The Porkchoppers

Ross Thomas

BASTEI ENTERTAINMENT

Bastei Entertainment is an imprint of Bastei Lübbe AG

For the original edition:

Project management: Lori Herber

Cover adaptation: Christin Wilhelm, www.grafic4u.de

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

E-book production: Jouve Germany GmbH & Co. KG

ISBN 978-3-95859-017-5

www.bastei-entertainment.com

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this e-book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Warren Bayless

The events and characters in this book are fiction and if any of them ever happened to the American labor movement, it is not only sheer coincidence, but also something of a pity.

PORKCHOPPER n [pork chops, labor-union slang for economic benefits + -er]: a labor-union officer regarded by fellow unionists as motivated chiefly by self-interest.

—Webster’s Third New International

Dictionary

Chapter 1

They were old hundred-dollar bills, a little limp now, even a little greasy, and one of them had a rip in it that somebody had neatly mended with a strip of Scotch tape. There had been seventy-five of them to begin with, but by the time they reached Truman Goff only fifty were left—fifty one-hundred-dollar bills, $5,000, and exactly the price that Truman Goff had decided to charge that year.

It had taken three weeks for the $5,000 to reach Goff. This was due only in part to the chronic whimsy of the Post Office. The major delay was caused by the five other persons who had dipped into the original $7,500 sum, each taking out two or three and even ten of the bills for himself before resealing what were left and mailing them off to the next address along with the white, three-by-five-inch card that bore the name that was printed with pencil in what most newspapers like to describe as crude block letters.

First stop for the $7,500 and the penciled name had been the fifth-story, one-room office of a fifty-two-year-old private detective in downtown Minneapolis who specialized in what he always described to clients as electronic surveillance. The detective’s name was Karl Syftestad and most of his clients were middle-aged husbands who thought, or just hoped, that Syftestad could slip around and get something on their wives that would hold up in divorce court.

In good years, Syftestad’s agency in the Benser Building netted him about $9,000 that he dutifully reported to the state and federal tax people. He usually managed to make another, unreported nine or ten thousand for arranging what he regarded as introductions.

For $300 he could introduce you to someone who would sell you a new Cadillac or Continental for only $3,500, if you weren’t too concerned about the validity of its Texas title. For beatings, Syftestad charged $500 and always assured customers that the prospective victim “will sure as shit know he’s had a good stompin.” The beatings were administered by a Minneapolis fireman during his off-duty hours. Syftestad and the fireman divided the $500 fee equally.

The letter containing the $7,500 was delivered to Syftestad at 11 A.M. on August 14, a Monday. The only other mail was a junk piece from a wholesale camera dealer in St. Louis that Syftestad read carefully before tossing into his wastebasket. He read all his mail carefully because he didn’t get much.

There wasn’t anything to read in the brown, oblong, manila envelope that contained the $7,500 other than the name penciled on the white card. Syftestad recognized the name and he felt that he should somehow give it its due so he pursed his lips and whistled a couple of notes off-key. Then he counted the money.

It was the seventh time in four years that Syftestad had received a letter like the one that now lay on his desk. The first one that came had contained only $5,000—and a penciled name. It had arrived two days after Syftestad had received a phone call from a man who identified himself as Bill, Just Bill.

“You’re gonna like what I’m gonna tell you,” the man who claimed that his name was Just Bill had said.

“What am I gonna like?”

“We’re gonna let you make a couple of bills every now and then for doing nothing.”

“What’s doing nothing?”

“Doing nothing’s doing nothing. You’ll get an envelope with some money in it. All you gotta do is take out your two bills, find another envelope, and send what’s left along to an address I’m gonna give you. You’ll have to buy your own stamps.”

“That’s all?” Syftestad had asked.

“That’s all. That’s absolutely all. Like I said, it’s for doing nothing.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know—”

“Syftestad.”

“Yeah?”

“We like you. We really do. We don’t wanta see anything happen to you and the reason we chose you is because we think you know how easy it is for something to happen to somebody. Am I getting through?”

