Hillerman, Tony (15 page)

Now it was almost 2
A.M.
and Cotton was no longer nervous. He was merely tired, tired almost to exhaustion. Wednesday had been a long, long day. And now it was Thursday.

“We’ll presume that Harge was on an assignment from the people he’s been working for,” Whan was saying. “The question is what you’ve been doing that concerns the Organization.”

“I told you what I think,” Cotton said. “I think Mac was after a story somebody didn’t want printed. Whoever it involved killed him. I got his notebook. It looks like there’s three unfinished projects he was working on. The State Park concession business. Something or other involving that insurance company, and that collusion on highway contracts. Take your pick.”

Cotton became aware again that he desperately wanted a cigarette. Why not? He wasn’t likely to live long enough for lung cancer. He thought about asking Whan for one, and rejected the thought. Whan was studying him.

“I nosed around some at all three of them,” Cotton said. “I told you that. And I told you there was a fairly good story in the highway situation—but not good enough to kill somebody over. And nothing that I could see in the park concessions or the insurance records looked very promising.”

“No use going over that again,” Whan said. “Let’s talk about a couple of other things. About how McDaniels might have got started on this thing and about what you’re going to do next.”

“I don’t know,” Cotton said. “First, I think I’m going to go through that damned notebook again to see if I missed anything. And through my own notes, and then maybe I’ll see if I can find out anything more about the highway deal.”

“How do you think McDaniels got on to it—whatever it was?”

“All I can do is guess,” Cotton said. “Usually it would be a tip. Somebody gets pissed off at the boss and calls the pressroom and gives some reporter ammunition.”

“That would be somebody who knew McDaniels—or at least knew who he was.”

“Not necessarily. The reporters have their own telephones but there’s also a phone booth in there and that’s the number listed in the book for the pressroom. That phone rings, and whoever’s not busy answers it. Usually it’s somebody wanting information, and once in a while it’s a tip on a story.”

Whan looked thoughtful. “A tip, you think.”

“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he saw something, or heard something, that made him curious. Or maybe he ran across something while he was doing regular routine checking.”

“Let’s say it was a tip-off from someone,” Whan said. “How would he handle it?”

“The first thing, he’d take a look at whatever records would apply. Bidding forms, purchase orders, pay vouchers, payroll, official reports whatever he could find officially on paper. First you want to find out not just whether there’s any truth in your leak but whether you can nail it. Whether you can prove it.” Cotton paused. He was so tired it was hard to think.

“Let’s say somebody tipped me off that you were cheating on your travel expenses,” Cotton said. “First I’d check all your expense vouchers for a few months at the city clerk’s office. I’d jot down all the dates you were charging the city for using your own car on city business and the places you claimed to have gone. Then I’d look at the city motor-pool records to see if you had a city car checked out on the same days. And I’d go through the billings from the oil companies to see if any of the credit-card slips had your name on them, and the license numbers on the slips, and the dates, and the places they were signed. And then, if this showed you were cheating, I’d go to you and tell you what I had and give you a chance to lie out of it.”

“You always ask the guy you’re after for an explanation?”

“Always,” Cotton said. “That’s the way the game’s played. You give him a chance to tell his side of the story.”

Whan thought about it.

“If I had about twenty good men with nothing else to do I could try to trace down everybody McDaniels talked to for the past month.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “But it probably wouldn’t tell us a thing.”

Whan stood up. “You’re registered at the Southside Inn as Robert Elwood. One of our people moonlights there as the night clerk. He, and I, and your editor are the only ones who know you’re back in town—unless you told somebody else. Let’s keep it that way.”

“I can’t work out this story in a motel room,” Cotton said. “I’ve got to be out talking to people.”

“We’ll keep an eye on the motel during the day and when you have to leave call here and ask for me, or Lieutenant Bierly if I’m out. Most of the time I can have somebody close.”

“Most of the time?”

“Look,” Whan said, “I’ve got four unsolved armed robberies to work, and fourteen or fifteen burglaries, and a homicide case to get ready for the District Attorney by next weekend, and we’re short four men in the detective division. I can have a man around you part of the time. When I can’t, you sit in your motel room with the door locked and be patient.”

