The Porkchoppers (2 page)

Simpson didn't open the letter until he got back to his farm. He counted the money first and put six of the bills aside for himself. He glanced at the white card and grinned when he recognized the name. It was sure going to be something to watch on TV, he thought. After he addressed the envelope and sealed its contents of sixty one-hundred-dollar bills and the white card with the penciled name, he went to the closet and took out a small gray cashbox and unlocked it.

He put the six one-hundred-dollar bills in with the rest of the money in the box, which was what was left from the $126,000 that he had taken from the L Street Branch of the Riggs National Bank all by himself one summer afternoon in Washington a little over six years ago. He then got in his Chevrolet pickup and drove 81 miles to Ft. Smith where he mailed the letter.

From Ft. Smith, Arkansas, the money and the white card flew to Los Angeles where they were delivered on August 29, a Tuesday, to Miss Joan Littlestone who lived in an apartment in the 900 block on Hilldale a block or so down from Sunset. Miss Littlestone was known to be bright, pleasant, and scrupulously fair with customers and employees alike. She supervised six girls and was highly respected in the trade in which she had been engaged, in one capacity or another, for thirty-seven of her fifty-three years. When the man called Just Bill had telephoned her, she had readily agreed to do what he wanted her to do because it was her nature to do what men wanted her to do, no matter how bizarre. The fee of $1,000 per forwarding seemed ridiculously high to her, but she hadn't questioned it. She had learned long ago that some men liked to pay more than they should; that, in fact, some men liked to be cheated and, as always, Miss Littlestone tried to be accommodating whenever she could and when the risk was low. Or at least not too high.

She took ten of the bills for herself and then carefully printed the name and address of the man who lived in Baltimore on the envelope. She glanced at the card that came with the money, but only the first name that was penciled on it stayed in her memory. Surnames hadn't proved too useful, or reliable, in Miss Littlewood's business and she seldom bothered with them.

It took six days for the letter to travel from Los Angeles to Baltimore by air because of a minor mix-up at O'Hare field in Chicago. The letter was waiting for Truman Goff when he arrived at his three-bedroom tract house in West Baltimore after putting in a full day at his job as produce manager of a Safeway store in the inner core of the city where the pilferage rate kept rising at a steady, almost predictable rate.

Goff drove an Oldsmobile Toronado, which was rather fancy for a supermarket produce manager, but not so much so that anyone would wonder where he had got the money. They would ascribe its ownership to self-indulgence and assume that it wasn't paid for anymore than theirs were paid for and like theirs, probably wouldn't be until it wore out and Truman Goff would have to see what he could trade it in for.

When Goff got home that Monday evening in early September his ten-year-old daughter, Miranda, was watching television as usual. It was nearly nine o'clock because the Safeway where he worked stayed open until eight.

Goff said how are you to his daughter who replied, hi, Daddy, and he went on into the kitchen and said, what's new, to his wife as he opened the refrigerator and took out a can of National beer.

“Not much,” his wife said. “You got a letter. It came in the mail today.”

“Who from?”

“I don't open your mail.”

“I just thought it might be on the outside. A return address.”

“I didn't see any.”

“Well, where is it?”

“Where the mail always is. On the dining table. When you want to eat?”

“When I finish my beer,” Goff said. “What're we gonna have?”

“Those pork chops you brought home Saturday. I didn't put 'em in the freezer so we'd better eat 'em. Pork don't keep.”

“Yeah, I know,” Goff said, and carrying his beer went from the kitchen into the dining area and picked up the manila envelope. He thought he knew what it was, but he wasn't sure. It could be a come-on for dirty pictures, he thought. They sometimes send the stuff out in plain envelopes like that, hand-addressed and all.

Goff put the envelope in his hip pocket and went into what his wife called the spare bedroom and what he called the den. It held a studio couch that could be made into a double bed, a maple kneehole desk, his wife's sewing machine, a small chest of drawers, and a four-shelf bookcase that was filled mostly with paperback westerns except for a big Bible and a three-year-old copy of
Who's Who.