“Yeah,” Syftestad had said. “Kind of.”

“Well, that’s fine then. It’s only just sort of playing post office. That’s all it is really.”

“You’re sure that’s all?”

“Why should I lie to you?”

“Why shouldn’t you? Everybody else does.”

The man who called himself Bill had chuckled in a sad, tinny, humorless sort of way, as though he wanted to demonstrate that he knew how to do it. “Well, there’s no funny business on our part and I’m sure that there’s not gonna be any funny business on your part, if you follow me and I think that you do.”

“Uh-huh. I follow you.”

“Okay then, that’s fine. Now you got something to write with?”

“I got something.”

Over the telephone the man who called himself Bill slowly had given Syftestad a name and address in East St. Louis, Illinois. It was a simple address and the name was even simpler, but Bill told Syftestad to read it back twice. When he was satisfied that Syftestad had everything right, Bill had said, “Just one more thing.”

“What?”

“Don’t lose it.”

Then Bill had hung up and Syftestad never heard from him again—except indirectly through the letters that contained the money and the penciled names. The first letter had contained $6,000. The next three rose to $6,500, then to $7,000 where they had remained until the seventh and last letter, which contained $7,500.

Because Syftestad was an ignorant man, the penciled names that the previous six letters contained had meant nothing to him. If he had been an assiduously careful reader of The Minneapolis Tribune, he might have seen, but probably not remembered, one or two or even three of the names during the course of a year, but they would have been buried in short, dull stories from AP or UPI about something fairly high-minded and therefore uninteresting that had happened in Los Angeles or New York or Chicago or Washington.

But Syftestad didn’t read newspapers much anymore, except for an occasional glance at the sports pages. He got whatever news he thought he needed from television, which was where most people got theirs, and the six names that had come across his desk during the past four years were not the kind that made network newscasts.

So Syftestad was content with his ignorance because he was smart enough to believe that he knew why a stranger would entrust him to send large sums of money to an address in East St. Louis. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to see my name written down on one of those little white cards, Syftestad thought, whenever he thought about it at all, which wasn’t often, because there wasn’t enough money in it to think about it often and besides, it was kind of unpleasant, and Syftestad didn’t like to think about anything unpleasant if he could help it, which he usually could.

But the name that was written on the card that now lay before him on his desk meant something because it belonged to a man who hired people to see that it occasionally got on the network newscasts. The people that he hired to do this were fairly successful because the position that the man held was sufficiently important to command some national interest. Not much perhaps, but some.

Syftestad poked the card with his right forefinger. The name on the card meant money, if he could figure the angle. For a moment or two Syftestad grew mildly enthusiastic about the possibilities. The enthusiasm waned when he remembered the man who had called himself Bill over the telephone. You’re not smart enough to figure an angle against people like that, he told himself. You’re just smart enough to play post office. So he sighed, took two one-hundred-dollar bills from the pile in front of him, folded them and put them in his trouser pocket, found an envelope, and used a ball-point pen to print the name and address of the man in East St. Louis, Illinois, the name and address that had been given to him four years ago.

As he dropped the envelope down the mail chute, Karl Syftestad told himself that he would start reading the paper more carefully during the next few weeks. It might be real interesting, he decided, like reading about something that you had something to do with.

Chapter 2

Three days later, on August 17, a Thursday, the envelope that the Minneapolis private detective had dropped in the mail chute was delivered to a corner bar at the intersection of Margate Avenue and Winder Street in East St. Louis, Illinois, which meant that the letter had found its way to the heart of a professionally tough neighborhood in what people who are usually up on such things regard as a professionally tough town.

The corner bar was called just that, The Corner Bar, by its owner and proprietor, Julius C. Eames, who was black, a little over 214 pounds, and who had won the place eight years before in a crap game over in Joplin, Missouri, by making a four the hard way. Eames hadn’t gambled much since, because he was convinced that he had used up whatever luck the Lord had allotted him that night in Joplin when he had walked out of the game with the bar and $5,469 in cash. Now he contented himself with selling a fair amount of Dixie Belle gin, Smirnoff vodka, Thunderbird wine, and Falstaff beer. He also sold quite a bit of Seagram’s Seven, but not much Scotch.

