Hillerman, Tony (3 page)

The red light was shining on the KLAB-TV television camera in the balcony now and the Minority Leader had the floor mike. A young man with a thin face and long sideburns was in McDaniels’s chair. Cotton didn’t know him. “. . . an act of extreme discourtesy,” the Minority Leader was saying. “This request is a reasonable request. If the Ways and Means Committee is to make sensible decisions on the financing of state programs it must have full information about all such programs. I do not say the refusal of Mr. Speaker to submit these bills to Ways and Means was made in bad faith. But I do commend to the honorable members of this house the thought that Mr. Speaker has acted without mature consideration.” The rich sound of the Minority Leader’s voice faltered and there were shouts of “Call the question” from a half-dozen scattered desks. The Minority Leader, Cotton noticed, was very much aware that the television camera was on and was reluctant to surrender the mike. Ulrich pounded once with his gavel.

“I urge this honorable House to vote no on the motion,” the Minority Leader said. He sat down.

“Question to close debate been moved and seconded,” Ulrich said. “All in favor. Opposed. Carried.” He banged once with the gavel. “Motion’s now to table the motion. All in . . .”

“Explain the vote,” the Majority Leader said.

“Yes vote means we leave the bill only in the Highways Committee. No means we double-refer it,” Ulrich said. “In favor say Aye.”

There was a roar of Ayes.

“All opposed Nay.”

There was a roar of No’s from the Republican side of the aisle. Cotton noticed the Clark Democrats didn’t join the chorus. He wondered why not.

“Ayes have it,” Ulrich said. “Motion’s tabled.”

Cotton looked at the Minority Leader, wondering if he would risk a roll call. The Minority Leader appeared engrossed in something he was reading. There would be no test of strength today. Again Cotton wondered why the Clark people had missed this opportunity.

“Did you do it to me, Cousin John?” Hall asked.

“Cousin Roy, I didn’t leave you a crumb. You’ll have to rewrite me.”

Ulrich was settling the House down to a long, routine afternoon of working its way through inconsequential bills waiting their fate on the calendar. Cotton moved down the table and sat in the AP chair next to the man with sideburns.

“My name’s Cotton. I guess you’re replacing Merrill.”

“George Cherry,” the man with sideburns said. “They pulled me off of general assignment until they can get a political man out here.”

“It was too bad about Merrill.”

“I hardly knew him,” Cherry said. “Just saw him in the office now and then.”

Cotton stared out across the House floor. A representative was trying to explain a floor amendment he was proposing to some sort of insurance bill—a fat man with a fat, rusty voice. Across the immense, rococo shabbiness of the room, a swarm of grade-school children were being herded into the spectators’ gallery by two teachers. Cotton was surprised at himself, and shocked. He was considering whether he should lie. If he did, it would be a professional lie, told to a fellow member of the brotherhood for professional reasons. It would therefore be a violation of taboo. Nothing was written about it in the pressroom rules, and nothing was said about it, ever. But it wasn’t done. Reporters screwed one another when they could. The
P.M.
’s warred among themselves, and collectively against the morning-paper reporters; the AP-UPI vendetta resumed each day; and the name of the game was cutthroat. But the game had its rules. One evaded. One was secretive. One covered his tracks. But one didn’t
lie
to another newsman. In a profession which risked a hundred mistakes in a working day, and published them on rotary presses, and saw years of being right destroyed by being wrong in one edition, the lie was too dangerous for tolerance.

But now Cotton found himself considering it. It would be a small lie. Harmless and impossible to detect. Its purpose was not even entirely serious—a simple yen to satisfy curiosity. Cotton made no decision. A lie might not be necessary, or it might be fruitless.

He would see.

“Did you find Merrill’s notebook?”

“There were three or four in all that junk on his desk,” Cherry said. “Which one?”

“He would have had it with him when he fell. That night when he left, he forgot it and he sent some guy to get it for him.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Cherry said. He looked at Cotton, his eyes neither friendly nor hostile. “Why?”

The lie didn’t form. Instead there was the acceptable mild evasion.

“Merrill said he had some information he was going to give me for my column. Something he didn’t want for a story. I figured it would be in his notebook.”

“What about?”

