He hung a left at the second light. State Route 17 North took them out of town. The traffic thinned out. Hay bales littered the fields beyond the road. Fence posts flew by as the Porsche picked up speed. They crested a hill at 85, heading down the far side onto a long stretch of two-lane at better than 110 miles an hour.
“Man, you’re making this thing fly,” said Johnny Gee.
“This car was built for roads and speeds just like this,” said Sam. “We’ll be home in less than an hour.”
“How far is it?”
“Ninety-five miles from the light back there.”
The speedometer said 120 as the Porsche leaned gently into a long sweeper around a stand of trees. Outside, a hard wind whispered at the edge of the window.
Mrs. Butterfield’s bedroom light went on as the Porsche pulled into the drive. Sam parked the car in the barn, closed the creaking door, and caught his mother in his arms as she ran out to greet them in her robe.
“Is there something wrong, Sam?” she asked.
“I’m so glad you’re okay, Ma,” he whispered in her ear.
They spent the next hour bringing her up to date, then went to bed.
The phone rang while Sam was checking the oil and tire pressure on the Porsche. His mother came to the door and called to him. It was just past ten.
“I called the cottage, and you weren’t there, so I called your mother,” said Betsy.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said, breathless from the gallop across the barnyard.
“And I’ve got something for you,” she replied.
“You first,” he said.
“There is absolutely no information in state government about any surveillance videotapes, missing or otherwise. I spoke to my friend at the IBI. I spoke to another friend in the governor’s office, one of his top political assistants. I didn’t bring up the tapes, exactly, but I got him to talking about Harlan Greene, and Sam, there’s nothing going on. No trouble. No problems. The governor’s been downstate twice in the last couple of months. They’re getting ready to buy another big tract of land next to the Shawnee National Forest to add to the Oxen Springs State Park down there. It’s a very good deal for the state, Sam, and Harlan has been the key to putting the package together. I’ve been on the phone since eight-thirty, Sam, and at this point, I just can’t come up with anything that even vaguely resembles what you’ve been talking about.”
“Betsy, thanks for everything you’ve done. Really.”
“Sam? Sam? That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“I don’t know what else I can say, Betsy. You’ve done what you could. Nobody knows anything. It’s my problem, not yours. Maybe I should just take it from here.”
“Sam, you sound … I don’t know how you sound.”
“Betsy, the cottage … the cottage was broken into last night while we were gone. That’s why I’m here at my mother’s. I’m worried, Betsy. I’m afraid someone else is going to get hurt, and I don’t want it to be my mom. Hell, I don’t want it to be me.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Sam.”
“Well, I’ve got something for you, like I said. We have one of the surveillance tapes.”
“What? You didn’t tell me that last night.”
“I didn’t know it. One of the tapes got left behind. It didn’t get sent off by Spicer. The tape turned up last night. So if you had, or have, any doubts about what I’m talking about, you can dispel them mighty quickly by coming over here and taking a look at this tape.”
“Sam, I’ve got a job here. I can’t just pick up and leave anytime I want.”
“Then come after work. Where are you? Carbondale?”
“Yes.”
“Betsy, you’re not forty-five minutes away. I’ll come over and get you, if you’d like.”
“That won’t be necessary. I get off at five-thirty. I’ll be there by seven o’clock.”
Sam thought quickly.
“Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing, Betsy. I mean your friend at the IBI, or anyone else. Let’s wait until you have a look at this thing. Then we can discuss what we ought to do.”
“Okay, Sam. I’ll be there at seven.”
She hung up. Sam turned around. Johnny Gee was sitting at the kitchen table sipping a beer and smoking a Picayune.
“Hey, it’s ten in the morning. We’re at my mom’s house now. Finish the beer and put out the cigarette. Have some respect.”
“That’s all right, Sam. I understand.” Mrs. Butterfield walked through the door from the dining room, a dust mop in hand. “When I get nervous, I clean. Look at me. This house is immaculate. I wet mopped every room in the house, and now I’m going over them again with a dust mop. Ridiculous. Absurd.”
