Hillerman, Tony (20 page)

He sat a moment, thinking. The hunt for him would be in full cry now. No question of that. Could they find him? No way. Not unless there was a leak in the Police Department. Anyway, it didn’t matter now if the pressroom knew he was back in town. He picked up the phone again.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” Tom Rickner said, “but your line’s been busy.”

“Did you get anything out of the highway personnel files?”

“I’ve got some names and dates for whatever they’re worth,” Rickner said. “But fill me in on all this. What’s this secrecy jazz that Ernie’s giving me, this sick-leave business, and . . .”

“I’ll explain it later. Give me what you’ve got.”

What Rickner had added little. It confirmed what the writer of the anonymous letters had told McDaniels about a flurry of transfers and demotions eight years ago, with many of the same names involved in another flurry of job shifting two years ago. Most of it would be useful only with more checking in the contract records—to connect the same names with roles in Reevis-Smith projects for follow-up stories later. But it did provide better ground for tying Herman Gay into the story.

Memos in the H. L. Singer personnel file transferred him from district to district to handle the Reevis-Smith projects. Each bore Gay’s signature as construction engineer. That pleased Cotton. It meant that Singer, with his pleasant voice and his daughter in high school, would not stand alone in the villain’s role in this first story.

“One other thing,” Rickner was saying. “There’s a letter here for you. Guess it’s a letter. Marked personal. Sealed envelope somebody left at the desk here for you.”

>20<

I
n the car it was warm, even with the heater fan now silent. Outside in the pools of dim yellow light under the old-fashioned statehouse street lamps it would be at least ten degrees below freezing—the cutting damp cold of early winter. Cotton buttoned his overcoat and glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes until three. A little too early. He pulled the letter from his coat pocket and read it again—carefully. Something about it tickled his subconscious—suggested vaguely that there was some odd fact that he should consider. But nothing came. It was like all the letters, the same tidy electric typewriter face, the same insolent arrogance of tone.

Mr. Cotton:

I gather that you have learned from Mr. Houghton that all is not well in Jason Flowers’s so-called “Quality Experiment” highway projects. From what my sources tell me, you have been diligent and therefore deserving of a reward.

But first let me warn you to be careful. The late Mr. McDaniels of the
Capitol-Press
was working on this story in his inept fashion before his death. When one considers the personality of Jason Flowers and how much this story would embarrass him, one wonders if McDaniels’s clumsiness was helped with a shove.

And now for the reward. I doubt if I can expect you to find enough to link the shrewd and careful Mr. Flowers directly to the thievery he has arranged. I have arranged for you to have some good luck.

The state income-tax return filed by Mr. Flowers and the corporate tax return filed by Reevis-Smith, Constructors, contain some interesting figures. As you know, these records are closed by law to all except tax officials. The law makes it a felony for tax officials to reveal information contained in returns to anyone. note: The legal penalty is for revealing the records, and not for inspecting them.

Therefore, if you happen to be at the capitol at 3
A.M.
Thursday morning, you will find entry of the east-wing basement utility tunnel unlocked. If you happened to be in the Bureau of Revenue wing on the third floor of the capitol building at 3:05
A.M.
you will happen to find that the door connecting the B-of-R records stacks with the east hall happens to be unlocked. If you enter you will find the tax file of Jason Flowers in the fifth row of file cases from the door. The file is about a third of the way back in the drawer. It is in the top drawer of the seventeenth file cabinet. The drawer is labeled “Individual, Fla-Flo.” The Reevis-Smith file is in the thirteenth row from the door, the eleventh cabinet east of the aisle, near the front of the top drawer. If you want copies, as I suspect you will, you’ll find a Xerox machine at the file clerk’s desk.

While 3
A.M.
is admittedly an inconvenient hour, I felt it advisable for two reasons. The person who will unlock the door for you does not, as you will appreciate, wish to risk being seen doing so. Second, you will wish to minimize the chances of being seen during your research in the bureau files. If you are early, you may frighten away our friend with the key. So be punctual.