“That’s what the man who called me said,” Cotton said. “That I’d get a little police protection but not enough to make the difference.”

“Did he say that?”

“That’s what he said.”

Whan took a long drag off his cigarette and rocked back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. “If it works the way I want it to work, they won’t know you’ve got any protection. You bought the ticket just to Kansas City, and under a phony name. There’s no way for them to know you came here. When they find out you did, I’d like them not to know you’re working with us.” He rocked forward, leaned his elbows on the desk—looking at Cotton. “I think that’s the best bet.”

“Like bait,” Cotton said. “You don’t want them to see the trap. Somebody shoots me, you grab ’em red-handed, they talk to get a lighter rap, and you solve the McDaniels killing. Trouble is, I’m dead. But if I had a cop with me, I see Harge, and I point him out, and you arrest him, and I’m still alive.”

“You said Harge was hurt. Besides, they wouldn’t use him after you got a look at him.” Whan opened the door, held it for Cotton. “Next time it will be somebody else.”

>16<

H
abit aroused John Cotton from a restless sleep at 6
A.M.
He awoke tired, hazily aware at first only that he was in an unfamiliar bed and then abruptly and nervously alert. He showered slowly, examining the collection of scratches and abrasions accumulated in yesterday’s desperate scramblings on the West Fork of the Brazos. Only one spot was painful—a bluish bruise on his left thigh which he could not remember inflicting. It was a long, narrow thigh ending at a bony knee. Cotton considered it as he soaped it. A good enough leg attached to a serviceable body. More elongated and thin than popular tastes required, perhaps, but generally satisfactory and usually trouble-free. It didn’t tend to fat, which was fortunate because be enjoyed eating, and it would probably last about another forty years. Cotton toweled himself briskly, avoiding thought of the next forty years, dug his shaving gear out of the suitcase, and lathered. The face in the mirror was not the face he would have chosen for himself. The jaw was a little long, the nose bony and slightly bent, and the ears more prominent than necessary. He had once—long ago—made an idle shaving-time effort to capture the face in a paragraph, in a simile and in a single word. The word he had settled on was “nondescript” and the simile “like a plow horse on poor pasture.” The face smiled slightly at him now, not resenting the insult.

At the door, he stopped for the automatic backward look at the room of the man who has long lived alone. And then, hand on the knob, he remembered that outside the door there was something to dread. He spent a second telling himself he was safe for a while. And then he went down to breakfast in the motel coffeeshop.

While he ate, he read with practiced speed through the
Capitol-Press,
the
Morning Journal
and yesterday’s state edition of the
Tribune.
He read Hall’s column in the
Journal
carefully. Nothing much had happened in politics in his absence.

By seven he was back in his room, on the telephone to Danilov, giving the managing editor his address and number and telling him of the arrangement with Captain Whan. Danilov didn’t sound happy or friendly, but then he never did.

“I’m pulling Tom Rickner off that urban-renewal stuff and sending him to the capitol to sub for you,” Danilov said. “He’ll do any leg work he can for you. And we’ll insert a box on the editorial page saying you’re on vacation or something like that. What do you think it should say?”

“Why not say I’m on an indeterminate leave because of a sudden illness?”

“O.K. Now, as soon as you can I want you to write a long memo outlining all this and sign it and get it to me.”

While he worked his way through McDaniels’s notebook again, Cotton considered why Danilov wanted the memo. Danilov would want the written report to keep the story leads alive in case something happened to the reporter. But that wouldn’t be the only reason. He would want it because Cotton had become more than a reporter in this affair—and thereby less than a reporter. He had become involved in his own story, which made him suspect. He had lost his official, sanitizing detachment. To Danilov he had become an ambiguous figure. On one hand he was still the reporter—the man the news desk must trust or the system would not operate. And on the other, he was part of the story, a news source from whom information must be automatically doubted. Danilov would decide—would have to decide someday if the story ever could be broken—just who John Cotton was. If he was the reporter, it would be:

After the
Tribune’s
capitol correspondent began investigating he received a call at his apartment. A man Cotton could not identify warned him that unless he left the city by the next morning he would be killed.

