Free Institute by James M. Cain Page B

say?”
    “It’s not you. Senator; it’s him. Mr. Garrett.”
    “Lloyd, he’s big.”
    “He’s been stuck with me, once I got her on my side, but he keeps blowing me up, making me bigger than I am. It makes me damned uneasy. A person knows his limitations.”
    “Maybe he’s not blowing you up. You impressed me just as much as you apparently did him. That ghastly day in court, when you calmly took charge up there on the witness stand and got it into the record that the pot they found in Jack’s car must have been planted by the police, which, you thought, was most unlikely, or else stashed by someone else because it was hot and had to be gotten rid of, as to your certain knowledge that it was not in the glove compartment when you and the boys left the car to go to the basketball game. It was a cool, nervy performance, your making that judge listen, and once he listened, believe. It was a day I’ll never forget. So I’m not so sure that Richard Garrett overrates you. Perhaps, as they say, you don’t know your own strength.”
    Though I certainly didn’t mean to, I had sounded cranky, so I started kidding along with the waitress as a way to save face. When she left again, the senator asked: “Lloyd, something’s bugging you more than you’ve been letting on. Come on, what is it? If you want to talk, that is.”
    I didn’t want to, but I could hardly help it. I blurted out the whole thing—about the building, the law against renting yourself office space, which, it turned out, he had voted for, being ordered to find a building and soon. Senator Hood began to laugh.
    “It’s like being given a scuba outfit and told to find the lost Atlantis,” he said. “And it also sounds like Richard Garrett, who is in the habit of commanding things to be done forthwith, and then, presto whango, they are ... sometimes.” Suddenly the grin left his face, as though Marcel Marceau had waved his hand across it, and he started snapping his finger at the girl. “Miss,” he said when she sashayed over, “I’m Senator Hood of Nebraska, and something has come up. We have to leave. We’ll be gone about a half-hour. When we come back, we will want our lunch ready exactly as we ordered it. Keep our table for us, please.”
    “Yes, sir,” she said as he pressed a bill in her hand.
    “What is it, Senator?” I asked, wondering if he were ill.
    “You’ll see. Come on, Lloyd.”
    We went upstairs and out on the street. A taxi stopped for us as soon as he had raised his hand. He gave an address on K Street, and when we got there he told the driver to park, “here by the curb—we want to sit for a minute and then go back where we came from.” Through the window he pointed at the building across the street. It was still under construction. Scaffolding was all around it and out over the sidewalk. It was a beautiful modern thing of sandstone. But it wasn’t one of those buildings that look like a refrigerator with windows cut in the sides. It had windows, of course, but they were spaced in a graceful way, with stone in between. I counted ten floors. The top two were set back in a kind of mansard style, a little like the Lincoln Memorial. The entrance was beautiful—no columns, no fancy stuff, just two large bronze doors. He stared and then said quietly: “How would that do for your institute?”
    “Perfect! Wonderful!”
    “Let’s go back to Harvey’s, driver.”
    While we rode, he talked. “You’ve heard of Bagastex?”
    “I’ve heard of bagasse.”
    “That’s right—Bagastex is made of bagasse—that stuff they get when they grind the juice out of sugarcane. It’s a floor covering that was developed by the Tombigvannah Corporation in Georgia. They tooled up, spent millions on it, and put up that building there, the one you just looked at. They had it made, they thought. By the end of the year they were due to line up with the big ones. And then the boom got lowered. Bagastex didn’t sell. Meanwhile, in Georgia