Hillerman, Tony (17 page)

“Slow down,” Janey said. “I’m taking notes.”

“The names are Herman Gay and Harold L. Singer,” Cotton said. “Tell Rickner I’m interested in whether any of the same people transferred or demoted six or seven years ago have been promoted, or moved around, in the past two years.”

“I’ve got it,” Janey said. “Do you think it was serious? The death threat, I mean?”

“Probably not. Probably just trying to make me nervous.” He laughed. “It worked. I’m nervous.”

“Then I don’t understand why you don’t just drop it,” she said. “It’s not worth getting hurt for. It’s just a newspaper story. And it’s sure to hurt somebody else even if you don’t get hurt.”

“Like the administration,” Cotton said. “Like the Democrats. If they don’t steal, they don’t get hurt.”

“I didn’t mean Democrats,” Janey said. “I meant people.”

“People like your Mr. Peters,” Cotton said. “Well, this time Mr. Peters isn’t so damned innocent—or helpless for that matter.”

She didn’t answer that. There was silence for a moment.

“John, last week when you asked me to go to New Mexico with you, were you joking?”

“Well, now—down deep at rock bottom I
was
serious.”

“All right, I’ll go. We can leave this evening.” Her voice was shaky. “I’ll tell them I’m having a nervous breakdown. Maybe I am.”

It took John Cotton a moment to digest the meaning of what Jane Janoski said. And then, in the befuddlement of amazement, he looked for the reason behind it, looked at the picture on the wall (a Swiss village) and at the draped window and the soundless television screen. A man with a mustache and a younger man in a sweater were standing in front of a sofa. The lips under the mustache moved. Why would Jane Janoski do this? The faces of both men convulsed in a pantomime of laughter. There were two possible answers. The temptation was there, born of want, and for a moment he toyed with it. The screen was filled now with the face of the man with the mustache, contorted with an idiot hysteria. Cotton released his breath, turned from the temptation to logic. Janey wanted to protect Paul Roark’s record. An admirable thing.

“First I have to wrap this up and be done with it,” he said. “Then I’ll show you the Land of Enchantment, with real sunshine just like you read about.”

“If you’re able,” she said. “If you’re still alive.” The seriousness left her voice. “Now or never,” she said. “I’ll find somebody else to take me.”

“Anyway,” Cotton said, “before you do, get my message to Rickner, will you?”

He called Whan’s number then, and told the captain he was going to the Hertz office to rent a car and then he would drive out to the Second District Highway Maintenance office. He would be there by 3
P.M.
and didn’t know how long he would stay.

>17<

T
he first law of political reporting—as Leroy Hall sometimes expounded the code to new hands in the pressroom—was: “If his lips move, he’s lying.” And the second law was: “Find the one who got screwed.” The one who got screwed, Cotton thought as he drove his Hertz Ford toward the Second Highway Division Maintenance office, was Lawrence Houghton. Under the logic on which Hall’s laws were based, that meant that Houghton would be willing to talk with unaccustomed frankness about the affairs of those who had screwed him. It was logical, but it didn’t always work. And it was less likely to work in the Highway Department than anywhere else because of the peculiar nature of that agency. Cotton turned it over in his mind—planning his tactics, wishing he’d had more time to research Houghton’s background. He was—almost certainly—one of the agency’s “good old boys,” one of the long-timers hired as a political patronage appointment before the merit personnel system had been imposed. Thus he probably had been active in politics, perhaps still was. It would help to know where his loyalties lay. Probably indirectly with Senior Senator Eugene Clark. Not directly, because Eugene Clark’s method of operation did not depend on a broad base of personal loyalties. His organization was a confederation of factional leaders, held together by the opportunity to serve their individual interests. Houghton’s loyalty—if he owed one—would be to one of those Clark allies, perhaps a county chairman, or the Land Commissioner, or one of the city-hall machines. Cotton had been nervously aware of a dark blue Pontiac which had followed his Ford onto the freeway. He peered into the rearview mirror, trying to see the face of its driver.