The Corner Bar earned him a living, but not what could be called a good one, so he supplemented his income by helping his customers out with small loans. He lent them $50 on Friday and they paid him back $60 a week later. Eames usually had about $1,500 out on loan and there weren’t many defaulters, partly because most of his customers genuinely appreciated the service and partly because all of them knew about the stickup.

The stickup had happened four years before, just after Eames had received a phone call from the man who called himself Just Bill and who had wanted Eames to provide much the same service that Syftestad had agreed to provide in Minneapolis. Eames had refused, a little curtly. Three days later a tall, slender brown youth had walked into The Corner Bar, aimed a .22 Iver Johnson target revolver at Eames, and demanded money. Eames had nodded thoughtfully and then started around the bar, heading for the slender youth who shot him three times before Eames reached him, took away the .22, and broke the youth’s neck with the edge of his left hand.

When Eames got out of the hospital nine days later he was something of a neighborhood hero. He also received another call from the man called Bill.

“We sorta liked the way you handled that kid we sent around to see you,” Bill had said. “The way we heard it, you done a real neat job.”

“Say you sent him?”

“That’s right. Of course, he was just a kid. We coulda sent around somebody a little older. With a bigger gun. You know what I mean.”

“Uh-huh,” Eames had said. “I do exactly. Maybe you better tell me again just what it is you want me to do.”

So Bill had told him and now Eames, for the seventh time, was concentrating mightily as he sat in the back booth of The Corner Bar and laboriously printed out the name of a man who lived in Buffalo, New York. Eames didn’t bother to read the name that was penciled on the white card.

The man who lived in Buffalo had been born there thirty-six years before and now ran an Italian restaurant that he had inherited from his father, Frank Martelli, who had died in 1959 while sitting peacefully in his living room. The undertaker hadn’t been able to do much with Frank Martelli, because of the way the shotgun pellets had taken away most of his head, so the casket had been closed at the funeral. The younger Martelli, who was called Frank Junior by everyone although his real name was Enrico, took over the restaurant after his father died and because he kept his mouth shut, his father’s former business associates let him alone most of the time.

When Frank Junior got the letter from Eames on August 21, a Monday, he took five of the one-hundred-dollar bills, stuffed them away in a pocket, and quickly placed the remaining sixty-six bills in a brown envelope that he had already addressed to a box number in Jack, Oklahoma. Frank Junior recognized the name that was penciled on the white card and crossed himself. Since the death of his father, he had turned to his religion, becoming almost devout but not so much so that he ever told anyone about the penciled name on the white card, not even his priest.

The post office in Jack, Oklahoma, was in the general store that old man Wimple had owned and run for forty-two years. When the letter from Buffalo, New York, arrived he put it in that new fella’s box. That new fella was using the name Bryan Simpson and he had lived with his wife on a 160-acre farm about nine miles out of Jack for six years now, running a few head of white-faced cattle, but not growing anything except blackjack oaks as far’as most folks could see. Everyone around Jack thought that Simpson’s wife had money because he was sure a shiftless sort and drank a lot to boot. He also looked a little Indian, which—in that part of Oklahoma—was only something to comment on, but nothing to get upset and bothered about.

Simpson didn’t open the letter until he got back to his farm. He counted the money first and put six of the bills aside for himself. He glanced at the white card and grinned when he recognized the name. It was sure going to be something to watch on TV, he thought. After he addressed the envelope and sealed its contents of sixty one-hundred-dollar bills and the white card with the penciled name, he went to the closet and took out a small gray cashbox and unlocked it.

He put the six one-hundred-dollar bills in with the rest of the money in the box, which was what was left from the $126,000 that he had taken from the L Street Branch of the Riggs National Bank all by himself one summer afternoon in Washington a little over six years ago. He then got in his Chevrolet pickup and drove 81 miles to Ft. Smith where he mailed the letter.