Sam laughed nervously. Johnny Gee stepped out on the back porch and lit another Picayune.
“This place is just like you read about in books,” he said, taking a deep drag. “Barns and fields and stuff. This is great.”
It was just before seven when Sam heard Betsy’s car on the drive. He opened the front door and stood on the porch as she stepped from her car, an old Volkswagen Rabbit convertible with a faded top and more than a few dents on the front fenders. She was wearing a dark gray business suit, high heels, and a bright yellow blouse open at the throat. She was still a brunette, her hair swept in easy curls behind her ears at collar length. Sam walked down the porch steps as she finished straightening her jacket. She picked up a briefcase and turned to find him standing next to the car’s front bumper.
“Sam … I … I …”
“It’s been over ten years. It’s good to see you, Betsy. You look great.”
She smiled faintly and ran a hand through her hair, leaving it tousled on top, frothy in the dim light.
“You haven’t changed a bit, Sam. I bet you haven’t gained a pound.”
“Reveille runs,” laughed Sam. He reached for her briefcase, and Betsy surrendered it willingly. “You look wonderful. Successful and grown up and wonderful.”
Betsy laughed. “I wanted to change before I came, but I had a meeting right up until the last minute. I feel grubby and used. But that’s government for you.”
“Why don’t you freshen up in the bath at the top of the stairs, and I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”
Mrs. Butterfield was standing on the porch stairs wiping her hands on her apron.
“Betsy, it’s so good to see you again. How many times have we talked on the phone? Twenty? Thirty? I kept trying to picture how you looked, then I remembered Sam still has a picture of you two at the ROTC hop in his room, so I went upstairs and found it on his dresser. You look just the way I remember you. Both of you.”
“Come on, Ma. Betsy doesn’t want a personal appearance analysis.”
“You all get ready for dinner,” said his mother. “I’ve got chicken frying and mashed potatoes and gravy and butter beans and a cucumber salad when you’re ready.”
“Betsy, this is Johnny Gee,” said Sam, introducing her to the skinny figure who had come to the door.
“It’s nice to meet you, Johnny,” said Betsy.
“Same here,” said Johnny Gee, shifting a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue.
When Betsy came downstairs, everyone was in the kitchen. She hung her jacket over the back of a chair and they sat down to eat. She and Mrs. Butterfield caught up on political gossip, and when they had finished eating, Johnny Gee cleared the table, and Mrs. Butterfield made coffee. Sam suggested they move into the living room.
It was simply decorated with a couch, a wing-backed armchair, and a love seat. A twenty-five inch television sat against one wall, an antique quilt hung on the other. The two windows at the front of the house had balloon shade curtains in a floral pattern. A braided rag rug covered the floor.
“Where’s your bag, Johnny?” asked Sam.
“Right here,” said Johnny Gee. He dumped out the contents of his overnight bag and picked up the tape and handed
it to Sam.
“I keep thinking there’s something we missed when we first looked at the tapes,” Sam said. “That there’s a weak link in here somewhere staring us right in the face, something so obvious we keep missing it because it’s obvious.”
He turned on the television and VCR, inserted the Sheraton tape and hit play. The screen flickered and the video came on, showing the hotel room in black and white.
He hit the fast forward button. The action sped up crazily until he hit play again. The tall man called Frankie walks in, does a sound check with an unseen man whose voice can be heard on the tape. The unseen man says:
“Step out in the middle of the room and say something, so we can get a sound level, Stillman.”
“I think I know who Stillman is,” said Mrs. Butterfield. “Your father had some trouble with him.”
They watched the tape for a few more minutes. The man called Frankie Stillman is drinking a beer, waiting for the others to arrive.
“Stop the tape,” said Mrs. Butterfield. “I’ve got him now.”
Sam stopped the tape and punched mute on the remote control so the television sound was turned off.
