Hillerman, Tony (2 page)

Cotton punched “min please” on the keyboard and stood up—still looking toward the door. By day, this echoing fourth-floor Senate wing of the capitol was a buzzing, rattling medley of sounds. Laughter, angry conversation, shouts, tapping high heels, slamming doors and the whine of elevator motors were bounced by the grimy marble of the corridors and mixed in a discordant symphony always present just outside the pressroom door. But at night the immense old building was virtually empty and its silence imposed a hush on the few who still occupied it.

Thus the sudden sound violated custom and protocol. But it wasn’t that which took Cotton through the pressroom door into the semidarkness of the corridor. There was something animal in the sound, something ugly and primeval which prickled the skin and demanded investigation.

The sound had come from the left, from the direction of the central rotunda. Cotton walked slowly from the corridor into the broad foyer directly under the capitol dome. The lights here were off but there was a dim illumination from below—lights from the lobby three floors below reflecting upward.

Cotton stood, listening. Footsteps. A figure emerged from a corridor in the House wing and then stopped at the edge of the foyer.

“Was that you?”

“I heard it, but it wasn’t me,” Cotton said.

The man walked toward him, skirting the marble railing which circled the open center of the rotunda. Cotton recognized him, a clerk in the office of the House Sergeant at Arms. But he couldn’t remember his name.

“What the hell was it?” the man asked. He looked around the foyer carefully, at the four broad corridors which led into it from the House and Senate wings and then upward at the fourth-floor mezzanine railing above. “Nobody here,” he said, looking at Cotton again.

“It damned sure wasn’t me,” Cotton snapped. “I heard it down in the pressroom.”

From a floor somewhere below came a stutter of voices—an excited sound. Cotton suddenly understood the noise, what had made it. He and the clerk walked to the railing, looking down.

“Good God,” the clerk said. “God.”

At the edge of the Great Seal of the Commonwealth embossed in the marble tile of the lobby floor a body was sprawled. It looked from this height, Cotton thought, like a broken doll. By the body, a man in the khaki of a capitol custodian was kneeling. Another man stood beside him, only the top of his hat and his shoulders visible.

“That’s what we heard,” the clerk said. “He fell from here.”

“Here or over the third-floor railing,” Cotton said. “Let’s hope it was that. That would give him some chance of being alive.”

There was no use calling the
Tribune
on it now. The next edition wasn’t until 11
A.M.
tomorrow. He thought about it. The later the
A.M.
reporters knew about it, the better. They would get the story soon but every minute that passed before they did would mean more missed editions and more details that would be fresh for the afternoon cycle. Still, he had sent McDaniels home. He should protect him at the
Capitol-Press.

Cotton leaned over the balustrade and cupped his hands. “Is he dead?”

The man in the hat looked upward, his face a small white oval. Cotton didn’t hear his answer.

“What?” he shouted.

“He’s dead,” the man yelled.

Cotton trotted back to the pressroom and switched the teletype key from tape to manual.

BE MIN WITH THE COLUM. JUST HAD FATAL. UNIDENTIFIED DROPPED DOWN CENTRAL ROTUNDA. WILL ADVISE. JC

And then he called the
Capitol-Press
desk and asked for the city editor. The switch button clicked. In the receiver Cotton heard the background sound of teletypes. A voice near the phone was saying, “all right, then, danm it, get it written.” And then it was talking into Cotton’s ear.

“Yeah?”

“This is John Cotton. McDaniels went home sick and I’m backstopping for him. Your mail edition out?”

“Running now,” the voice said. “What ya got?”

“Just had a fatal out here. Somebody did a dry dive in the rotunda. Just a minute ago. I’ll go down and get an identification and call you back.”

“We’re locking up the two star at ten-fifteen,” the voice said. “We can save a hole for it.”

“It may not amount to much,” Cotton said. “But if it’s a biggie, I work for the
Tribune,
and if anybody asks you, it’s McDaniels covering for you.”

“O.K.,” the voice said. “If it’s a good one—somebody big—call me back quick, before you wrap it up. I’m playing a second-cycle story on the President’s press conference and if your fatal is some hotshot I could move the President inside and lead with your jumper.”