From Ft. Smith, Arkansas, the money and the white card flew to Los Angeles where they were delivered on August 29, a Tuesday, to Miss Joan Littlestone who lived in an apartment in the 900 block on Hilldale a block or so down from Sunset. Miss Littlestone was known to be bright, pleasant, and scrupulously fair with customers and employees alike. She supervised six girls and was highly respected in the trade in which she had been engaged, in one capacity or another, for thirty-seven of her fifty-three years. When the man called Just Bill had telephoned her, she had readily agreed to do what he wanted her to do because it was her nature to do what men wanted her to do, no matter how bizarre. The fee of $1,000 per forwarding seemed ridiculously high to her, but she hadn’t questioned it. She had learned long ago that some men liked to pay more than they should; that, in fact, some men liked to be cheated and, as always, Miss Littlestone tried to be accommodating whenever she could and when the risk was low. Or at least not too high.

She took ten of the bills for herself and then carefully printed the name and address of the man who lived in Baltimore on the envelope. She glanced at the card that came with the money, but only the first name that was penciled on it stayed in her memory. Surnames hadn’t proved too useful, or reliable, in Miss Littlewood’s business and she seldom bothered with them.

It took six days for the letter to travel from Los Angeles to Baltimore by air because of a minor mix-up at O’Hare field in Chicago. The letter was waiting for Truman Goff when he arrived at his three-bedroom tract house in West Baltimore after putting in a full day at his job as produce manager of a Safeway store in the inner core of the city where the pilferage rate kept rising at a steady, almost predictable rate.

Goff drove an Oldsmobile Toronado, which was rather fancy for a supermarket produce manager, but not so much so that anyone would wonder where he had got the money. They would ascribe its ownership to self-indulgence and assume that it wasn’t paid for anymore than theirs were paid for and like theirs, probably wouldn’t be until it wore out and Truman Goff would have to see what he could trade it in for.

When Goff got home that Monday evening in early September his ten-year-old daughter, Miranda, was watching television as usual. It was nearly nine o’clock because the Safeway where he worked stayed open until eight.

Goff said how are you to his daughter who replied, hi, Daddy, and he went on into the kitchen and said, what’s new, to his wife as he opened the refrigerator and took out a can of National beer.

“Not much,” his wife said. “You got a letter. It came in the mail today.”

“Who from?”

“I don’t open your mail.”

“I just thought it might be on the outside. A return address.”

“I didn’t see any.”

“Well, where is it?”

“Where the mail always is. On the dining table. When you want to eat?”

“When I finish my beer,” Goff said. “What’re we gonna have?”

“Those pork chops you brought home Saturday. I didn’t put ’em in the freezer so we’d better eat ’em. Pork don’t keep.”

“Yeah, I know,” Goff said, and carrying his beer went from the kitchen into the dining area and picked up the manila envelope. He thought he knew what it was, but he wasn’t sure. It could be a come-on for dirty pictures, he thought. They sometimes send the stuff out in plain envelopes like that, hand-addressed and all.

Goff put the envelope in his hip pocket and went into what his wife called the spare bedroom and what he called the den. It held a studio couch that could be made into a double bed, a maple kneehole desk, his wife’s sewing machine, a small chest of drawers, and a four-shelf bookcase that was filled mostly with paperback westerns except for a big Bible and a three-year-old copy of Who’s Who.

After putting his can of beer down on the desk, Goff opened the letter by ripping the flap with his forefinger. He didn’t smile when he saw the money inside. He counted the fifty one-hundred-dollar bills quickly onto the desk, then folded them once and buttoned them away in his left hip pocket. He looked at the card and then up at the ceiling, mouthing the name silently until he was sure he had it right. He tore the card into tiny pieces and went down the hall to the bath where he flushed the pieces down the toilet.

When he came out of the bath, his wife called to him from the kitchen. “You ready now?”

“In a minute,” he called back.

“It’s gonna get cold.”

