Hillerman, Tony (8 page)

“Come on, Junior,” Ulrich said. “Call or fold.”

Garcia put the cigar between his teeth. “My mother told me not to call unless I could raise. I’m going to raise the son-of-a-bitch a little.” He added three blue five-dollar chips to the pot.

“Just to get the shoe clerks out,” Hall said.

Three fours, Cotton thought. Or maybe a club flush. He felt a sudden hunch that his seventh card would be a queen, giving him a winning full house. Cotton had learned years ago to resist hunches in poker.

“You bought a pot,” he said, folding the hand. “What did you have?”

“Knock off all the talking and deal the cards,” Kendall said.

Cotton won his own deal, a five-card stud hand, with a pair of tens, and then folded the next two hands of draw. While Ulrich shuffled he got up and made himself a bourbon and water. As he dropped in the ice cubes the telephone on the kitchen wall rang.

“Get the phone,” Hall said. “If it’s for my wife, tell ’em she’s out playing bridge.”

“Hall residence,” Cotton said.

“This is the
Gazette.
Is Whitey still there?”

“He went back to the capitol to get some sort of information for you,” Cotton said.

“That was damn near two hours ago. He hasn’t called in and we’re on deadline. I think the son-of-a-bitch skipped the country.”

“He better not have,” Cotton said. “He borrowed my car.”

“If he comes back tell him to call the desk,” the voice said.

Back in the den, Cotton found Ulrich had dealt him four diamonds in a draw hand. He called the opening bet, drew a small spade and folded. He considered briefly why Whitey hadn’t called his office and hadn’t returned. Maybe car trouble. Cotton’s car was a battered Plymouth sedan. The left rear fender was rumpled and rusty and it needed a change in spark plugs, but it was usually reliable.

Cotton sipped his drink. A little too much bourbon. He watched Hall call Garcia’s bet and thought, with pleasure, about Janey Janoski. Monday he would drop by her office and tell her what he had found. But what had he found?

He hadn’t, he was fairly sure now, found the story that had excited McDaniels. Not if McDaniels was a seasoned pro in the reporting game. The story wasn’t
that
good. His calculations indicated that the juggling of overruns on the project he had multiplied out might have increased the Reevis-Smith profits something like $28,000. He had found four other contracts in which Reevis-Smith worked with Singer as project engineer. In each of them the pattern seemed to be similar. But, if they were no worse, the total would amount to less than $100,000 on construction valued at more than $13 million. Not enough to excite a pro.

Garcia dealt him a seven of diamonds. Cotton looked at his hole card. Four of spades. He folded, and began shaping in his mind the story as it would probably appear. It would be a tough one to write—and a hard one for the reader to understand.

“Highway Department records indicate that last-minute changes in at least five road-building projects have served to increase the profits of Reevis-Smith Constructors, Inc.”

He considered the sentence—whether the facts he had would support the statement. They would. Would they support adding the qualifier “substantially” after the verb “increase”? Probably not.

“In all five projects, changes ordered after the contract was awarded tended to decrease the amount of items—such as roadbed materials—on which Reevis-Smith had offered low prices and to increase the amount of items on which Reevis-Smith had bid higher than other contractors.

“In total, the changes appeared to have increased the contracting company’s profits about”—Cotton guessed at what the figure might be—“$90,000.”

Ulrich pushed the deck in front of him.

“They’re cut. Deal.”

Cotton anted a quarter and dealt draw. He dealt himself a pair of threes, and a queen, nine, five.

Ulrich opened. Garcia folded. Hall raised the bet to seventy-five cents. “This isn’t a hand. It’s a foot,” Kendall said. He dumped the cards on the table. Cotton folded and dealt to the callers.

And the next paragraphs would be what the Highway Department said about it, and the comment from whatever Reevis-Smith official was stuck with commenting. They would be what Hall called the “lying-out-of-it paragraphs.”

“Chief Highway Engineer C. J. Armstrong said that such change orders are common. He pointed out that original working plans for highways often have to change considerably during construction because ‘as the road is being built we learn more about the demands of the terrain and the condition of the rock and soil on which we are building.’

“’We give the engineers in charge of the project a lot of flexibility to adjust the work to meet conditions as they develop,’ Armstrong said.

