Why had he done it? He honestly hadn't known. It had taken him months to understand that brutal rage. Understanding had come slowly, by bits and pieces. First came the knowledge that the girl had not been really important to him. (When had he started thinking of Alice Beck-blonde, slender, sexy and silly Alice Beck-as "the girl"?) If it had been someone other than Charley he had found with her in the back seat of their car, his reaction would have been nothing more than disappointment and disgust. He had been halfway through boot training at Camp Pendleton before he had fully understood that his sick, homicidal fury had been based in self-contempt for his own weakness. He had thought at first the car had something to do with it. They had worked almost three years to buy it-he and Charley-pooling their funds, savoring their high-school poverty, and looking ahead to the trip through Canada which would celebrate their graduation to manhood. Charley had defiled all this. Charles Albright Graff (frail, witty, happy, ineffable friend) had known that Cotton intended to marry Alice, just as he had known all Cotton's thoughts, all his hopes, the peaks of his happiness and the pits of his despair. This was what Charley had betrayed. And it had taken Cotton months to know that even this was not enough to explain his savagery.
The memory of it still ached in his mind. His fists striking the bloody mouth that had so often laughed with him, feeling Charley's pain as much as Charley must have, but striking again and again as if to kill something within himself by killing it in Charley. And he might, indeed, have killed had Alice's screaming not attracted the man who had pulled him away and taken all of them to the hospital emergency room. Killed Charley, but not this new knowledge that Charley's betrayal had planted within him. He had only gradually-over the months-realized that Charley had simply completed a lesson he had been too slow to learn. That each human spirit must travel alone, safe only in isolation. He had forgiven Charley then, and started a letter to him. But he hadn't finished it. Innocence was ended. There had been nothing, now, to say.
A young policeman in a motorcycle helmet walked in, looked at him curiously and walked out again. Cotton wrenched his thoughts away from Charley Graff and found himself wondering about Janey Janoski. He wondered specifically if Miss Janoski (or was it Mrs. Janoski?) had ever learned this elemental lesson in interpersonal relations. He doubted it. There was something reckless and vulnerable about Janey Janoski-the shield lowered too easily. Or was this woman's apparent openness itself a fa‡ade behind which the genuine woman lived? He was thinking about that, doubting it for a reason he couldn't identify, when Addington reappeared through the doorway. He had a sheet of pink paper in his hand.
"No notebook," he said. "Here's the invoice. Everything I remembered, except I forgot two books of paper matches and one of those slips you get when you buy gasoline on your credit card."
He handed the invoice to Cotton. It told him nothing that Addington hadn't except that the billfold contained currency, a twenty and seven ones.
"O.K.," Cotton said, "and thanks a lot for the trouble."
McDaniels had carried no notebook with him on his five-story drop down the rotunda well. It was time now to think about what, if anything, that might mean.
Cotton drove slowly through the light dinner-hour traffic toward Capitol Heights and his apartment. The problem seemed uncomplicated. McDaniels had come into the pressroom drunk. McDaniels had tossed his notebook on his desk. Cotton recalled that clearly. Mac had tried to write his night lead on the tax hearing. Mac had announced he was celebrating cracking a really big story. Mac had left, saying he was going home to bed. A little later the man in the blue topcoat had come in looking for the notebook. How much later? Cotton couldn't be sure. But he did remember the man had picked up the notebook. It was in his hand when he left. Something was in his hand. Maybe the notebook. And then some time had passed and Cotton had heard the sound McDaniels made screaming his way down the well of the rotunda. But Mac hadn't had the notebook when he hit bottom. Why not? The obvious simple answer was that Blue Topcoat hadn't given it to him. Another why not? The man had said Merrill had sent him back to pick it up. Had Mac fallen before the man reached him with it? Too much time for that.