“In a minute, goddamnit,” he yelled and went back into the den, took the copy of Who’s Who from the bookcase, turned to the C’s, and read all about the man that he was going to kill.

Chapter 3

Donald Cubbin looked as if he should be president of something, possibly of the United States or, if his hangover wasn’t too bad, of the world. Instead, he was president of an industrial labor union whose headquarters was in Washington and whose membership was up around 990,000, depending on who did the counting.

Cubbin’s union was smaller than the auto workers and the teamsters, but a little larger than the steelworkers and the machinists, and since the first two were no longer in the AFL-CIO just then, it meant that he was president of the largest union in the establishment house of labor.

Cubbin had been president of his union since the early fifties, falling into the job after the death of the Good Old Man who was its first president and virtual founder. The union’s executive board, meeting in special session, had appointed the secretary-treasurer to serve as president until the next biennial election. As secretary-treasurer, Cubbin had spent nearly sixteen years carrying the Good Old Man’s bag. After he was appointed president, he quickly learned to like it and soon discovered that there were a number of persons around who were anxious and eager to carry his bag, and this he particularly liked. So he had held on to the job for nearly nineteen years, enjoying its perquisites that included a salary that had climbed steadily to its present level of $65,000 a year, a fat, noncontributory pension scheme, a virtually nonaccountable expense allowance, a chauffeured Cadillac as big as a cabinet member’s, and large, permanent suites in the Madison in Washington, the Hilton in Pittsburgh, the Warwick in New York, the Sheraton-Blackstone in Chicago, and the Beverly-Wilshire in Los Angeles.

Over the years Cubbin had faced only two serious challenges from persons who wanted his job. The first occurred in 1955 when a popular, fast-talking vice-president from Youngstown, Ohio, thought that he had detected a groundswell and promptly announced his candidacy. The Youngstown vice-president had received some encouragement, but more important, some money from another international union that occasionally dabbled in intramural politics. The fast-talking vice-president and Cubbin fought a noisy, almost clean campaign from which Cubbin emerged with a respectable two-to-one margin and a permanent grudge against the president of the union that had meddled in what Cubbin had felt to be a sacrosanctly internal matter.

Cubbin was a little older in 1961—he was fifty-one by then—when for the second time he detected signs of opposition. This time they came from a man that he himself had hired, the union’s director of organization who, after getting his degree at Brown in economics, took a job as a sweeper in a Gary, Indiana, plant (an experience he still had nightmares about) and who possessed, along with his degree, the conviction that he was destined to be the fore runner of a new and vigorous breed of union leadership, the kind that would be on an equal intellectual footing with management.

Cubbin could have fired him, of course. But he didn’t. Instead he placed a call to the White House. A week later the director of organization was awakened at six-thirty by a call from Bobby Kennedy who told him that the President needed him to be an assistant secretary of state. Not too many people were saying no to the Kennedys in 1961, certainly not the director of organization for Cubbin’s union who was then only thirty-six and terribly excited about being chosen to scout for the New Frontier. Later, when Cubbin had had a few drinks, he liked to tell cronies about how he had buried his opposition in Foggy Bottom. He did an excellent mimicry of both Bobby Kennedy and the director of organization.

Most actors are good mimics and Donald Cubbin probably should have been an actor. His father had been one. So had his mother until their touring company collapsed in Youngstown in 1910. Cubbin’s father took the first job he could get, which was in a steel mill. It was only temporary, until the child was born, but the child, Donald, arrived six months later along with new debts and somehow Bryant Cubbin never did get out of the steel mill, not until he died of pneumonia during a layoff in 1932 when his son was twenty-one years old.

Donald Cubbin was in Pittsburgh when his father died. There weren’t any jobs in Pittsburgh in 1932, or any place else, so Donald Cubbin was attending business school during the day and acting in amateur theatricals at night. When his father died, Cubbin had a lead part in Sidney Howard’s eight-year-old play They Knew What They Wanted. He played Joe, the roving Wobbly.

