The Porkchoppers

by Ross Thomas

“I’m already doing it,” Indigo Boone said and hung up.

  Harmes went upstairs, got dressed, told his wife to call his lawyer, and to tell anyone else who called that she didn’t know where he was. As he walked out to the plain black Ford with the two detectives, Harmes asked Bauer, “This is costing somebody a bundle. You got any idea how much?”

  Something that looked like anger flicked over Bauer’s face, but it didn’t last. He smiled his tired smile again. “You may be right, Mr. Harmes, this might have cost somebody a bundle, but I’ll tell you something, if you’re real interested.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t a bundle of money.”

  Indigo Boone put down the phone, and moved over to a window, and stared out over the Midway at the gray buildings of the University of Chicago. It was the third call that he had made since talking to Marvin Harmes and he knew there was no use in making any more of them. Whoever rigged this one, he thought, rigged it all the way from the top, the very tip-top, and there ain’t nothing can be done for that boy. He’s just gonna have to sit it out till seven o’clock. They’ll let him go then, after seven. After the polls close.

  In Walter Penry’s Washington office the phone rang at eight-thirty and Penry answered it himself on the first ring. After he said hello he nodded across his desk at Peter Majury. Penry listened for a while and then said, “Well, I certainly appreciate your cooperation, Ron. And be sure to tell the boss that I appreciate it, too. And Ron, if you get the chance, tell him I’d like to arrange a little testimonial dinner for him sometime next month, if he’s got a free date. Thanks again. I’ll be talking to you.”

  Penry hung up the phone and smiled his rogue smile at Peter Majury. “They picked Harmes up half an hour ago. They’ll hold him until seven tonight.”

  “Well,” Majury said, “at least they won’t steal it in Chicago, not without Harmes to coordinate it.”

  Penry nodded. “Can you think of any other mischief we should do?”

  “No,” Majury said, “I think we’ve done it all.”

  Donald Cubbin awakened in the Pittsburgh Hilton the morning of October 15 without a hangover. He even caught himself whistling as he shaved, something that he hadn’t done in months. He had had only two drinks the day before and only three on Sunday. Not even his broken finger bothered him. Maybe I’ll cut it out altogether, he told himself as he patted shaving lotion onto his face. Maybe I don’t need that stuff anymore.

  One other reason for Cubbin’s unusual sense of well-being were the preelection reports that had flowed into his campaign headquarters after his television appearance with Sammy Hanks. They had been encouraging and Cubbin, knotting his tie, stopped halfway through because he had just had a peek into himself and was surprised by what he had found. You really wanted it again, didn’t you? he thought. You still wanted it all, the attention, the comfort, the hangers-on, the waiting elevators, all that crap. But there’s something else. There’s that feeling you sometimes get when they’re all sitting there waiting for you to say it, the yes or the no, because you’re the man they’ve chosen to tell them which is right, yes or no. And some of them who’re waiting for you to say it are smarter, and a lot of them are richer, but none of them can say it except you and that’s really what it’s all about. And either you thrive on it or it scares the shit out of you and you try to hide from it in a bottle of booze. Well, Cubbin thought, giving his face a last admiring glance in the mirror, you don’t have to hide anymore.

  Cubbin enjoyed his thoughts, but he enjoyed the memory of the previous night even more because he had made love to his wife, more or less successfully, at least for him, for the first time in more than seven months and, by God, he was going to lay off the booze today and try it again tonight. That’s what had done it, he decided, the booze. There wasn’t anything wrong with him. Last night hadn’t been bad at all, not for an old crock of sixty-two. Damn near sixty-three, he corrected himself. You might as well start being halfway honest, at least with yourself.

  He came out of the bathroom where he had dressed so as not to disturb Sadie, something that had never concerned him before. She was already awake, but still lying in the bed, smiling at him. “Good morning, lover,” she said.

  “How’re you, sweetie?”

  “I’m just fine. Just fine. A couple of more nights like last night and I’ll feel so wonderful I won’t be able to stand myself.”