The Pontiac flashed past him, driven by a blond boy in a leather jacket. Cotton glanced in the mirror. The car behind him was now a Cadillac, driven by a white-haired woman. He chewed on his lip—thinking. It was absolutely essential that he persuade Houghton that he would be protected as a source. The department was split into a kaleidoscope of factions, between the “good old boys” and the professionals, between advocates of asphalt and fans of Portland cement, by partisan politics and by office politics. But it had its traditions. And one of them—deeply ingrained by years of suffering as the state’s most popular target for legislative investigations, campaign abuse and hard treatment by the press—was a repugnance for the tattle-tale. “No atheists in the Highway Department,” Hall said. “When a road falls apart, or a bridge collapses, or an alignment is surveyed wrong, it always has to be an act of God so nobody has to blame anybody.”

Cotton pulled into the Maintenance Division parking lot. He was sure Houghton would talk only if he was convinced no one ever could guess he had talked. And that meant Houghton must not guess that anyone knew McDaniels had gotten information from him. It would be tough, and Cotton didn’t decide how to approach it until he met Lawrence Houghton in his office, and saw the sort of man he was.

He was an oversized man, six foot four, Cotton guessed, with an impressive shock of carefully combed hair, an impressive brigadier’s mustache, a handsome pink face impressively scrubbed, and a clear, clipped loud voice with which he invited Cotton into a chair while he “finished signing some papers.” Cotton felt an instant instinctive dislike, quickly tempered by relief. He had dealt with men like this before. They were easy.

“I don’t have a lot of time this afternoon,” Houghton said. “Perhaps this won’t take long.”

“I hope not,” Cotton said. “Because I’m afraid I’m imposing on you. The fact is I need an authority on highway construction to talk to. Maybe there are others in the department as knowledgeable as you are.” Cotton’s tone indicated he doubted that. “But I also need someone I can trust.” Cotton paused, looking into Houghton’s eyes. Mustn’t overdo this. “Trust absolutely, that what is said here will be held in absolute confidence.”

“Of course,” Houghton said.

“As you’re already aware, a political reporter’s reputation depends on protecting his sources. So I know you won’t ask me the source of anything I’m going to talk to you about. I couldn’t reveal that even to a grand jury.” Cotton paused the proper moment for emphasis. “We go to jail first.”

“I am aware of that,” Houghton said.

“Things have been happening in your construction division since they moved you out of it,” Cotton said. He ran quickly through the pattern of bidding and changing orders in the Reevis-Smith Quality Experiment projects. Houghton’s face remained impassive—a study in blandness. “All that’s clear enough. It’s in the records. What isn’t clear—at least to me—is what else is going on. There’s not enough profit involved in these changed orders to make it worthwhile. There must be something else going on to make it pay and I don’t know enough about highway construction to see it.”

Houghton was rubbing his chin and the side of his mouth.

“This is in absolute confidence?”

“It is.”

Houghton smiled, a patronizing smile. “It’s really very simple.”

Cotton waited a moment for him to continue, then realized the game the engineer wanted to play. Oh, well. Let him enjoy it.

“Simple? It’s not simple for me.”

“Cement,” Houghton said.

Cotton thought about cement. “I don’t understand,” he said. His dislike for Houghton grew.

“The jobs you mentioned were all part of Delos Armstrong’s Quality Experiment. His way of getting quality is spending more money on base stabilization and enriching the slab mix.” Houghton laughed, an expression of scorn. “Eight sacks to the yard.”

“Compared to what?”

“Usually about five. Five sacks gives you the strength you need. But the surface isn’t completely waterproof, of course, and in this climate the water freezes and you get chipping.” He laughed again. “Armstrong thinks you can make it rich enough to stop that. Or he pretends he does.”

“But how is anyone making money out of this? You think the cement supplier is paying off?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“O.K.,” Cotton said. He kept the impatience out of his voice. “I guess I’m dense, but I don’t see how it works.”

Houghton smiled again. “How much profit would you make, Mr. Cotton, if your work-in-progress sheets showed you were putting eight sacks per yard but you were only using five, or maybe six?”

“Um-m. Quite a lot, I’d guess. But wouldn’t that be easy to catch?”

“No.”

“Why not? Wouldn’t a core drill show it? If somebody got suspicious and had it analyzed in the lab?”

“The test is for lime content, Mr. Cotton. And there’s a substantial variation of lime content in the aggregate—the sand and crushed rock you mix with the cement. And after a while the lime content of the base under the slab affects it. A lab test wouldn’t prove a thing.”

