Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I thought you hated this picture.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said it wasn’t a western.”

  “You’ll miss a lot more if you have to go to the stand.”

  I shushed her and turned up the volume.

  Ten minutes later, when the youth with the candy tray had worked his way to the other side of the lot, I got out and laced my way between parked cars to the little building in the center. J. W. Pierpont was leaning on the end of the counter, munching popcorn from a box with Popeye on the front. He had on a tweed sport coat and his Panama. I had never known anyone with so unerring a barometer for bad combinations of dress.

  “Esther Williams’ playing at the Galaxy,” he said. “I wish you’d picked that one. A hundred broads in bathing suits, you know?”

  “If you wanted to jerk off you should’ve stayed home with Betty Page.” I paid the girl, put the Crackerjacks in my sweater pocket, and joined him out of the line of traffic.

  “I ain’t done that since I was a kid. Spillane, you know?” He pried a kernel loose from a molar with his little finger. “What you got for me?”

  “I need more time.”

  “You couldn’t ask for that over the phone?”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d give it to me and I didn’t want to have to explain why I needed it. I don’t know whose phone is tapped.”

  “So explain. I’m on the company clock.”

  “I talked to Charlie Balls last night.”

  “I didn’t figure you went out there to play pinball.”

  “I asked him flat out who dropped the dime on Reuther. He pulled a gun on me.”

  “Charlie’s getting mellow. In the old days he’d of used it.”

  “I doubt it. All he had to do was stonewall. I touched a nerve of some kind. It’s just a hunch, but I think it has something to do with Frankie Orr wanting to come back from the old country.”

  He munched popcorn and said nothing. On the surface of his eyeglasses, Spencer Tracy grasped Anne Francis by the wrist. “Hunches come from somewhere.”

  “Charlie Balls was pretty sure it was happening. Maybe things have changed since I dug up dope for a living, but back then we looked for the thing that was sticking up so we could get our fingernails under it.”

  “Frankie was still in this country when Reuther got shot.”

  “He was under indictment even then. He didn’t get to be the Conductor waiting for things to happen. That prostitution rap the government hung on him was cobbled up. Everyone knows his power came from the unions. His relationship with Albert Brock and the Steelhaulers put fifty thousand trucks at his disposal for transporting contraband nationwide and his contacts in the UAW and the AFL-CIO gave him access to three million in strike and pension funds. Working capital, impossible to trace as long as you can generate enough cash flow to replace what you’ve borrowed. And everywhere the mob dips its bucket, it comes back brimming over with currency.”

  “Walter don’t like gangsters. That’s a fact.”

  “His price is more power. Trouble is, so is Frankie’s. It’s one thing he doesn’t spread around. So he gets chummy with someone in the union who wants to be Reuther, but who’s a lot more reasonable to deal with on a business basis, and he takes steps to weed out Walter. When that blows up he targets Victor. Object lesson.”

  Pierpont tilted the popcorn box and slid the last crumbs into his mouth. Then he crushed the box and flipped it in the direction of the overflowing trash can by the corner of the building. It glanced off the pile and started a small avalanche. He ignored it. “That’s a lot to get from nothing. You said Charlie Balls wasn’t talking.”

  “It makes more sense than Reuther’s theory. Why should the Ballistas do Israel Zed any favors?”

  “Joint effort. They all benefit. Wouldn’t be the first time Ford went partners with thugs. Ask Walter.”

  “That was under Harry Bennett. Henry Deuce bounced Bennett as hard as Bennett’s gorillas bounced Reuther off Miller Road. As Charlie Balls would say, you’re barking down the wrong hole. There’s no conspiracy at Ford.”

  “You been to an awful lot of trouble. You know? All Walter wanted you to do was poke through a couple of files at the Glass House. Thing like going out to Lone Pine Road, that’s my job. I might of cleaned up on the slots while I was at it. You got ambitious.”

  “It’s been a long time since I ran down a lead beyond a tip on a new job,” I agreed. “It’s been a good deal longer since I spooked for anyone. It’s been never. You go with your experience.”