“He didn’t say,” Cotton said. Either McDaniels had been working with his desk on the story or he had kept it to himself until he had a string around it. In the first case, Cherry would know all about it and would be interested in knowing if Cotton knew anything. In the second case, Cherry would know nothing at all and Cotton had no intention of alerting him.

“Maybe our police reporter has it,” Cherry said. “He picked up all of Merrill’s stuff at the morgue. Billfold and all that. Gave it to Merrill’s widow, I guess.”

“It’s probably old stuff now, whatever it was,” Cotton said. And then he changed the subject.

>3<

T
he
Capitol-Press
police reporter was a very young man named Addington with a sandy mustache and sandy eyebrows and pale blue eyes. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Let’s see.” He ticked the items off on his fingers.

“A billfold, a bunch of keys in a key case, some coins, eighty-seven cents I think it was, glasses and a case for them, a handkerchief, two ballpoint pens, a comb.” Addington’s voice stopped. He thought. “A cigarette lighter, part of a pack of cigarettes, a pair of dice and a couple of those discs you get in one of those gas-station contests. There wasn’t any notebook.”

“No notebook,” Cotton said.

“They didn’t give me one.”

Cotton had found Addington sitting at a table in the central station interrogation room, working his way through the day’s log of complaint calls. “I’ll go ask the records sergeant,” Addington said.

Cotton stared at the half-finished pack of cigarettes Addington had left on the table. Eighteen days now since he had smoked, going on nineteen. Two of the cigarettes were half out of the pack. Cotton felt saliva forming in his mouth. He had matches in his pocket. When Addington returned he would say, “I bummed one of your cigarettes,” and Addington would think nothing of it. But then Cotton would be back on two and a half packs a day by tomorrow. And eighteen days of misery would be wasted. He looked away from the cigarettes. In a few minutes Addington would be back almost certainly with confirmation that there had been no notebook on McDaniels’ body. Cotton would think about that when the time came. Now he thought about police-station interrogation rooms, which came in various shapes, colors and furnishings but which all managed, somehow, to look depressingly like this one.

The light through the barred windows on the back wall changed suddenly from the gray of twilight to garish yellow as the lights over the police only parking lot went on. From somewhere down a corridor came the sudden clanging of a steel door closing. And then the faint animal smell, the universal odor of all jails. And with the smell the old, sore memory was with him again. The juvenile division officer saying: “Were you trying to kill him, John? Were you?” And his own voice repeating, “No, no. No. He was my friend.” The interrogation room at Santa Fe had been about like this one—like all of them, everywhere. Grimly impersonal, devoid of comfort. Wooden chairs and the heavy table covered with vinyl cold under the forearms, and Charley Graff in St. Vincent’s with a concussion and a broken jaw and his own knuckles cut and aching and his mind trying to find an answer to satisfy the officer.

Why had he done it? He honestly hadn’t known. It had taken him months to understand that brutal rage. Understanding had come slowly, by bits and pieces. First came the knowledge that the girl had not been really important to him. (When had he started thinking of Alice Beck—blonde, slender, sexy and silly Alice Beck—as “the girl”?) If it had been someone other than Charley he had found with her in the back seat of their car, his reaction would have been nothing more than disappointment and disgust. He had been halfway through boot training at Camp Pendleton before he had fully understood that his sick, homicidal fury had been based in self-contempt for his own weakness. He had thought at first the car had something to do with it. They had worked almost three years to buy it—he and Charley—pooling their funds, savoring their high-school poverty, and looking ahead to the trip through Canada which would celebrate their graduation to manhood. Charley had defiled all this. Charles Albright Graff (frail, witty, happy, ineffable friend) had known that Cotton intended to marry Alice, just as he had known all Cotton’s thoughts, all his hopes, the peaks of his happiness and the pits of his despair. This was what Charley had betrayed. And it had taken Cotton months to know that even this was not enough to explain his savagery.

The memory of it still ached in his mind. His fists striking the bloody mouth that had so often laughed with him, feeling Charley’s pain as much as Charley must have, but striking again and again as if to kill something within himself by killing it in Charley. And he might, indeed, have killed had Alice’s screaming not attracted the man who had pulled him away and taken all of them to the hospital emergency room. Killed Charley, but not this new knowledge that Charley’s betrayal had planted within him. He had only gradually—over the months—realized that Charley had simply completed a lesson he had been too slow to learn. That each human spirit must travel alone, safe only in isolation. He had forgiven Charley then, and started a letter to him. But he hadn’t finished it. Innocence was ended. There had been nothing, now, to say.

