Hillerman, Tony (18 page)

“Hall? No. I don’t think so.”

“He’s about five-nine, sort of slender, gray hair, cut in a burr. He was in here early in September looking at the records.”

“Oh,” Horst said. “The reporter.”

“With the
Journal,”
Cotton said. “Has he been in here since then?”

“If he has been, it’s in the book. Nobody gets in here without signing in and out. And I haven’t seen him since then.”

Cotton worked until almost five, recording the cement haul figures in his notebook, asking himself while he worked why Hall had sat on the story for more than a month. His first thought was that it hadn’t checked out. But that didn’t stick. This one would check out. His own notebooks already held enough for a solid story even without the cement angle. That left two alternatives. Hall might have missed the big rigging and the funny work with the change orders. Knowing how Hall worked, Cotton couldn’t believe that. Something must have brought Leroy to this particular file among the thousands of files. He couldn’t believe Hall would miss seeing what Cotton had seen. That left the last alternative. And knowing Hall, he didn’t believe that either. Didn’t like, even, to think of it. But two million dollars with more to come was a lot of money. Enough to corrupt a lot of people. As he signed out on Willie Horst’s ledger, Cotton wondered if it was enough to corrupt Leroy Hall.

>18<

T
he telephone woke Cotton. He sat on the edge of his bed, groggy, and heard an efficient female voice establish his identity and tell him that Mr. Kenneth Alvis wished to speak to him. Mr. Kenneth Alvis wasted no words.

“Mr. Cotton? I’ve thought it over. You can come on down and look through the invoices.”

“Good. When?”

“Right now,” Alvis said. “You know where we are? Take the Industrial Avenue turnoff off the Interstate east.”

“I can find it,” Cotton said. He looked at his wristwatch, managing finally to focus. It was eight fifteen. “I’ll be there about nine.”

Cotton thought as he shaved that Mr. Alvis had almost certainly done more since their telephone talk last night than think it over. He had probably talked to somebody in the Alvis Materials business office and in its bulk cement operation and assured himself that this subsidiary of his empire was innocent of collusion in any graft that Cotton might have found. Last night Alvis had been totally noncommittal.

Cotton had reached him at home and identified himself and Alvis had said that he followed Cotton’s column in the
Tribune.
He sounded friendly. But he hadn’t sounded friendly when Cotton finished his quick explanation of why he wanted to check the invoices on the cement deliveries to Reevis-Smith. He had sounded coldly businesslike.

“If it works the way I think it does, the Highway Department man and the contractor are falsifying your delivery records,” Cotton had explained. “Your people wouldn’t be implicated—wouldn’t even know about it. All I need to do is to see the records at your end to confirm that’s what’s happening. It wouldn’t be bad publicity for Alvis Materials—in fact, I might not even have to identify the supplier. No real reason to.”

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 Juárez, 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 Juárez 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 Reevis-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.”