Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Will you tell him I can’t help him?”

  “I would, Connie. Honest to Christ I would. But I’m fresh out of leads and Walter’s starting to wonder if I’m worth keeping around. You can see why I can’t let him do that. So I guess you’re going to have to start digging and be quiet about it.”

  I drained my glass. The sediment in the bottom tasted like soggy pencil shavings, but the glow in the pit of my stomach was welcome even if I did have to deal with what happened later. “You’re the detective. Tell me how.”

  “My old man was a deputy sheriff down in Arkansas when Judge Parker was on the bench. My uncle was an Arizona Ranger. This work’s in my blood. I can’t tell you how to do it any more’n you can tell me how to tie one word onto the end of the one before. I can tell you why. You don’t want to spend your sixty-fifth birthday slurping soup cold out of the can in no eight-foot trailer up in Oakland.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what Reuther said. He was bluffing.”

  “Was he now.”

  “A labor strike is a last resort. It’s hell on the union treasury and breeds enemies among the rank-and-file. In the end everyone loses. It’s only good as a threat, and he’s too smart to consider throwing away such a powerful weapon to bring one reluctant middle-age spy into the fold. The E-car’s success means just as much to the union as it does to Ford. If it goes over, the profits will be bigger and so will the payrolls. If it fails there will be cutbacks and layoffs. That attempt on his life is starting to be a long time ago. He’s not about to wrap everything he’s fought for in an eight-year-old newspaper and throw it down the sewer.”

  “You’re right. A man’s got to get up early to put one over on you. Me, I don’t sleep. I’m like the Pinkertons that way.” He curled a spindly arm over the side of the chair and hoisted a tattered brown leather portfolio into his lap. It was scuffed down to the yellow undergrain at the corners and much of the stitching had come loose. With all the patient care of a dowager determined to preserve the wrapping on a gift for later use, he undid the tie and flayed it open. Out came a mottled-gray cardboard file folder containing a sheaf of stapled sheets and half a dozen glossy eight-by-ten photographs. He held up each of the latter a full ten seconds, facing me, before putting it down and reaching for the next. Somebody who knew a good deal about photography had caught a scale model of the Edsel at all angles.

  I felt hollow-headed. My field of vision was closing in. I bent down to set my empty glass on the floor. This put my head between my knees and brought blood to my brain. When I sat back again I felt almost normal.

  “I know you’re busting to tell me where you got those,” I said.

  “Well, look at the serial number.” He held them out. When I didn’t reach for them he got up and laid them gently in my lap.

  My vision was still clearing, but I didn’t want to bring the pictures close to my face with him watching. I stared until I could make out the row of numbers embossed on the model’s detailed undercarriage.

  “Maybe you don’t recognize it,” Pierpont said. “Lots of people don’t know their own telephone number or the numbers on their license plate. Maybe you don’t know that when Ford strikes off these nifty little toys they record the numbers so they know which one goes to which office. They don’t want no extras floating around, you know? So when one of them turns up someplace it don’t belong they can look at the serial number and it tells them straight off whose knuckles need knocking. I guess I don’t got to tell you whose name is written next to the number you see on the model in them pictures.”

  “They could’ve been taken before the model got to my office. Or before I had the chance to change the combination on the safe.”

  “Could have. I don’t think there’s room to write all that next to the name and number. Keep the shots. There’s negatives.”

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Good question. I could sell them to GM or Chrysler or DeSoto and retire, only I wouldn’t have time to wet my first hook before Walter’s friends caught up to me with blowtorches. Or I could stick a stamp on ’em and send ’em to Hank the Deuce. He’d be grateful. He likes cutting people off at the knees. Ask Harry Bennett.”

  “Or you could hang on to them until I found out what Reuther wants me to find out.”

  He moved his thin shoulders. “I got a safe deposit box at NBD. Plus I’m bonded.”

  That made me laugh despite myself. He surprised me by getting mad.