The amateurs charged 15 cents admission and their audiences were small, partly because 15 cents was a lot of money in 1932 and partly because most of the amateur actors were awful, although they somehow had enough judgment to select fairly well-written plays.

In the small audience that night was Bernie Ling, a twenty-seven-year-old, third-string publicity man for Warner Brothers who was in Pittsburgh to see what kind of free space he could get for a new and terrible film that could lose his studio a lot of money. Ling had only contempt for motion pictures, but he liked plays. They had real people saying real words and Ling could lose himself in the story while still noting with pleasure the nuances of gesture and diction and what he liked to refer to as stage presence.

When the twenty-one-year-old Donald Cubbin strode out onto the stage, Ling stirred in his seat a little. It was not Cubbin’s looks that made him stir. There was a surplus of good-looking youngsters in Hollywood. There always would be. But still, the kid was all right, about six foot tall, not too heavy, maybe 160 or 170, with a hell of a good head of hair, black, straight and thick, and features that a tough chin ransomed from prettiness. He would age well, Ling thought, and then decided that there was still something else, some other quality that had struck him. Not the voice, although it was good, almost too good, a deep, hard baritone equipped with what seemed to be natural projection that rolled it out over the audience. Somebody had taught him that, Ling decided before settling back to watch the play and search for the word that would describe just what it was that the kid had. By the end of the second act Ling thought he knew what it was. Dignity. The kid had dignity, the kind that is usually the small reward of those who at age forty or fifty, having scraped at the bottoms of their souls, survive the revulsion and are never thereafter much dismayed by the awfulness of others.

Whatever it was, Ling thought it was salable so he left the play before the third act was over and took a taxi to the all night Postal Telegraph office and sent a telegram to his uncle who was a producer at Warner Brothers.

“SPOTTED POSSIBLE YOUNG MALE LEAD PITTSBURGH STOP STRONGLY URGE SCREENTEST BERNIE,” the telegram read after Ling and the Postal Telegraph man argued for a while about whether “screentest” was one word or two. They finally agreed that it was one word after Ling gave the man two tickets to the rotten picture that was opening at a downtown theater the following day.

Donald Cubbin didn’t meet Bernie Ling until two days later, after he had returned from his father’s funeral in Youngstown, bringing his mother back with him because she had no other place to go. Between them, Cubbin and his mother had $21.35. He moved her into the room next to his at the boardinghouse and then took the streetcar to the business school where he told Asa Pettigrew, its owner, director, and founder, that he was quitting.

“Can’t you hang on for three weeks until you get your certificate?” Pettigrew asked.

“No, I can’t hang on. I have to get a job.”

“I can’t refund any of your tuition, you know.”

“I know.”

Considerably mollified, Pettigrew said, “Well, I got a call this morning.”

“About what?”

“About a job. They want a male secretary who can do bookkeeping. It’s not a regular company and it might be only temporary and the reason they want a male is that they do a lot of swearing and dirty talking.”

“Where is it?” Cubbin said.

“I don’t know if you want to get mixed up with this bunch. They’re some kind of labor union. Probably reds.”

“I need a job, Mr. Pettigrew.”

“Might not last long.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“They’ll probably be run out of town and you along with them.”

“I’ll have to take that chance.”

“They’re dirty talking. They said so themselves.”

“Fine.”

“Pays twelve-fifty a week.”

“Good.”

Pettigrew handed Cubbin a slip of paper. “You call this man here. Tell him I recommended you.”

“Thanks, Mr. Pettigrew.”

Pettigrew shrugged. “I told ’em they could get a girl for ten bucks who’d put up with their dirty talking, but they said they wanted a man, but that they didn’t want any nance. You know what a nance is, don’t you?”

Cubbin nodded. “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

He got the job, of course. The Good Old Man himself hired Cubbin in the shabby, one-room office that was located in the heart of what they later called Pittsburgh’s golden triangle. “Let’s see what you can do, son,” he said.

Cubbin nodded, sat down in a chair, and took out his pencil and a stenographer’s notebook.

