Hillerman, Tony (4 page)

The pressroom was empty. Cotton sorted quickly through his spiked teletype copy and pulled off the file for Monday. When McDaniels had left the room it had been twenty-two minutes before his deadline. The message from the
Tribune
city room giving him the go-ahead to transmit his column was signed off at 9:45
P.M.
That meant seven minutes had passed before Mac fell.

The swivel chair squeaked as Cotton leaned back. He stared at the ceiling. What had delayed Mac seven minutes? A trip to the john? That might account for it. That or meeting a politician willing to talk to a reporter even if he was drunk. Cotton walked slowly to McDaniels’s desk. No matter what had delayed Mac, the man in the blue topcoat had had plenty of time to give Mac his notebook. So what the devil had happened to it? Maybe, it occurred to Cotton suddenly, the man hadn’t found it. He thought backward, recreating the scene, seeing Mac in the doorway, Mac tossing the notebook on the desk, remembering that a little later Mac couldn’t find it. He had found a notebook, but he had said it was an old one—filled and set aside for filing.

Cherry had made no effort to sort out McDaniels’s desk-top accumulation. There was still a deep stack of carbons of bills introduced, a pile of outdated Bill-Finders, old House and Senate working calendars for the past several weeks, and a litter of press releases. But no notebook. Not even the old filled one. In the second drawer of the desk, Cotton found four spiral notebooks—all pages filled with Mac’s scrawl. Notes on the last page of the newest one concerned a press conference the Governor had held in September, just before the Legislature had convened. Cotton looked at the first page. There were Mac’s notes on an appointment to the Public Employees Retirement Board made late in July. Mac had filled the book in a little more than five weeks. Cotton arranged the other notebooks in chronological order and went through them, looking for datable material. The arithmetic was simple enough. At the average rate Mac filled notebooks, there must be at least two missing. Probably the most useless deduction of the year, Cotton thought, but it probably meant Blue Topcoat had picked up the filled notebook that had been on Mac’s desktop. And maybe that meant the notebook Mac had still been using was still around somewhere. Cotton sorted through the desk-top jumble again and then reached his hand down between the back of the desk and the wall. A pile of old papers, months of desk-top slippage, had accumulated there, caught atop a hot-air vent. On top of this pile, Cotton’s fingers encountered the cardboard cover of a spiral notebook.

He flipped through it hurriedly. About two-thirds of the pages were filled with McDaniels’s jottings. On the last such page were his notes on Tuesday night’s Taxation Committee hearings. Cotton remembered that McDaniels had thrown his notebook onto the desk that evening and then, when he was trying to write his story, couldn’t find it. He had apparently thrown it a little too hard.

The complaining whine of a police siren somewhere down Capitol Avenue filtered through the dusty windows. It made Cotton conscious that he was sitting at a dead man’s desk, sorting through the privacy of a dead man’s papers. He felt slightly furtive.

“Elliot—sez need only bout 18 milyn adnl to balance genl fund next fiscal. Sez estimates of the State Ed Assn sheer nonsense. If the approp com keeps its head, we won’t need any new taxes.” Those were the last words scrawled on the page. The last note taken by Merrill McDaniels, political reporter. A quote from a half-senile country banker-politician. A lie told for political purposes. How did McDaniels intend to use the quote? He had worked next to the man for more than eight months and he didn’t know him well enough to answer. It was a sad, lonely thought and he turned away from it. The words could be used, as Representative Howard Elliot intended, to mislead the public. Or they could be used, with the hard facts of general-fund revenues and impending budget appropriations, to prove Elliot ignorant, or a liar.