  “You eastern sonsabitches set one hell of a lot of store by what’s right. What’s right is what you say is right. It’s damn funny what you figure you can’t live without once you got all the things you really can’t live without. I was ten when I found out shoes ain’t just for grownups. That was fifty-two years ago and you can still strike a match on the sole of my foot. You try going barefoot in the snow on one plate of fat drippings a day for ten years. Try it for a week. Then come back and tell me what’s right. See if it’s the same.”

  I could see his eyes now behind the aquarium glass of his spectacles, swollen out of their lids with the veins showing like bits of broken thread. He was breathing hard, whistling through his nose.

  I said, “If you’re waiting for an apology, you can stick it up your blackmailing ass.”

  His breath whistled for another minute. At length it grew even and he felt for the brim of his hat with both hands as if to make sure he was still wearing it. The movement reminded me of a dignified old woman adjusting the pins in her hair. There was something spinsterish about J. W. Pierpont. I wondered if that shoeless childhood had included wearing hand-me-downs from a legion of older sisters. “That the answer you want me to take back to Walter?”

  “It sure as hell is,” I said. “In the perfect world.” I doubled the sheaf of photographs, shredded it, doubled and shredded it again, and went on until my fingers gave out. Then I brushed the bits off my lap. “Check back with me in a week. I’ve got something working.”

  “Tear this up too if you want. There’s copies.” He handed me the folder. I knew what the stapled sheets contained, but I looked anyway. Preliminary specs on the Edsel, from the length of the wheelbase down to the position of the clock in the dashboard.

  After he left, I stared at the telephone and willed it to ring. When it did, three days later, I had to climb down from the overhead fixture to answer it.

  PART THREE

  The Gardens of Barbary

  18

  EIGHT MILES NORTH OF Detroit, the glass and concrete ran out and the primordial world that had existed before the coming of Cadillac reasserted itself with a vengeance. Gravel roads twisted among stands of trees so thick a motorist couldn’t see between them, through swamps darkened under clouds of mosquitoes, past lakes whose smoked-glass surfaces had reflected mammoths and mastodons ten thousand years before the first man crossed the land bridge from Siberia onto a continent still damp from the last ice age. Near enough to the Midwest’s second largest city to vibrate with the strumming of its traffic, Lone Pine Road ran a mile from one lonely lighted window to the next. The driver who minutes before had rushed to beat a red light on Woodward had now to brake for a line of deer crossing the road behind the eerie green lanterns of their eyes.

  I felt the thrum from the Highwayman’s Rest through the sole of my foot on the accelerator before I saw anything. The big Mercury, smooth-running and leathery-smelling like the inside of a shoe store, was as tight as an airlock. I couldn’t even hear the air rushing past, giving me the impression I was standing still while some unseen grip cranked the scenery past the windows. The car had been delivered that morning and I hadn’t yet found out how to dim the dashboard lights; when I glanced up at the rearview mirror I saw a pair of eyes screwed almost shut in a face the color of quicklime. The steering wheel was as big as a hula hoop.

  I boated over a hill and there it was, a corrugated barn shaped like an airplane hangar and nearly as large in a clearing solid with automobiles. They were parked three deep a
nd so close together it would take a Houdini to climb in or out of any one of them without nicking his neighbor with the edge of a door; which helped to explain why there was a fist-fight there nearly every night. The Ballistas could have supported a trio of Grosse Pointe debutantes for a year on what they must have been paying the local authorities to remain open nightly.

  With the paranoia peculiar to the new-car owner, I parked on the extreme edge of the clearing twenty feet from the nearest abrasion and walked over the bare unpaved earth to the front door. There was no sign identifying the place. Since no such establishment could long exist undetected, with or without the blaring music and heavy traffic, I recognized this as a throwback to the blind pigs of my youth, whose peepholes and passwords were largely a device to make the casual customer think himself among a privileged shady elite. Melons taste sweeter when they’re filched.