On the way down in the elevator Cotton thought that it might be somebody fairly big. At least it would most likely be somebody in state government. A tourist wouldn’t be in the capitol at night and there must be more convenient places for an intended suicide to do his jumping. It would be somebody in government, probably not a run-of-the-mill clerk. Probably somebody with enough responsibilities to keep him working in his office at night. Or maybe some legislator. Suicide of anyone on the public payroll raised interesting possibilities. Might be worth a two-column head, or one column above the fold.

Cotton pulled the door of the antique elevator open on the first floor and trotted toward the lobby floor of the rotunda. The feeling was familiar, a knotting in his stomach, a tightness in his chest. When he had been a police reporter, he had felt it often—this approach to violent death—without getting used to it. They always looked surprised. No matter the circumstances. The suicide gassed in his garage, the motel night clerk with a robber’s bullet through his neck, the middle-aged woman pinned beneath her car. The details were different but the eyes were the same. The intellect believed in death but the animal in man thought it was immortal. The eyes were always glossy with outraged surprise.

Four men stood by the body now, talking quietly. Cotton recognized the clerk from the fifth floor, and the custodian, and the man in the hat. The fourth man was fat, a Game and Fish Department employee, but Cotton didn’t know his name.

And then he looked downward. He saw it would not be a big one for the night city editor of the
Capitol-Press.
Not a play story. Probably a one-column head below the fold at best. Maybe no better than page two. The surprised eyes staring sightlessly up at the capitol dome six floors above were those of Merrill McDaniels.

>2<

H
ouse speaker Bruce Ulrich pounded twice with his gavel. “Chair recognizes Sergeant at Arms.”

“Mr. Speaker, a message from the Governor.”

“The house will receive a message from the Governor.”

Alan Wingerd, the Governor’s press secretary, came down the aisle from the double doors, paused briefly to say something to the Majority Leader at the front-row aisle desk, laughed, and then handed the Clerk of the House a folded paper.

“The Clerk will read the message from the Governor,” Ulrich said. Ulrich put down the gavel and returned his attention to the newspaper on his desk. Cotton had noticed earlier, with some satisfaction, that Ulrich was reading the first edition of the
Tribune.
The banner said roark asking for $150 million road fund.

The Clerk of the House was reading in his clear, prissy voice.

“Honorable Members of the House of Representatives of the 77th General Assembly,

“I am hereby asking the Majority Floor Leader to submit for your consideration three bills, the passage of which I feel is essential to the safety and convenience of the people of this commonwealth.

“The first of these bills would adjust the road-users’ tax in certain categories to increase revenues an estimated seventeen million dollars per annum. The second of these bills would authorize issuance of bonds against this revenue. . . .”

Cotton yawned and glanced down the press table. At his right, Leroy Hall was reading his way through the stack of bills introduced in the morning session. The AP and UPI chairs were vacant. The wire-service men were in the pressroom filing new leads. In the next chair Volney Bowles of the
Journal
was working a Double-Crostic in a
Saturday Review.
Beyond him, in the last chair, sat Junior Garcia. Garcia seemed to be asleep.

Hall jabbed Cotton with his elbow. He was a skinny man, in his fifties, his gray haircut in a bristling burr. “Cousin John,” he said, “you see that
Capitol-Press
story on McDaniels’s inquest. You think it was an accident?”

“What else?” Cotton said. “You knew Merrill. He didn’t jump.”

“You said he was drinking,” Hall said. “You’d have to be pretty drunk to fall over that balustrade.”

“He was stiff.”

Hall was looking at him questioningly. “Mac didn’t hardly ever drink much?” It came out as another question, irritating Cotton.

“You think somebody pushed him? Like who? You’re sounding like a beginning police reporter.”

“I guess I just feel bad about it,” Hall said. He was looking down, drawing doodles on his note pad—elaborate daggers with jeweled hilts. “Did you know we used to work together on the Portland
Oregonian
before it folded? He was general assignment and I was covering the county building.”

Cotton was only half listening. The clerk’s voice was droning on: “. . . recognize the reluctance of this distinguished body to increase the burden of taxation on the motor-carrier industry. However, this industry will benefit disproportionately from the expeditious construction of a safe network of highways and . . .” This call by the Governor for a road-users tax increase, a bond issue and a crash program in highway construction had come as a surprise—a rarity in a gossipy statehouse where almost everything leaked. That meant little time for reaction to develop. Cotton was watching the floor. The Minority Floor Leader was leaning over the desk of the Majority Whip. The conversation might be casual, since the two men were long-time friends. Or, since the Majority Whip was a Gene Clark Democrat, it might be negotiations for a Republican—Clark Democrat coalition to kill Roark’s road plan. Cotton signaled for a page boy and started jotting a note to the Minority Leader. Hall was still talking.

