Tony Hillerman - The Fly on the Wall

by The Fly on the Wall(lit)

  "Well, now," Cotton murmured. "That's interesting."

  "What?"

  "This must be it," Cotton said. "Let's take the whole file over to the table."

  There he carefully checked off the figures in McDaniels's notebook against the bid tabulation. Of the 108 items on which the contractors had bid, Mac had noted the prices by the two lower bidders on only seventeen. In each case, the Reevis-Smith offer was either noticeably higher than the others or noticeably lower. He pointed this out to Janey.

  "But what does it mean?"

  "Beats the hell out of me," Cotton said. "Let's think about it."

  "I don't know enough about it to know what to think."

  "Let me think, then. You listen."

  Janey smiled at him. "That's a nice way to say shut up," she said. "I like tactful people."

  Cotton thought. He stared at the wall behind the table. The wall was off-white and clean. Reevis-Smith was high on some items, low on others. It didn't seem to mean anything. All of the other bidders were also high on some items and low on others. What mattered was the total when it was multiplied out and the line totals added together. That represented the total price of the project, the amount paid to the contractor, the cost to the taxpayers. And Reevis-Smith had offered the lowest total price. But no! It didn't work that way. The bids were on estimated amounts. The contractor was paid for the amount of materials actually put into the road, the actual amount of work done.

  Cotton began flipping hurriedly through the file folders, looking for the final acceptance sheet. There these actual amounts would be totaled, showing the final, total cost of the project after its completion. He knew now what Mac had found, and what he would find. There would be a big overrun in the total amount paid. He would find that Reevis-Smith, which had (he glanced at the bid sheet, checking the figure) bid in the job at $2,837,350, had finally been paid several hundred thousand dollars more than that.

  "I'm listening and all I'm hearing are the wheels going round in your head," Janey said. "But what are you looking for now?"

  "In just a minute I'm going to show you what we highly skilled, dedicated reporters call an overrun," Cotton said. "Reevis-Smith bid the job at two million eight and we're going to find it collected a lot more than that."

  He found the final acceptance sheet.

  "It should be on this." Janey, he noticed with satisfaction, looked impressed.

  The total project summary figure was near the bottom of the page. It was $2,839,027.

  "Right?" Janey asked.

  "Wrong," Cotton said. He leaned back in the chair again, feeling deflated. What the devil had McDaniels been after?

  "Not much difference?"

  "Less than two thousand dollars," Cotton said. "Two thousand on a project of almost three million. Nothing. Anyway, they never hit it right on the nose."

  Cotton stared at the wall in front of him, thinking. The miniskirted blonde became visible in the corner of his eye-restoring something in a file cabinet to his left. Cotton held his focus on a mark on the plaster, aware that Janey had glanced at him.

  "What could it be?" He asked the question to himself and Janey ignored it.

  "Well," she said. "Enough of this hunting rabbits. Back to researching bills and answering mail."

  "I'll walk back with you."

  "That's not necessary." Cotton sensed something in her voice. Coolness? She got up. "You think," she said.

  Cotton looked after her.

  "Wish me luck."

  She looked over her shoulder at him, half smiling. "I don't know. I think I'm wishing the luck to all the Art Peterses in the Highway Department."

  After that Cotton tried thinking for a while. Nothing offered itself. And then he began working his way through the file, reading memos from the project engineer to the construction engineers, memos from the Bureau of Public Roads to the Administrative Engineer; reading landfill compaction reports, reading change orders, reading analyses of the solubility of roadbed material, reading gravel hauling slips, finding nothing and finally finding himself forgetting what he was looking for.

  He got up, stretched stiff muscles. Miniskirt was out of sight. Far down the room two file clerks, man and woman, worked heads down at a table. There was the faint sound of a radio playing somewhere. Advertising insurance.

  Cotton walked to one of the narrow basement windows and looked out, eye level with the wet grass of the lawn. The rain had started again. A gray drizzle.

  What had McDaniels found in that file? He leaned his forehead against the glass. Cold. Where had it gone-that mood he had felt walking around the rain puddles with Janey Janoski? What had it been? Fun? Was that the word for it? He thought about fun. It lost its shape and its meaning as words did when he thought of them and became a visual shape. Three letters representing a sound. On the misted window, he marked the symbols fun, examined the shape, wiped it away with a finger, and looked again out across the dripping grass.

  McDaniels wrote down only the high numbers and the low numbers. Why? High on reinforcing bar. Low on roadbed material removed from borrow pits. High on aluminum culvert. Low on...

  He turned abruptly away from the window, hurried back to the table and sifted through the files. One of the change orders he had noticed involved aluminum culvert, and one involved roadbed materials. He found the subbase order first. It noted a reduction in borrow material between Station 217 and Station 218 by 470 cubic yards. Under "Explanation" someone had typed: "Change in grade due to on-site drainage requirements." Immediately under it in the file was the order changing the amount of aluminum culvert used. It noted that 316 additional linear feet of culvert was added to the project between the same stations and "Drainage requirements" was typed in as the explanation. Both were signed "H. L. Singer, Project Engineer."

