the Governor while he made sure of his tipster’s reliability.

“What do you think?” Whan asked. His eyes were on the television set, where a young man with horn-rimmed glasses was engaging two housewives in some sort of competition. It seemed to involve guessing what was behind a screen.

“I think whoever wrote these is mean as a snake,” Cotton said. “And I think he’s got some interesting leaks—like into Flowers’s law business. And that he did a hell of a lot of legwork on this revenge job.” Cotton stopped talking and thought. “And that makes me wonder why. Is hatred enough motive for that?”

“You know what I think?” Whan asked. He turned the audio on the TV all the way down. The lips of the master of ceremonies moved soundlessly in a charade of laughter. “I think we’re no place. I don’t have any idea who killed McDaniels. I don’t know why it happened. I don’t know where to start looking.” Whan took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped a smudge from the TV screen. “You used to be a police reporter,” he said. “You know how it works. Ninety percent of the homicides are busted when they happen. Guy strangles his wife and calls us to come and get the body. Guy knifes somebody in a bar with fifteen people watching. Or if it isn’t that easy, it’s just a matter of finding out who had reason to do it. Or talking to your informers about who was in town with a gun and a need for quick money. Here we got nothing. We got a guy who falls down the capitol rotunda while drunk. Officially an accident. We got a guy who gets his borrowed car run off the bridge in a hit-and-run case. And we’ve got the owner of the car who tells us he got a telephone death threat and then got shot at in another state. We’ve got nothing. Nothing solid.”

“You’ve got a cigar box, and a toy booby trap and a Polaroid picture of my back,” Cotton said. “If you think I’m lying, there are some things I didn’t imagine.” Cotton took out his apartment key and dangled it. “The box is on the coffee table.”

“No box,” Whan said. “We looked this morning. Where did you leave it?”

That wasn’t hard to remember. “It was on the coffee table,” Cotton said again. “And I locked the door behind me.”

“The door was locked.”

“So somebody got in, somehow, and took their cigar box back.”

Whan put down the handkerchief and looked up. “Why?”

“Why? Why, goddamn it, so if I talked to the police there wouldn’t be a shred of evidence that I wasn’t lying.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Whan said, ignoring Cotton’s anger. He was standing now, half a head shorter than Cotton, looking up at him.

“To tell the truth,” he said, “I can’t imagine how we’re ever going to have anything to take to a grand jury.”

“What are you telling me?” Cotton asked. “That you don’t have time for this?”

“If we had a couple or three men to watch you three shifts a day—which we don’t have—maybe we’d put ’em on you. And they’d watch for maybe a month and nothing would happen, because then nothing can happen. So maybe after a month you get tired of having somebody at your elbow and we call it off.” Whan looked up from the television directly at Cotton. “So then if somebody wants to kill you, they kill you. And what has anybody gained?”

“So how do you handle it?”

“Let’s say we keep a man in the background when you’re someplace risky. You let us know where you’re going, and when. And we try to stay invisible. And then, if somebody tries anything overt, we have him and it’s all wrapped up.”

“Anything overt? You mean like shooting me? Like he shoots me, and you guys make a quick arrest, and everything is neat and tidy. You’ve got a suspect with a smoking gun and a body on the floor with a bullet in it.”

“It wouldn’t be like that,” Whan said mildly. He picked up his hat. “Look. We’ve got maybe thirty people in this city right now under peace bond. They’re under peace bond because they told the estranged wife, or the landlord, or somebody they were going to kill ’em. And there’s a lot of other people—cranks, deviates, like that—that we try to keep an eye on. There’s no way we can babysit everybody we need to babysit.” Whan stopped at the door, glancing back. “So you’re going someplace, call us thirty minutes ahead and let us know where you’re going. And keep your door locked.”

Cotton called the Second District Highway Maintenance office first and made an appointment to see Lawrence Houghton. And then he called the Legislative Finance Committee switchboard and asked for Jane Janoski. The telephone rang, and rang, and rang, and rang and clicked abruptly and said, “Janoski.” The sound was so abrupt and short-tempered that Cotton laughed. He hadn’t laughed for at least two days.

“Come on, Jane,” he said. “I haven’t even asked you to do me the favor yet. Cheer up.”

“Is this John? Are you all right?”

The question surprised him, touched him. “Sure. Why not?”

“I saw in the
Tribune
you were on sick leave. What is it?”

“I’m not sick,” Cotton said. “It will take a while to explain it.” He paused, thinking how much he should tell her. Enough, he decided, so she would understand why he didn’t want anyone to know he was in town—and enough so that she would be alert to danger, aware that the time she had spent with him in the Highway Department records room might have involved her in some risk. He told her of the telephoned death threat.

“They—whoever
they
is—think I’ve left town and I want to keep it that way,” Cotton said. “Tom Rickner is replacing me at the pressroom and I need to get a message to him, but I don’t want to call there because, if Rickner’s out, somebody answers for him and then it’s all over the capital that I’m still here.”

“You should go to the police,” Janey said. “You should . . .”

“I did,” Cotton said. He kept the cynicism out of his voice. “I’ve got police protection. What I hope you’ll do for me is call Rickner for me and ask him to check in the Highway Department personnel records on Herman Gay and Harold L. Singer—when hired, promotions, transfers, anything interesting. And then I want him to check back during Governor Newton’s administration—probably the last year of it—and see if he can find when Gay was transferred out of a job as Sixth Division Construction Engineer and get me the names of everybody else who was transferred, or demoted, or anything at about the same time.”