“He’d always wanted to be a political writer,” Hall was saying, “and he would have been good at it. D’you know he had a leak in the Governor’s office?”

“How do you know?” The note asked the Republican Floor Leader if he would try to stall Roark’s road bills by asking to have them referred to two committees, if he had any substantial Democratic support and if he had enough votes for the double referral.

“He knew about this Roark road-fund bond-issue scheme before we did,” Hall said. “He made some crack about it last week—joking about it.”

“Why didn’t he write it?” Cotton handed the note to the page.

“I’ve been wondering,” Hall said. “I didn’t think anything about it. Thought it was just some crap he’d picked up from the motor carriers’ lobbyist. But, when Wingerd gave us the advance press release this morning, I knew Mac must have had some early word, and it must have come from one of Roark’s people.” He laughed. “It damned sure didn’t come from Jason Flowers.” The Highway Commission chairman’s animosity toward the
Capitol-Press
and all associated with it was widely known.

“Other people in the Highway Department had to know about it, too,” Cotton said. He started to tell Hall what McDaniels had said about the big story he was going to break, but checked the impulse. Suddenly he wanted to do some careful thinking about those drunken confidences and about McDaniels.

“I didn’t know him all that well,” Cotton said. “I thought maybe he was still green on political reporting. You know—hearing some tip and getting excited before he checked it.” McDaniels had to be green. Why else tell Cotton about his hot story? Why risk it? Because the booze made him friendly? Because in his drunkenness he was reaching out to touch someone—reaching with the only thing he had to offer? Cotton found the thought uncomfortable.

“No,” Hall said. “Merrill was a pro. A good digger.”

Cotton noticed that Hall, without seeming to do so, was also watching comings and goings on the House floor. “You think they’re going to pull something?”

Hall looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

Cotton laughed. “You bastard. You know what I mean. You’re just hoping it won’t happen on my time.”

“It’s already an
A.M.
’s story. But relax. Nothing’s going to happen.”

The clerk’s singsong voice worked its way through the final page of Roark’s message. “. . . highways which are a disgrace to this great state and an increasing danger to the motoring public.” The page boy handed Cotton a folded slip of paper. It read:

Not for quote:

1. We’ll move for a double referral.

2. The Clark people aren’t playing.

3. Probably not.

Cotton looked at his watch. Nineteen minutes before his three-star-edition deadline. He got up.

“Just out of curiosity,” Hall said, still drawing daggers, “are you screwing me out of my lead for tomorrow?”

“Those are my intentions,” Cotton said. “To do unto Leroy Hall what Leroy Hall has so often done to me.”

In the pressroom, Cotton didn’t take time for the typewriter and editing. He punched the information directly into teletype tape and filed it.

INSERT IN ROARK ROAD-FUND STORY, SUBS FOR SECOND PARAGRAPH. WHEN THE MAJORITY LEADER INTRODUCED THE GOVERNOR&RSQUO;S THREE-BILL PACKAGE, REPUBLICAN MEMBERS TRIED TO DELAY THE PLAN WITH A MOTION TO REFER THE BILLS TO WAYS AND MEANS COMMITTEE AS WELL AS THE TRANSPORTATION COMMITTEE.

LACKING SUPPORT OF THE ANTI-ROARK DEMOCRATS IN THE HOUSE, THE MOTION SEEMED CERTAIN OF DEFEAT.

Cotton signed the insert with the time and his initials and hurried back to the House chamber. He had put his neck out a mile. If things went as the Minority Leader said, the
Tribune
would have this development a cycle ahead of the
Morning Journal
—a fact which Managing Editor Ernie Danilov would remember about twenty-four hours. If something went awry, if for some reason the Republicans switched signals at the last moment, nobody would ever forget he had been wrong. The nervousness Cotton felt as he hurried down the corridor was a totally familiar feeling. Cotton and most of the other newsmen for the afternoon papers lived with it—took such calculated risks routinely, two or three times a week, during the high-pressure days of the legislative session. They wrote in the past tense at 1
P.M.
of things that would happen at 3
P.M.
The game demanded cool nerves, a savvy of the situation and an accurate judgment of news sources. But, if you didn’t play it, the morning papers broke all the stories.