“Dear Sir and Brother,” the Good Old Man began. He was not so old then, not quite forty-five in 1932, but already he dictated his letter as if delivering a short speech to an audience of a thousand or more, reaching his roaring peroration in the next to last paragraph and ending each letter with a heartfelt and whispered “Fraternally yours.”

Cubbin took it all down in Pitman at around eighty words per minute and typed it up on the office L. C. Smith at a steady sixty-five words per minute. After the Good Old Man read it, he looked up at Cubbin and smiled, “I don’t have much education, son, but I’m not stupid. I put a couple of little grammatical errors in on purpose. You took ’em out. Why?”

“They weren’t bad enough to leave in,” Cubbin said.

The Good Old Man nodded. “That’s a pretty fair answer,” he said after a while. “You say you can also keep a simple set of books?”

“Yes, I can do that.”

“All right, you’re hired. Be here tomorrow at eight. You know anything about unions?”

“No.”

“Good. You can learn about ’em my way.”

When Cubbin got back to his boardinghouse to tell his mother that he had landed a job, he found a tall, thin young man waiting for him on the front porch. The tall, thin young man introduced himself as “Bernie Ling of Warner Brothers.”

Cubbin heard the Warner Brothers but discounted it as part of some kind of a sales pitch. “I’m sorry,” he said, starting to brush by Ling, “but I can’t afford one right now.”

“I’m not selling,” Ling said. “I’m making you an offer.”

“Of what?”

“A screen test. In L.A.”

“Bullshit,” Cubbin said and started past Ling again.

“Here,” Ling said, taking a telegram from his pocket. “Read this.”

The telegram was from Ling’s producer uncle, a man who enjoyed some partly manufactured notoriety for his unwillingness to squander words. The telegram read, “BUS FARE ONLY LOVE FISHER.”

“I don’t get it,” Cubbin said.

“Fisher. That’s Arnold Fisher, a producer. My uncle. At Warner Brothers. I’m with their publicity department. I saw you the other night in the play. I wired my uncle and they’re willing to pay your bus fare to L.A, for a test. No shit.”

“You saw me?” Cubbin said, thinking a message to his father: Why did you have to go and die and be out of a job?

“I think you might make it out there,” Ling said. “I mean really make it.”

Cubbin slowly handed back the telegram. “Sorry, but it’s just not possible right now.”

“Christ, all you have to do is get on a bus.”

There was a moment for Cubbin when it was all possible, better than possible, it had all happened, the bus ride, the screen test, the instant fame, and the gigantic salary. He had it all for one impossibly fine moment until he remembered his mother, the new widow, waiting alone upstairs, waiting for the only person she knew in Pittsburgh to come home and tell her how she was going to live for the rest of her life. I’ll send for you, Mother, he thought, but told Bernie Ling, “My father’s just died and I can’t leave my mother.”

“Oh, well, that’s tough. I’m sorry,”

“Maybe later when things get straightened out.”

“Sure,” Ling said. “Here’s my card. When you get things settled drop me a line and we’ll try to work something out.”

“You say you really think there’s a chance?”

“I never wire my uncle unless I think there’s a damn good one.”

“Well, I hardly know how to thank you—”

“Forget it. No, hell, don’t forget it. Drop me a line instead.”

“Sure,” Cubbin said, “I’ll do that. As soon as everything’s settled.”

But he didn’t and six months later Ling left Hollywood for a job with a newly formed New York advertising agency where after a time he grew rich enough to help back a few plays that had depressingly short runs.

As for Donald Cubbin, there wasn’t a day in his life that he didn’t remember his front-porch conversation with Bernie Ling and the decision that he had made. And there wasn’t a day in his life that he didn’t regret it.

The six-place, twin-jet Lear 24 bearing Donald Cubbin and his entourage of four had just left Hamilton, Ontario, and was pointing itself toward O’Hare International in Chicago when Fred Mure, having waited until his boss had finished reading the entertainment section of the newspaper, which was the first section he always read, leaned across to tap Cubbin on the shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Chicago in an hour. Not bad, huh?”