“H. L. Singer, who was project engineer on all five jobs, agreed. ‘It just happened that when we got those jobs started we found we had more rock underground than had been estimated, so we cut down on the roadbed requirements,’ Singer said. ‘And it also happened that the drainage situation looked worse than the survey indicated, so we added more culverts.’”

That wouldn’t be exactly what they would say, but it would be close. And then there would be a dozen more paragraphs pointing out that this odd sort of profitable coincidence didn’t happen with other contractors, and that if the specifications had been written accurately in the first place, Reevis-Smith would not have been low bidder on any of the five jobs, and adding details of what the change orders involved and how they were made. It would run maybe eight hundred words, and it would be worth maybe a two-column off-play head on the front page on an average day. And, when enough time had passed for it to be fairly well forgotten, Singer would be eased out of his Highway Department job and there would be some quiet, never-admitted tightening-up of specification writing and change orders, and then everybody would be very good, or very careful, for a year or two.

“Come on, Cotton,” Kendall said, “queens bet. You’ve got a pair of goddamned ladies.”

“Dollar,” Cotton said. A good enough story. But not a prize winner. And far from good enough to explain McDaniels’s excitement. Maybe he had found a way to prove a link between Reevis-Smith and Singer. Maybe the bribing had been careless. But bribery was never careless. More likely this wasn’t the story at all. Even if you could prove bribery this one wouldn’t win the Pulitzer. More likely—much more likely—one of the other leads Mac’s notes seemed to contain was the source of the hot one.

On the seventh card, he still had queens and sevens. They cost him fourteen dollars in total to Ulrich’s small straight.

A little after eleven Cotton’s luck improved. He bumped into a high straight with a well-concealed full house and took a forty-seven-dollar pot from Hall and then won two small draw pots. But the deck was generally cold and he had trouble keeping his mind on the action. The conversation drifted from ribald speculation about what Whitey might be doing in his long absence, to Roark’s senatorial ambitions, to Ulrich’s strategy for squeezing Roark’s tax-reform bill through the house, to the extramarital affair apparently being conducted by the State Treasurer with one of his secretaries.

“I don’t like to think ill of the dead,” Garcia said. “But I wondered for a while there if old Merrill didn’t have something like that going for him.”

“I don’t think Mac did any screwing around,” Ulrich said. “Not like Cotton here, anyway. Not wholesale.”

“Cotton doesn’t enjoy it,” Kendall said. “He’s laying all the statehouse secretaries out of a sense of duty. He thinks it improves their efficiency.”

“It’s not that,” Ulrich said. “He’s doing it for his friends. Doesn’t want us to worry that he might be impotent.”

“I used to see Mac’s car parked over at the Highway Maintenance Division office quite a bit,” Garcia said. “The only story you get out of there is the once-a-year alibi about how come it took so long to get the snow off the highways.”

“When was this?” Cotton asked.

“Week or ten days ago. I drive by the district office on my way to work, and there was old Mac’s car. Three or four times. Figured maybe he had a girl out there.”

“It’s your bet, Cousin Garcia,” Hall said. “Notice how chatty the son-of-a-bitch gets when he starts winning? Mac didn’t cheat on his wife.”

“Two white ones,” Garcia said.

The phone rang.

“That’ll be Whitey with some improbable excuse,” Hall said. He folded his stud hand and went into the kitchen.

Ulrich raised the bet to four dollars, which surprised Cotton. The Speaker of the House had a queen, ten, three showing. And Garcia was betting an exposed pair of sevens. Cotton had a nine down, and had paired it on his fourth card.

“Either you’re lying or you’ve been laying in the weeds,” he said. “Which one?’

“I don’t remember,” Ulrich said. “I forget what I have in the hole. It was some sort of face card.”

Cotton studied Ulrich’s cards and then Ulrich’s face. Neither told him anything.

“You’ve got three alternatives,” Ulrich said. “You can call, or you can raise, or you can fold.”

“Or I can cut my throat,” Cotton said.

“John,” Hall said, “you better take this call. My night city editor has a story about you being dead.”

Cotton spun in the chair. Hall wasn’t smiling.

“They’re pulling your car out of the river,” Hall said. “The driver wasn’t in it but they got your name by checking back on the license tags.”

