Free The Porkchoppers by Ross Thomas Page A

there’s enough money in it to make it worth your while.”
    â€œDon?” Penry said.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDid I mention money? Did I ever hint at it?”
    â€œNo, but—”
    â€œDon?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWe’re friends, aren’t we?”
    â€œSure. We’re friends.”
    â€œWell, I just wanted to make sure you thought so because that’s why I called you. Because we’re friends and friends help each other out. Now you’ve helped me out in the past, haven’t you?”
    Cubbin didn’t really like to think about that. Helping Walter Penry out had involved doing nothing. It had, in fact, involved not making a decision, so if anything, it had been a negative kind of help. “Well, I don’t know, Walter,” Cubbin said. “I haven’t really done much.”
    This was true. One of the largest specialized manufacturing companies in the nation should have been organized by Cubbin’s union years ago. It was a company that was owned 100 percent by an immensely rich, immensely eccentric recluse who was Walter Penry and Associates’ principal client. He would remain their client as long as his company remained unorganized. The company had grown into a major concern during Cubbin’s tenure as union president. Over the years, Cubbin had directed only token efforts toward organizing it. He had sent the union’s malcontents, its failures, and its drunks to do the job and when they reported back that they had been unsuccessful, Cubbin had told them to try again. Some of the union’s failures and malcontents had made a career out of not organizing that particular firm and whenever Cubbin got pressure from his board about it, he would send out some other incompetents. As in every organization, there were always plenty of them around.
    The agreement between Cubbin and Penry that the eccentric recluse’s company would not be organized had never been explicit. Penry wasn’t even sure that it was tacit, but he had found that as long as he was pleasant, friendly and helpful to Cubbin, his client’s company stayed unorganized. Being pleasant and friendly was Penry’s stock in trade; being helpful was introducing Cubbin to various New York and Los Angeles actors and actresses who were told that their careers might be enhanced if they were attentive and flattering to the union man. Because Cubbin, at sixty-two, was still stagestruck, this had been an easy, even enjoyable task for most of them and some of them had even become his close acquaintances, if not his good friends.
    Penry knew that if Cubbin’s union made even a halfway serious attempt to organize the firm, it could be sewn up in six weeks. He also knew that if Sammy Hanks got elected president, the attempt would not be halfway serious, it would be completely so, and Walter Penry and Associates would lose its most valuable client.
    The reelection of Donald Cubbin was the most important current project that Walter Penry and Associates had and Penry didn’t want to think about what would happen should Cubbin lose—although he knew he would have to think about it soon and have a contingency plan ready to go just in case. It was what a realist would do and Penry prided himself on being realistic, which meant, of course, figuring out how to make a dollar from disaster.
    â€œDon,” Penry said, “why don’t you keep tomorrow afternoon free? The boys and I’ll fly up tomorrow morning and then we can have a good talk—at my place.” By my place, Penry meant the Hilton. He almost always stayed at Hilton hotels because he had once done some work for the chain and the management was so grateful for having been extricated from a possibly embarrassing situation that Penry had been presented with a silver card that entitled him to a 30 percent discount. The Hilton chain also had gold cards that entitled the bearer to a 50 percent discount, but its