When Cloke was through talking he turned and walked down the sidewalk toward his car. He was a little over two hundred feet away when Truman Goff stepped out from behind his own car, lifted the rifle, aimed, and shot Bruce Cloke three times, twice before he even hit the ground. Then Goff got in his car, made a U-turn, and sped back toward East Baltimore.
When he arrived home, he turned on the TV set and started to clean his rifle.
“That didn’t take long,” his wife said. “I thought you was gonna be gone all day.”
“One of the guys I was supposed to see couldn’t make it,” Goff said.
“I thought you cleaned that thing yesterday,” his wife said.
“I didn’t do too good a job.”
“Well, can I use the car this afternoon? I gotta go shopping.”
“Sure, go ahead and use it.”
When the telephone rang at three-seventeen that afternoon, there was no one in the apartment but Goff who was sprawled in a living-room chair reading a Max Brand western. After Goff picked up the phone and said hello, a man’s voice said, “This is Bill.”
“Bill who?”
“Just Bill.”
“I don’t know any Bill.”
“Too bad about old Bruce Cloke and how he got shot up and killed this morning, isn’t it?”
“Yeah?” Goff said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I guess you’re sorry about that nigger down in Richmond, too.”
I shoulda killed that son of a bitch down in Virginia before he could talk to anybody, Goff thought. I should’na waited. I shoulda killed him the same night I shot the nigger.
“Whaddya want?”
“Well, Truman, I think you and me can do a little business.”
“I ain’t got any money, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Oh, I don’t want any money from you. I wanta give you some.”
“For doing what?”
“For doing the same thing you did out on Saracen Street this morning — and what you did down in Richmond day before yesterday.”
“I ain’t interested.”
“Well, the Richmond cops would be mighty interested in you. But not as much as the Baltimore cops. All you did was shoot a nigger down in Richmond. But still, they’d be mighty interested.”
“You said something about money.”
“That’s right, I did.”
“How much money you talking about?”
“Thirty-five hundred to begin with. Interested?”
“Go on.”
“Well, that’s all. You’ll get the money in the mail along with a name. All you gotta do then is take care of the name just like you took care of that nigger and old Bruce. You also might have to do a little traveling.”
“How many times I gotta do this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe once a year. Maybe twice.”
“What’s the catch?”
“There’s no catch. All you gotta do is make sure the job is done within two months after you get the letter with the money and name. That’s all.”
“There must be some kind of catch.”
“Well, if you don’t do it, there will be. You understand what I mean.”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“Well?”
“Well, what the hell do you want me to say? I ain’t got any choice, do I?”
“No, Truman, you don’t. You don’t have any choice at all. You’ll be getting a letter in the next couple of weeks or so.”
“Can I ask you one question?”
“Sure,” the man who called himself Just Bill said.
“Have you got a moustache and gray hair that’s sorta wavy on the side?”
The man who said his name was Just Bill didn’t answer. He hung up instead.
13
Kelly Cubbin had been born in 1945, three months after V-J Day, and one of his earliest memories was of the CIO convention that he had attended in 1951 and of going with his father to the hotel room of a man with wavy, dull, red hair and twinkling eyes who had given him some orange juice. Kelly remembered the orange juice because the man had squeezed it himself from some oranges that he had bought from a supermarket that was close to the convention hotel. Kelly also remembered that the man had kept squeezing a black rubber ball in his left hand over and over again. Years later, whenever he saw the redheaded man on television, Kelly remembered the orange juice and how much he had admired the man for having had his own oranges in his hotel room.
Kelly was born in Pittsburgh, but he had grown up in Washington after his father’s union moved its headquarters there in 1951. He had lived in Northwest Washington in a house that Donald Cubbin had bought at a bargain from a defeated U.S. senator from Washington state. The house was almost new at the time and was in Chevy Chase and Kelly’s mother had died in it in 1965 when Kelly was in his senior year at the University of Wisconsin.
Kelly didn’t see too much of his father when he was growing up and attending Lafayette School on Broad Branch Road and Alice Deal Junior High and Woodrow Wilson Senior High, graduating from the last when he was still sixteen years old. Kelly remembered his mother as a quiet, shy woman who looked after his clothes, and smiled at his report cards, and gave him books, and tried to spoil him a little, and cooked wonderful dinners, mostly for the two of them because his father was seldom home until late. She had died as quietly as she had lived, in bed alone, except for a copy of the poems of Rupert Brooke.
His father, not knowing too much about children, had always treated Kelly more as a contemporary than as a child, usually assuming that Kelly had the judgment and resources of a grown man. In that way Donald Cubbin escaped much of the responsibilities that go with fatherhood and his son grew up regarding his father as an elder and often errant brother. It was a relationship that made Kelly mature a bit more quickly than most children but it had also helped prevent Donald Cubbin from ever growing up — at least all the way.
When he graduated from Wisconsin in 1965 with a degree in English literature, Kelly, not much wanting to go to Vietnam, had joined the war on poverty’s domestic Peace Corps, a draft haven whose overly precious acronym was VISTA, for Volunteers in Service to America. VISTA assigned him and three other volunteers, two white youths and a black girl, to a small unincorporated Negro community just outside of Anniston, Alabama. The community was what the professional experts on poor folks at the Office of Economic Opportunity referred to as a rural poverty pocket. Three months after the VISTA volunteers arrived, whatever natural leadership the community might have had abdicated in favor of the young people and Kelly found himself serving as the black community’s unofficial mayor. That lasted until the Ku Klux Klan, or a would-be affiliate, came riding by one night and shot-gunned the shack that he was living in.
At the time of the shotgunning Kelly had been in the bed of a twenty-six-year-old divorcée whom he had picked up in Anniston. Three days later Washington transferred Kelly to a Navajo reservation in Arizona where he spent the remainder of his year in service to America by getting Indians who had been arrested as drunk out of jail on their own recognizance. Often he would lend them a dollar so that they could buy a jug to keep the shakes away.
In 1966, with the draft still hanging over him, Kelly joined the army. But he wasn’t sent to Vietnam. Instead, he spent a cushy two years in Hoechst, just outside of Frankfurt, as an enlisted staff announcer and news reader for the American Forces Network. The deep, polished baritone that he had inherited from his father made him a natural for the job.