  Cotton reinserted the pink carbons into the file at an angle so they would keep their place in the chronology but be easy to find. He flipped quickly through the work-in-progress papers. There were dozens of the change-order sheets, week by week-scores of them. And the pattern was quickly apparent. The changes on materials on which Reevis-Smith had bid high were almost always increases-thus increasing the contracting firm's high-profit items. But changes in items like roadbed materials, excavation and compaction-items on which Reevis-Smith had bid low-were almost uniformly reductions. And, without exception, they bore the signature of H. L. Singer.

  Cotton rocked backward in the chair, smiling.

  Mr. Singer, Mr. Singer. You have run out of string. Mr. Singer, you hapless bastard, you didn't cover your tracks at all.

  He looked at his watch. Almost four. An hour before the records room would close. He worked steadily, rapidly, efficiently, knowing almost exactly now where to look-transferring figures from the records to his notebook. He finished with the file labeled "FAS-27(2)5 1322" and began checking other project files for contracts won by Reevis-Smith on which H. L. Singer had served as project engineer. There wouldn't be time today to finish the job. That would take hours. He would simply try to scout its dimensions-determine how extensive this corruption had been. There would be time for pinning it all down, and wrapping it all up another day. H. L Singer would keep. There was no possible way for Singer to escape.

  Outside, the cold rain was turning to snow. Cotton was too engrossed in his hunt to notice.

  7

  The card was the deuce of clubs. It fell across the queen of diamonds and the jack of diamonds.

  "I have just busted the diamond flush of Cousin John with the double blank," Hall said. "I hope all you guys appreciate how carefully I'm dealing."

  "I believe that made me three deuces," Cotton said. He turned up the corner of the hole cards and looked at a spade queen. "Yeah," he said. "I'm working on the world's smallest full house."

  Hall dropped the five of hearts in front of Pete Kendall, who had the nine of clubs and the ten of spades showing. "No help," Hall said.

  "Pay attention when you're dealing," Kendall said. "I don't n
eed that goddamn five."

  The next card gave Junior Garcia a pair of fours and a jack showing, and the next one was the ace of hearts, which gave House Speaker Bruce Ulrich an ace, trey and king up.

  "Fours bet," Hall said.

  Garcia put his cigar in the ashtray and tossed four white chips into the pot. "Four dollars," he said.

  Ulrich folded. Hall had already dropped. Cotton considered the odds. If Garcia had another pair it was probably jacks, and he had one of Garcia's jacks. There was about eleven dollars in the pot. "Call," he said.

  Ulrich relit his cigar butt and blew a heavy blue cloud across the table. "You know," he said, "if Roark really has got some running money lined up he might beat Gene Clark. He's been the best Governor this state's had."

  "You've just damned the man with faint praise," Hall said. "That's like saying he's the world's tallest runt."

  Kendall was studying his hole cards, his expression foreboding. "Or the world's most moral grandma raper," he said. "Like saying as lively as a three-toed sloth. Lovely as a bucket of guts. Honest as..."

  "Kendall's on a simile kick again," Hall said. "You see his story on the abortion bill yesterday? He said Senator Wheelwright opened debate like a lioness opening an antelope."

  "I wish I'd said that," Garcia said.

  "You will," Kendall said. "Lacking the quota of spades required for a flush, I fold."

  "Kendall learned that fancy stuff on the Corpus Christi Caller," Hall said. "They even write sports like that in Texas. `The forward wall of the Longhorn defense was in hideous disarray.' Stuff like that."

  "I once wrote that the Southern Methodist passing attack, like sweet corn, traveled poorly, losing flavor with each mile from the Cotton Bowl corn patch. And got it past the desk." Kendall's expression changed from morose to merely grim with the remembered triumph. "Stole that one from A. J. Liebling," he said. "Deal the cards. It's like playing with a bunch of Brownies."

  "Pot's right," Hall said. He dealt Cotton the jack of spades and Garcia the seven of clubs. "Pair of jacks," Hall said. "Jacks are tall."

  "Let's not change the bet," Cotton said. He pushed four white chips into the center.

  "What the hell happened to Whitey?" Kendall said. "He's been gone an hour." Garcia was studying Cotton's cards.

  "What'd he say he was going to do?" Kendall said. "Wasn't he just going to call something in to his desk?"

  "He said the Gazette wanted some information about the Health Department funding," Ulrich said. "But he had to drive back out to the newsroom to get it."

  "It's just six or eight blocks," Kendall said. "If he wants to play poker he ought not screw us around like this. I don't like a five-handed game."

  "You don't like losing," Hall said. "You know that quotation from Shakespeare: `When the city desk calleth one, one goeth.'"

  "Come on, Junior," Ulrich said. "Call or fold."