“Your father had a run-in with him quite a few years back, I don’t know how long ago it was.” She turned to Sam, who was pouring coffee in Johnny Gee’s cup. “You remember, when we had all that trouble getting our grain to market.”
Sam nodded. “And this guy was involved?”
“Frankie Stillman. He was with a Teamster’s local that was raising holy hell down here, threatening people, slashing tires on people’s cars and trucks, smashing in windshields with baseball bats. The way it happened, the Teamsters raised their rates to haul our grain, and they raised them so high, so fast, they were way ahead of the market price on the grain itself, and we couldn’t make much of a profit. So some of us, and your father was the first one to do it, started leasing trucks and hauling the grain to market ourselves. That was when the trouble started. Stillman showed up with some thugs, and they started terrorizing anybody who even thought about trucking their grain with any outfit that wasn’t affiliated with the Teamsters, didn’t have a Teamster contract. The whole thing happened when they shut down the railroad spur to the grain elevator we used. That was a political deal, a fix. One day the spur was open, and the trains were running in cars to pick up grain. The next day the spur is shut down, and we’re forced to truck our crops to Continental Grain.”
“And you’re sure he was the one who was behind it?”
“Oh, I don’t think Stillman was behind shutting down the spur. But he was working for somebody who was. He was just a thug sent down to enforce the Teamster business on us. But that’s him, all right. He’s older, but it’s him.”
“What do you mean, shutting down the spur was a political deal?” asked Sam.
“It’s all political, son. Every time something happens in this state, it’s political. With the spur open, the railroad’s making money hauling our grain, we’re making money selling it. When the spur closed, the railroad’s not making any money hauling our grain, and if we want to sell it, we get it trucked from our elevator down to Continental’s, and the trucking company is the one making money, and of course, the Teamsters, the union, and the drivers. It’s like poker. One day this one’s got the cards, he’s got the good hand, the next day that one’s got the good hand. The only thing being, the dealer’s crooked, and they’re playing with a marked deck. The little fellow, the farmer, the small grain elevator operator, we’re just standing in the room watching them shuffle the cards and move the money around the table. That’s what I mean by political.”
“Jesus,” breathed Johnny Gee. “I always knew stuff was crooked and fixed and everything, but I never heard it spelled out like that.”
Betsy laughed softly. “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she said under her breath. “As a general rule, you can count on things being worse than they seem. Especially when it comes to politics in southern Illinois.”
“You’ve probably dealt with situations like this at the governor’s offices, haven’t you, Betsy?” asked Mrs. Butterfield.
“We had to settle for a very bad deal not long ago. Midwest Pacific wanted to close twenty depots around the state, and we got them to keep fifteen open by removing the requirement that they service certain spurs here and there. They had us coming and going. We were damned if we didn’t and damned if we didn’t. The farmers were mad at us for letting their spurs be closed down, but if we hadn’t made the deal, we’d have lost freight service over half the state. It was terrible. A terrible situation.”
Sam stared at the television screen. With the VCR off, a movie was on, black and white. A fishing boat was putting out to sea and Stewart Granger was its captain. He watched the soundless action for a moment, then he spoke.
“So whoever Frankie Stillman is working for is the person these tapes belong to.”
“It sure looks that way,” said his mother.
“So they might not belong to Harlan Greene at all.”
“I would say the chances are that they don’t belong to Harlan Greene. I think they belong to someone who wants Harlan out of the action,” said Betsy.
“What about Stillman?”
“Oh, Sam,” said his mother. “He’s a jack of all trades, working for the highest bidder: the Teamsters here, someone else there. I heard he was involved with liquor licensing at one point, several years after the Teamster trouble.”
“Liquor licensing?”
