All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [81]
“Well,” I said to the Boss, “you gave yourself a good time.”
“Damn it,” he said, “it’s just something in their eyes makes you do it. This fellow now, he’d lick spit, and you can see that, and it makes you do it.”
“Yeah, I said, “it looks like he’s a long worm with no turning, all right.”
“I gave him every chance,” the Boss said glumly. “Every chance. He didn’t have to say what I told him to say. He didn’t have to listen to me. He could have just walked out of the door and kept on walking. He could have put a date on that resignation and handed it to me. He could have done a dozen of things. But did he? Hell, no. Not Byram, and he just stands there and his eyes blink right quick like a dog’s do when he leans up against your leg before you hit him, and, by God, you have the feeling if you don’t do it you won’t be doing God’s will. You do it because you are helping Byram fulfill his nature.
“Not that it’s any of my business,” I said, “but what’s all the shouting about?”
“Didn’t you read the paper?”
“No, I was on vacation.”
“And Sadie didn’t tell you?”
“Just got here,” I said.
“Well, Byram rigged him up a nice little scheme to get rich. Got himself a tie-in with a realty outfit and fixed things up with Hamill in the Tax Lands Bureau. Pretty, only they wanted it all to themselves and somebody got sore at not being cut in, and squawked to the MacMurfee boys in the Legislature. And if I get my hands on who it was–”
“Was what?”
“Squawked to the MacMurfee outfit. Ought to taken it up with Duffy. Everybody knows he’s supposed to handle complaints. And now we got this impeachment business.”
“Of who?”
“Byram.”
“What’s happened to Hamill?”
“He’s moved to Cuba. You know, better climate. And, from reports, he moved fast. Duffy went around this morning, and Hamill caught a train. But we got to handle this impeachment.”
“I don’t think they could put it through.”
“They ain’t even going to try. You let a thing like that get started and no telling what’ll happen. The time to stomp ’em is now. I’ve got boys out picking up soreheads and wobblies and getting ’em to town. Sadie’s been on the phone all day taking the news. Some of the birds are hiding out, for the word must have got round by this time, but the boys are running ’em down. Brought in three this afternoon, and we gave ’em what it took. But we had something ready on them all. You ought to’ve seen Jeff Hopkins’s face when he found out I knew about his pappy selling likker out of that little one-horse drugstore he’s got over in Talmadge and then forging prescriptions for the record. Or Martten’s when he found out I knew how the bank over in Okaloosa holds a mortgage on his place falling due in about five weeks. Well–” and he wriggled his toes comfortably inside of the socks–“I quieted their nerves. It’s the old tonic, but still soothes.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Get over to Harmonville tomorrow and see if you can beat some sense into Sim Harmon’s head.”
“That all?”
Before we could answer Sadie popped her head in the door, and said the boys had brought in Witherspoon, who was a representative from the north tip of the state.
“Put him in the other room,” the Boss said, “and let him stew.” Then, as Sadie popped out again, he turned to me and answered my question. “All, except get me together all you have on Al Coyle before you leave town. The boys are trying to run him down and I want to be heeled when they book him.”
“O.K.,” I said, and stood up.
He looked at me as tough he were about to say something up to it, and I stood in front of my chair, waiting. But Sadie stuck her head in. “Mr. Miller would like to see you,” she said to the Boss, and didn’t give the impression of glad tidings.
“Send him in,” the Boss ordered, and I could tell that, no matter what he had had on his mind to say to me a second before, he had something else on it now. He had Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, Attorney General, on his mind.
“He won’t like it,” I said.
“No,” he said, “he won’t.”
And then in the doorway stood the tall, lean, somewhat stooped man, with swarthy face and unkempt dark hair and sad eyes under black brows, and with a Phi Beta Kappa key slung across his untidy blue serge. He stood there for a second, blinking the sad eyes, as though he had come out of darkness into a sudden light, or had stumbled into the wrong room. He looked like the wrong thing to be coming through that door, all right.