Tony Hillerman - The Fly on the Wall

by The Fly on the Wall(lit)

  "Have you thought about the third alternative?"

  "What?" Cotton asked. He was genuinely puzzled.

  "It was your car," Whan said.

  Cotton said nothing. He was thinking that Robbins and he were both tall and lanky, both blond.

  "If nobody had a reason to kill Robbins, does someone have a reason to kill you?"

  "Yeah," Cotton said slowly. "I see what you mean. It's an interesting idea."

  "Think about it," Whan suggested.

  Cotton thought about it. He thought about three National Guard officers indicted after his stories exposing falsification of travel expenses, about a state health director fired after his series on nepotism in the department, about a State Senator defeated for reelection in the wake of the Tribune series on conflicts of interest, about others injured, outraged or offended down through the years.

  "I've got some enemies," Cotton said. "I've hurt some people. But they're politicians. They're smart. They run risks and if they get caught they tend to be philosophic." He stopped, thinking about it again, and feeling vaguely deprived that even the animosity he inspired was casual, impersonal. Or was there some sort of ironic justice that a man with no one to grieve for him had no one to hate him?

  "No," Cotton said. "You have to rule out your third alternative."

  "Why don't you keep thinking about it?" Whan said. "And if you have any interesting thoughts, give me a call."

  It was almost noon when Cotton got back to his apartment. He had stopped at the police garage and inspected the soggy remains of the old Plymouth. It had been worth maybe $600, but he had driven it six years and he would miss it. He had called his insurance agent from the garage to arrange to file a claim. Finally he had taken a taxi home, riding glumly through the gray day. The coffee was strong but drinkable. He poured a cup, made a salami and lettuce sandwich, considering Whan's line of questioning. The captain, he thought with wry amusement, considered him a possible murder victim on the hoof. The captain was taking advantage of a unique opportunity-interviewing the victim before the homicide. Except it made no sense.

  At the table, he unfolded his copy of the accident report and read through it carefully. There had been two witnesses, a teenager crossing the bridge walkway and a woman who had pulled onto the bridge just as the accident happened. Their reports were about the same. The truck, identified by the boy, was a green cab-over diesel pulling an empty flatbed trailer. Cotton turned to the stolen property report:

  ITEM: 1970-model Mack diesel tractor, cab-over flatbed trailer attached. Dark green. Transportation Commission Tax No. 92772 in white on both doors. License LA3-8302.

  TIME: Noticed missing about 5 P.M., Friday, October 15. Last noticed on lot about 8 A.M., same date.

  PLACE: Equipment lot at 1100 Third Street.

  OWNER: Reevis-Smith, Constructors, Inc.

  Cotton pursed his lips. Small world, he thought. Damned small. How many coincidences did that make? Two accidental deaths within a week. Both statehouse reporters. That was one. And the second reporter crowded off a bridge by a truck stolen from a company being investigated by the first reporter. That was two. Or maybe two and a half by the time you sorted it out.

  He read the remarks. The equipment manager had missed the truck at closing time Friday when equipment check-in was verified. He had presumed a company driver was making some unauthorized use of it, or had taken it to the shop for a tune-up without filing a required report. He hadn't realized it was stolen until Saturday morning.

  Cotton checked the time. The theft hadn't been reported until shortly before police had found the vehicle.

  Outside, the dirty sky dragged down at the rooftop-a steady, cheerless drizzle. Cotton closed his eyes. Santa Fe would be a pattern of sun and shadow-clear blue sky over the La Bajada plateau and early snow clouds fighting with the wind to control the mountaintops. The air would be chilly, and the sun hot, and the forest of aspens above the Horse's Head an ocean of gold. The ravens in the cottonwoods by St. Catherine's Indian School would be raucous with autumn.

  He opened his eyes and examined the grayness outside his window. He felt cold. Too much coincidence.

