Tony Hillerman - The Fly on the Wall

by The Fly on the Wall(lit)

  There had been a half-minute silence, and then: "What's your telephone number, Mr. Cotton? I'll think about this and I'll call you in the morning." No questions, no comments, just that. Cotton had sat beside the telephone for a moment, thinking-trying without success to decide whether to be optimistic. And then he had thought again of Leroy Hall's doodles on the hauling slip and he had walked out of the motel room and down the block through the dark autumn wind and turned into a place called Al's Backdoor and begun, methodically, to drink. He drank margueritas-tequila cut with lime juice and served with the glass rimmed with salt. Drank and remembered. Frank's Lounge in Santa Fe, when he was young, and the Sunday edition had gone to press, with Mygatt, Peterman and Peterson, Hackler and Bailey and Alding, celebrating the end of another week, and the sweatshirt crowd jamming the bar, checking their parlay card point spreads against the sport-page results. And the bar on the top of the San Antonito in Ciudad Ju rez, cool in the Mexican heat, when he'd been exhausted and exultant, with Rick Barzun, celebrating blanking AP on the finish of the Pan-American Road Race. How many was it? Eleven dead and eighteen hospitalized. A Porsche it had been. Not one of the Porsche team but an Argentine driver, skidding into the crowd on that fast final run from Chihuahua to the Ju rez airport. And the luck of finding the Mexican colonel who had handled the army ambulances, and of having the radio-telephone link open to the Dallas UPI bureau. He remembered every detail. Perfect recall. But where was Barzun now? Where were they all? Scattered and lost. On the third marguerita he considered Janey, wondering if she was the Governor's much-rumored mistress. That led him to her offer to go to New Mexico with him and to her reasons for it. These he pondered gloomily and found, once again, to be admirable, but foolish. The story wouldn't hurt Governor Roark that much. Not beyond recovery. Not unless Roark's own hands were dirty.

  The bar was dark and quiet. People came and went. Sometime about midnight, a newsie came in with the two-star edition of the Gazette, which Cotton bought, put in the booth beside him and forgot. He lost interest in numbering the margueritas. The tequila was cold in his mouth and warm in his stomach. Now, at last, he was ready to consider what had drawn him here. To think of Leroy Hall and the impossible alternatives. He preferred to believe that Hall had simply missed the story. But Hall wouldn't have checked that particular project file among those acres of files unless he had reason to be suspicious. And, being suspicious, he would have been thorough. Hall wouldn't have missed the bid rigging, or the funny business with the changed orders. And, being Leroy Hall, he would have looked shrewdly beyond this minor thievery for the big money. And he would have seen what Cotton eventually saw. Hall must have the story. Probably had had it weeks ago, before McDaniels had been tipped to it. So why hadn't the Journal run it? Cotton tried to concentrate. It was important that he find an answer to substitute for other obvious but incredible answer. Janey Janoski probably wouldn't run it. Janey was smart like Hall. Maybe not quite as savvy in politics, but wise. And Janey wouldn't run it because she wasn't detached from it all. Janey would see H. L. Singer and Flowers and the rest of them as people with wives, and children, and lives to lead. (Or would she, above all, see Paul Roark?) She was not conditioned, as he and Hall were conditioned, to see beyond those who got hurt, the people with faces, to the three million faceless people whose money was stolen and who needed to know about it. But that was just part of it. Janey wasn't like Hall and him. Not like the metaphorical fly, seeing all, recording all, feeling nothing. No. Hall's reason for suppressing the story wouldn't be Janey's reason. Why did he try to deny that Hall, like any man, must have his price? Why did it hurt so much to admit that Leroy Hall, whose daily work was in the fields of compromise, where no value was absolute, had himself compromised? Why did he hate this thought? Hall was his friend. He thought about it, trying to concentrate. An answer came to him gradually. Maybe Hall suppressed it, not just for money they paid him, but as a gesture of contempt for all of it. Because the dry, brittle, witty surface cynicism Hall displayed ran right to his core. Because Hall, in his experience and his wisdom, had learned that the game they played in the pressroom-scoffed at and joked about and believed in-was indeed a game without sense or value. That was why he couldn't accept Hall's betrayal. Because it would mean Hall had concluded that what they did had no meaning. And Leroy Hall was-after all-smarter, and wiser, than John Cotton.