Betsy stood up and paced the floor, a study in frustration. “You’ve got to have a license to bring liquor into the state. For example, say you have the license to bring Johnny Walker Scotch into Illinois. Every bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch whiskey sold in Illinois yields you fifty cents, as your licensing fee. Johnny Walker is a popular Scotch, so that’s a lot of fifty cents adding up over the course of a year. Somebody else has Dewar’s, somebody else Cutty Sark. Suppose someone comes along, and he wants all the Scotch licenses. These are state licenses, governmental licenses. Getting and holding a license is a political matter. So you work to undercut the Dewar’s guy, the Cutty Sark guy, the Johnny Walker guy. You give more money than they do to the winning gubernatorial candidate. You make sure your contributions get noticed. This is politics. When a new governor comes in, you increase your Scotch licenses by one, or perhaps two. Stillman was probably in the business of ‘arranging’ liquor import licenses. A dozen of those guys come out of the woodwork every time a new governor gets in.”
“He’s had his grubby little mitts in all kinds of stuff, huh?” asked Johnny Gee.
“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Butterfield.
“So who’s Frankie Stillman working for right now?” asked Sam rhetorically. “Somebody who hates Harlan Greene, which isn’t a hard thing to do. Half the political types in the state of Illinois would like to nail his hide to the wall of their dens.”
“You’re getting the hang of it now,” said Betsy.
“I’ve picked up a thing or two over the years,” said Sam. “Even the army has its brand of politics.”
“You want to see more?” asked Johnny Gee.
“Run the rest of the tape, Johnny,” said Sam. “Let them watch the big man, Harlan Greene himself, work his magic.”
They ran the Sheraton tape. When Harlan Greene and his assistant walked in, Betsy stopped pacing, riveted to the screen.
“That’s Harvey Pugh!” she yelled. “That little worm. He’s been attached to Harlan like a pilot fish for so many years, they’re practically the same person. They finish each other’s sentences …”
“Yeah. Keep watching. He starts talking for Harlan in a minute.”
The tape ran through, and Betsy sank into the armchair in the corner.
“Those sons of bitches. They weren’t talking about the land purchase for the state park, that’s for sure. They’ve got something going on the side. I should have known …”
“What do you mean, Betsy?” asked Sam.
“
The thing that surprised the governor on this state park deal was the fact that Harlan wasn’t asking for anything. He put the deal together gratis. Usually, he’s got his hand out from day one. But this time, all he asked for was a couple of campaign appearances by the governor next spring during the primary for his candidates down here. I didn’t think anything of it, and I guess the governor didn’t either. When he hears about this, he’s going to have a seizure.”
“How is he going to hear about it?” asked Sam.
“I’ll tell him, first thing in the morning,” said Betsy.
“Wait a minute,” said Mrs. Butterfield. “You all had better have a look at something before you go making plans to talk to the governor.”
MRS. BUTTERFIELD GOT up from the sofa and started rummaging through a stack of newspapers in the corner.
“I clipped it a couple of weeks ago.” She flipped through the stack of papers carefully. Finally she pulled a single page of newsprint from the pile.
“Here it is,” she said. “You remember, Sam, the way your father used to clip official notices from the paper? I guess I inherited the habit when he died. I’ve been clipping official notices from the paper for years. You’d be amazed what you find in all the boring legalese.”
“What do you mean, Ma?”
“Well, they’ve got to file official notices in the paper for all kinds of things. For example, if you’re applying for a zoning variance, you’ve got to print a notice of your filing for three successive days, including the details of the variance you’re filing for. If you’re applying for certain kinds of construction permits, you’ve got to run notices of your application. Many are environmental certifications which involve details regarding projected sewage discharge and the plans to deal with any sewage produced by the project. In certain instances, you have to print a notice if you’re applying for a liquor license. Your father used to watch the notices carefully. Very carefully.”
“Why?”
“Jobs,” said his mother. “Remember how your father used to pick up extra money working as a plumber? Well, every time they build something, it’s got to be plumbed. Factories have to be plumbed. Restaurants and bars have to be plumbed. Condos, apartment buildings, office buildings. Lots of plumbing jobs in those notices. Watching them, he used to find out about jobs before the want ads ran in the classified. He lined up quite a bit of extra work that way.”
Rules of the Road Page 21