Thunder City

by Loren D. Estleman

  There was not, in point of fact, much to run. Local streetcar service was provided by Detroit United Railways, which held the city franchise. The private company laid and maintained its tracks, replaced its rolling stock, and hired conductors, then submitted its invoices to City Hall. Randolph Strick drew up bank drafts to cover the expenses, meticulously recording the transactions in his ledgers. Every penny was accounted for, and two separate and well-organized petitions for reform had failed to uncover anything improper in the deputy commissioner’s neatly ruled columns. This was because the improprieties existed only in the offices of the DUR itself, whose officials paid James Aloysius Dolan a comfortable monthly stipend in return for his continued successful opposition to public ownership of city transportation. He was in the plum position of being able to monitor just how much money was paid to the DUR by the city, and thus to ensure that nothing was held back from his end. Strick was one of the very few absolutely honest men he had ever met, contented with his eighteen-dollar-per-week salary and the sandwiches he brought from home to eat at his desk while he worked. Dolan had become convinced of this when he had a nephew employed with the accounting office of the DUR try to induce the deputy to keep a second set of books in return for 50 percent of the resulting profits. Strick had politely declined.

  The polite part was important. The commissioner delighted in his deputy’s total lack of sanctimony. An honest man who did not expect honesty of others, or resent its absence in strident tones, was as rare as a beautiful woman who did not condescend to those of her sisters who did not possess beauty. Dolan was certain that Strick, who would pay a messenger service two dollars to return a penny pencil that he had absentmindedly put in his pocket, would not even make a face if Dolan were to trip an old woman with his stick right there in the office and steal her purse as he was helping her to her feet.

  On this holiday, Dolan had stopped in to learn if Strick’s sources in Monroe County had confided to him the various routes being discussed for the construction of a new interurban line between Detroit and Toledo.

  “There is not a thing new from here to Monroe.” The man’s heavy Ruhr Valley accent, despite his emigration to America at the age of six, indicated that he still did most of his thinking in German. He continued to draw lines through his sevens and refer to the last letter in the alphabet as zed. “There is some discussion of moving it inland from the lake south of Monroe to avoid flooding the tracks in high weather.”

  “How far inland? I need to know the exact property being discussed.”

  “My friend was not specific.” On the rare occasions Strick ate lunch outside the office, he always ate it in Diedrich Frank’s saloon with Gunter Klaus, a Monroe County farmer who also sat on the planning commission. Neither man was married, although both were approaching middle age. Whatever dark doubts Dolan entertained about his deputy, he neither spoke of them nor confronted them in private. Bees’ nests were not to be disturbed when honey was free.

  “You had a call.” Strick indicated the brass upright telephone standing aslant atop a heap of foolscap on his desk. “That man Borneo.”

  Dolan frowned. “What did he want?”

  “He heard your speech. He said to tell you it made him proud to be in America.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He said it amazed him how you find time to rehearse your oratory and still manage your busy schedule.”

  The message lay heavily atop Dolan’s breakfast. The Sicilian never called unless he wanted to remind Dolan he existed. That meant he was feeling neglected. Maybury’s police must have hit one of Borneo’s brothels. Dolan and Borneo had never met, but there were times when the damn arrogant wop seemed to consider himself the senior partner in their arrangement. He wondered if it might be time to kick in a couple of the man’s horse parlors; show him how the cow ate the cabbage.

  Probably not, however. He preferred to save public demonstrations of good government for October, so that the details were still fresh in the minds of voters come the first Tuesday in November.

  He changed the subject. “See if you can get your friend in Monroe to be specific. I don’t want to have to buy up every acre of farmland in the county and wind up planting potatoes on most of it.”

  “Haven’t you sources of your own?”

  “They’re all Lutherans down there.”

  “I am Lutheran,” Strick said.

  “You are, but you’re the only one I’ve ever met who I didn’t think would nail his damn manifesto to my front door.” He adjusted his boater, popped the crown, thumped his cane on the rug, and caught it on the bounce. He was feeling uncommonly good after his successful speech, in spite of the disturbing telephone call; the prospect of a little punitive raid in woptown in four months put the shine back on things. “I’m off to fried chicken and Kraut potato salad. You ought to get out and into the sun, Randy my lad. It’s a national holiday, or haven’t you heard?”

  “I have sensitive skin. And these ledgers are not going to keep themselves.”

  “I’m going to see you get a two-dollar raise. Not that you’ll have any fun with it.”

  Strick smiled faintly. “I have a sister in Düsseldorf. She can use the money.”

  “We all have sisters in Düsseldorf,” Dolan said, and left for his picnic.

  On the dock at the foot of Woodward he stood still for more congratulations upon his speech, some of which patently came from acquaintances who had not been present when he gave it, and when the ferry bumped to a rest against the hemp fenders and a crew member swept off his cap and motioned for Big Jim to board first, he had the opportunity to shake his head and stand aside for a lady in a seersucker dress with matching hat and parasol. She bowed her head graciously and caught his eye with a knowing glint that he interpreted as acknowledgment of a previous acquaintance. He did not remember her, and it bothered him all the way to the island. He stood near the bow, smoking a cigar and contemplating the betrayal of his phenomenal memory, the greatest weapon in his arsenal.