  The glass before him seemed almost empty. He focused on it, and was suddenly aware of a man standing at his elbow. "Time to go," the man said. The voice was soft.

  Cotton jerked his head up, looking at the man. He had forgotten that someone, somewhere, was hunting him, but he remembered it now.

  "Two o'clock. Closing time," the man said. "Got to lock the place up."

  "Oh." Cotton pushed himself to his feet, picked up his coat. He walked, unsteadily, toward the door.

  "Wait," the man said. "You're forgetting your money." The man laughed. "Unless you meant to leave an eighteen-dollar tip."

  Now, the morning after, Cotton felt the crumpled bills in his trousers pocket, and remembered all of this, although some of it was hazy and his head was aching. He pulled out the money. A ten, a five and two ones. The bartender had saved himself a one-dollar tip. Fair enough.

  The shirt was his last clean one. He would try to find time today to buy some more, and some socks and underwear. He called Whan's office to report his destination. Whan was out and the officer he was referred to made no pretense of caring where John Cotton was going to be this morning.

  In the office of Kenneth Alvis, the wall clock said four minutes after nine. The man Cotton thought would be Alvis proved to be a company auditor whose name sounded something like Crichton. Alvis was small and white-haired, with the weathered skin one attains either by working outdoors or playing a lot of golf. The third man Alvis introduced was named Harper and was, Alvis said, "in cement." Harper looked nervous and slightly belligerent.

  "Here they are," Alvis said. He indicated a stack of papers on his desk. "Billing slips on what we've delivered to Reevis-Smith for the past thirty months. That's right, isn't it? The past two years, you said."

  "I don't want to waste a lot of valuable time for you people," Cotton said. "I can do this. I just want to run a total on your bulk deliveries to Reevis-Smith on each of five highway jobs."

  "We don't keep it like that," Harper said.

  "How could I figure it out?"

  "I don't know. I guess we could check on the delivery point. We charge a haulage fee too, so we show on the billing slip where the batch plant was where we dumped the loads."

  "That should do it," Cotton said.

  The batch plant for project FAS 007-211-3788 proved to be at Ellis, a small town near the Lake Ladoga dam in the southeastern corner of the state. While Harper, Alvis and Cotton sorted the Ellis deliveries out of the pile, Crichton brought in an adding machine.

  Crichton was fast at it. Fast and sure. He tore the tape off the machine, glanced at it and handed it to Cotton.

  "Thirteen thousand, seven hundred and eighty-six tons," he said. "Is that about what you were expecting?"

  Cotton stared at the tape, incredulous. He had been a fool to think it would be this easy.

  "Can you translate these tons into sacks?" But, even as he asked, he knew he was just wasting time. Twenty sacks per ton would be about 275,000 sacks-almost exactly the amount the state had paid Reevis-Smith for on that job.

  "Sure," Crichton said. He tapped quickly at the adding machine. "It's 275,720 sacks." He was watching Cotton's face. "That's too much, I gather?" The question had a trace of satisfied malice in it.

  "Mr. Alvis, I want to apologize for wasting your time," Cotton said. He felt sick. "I had some bad information, and I made a bad guess from it." He cursed Houghton, and then himself, for not being more wary of Houghton. The engineer had obviously been showing off. He should have guessed Houghton was himself guessing-trying to impress.

  "Well," Harper said, "that is what we delivered to Ree
vis-Smith there. That's what they used for the jobs they had there. And if you want just what went into the highway, you'll have to get the breakdown from them."

  "Jobs," Cotton said. "I don't follow you. Was there more than one job?"

