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 him. 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.
Now that he was president, Hanks didn’t feel that he could afford to inquire too closely into how Marvin Harmes had stolen the election in Chicago, so he didn’t, and Harmes could never see any point in telling Hanks that he hadn’t.
Hanks’s second official act was to call Oscar Imber in and fire him. The next day Imber went to work for the Teamsters.
Twenty minutes after he fired Imber, Hanks called Fred Mure in and did the same thing to him. Mure could think of no one who needed his talents so he called Sadie Cubbin, but she refused to talk to him.
Charles Guyan, who had already collected the last of his fee a week before Cubbin was killed, loaded his wife onto their Chris-Craft, along with two cases of Scotch, and sailed off down the inland waterway to Florida.
As soon as he heard of Marvin Harmes’s new appointment, Indigo Boone sold him a $100,000 life insurance policy over the telephone. Neither of them mentioned the election, but Harmes thought it best to take out the policy anyway.