  9

  Congressman William Jennings Gavin died sometime in the small hours of Sunday morning. He managed the event as he usually did-to the maximum inconvenience of the working press. City editors, not warned by the customary ritual of preliminary illnesses, found the obituaries in their files hadn't been updated for years. And the fraternity of political writers-not alerted to impending death by reassuring statements from press aides-were caught unprepared for morbid speculations required of them by any sudden vacuum in the political command.

  It occurred to John Cotton, when the Sunday-morning call came from his state editor, that he had never given the slightest thought to the political effects if Congressman Gavin died. Bill Gavin didn't seem to be the sort who would.

  "You know what we want," the state editor said. "Who Roark will appoint to replace him, and crap like that. We'll hold your Monday column over until Tuesday."

  "Roark's not going to talk about the appointment while the body's still warm," Cotton protested. "They never do that until after the funeral. All I can do is guess."

  "O.K., guess then," the state editor growled. "The first time in twenty years the son-of-a-bitch broke any news on the P.M. cycle and then he does it on Sunday when we don't have an edition."

  Cotton made three telephone calls: to Alan Wingerd to confirm that Roark would have nothing to say; to Joe Korolenko, to discuss the question of impact with this astute student of working politics; and to Ulrich, who often knew what Roark was thinking as soon as Roark did. Ulrich could tell him nothing-except that the Legislature would recess Monday and Gavin's body would lie in state in the House chamber. Korolenko wasn't much more helpful. He sounded depressed. Gavin had been his friend for forty years.

  "I don't know who we'll ask Paul to appoint," Korolenko said. "You can't really replace Bill Gavin. You damn sure can't fill the gap he leaves in the party."

  "Will Gene Clark be able to pick up part of Gavin's people?"

  "No comment." Korolenko snapped out the words.

  "O.K., Joe," Cotton said. "Let's just chat about it then. It will be not for attribution. I just want to get a feeling for it."

  "If we're just talking as friends, sure, Clark will pick up some of the wreckage. The hyena always gets his bite."

  "How about the State Executive Committee?"

  There was a long pause. Seven committee members were Gavin people, part of the controlling Korolenko-Gavin-Roark coalition. The pause lengthened, telling Cotton that Senator Clark's encroachment on the committee must be more serious than he had thought.

  "Clark will pick up one," Korolenko said. "That's all we'll lose. I think."

  "You think?"

  "Who knows anything for sure these days," Korolenko said. He sounded tired.

  "No ideas about the replacement then. How about the names of some people from the third district who might be considered?"

  "I owe you a favor, John. I've owed it to you for four years now, and I pay my debts. You know that. But I just haven't had time to think about it yet. When I do, I'll call you."

  Cotton wrote the column then, throwing away three false starts before he finished it. He spent four paragraphs reporting why Gavin's death would be a blow to Paul Roark's senatorial ambitions and then shifted into background.

  Since he completed his term as Governor 25 years ago and won the first of his 13 consecutive terms in Congress, Gavin had been one of the pins keeping the Democrats in this state from splintering along lines of factional interest.

  Gavin and Senator Eugene Clark have disagreed on policy matters for years.

  He reread the sentence, thinking it was a notable understatement. Clark was a sophisticated, urbane political creature, with a sort of country-club, Hamiltonian distaste for mass man. Gavin had been a sort of latter-day populist, who never lost his rapport with, and popularity
among, the blue-collar workers. The Clark-Gavin relationship was a genuine animal dislike bordering on hatred.

  Cotton considered working in a paragraph on Korolenko's health. The old man looked bad and was in his seventies and there were rumors he had something incurable. But today such speculation seemed too ghoulish.

  The rest of the column was sheer guesswork, carefully qualified, concerning the sort of horse trading which might be involved in the appointment of a man to fill the Gavin vacancy until the next election. Cotton read it without pleasure, folded the three typed pages into his coat pocket, and took a taxi to the capitol.

