When Cubbin led the still weeping Hanks out into the corridor, he looked around and asked, “Isn’t there anybody around who can take care of him? I’m not his goddamn nurse.”
“Della walked out,” Majury said.
Kelly Cubbin stepped up to his father. “Let me have him, chief.”
“Well, somebody take him.”
“Come on, Sammy,” Kelly said. “I’ll take you home. Give me the keys, Fred.”
“How’re we going to get home then?” his father asked.
“It’ll come to you,” Kelly said and led Sammy Hanks off down the hall.
“That was a damned fine thing you did, Don,” Oscar Imber told him. “Damned fine.”
“It didn’t lose any votes either,” Charles Guyan told him.
“You think I handled it all right, huh?” Cubbin said.
“You were perfect, Don,” Guyan said, “perfect, and God you should have seen it on the monitor. Great TV. Simply great.”
“Maybe we can get a tape and run it sometime,” Cubbin said.
“Jesus, you were good,” Ted Lawson told Cubbin and clapped him on the back.
“Very nice, very nice indeed,” Peter Majury said.
Cubbin winked at him. “Was I compassionate enough for you, Pete?”
“Nicely so, very nicely indeed.”
Considerably buoyed not only by Sammy Hanks’s misfortune, but also by his own noble reaction to it, Cubbin turned to look for Fred Mure. “Let’s go find the can, Fred.”
“Sure, Don.”
Inside the men’s room, Cubbin first checked the stalls to make sure that they weren’t occupied. He then took the half-pint from Mure, drank deeply, and closed his eyes and sighed.
“I thought you looked great, Don, real great.”
Cubbin opened his eyes and looked at Mure. “Fred,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I want you to do me a favor.”
“Sure, Don, what?”
“Stop fucking my wife.”
26
On the day of the election, October 17, a Tuesday, the two cops came for Marvin Harmes at seven o’clock in the morning. They were from the Chicago detective bureau and one was a lieutenant and the other was a sergeant.
The lieutenant, who identified himself as Clyde Bauer, was bald and having trouble with his weight. His partner, the detective-sergeant, was a thirty-eight-year-old redhead whom everyone called Brick. His real name was Theodore Rostkowski.
Lieutenant Bauer first informed Harmes that he was under arrest and then he told him about his rights and even let him look at the two warrants, one for his arrest and the other for the search of his home.
“What’re you expecting to find?” Harmes said.
Bauer shrugged. “A little pot, maybe even a little heroin.”
“Go ahead and search.”
“We already have,” Bauer said and smiled. “I’m afraid we’re gonna have to take you downtown, Mr. Harmes.”
“Why the rig?”
Bauer smiled again. It was the tired, resigned smile of a man who was weary of his job, perhaps even weary of life. “Just get dressed, Mr. Harmes.”
“Can I make a phone call?”
Bauer looked at Rostkowski who shrugged. “Go ahead.”
Harmes turned to his wife who stood, shivering a little in her robe, although it wasn’t cold. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “Just go upstairs and see to the kids. I’ll fix it.”
He watched her climb the stairs and then crossed to the phone and dialed a number. Harmes wasn’t calling his lawyer; he knew that a lawyer wasn’t going to do him much good. He was calling Indigo Boone.
When Boone muttered a sleepy hello, Harmes wasted no time. “This is Harmes. There’s a couple of cops here who’re gonna bust me on a rigged-up dope charge. Man, this is one day I can’t afford to be busted.”
“Yeah, today is the day, ain’t it?”
“It sure as hell is.”
“Well, it won’t work unless you’re there to do the final switching.”
“I know. That’s why I’m calling.”
“I’m glad you called me. Lawyer ain’t gonna do you no good today.”
“Think you can do something?”
“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.