  “Well, there’s always tonight,” Cubbin said and winked.

  “Is that a promise?”

  “It’s a promise.”

  “Give us a kiss,” she said and Cubbin bent over the bed and kissed her for a long moment, enjoying it thoroughly.

  “Do you have to go?”

  “I have to go vote.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”

  “We’ll have lunch together though.”

  “Good. Bye, darling.”

  “Bye.”

  Cubbin entered the living room of his suite where the four men waited for him. He looked at them and thought, well, I’m not going to have them hanging around anymore either. Maybe Kelly, though. Kelly’s all right. But not Fred Mure. Fred goes tomorrow. As for Imber and Guyan, they’ll just drift off, no matter what happens.

  “Now,” Cubbin said, smiling brightly and clapping his hands together lightly, “let’s go vote for a good man.”

  “Just wait a couple of minutes, Don,” Fred Mure said, “while I go get the elevator.”

  They left the Hilton and drove south and then west through Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle. Cubbin was in the back between Imber and Guyan. In front was Kelly with Mure at the wheel.

  “Right over there where that new building is,” Cubbin said after a few blocks, “that’s where Old Man Pettigrew’s Business School used to be. He’s the one who got me the job with the union. ‘They do a lot of swearing and dirty talking,’” Cubbin said, in a perfect imitation of the long-dead Pettigrew. “That’s why I got the job, because the old man didn’t think a girl should be around all that cussin.”

  They rode for another three blocks in silence until Cubbin said, “And right over there, where that parking lot is, that’s where the old Sampson Plant used to be before they tore it down. In the summer of thirty-eight I spent forty-one days in that place and God, it was hot. We lived on hot dogs and beans that they used to send up to us in a bucket that we lowered out of the window with a rope. It was a sit-down and the old man sent me in to sit with them and I never spent a more miserable forty-one days in my life. I remember at first that there were a couple of babes that got in at night and took care of anybody who had a quarter, but after a few days they had to lower their price to fifteen cents. Jesus Christ, they were ugly.”

  Cubbin lapsed into silence for a few minutes. Then he said, “God, Pittsburgh’s changed. This used to be one real tough town.”

  “We’re going where it’s still tough, Don,” Imber said.

  “You mean across the river?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah,” Cubbin said, “it’s still pretty grim over there.”

  Across the Monongahela, Fred Mure drove the green Oldsmobile through gray, tired-looking streets. At a red light, a woman of about fifty, dressed in a shapeless brown coat and clutching a six-pack of beer, looked casually into the back seat, and then looked again, a smile brightening her already seamed face. She waved at Cubbin and called, “Hi yah, Don.”

  Cubbin grinned, rolled the window down, leaned over Imber, and called back, “Hi yah, pal.”

  “I’m votin for you today.”

  “Good for you, I’ll need it.”

  “Ah, you’ll win all right.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  The light changed to green and Mure drove on. “Who was that?” Imber asked.

  Cubbin grinned happily. “I haven’t got the vaguest idea.”

  Local Number One’s hall was on a side street, across from a row of two-story buildings that had shops on the ground floor and apartments above. The un
ion hall, built of red brick, was two stories high, and looked as if as little as possible had been spent on its design.

  Outside the hall on the sidewalk, television crews from the three networks were already set up. The elected offi cials of Local Number One waited on the steps for Cubbin as a fairly steady stream of union members filed in and out from the polling booths. The stream was steady because it was in their contract that they got three hours off with pay to vote in their union’s biennial elections.

  The cameras followed Cubbin as he left the car and walked up the steps to shake hands with the local union officials. As he turned from them, an old man of about seventy wearing day before yesterday’s whiskers and a worn gray topcoat stepped up to Cubbin, threw his arms around him, kissed him wetly on the cheek, and in a choked voice said, “God bless you, Don Cubbin, because you’re a good man.”

  Cubbin couldn’t help the tears that came to his eyes. He brushed them away with his left hand and used his right one to shake the old man’s hand. “Thanks, pal,” he said. “Thanks very much.”