  "They worked them both out of the same batch plant," Harper said. "The structures and the slab on the highway and all that work at the resort. But you could get the breakdown from them. Both state jobs in a way, but they'd have to keep the books separate, I guess."

  It was for Cotton one of those moments when time seems to slow down, when the words hang in the air. Another piece of the puzzle clicked neatly into place.

  "Well," Cotton said. He was grinning now. "So that's how it works." Alvis was staring at him, waiting for an explanation. Let him wait. Cotton was thinking: Here's where Wit's End fits in. And maybe this explains Midcentral Surety-a bonding company which wouldn't make any nosy inspections. Cotton glanced back at Harper.

  "Could Reevis-Smith be buying cement from someone else-using some other supplier for these Lake Ladoga resort improvements?"

  "That would be pretty stupid," Harper said. "Anyway, they weren't. I get by there now and then and they're using the same batch plant for both jobs."

  Alvis was smiling faintly now, understanding it, looking at Cotton with approval. He laughed. "The son-of-a-bitch is shorting enough cement out of the highway job to handle the resort construction. Getting paid for it twice."

  "Just between us, I think it was even neater than that," Cotton said. "I think the same people who own Reevis-Smith own the park concession company. That would take the risk out of it. Reevis-Smith knows it's going to build the resort improvements-the roads and so forth. And, with some collusion in the Highway Department, it gets a lock on the highway jobs in the right places at the right time."

  "How about that!" Alvis said. "Smart son-of-a-bitch. He gets paid twice for all his cement work."

  "And for God knows what else," Cotton said. "But that will all have to come out in the wash. Now I just want to make sure that he didn't get cement from any other source."

  "Joe," Alvis said, "who else could they get cement from? To that batch plant, I mean?"

  "They didn't get it from nobody but us."

  "But they could have gotten it from Perkins Brothers, or maybe Allied. Who else?"

  "Them and maybe A & J, if they don't mind the extra shipping," Harper said. "But I'll bet my ass they didn't."

  "You know the people. Get on the horn and find out for sure." Alvis turned to Cotton. "That's what you want, isn't it?" Alvis was enjoying this.

  "That would save me a lot of time."

  "O.K.," Alvis said. "Done. And you remember our deal. You keep us out of the paper."

  "If you don't want in," Cotton said. "But you're doing a lot of public good here-cleaning up corruption. Why not get credit?"

  Alvis was still grinning. "Get credit for screwing a customer? The smart son-of-a-bitch."

  19

  It was almost noon when Cotton left the office of Alvis Industries. It had taken less than thirty minutes for Harper to confirm what Cotton already knew-that no one else had hauled bulk cement to any of the Reevis-Smith Quality Experiment projects. And then Harper had another thought. He knew the foreman of the trucking outfit which subcontracted on Reevis-Smith jobs. This took a little longer, but when the last phone call had been made, Cotton had a tally of tons of mixed cement hauled from batch plants on all five of the contractor's highway jobs the past two years to state park improvement projects let to Reevis-Smith. Alvis ran the adding machine now, totaling tonnage and converting wet cement into money. The final amount on the tape was $318,427.

  "That's more than we net out of this whole goddamn operation in a year," Alvis said.

  On the way back to his motel Cotton noticed a police car behind him. A coincidence, or the first visible sign that Whan was providing any protection? If he needed it at all, he would need it now. Yesterday's activities would have alerted anyone who might be watching that Cotton was in the capital and working on the story. McDaniels had copied notes out of those contract files in the Highway Department records room and had been pushed over the balustrade down the capitol well. Leroy had visited the records and had been... He balked at the word, and then accepted it. Bribed. How much had they paid him? Cotton tried to imagine the scene and found it impossible. The Leroy Hall he knew-thought he knew-refused the role, refused to hold out his hand, refused to accept the imagined envelope thick with hundred-dollar bills. Then what was his price, if not money? Cotton turned away from the unanswerable question and sorted out his story. What he had. What he needed. He had nothing, beyond the circumstances of Highway Department policies and appointments, to tie Jason Flowers to the affair. He had nothing definite beyond peculiar coincidence to connect Wit's End, Inc., with this conspiracy. He had no doubt there was a direct connection, but with what he had now-and the way he would have to write it-Wit's End would appear a possibly innocent customer unaware that stolen cement was being poured into its park improvements. Nor had he anything to connect Midcentral Surety-not even a real clear idea of how it connected. Nothing more than the coincidence that it had interested McDaniels at the same time he was digging into Reevis-Smith-and perhaps that was simply because it was bonding Reevis-Smith contracts. Cotton had that, and a strong suspicion.