  He signed off the column on the teletype at 10:43 and flicked off the switch, conscious of the total silence. In an hour and seventeen minutes it would be appropriate to eat lunch. He could go home, play one or two games of solitaire, and then it would be time to open a can of... He considered the alternatives. Creamed chicken soup. Or he could walk around for an hour and drop into a caf‚ and buy something. Neither alternative had any appeal. He stared down the newsroom, his eyes stopping at the desk of Whitey Robbins. There was a paper in the typewriter-a story which would never be finished. A flutter of motion at the window, a house wren on the sill. Cotton had intended not to look out the window at the grayness of the day. Now he felt a bleak, overpowering loneliness. Somewhere from far away there was a muffled sound. Perhaps a janitor slamming something, if janitors worked on Sunday. Perhaps a door closing. The silence returned, buzzing in his ears. If it had worked out differently and he had married someone he would rush back to the apartment and he'd say, "Wife, I'm low today," and his wife would say... He frowned, trying to think what a wife would say. He couldn't make it work. The wife needed a personality. She became Janey Janoski. Janey would say something wise. Janey would say, "It's this goddamn weather. Let's fly away to one of those sunny places you always talk about." And he would say, "What about Ernie Danilov?" And she would say, "He got along without you before he met you. He can get along without you now."

  Cotton walked out of the pressroom, down the dark hallway-hearing the echoes of his footsteps. He pushed the elevator button and waited. A clanking sound came up the shaft, and the creaking of the cables. Then he turned abruptly, walked back to his desk and riffled through his Directory of Public Employees. He ran his finger down the J's. It was listed simply as Janoski, Jane, Executive Secretary, Legislative Finance Committee.

  He dialed her home number.

  "Hello."

  "This is John Cotton. I thought you might like to hear what I found out about that highway contract."

  "What did you find out?"

  Cotton paused. The feeling was familiar but he hadn't suffered it since high school. "Ah. Well. Could I tell you over lunch? Have you had lunch yet?"

  It was more than a mile to the Copper Pot but Cotton walked. A tall, slightly stooped man who had forgotten to get a haircut last week and whose suit needed pressing, walking rapidly across the damp parking lot, whistling. Walking past the few parked cars, glancing at the man sitting in the dark blue Cadillac and smiling because the man looked vaguely familiar, not noticing the blue topcoat tossed over the back of the seat beside the man, not noticing (because he was thinking of Janey Janoski) that the man did not return the smile; that the eyes of the man were studying him in cool appraisal.

  10

  At ten minutes before nine Monday morning, Cotton stood in the senate gallery, looking down at the lying-in-state of William Jennings Gavin. He was thinking of the luncheon meeting, and of Janey Janoski, and deciding once again that he had talked too much and listened too little. It had been fun, but the memory was disappointing, and slightly puzzling. Janey's enthusiasm for his success in the Highway Department files had been brief-quickly changing to questions about the identity of H. L. Singer. And, when Cotton could identify Singer only as a project engineer, she'd returned to questions about the impact of the story on reputations in general. Then somehow they'd wound up talking about novels, and Cotton had talked (endlessly, as he recalled it) of the novel half finished in his desk drawer, and of how he should finish it. Most of the lunch had been pleasant, and then they had walked through the cold, almost deserted downtown streets, peering into the windows of closed shops. But now his mind returned, like a tongue to a sore tooth, to the moments of friction. Janey's distaste for his story could be the normal reaction of a Roark Democrat-conscious that even a small dent in the administration's image did its small damage. But he thought about the gossip. That Roark's marriage was on the rocks, that Roark had a mistress. And of Janey's name among the dozen possibilities the gossips listed. He was aware that the television lights had gone on again and that Leroy Hall, standing beside him at the gallery railing, was leaning over for a better view.

  "He's saying, `I'm glad you're dead, you rascal you,'" Hall said.

  "Who?"

  "Our good Senior Senator," Hall said. "If the boobs watching TV tonight can read lips, that's what they'll see Cousin Gene Clark is saying."