  “How much did he cost you, Charlie?” the NBC news man asked Guyan.

  “Fifty bucks,” Guyan said.

  “That’s all right, we’ll still use it.”

  Kelly Cubbin and Fred Mure waited outside together for Cubbin while he voted. Oscar Imber and Charles Guyan chatted with the TV newsmen who had decided that they would get some more film of Cubbin as he came back down the steps.

  “Can I ask you something, Kelly?” Fred Mure said.

  “Sure.”

  “Is your dad mad at me?”

  “Not that I know of. Why?”

  “He’s been acting sort of funny the past couple of days.”

  “How funny?”

  “Well, he’s hardly drinking anything at all.”

  “Don’t you think that’s an improvement?”

  “Yeah, I guess so, but he don’t seem his old self for some reason.”

  “I haven’t noticed.”

  “Maybe I’m just oversensitive.”

  Kelly grinned. “Yeah, Fred, maybe you are.”

  Inside, Cubbin voted without hesitation for himself and his slate, shook some more hands, signed one autograph, and then headed back for the entrance. He paused at the top step to wave at the cameras and then started down them slowly.

  The first bullet hit him in the shoulder and a moment later the second went into his stomach, ricocheted off something, and lodged finally in his right lung. He started to fall, but caught himself, and managed to stagger down another step, thinking only: This can’t be happening. Not to you.

  And then because he knew he had to fall, he thought: Do it right. Do it like Cagney used to do it. Then the pain hit again and he went down, folding up first, then unfolding, then turning, and finally sprawling face-up on the sidewalk, eyes open and staring right up into the turning cameras.

  Kelly was the first one to reach him. Cubbin looked up into his son’s strained face and he knew that he had to say something, something that the kid could keep, but the only thing that he could think of to say was something that represented nearly forty years of regret, but it was all that he could think of, except for a mild curiosity about how he would look on television that night. So he said it, the two words that made up the name that symbolized the might-have-been world of Donald Cubbin.

  “Bernie … Ling,” Cubbin said and then he died.

  There was shouting now, and a little panic, and some shoving, and even a few screams, but Kelly ignored it all as he knelt by his father, weeping, until Oscar Imber took him by the arm and helped him up.

  “Is he dead, Kelly?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Did he say something there—right at the last?”

  They had the microphones stuck in front of Kelly’s face now as the cameras objectively recorded the grief that was his face. “What did your father say—was it a name?” one of the TV newsmen asked, hating himself for doing it.

  Kelly nodded. “It was a name.”

  “Can you tell us what it was?”

  “Sure,” Kelly said as he tried to choke back the tears. “Rosebud.”

  27

  At the sound of the first shot, Fred Mure whirled around in a crouch. His eyes swept the street, found nothing, but when the second shot came his ears told him where to look and his gaze moved up to the roof of the two-story building across the street.

  He thought he saw a blurred, shiny motion on the roof, but it disappeared before he could make sure. He felt that he should do something so he raced across the street, tugging the .38 Chief’s Special from its hip pocket holster. A car, coming fast from his right, slammed on its brakes and squealed to a stop, but not before its right bumper grazed Mure’s leg. The car’s white-faced driver pounded his horn and screamed, “Stupid bastard!” but Mure didn’t hear him. He didn’t even know that he had been hit.

  To the right was a narrow passageway where they kept the garbage cans. It ran between two buildings back to an alley. Mure tore down it, but slowed and then stopped when he reached its end. It was not training, but instinct that made Mure peer cautiously around the corner of the building. In his right hand was the revolver that he had carried for three years, but had fired a mere dozen times, and then only at tin cans. Cubbin had always made fun of him for carrying it and once, when drunk, had even tried to take it away from him. Boy, he wouldn’t make fun of me now, Mure thought as he squatted down and peeked around the corner of the building into the alley.

  He saw the back of a blue Toronado with Maryland plates. It was parked next to a steel fire escape. The Toronado’s engine was running and traces of blue smoke escaped from its exhausts in steady gasps. Its left-hand door was open.