God, he’s an idiot, Cubbin thought. But he nodded and said, Not bad, before surrounding himself with the paper again. It was his second trip to Chicago in less than a month and he would make at least three more trips there before the month was over because he knew that they were going to try to steal it from him, and the best place for them to make their try was in Chicago. It was a town, Cubbin thought, where they were very good at stealing almost anything and where, over the years, they had made a fine craft out of stealing what they would try to steal from him, which was, of course, an election.

Chapter 4

Not too many persons other than those who retained his services knew exactly what it was that Walter Penry did for a living. His wife had some notion, but she spent most of her time by their pool in Bel-Air while Penry spent most of his time traveling, or in Washington, where the headquarters for Walter Penry and Associates, Inc., was located.

Penry had about ten associates but his two principal ones were Peter Majury and Ted Lawson and they knew what he did. At least most of the time. Majury was a planner and manipulator and haunted the corridors of Washington dressed invariably, winter and summer, spring and fall, in a long, belted trench coat that looked as though it had been bought cheap at an Afrika Korps surplus sale. Majury spoke in a tone that was just louder than a whisper and spiced with a slight accent that somebody had once described as Slav Sinister, but which was actually German, the legacy of his parents, both Swabians, who emigrated to New Braunfels, Texas, in the thirties and never bothered to learn English. When he wanted to, Majury could also speak with a grating Texas twang.

Ted Lawson, the other principal associate, was a big, slab-sided man who seemed to gangle as he walked. He was usually all bluff heartiness and employed a loud bray for a laugh because he had decided that that was what people expected from a man of his size who had a bright, beefy complexion and a mouth that nature had turned up merrily at the corners. If one could make a choice about such things, Lawson would have chosen to be a loner, but there wasn’t any money in that so he had become what he was, a man who could fix things for people who needed things fixed. It didn’t matter much what needed doing, Lawson knew somebody who could do it.

What Walter Penry and Associates, Inc., actually specialized in was skulduggery, the kind that stayed just within the law. Walter Penry knew what the law was because he had been given a degree in the subject by the University of Iowa in 1943 although he had never practiced because he had joined the FBI instead, thus avoiding the discomfort of military service while honorably serving his country at a reasonable salary.

Penry had resigned amicably enough from the FBI in 1954 with what he always referred to as a spotless record. The reason that he resigned, at least the reason he gave the FBI, was to go into business for himself, but that was only partly true. The real reason was to conduct a bit of industrial espionage for a cosmetic firm that would, in two months’ time, net him twice what his annual salary was as a special agent working out of Los Angeles.

Using the money that he made from his first industrial espionage assignment as capital, Penry founded his firm with headquarters in Washington and a branch office in Los Angeles, although the branch office at that time consisted of nothing more than his wife and his home telephone. His home now had an unlisted number but, his wife still answered it with, “Walter Penry and Associates.”

Penry knew what kind of business he was after from the first. There were many unpleasant tasks that various organizations needed done and Penry let it be known that he was willing to do them. He had once spent an entire February afternoon in Dallas firing the top management of an electronics firm while its president and founder and major stockholder, who was something of a coward, basked on Sapphire Beach in St. Thomas.

Penry also worked the periphery of politics, for hire to either party, specializing in deep background investigations that would produce information intended to have jolting political repercussions. Thus far his more noteworthy efforts had prevented three prospective cabinet members, two Democrats and a Republican, from being sworn in. Another time he had come up with information, twenty years old but still damaging, that had kept a Supreme Court justice off the bench.

But of all Penry’s clients his favorite was the immensely fat old man who sat across the table from him now, picking disconsolately at a dish of white chicken meat and cottage cheese. The fat old man was Penry’s favorite client for several reasons, not the least of them being that he was the one who paid him his second largest retainer, but the principal one being that Penry considered the old man to be as smart and as realistic as he himself was. Had Penry but known it, the old man considered him to be a bit simple, but the old man thought of nearly everyone that way.