  “Could just be you want us off your back and you’re pointing just any old where.”

  “Could be. But you’re not sure. You must be good at what you do or Reuther wouldn’t have hired you. In that case you’re too good not to run it down.”

  “I’ll look into it. Like I say, I might get lucky on the slots.” He produced a red bandanna from an inside pocket and mopped the butter off his palms. “You don’t mind if I hang on to them pictures till I turn something. They’re in a safe place. You know?”

  Music swelled from a hundred car speakers. The picture was coming to an end. I nodded and went back to the car. When I turned to open the door he was no longer at the concession stand. He moved fast for a man in his sixties.

  “What’d I miss?” I pulled the door shut and handed Agnes the box of Crackerjacks.

  “Only everything. Who was that you were talking to?”

  “Just an Ernest Borgnine fan. We agreed he should have won an Oscar for From Here to Eternity. Anyone who would beat Frank Sinatra to death deserves some kind of award.”

  “He looked like some kind of insect.”

  “Who, Sinatra?”

  “The Ernest Borgnine fan. He looked like some kind of goggle-eyed bug. Not like someone you’d want to talk to.”

  “My legs were stiff from sitting. It felt good to stand.”

  She crunched Crackerjacks. “I wish I knew what’s happening with you. I’d think it had something to do with that horrible night at Woolworth’s, but you were acting strange before that. Ever since you went to work for Ford. I still don’t know what you do there.”

  “I’m selling a car. A new line. Zed liked my work on ‘Detroit the Dynamic’ at Slauson and decided to put me in charge of promotion for the whole division.”

  “Fine. Don’t tell me.”

  I let it drift. Around us, engines were starting, headlight beams raking around. “What do you know about Stuart Leadbeater?” I asked.

  “Lawyer with the city attorney’s office,” she said after a moment. “He ran errands for the Kefauver committee when it was in town and got bit by the political bug. Served a term on the school board, then ran for superintendent and lost. Now he’s running with the pack for Wayne County Prosecutor.”

  “What are his chances?”

  “I believe the term you gentlemen use is piss-poor. He’s a Republican and there hasn’t been one of those in local office since Booth shot Lincoln.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Why? You told me you voted for FDR.”

  “Haven’t voted since. If Leadbeater were a shoo-in he might be feeling generous. If he’s hungry and losing it means he isn’t taking prisoners.”

  “Considering politics, Mr. Minor?”

  “Would you vote for me if I were?”

  “Not in this world or the next.”

  “I always said you were a smart woman, Agnes. I owe someone a favor and it means talking to Leadbeater. How much have you got on him down at Slauson?”

  “Not a lot. We put together some ads for the Republican slate when he ran for the school board. That means a short bio and professional resume. A clipping file, of course. I spend all day Tuesday and Friday with scissors.”

  “Can you send me what you have? I’ll get it back to you in good shape.”

  “I doubt the Admiral will notice it’s missing.”

  “How is the senile old bastard?”

  “Getting worse. He plays with
that toy ship in his office all the time. If he were in any other business he would be looked on as odd.”

  “As businesses go it’s not so bad. Being a private dick has to be the bottom of the barrel.”

  She offered me the box of Crackerjacks. When I held up a palm she said, “Sorry. I keep forgetting. Did Henry Junior give you an attractive secretary?”

  “Secretaries never are. Neither are nurses. That’s a myth. The pretty ones are all on The Guiding Light.”

  “I thought maybe you were dating. That would explain some of your behavior lately.”

  “I’m dating right now.”

  “I mean someone young. It would fit the profile. When a woman starts growing old she dyes her hair. When a man starts growing old he goes out with women who are too young to have to.”

  “Is that what happened to your marriage?”

  “Maybe. I never got the chance to ask. I sent him to the market for a loaf of bread and he just kept going. That’s when I went back to work and became one of those unattractive secretaries. I had a son at school.”

  “You must have done a good job. Not many West Point cadets have single mothers.”

  “It was hard at first. It’s still hard, but I don’t think he believes any longer that I drove his father away.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to bring back rotten memories.”