The traffic signal at Capitol Avenue turned amber ahead of him. Cotton braked to a stop-thinking hard. Plenty of time-as he remembered it. A new thought struck him. If there had been as much time as there seemed, why was Mac still on the fourth floor? It was no more than thirty steps to the nearest elevator from the pressroom door. Mac had been going straight home. What the devil had kept him in the foyer all that time? Or had it been as long as it seemed?
Cotton flicked down the turn indicator, signaling a left on Capitol. He would detour past the statehouse and check the signoff times on the teletype copy he had filed that night. That would tell him exactly.
A raw autumn wind was blowing out of the north as Cotton trotted up the sidewalk past the now-leafless capitol rose garden. Lights were burning on the seventh floor of the Health and Welfare Building. Health and Welfare, in trouble with the Senate Social Services Committee, would be working late. But the statehouse itself was almost totally dark. Cotton let himself in through the press entrance, under the west-wing stairway at the Sub 1 floor level. He hurried past the Game and Fish Department offices, past the doors of the State Veterinary Board, the Funeral Directors and Embalmers Commission, the Contractors' Licensing Office, and the Cosmetology Inspection Bureau. He reminded himself, as he did almost every day when he used this route, that there might be good hunting among these obscure agencies forgotten in the capitol catacombs. In fact, he had a tip jotted in his notebook about the Veterinary Board. An anonymous caller had told him the director was letting his wife use agency gasoline credit cards. When he could find time he would check it out.
Cotton thought about time while the elevator whined its way slowly toward the fourth floor. Addington hadn't asked him why he wanted Mac's notebook. Had he asked, he would have told him just about what he had told Cherry. But he would have been honest about it; he would admit it was just a matter of curiosity. He had notebooks of his own crowded with story ideas dying on the vine and no time to work them. It was simply that Mac had been excited. And that excitement, if Mac was as case-hardened a pro as Hall claimed, was worth some curiosity.
The pressroom was empty. Cotton sorted quickly through his spiked teletype copy and pulled off the file for Monday. When McDaniels had left the room it had been twenty-two minutes before his deadline. The message from the Tribune city room giving him the go-ahead to transmit his column was signed off at 9:45 P.M. That meant seven minutes had passed before Mac fell.
The swivel chair squeaked as Cotton leaned back. He stared at the ceiling. What had delayed Mac seven minutes? A trip to the john? That might account for it. That or meeting a politician willing to talk to a reporter even if he was drunk. Cotton walked slowly to McDaniels's desk. No matter what had delayed Mac, the man in the blue topcoat had had plenty of time to give Mac his notebook. So what the devil had happened to it? Maybe, it occurred to Cotton suddenly, the man hadn't found it. He thought backward, recreating the scene, seeing Mac in the doorway, Mac tossing the notebook on the desk, remembering that a little later Mac couldn't find it. He had found a notebook, but he had said it was an old one-filled and set aside for filing.
Cherry had made no effort to sort out McDaniels's desk-top accumulation. There was still a deep stack of carbons of bills introduced, a pile of outdated Bill-Finders, old House and Senate working calendars for the past several weeks, and a litter of press releases. But no notebook. Not even the old filled one. In the second drawer of the desk, Cotton found four spiral notebooks-all pages filled with Mac's scrawl. Notes on the last page of the newest one concerned a press conference the Governor had held in September, just before the Legislature had convened. Cotton looked at the first page. There were Mac's notes on an appointment to the Public Employees Retirement Board made late in July. Mac had filled the book in a little more than five weeks. Cotton arranged the other notebooks in chr
onological order and went through them, looking for datable material. The arithmetic was simple enough. At the average rate Mac filled notebooks, there must be at least two missing. Probably the most useless deduction of the year, Cotton thought, but it probably meant Blue Topcoat had picked up the filled notebook that had been on Mac's desktop. And maybe that meant the notebook Mac had still been using was still around somewhere. Cotton sorted through the desk-top jumble again and then reached his hand down between the back of the desk and the wall. A pile of old papers, months of desk-top slippage, had accumulated there, caught atop a hot-air vent. On top of this pile, Cotton's fingers encountered the cardboard cover of a spiral notebook.