  Jimmy Dolan was a loudly vocal supporter of monogamy, and it was his secret pride that he practiced it in private in so far as a man of his prominent stature could expect to maintain his sacred vows. In a public life of twenty years he had taken but four mistresses. He was certain the woman at the dock was not one of them, though she may have been among the dalliances and diversions that had helped him shoulder the burden of his many campaigns. At the same time he was certain that he would not have forgotten a woman of her exotic appearance. She had black hair, fine dark eyes, a bold aquiline nose, and a hint of olive coloring beneath a discreet application of powder (Greek? Spanish? Surely not American Indian; there was nothing of the mission school about her), and she had a straightforward way of looking at a man that was unusual in one of her class—if the evidence of her attire could be accepted—that he found both disturbing and intriguing. She was about thirty, but he approved of that. The mistresses of most of the prominent men he knew were young, with large milky brows and unformed features, who if one were to unpin their preposterous hats and feel about the crowns of their heads, would reveal a soft spot where the plates of the skull had not yet joined. It was an easy enough thing for a young girl to be pretty, when life and the laws of nature had not yet discovered her, rather more of a permanent achievement for a seasoned woman to be beautiful without involving some kind of pickling process. He rejected the possibility that she was a prostitute. She appeared to be unescorted, and it was unthinkable that a courtesan of her type would need to fish for clients on Belle Isle. The police there were peculiarly adept at weeding out such women on Sundays and holidays, when families flocked to the island.

  No, they had not met, he was sure of that, whatever the intimacy implied by her regard. An invitation, perhaps. Such things were not unheard of at his station. He knew full well he was no Sandor the Magnificent; without Noche’s assistance it had taken him ten minutes that morning to tie his laces and button his gaiters, with intervals to catch his breath from
all the bending, and notwithstanding the confidence that a dignified girth inspired at the polls, it did nothing for one’s romantic attraction. But authority and fame exercised a gravitational pull of their own. It was not Jim Brady’s brilliantined hair that kept Lillian Russell by his side when he rode down Fifth Avenue, but the way he shone when he entered the New York Stock Exchange.

  He did not see her again when the ferry docked at Belle Isle, except as a flash of seersucker in a sea of parasols and boaters flowing down the gangplank. Charlotte and the children were waiting at the dock. He kissed his wife on the cheek, relieved her of the great wicker hamper, and they strolled to the picnic grounds, where she spread the blanket and laid out the linen and silver while the children played hide-and-go-seek among the trees. The smells of sun and water there where the river prepared to enter Lake St. Clair were intoxicating; or perhaps Dolan was simply light-headed from his cigar. He knew he should wander over to the baseball diamond and shake some hands, lose a bet or two on a pop fly or a base on balls and pay up with a genial oath as to the luck of the man and his devilish unfair knowledge of the American pastime. Instead he leaned against a great oak old enough to have stood there when Cadillac came through, his head swimming while he watched the canoers paddling down the blue canal and thought of the dark woman.

  chapter six

  God is a Mother

  EDITH HAMPTON CROWNOVER WAS a literal woman; and even though she was happiest when she was in the morning room of the large four-gabled house on Jefferson Avenue where she had raised her three sons and one daughter, she quit it each day at noon and did not return to it until the next day after breakfast.

  It was a small room with an east window, dazzling after dawn. Cabbage roses bloomed on the wallpaper and there was a pink-and-white braided rug, an upholstered rocker that had been a reluctant wedding gift from her mother, a spinet desk of cinnamon-colored pearwood, and a straight chair with a cushion for her weak back. Doe-eyed mothers and corpulent pink babies stared out of scrolled frames on the walls. The desk, below the thicket of family pictures supported on wedges and miniature easels on the stepped top, was tidy. The pigeonholes were labeled in her neat Palmer hand, stocked with ample stationery, and nothing so impractical as a tulip vase or a book of poetry rested on the blotter to interrupt her movements between the glass inkstand and the sheet before her. Every day except Sunday she wrote letters and postcards to family and friends, planned the dinner menu, and read novels in the rocker until the towering hickory grandfather clock in the downstairs hallway chimed twelve, when she went down to lay the table for the afternoon meal she shared with her husband. Abner II always dined at home during the workday on the advice of his doctor, who had told him five years ago that eating at the office or with business associates in restaurants was a criminal act upon his delicate digestive system. Not to eat at all was worse. The early days of his success, when he would pass twelve to fourteen hours at his desk or on the factory floor, working without food or gobbling sandwiches from a tin pail while he read contracts and dictated telegrams, were emphatically over. Edith, who had outgrown the romantic stage at the beginning of their marriage when she had brought meals in a basket to Abner’s office, had for many years been accustomed to the quiet solitude between breakfast and dusk, when her husband came home for dinner and an hour with his newspaper before retiring. No one had thought to consult her when the situation changed. She had made the adjustment without complaint, instructing the cook that the noonday meal would henceforth be prepared for two, and ate with him in the dining room, usually in silence, conversation concerning the changeless routine of their respective days having long since become redundant. Only the chiming of the grandfather clock on the half hour interrupted the clink of silver on china.

  The menu consisted invariably of leftovers from the evening before. Nothing went to waste in the Crownover household; last night’s roast beef or mutton was removed from the icebox and reheated, cold boiled potatoes were peeled, cut into slices, and fried lightly in butter, ham carved too close to the bone to serve again in its original incarnation was shredded, mixed with diced carrots, potatoes, and leeks, and risen again as hash. Slightly stale bread was toasted and served dry. Thus the kitchen observed the custom of the factory, where lumber ends were turned on lathes to function as pegs, stripped bolts retapped, and wood shavings swept up and saved to fuel the heating stoves in the winter. Abner drank warm milk or water with his meal, Edith iced tea with lemon in balmy weather and coffee with a dollop of cream when coal burned in the furnace. Dessert was never present during the day, and in the evening only when they entertained guests. Abner had no sweet tooth, and his wife, who considered cakes and pies and sherbets convivial things, never ate them unaccompanied. While the table was being cleared, the Coach King removed himself to the rolled leather sofa in the parlor, where he remained recumbent for thirty minutes to avoid exciting his already overactive acids before he rose and walked back to the office. Left to herself again, Edith reviewed the dinner menu with the cook, then rested to relieve the excruciating pain in her lumbar region before attending to errands, visiting friends, or helping to raise funds for the Orphans’ Asylum as part of her charitable duties as an Electra with the Order of the Eastern Star. She found the work more diverting than the company; O.E.S. ladies were boring to a degree that made Rhode Island seem as lurid as the Barbary Coast.

  Edith Hampton Crownover no longer felt anything toward her husband beyond the necessity to provide respite from his various burdens. She filled her days with repetition and lived only for her sons—and her daughter, with whom she alone of all the family retained contact.

  Twice each week, one of the letters she wrote in the morning room was addressed to “Katherine Crownover Gorlich, in care of Ogilvie’s General Merchandise, Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory.” Gus Gorlich was the name of the man with whom her firstborn child had disappeared at age fourteen, not to be heard from until a letter arrived at the Jefferson Avenue address identifying Ogilvie’s store as the place where she could be reached. It went on to describe the brief ceremony that had wedded them in the home of a justice of the peace in a place called Stilwell, with a witness who signed himself Pete Stands-in-Water; she and Gorlich, a man of forty and a widower, had drawn a wagon loaded with foodstuffs and farming equipment up to a starting line at the edge of a three-thousand-square-mile section of land called the District, then at the first note blown on a cavalry bugle had raced to a 160-acre lot marked off by federal surveyors and claimed it as their own. Abner’s sole comment, upon reading the letter, had been a muttered observation that she had not said whether the wagon was a Crownover. He had not spoken of their daughter from that day to this, other than to forbid his wife to answer her letters or to accept them when they were delivered. Edith’s first act had been to arrange for a box in her name at the Detroit Post Office. She then wrote Katherine, congratulating her upon her marriage, warning her of the pitfalls to avoid in farming, as outlined in various novels, and instructing her to address all future letters to her mother in care of the box number. In this manner the correspondence had continued for thirteen years. Abner, who never entered the morning room, did not know that among the pictures standing atop the spinet desk were cabinet photographs of their two grandchildren. He either did not notice or ignored his wife’s grief when she received notice that both had died within three weeks of each other of cholera in 1894. She did not mention it to him, nor to her sons, for fear that one of them—most likely Edward, whom she loved equally with the others but did not trust—would let something slip to their father. She alone shared in the couple’s anguish over the deaths and, six years later, when drought destroyed their crops and forced the bank in Guthrie to foreclose upon their farm, the failure of their dreams of success. Both were now living in town, where Gus worked in a livery stable and Katherine cleaned the rooms in a hotel, supplementing their income with odd jobs and the small amounts of money Edith managed to send them without alerting Abner. Katherine answere
d her mother’s letters once a month. Invariably she apologized that her workday left her little time to do anything but sleep, and too exhausted to write.

  Edith fretted that her daughter was working herself into an early grave. At night, when she lay in bed thinking, she resolved to sell off some of her shares in Crownover Coaches—an anniversary present from Abner when he was too poor to give her anything else—and send the money to Katherine. In the light of day she cowered from the scene that would take place when her actions and their purpose were discovered. She owned thirty-eight percent of the company stock, the largest single block aside from her husband’s forty-two percent. With six percent owned by stockholders outside the family, the remaining fourteen had been distributed among their sons in descending increments according to their ages—excepting Harlan, whose meager promise had entitled him only to three percent, below his younger brother Edward’s five. Abner was determined that none who did not bear the name Crownover would ever wield power sufficient to direct the company’s fortunes. Edith had no doubt that he would divorce her if she parted with a single share.