  She smiled briefly at the politeness. In the light reflecting off the blank movie screen she looked just like Peggy Lee. Most of the other cars had pulled out, leaving us alone in a forest of speaker stands. “Going to church in the morning?” she asked.

  “If I were to step through the door of St. Mary’s after all these years the roof would fall in.”

  “Good. I wouldn’t want God angry at me if you overslept.”

  Understanding seeped slowly through my thick Greek skull. I cleared my throat. “When I was a kid I couldn’t wait to finish growing up so I could be sure I was reading all the signals right. I’m still waiting. I need to know if you’re saying what I sure hope you’re saying.”

  She made a little squeal and pulled something out of the box. “Oh, look, I found the prize.”

  21

  THE OLD DETROIT CITY Hall towered in unassailable if somewhat dirty-faced dignity over the block bounded by Woodward, Fort, Griswold, and Michigan, four of the city’s oldest and most hallowed thoroughfares, pounded hard as iron long before the invention of asphalt by the booted feet of Cadillac and LaSalle and the softer but no less firm tread of Fathers Richard and Marquette, clerical brigands of a kind of Catholicism unknown to the crumbling faith of Protestant America under Eisenhower. Dominated by a clock tower whose iron bells trummed the hour to the accompaniment of decomposing gingerbread, the building sported tarnished green life-size statues of those four dead giants in corner niches added in 1884 and appeared on postcards and souvenir dishes in middle-class living rooms throughout the world. The ghosts that prowled among the columns in its drafty lobby wore stovepipe hats and side whiskers. The stench of their unwashed coattails saturated the old dirt packed into the fissures in the marble walls, and there were orange stains on the wainscoting that couldn’t be explained away entirely by leaks from the rusted pipes in the ceiling. In those days politicians freighted pistols next to their fobs.

  The talk, once the building’s current occupants had finished carrying their cartons of stationery and family photographs into the new City-County Building down the street, was of demolition. There were those who spoke in favor of maintaining the old structure for historical purposes, but they weren’t paying the bills, and anyway the dust from which it rose was a better fate than invasion by men in porkpies and women with plastic purses and unspeakable children. It soared too much for a civilization concerned with spreading out close to the earth as if to foil enemy radar. The glazed obelisk built to replace it represented more worldly ideals. It needed neither God nor gimcrackery, and the best thing that could be said about it was that when its time came the only controversy would be whether to blow it up or swing the ball.

  I rode a clanking birdcage elevator to the fourth floor and listened to my footsteps on hardwood in a corridor smelling of rung oil and dry rot. Ceiling fans swooped overhead, typewriter keys snicked behind tilted transoms. I paused before a door with S. F. I. LEADBEATER lettered in gold on the rock-candy glass, then thumbed down the brass latch and went on through. Sunlight, smuggled into the windowless room under the connecting door to the private office beyond, lay on the floor like spilled wheat, stopping at a fruitwood desk behind which a woman in a starched white blouse with pencils in her hair sat clittering the keys of an electric typewriter on a stand. When I approached the desk she swiveled and folded her hands on the blotter. She had made some effort to color her pale face with spots of rouge. The effect was not so much Ann Sheridan as Raggedy Ann. So far my theory about secretaries remained unchallenged.

  “Yes.” Not a question, but tentative acknowledgment that someone was sharing her oxygen. The nameplate on the desk read MISS HEIMDALL.

  “Connie Minor. I called yesterday for an appointment.”

  She glanced at the clock, a Regulator, on the wall opposite the desk. It and the piece of furniture she was seated behind, hand-rubbed with a beveled top, were the only objects in the room with character, and I was including Miss Heimdall. “Yes. You’re right on time. Unfortunately, Mr. Leadbeater is detained. He said for you to go in and wait.”

  My more devious instincts did a quick roller-coaster loop. I was reporter enough to embrace the time alone in my subject’s private office, but familiar enough with politicians to know that if there was anything in there worth looking at it would be under lock and key. I thanked her and let myself through the door. The clittering had started again before I got it closed.

