Tony Hillerman - The Fly on the Wall

by The Fly on the Wall(lit)

  It was eleven minutes until 11 A.M. when Cotton left the Governor's office. Enough time-if he ran up two flights of stairs instead of waiting for the elevator-to tell the desk that the press conference had produced nothing of value so the hole saved for him could be filled with another story. As he trotted up the steps he decided he would tell the slotman to rely on AP and UPI for capitol coverage today. He felt an urgency, a stirring of excitement. He hadn't learned much from Roark. But he had learned that the story McDaniels had been chasing must have been very big indeed. From what Roark had said, Mac had somehow nailed down a clean exclusive on the highway bonding plan, and he had tricked the Governor into confirming it for him. But he had chosen to sit on the story. Why? Certainly not because the Governor had asked him to. Such requests were routinely rejected. No reporter would have suppressed such a story simply to accommodate a politician. To do so violated ethics, common sense and competitive instincts. Mac must have sat on the bonding story to protect his source. And yet he hadn't hesitated to let the Governor know he had a leak somewhere. That didn't seem to matter. For some reason, Mac wanted the information confirmed even though he didn't plan to use it. He had confirmed it by using a hoary old reporter's trick. He had presented the Governor his rumor as if it were fact and Roark had walked right into the trap.

  The confirmation would have proved to McDaniels that he could trust his source. Maybe it proved other things. The way Mac had handled it told Cotton two things. McDaniels had been a highly competent reporter. And he had passed up a clean beat on the highway bonding story to avoid any risk of endangering the other story he was developing. That story must, therefore, be about as Mac had described it-an "earth-shaking bastard!"

  5

  Cotton sat in a stenographer's chair, his heels supported on the rim of Janey Janoski's wastebasket. He watched the rain streaking the windows of the Legislative Finance Committee office. He thought: Damn the rain.

  "Just a minute," Janey Janoski said. "Just a minute. It's here somewhere."

  "It's on the jump page," Cotton said. "About halfway down the column."

  "I don't care where it is," Janey said. She folded back the front page of the Morning Journal, looking for it. "Leroy didn't have any reason to put it in."

  A man stood at the bus stop by the east entrance of the capitol, absolutely motionless, enduring. Cotton put him on the bus, took him downtown, switched him to the airport limousine, bought him a ticket at the TWA desk, boarded him on the 11:05 flight to Albuquerque Sunport-mentally rescuing a human being from the dreary day.

  "I should get back to work," Cotton said.

  "Listen," Janey said. "Listen to this. `The invoice for the shipment bore the signature of Arthur L. Peters. Personnel records show Peters resigned his job as accounting clerk in the Bureau's Tobacco Tax Division less than a month after the stamps were delivered. He is now employed by Bradbury-Legg, a capital accounting firm. Peters said he had "no idea" what happened to the stamps.'"

  Janey handed the Journal to Cotton. "He didn't have any reason to put that in," she said.

  "It's the rain," Cotton said. "You're in a hell of a mood this morning."

  "You know Art Peters. He's that tall, skinny man who was always there with all the records when the committee was hearing those cigarette-tax bills. He's not a crook."

  "Leroy didn't say he was a crook." Cotton's voice was noticeably patient. "He said Peters's signature was on the shipment invoice and that Peters said he didn't know what had happened to the stamps."

  "But you know how people think," Janey said. "There's the implication. People read that and they say, Well, well. Peters got the stamps, and he quit his job and now five hundred thousand cigarette-tax stamps are missing. And they say the newspaper wouldn't have put it in like that if he wasn't mixed up in it."

  "You know what we should do, Janey," Cotton said. "We should pick up your telephone there and call the airport and fly out to Albuquerque or Tucson or someplace decent and let the sun shine down upon us."

  "I'll bet Peters loses his job."

  "I didn't write the goddamn story," Cotton said. He looked at the headline, wishing he had.

  500,000 CIG TAX

  STAMPS MISSING

  The headline was three columns wide in 42-point type. On another, duller day it would have won play position. But this morning the streamer read: plane hits school; 32 die. The stamp story was typical Leroy Hall, written in crisp sentences.

  A half-million cigarette tax stamps with a face value of $50,000 are missing from Revenue Bureau stocks.

  The stamps disappeared after the shipment from Decal, Inc., of Chicago, was delivered to the bureau last July 9. State law requires tobacco dealers to affix the stamps-for which they pay the state $100 per 1,000-to each pack of cigarettes before it is sold.

  A Revenue Commission spokesman conceded that the stamps are missing and that they might have reached the hands of cigarette bootleggers. Since discovery of untaxed cigarettes in vending machines last fall, the bureau has been making routine inspections to assure that all smokes sold have the stamp affixed.

  He knew what each paragraph said, and he knew how Hall had come across the story. Cotton had received the same anonymous tip (and so had Merrill McDaniels), and had dutifully added it to his list of things to be checked when time allowed. It had been a spite call. He had known that there was a good chance it would check out probably and usably true. But he had put it off and Hall had beaten him to it.