A young policeman in a motorcycle helmet walked in, looked at him curiously and walked out again. Cotton wrenched his thoughts away from Charley Graff and found himself wondering about Janey Janoski. He wondered specifically if Miss Janoski (or was it Mrs. Janoski?) had ever learned this elemental lesson in interpersonal relations. He doubted it. There was something reckless and vulnerable about Janey Janoski—the shield lowered too easily. Or was this woman’s apparent openness itself a façade behind which the genuine woman lived? He was thinking about that, doubting it for a reason he couldn’t identify, when Addington reappeared through the doorway. He had a sheet of pink paper in his hand.

“No notebook,” he said. “Here’s the invoice. Everything I remembered, except I forgot two books of paper matches and one of those slips you get when you buy gasoline on your credit card.”

He handed the invoice to Cotton. It told him nothing that Addington hadn’t except that the billfold contained currency, a twenty and seven ones.

“O.K.,” Cotton said, “and thanks a lot for the trouble.”

McDaniels had carried no notebook with him on his five-story drop down the rotunda well. It was time now to think about what, if anything, that might mean.

Cotton drove slowly through the light dinner-hour traffic toward Capitol Heights and his apartment. The problem seemed uncomplicated. McDaniels had come into the pressroom drunk. McDaniels had tossed his notebook on his desk. Cotton recalled that clearly. Mac had tried to write his night lead on the tax hearing. Mac had announced he was celebrating cracking a really big story. Mac had left, saying he was going home to bed. A little later the man in the blue topcoat had come in looking for the notebook. How much later? Cotton couldn’t be sure. But he did remember the man had picked up the notebook. It was in his hand when he left. Something was in his hand. Maybe the notebook. And then some time had passed and Cotton had heard the sound McDaniels made screaming his way down the well of the rotunda. But Mac hadn’t had the notebook when he hit bottom. Why not? The obvious simple answer was that Blue Topcoat hadn’t given it to him. Another why not? The man had said Merrill had sent him back to pick it up. Had Mac fallen before the man reached him with it? Too much time for that.

The traffic signal at Capitol Avenue turned amber ahead of him. Cotton braked to a stop—thinking hard. Plenty of time—as he remembered it. A new thought struck him. If there had been as much time as there seemed, why was Mac still on the fourth floor? It was no more than thirty steps to the nearest elevator from the pressroom door. Mac had been going straight home. What the devil had kept him in the foyer all that time? Or had it been as long as it seemed?

Cotton flicked down the turn indicator, signaling a left on Capitol. He would detour past the statehouse and check the signoff times on the teletype copy he had filed that night. That would tell him exactly.

A raw autumn wind was blowing out of the north as Cotton trotted up the sidewalk past the now-leafless capitol rose garden. Lights were burning on the seventh floor of the Health and Welfare Building. Health and Welfare, in trouble with the Senate Social Services Committee, would be working late. But the statehouse itself was almost totally dark. Cotton let himself in through the press entrance, under the west-wing stairway at the Sub 1 floor level. He hurried past the Game and Fish Department offices, past the doors of the State Veterinary Board, the Funeral Directors and Embalmers Commission, the Contractors’ Licensing Office, and the Cosmetology Inspection Bureau. He reminded himself, as he did almost every day when he used this route, that there might be good hunting among these obscure agencies forgotten in the capitol catacombs. In fact, he had a tip jotted in his notebook about the Veterinary Board. An anonymous caller had told him the director was letting his wife use agency gasoline credit cards. When he could find time he would check it out.

Cotton thought about time while the elevator whined its way slowly toward the fourth floor. Addington hadn’t asked him why he wanted Mac’s notebook. Had he asked, he would have told him just about what he had told Cherry. But he would have been honest about it; he would admit it was just a matter of curiosity. He had notebooks of his own crowded with story ideas dying on the vine and no time to work them. It was simply that Mac had been excited. And that excitement, if Mac was as case-hardened a pro as Hall claimed, was worth some curiosity.