Or it would be:

Cotton said, in a signed statement, that a man called his apartment and warned him he would be killed unless he left the capital the next morning. Cotton said . . .

Notice, reader, we tell you only what John Cotton said. He said this in a signed statement. We certify only that he said it. We do not certify that it happened. We had no disinterested fly on the wall in his apartment, overheard no call. You decide if Cotton lies.

The sound of rushing water. In the next motel unit someone had turned on the shower. Cotton called a rental service and arranged to have a typewriter delivered. Then he went back to his study of McDaniels’s notes. Nothing suggested anything. He turned the page. Near the top in McDaniels’s neat script was written
“Houghton??”
He had noticed it once before, and wondered who, and why the underline, and why the question marks. Now he knew who. Houghton was the Second Highway District Maintenance Engineer. Wingerd had mentioned that McDaniels had interviewed him. And he remembered Volney Bowles, at last week’s poker game, gossiping about McDaniels’s car parked often at the district highway office. But why the question marks? He flipped forward in the notebook, calculating. The name apparently had been written the day before McDaniels tricked Roark into confirming that tip. Had Mac mentally removed the question marks after the Governor’s indiscreet confirmation that Houghton was an accurate and informed leak?

Cotton read the list he was compiling on a sheet of motel stationery.

It read:

Check ownership structure of Wit’s End, Inc.

Background A. J. Linington.

Who reinsures for Midcentral Surety? Who owns it?

Why was Mac trying to get highway-project hauling slips? What slips?

Cotton added, “Check Houghton. What did Mac learn from him?”

He worked slowly through page after page. No ideas came. Hunger caused him to look at his watch.

While he ate a hurried hamburger in the motel coffeeshop, the state edition of the
Tribune
arrived. The box was there on the editorial page, set in boldface type.

The political column by John Cotton, the
Tribune
State Capitol Correspondent, which normally appears on this page, will be discontinued for an indefinite time. Cotton has taken a leave because of illness. His duties have been assumed by Thomas J. Rickner, long-time
Tribune
city-government reporter.

He paused at the door of his room, hearing a voice inside. It was the television set—a network promotion for the Friday Night Movie. On the screen, a man with a pistol was climbing a fire-escape ladder toward an open window. Cotton sat on the bed and stared without seeing.

By now, long before now, Harge would have telephoned whomever had hired him and reported the failure. Or would he? Maybe Harge would gamble that Cotton would continue running, would disappear. Maybe he would report that Cotton was dead and that the body would never be found. Cotton considered this deceit, liking the idea. But it wasn’t likely. He didn’t think the man he had known as Adams would do it. Almost certainly he had reported accurately. Reported to X, to the unknown quantity in this equation, that Cotton was alive. A woman on the TV screen was examining a dirty shirt collar in a laundromat. Cotton closed his eyes—trying to imagine. Logic told him X would be disappointed, perhaps angry. He couldn’t picture X. One man? Several men? A respectable corporation executive in a paneled office of Midcentral Surety, Inc.? Or a Mafioso type with sideburns and handmade shoes? Or someone in the Chicago Organization, as Captain Whan suggested? He visualized a florid, jowled, heavy-set man wearing a dark shirt and a white tie. A character actor in a low-budget, made-for-television movie. He pushed himself up from the bed. That was part of the trouble. It didn’t really seem real to him. And yet somewhere, right now, at ten minutes before 2
P.M.
there was a man—genuine flesh and blood—who must be extremely conscious of the existence of John Cotton. This man must be thinking of Cotton, deciding that maybe Cotton was still running and maybe Cotton wasn’t running. He might be sitting behind a desk, or driving a car, or in conference with associates. Wherever he was, he would be adjusting himself to the unexpected knowledge that the threat posed by John Cotton had not been—as confidently expected—erased on a fishing stream in New Mexico.