  Garcia put the cigar between his teeth. "My mother told me not to call unless I could raise. I'm going to raise the son-of-a-bitch a little." He added three blue five-dollar chips to the pot.

  "Just to get the shoe clerks out," Hall said.

  Three fours, Cotton thought. Or maybe a club flush. He felt a sudden hunch that his seventh card would be a queen, giving him a winning full house. Cotton had learned years ago to resist hunches in poker.

  "You bought a pot," he said, folding the hand. "What did you have?"

  "Knock off all the talking and deal the cards," Kendall said.

  Cotton won his own deal, a five-card stud hand, with a pair of tens, and then folded the next two hands of draw. While Ulrich shuffled he got up and made himself a bourbon and water. As he dropped in the ice cubes the telephone on the kitchen wall rang.

  "Get the phone," Hall said. "If it's for my wife, tell 'em she's out playing bridge."

  "Hall residence," Cotton said.

  "This is the Gazette. Is Whitey still there?"

  "He went back to the capitol to get some sort of information for you," Cotton said.

  "That was damn near two hours ago. He hasn't called in and we're on deadline. I think the son-of-a-bitch skipped the country."

  "He better not have," Cotton said. "He borrowed my car."

  "If he comes back tell him to call the desk," the voice said.

  Back in the den, Cotton found Ulrich had dealt him four diamonds in a draw hand. He called the opening bet, drew a small spade and folded. He considered briefly why Whitey hadn't called his office and hadn't returned. Maybe car trouble. Cotton's car was a battered Plymouth sedan. The left rear fender was rumpled and rusty and it needed a change in spark plugs, but it was usually reliable.

  Cotton sipped his drink. A little too much bourbon. He watched Hall call Garcia's bet and thought, with pleasure, about Janey Janoski. Monday he would drop by her office and tell her what he had found. But what had he found?

  He hadn't, he was fairly sure now, found the story that had excited McDaniels. Not if McDaniels was a seasoned pro in the reporting game. The story wasn't that good. His calculations indicated that the juggling of overruns on the project he had multiplied out might have increased the Reevis-Smith profits something like $28,000. He had found four other contracts in which Reevis-Smith worked with Singer as project engineer. In each of them the pattern seemed to be similar. But, if they were no worse, the total would amount to less than $100,000 on construction valued at more than $13 million. Not enough to excite a pro.

  Garcia dealt him a seven of diamonds. Cotton looked at his hole card. Four of spades. He folded, and began shaping in his mind the story as it would probably appear. It would be a tough one to write-and a hard one for the reader to understand.

  "Highway Department records indicate that last-minute changes in at least five road-building projects have served to increase the profits of Reevis-Smith Constructors, Inc."

  He considered the sentence-whether the facts he had would support the statement. They would. Would they support adding the qualifier "substantially" after the verb "increase"? Probably not.

  "In all five projects, changes ordered after the contract was awarded tended to decrease the amount of items-such as roadbed materials-on which Reevis-Smith had offered low prices and to increase the amount of items on which Reevis-Smith had bid higher than other contractors.

  "In total, the changes appeared to have increased the contracting company's profits about"-Cotton guessed at what the figure might be-"$90,000."

  Ulrich pushed the deck in front of him.

  "They're cut. Deal."

  Cotton anted a quarter and dealt draw. He dealt himself a pair of threes, and a queen, nine, five.

  Ulrich opened. Garcia folded. Hall raised the bet to seventy-five cents. "This isn't a hand. It's a foot," Kendall said. He dumped the cards on the table. Cotton folded and dealt to the callers.

  And the next paragraphs would be what the Highway Department said about it, and the comment from whatever Reevis-Smith official was stuck with commenting. They would be what Hall called the "lying-out-of-it paragraphs."

  "Chief Highway Engineer C. J. Armstrong said that such change orders are common. He pointed out that original working plans for highways often have to change considerably during construction because `as the road is being built we learn more about the demands of the terrain and the condition of the rock and soil on which we are building.'

  "'We give the engineers in charge of the project a lot of flexibility to adjust the work to meet conditions as they develop,' Armstrong said.

  "H. L. Singer, who was project engineer on all five jobs, agreed. `It just happened that when we got those jobs started we found we had more rock underground than had been estimated, so we cut down on the roadbed requirements,' Singer said. `And it also happened that the drainage situation looked worse than the survey indicated, so we added more culverts.'"

  That wouldn't be exactly what they would say, but it would be close. And then there would be a dozen more paragraphs pointing out that this odd sort of profitable coinci
dence didn't happen with other contractors, and that if the specifications had been written accurately in the first place, Reevis-Smith would not have been low bidder on any of the five jobs, and adding details of what the change orders involved and how they were made. It would run maybe eight hundred words, and it would be worth maybe a two-column off-play head on the front page on an average day. And, when enough time had passed for it to be fairly well forgotten, Singer would be eased out of his Highway Department job and there would be some quiet, never-admitted tightening-up of specification writing and change orders, and then everybody would be very good, or very careful, for a year or two.