And here he was, being punctual. Following orders just as McDaniels must have done, serving as a tool of some anonymous hater. Cotton stared into the darkness. He had parked in the executive lot in the space marked reserved, asst. secy of state—the space nearest the small side door which his own key would unlock. In four or five minutes he would climb out of this car, walk through that door, take the elevator to the third floor, do exactly what the-man-who-hated-Jason-Flowers had told him to do. Why? Was it simply because fifteen years as a newsman had hardened him against leaving a hole in a story? Because the artistry of the craft demanded maximum completeness? Was it because of some sense of righteousness—an urge to punish and destroy? Or was it because it seemed cruelly unfair that H. L. Singer (the pawn, cheerful voice, the teenaged daughter) should stand almost alone as thief in the first break of the story? He found the last explanation most comfortable. But he wasn’t sure.

Cotton glanced at his watch again. Now it was time. He stepped out of the car, flinching against the cold air, walking slowly. He thought he knew what the income-tax records would show. It would be a legal fee. Flowers would report it as income from Reevis-Smith. Reevis-Smith would claim it as an expense deduction. The payoff bribe on the record under a polite name. Reported because state tax returns and bank deposits were cross-checked by the Federal Internal Revenue Service inspectors against federal returns. That’s what he would find. (But why, then, had the letter writer sent him to look at both returns? He could confirm a legal fee in either one. Was that what bothered him about the letter?) The fee would be large. And if he could confirm it in the file, it would be all the link he needed. He could handle it in one additional paragraph.

“Records of Reevis-Smith show the construction firm paid a . . .” How much would it be? $50,000, probably more. “. . . a $50,000 fee last year to Jason Flowers, chairman of the State Highway Commission and author of the Quality Experiment program on which the contractor has been working.”

Maybe the tax file would show a series of annual payments. But one year, one fee, would be enough to show the corruption came from the top, to tie in the top man, enough to modify for the reader the role of H. L. Singer. Singer would become a man who might—after all—be nothing worse than a fool and a weakling following orders from above.

The darkness at the side door was almost total and Cotton fumbled a moment at the lock. (Was this who teased him? That his anonymous hater—who knew everything—didn’t know that statehouse newsmen carried building access keys and—not knowing this—had arranged to have another door unlocked?) Inside, he stood a moment, still thinking about the letter. The hallway here was lined with glass cases—a display of natural predators mounted by some forgotten Game and Fish Department employee for some bygone state fair and exiled now to gather dust in this basement corridor. Cotton, who had walked past this array of taxidermy for seven years without a glance, glanced now at the snarling bobcat beside him, and past it at an owl, its wings spread, rising from a bush with a woodmouse caught in its talons. The taxidermist had added a touch of macabre realism to the tableau by preserving the mouse’s death throes, its teeth bared in an eternal silent squeak of death. Cotton’s eyes rested on the mouse, thinking of mousetraps and cheese. But the letter wouldn’t be bait. Couldn’t be. Its anonymous author wanted his story broken, wanted Jason Flowers destroyed. The letter writer’s interests were opposite to the interests of those who had hunted him—those who must be hunting him even more frantically now. But they would never think to hunt in this empty state capitol building at three o’clock in the morning.

Yet he stood motionless, listening. Somewhere far away in the hollowness of the corridors something produced a sound. Something made unidentifiable by the echoing distance. A thumping. Brief, replaced by the ringing silence. Cotton was conscious that while those who hunted couldn’t know he was here, neither did the police. Calling Whan’s office to report that he planned a 3
A.M.
trespass on the state capitol building would have demanded explanations which he couldn’t give. Cotton realized he was feeling something he hadn’t felt since boyhood—not exactly a fear of the dark, but of the hobgoblins which inhabit it. Another dim sound reached him from somewhere in the echoing building. Someone moving. A janitor, perhaps? Or a night guard? Was there a guard in the building at night? If there was, Cotton couldn’t afford to be heard. He squatted, removed his shoes, and left them atop a glass case housing a weasel frozen in an eternal crouch behind an unwary quail.