“I see. But how about the hauling slips?”

Houghton’s expression shifted from amusement to mild irritation—the teacher losing patience with a student’s slowness.

“You asked me to speculate, Mr. Cotton. That’s what I’m doing. Those hauling slips are handled by the project engineer. If he’s in this, as you believe he is, they would be easy for him to falsify. The supplier delivers bulk cement in hopper trucks. They’re sealed with a tape and bonded. But if the project engineer and the contractor’s weights man have an agreement, it would be easy enough to have the records show eight trucks were dumped at the batch plant, instead of five trucks.”

It would, indeed. Cotton felt a growing excitement. He knew how he could pin this down, with a bit of luck. He guessed Houghton wasn’t speculating at all. He was talking from sure, certain knowledge. Knowledge which McDaniels had confirmed before he died. And if this was happening with other smaller items, with roadbed watering, with tamping, with cubic yardage of excavations, with gravel tonnages, though much smaller in money, and harder to prove, they were probably enough, taken together, to double whatever the cement graft amounted to.

“So how much money would you guess would be involved?”

“Figure it up,” Houghton said. “It’s about $1.18 per sack, now. If you’re stealing three sacks out of a yard that’s $3.54. And five yards per running foot of standard with slab. That’s $17.70. Times 5,280 feet per mile, and you get about $90,000 per mile. And you double that if it’s a four-lane project.”

Cotton whistled. “That’s enough to make it worthwhile.” More than enough. It would amount to maybe $2 million in the projects Reevis-Smith had handled so far, with no end in sight. And, since it was the kind of money that wouldn’t show on the corporate-income-tax form, it was worth maybe $4 million in honest profits.

Cotton reached the Highway Department records room just after 4
P.M.
, pausing only long enough to call Whan’s office and report his movement. He wrote his name and employer in the check-in register and then wondered, suddenly and belatedly, if he should have. But the risk seemed small and was now unavoidable. A quick check of the specifications confirmed what Houghton had said about the enriched cement mix. He jotted down the final bulk-cement delivery figures from the last worksheet on the first project and noted the name of the supplier—Alvis Materials. That was a big, old-line equipment and building-supplies dealer. A family corporation, Cotton remembered, and old man Alvis had once been something or other in state government. Adjutant General, he thought it was. And that might, or might not, be helpful. Cotton pulled out a thick stack of cement hauling receipts. If, by some slight chance, someone had been overconfident enough, or careless enough, not to falsify these receipts their total might not jibe with the worksheet total and that would save him a great deal of work. He noticed, first, that all the loads weighed a few hundred pounds more or less than nine tons. He would round it off at that figure and count the slips and multiply, which would be close enough to tell. When he reached the bottom slip he stopped, staring at it. Someone had done his arithmetic for him, done it in small, precise numbers in black ink. The total, Cotton noticed, was very close to the worksheet figure. And beside the total, also in the black ink of a fine-tipped ballpoint pen, an array of doodles desecrated Willie Horst’s records. The doodles were small daggers, each with an ornate pommeled hilt. Familiar daggers. Daggers he had seen a hundred times, forming under Leroy Hall’s pen on the margin of Leroy Hall’s note pad at a hundred press conferences and committee hearings and dull legislative sessions. Hall was on the story too, and Hall had got here first.

Cotton put the haul slips back into the folder and the folder back into the filing case and walked slowly back to the entrance desk. If Roy was less than a day or two ahead of him there might be a chance to beat him—if Hall was unaware of the competition and working unhurriedly. Cotton ran his finger down the page of the check-in book, looking for the name. It wasn’t on the first page, which went back to Monday. He felt a mounting sense of sick disappointment and defeat. With luck he could wrap this up in two or three days, but he wouldn’t have two or three days. He checked the next page. No Leroy Hall there. And then, more rapidly and with growing surprise, back into the ledger. Finally, on pages dated September 7, he found Hall’s signature—neat, tight, in black ink. Written almost six weeks ago. And written, he noticed as he continued checking, three times. Hall had been here on three consecutive days.

“Mr. Horst,” Cotton said. “Do you know Leroy Hall?”