The Porkchoppers

by Ross Thomas

  It took him longer to get an in with the blacks. But after his partner discovered that Kelly wasn’t interested in splitting what little juice the neighborhood provided, things got better. His partner was Private R. V. Emerson, a black, sad, tough cop with five kids who passed the word that Kelly was about half human and nobody had better mess with him.

  The people in the neighborhood never trusted Kelly completely, but they slowly accepted him, and some of them even liked him—as much as they could ever like any cop. And after a while they began to turn to him with some of their problems because they found that his advice was usually sound and it was always free. And finally he became the neighborhood’s unofficial ombudsman, which was as close as he ever got to becoming what he wanted to be, the village wise man.

  He liked it. He even liked being pure cop but not well enough, at least not well enough to satisfy the annual review and evaluation board, one of whose members asked him: “You know what they call you, Cubbin?”

  “Who?”

  “The guys you work with. They call you Mother Cubbin. Now what do you think of that?”

  “Not much.”

  “It don’t bother you?”

  “No,” Kelly said, “it doesn’t bother me.”

  “Do you really like being a cop, Cubbin? I mean really like it?”

  “I like it very much. Why?”

  “Because you sure don’t act like a cop.”

  Three days later he was placed on what they called administrative leave. Only a few of the residents of the neighborhood back of the Hilton ever asked Private R. V. Emerson what had happened to his ex-partner, “You know, that white kid cop who was always stickin his nose in other folks’s business.”

  It was eleven o’clock in the morning and Kelly Cubbin sat in a chair and drank coffee and watched his father sleep. He had been watching him for nearly a quarter of an hour and thinking: at least you don’t hate him. Whether you love him or just pity him probably isn’t too important. You’ve come to know his posturing and his playacting and what they cover up. My father, my elder brother who fell in love with the sound of applause at an early age and spent the rest of his life looking for it in all the wrong places. I didn’t fly up here to be consoled by you because the only way you can offer that is from the depths of your checkbook. I flew up here because the village got rid of its wise man who wasn’t quite smart enough to hold on to his job. Do you need a wise man, chief?

  Donald Cubbin rolled over in his bed and groaned. He was awake and wishing that he weren’t. He had to make it to the bathroom and vomit, but it seemed too far away. A mile too far.

  “You awake, chief?” Kelly said.

  “Kelly?”

  “Right here.”

  Cubbin groaned again. “I’m dying, son.”

  “Let me help you up.”

  Kelly helped his father to sit up on the edge of the bed. “Little queasy?”

  Cubbin nodded, not trusting himself to speak. “Can you make it to the john?” Kelly said.

  Cubbin pushed himself up from the bed. He weaved toward the bathroom almost staggering. He made it to the toilet just as it came up, great wet gobs of it. Cubbin hated the mess that his stomach rejected but he forced himself to look at it because he knew that the sight of it would make more come up and the quicker that happened, the better he would feel.

  When he came out of the bathroom a few minutes later he was pale and shaky but the nausea seemed to have gone.

  “I’ve got a little medicine for you, chief,” Kelly said and handed his father a tall glass that contained a thick, white liquid. Cubbin took the glass with both hands and raised it to his mouth where its rim clattered against his teeth before he got the first swallow down.

  The drink was part cream, part brandy, part crème de menthe, two raw eggs, and a jigger of vodka. It was Fred Mure’s invention and after he drank half of it, Cubbin eased himself down into a chair and leaned back, waiting for the alcohol to make it stop hurting.

  After a few moments he took another cautious swallow and sighed. That was better. The shakes were going. The queasiness had departed. He looked at his son. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came in last night.”

  “Did I—uh—”

  “We talked a little and you went to bed.”

  Cubbin nodded. “I don’t remember.”

  “You’d had a few.”

  “I remember that goddamned TV program though.”

  “I heard about that this morning.”

  Cubbin finished the rest of his drink. “Where’s the other one?” he said. “I need two.”

  Kelly crossed to the dresser, picked up the other drink that Fred Mure had provided, and handed it to his father. “It’s none of my business, but you’re hitting it a little hard these days, aren’t you?”

  “Well, you saw me last night. And this morning. There’s no reason to lie to you.”

  “I just thought I’d mention it.”

  Cubbin shrugged. He was feeling better. Much better. “I’d be an ass to say that I can handle it so I’ll just say that I can make it. Just barely. It’s not this bad every day. Not quite. Not yet anyhow.”

  “It’s your liver.”

  “That’s right, kid, it’s my liver. What’re you doing here anyway?”

  “I got fired.”

  Cubbin looked at his son. Be careful now, he told himself. Don’t say it wrong. “You did, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “A little.”

  “You want it back?”

  “My job?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What happened?”

  “They didn’t much care for my attitude. My arrest record wasn’t too good. Little things like that.” Kelly grinned. “It’s not important.”

  “Do you think you did a good job?”

  “I think so, but they don’t, and that’s what matters.”

  “No it doesn’t, kid. If you think you did a good job, that’s all that matters. Take it from me.”

  “Sure, chief.”

  “Got any plans?”

  “No. Not really.”