He flipped through it hurriedly. About two-thirds of the pages were filled with McDaniels's jottings. On the last such page were his notes on Tuesday night's Taxation Committee hearings. Cotton remembered that McDaniels had thrown his notebook onto the desk that evening and then, when he was trying to write his story, couldn't find it. He had apparently thrown it a little too hard.
The complaining whine of a police siren somewhere down Capitol Avenue filtered through the dusty windows. It made Cotton conscious that he was sitting at a dead man's desk, sorting through the privacy of a dead man's papers. He felt slightly furtive.
"Elliot-sez need only bout 18 milyn adnl to balance genl fund next fiscal. Sez estimates of the State Ed Assn sheer nonsense. If the approp com keeps its head, we won't need any new taxes." Those were the last words scrawled on the page. The last note taken by Merrill McDaniels, political reporter. A quote from a half-senile country banker-politician. A lie told for political purposes. How did McDaniels intend to use the quote? He had worked next to the man for more than eight months and he didn't know him well enough to answer. It was a sad, lonely thought and he turned away from it. The words could be used, as Representative Howard Elliot intended, to mislead the public. Or they could be used, with the hard facts of general-fund revenues and impending budget appropriations, to prove Elliot ignorant, or a liar.
The sound of the siren died away. Except for the faint, changing murmur of traffic on Capitol Avenue the pressroom was still. A long, narrow room, a row of tables in the middle and its dingy walls lined with desks. It had occurred to Cotton long ago that these work stations were arranged more or less in the informal pecking order of their owners, or their owners' publications. To the left of the high, unwashed windows was the old roll-top of Leroy Hall, the unchallenged if unproclaimed Numero Uno of the pressroom, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for bagging two county commissioners and a district judge in a land-zoning-bribery affair, chief of the Journal's capitol bureau, whose "Politics" column reached 450,000 subscribers daily. Across the window, the desk of T. J. Tobias, the room's senior citizen, who had written politics for the Evening News since the early Roosevelt administrations, who had scores of political scalps to his credit, and who remembered too much, and drank too much, and coasted now into retirement, relying more on nostalgia than on facts. And next to Tobias, Eddie Adcock, ex-Associated Press and now syndicated, writing for twenty-five or thirty small dailies and specializing, so it seemed to Cotton, in embarrassing county chairmen whose patronage efforts showed. Across from Adcock, Cotton's desk, and above it one of the more exotic examples of the graffiti which had been accumulating on the pressroom walls for generations.
It was an ink drawing, about two feet square, of a housefly. The drafting was careful, with each of the thousand facets of the bulging fly eyes carefully suggested by the pen. The fly had been there, already stained and yellow, when Cotton had taken over the desk seven years ago. Old Man Tobias had told him that he thought it had been glued into its position back in the 1930's by a reporter who had subsequently fallen from grace and gone into public relations.
After wondering about the drawing for months, the thought had dawned on Cotton that it must represent Walter Lippmann's famous concept of the newsman as "the fly on the wall," seeing all, feeling nothing, utterly detached, utterly objective. By then, Cotton had become comfortable with this grotesque ugliness staring down at him. And the drawing remained, reminding him, and all who glanced at it and knew its meaning, that the reporter was supposed to be a little more than human. Or a little less.
For some reason the stare of this symbolic insect now oppressed Cotton with a sense of loneliness and isolation. He glanced away from it, past the collection of erroneous headlines tacked above Pete Kendall's desk (ROARK WON'T RUN FOR GOVERNOR. DEWEY ELECTED. GOVERNOR PREDICTS CALM ON CAMPUSES,) past the cluster of teletypes at the AP-UPI working stations, past the desks of the Capitol-Press, the Daily Independent, the World, the Morning Bulletin, the Beacon, the Times, the Gazette, the Evening Sun, and, finally, over to the desk of Jake Mills of Broadcast Information Network and, segregated near the doorway, the four television stations. The performing apes, Hall called them, using the pressroom without being part of its hard-bitten, cutthroat camaraderie. Tolerated but not accepted-like birdwatchers in a club of foxhunters.