“Whitey,” Cotton thought. The phone felt cold on his ear.

“This is John Cotton.”

“John, this is Glen Danley. We’re about ready to kill you off in our final home edition. Was your car stolen or what?”

“Whitey Robbins borrowed it,” Cotton said. “He’s the capitol man for the
Gazette.
What happened?”

“All we have is a story that moved a little while back on the AP state wire. Just a minute. I’ll read it to you.”

Danley read in the steady, paced voice of a man practiced in dictating over the telephone.

“The car of John Cotton, widely read political columnist for the Twin Cities
Tribune,
plunged off a bridge into Rush River near the state capitol late Tuesday. Police were dragging the rain-swollen stream for the body of the driver.

“Witnesses said the driver was the only occupant. Police said the accident happened when a semi-trailer truck swerved in front of the car on the narrow, antiquated bridge and forced it through the railing. The truck did not stop and was sought by police.

“The identity of the driver was not immediately established. However, Cotton could not be located at his apartment or at his desk at the capitol and Police Captain James Archibald said, ‘We presume he was the victim.’

“Cotton, forty-one, had covered the state politics for the
Tribune
for nine years and his ‘At the Capitol’ column had statewide readership.

“A native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cotton joined the
Tribune
staff after serving as police and general-assignment reporter on the Denver
Post.

“That’s it,” Danley said. “I didn’t know you used to be on the
Post.”

“I was,” Cotton said. He felt numb.

“Who do you say had your car?”

“It was Whitey Robbins. He’s the capitol man for the
Gazette.”

“Robbins,” Danley said. “Like the bird?”

“Two
b
’s and an
s
on the end,” Cotton said.

“How about the first name?”

“William,” Cotton said.

“Age and address?”

Cotton’s numbness was changing gradually to anger. Whitey Robbins was somewhere in the mud at the bottom of Rush River.

“I don’t know,” he said, and hung up.

He dialed the AP number. From the next room, from the poker table, low voices. Hall had told them. The mourning for Whitey Robbins had begun.

“Associated Press.”

“This is John Cotton. You better get a kill out on the story about my car in the river. Whitey Robbins was using it.”

“He was? Oh. Damn, John. I’m sorry about that. I mean I’m sorry we did that to you. You know how . . .”

Cotton cut him off. “Have they found the body yet? And when did it happen?”

“We got out carbon on the fatal from the
Capitol-Press
about nine-thirty,” the voice said. “And then Addington called us from the police station about ten thirty and updated it about the car being registered in your name and more details.”

“Have they recovered his body?”

“Not when we checked.” The voice paused. “It’s R-o-b-b-i-n-s, isn’t it?—the guy with the
Gazette
. What’s his first name?”

“William,” Cotton said, and hung up.

He stared at the phone. The story would have made the 11
P.M.
newscasts. There must be somebody he should call to assure that he was not at this moment drowned under a polluted river. But there was no one. There was literally no one—he realized bleakly—who would have heard of his death with shock and grief and sorrow. Once, Charley Graff would have mourned him—feeling the same stunning agony of loss that he had felt when the nurse emerged from the intensive-care room and told him and his mother that his father was dead. Twenty-seven years ago, but Cotton remembered the feeling exactly. Remembered how he had felt, and how his mother had looked—bloodless and withdrawn, her sight turned inward, her eyes not seeing him. His mother had mourned, she and her bottle. But who, now, would mourn for him? He thought about it, his hand still on the telephone receiver. Leroy Hall would feel a certain sadness, he knew. Hall would miss the competition and the endless banter and the careful, guarded friendship. And Ulrich would be genuinely sorrowful for a while, and Junior Garcia, and perhaps Kendall, who was, under the cynicism, a sentimental man. The others in the newsroom would simply be shocked, sorry it happened, reminded unpleasantly of their own fragile mortality. And some of the women might miss him—a little—for a while.

And who would mourn Whitey? Cotton picked up the telephone book and began sorting grimly through it for the William Robbins number. Sometime tonight that telephone would be ringing and Whitey’s wife would answer and a police desk sergeant would invite her down to the morgue to identify what had been her husband. He couldn’t save her the pain, but at least he could soften the shock.