by Ross Thomas
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.
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.
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 Brau
nfels, 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.”