  Cubbin’s mind worked swiftly. It could still do that for about twenty minutes a day when the alcohol had dulled the pain but not the mind. He sometimes told himself that twenty minutes were all anybody needed. Most people don’t think for even five minutes a day, so if you really make use of the time, you’re a quarter of an hour ahead of almost everybody else.

  “I got an idea, kid.”

  “What?”

  “Well, this election’s going to be just a little bit—uh— shitty, you know?”

  “I think so.”

  “I could use you.”

  “To do what?”

  “Oh, sort of follow me around and remember what’s said and what’s not said.”

  “I thought Fred did that.”

  “Fred’s not smart enough for some of these deals. That’s one. Two is they won’t let him sit in on some of them. But nobody can object to my son and something tells me that I might need a witness.”

  “You’re in trouble?”

  Cubbin finished the second drink before he answered. Do it just right, he told himself. Underplay it. He nodded at his son and said, “That’s right; I’m in a little trouble.”

  “Do you really need me, chief, or are you just bullshitting me?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re bullshitting me,” Kelly said, “but I’ll do it anyway.”

  14

  Indigo Boone, the man who knew how to steal elections, lived in a third-story, six-room apartment on Sixtieth Street just across the Midway from the University of Chicago. It was still called the Midway because that’s what it had been when they had held the World’s Columbian Exposition there back in 1893. Later the city had turned it into a park of sorts with a bridle path and for a time they had even flooded sections of it in winter to form ice-
skating rinks.

  But all that had been a long time ago when the neighborhood had been one of the choicer places to live in Chicago, much favored by intellectuals who liked the university atmosphere. Now it was just another black neighborhood that was not quite yet a slum.

  But Indigo Boone kept his place up nice because he owned the building and he thought he should set an example for other landlords. Boone had bought the building in 1946 with money that he had made in the Manila black market. He had bought it through a white attorney because the people who had owned it then would have refused to sell to a black. But all that was more than a quarter of a century ago and Boone had been living in his own apartment in his own building for nearly fifteen years now.

  He was not a man who liked to move much. He had been born in New Orleans in 1921 and had grown up in the French Quarter on Dauphine Street where he had had to hustle if he wanted to survive without resorting to steady work. He most probably would still be in New Orleans if he hadn’t been drafted in early 1942 and assigned to a black quartermaster outfit that ended the war in Manila with Boone as its top sergeant.

  He had made money, a lot of it, on the Manila black market just after the war ended and before the records could get straightened out, selling truckloads of cigarettes, blankets, powdered eggs, Spam, and sometimes even the trucks themselves.

  When he had returned to the States he had headed for Chicago because he had it on what he considered to be good authority that the economic, political, and social climate there would be to the liking of a man of his tastes and ability. Chicago hadn’t disappointed Indigo Boone any more than it had ever disappointed any of the hard, fast, smart hustlers who flocked to it.

  Boone had started small in Chicago, first investing a fair amount of capital in several white-occupied apartment buildings, including the one on Sixtieth Street, and then buying into a small construction company. Boone knew little or nothing about the construction business, but he knew almost all there was to know about payoffs and bribes and kickbacks and so his business began to flourish with the collective blessing of various city employees who bought new cars or had their kids’ teeth straightened thanks to Boone’s generosity.

  Indigo Boone also went into politics, starting small and mildly meek at the precinct level and gradually working his way up the Democratic party ladder, largely by doing those onerous chores that nobody else wanted to fool with, until he was now something of a minor power with excellent connections downtown.

  Prior to 1960 Boone had helped steal a few elections, but it had been mostly minor stuff that had involved no more than sending some extra Democratic state legislators down to Springfield. But on the night of the election of 1960 the word came down to Boone that they would need a few additional Kennedy votes. Boone had found them here and there, doing what he regarded as no more than his usual workmanlike job. But as the night wore on, additional word came down that more and more Kennedy votes were needed, that in fact a whole raft of them was needed, that indeed a deluge of Chicago Kennedy votes was desperately needed to offset the downstate trend.

  Boone found them. At least he found a lot of them and some said most. He invented new ways to filch precincts right out from under the noses of the Republican poll watchers. He improvised foolproof means of inflating the actual Democratic vote. He fell back on time-honored methods and voted the lame, the sick, the halt and the dead. He even, some said, managed to corrupt the voting machines themselves. He sped from polling place to polling place that night and early morning in a squad car, its siren moaning hoarsely, its top light flashing, giving counsel, advice, and instructions to the party faithful and buying what was needed from those who were not so faithful, peeling off fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills from a roll that one prejudiced observer later claimed was “as big as a big cantaloupe.”

  Afterward, there were those partisans who claimed that Boone’s efforts had saved the nation from Richard Nixon, at least for a while. Illinois went Democratic by 8,858 votes out of the 4,746,834 that were cast for the two major parties. “Well,” Indigo Boone had said later, “when they called up and told me they needed some more Kennedy votes, why I just scurried around and got them some more, about nine thousand more, if I recollect right.”

