“Would you like me to try that number?” the operator asked Goff.
“No,” he said, “I’ll place the call later.”
Goff waited until he got his dime back and then left the diner and crossed the street to his car. That story he had read in The New York Times had been right, Goff told himself, but it was still a good thing to check because you could never believe what you read in the papers. Now he knew for certain that Donald Cubbin would be in Chicago on Sunday and Monday. He would fly up there Sunday and then Monday afternoon or evening he would buy a ticket and fly on down to Miami. Truman Goff had been to Chicago before but he had never been to Miami and he found himself looking forward to it.
17
Donald Cubbin’s hands began to shake a little that Friday as he and Kelly rode the elevator up to Walter Penry’s suite in the Chicago Hilton. Cubbin jammed his hands deep into his coat pockets and when the elevator stopped on the fourteenth floor he said to his son, “Why don’t you wait here? I need to go back down and get a cigar.”
“Come on, chief,” Kelly said.
“Look, kid,” Cubbin said as he stepped from the elevator, “I’d really like a cigar.”
Kelly looked up and down the corridor and then produced a half-pint bottle of Ancient Age and handed it to his father. “Compliments of filthy Fred Mure,” he told him. “He said you’d be needing it.”
Cubbin took the half-pint, trying to conceal his eagerness, and glanced around. There was no one in sight. He looked at his son. “You know what this is?”
“It’s whiskey.”
“It’s goddamned embarrassing, that’s what.” He raised the bottle and drank three large gulps.
“That’ll put the bloom back in your cheeks,” Kelly said, reaching for the bottle.
“Now what kind of a father would do that in front of his own son?” Cubbin said.
“The kind who needs a drink.”
Walter Penry opened the door to Cubbin’s knock and beamed at both father and son. “How are you, Don?” he said, grasping Cubbin’s right hand in both of his.
“Fine, Walter. I don’t think you’ve met my son, Kelly.”
“No, but I’ve sure heard a lot about him — and all of it good.” Kelly and Penry shook hands and sized each other up. The kid looks brighter than his old man, Penry thought, which could mean trouble. I don’t like this slick sonofabitch, Kelly decided as he offered Penry a carefully selected smile, the kind that gave away nothing but a view of his teeth.
Cubbin shook hands with the boys, as Penry always referred to them, thirty-seven-year-old Peter Majury and forty-five-year-old Ted Lawson. Penry then introduced them to Kelly who decided that he didn’t like them any better than he liked Penry and thought: the old man’s got himself into speedy company. If that sneaky-looking one got a haircut, he could play the mad SS major in some World War Two movie. And that big one, who must wear that smile of his to sleep, could be the gunfighter who can’t get enough of his job. Kelly always cast people whom he met and didn’t like into film roles. For some reason it helped him to remember their faces and names. As for you, he thought as Penry handed him a drink, you look like that dolt on the FBI show who’s always talking over the phone to Junior Zimbalist and telling him that the director’s taking a personal interest in this one, Lewis.
“I think your dad told me that you’re on the force in Washington,” Penry said.
“He’s resigned,” Cubbin said quickly before his son could say anything. Kelly let it go.
He got bounced, you mean, and I’ll bet I know why, Penry thought, but said, “Well, Don, I guess that makes you the only one in the room who’s not an ex-cop of some kind. I spent eleven years with the FBI and the only thing I took with me when I left was a handshake from Mr. Hoover and a spotless record. Peter here did something or other for the CIA for above five years and Ted was with the Treasury. Seven years wasn’t it, Ted?”
“Eight,” Lawson said.
“How’d you like being a cop, Kelly?” Penry said.
“I liked it fine.”
“And you resigned to give your dad a hand, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, from what I hear, Don, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”
Cubbin bristled. “I don’t know where you get your information, but it sounds like you’re getting it from Sammy.”
“Come on, Don. You know we didn’t fly all the way up here just to kid around with each other. I understand Sammy’s put himself together a pretty good campaign.”
“That television program last night,” Peter Majury said and clucked his tongue a couple of times. “That was most unfortunate.”
“One TV program doesn’t make a campaign,” Cubbin said.
“Well, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” Penry said. “Your campaign and how we can help. But let’s have some lunch first.”
They had lunch in the room, but not before Kelly made sure that his father was fortified with another drink, this time a double bourbon that Cubbin sipped as he nibbled at his steak and salad. While they ate, Walter Penry delivered himself of a number of opinions concerning the state of the nation and the world which, Kelly decided, would have had Attila the Hun nodding agreement. Kelly was thinking of needling Penry, of pricking that bloated self-assurance to see what would ooze out, when Penry said to Cubbin, “Now you and I, Don, we’ve always thought alike and—”
“What?” Cubbin said, looking up from his drink that was now about three-fourths gone.
“I said we’ve always thought alike.”
“Walter, you’re a nice guy but you’re also full of shit.”
Penry decided to retreat. “Of course, everyone has differences, but usually we wind up on the same side.”
Cubbin was staring at Penry now. You don’t owe him anything, he told himself. He owes you. You don’t have to put up with any crap from him. “You know what I’ve been doing for the last fifteen minutes, Walter, I’ve been half listening to that line of bull you’ve been handing out and wondering how a grown-up man like you can bring himself to say such damn foolishness, let alone believe it.”
“Well, Don, we don’t have to agree on everything to be friends,” Penry said.
“Who said anything about friendship? Some of my best friends are damn fools.”
“Which of Walter’s points do you especially disagree with, Don?” Majury asked, always eager for details, especially when they promised conflict.
“All of ’em,” Cubbin said. “Now nobody’s ever accused me of being a liberal, not since fifty-two anyhow after I came out for Eisenhower instead of Stevenson. I doubt if I’d do it today, but I did it then because I thought Ike wanted to be President. It wasn’t my fault that he didn’t take to the job. Well, that didn’t make me popular. And I didn’t get any more invitations to the White House after sixty-four when I first started yelling about Vietnam. Now let me tell you why I did that. I’m no foreign-affairs or military expert, but I used to be a pretty fair bookkeeper. So I just looked at the books. Well, I’ve got a sort of simple philosophy that’s probably old hat nowadays. I believe everyone in this country should have enough to eat, plenty to wear, a good home to live in, an education, and a doctor to go to when they’re sick. Now this they deserve just like the air they breathe. That’s not too hard to understand, is it?”
“You’re doing fine, chief,” Kelly said.
“Yeah, well, like I said, I took a look at the books just like any bookkeeper would and I decided that we could either have ourselves a war over in Southeast Asia or we could have a fairly decent country, but we couldn’t have both. We just didn’t have the money. Well, I decided I’d rather have a decent country and I said so and kept saying so and George Meany got so mad he wouldn’t even speak to me for six months until he had to because he wanted something. So there I was for about two years all by myself except for the kooks and the nuts until it finally got respectable to be anti-Vietnam. But let me tell you something, Walter, it wasn’t any fun suddenly being the fifty-five-year-old darling of every left-wing, long-haired hippie in the country, but by God that’s what I was. Christ, I even got a letter from Norman Mailer.”