  The room wasn’t large by contemporary standards—smaller than my part of the Glass House—but would have been considered spacious at the time the building went up. The original ten-foot ceiling had been brought down to contemporary dimensions with suspended panels, and new plasterwork had gone in over the wiring to the switches and fixtures; but someone with taste beyond the purely functional considerations of the usual bureaucratic remodeling had taken pains to preserve the atmosphere of late Victorian society set adrift in the swelling torrent of the Industrial Revolution. The shoulder-high tongue-and-groove wainscoting had been stripped and refinished recently by someone who knew what he was doing, leaving a surface that gleamed softly rather than glistened, butterscotch-colored and still smelling faintly of turpentine. The floor, somewhat darker and made of two-inch-wide boards fitted so tightly you could have rolled a piece of buckshot across the room without a bump, were left exposed for two feet around a deep red Oriental rug and still showed a couple of charred depressions from an old fire, lovingly maintained lest-we-forget. The overhead light was a milk-glass bowl suspended from a five-bladed fan with a seven-foot sweep and a dangling brass chain ending in a tassel. Shelves had been erected inside two arched windows, bricked in during an intervening era when coal was more precious than light, and supported mustard-spined law books and unmatched silver pieces of meticulous workmanship brought together by a collector of some knowledge. The third, left open, looked north as far as the goldleafed dome of the Fisher Building.

  After all this attention to detail, the furnishings themselves were a disappointment. From the overcarved ebony of the Regency desk to the burgundy tufted leather of a sofa that no one had ever stretched out on or ever would, it was a business cliché of a type not far enough removed from the present to be anything but rancid. The heavy gold frames on the requisite portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and Eisenhower, the horsehair pens standing erect in their brass stand on the desk, and the square cut-glass decanters of coppery whiskey and oxblood wine gathered cruetlike in their wire rack on a drum table with lion’s-head pulls on the drawers stank of masculinity in an aggressive and uncompromising way that made me question whether the occupant of the office wouldn’t rather be shar
ing a flouncy four-poster with the boy who emptied the wastebaskets. The very air was layered with a pungent leathery, worksweat, rotting-oak odor, as if Paul Bunyan had paused there to lean on his axe on his way to clear the Pacific Northwest.

  “Hideous, isn’t it? I made the mistake of hiring an office decorator. She looked up my family tree, found a couple of railroad barons and I suppose no small number of horse thieves, and ordered everything straight from Abercrombie and Fitch. I had to restrain her physically from mounting a boar’s head over my Revere ware. I’m Stuart Leadbeater. You needn’t introduce yourself, Mr. Minor. When I came out here I made a point to look up the city’s recent history. That included a complete run of the Banner.”

  He spoke rapidly—half the inundation had spent itself before I turned from a cast-iron celestial globe on its own stand to face the man in the doorway—but with all his consonants bitten clean through by some kind of eastern-school accent that was to become quite familiar to me, and to America itself, throughout the next political period. He looked younger than the thirty-eight years I knew him to be and a good deal less formal than his background suggested. His skinny tie was knotted crookedly, his three-button coat unfastened to expose a braided-leather belt, and his hair needed combing. It fell in a bunch over one side of his forehead like a strawberry blonde carnation, softening the effect of a lantern jaw and long upper lip that if it weren’t smiling might have belonged to a grave cardinal in something painted by Caravaggio. I’d have bet my two weeks’ vacation that when he was a few years younger he had flirted with a moustache to cover it up, then decided to live with it shorn after Tom Dewey’s defeat.

  All very open and casual. But his eyes were tiny and close-set; and although I was no fan of physiognomy, repeated experience had taught me that the condition was caused by the collapse of the skull where the faculties of conscience and mercy were normally located.

  “You’re a politician, all right.” I grasped the hand he presented, well-tended with a practiced grip. My father might have found fault with the lack of calluses, but I had known at least as many black hearts in bib overalls as I had honorable intentions in silk shirts. “For a Republican you have a generous idea of what’s recent history and what went out with Alley Oop.”