  No simian doorman impeded my entrance—even the most romantic of post-sunset adventurers had grown too sophisticated for that—and I stepped out of the blowy mid-spring night into a vast room heated almost exclusively by the excitement of its patrons. A pall of smoke clung like cotton candy to the naked rafters twenty feet overhead and a carpet the same thickness and shade of green as the felt on a ping-pong table covered the floor, which would be a poured concrete slab; the place had gone up in three days and the carpenters, generally the most expensive of all the contractors, had finished their work in an afternoon. A Wurlitzer jukebox pulsated pink, green, and blue light to a Jerry Lee Lewis beat, proving that people will happily pay a two-drink minimum to expose themselves to something they would kick their kid out of the house for tuning in on the radio for free. The tables looked like wheels and axles stood on end, with four potato-chip chairs per table, most of them occupied. A four-sided bar formed an island in the middle of the room, because something had to block the view of the floor show for those customers who didn’t know how to tip. Most of the light came from strings of white Christmas-tree bulbs wound around the rafters and plugged unceremoniously into exposed outlet boxes on the posts supporting the roof, from the flashing TILT signs on the pinball machines along the wall next to the door, and from funnel-shaded fixtures suspended over a couple of pool tables and a glistening thirty-foot shuffleboard already legendary as the “longest in the Midwest,” but the place was bright enough to read a newspaper in the reflected glow of all the glasses, bottles, cufflinks, and broken blood vessels. It was a hothouse of a sort, supporting all kinds of nocturnal life in its artificially created environment.

  All this covered the electric bill and the local graft. The wagers made on the pocket shots, free games, and shuffleboard were enough to get the liquor license yanked, but the Commission inspectors had larger fish to fry, and most of them in the back room, which would be much smaller with few frills, and less impressive in inverse proportion to the size of the profits. There would be craps, blackjack, a wheel, one-armed bandits, and as many takers as you needed for any bet you wanted to place on any game from the World Series to a bicycle race in Bombay. There you would find your doorman, and he wouldn’t be for looks. It was a myth that the boys with the busted windpipes and the bent-over noses didn’t care where you came from or whether you had collateral. They didn’t break legs for fun; that was just a fringe benefit. They were the most cautious businessmen in the Free World, and their faith in their country’s currency would be touching if they just spent it on better tailors.

  I found an empty stool at the bar just as someone jerked the plug on the juke, choking off “Hound Dog” in the middle of the drum lick. An acetylene spotlight mounted near the roof slammed on, a live combo picked up their instruments on the corner stage, and a slender baritone in a well-cut tuxedo began making sly love to a microphone to the tune of an Italian ballad with a tradition as old as eighty-nine-cent wine. He was good-looking in a machine-oiled kind of way, curly-haired and straight-nosed, but he was continually being upstaged by his partner, who spent most of the song walking on his ankles among the tables in a busboy’s uniform two sizes too small and spilling drinks from his tray amid frantic shouted apologies. The mechanics of the routine, the handsome organ grinder and his rogue monkey, were obvious, embarrassingly so, but it made the crowd hysterical. I found myself laughing for no other reason than to be part of the merriment. I got the impression from comments drifting my way that the pair had some fame and had appeared together in a couple of movies; if I had been aware of them at all before this, I must have been distracted. In any case I hadn’t gone to see a comedy since Buster Keaton learned to talk. Evidently it was a bright yellow feather in the Ballistas’ fedora that the partners had consented to interrupt a long run in Vegas to play a roadhouse unknown to anyone outside the Detroit area. Probably it was payback for a baseball bat swung at the knees of someone who had been giving them grief.

  A bulky black cloud blocked out the light. I edged over on the stool to make room for the newcomer at the bar, not realizing who it was until he spoke.

  “Guinea sings okay, huh? I wanted to be a singer in the worst way when I was a lot younger. Problem is, that’s just how I sung. Billy Eckstine, he was the man.”

  “Maybe he secretly wanted to be a wrestler.” I shook Anthony Battle’s enormous hand. Leaning on his elbow with his back to the light, he placed his features in shadow, but his sport coat was bright enough to take up the slack. It was yellow with black checks. The lapels were the widest I’d ever seen. One of them contained enough material to make a pair of sleeves for me. “I’ll buy you a drink as soon as I can get the bartender’s attention,” I said.

