At the Sheraton Mure jumped out of the cab and pushed through the revolving door. Waiting in the lobby was a group of five men. One of them stepped forward, but Mure waved him back. “Wait right there, Phil. He’ll be here in five or six minutes.”
“We just wanta see him for a minute.”
“You can see him upstairs.”
“Appreciate it, Fred.”
But Mure was already heading for the bell captain’s desk. The captain rose quickly when he looked up and saw Mure.
“How are you, Jimmy?” Mure said.
“Fine, Fred, and you?”
“Keeping me on the run.”
“What’ll you need?”
Mure looked at his watch and then pointed at the bank of elevators. “Give me number one and number two in five minutes.”
“Right. How many bags?”
“Need a couple of boys.”
“You’ve got ’em. Staying long?”
“A few days. I’ll take care of you later.”
“Sure, Fred.”
Mure moved away from the bell captain and stationed himself in the lobby where he could keep an eye on both the elevators and the revolving door. He also let his gaze wander about the lobby, mentally classifying its occupants. No nuts, he thought. Just people.
The captain had summoned four of his bellhops who nodded as he gave them instructions. “Cubbin’s due in about three minutes. You two get on the door. You two bring number one and two down and hold them. Just like always.”
The four bellhops nodded and moved toward the elevators and the revolving door. Five minutes later the green Cadillac bearing Donald Cubbin pulled up at the hotel entrance. The uniformed doorman jumped for it. Cubbin was first out followed by the vice-president and the other two members of the Chicago reception committee. From the blue Oldsmobile came Oscar Imber, Charles Guyan, and John Horton, the minor union official. Before Cubbin had made it to the revolving door the bellhops had already gathered the bags from the two cars.
Cubbin was first inside the lobby, his long, double-breasted raincoat open and flapping, a cigar clenched between the white teeth of his smile, his eyes restlessly moving from side to side searching for anyone who deserved a wave or a nod or a hi-ya, pal. When he saw the group of five men he winked and jerked his head toward the elevators, not breaking his long stride.
“Number one, Don,” Mure murmured as Cubbin flashed past him. The idlers and loafers in the lobby had turned to watch the entrance that had now swelled into a small procession.
“Who is it?” an idler asked a loafer.
“Lorne Greene,” the loafer said, not wanting to seem stupid.
“Who’s that?”
“Pa Cartwright. On TV. You know, on ‘Bonanza.’”
“Oh, yeah. I thought it looked like him.”
Cubbin entered the elevator swiftly, Mure just behind him. Well schooled, the bellhop who was piloting the automatic car turned the key, closing the door.
“Stop on six, Carl,” Mure said.
“Right, Mr. Mure,” the bellhop said.
The elevator stopped at six, but the doors didn’t open. The bellhop kept his face carefully to the front of the car as Mure handed Cubbin one of the now opened half-pints of Ancient Age. Cubbin tipped the bottle up and swallowed greedily. Then he handed it back to Mure who told the bellhop, “Okay, let’s go,” and slipped the bottle back into his coat pocket.
Donald Cubbin closed his eyes and sighed appreciatively as he felt the whiskey go to work.
7
Truman Goff, who had looked up the man he was going to kill in Who’s Who, had three weeks’ vacation coming from the Safeway store in Baltimore and he arranged to take one week of it during the second week in September and the other two weeks beginning October 9, a Monday.
The manager of the Safeway wasn’t surprised at Goff’s request because his produce manager always took his vacation at odd times and actually it made things easier because Goff was always there during the summer to fill in when others were away on vacation.
Goff’s decision to take his vacation so late in the year was no surprise to his family either. For the past three years, since their daughter had turned seven, the Goffs had vacationed separately. His wife had returned in July from a three-week tour of Europe which had cost Goff $995 plus the $300 he had given her to buy stuff with. His daughter had spent six weeks of the summer at a Methodist camp in Pennsylvania, just as she had done the previous two summers while her mother had taken packaged tours to Hawaii the first year and to Mexico the second. Now whenever she and her husband watched television together, which wasn’t often, and a foreign city was shown, Mrs. Goff usually said, “I been there,” even if she hadn’t, which irritated Goff who had never been out of the States and had no desire to go. But his wife’s “I been there” still irritated him which, of course, was why she said it.
Truman Goff’s wife wasn’t sure where her husband got the money to pay for her tours. He said he played the horses with a scientific system, but she didn’t believe it. Still, for the past three or four years he always seemed to have plenty of money and as long as he spent some of it on her she wasn’t going to worry about where it came from.
When Goff came home after arranging his vacation he told his wife, “I’m gonna take a week off starting Monday.”
“Where you going?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Florida.”
“It’s still hot down there.”
“I like it hot. I’ll leave you the car.”
“You’d better leave me some money, too.”
“Yeah, well, here’s four hundred. You can buy the kid some new clothes for school.”
Goff handed his wife four one-hundred-dollar bills. They were old, well-used bills and one of them had a rip in it that someone had neatly mended with a strip of Scotch tape.
“Well, have a good time,” his wife said, putting the money away in her purse.
“Yeah, sure,” Goff said and started carefully turning through The New York Times.
“What’re you reading that for?” his wife said.
“They got a better racing section than the Sun,” Goff said, stopping on page 13 because it contained a one-column headline that read:
Donald Cubbin’s second wife was waiting for him when he eventually made it to his four-room, two-bath suite on the Sheraton-Blackstone’s twelfth floor. Cubbin hadn’t seen his wife in three days, but they greeted each other as if it had been a couple of years.
“How’s my darling little girl?” Cubbin said, booming the words out as he wrapped his arms around his wife and picked her up about three or four inches off the floor before he set her back down and kissed her wetly on the mouth.
“Honey, it seems months,” his wife said, smiling up at him with the handsome teeth that a Beverly Hills dentist had capped for $1,700.
“How’ve you been, sweetie?” Cubbin said, taking off his raincoat.
“Fine, darling, but I missed you so much.”
“I missed you, too, honey.”
It went on like that for a while, the terms of endearment punctuating every phrase. Fred Mure stood a little back from the couple, smiling as he watched them greet each other.
Oscar Imber and Charles Guyan had also come into the room and they tried to avoid looking at what Imber called “The Don and Sadie Show.” But there was nothing else to look at and after a while both men watched with a certain amount of detachment as the couple exchanged endearments and traded some more wet kisses that involved what Guyan thought of as “too much tongue work.”
Cubbin’s first wife had died seven years before, leaving him with their only child, a nineteen-year-old son, and a surprisingly dim memory of a vague, shy woman who had been a vague, shy girl when he had married her when she was nineteen and he was twenty-four.