  Senator Clark, his white head bowed and reflecting the portable lights, stood before the open casket while two cameramen recorded his display of sorrow.

  "Gavin would have enjoyed watching that," Hall said. "He really would have enjoyed it."

  A fat woman under a large hat replaced Clark at the casket. Behind her the line led back through the east aisle of the Senate chamber, past two National Guardsmen standing at parade rest at the door, and out into the hall. Most of them were older people. Cotton recognized an assistant state treasurer, a secretary from the Corporation Commission, a retired legislator, and two county Democratic chairmen in the slowly moving line. Others looked familiar-faces he had seen at political conventions and campaign rallies. Most of them he had never seen before. They looked like what Hall called the "real people."

  "A lot of poor people," Hall said. "The kind of people old Bill never forgot, and they're not forgetting him. When Clark dies, it will look like a combined convention of the Rotary Club and the Chamber and the Bankers Association."

  "That was a hell of a column you wrote this morning," Cotton said. The column had been superb. Hall had ignored the obvious political speculation. He had put together a series of remembered incidents in Gavin's career-a promise kept, a betrayal punished, an old favor repaid, a skirmish lost, a battle won. Tales told with affectionate nostalgia. And the effect had been almost poetry.

  "I worked on it," Hall said. "I liked the man." He turned abruptly and looked at Cotton. "And I like Joe Korolenko. And I respect Paul Roark for what he's trying to do. And I can't stomach Gene Clark. But I think you feel about the same about all of them. Nothing at all. Like you were a psychologist watching rats in the maze. I never could understand that about you."

  Hall's intensity surprised Cotton, and embarrassed him a little. He looked out across the chamber, at the profusion of funeral flowers around the bier, thinking about what Hall meant.

  "I like some of them better than others."

  "But not on company time," Hall said. "When you're writing, it's `a plague on both your houses.' You say, `Folks, here we have two gray rats: Eugene Clark and Paul Roark. Both politicians. Same goal. Power. Get the power and you get the money.'"

  "It's not that simple," Cotton said. What the hell was the matter with Hall today?"

  Leroy was looking down at the slow-moving line. The only sound was the shuffling of feet, an occasional muffled cough.

  "The great electorate," Hall said. "The citizenry of the state. You think, Give 'em the facts and they'll make the right decisions. But they're not reading past the headlines. They're watching I Love Lucy and getting their instant political wisdom from some former disc jockey with a sincere smile on the ten-o'clock news. The bastard couldn't name the National Committeeman for you, but he's got credibility because they like his teeth."

  Cotton said nothing.

  "Cousin John, we've sold ourselves a bill of goods, you and Junior and I, and Volney and all of us. We buy this business of give them the fact
s and man decides in his enlightened self-interest. How about changing it-being realistic? Deciding that sometimes they're not going to digest the facts and come to the enlightened conclusion. You know it's true. You've seen it, time after time." Hall looked up, his eyes on Cotton's eyes. "How about making a selection sometimes of what facts they can handle-giving them what's good for them?"

  "You feel like playing God?" Cotton laughed. "I'm not ready for it."

  "O.K.," Hall said. "Forget it." He turned from the railing, from Cotton, and walked away.

  Cotton looked after him, puzzled at the anger, and wondering what Leroy Hall had been trying to say to him.

  11

  It was a quarter to five when Cotton returned to the newsroom and found the message in his typewriter.

  He was tired. He had spent most of the morning going through records in the State Park Commissioner's office. He had found nothing-or virtually nothing. Wit's End, Inc., held-as McDaniels's notes indicated-a contract for developing new state parks. But he could find nothing irregular. Bidding for the developing had been competitive. Wit's End had been low. Cotton had left at lunch-guessing that McDaniels had either followed a bum lead or had found a way to prove something that Cotton couldn't even suspect. He lunched with the thought that he had accomplished nothing beyond making the Park Commission staff nervous, and curious about why Cotton was interested in Wit's End, Inc.