  Cotton let his eye follow a bead of water tracing its way down the window pane, thinking of how Hall would have worked his way through the invoice records-checking stamp orders against sales to wholesalers and then against inventory supplies; looking for a small squirrel of a story proving that the bureau was buying more than it needed from a company which kept a State Senator's law firm on a retainer; finding instead a bobcat of a story-a receipted shipment which didn't reach the supply room. The water bead merged into the general wetness on the pane. Janey, who had been talking steadily, was still talking.

  "... and that all sounds very nice, and proper, and worthy. But why do you have to hurt someone when it doesn't do any good?"

  "I don't know. It's one of the details that make a story sound credible. Leave out the specific stuff and it sounds like you made it all up."

  "I don't buy that," Janey said. "You guys just don't think about whom it hurts."

  "Boy," Cotton said, "you're grouchy today." He pulled McDaniels's notebook out of his coat pocket. "I've got something here that will take your mind off your troubles. A mental exercise."

  "What is it?" Janey put on her glasses, which were square with horn rims. They reminded Cotton that Jane Janoski was a pretty woman and of the pressroom gossip about her. He put the opened notebook on the desk in front of her.

  "The problem is figuring out where those figures came from, or what they mean."

  Janey picked up the notebook.

  According to the gossip she was a lesbian. Or she was a secret swinger, conducting an affair with none other than Governor Paul Roark. Or she was the devoted mistress of the vice chairman of her standing committee. Or she was a Vietnam war widow mourning her husband. For the first time Cotton found himself speculating on which, if any, version was true.

  "Where'd you get them?"

  "That's not the question," Cotton said. "The question is what they mean."

  "Those initials don't mean a thing to me," Janey said. "Rebar. I've heard that somewhere. It's something technical, I think."

  "It must be," Cotton said.

  "Part of it is some sort of tabulation," she said-still studying the figures-"and part of it might be computer account coding." She looked at Cotton over her glasses. "What does `borrow' mean?"

  "Neither a lender nor a borrower be," Cotton said. "It's what you do when the rent comes due."

  "Maybe it has some technical second meaning," Janey said. "Is it fair to use the dictionary?"

  "I looked up rebar," Cotton said. "It wasn't t
here."

  "But I've got the world's biggest dictionary," Janey said.

  Cotton followed her to the Webster's Unabridged International on its stand in the bill-drafting office. She turned pages.

  "Rebar. Here it is. `Music. To change the position of the bar lines in a composition.' That help?"

  "I don't see how."

  Janey turned more pages.

  "Borrow. `The opposite of lend.' We knew that one. `Term used in arithmetical subtraction.' That doesn't help. `How about the stops on an organ'?"

  "No."

  "How about `a nautical term, relating to sailing close to the wind'?" Cotton laughed.

  "How about `the material removed from a borrow pit and used as a base in road and highway construction'?"

  Cotton felt immensely silly. "That's it," he said. "Borrow. Of course. I should have thought of it."

  Janey looked at him curiously. "Is it important?"

  "It means you won," Cotton said. And it meant he knew now the source of Mac's story.

  "The figures came out of some highway construction project?"

  Cotton recovered his notebook. "Right. You're good at puzzles."

  "No I'm not," Janey said. "Now I'm puzzled about what this was all about."

  It occurred to Cotton that he had developed this habit of wasting time in the Legislative Finance Committee office because he enjoyed Janey Janoski. It occurred to him that it would, indeed, be pleasant to take this skinny, emotional, unpredictable brunette to the airport and continue this conversation somewhere where the sun was shining. He felt a sudden impulse to know her-to say: Janey Janoski, which one are you: the lesbian, the mourner or the lover? With that thought came another, surprising and shocking-Janey would tell him. If he asked her in the right way, Jane Janoski would show him her soul with all its scars. Cotton felt a surge of uneasy dismay. Or was it pity? The same concern one felt for a fingertip with the nail removed?

  "You're looking at me funny," Janey said. "Does that mean you're actually going to let me know what you're working on?"

  "I don't know for sure myself," Cotton said. "I think that when you add those figures together just right they tell you somebody's had his fingers in the public till."

  "Are you going to catch another Art Peters?" She smiled and he could read nothing in the smile. But it stung. And, unreasonably, it angered him.

  "I'll make a deal," Cotton said. "I'm going over to the Highway Building now and see if I can find the end of the string. You can come along and help. And, if we catch someone like Arthur L. Peters, I'll give you a chance to talk me out of it. You can decide whether we bag him."

  "Like going rabbit hunting," Janey said. "But I have a chance to save the rabbit."

  6

  Janey had been too busy to go to the Highway Building, remembering a list of committee bills which still needed researching and mail to be answered. But she had gone, first protesting that she shouldn't and then joining him in rationalizing why she should.

  "Maybe you'll find that all those seven thousand tons of highway construction records are written out longhand," Cotton had suggested, "by three thousand clerks on Republican patronage. And you suggest a bill making typewriters mandatory and you're the hero of every Democrat on your committee."