After putting his can of beer down on the desk, Goff opened the letter by ripping the flap with his forefinger. He didn't smile when he saw the money inside. He counted the fifty one-hundred-dollar bills quickly onto the desk, then folded them once and buttoned them away in his left hip pocket. He looked at the card and then up at the ceiling, mouthing the name silently until he was sure he had it right. He tore the card into tiny pieces and went down the hall to the bath where he flushed the pieces down the toilet.

When he came out of the bath, his wife called to him from the kitchen. “You ready now?”

“In a minute,” he called back.

“It's gonna get cold.”

“In a minute, goddamnit,” he yelled and went back into the den, took the copy of
Who's Who
from the bookcase, turned to the C's, and read all about the man that he was going to kill.

3

Donald Cubbin looked as if he should be president of something, possibly of the United States or, if his hangover wasn't too bad, of the world. Instead, he was president of an industrial labor union whose headquarters was in Washington and whose membership was up around 990,000, depending on who did the counting.

Cubbin's union was smaller than the auto workers and the teamsters, but a little larger than the steelworkers and the machinists, and since the first two were no longer in the AFL-CIO just then, it meant that he was president of the largest union in the establishment house of labor.

Cubbin had been president of his union since the early fifties, falling into the job after the death of the Good Old Man who was its first president and virtual founder. The union's executive board, meeting in special session, had appointed the secretary-treasurer to serve as president until the next biennial election. As secretary-treasurer, Cubbin had spent nearly sixteen years carrying the Good Old Man's bag. After he was appointed president, he quickly learned to like it and soon discovered that there were a number of persons around who were anxious and eager to carry his bag, and this he particularly liked. So he had held on to the job for nearly nineteen years, enjoying its perquisites that included a salary that had climbed steadily to its present level of $65,000 a year, a fat, noncontributory pension scheme, a virtually nonaccountable expense allowance, a chauffeured Cadillac as big as a cabinet member's, and large, permanent suites in the Madison in Washington, the Hilton in Pittsburgh, the Warwick in New York, the Sheraton-Blackstone in Chicago, and the Beverly-Wilshire in Los Angeles.

Over the years Cubbin had faced only two serious challenges from persons who wanted his job. The first occurred in 1955 when a popular, fast-talking vice-president from Youngstown, Ohio, thought that he had detected a groundswell and promptly announced his candidacy. The Youngstown vice-president had received some encouragement, but more important, some money from another international union that occasionally dabbled in intramural politics. The fast-talking vice-president and Cubbin fought a noisy, almost clean campaign from which Cubbin emerged with a respectable two-to-one margin and a permanent grudge against the president of the union that had meddled in what Cubbin had felt to be a sacrosanctly internal matter.

Cubbin was a little older in 1961—he was fifty-one by then—when for the second time he detected signs of opposition. This time they came from a man that he himself had hired, the union's director of organization who, after getting his degree at Brown in economics, took a job as a sweeper in a Gary, Indiana, plant (an experience he still had nightmares about) and who possessed, along with his degree, the conviction that he was destined to be the fore runner of a new and vigorous breed of union leadership, the kind that would be on an equal intellectual footing with management.

Cubbin could have fired him, of course. But he didn't. Instead he placed a call to the White House. A week later the director of organization was awakened at six-thirty by a call from Bobby Kennedy who told him that the President needed him to be an assistant secretary of state. Not too many people were saying no to the Kennedys in 1961, certainly not the director of organization for Cubbin's union who was then only thirty-six and terribly excited about being chosen to scout for the New Frontier. Later, when Cubbin had had a few drinks, he liked to tell cronies about how he had buried his opposition in Foggy Bottom. He did an excellent mimicry of both Bobby Kennedy and the director of organization.