The sound of the siren died away. Except for the faint, changing murmur of traffic on Capitol Avenue the pressroom was still. A long, narrow room, a row of tables in the middle and its dingy walls lined with desks. It had occurred to Cotton long ago that these work stations were arranged more or less in the informal pecking order of their owners, or their owners’ publications. To the left of the high, unwashed windows was the old roll-top of Leroy Hall, the unchallenged if unproclaimed Numero Uno of the pressroom, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for bagging two county commissioners and a district judge in a land-zoningbribery affair, chief of the
Journal’s
capitol bureau, whose “Politics” column reached 450,000 subscribers daily. Across the window, the desk of T. J. Tobias, the room’s senior citizen, who had written politics for the
Evening News
since the early Roosevelt administrations, who had scores of political scalps to his credit, and who remembered too much, and drank too much, and coasted now into retirement, relying more on nostalgia than on facts. And next to Tobias, Eddie Adcock, exAssociated Press and now syndicated, writing for twenty-five or thirty small dailies and specializing, so it seemed to Cotton, in embarrassing county chairmen whose patronage efforts showed. Across from Adcock, Cotton’s desk, and above it one of the more exotic examples of the graffiti which had been accumulating on the pressroom walls for generations.

It was an ink drawing, about two feet square, of a housefly. The drafting was careful, with each of the thousand facets of the bulging fly eyes carefully suggested by the pen. The fly had been there, already stained and yellow, when Cotton had taken over the desk seven years ago. Old Man Tobias had told him that he thought it had been glued into its position back in the 1930’s by a reporter who had subsequently fallen from grace and gone into public relations.

After wondering about the drawing for months, the thought had dawned on Cotton that it must represent Walter Lippmann’s famous concept of the newsman as “the fly on the wall,” seeing all, feeling nothing, utterly detached, utterly objective. By then, Cotton had become comfortable with this grotesque ugliness staring down at him. And the drawing remained, reminding him, and all who glanced at it and knew its meaning, that the reporter was supposed to be a little more than human. Or a little less.

For some reason the stare of this symbolic insect now oppressed Cotton with a sense of loneliness and isolation. He glanced away from it, past the collection of erroneous headlines tacked above Pete Kendall’s desk (ROARK WON’T RUN FOR GOVERNOR. DEWEY ELECTED. GOVERNOR PREDICTS CALM ON CAMPUSES,) past the cluster of teletypes at the AP-UPI working stations, past the desks of the
Capitol-Press,
the
Daily Independent,
the
World,
the
Morning Bulletin,
the
Beacon,
the
Times,
the
Gazette,
the
Evening Sun,
and, finally, over to the desk of Jake Mills of Broadcast Information Network and, segregated near the doorway, the four television stations. The performing apes, Hall called them, using the pressroom without being part of its hard-bitten, cutthroat camaraderie. Tolerated but not accepted—like birdwatchers in a club of foxhunters.

Cotton turned his thoughts back to the notebook. Tomorrow he would tell Cherry he had found it and offer it to him. The ethics of the situation didn’t require him to tell Cherry what Mac had said about his big story. And the traditions of the game argued against it. Cherry probably wouldn’t want the notebook. Cotton was fairly sure
he
wouldn’t want it once his curiosity was satisfied. Unless the fox Mac was chasing looked unusually fat, he couldn’t imagine how he could find time for it.

He read his way idly into the notes, working from the back of the book. McDaniels had operated abut the way Cotton did—recording the spelling of names, occasional figures, key phrases from interviews, and a rare complete sentence for direct quotation. Like most newsmen, Mac used his notes only for the specifics his memory wouldn’t retain. Cotton worked through six pages, matching details with his recollection of capitol news developments—looking for anything which didn’t fit.

The seventh page stopped him. It was filled with columns of figures.

An entire page of such tabulations, penned in neat rows, identified with code letters like “pcem pp,” and “alm pp,” and “gding,” and “wting.” Idle curiosity turned to absorbed interest. Cotton studied the numbers, looking for a pattern. He could see only that they were arranged in groups of five. That suggested nothing except—by the sheer size of some of them—that McDaniels’s fox might indeed be fat. The ten-digit numbers might be account numbers coded for computer bookkeeping, or purchase order numbers, or almost anything. The abbreviations (if that’s what they were) were gibberish. Cotton, who wrote “that” with a “tt” in his notebook, used “gv.” for “governor,” and “xgr.” for “legislature,” thought about “The Goldbug,” the Poe short story that turned on breaking a cryptogram to find pirate treasure. That could be done, he guessed, by working through the notebooks to determine what letters Mac tended to drop out of words.