Cotton turned his thoughts back to the notebook. Tomorrow he would tell Cherry he had found it and offer it to him. The ethics of the situation didn't require him to tell Cherry what Mac had said about his big story. And the traditions of the game argued against it. Cherry probably wouldn't want the notebook. Cotton was fairly sure he wouldn't want it once his curiosity was satisfied. Unless the fox Mac was chasing looked unusually fat, he couldn't imagine how he could find time for it.
He read his way idly into the notes, working from the back of the book. McDaniels had operated abut the way Cotton did-recording the spelling of names, occasional figures, key phrases from interviews, and a rare complete sentence for direct quotation. Like most newsmen, Mac used his notes only for the specifics his memory wouldn't retain. Cotton worked through six pages, matching details with his recollection of capitol news developments-looking for anything which didn't fit.
The seventh page stopped him. It was filled with columns of figures.
S-007-211-2778 Rebar cnt 121,000 usd 97,000
S-007-272-2112 109,000 91,100
S-007-411-2772 92,300 85,900
S-007-437-2442 142,000 130,600
S-007-255-2616 186,200 171,000
halg sb 390,000 actl. 412,720(in tms)
412,000 actl. 438,000
290,500 311,300
187,000 201,000
313,000 363,000
An entire page of such tabulations, penned in neat rows, identified with code letters like "pcem pp," and "alm pp," and "gding," and "wting." Idle curiosity turned to absorbed interest. Cotton studied the numbers, looking for a pattern. He could see only that they were arranged in groups of five. That suggested nothing except-by the sheer size of some of them-that McDaniels's fox might indeed be fat. The ten-digit numbers might be account numbers coded for computer bookkeeping, or purchase order numbers, or almost anything. The abbreviations (if that's what they were) were gibberish. Cotton, who wrote "that" with a "tt" in his notebook, used "gv." for "governor," and "xgr." for "legislature," thought about "The Goldbug," the Poe short story that turned on breaking a cryptogram to find pirate treasure. That could be done, he guessed, by working through the notebooks to determine what letters Mac tended to drop out of words.
Deeper in the notebook he found four other pages of similar numbers, interposed with other notes. Some seemed to represent the day-to-day routine of capitol coverage. Others he couldn't identify with published stories. There seemed to be, he finally decided, three or four unwritten stories represented in the jottings. One seemed to concern the State Insurance Commission, one involved loose accounting for cigarette tax stamps-a story Cotton had already been tipped on himself-and the third seemed to turn on the State Park Commission. The pages of figures might be part of any of them-or a story of their own.
He snapped the notebook shut and leaned back, looking at the fly on the wall without seeing it. Given time and McDaniels's clippings for the past few weeks he could sort it out. But where would he find the time?
The clock on the walnut-paneled wall was old and ornate. Its small hand stood almost exactly on 10. The large hand clicked two marks past 12. Governor Paul Roark was two minutes late for his Thursday-morning press conference. In approximately 180 seconds, John Cotton-senior man among the P.M. reporters-would get down from the windowsill where he was slouching and walk out of the Executive Conference Room, and the six other reporters waiting there would follow him. Tradition gave the Governor five minutes of grace. The rule had been proclaimed a dozen administrations back by a United Press reporter long since transferred and forgotten. He had argued that the Governor was-after all-still a public servant. To wait for him longer than five minutes would be to undermine the relationship between newsmen as watchdog-auditor-guardian-of-the-public-trust and the Chief Executive as politician and feeder-at-the-public-trough. And while the rule had been born in philosophy, it had lived in practicality. P.M. reporters, with edition deadlines looming, could ill afford to waste more than five of the crucial sixty minutes between 10 and 11 A.M.
Tony Hillerman - The Fly on the Wall Page 3