Most actors are good mimics and Donald Cubbin probably should have been an actor. His father had been one. So had his mother until their touring company collapsed in Youngstown in 1910. Cubbin's father took the first job he could get, which was in a steel mill. It was only temporary, until the child was born, but the child, Donald, arrived six months later along with new debts and somehow Bryant Cubbin never did get out of the steel mill, not until he died of pneumonia during a layoff in 1932 when his son was twenty-one years old.

Donald Cubbin was in Pittsburgh when his father died. There weren't any jobs in Pittsburgh in 1932, or any place else, so Donald Cubbin was attending business school during the day and acting in amateur theatricals at night. When his father died, Cubbin had a lead part in Sidney Howard's eight-year-old play
They Knew What They Wanted.
He played Joe, the roving Wobbly.

The amateurs charged 15 cents admission and their audiences were small, partly because 15 cents was a lot of money in 1932 and partly because most of the amateur actors were awful, although they somehow had enough judgment to select fairly well-written plays.

In the small audience that night was Bernie Ling, a twenty-seven-year-old, third-string publicity man for Warner Brothers who was in Pittsburgh to see what kind of free space he could get for a new and terrible film that could lose his studio a lot of money. Ling had only contempt for motion pictures, but he liked plays. They had real people saying real words and Ling could lose himself in the story while still noting with pleasure the nuances of gesture and diction and what he liked to refer to as stage presence.

When the twenty-one-year-old Donald Cubbin strode out onto the stage, Ling stirred in his seat a little. It was not Cubbin's looks that made him stir. There was a surplus of good-looking youngsters in Hollywood. There always would be. But still, the kid was all right, about six foot tall, not too heavy, maybe 160 or 170, with a hell of a good head of hair, black, straight and thick, and features that a tough chin ransomed from prettiness. He would age well, Ling thought, and then decided that there was still something else, some other quality that had struck him. Not the voice, although it was good, almost too good, a deep, hard baritone equipped with what seemed to be natural projection that rolled it out over the audience. Somebody had taught him that, Ling decided before settling back to watch the play and search for the word that would describe just what it was that the kid had. By the end of the second act Ling thought he knew what it was. Dignity. The kid had dignity, the kind that is usually the small reward of those who at age forty or fifty, having scraped at the bottoms of their souls, survive the revulsion and are never thereafter much dismayed by the awfulness of others.

Whatever it was, Ling thought it was salable so he left the play before the third act was over and took a taxi to the all night Postal Telegraph office and sent a telegram to his uncle who was a producer at Warner Brothers.

“
SPOTTED POSSIBLE YOUNG MALE LEAD PITTSBURGH STOP STRONGLY URGE SCREENTEST BERNIE
,” the telegram read after Ling and the Postal Telegraph man argued for a while about whether “screentest” was one word or two. They finally agreed that it was one word after Ling gave the man two tickets to the rotten picture that was opening at a downtown theater the following day.

Donald Cubbin didn't meet Bernie Ling until two days later, after he had returned from his father's funeral in Youngstown, bringing his mother back with him because she had no other place to go. Between them, Cubbin and his mother had $21.35. He moved her into the room next to his at the boardinghouse and then took the streetcar to the business school where he told Asa Pettigrew, its owner, director, and founder, that he was quitting.

“Can't you hang on for three weeks until you get your certificate?” Pettigrew asked.

“No, I can't hang on. I have to get a job.”

“I can't refund any of your tuition, you know.”

“I know.”

Considerably mollified, Pettigrew said, “Well, I got a call this morning.”

“About what?”

“About a job. They want a male secretary who can do bookkeeping. It's not a regular company and it might be only temporary and the reason they want a male is that they do a lot of swearing and dirty talking.”

“Where is it?” Cubbin said.

“I don't know if you want to get mixed up with this bunch. They're some kind of labor union. Probably reds.”

“I need a job, Mr. Pettigrew.”

“Might not last long.”

“It's better than nothing.”

“They'll probably be run out of town and you along with them.”

“I'll have to take that chance.”

“They're dirty talking. They said so themselves.”

“Fine.”

“Pays twelve-fifty a week.”

“Good.”