  "Written out by quill pens," Janey said. "Or maybe when we read those construction specifications we'll notice that what they're mixing into the roadbed is really peanut butter, and I'll tell Gene Oslander about it, and I'll really be a hero."

  Cotton thought about it, and laughed. Representative Oslander was a wholesale grocery broker. "If they're using peanut butter, you can bet Oslander's already subcontracting it," he said.

  And Janey had laughed at that, although maybe it wasn't really funny. But the rain had stopped now, and the mist was rising, and there was a scent of leftover summer coming from somewhere, and it was fun walking like this-skirting the puddles on the wet sidewalk. Fun, Cotton thought. That's a good, old-fashioned word. He hadn't used it much. He tried to remember the last time.

  And then he was signing into the highway records room-and Willie Horst was leading them down the central corridor, past endless rows of blue steel filing cabinets, under a sky of fluorescent tubes. Past tables where file clerks worked, past a pretty sweatered girl in a miniskirt. Cotton looked at the girl and noticed that Janey had been aware of the look.

  "The completed jobs start down here," Horst was saying. "They're filed chronologically by the project acceptance date. And the file's also chronological. Starts with the bidding specs, and the invitation to bids, and the bids, on down through all the work-in-progress reports." Horst was a tall, stooped man with large ears and a habit of allowing long pauses between sentences while he sorted out exactly what he wanted to say. Cotton had time to think that the next sentence would be a third reminder of how important it was for them not to get his paperwork out of order.

  "When you go through that stuff, put each page face down on the table and then the next page face down on top of that," Horst said. "Then when you put it back in the folder it's the way it was when you took it out."

  "We won't mix it up," Cotton said.

  Horst stopped and pulled out a drawer. "Here's where last year's starts. Down the aisle and back toward the end of the room is earlier. And after three years old it goes into the microfilm files."

  "We'll start here," Cotton said.

  Horst stood, looking at him doubtfully.

  "We just want to do a little spot checking," Cotton said. "If we have any problems, we'll come up and ask you."

  "Put it back like it was," Horst said.

  The file Cotton pulled and carried to one of the work tables at the side of the room was labeled "FAS-27(2) 5 1322." It included at least twenty folders and more than enough paper to fill a bushel basket. "The FAS means it was a Federal Aid construction job on the secondary highway system, and the two in parentheses means it's a two-lane job," Cotton said. "I think the five means it's in the Fifth Highway Maintenance District."

  Janey looked from the pile of file folders down the rows of cabinets. "Good lord," she said. "We found the haystack. But how can you expect to find the needle?"

  "I'm showing you how a smart, well-trained, highly skilled, dedicated newspaper reporter goes about his duties," Cotton said. "He brings somebody along to help with the work. You didn't think I brought you along for the companionship?"

  "Seriously," Janey said, "it's impossible."

  "I don't think so. It just takes time."

  It took approximately thirty minutes to complete the first step and it might have taken less-Cotton told himself-had his thinking been clearer. They found the specification sheets attached to the invitations to bid and combed them carefully-looking fruitlessly for the same pattern of figures which appeared in McDaniels's notes. There was no such pattern.

  Janey glanced at her watch. "Altogether I'll take an hour," she said. "Then I have to get back to work."

  Next they looked at the itemized bid sheet, listing the asking prices for all contractors trying for the job.

  And there it was. Cotton felt a stirring of excitement, a remembered feeling. In boyhood he had felt it. An animal track, fresh in melting snow.

  "See it?" Cotton said. He put the tip of his ballpoint under the line.

  "Rebar," he read. "1.20, 1.11, 1.32, 1.09, 1.14. Mac got his figures off a bid tabulation sheet."

  "And there's that Al C.C. Half Sec. 24 in. D. 16 ga. L.F.," Janey said. "What's that?"

  "That must be corrugated aluminum culvert," Cotton said. "Twenty-four inches in diameter and sixteen-gauge metal. And the L.F. means the prices quoted are for linear feet." He shook his head. It should have been obvious from the first. "And rebar is reinforcing bar-the steel bars they use to reinforce bridges and pavement."

  Janey smiled at the sourness of the statement. "So why didn't a highly skilled, dedicated reporter think of that?"

  It was well past her self-imposed one-hour deadline before they found the cont
ract which had been the source of some of the notebook figures. They had worked their way methodically back through the files, taking alternate cabinets, looking only at the bidding tabulation sheet and checking only the prices in the columns McDaniels had noted.

  "Hey," Janey said. "I think this is it."

  Cotton closed the drawer in which he was working and squatted beside her.

  "See. The numbers match."

  Cotton checked the tabulation: Rebar 1.19 1.07; and down the page: Borrow.82.89.

  "Yeah," Cotton said. "He didn't write them all down. Just the second and fourth columns." He glanced at the bottom of the page, where the figures on each line were multiplied against the number of unit amounts involved and then added for the total money bids on the project. McDaniels had made note only of the prices offered by the lowest bidder and his nearest competitor. He looked at the top of the columns for the names of the bidding companies. The low bidder was Reevis-Smith, Constructors, Inc. The name rang a bell. The company sued by the labor union in the Supreme Court case McDaniels had checked.