  He glanced into his rearview mirror as he turned into the motel lot. The police car was no longer visible. Cotton pulled into the slot reserved for his room number, cut the ignition and sat, looking. Three men walked out of the coffeeshop toward him. They walked past his car, talking, seeming to ignore him. They got into a blue-and-white Chevy and drove away. A young woman in a tailored suit emerged from the walkway between the first and second blocks of motel units and stood a moment beside the ice machine, her eyes roving over the parking lot. She looked directly at Cotton, studied him, and then looked away. Would they use a woman? Would they do anything in the cold light of noon?

  Cotton sighed and climbed out of the car. The woman had disappeared. He walked hurriedly to the stairway, trotted up the flight of steps and stopped behind the pillar at the head of the stairway. His room was six doors down this second-story walkway-at least thirty yards of wide-open exposure to anyone in the parking lot. He pulled his room key out of his pocket, took a deep breath and ran. And when he was inside the room, breathless, the door locked securely behind him-feeling simultaneously foolish and relieved-he hardened a resolution he had already made. Today would be the end of it. He would work until office closing time pulling together whatever loose ends he could. And then he would write what he had. The story would appear tomorrow and it would be over. No more hiding. No more panic. No more reason for anyone to kill him. Once the story broke, every reporter in the statehouse would swarm on to it-scrambling for whatever he had missed. But he'd give Danilov a head start on the rest of it.

  He called Danilov first. Ernie had the rundown he had asked on A. J. Linington. Member of the bar. Owned little law firm with offices in the Exchange Building. Showed up in the file three times in the last eight years, twice as defense attorney in gambling cases and once representing a union business manager indicted for attempted extortion. The union was Haulers and Handlers, International, an independent.

  "And," Danilov continued, "this Linington cat also turned up in that ownership check the business-page desk made for you. He's listed as agent-of-record for both corporations."

  "Both?"

  "Midcentral and Wit's End."

  "But not Reevis-Smith?"

  "No. That was owned by the estate of Frank Reevis until three years ago. A lot of labor troubles and it went into bankruptcy receivership. Then it was sold to Highlands Corporation. That's a Delaware corporation with a business address in Jersey City."

  "Never heard of it," Cotton said. He was disappointed. Linington gave them some connection between Wit's End and Midcentral-but that connection was meaningless. What he needed was a link between the resort company and the c
onstruction firm.

  "You'll hear more of it," Danilov said. "This Highlands Corporation is also registered as owner of Midcentral Surety and Wit's End, Incorporated. They're subsidiaries."

  "Wonderful," Cotton said. Another loose end pinned down. One less crumb left for the opposition papers. "I'll use that Wit's End-Reevis-Smith connection in the story. Check it with the business desk to make sure I say it right."

  "Yeah," Danilov said. "How's it coming?"

  "Count on it for tomorrow. First edition."

  "How big is it?"

  "Be a banner," Cotton said. He told Danilov briefly what he had. There was a short silence. Danilov preparing a compliment, Cotton thought. He had never heard a Danilov compliment. He would ignore it, he decided.

  "I guess it'll take room on the jump page," Danilov said. "What'll it run? Galley and a half or so? You write too loose. Try to keep it tight."

  A Danilov compliment.