  He disengaged his hand and thumped a finger on the bar. It sounded like a kettle drum. The barman, olive-skinned with Brilliantine in his hair and a pencil moustache, came over. I asked for a tonic water. Battle ordered gin.

  “Mr. Carlo says go back after the show. That door.” He pointed. “He says he remembers you.”

  “What did you tell him I want to talk to him about?”

  “The old days. How you get from there to now’s up to you.”

  “Thanks, Anthony. Hear anything more from Leadbeater?”

  “That’s why I called. He planning a press conference first of next month. He dropped by the gym yesterday to axe if I had any names for him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What else? I say I’m working on it. Mr. Connie, you gots to help me.”

  I drank tonic water. It did absolutely nothing for me. My latest bodily treachery had condemned me to blandness in all things. The future yawned before me as mild as a filter cigarette. “Where does he hang out?”

  “He gots him a office in City Hall.”

  “Old or new?”

  “Old. I don’t think anybody done moved into the new one yet.”

  “I’ll talk to the man.”

  “What you going to say?”

  “Hell, Anthony, I don’t know what I’m going to say to Charlie Balls.”

  The baritone came to the end of his song. His partner bounded up on stage to join him as applause splattered through the room. They bowed and galloped out through the door Battle had indicated. The spotlight died. I slid off my stool, smacked the palm of my hand against the wrestler’s upper arm—it was like slapping a telephone pole—and went off in the performer’s path. On the way I passed a large party gathered around a table twenty times the size of any of the others with a white linen cloth. It consisted of ten or a dozen men and women in evening dress, including cummerbunds and sequins, with bouquets of champagne bottles sprouting out of silver buckets. They were making enough noise to fill the room without assistance from the other tables, all except a thin hollow-cheeked specimen of manhood whose wing collar was too big for his neck. He sat glumly staring into his glass amid the fun, standing out the way he probably never would in any ordinary crowd. He was probably in his twenties but seemed older in his spleen. A pair of crutches with padded arms leaned against the table next to his chair. I wondered fleetingly if that explained his mood. In any case I
forgot his features as soon as they were out of my sight.

  The door led not into the gaming room as I had supposed, but down a short hall with locked doors on either side that I suspected belonged to dressing rooms and down an open arch into a storeroom roughly the size of the ground floor of my house. For that it seemed cramped because of the size of the room I had just left and because it was stacked nearly to the ceiling with cardboard cartons. Insulation wrapped in brown paper lined the walls between exposed studs, shadows crawling over them from the bare bulbs of four drop cords slung up over the rafters and dangling down like the decorations at an Old West necktie party. The air dripped sour mash, rat dung, and that all-pervasive odor of the decade, fresh sawdust.

  A Caligari-like aisle twisted crookedly between stacks of cartons to a work table nearly ten feet square like the ones garment workers used to trace and cut patterns. Here the light tunneled down between cartons stenciled Old Grand Dad and Tele King. I tried to remember where I’d come across Tele King before; someplace recent. In any case I shoved the problem aside to be worked out later. It hadn’t been so long since I’d dealt with the kind of person who was standing on the other side of the table that I’d forgotten the wisdom of keeping my mind clear.

  It was a type I knew well. You wouldn’t have noticed him on the street, but if he showed up at a party you were giving and you had security you would place it on red alert. This one was a small muscular specimen in a shiny black nylon sport shirt with the tail out over windowpane slacks best described as Halloween orange. Black wiry hair covered his arms from the backs of his hands to his elbows, making him appear at first as if he were wearing long sleeves, but his head was absolutely hairless. His scalp shone like white polished bone, poreless and about as capable of supporting a healthy follicle as a freshwater pearl. Shadowed under the downlight, his eyes were a disturbing shade of amber, like a feral dog’s. The rest of him was unimpressive: a thick-bridged nose that bent up at the end, exposing his nostrils; gray meaty lips like two slices of headcheese; retreating chin; a neck that needed washing; and too many years of cakes and pasta around his middle, eroding a body that at one time had been all gristle and sinew. His daily regimen of eye-gouging and kneecapping was getting to be a long time in the past.