Avoiding the clanking elevator meant trotting up five flights of stairs to third floor main. The architects of this massive old granite pile had given its interior a spurious spaciousness by making its main-floor corridors two stories high—each floor with a mezzanine corridor overlooking it. Cotton reached third floor main out of breath. He leaned against the wall beside the stairhead window, puffing. The letter in his inside coat pocket, the touch of stiff folded paper against his armpit, again tickled his subconscious. And this time his memory abruptly answered the question.

This letter was different because it was the original copy. Those Whan had brought him from McDaniels’s files had been Xerox copies. But why should his subconscious be warning him that this mattered? The question almost instantly produced its response. Another question. Where were the originals? Cotton caught his breath. McDaniels obviously had made the copies for his file. Had the originals been in Mac’s coat pocket before he made his long fall? They weren’t among his belongings at police headquarters. Or had they been on his desk when the man in the blue topcoat came looking for the notebook? In the microsecond it took these questions to form, Cotton became conscious of the cold tile under his socks, of the coldness of the marble against the back of his head, of the coldness of his neck, of a chilling, dreadful fear. It took him a moment to control it. To think rationally. He found himself remembering the strange seven minutes or so which passed between the time Mac left the pressroom and his dying scream. If he was being held and searched this gap in time would be explained. But there could be other explanations of what happened to the original copies of the first three letters. And the letter addressed to him had the same tone, the same arrogance, as the ones written to McDaniels. Apparently the same typewriter—although any of a hundred thousand electrics could have done the job. Cotton felt his panic ebbing. This almost certainly wasn’t a trap set by his hunters. But he would take a precaution. He would climb another flight of steps to the third mezzanine. He would work his way quietly along the balcony around the corner to the long wing. From the balcony, out of sight behind its ornate waist-high granite railing, he could see if there was any sign that anyone was waiting near the doorway to the Bureau of Revenue file room. He pushed himself away from the wall.

On the mezzanine balcony the floor seemed, somehow, even colder. He eased himself around the corner in a crouch and peered over the railing down the main-floor hallway below him. At the far end, almost a hundred yards away, the dim yellow light of a single bulb lit the west stairwell and cast the office doorways in sharp relief. And below him the dim light from the rotunda pushed weakly against the darkness. But much of the central section of the corridor was lit only by a vague illumination reflected from the polished floors and the grimy walls. The door Cotton would enter was in this area of almost total darkness. He stared, finally identifying the blacker rectangle that would be the doorway. Nothing moved. Nothing seemed to be there.

Cotton squatted, thinking, Owls see in the dark. Mice do not. Inane thoughts. He heard the faint sounds that old buildings make in their sleep. Somewhere in the dim distance the almost inaudible whirring of a heater fan was turned on by a sleepless thermostat in an office far below him. Somewhere a creak of stone or steel contracting. And beneath it, indistinguishable even in moments of utter stillness, a humming no louder than the blood moving in his own veins.

An abrupt sense of the silliness of what he was doing—crouching here above this empty hallway like a frightened child with his bruised thigh aching in a cramp—washed over him and overpowered fear. He would climb down the stairs, walk into the Bureau of Revenue file room, be done with his business, and get the hell out of this spooky building. He felt a sudden impulse to break the ringing silence, to waken the haunted sleep of these hallways with a shout. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch. Nine minutes after three. He was no longer punctual.

The sound reached his consciousness just as he started to rise. It said, “Whisk.” Whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk. A regular cadence. Cotton froze. Puzzled. Then no longer puzzled, but afraid. The cadence was of footsteps. The sound of cloth on the tiled floor. Whoever walked had, like himself, removed his shoes. The sound came from Cotton’s left, from across the rotunda, moving almost directly toward him. He sank lower behind the railing, staring out between the granite posts which supported it.

A man came into view, walking across the open rotunda floor toward the corridor. Cotton’s view from above foreshortened the figure, but he appeared to be a tall man. Bareheaded, lank dark hair falling over his forehead, a blue topcoat. It was the man who had come into the newsroom looking for Mac’s notebook. The coat pockets bulged (his shoes?). He walked almost directly under Cotton, the whispering sound of his socks on the floor plainly audible now in the silence. And then a voice, very low: