Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  The Shamrock, eternally twilit by the reflected glow off red oak and hand-rubbed brass, was murky with smoke and smelled bitterly of beer and boiled cabbage and phantoms in derbies with gold toothpicks on their watch chains. It was already filled with gamegoers, but Janet spotted a table being vacated, squealed, and disengaged herself from my arm to claim it, caroming off hips and elbows and spilling an ounce of somebody’s highball on the way. I trailed her, muttering apologies.

  “You take chances.” I sat down.

  She was already sitting. “I can afford to. I’m told I’m cute.”

  “I’m told I’m not. I have a punchable face.”

  “I’m sorry. I forgot.” A concerned look claimed her features. When I was released from Henry Ford Hospital I’d found a comic get-well card awaiting me at home with Janet’s signature. “That must have been horrible. Did you decide to press charges?”

  “I might have, when I was younger and time was cheap. I don’t care to take a day off work to let some defense attorney take a crack at me on the witness stand. Anyway, they’re juveniles. Even if they got the maximum, which never happens, they’d come out with the same pimples they took in.”

  “What makes them do it? Rock ’n’ roll?”

  “Don’t mock me, child. My old man said we wouldn’t have gangsters if we didn’t have the Charleston. A punk’s a punk in black leather or a silk suit.”

  “That sounds like you read it somewhere.”

  “Wrote it” I tapped my forehead. “In here. It’s too long for a dummy sheet.”

  “I’ve known a few advertising men, none of them outside the office. I never heard any of them talk about the job the way you do. They were all so…” She moved her shoulders, smiling at her inadequacy.

  I grinned back. “‘Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes’?”

  “Did anyone ever actually say that?”

  “Someone must have. No business can go a hundred years without one original thought. Go on.”

  “That’s pretty much it. I always had the impression they’d rather sell cigarettes than be President.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  She flicked it aside. “How can you be any good at something you have so much contempt for?”

  “I don’t know if I’m any good at it.”

  “Mr. Zed says you’re a genius.”

  “Mr. Zed voted for Tom Dewey. I don’t know if I’m any good. Fortunately, neither does anyone else.” I looked around. “Are you hungry or thirsty or both? It doesn’t look like we’re going to be waited on before 1960.”

  She said a vodka tonic would be welcome. I shouldered up to the bar and returned with her preference and a glass of mineral water and bitters for me, with a lemon twist to make it last. I hate lemons.

  “Do you really want to hear this rubbish?” I asked. “I’d rather discuss the Tigers’ pennant chances.”

  “The season’s young. I’m trying to learn.”

  “Don’t bother taking notes. By the time the numbers come in on an ad campaign, so many others have come and gone nobody remembers who came up with it except the guy who did, and he’s only going to mention it if the numbers are good. If the button-counters ever got around to assigning averages the way they do in baseball, half the fifty-grand-a-year account executives in this country would be on relief.”

  “Not much incentive.”

  “Less than none. The vocabulary we draw from contains just forty words. Twenty of them have only four letters and ten of those are ‘free.’ All the possible combinations were used before the invention of the portable can opener—which by the way is the last absolutely essential item our civilization has produced. Now, there’s a campaign I’d have been proud to have participated in. All we’ve done since is chew our cud.”

  “Wow.”

  I held up a finger. “That’s one of the words.” I sipped from my glass, made a face at the lemon.

  She noticed. “Do you miss drinking?”

  “Never developed a taste for alcohol. When I was with newspapers it was a diplomatic tool. All the work got done in blind pigs. The most successful reporter I ever knew never left his table at the Anchor Bar.”

  “Somehow I don’t think you could be that kind of reporter.”

  “I couldn’t find the rush in a glass. That was my undoing. My kind of newshawk went out with running boards.” I stirred my swizzle. “Bold talk for an old coward.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Because the only time I ever saw a man murdered I wet my pants. “No reason. It’s the mineral water talking. Do you miss Toledo?”

  “I miss my parents. I see them every Christmas, though. In a way that’s harder than not seeing them at all. I notice how much they’ve aged from one year to the next. Oh.” She put her glass to her lips instead of a hand.

  I grinned again to show her I knew how old I was. Give or take a year.

  She rotated her glass, making hula hoops with the rings. “What you said about nobody knowing who dreamed up a campaign when the sales figures come in,” she said. “It isn’t going to be that way this time, is it? I mean, everything’s sort of vested in you.”

  “Your boss is no fool. Our boss. He took the heat when Truman beat his boy, but he’s not going to make that mistake in the private sector. He’s found a goat.”

  “Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “Everything scares me, Janet. Sitting in a wheelchair with my wrists tied to the arms in a state nursing home scares the living hell out of me. Boys one-quarter my age in sideburns and girls with their shirttails out make me cross the street when they come my way. I’m scared of dogs. Not the big ones with deep barks, the little yappy ones that rip at your ankles when you turn your back on them. Failing doesn’t scare me the way those things do. I’ve done it before. I’m good at it.”

  When she laughed I could see the shallow dents in her incisors where the braces had been removed. “That’s quite a pep talk. Do you believe any of it?”

  “Enough of it.” I emptied my lungs. “Well, it’s a great car. The economy’s booming. It should sell itself with no help from me. I’d be an idiot not to claim credit.”

  “You’re no coward. Courage isn’t being unafraid, it’s being afraid and going ahead and doing it anyway. Like when I left home. That took guts.”

  “How’s it working out?”

  “I don’t plan to be a secretary my whole life, if that answers your question.” She took in a healthy dose of vodka and set the glass down with a bang that turned heads from the packed tables nearby. “You’re looking at the future first female division chief in the history of the American automobile industry. Think I stand a chance in hell?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person. I’m the one who said no woman would last two weeks in an aircraft plant. I thought they’d get their bracelets caught in the punch presses.”

  “What do you think now?”

  We were no longer the object of others’ attention. The bartender, a porky butch-cut towhead in a green velvet vest and leatherette bow tie, stood on tiptoe behind the bar, smashing the flat of his hand against the brown Bakelite cabinet of a Tele King TV set on its high shelf. Wyatt Earp refused to stop doing backflips on the big seventeen-inch screen; the pounding only made him speed up.

  “Unless the United States of America declares war on Chrysler,” I told Janet, “you’ve got as much chance at an office with a window and a plant as Duffy there has of getting that picture to look as good as it did in the store.”

  Her face went smooth.

  “Well,” she said, “you’re honest.”

  I nodded. “It’s a fault.”

  She covered the hand I had resting on the table with the one on the end of her short arm. It was as soft and pink as a baby’s and seemed to have as much strength. The pressure she applied almost wasn’t there.

  “You’re no coward,” she repeated.

  I had moved from my apartment in the city to a rented house on Puritan Stre
et in Highland Park, a woodsy community hemmed in by Detroit on all four sides like a snag in the current. In younger days, given the brighter turn in my personal finances, I might have popped for something in brick with a trellis in St. Clair Shores, but one thing I had learned about any kind of upswing was that gravity is older and more patient, and real estate is tougher to get rid of than warts when you need cash. It was a comfortable thousand square feet stacked into two stories under a high-peaked roof like the houses Henry the First used to throw up for his employees in Dearborn, and about that old. I had a strip of grass and a flowerbed next to the front stoop with some kind of tough streetwise blossoms poking through the tangled greenery. I shared the driveway with the house next door and the sky was my garage.

  Janet pulled into the curb and braked. “Nice place.”

  “It was the stairs that sold me,” I said. “I like to hear my joints in the morning. Thanks for the ride.” I pressed down the door handle. “Thanks for a lot of things.”

  “How are you getting to work tomorrow?”

  “There’s a DSR stop on the corner.”

  “I could pick you up.”

  “It’s out of your way.”

  “I could start from here.”

  I read her face. She would have to work on that if she planned to become an executive. “You don’t want the complication,” I said. “Believe me.”

  “I liked you from the start, Connie. You’re one of the few men I’ve met who haven’t told me they were sorry about my arm.”

  “That’s not a reason.”

  “It’s on the list.”

  “Everybody’s got something. I’ve got a sugar problem and fallen arches to start.”

  “It’s Agnes, isn’t it?”

  “It’s Agnes,” I said. “And it isn’t Agnes. We’re contemporaries. We don’t have to fill each other in before we fight. I’ve got Al Jolson in my record collection, for Christ’s sake. I thought James Dean was the head of a college somewhere until somebody set me straight. You and I would just waste six months finding out what we already know: It won’t work. You’re young enough to squander that much time on a lot of young men who won’t be good for you. My time isn’t more valuable; I just don’t have as much to risk.”

  She smiled. It was the saddest thing I’d seen that day, and I’d watched three men half my age who made twice as much as I miss pop flies I could have caught with my arms full of groceries. “You know what you sound like? You sound like a man working overtime trying to talk himself out of something.”

  “You know what? You’re right.” I leaned over, gripped her shoulders hard, and kissed her. Her lipstick tasted like strawberries. “I’m not so old I’ve forgotten what I’m passing up.” I got out and slammed the door. I went up the walk without turning and got my key out and let myself inside. It was another minute before I heard the Lincoln start up and pulse away. By then I knew I wasn’t alone in the house.

  17

  THE DETROIT I KNEW didn’t leave its lights on when the house was unoccupied. Back when a quarter was so big you couldn’t see around it, the risk of burglary was infinitesimal compared with the certain knowledge that, second by second, your hard-struck pennies were rolling down a cord and out through the meter, and there was nothing to steal anyway. That was changing, but I wasn’t. That’s why the ellipsis of yellow light poking out of the cramped living room into the little entryway when I closed the door had me reaching back for the handle. Somewhere around age forty-nine I had thrown out my baseball bat, deciding to leave criminal confrontations to the people I fed with my tax dollars.

  “Oh, don’t leave. I been waiting long enough. You know?”

  I knew that sharp pioneer twang, bitter as white dust. I shut the door again and stepped into the living room, where J. W. Pierpont was sitting in the overstuffed chintz chair that had come with the place. He was still rushing the season in his Panama and he had on a brown three-piece knobby-knit suit and yellow shoes with hard round toes like Mickey Mouse wore. My copy of Kon-Tiki lay open in his hands under the light from the china lamp I had inherited from my mother, by way of the pawnshop where my father had sold it along with the rest of the parlor furniture for the money to bury her. His thick round glasses were opaque in its light. A water tumbler containing a honey-colored liquid stood on the lamp table beside a dusty green bottle I recognized.

  “You don’t have no liquor in this dump, you know? This shit is so old it’s turned to vinegar.”

  “The landlord threw it in with the stove and refrigerator. You’re supposed to use it for cooking.” I sidled over to the portable three-speed phonograph I kept on the window seat, my only recent indulgence if you didn’t count the Motorola in the corner, and lifted the lid. The little aluminum film canister where I kept my household cash rolled up was still taped inside the cutout that provided access to the tubes. It didn’t look as if it had been disturbed. I turned the knob all the way over to REJECT. The long-playing record at the top of the spindle dropped to the turntable and the arm swung over and down. Rosemary Clooney began singing “Come On-a My House.” It could have been anything, but it would be that.

  “I never cook with liquor. The best part burns off.” He let the cover fall shut on the book and refilled his glass. “I don’t figure this guy Heyerdahl. Waste months putting together a boat and sailing it all the way from South America to a bunch of birdshit islands in the middle of the Pacific. I don’t see no percentage. You know?”

  “The book sold two hundred thousand copies last count.”

  “No kidding, is that a lot?”

  “Mine sold twenty-five hundred. They said.”

  “Mickey Spillane, there’s a guy that knows how to clean up in the scribbling racket. He sells millions and I bet he never set foot in no boat. I sure have to thank him, too. Pussy’s a lot easier to find since he started writing about Mike Hammer. I just show ’em my license and invite them back to my place to see my big gun.” His dry heave of a laugh made bubbles in the glass.

  “I’m sure he’d be happy to know he’s making a difference.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t know about cleaning up. You got nothing worth having, just an idiot box and a record player with a hunnert and thirty-two bucks hid inside. No wonder you got a lock on the front door I could pick with my dick. Don’t worry,” he said when I turned back toward the phonograph, “I put it back. The retainer I get from the UAW pays me more’n that in the time it’d take me to put it in my pocket.”

  “I hope you didn’t spend too much of it waiting for me. I identify with labor.”

  “I sure don’t. It sounds just like work. Walter says hello, by the way. Big shot like him, I bet you thought he forgot all about you.”

  “He didn’t get to be a big shot by forgetting people.” I excused myself, went into the kitchen, and came out with a small glass, which he filled obligingly from the bottle. It was worth a diabetic episode to me if the wine would blot out the picture of J. W. Pierpont alone in an apartment with a woman. I sat down on the horsehair sofa, a mistake; the weak springs made a hollow that put the glare of the lamp in my eyes. I closed them.

  “Walter ain’t heard from you,” Pierpont said. “He wants to know if the deal took.”

  “I was supposed to wait for you to get in touch with me.”

  “He’s worried. All you been doing is hanging out with nigger wrasslers and going to ball games with dames half your age. You ought to be ashamed.”

  “For what, my choice in women or spending time with Negroes?” I’d had a hunch someone had been following me. I was pretty sure who it was, although I hadn’t spotted him. I supposed he was good or Reuther wouldn’t have hired him to begin with.

  “Oh, hell, there ain’t nothing like that moist young pussy. You should stay out of them coon neighborhoods, though. I can’t watch you and my hubcaps both.”

  “Pierpont, I don’t give a flying fuck about your hubcaps and neither do you. All you had to do was pick up a phone and I’d tell you what I found
out.”

  He held a fist next to his face. “Ring, ring. Hello, Connie? This is Jerry. How you doing? Fine, fine. Oh, I think winter’s got its licks in. No, this one wasn’t so bad. Well, I got to go. Oh, say, what’d you find out about that plot to ice Walter Reuther?” He lowered the fist.

  “Not a damn thing.”

  “Connie, I’m disappointed. Walter’s disappointed.”

  “I’m watching my step. Israel Zed is on to me. He as much as said he knows all about that meeting with your client. That’s a leaky organization you’re working for.” I had an illuminating idea then, courtesy of the bad sherry. “Or maybe you’re walking on both sides of the fence.”

  He smiled, showing me the wonders of the denture-maker’s art. If he wasn’t the oldest private detective in Michigan he had a good shot at it. “I tried that. There’s no percentage. My partner could give you a second opinion only he’s sniffing flowers from the wrong end in Mount Elliott Cemetery. I can’t say I’m surprised, though. Them union pimps is too dumb to remember who paid them the biggest bribe and what it was for. So they cross everybody. Now, it could be Zed was suspicious from the start and had a tail on you when the boys and me picked you up, but it ain’t likely. I ain’t the best shadow man around, but I got the best eye for one. Somebody spilt the frijoles.”

  “Anyway, you can see I’m not much good to you.”

  “I never figured you was. Turning you was Walter’s idea. He’s got this control thing. I’d of quit him a long time ago, but I can’t see going back to traffic court and hanging around waiting for someone to pay me to beat the streets collecting eyewitness affidavits.”