Deeper in the notebook he found four other pages of similar numbers, interposed with other notes. Some seemed to represent the day-to-day routine of capitol coverage. Others he couldn’t identify with published stories. There seemed to be, he finally decided, three or four unwritten stories represented in the jottings. One seemed to concern the State Insurance Commission, one involved loose accounting for cigarette tax stamps—a story Cotton had already been tipped on himself—and the third seemed to turn on the State Park Commission. The pages of figures might be part of any of them—or a story of their own.

He snapped the notebook shut and leaned back, looking at the fly on the wall without seeing it. Given time and McDaniels’s clippings for the past few weeks he could sort it out. But where would he find the time?

>4<

T
he clock on the walnut-paneled wall was old and ornate. Its small hand stood almost exactly on 10. The large hand clicked two marks past 12. Governor Paul Roark was two minutes late for his Thursday-morning press conference. In approximately 180 seconds, John Cotton—senior man among the
P.M.
reporters—would get down from the windowsill where he was slouching and walk out of the Executive Conference Room, and the six other reporters waiting there would follow him. Tradition gave the Governor five minutes of grace. The rule had been proclaimed a dozen administrations back by a United Press reporter long since transferred and forgotten. He had argued that the Governor was—after all—still a public servant. To wait for him longer than five minutes would be to undermine the relationship between newsmen as watchdog-auditor-guardian-of-the-public-trust and the Chief Executive as politician and feeder-at-the-public-trough. And while the rule had been born in philosophy, it had lived in practicality.
P.M.
reporters, with edition deadlines looming, could ill afford to waste more than five of the crucial sixty minutes between 10 and 11
A.M.

Cotton looked at Alan Wingerd, the Governor’s press secretary, who had handed out ditto copies of a Roark statement announcing the appointment of Tommy Gianini, identified as a prominent Tahash County civic leader and businessman, to the State Pardon and Parole Board, and was leaning against the wall, looking bored.

“He’s late, Alan,” Cotton said. “If he’s not going to show we’ve got work to do.”

“Got tied up on the telephone,” Wingerd said. “He’ll be here.”

Governor Roark walked in. “Here he is now,” the Governor said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“You have anything besides the handout?”

“No,” Roark said. “I’m available for questions.”

“This guy you’re putting on the parole board,” Volney Bowles said. “Isn’t he the Tahash County Democratic Chairman? How does that fit with your campaign statement about not giving jobs to party officials?”

Roark’s smile lost nothing. “Delmar is the chairman, Tommy is his brother.”

“O.K.,” Bowles said. “See any conflict there?”

“None,” Roark said. “If you rule out everybody related to party officials you don’t have much left to appoint.”

“Has Gianini got any kinfolk in stir?” Bowles asked. “Why did he want the job?”

Roark’s smile frayed. “Mr. Gianini has no relatives in prison to my knowledge.”

“To my knowledge,” Bowles said. “Are we supposed to quote you as saying you know Gianini doesn’t have any felons in the family, or that you don’t know whether or not your new Parole Board member has kinfolk in prison?”

Roark laughed. “Come on, Vol,” he said. “I said I was sorry I was late.”

“Vol’s on a diet,” Cotton said. “A hard-boiled egg for breakfast, a hard-boiled egg for lunch and a broiled steak for dinner. It makes him mean as hell.”

“I’ve got a couple for you,” Junior Garcia said. “Will you sign or will you veto House Bill 178? And what are you going to do about that situation down in LeFlore County?”

“What’s House Bill 178?” Roark asked.

Everybody laughed except Wingerd, who looked glum. House Bill 178, if signed, would legalize parimutuel racetrack betting. The Democratic National Committeewoman, a woman of grandiose temper and considerable clout, raised racehorses. The word in the pressroom was that Roark had made a secret primary campaign commitment to the Committeewoman that he would sign a race betting bill on the unlikely chance she could get one passed. The word was, further, that the secret had leaked, as political secrets tend to do, and that Republican leadership had conspired with the tourist and gambling blocs. The press table subsequently had witnessed the spectacle of the Senate Minority Leader, a Baptist layman of notorious piety, voting for legalized gambling. The Governor had thus been handed the choice of outraging the Committeewoman and Motel Association with his veto, or the do-gooders with his signature.