  Boone’s stock shot up enormously downtown after the election and three weeks later he even got a letter from John Kennedy that warmly thanked him for “your in valuable efforts on my behalf.” Boone had the letter framed and hung it on his living-room wall and never failed to point it out to visitors when they came calling, even if they had already seen it a dozen times.

  Marvin Harmes had never seen the Kennedy letter because he had never been in Indigo Boone’s home before. So after the two had formally shaken hands, and the letter had been pointed out to Harmes, he had read it carefully, every word, because he felt that Boone might test him on it. While he read it Harmes felt Boone’s eyes on him as they took in his ivory silk double-breasted suit with its twelve imitation black pearl buttons, his Sea Island cotton shirt with its tiny black and white checks, his knit black silk tie, and his ankle-high black calf boots that were so highly polished that they gleamed like patent leather.

  Machine written and machine signed, Harmes thought as he read the letter for the third time, but I’m sure as hell not going to tell Mr. Indigo Boone that. Instead, he turned slowly from the letter and said, “Now that’s really something. You must be mighty proud of that, Mr. Boone.”

  Boone knew that the letter had been written by one machine and signed by another, but it served its purpose. It made some people think that he was a bit naïve, even simple, and that sometimes made them a little careless in their dealings with him and if they were, it usually could be worked to his advantage.

  “Well, when I was just a raggedy-ass kid growin up in New Orleans, I sure didn’t think I’d ever get a letter from the President of the United States of America.”

  Harmes nodded understandingly, but thought, Don’t try to torn me, man. You wouldn’t really give a shit if that letter was signed by Jesus Christ himself, unless you could figure on making a quarter out of it. “I met his brother a couple of times,” Harmes said as casually as he could, thus establishing his own connection with the nation’s departed royalty.

  “He was a good man.”

  “A good man,” Harmes agreed solemnly.

  “Well, let’s make ourselves comfortable,” Boone said, indicating a chair after deciding that Brother Harmes sure as hell don’t give nothing away for free. He moved over to a closed mahogany cabinet and turned to look back at Harmes. “I’m going to have a little refreshment. You care for something sociable?”

  Before Harmes could answer, Boone pressed a button and the top of the cabinet moved up and folded itself back revealing a wet bar with a sink, a small refrigerator, a couple of dozen bottles, and a variety of glasses.

  Nice trick, Harmes thought. I’m impressed just like I oughta be. “Scotch on the rocks,” he said.

  “That’s my drink, too,” Boone said although he preferred bourbon.

  While Boone mixed the two drinks, Harmes took in the room. It was worth a look, he decided, because a vast sum and much time had been spent in an attempt to give it a look of rich, quiet elegance. The room had been done in black and soft shades of brown that ranged from creamed coffee to cinnamon to dark amber. The ceiling was painted a light tan and the walls were covered with a faint brown material that was patterned in raised, dark brown fleurs-de-lis that looked like plush, brown plush, if there is such a thing, Harmes thought. Two black leather couches of an indeterminate, but comfortable design flanked the fireplace whose ornate mantel had been carved out of brown marble. Or maybe it’s just painted wood, Harmes thought. If he got hold of the right Italians, they can do things to wood that would make you swear it was marble.

  The three windows that faced out over the Midway were draped in dark brown velvet and the windows themselves had fringed, pale tan shades that were drawn half way down. Above the fireplace
was a large sepia sketch of a New Orleans street scene in the French Quarter. There were some other chairs covered in tobacco browns that were carefully placed so as to make conversation easy. Against one wall was a dark walnut table that Harmes thought was probably an antique. It held a copper vase that contained some thoughtfully arranged chrysanthemums whose shade almost exactly matched the vase that held them.

  And in one corner, all by itself, next to the door that led to the rest of the apartment, was the Kennedy letter in its plain black frame. That letter’s the only white thing in the room, Harmes thought. I do think Mr. Indigo Boone is trying to tell me something.

  As Boone came toward him with the drinks, Harmes could see why his parents had named him Indigo. He’s sure one black nigger, Harmes thought, and if black is beautiful, he must be the most gorgeous thing in town.

  Boone was black, as black as ebony and just as smooth except for his short, kinky hair that had turned dove gray on top and nicely white at the sides. He was a big man who was a little surprised to find himself gray and running to fat now that he was just past fifty. But he covered his stomach up with double-breasted vests and Harmes, who knew a lot about clothes, estimated that the beautifully cut gray worsted suit that Boone wore could have cost no less than $400. I’m gonna have to ask him who did it for him, Harmes decided. I might not ask him anything else, but I’m sure gonna ask him that.

  “I was just thinking,” Boone said as he handed Harmes his glass, “I was just thinking that it’s funny we never ran into each other before.”

  “We don’t socialize much,” Harmes said. “Whenever I’m not traveling the wife and I sort of like to stay home.”

  Boone nodded his understanding. “Well, the older you get the less you mix and mingle, I spect. Of course, if you’re into politics, then you almost have to get out and move amongst ‘em. And I do believe you wanted to see me about something that’s got to do with politics?”

  Well, he led into it smooth enough, Harmes thought as he nodded yes and then took a swallow of his drink, automatically noting that the Scotch probably cost twelve dollars a fifth, at least that.