  When Mure heard the clatter of leather shoes on the steel steps of the fire escape, he jerked his head back around the corner. You gotta look, he told himself. You got to make yourself look. He edged the right side of his face around the building’s corner until one eye could see the man who clattered down the fire escape, taking two and even three steps at a time. The man wore white, transparent plastic gloves and carried a rifle in his left hand.

  I seen him before, Mure thought. I seen him and Don somewhere together before. Mure had a phenomenal memory for faces, home numbers, dates, names, and addresses, but he could seldom recall yesterday’s weather because, to him, it was totally useless information.

  In Chicago, he remembered, at night, in the Sheraton-Blackstone lobby after that $43.85 dinner we had at Gino’s. He was the weasel sitting there in the lobby and Don said “hi yah” to him and he said “hi” back.

  As Truman Goff raced down the fire-escape steps he rehearsed his next moves in his mind. Rifle in the trunk, slam the lid hard, into the car, straight ahead, turn right, go two blocks, turn left and keep straight on. In five minutes, maybe five and a half he would be on the highway that led to Wheeling, West Virginia.

  That first shot had gone high, Goff told himself, remembering how he had forced the second one, willing his finger to squeeze the trigger of the Remington .308 that he had stolen from a parked car in Miami. But the second shot had been all right; it had killed him. Goff wasn’t sure how he knew about the second shot but he knew. He always knew.

  Goff trotted to the rear of the Toronado and lifted the trunk lid that he had left carefully unlocked. He put the rifle under an old blanket, slammed the lid, and then froze when the voice behind him said, “Hey, you.”

  He must have a gun, Goff thought. He’s gotta have a gun. You can either try for the car or you can try the other. Goff decided to try the other. His right hand moved quickly to his belt and pulled the .38 Colt Commander free, but held it hard against his belly.

  Now, he thought and whirled quickly, but before he turned all the way around the bullet slammed into his right thigh and knocked him back against the car.

  Why don’t he fall down? Fred Mure thought as he watched the thin, intense man slowly bring the automatic up. Why don’t he fall down? I hit hi
m. When you hit ’em they’re supposed to fall down.

  Goff didn’t recognize the man who stared at him from only ten feet away. He felt the pain in his leg, but it didn’t bother him. Truman Goff could ignore pain the way some people ignore Christmas. He brought the automatic up and was squeezing its trigger when Fred Mure’s second shot struck Goff’s right shoulder, throwing his aim off. Mure fired again and this time Goff crumpled to his knees with a bullet in his left side just below the heart. Goff tried to lift the automatic again, to aim and fire it at the man once more, but it had grown too heavy. All he could do was lift his head and watch the man walk slowly toward him.

  Fred Mure and Truman Goff stared at each other for ten seconds of long silence and during that time they exchanged life histories, agreed on at least one major philosophical point, and then with considerable mutual regret on both sides, agreed to part.

  So in a back alley in Pittsburgh Truman Goff bowed his head and into it Fred Mure fired two bullets.

  28

  Three days after it impounded the ballot boxes, the U.S. Department of Labor retained the Honest Ballot Associa tion to count the votes in the election contest between Donald Cubbin and Samuel Morse Hanks.

  Nearly 65 percent of the union’s members had bothered to vote and on October 23, a Monday, the results were announced by the Secretary of Labor: Cubbin, 316,587; Hanks, 317,132; Void 5,941. The wags around the department agreed that Void would have had a better chance if his campaign hadn’t peaked so soon.

  The FBI had been called in to investigate the circumstances surrounding Cubbin’s death on the grounds that there was some possibility that his civil rights might have been violated. The Pittsburgh police ruled that Truman Goff, deceased, was guilty of murder one and closed the case. Manslaughter charges against Fred Mure were quietly dropped.

  The day after the election results were announced, Sammy Hanks moved into Cubbin’s vacated office. Hanks’s first official action was to appoint Marvin Harmes to the newly created post of “special assistant to the president,” which meant that Harmes would now be earning $37,500 a year instead of $30,000.