Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Surely not. I was in tenth grade when Repeal came. There are young men studying for the bar who never knew another President but FDR until they were old enough to shave. Just the other day my nephew asked me what television programs I watched as a boy. I had to explain radio to him. Yet the leaders of our country, this state, this city, were all born in another century. Time is relative, Mr. Minor. Women mark it with hemlines; men with headlines. Just for now I’ll overlook your scurrilous reference to my political affiliation. Truth to tell, I’m not that impressed with some of its more visible representatives. To a man they’re bovinely unaware of the cancer spreading through our society. Won’t you sit down? That chair’s the least uncomfortable of the bunch. I had it reupholstered with foam rubber. Even our hearty ancestors preferred to have a saddle and blanket between themselves and the hair of the horse.”

  I sat, blasted off my feet by the hurricane of his vocabulary. I’d violated the first rule of survival in the information-gathering business by coming in with a preconceived notion of the sort of man I was dealing with. Now I had lost the first advantage while I sought time to frame a fresh plan of attack.

  Stuart Freemantle Ingram Leadbeater had been born in a snowbound hamlet named St. Agatha on a frozen lake in Maine in 1918, taken a degree in contract law from the University of Maine in 1940, passed the bar on the second try, and languished in the legal department at the Kennebec Paper Company in Augusta until Pearl Harbor. He had joined the navy and received a nasty paper cut from a copy of Davis’ Naval Courts and Boards, for which he was promoted to lieutenant junior grade and stationed in Point Barrow, Alaska, where it may be noted no successful invasion by Imperial Japan took place from the date of his arrival through the end of the war. Having drunk in the sophistication of Prudhoe Bay, he was understandably disenchanted with a future with the pulp paper industry, and after his release from service he assembled a résumé and floated it to prestigious law firms across the country. When the anticipated flood of requests for interviews failed to occur, he downsized his aspirations, eventually consenting to fill the void left in the Detroit city attorney’s office by the sudden death of a twenty-three-year-old Michigan Bar hopeful due to congenital heart disease. There he parlayed an ability to spend twelve hours at a stretch tracking down arcane precedents in the stacks of the law library at Wayne State University into a research assignment with the Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce.

  In that capacity, on loan from the city in return for a promise of federal funding for various municipal construction projects, Leadbeater had distinguished himself so far as to prompt a special commendation signed by Senator Kefauver, which went into his jacket at City Hall. Of greater significance were the five seconds of national fame that came his way when he appeared on camera handing a slip of paper containing pertinent facts to Rudolph Halley, the committee’s chief counsel. The gesture happened to take place during a dramatic moment in the testimony of Leo Bustamente, bodyguard and sometime leg-breaker in the employ of Frankie Orr, and the footage was repeated during the six and eleven o’clock news broadcasts. I’d noted the presence in the office of a framed blow-up from the Free Press’s front-page coverage in which the photographer had captured Leadbeater leaning over the counsel’s shoulder. It’s not every day you get to study the precise moment when the direction of a man’s life changed. Some pursued public office with an earnest desire to improve the world, some for wealth, many for power. The rest just liked to read their names in print.

  From this information, delivered to my door by special messenger from Agnes DeFilippo’s desk at Slauson & Nichols, and from the pale, slick-haired image in the newspaper photo, I had constructed a repressed, stoop-shouldered fanatic who like so many others before him had turned to politics as an escape from his own mediocrity. The Redbaiting that had drawn him toward the lighted ring of professional wrestling, and into the life of Anthony Battle, was both an opportunity and a deep faith. In the ice-locked reaches of northern Maine it was probably easier to imagine the tread of an invading Soviet Army in Arctic boots and Astrakhan hats than in the comparatively temperate climate of southeastern Michigan, and those long changeless months spent defending a skeleton post on the threshold of Siberia might have skewed anyone’s opinions about which group posed the greatest threat to our way of life, the Nazi enemy or our Soviet allies. True to the type, the wife he had acquired after leaving the navy and before the move to Detroit would be a mouse-faced woman in a cloth coat with a monkey collar who volunteered to serve turkey at the Salvation Army mission on Thanksgiving Day; their seven-year-old daughter would wear yellow party dresses and hair bows and dream of serving charity turkey for her future Republican husband.

  This was the animal I had come prepared to tame. I had brought nothing with which to handle this sparking wire whose casually unkempt appearance and icon-smashing charm ran counter to everything I had experienced in the greasy half-light of the political arena. It had been too long. I hadn’t returned; I had merely been disinterred, and my petrified bones were crumbling in the indifferent atmosphere of an age I was never intended to see.

  “Are you a drinking man, Mr. Minor?” He lifted the wire rack and studied the decanters’ contents against the light, as if searching for impurities.

  “Not any more. I thought members of your party never drank before sundown.”

  “Yes. I’m somewhat disenchanted with the party of Lincoln. They forget they repudiated Honest Abe in 1864, forcing him to win re-election as an independent. I think sometimes of changing my affiliation, but mugwumps aren’t to be trusted. They’re like journalists who take it into their heads to run for office. No offense.”

  I waved it away. I’d known a few, W. R. Hearst included, and wouldn’t have voted for one on a bet. Anyone who spent as much time with politicians as reporters were forced to and wanted to become one was unfit to lead.

  Leadbeater poured a stiff jolt into a rock glass from the bottle marked BOURBON. “What brings you to city hall? I was under the impression you were no longer with the Fourth Estate.”

  “It’s the right one. I’m with promotion at Ford.” In the absence of ammunition I was moving slowly, seeing how much I could salvage of what I’d brought. “Some of us in the Glass House think you’ve got a real shot at becoming county prosecutor.”

  If I was looking for a spark of campaign-contribution avarice, he disappointed me. He leaned a hip against the corner of his desk, swirling the liquid in his glass and frowning down at it. “I can’t do much for the auto industry in the prosecutor’s office. Surely Mr. Ford knows that.”

  “Mr. Ford doesn’t live in the present. He already considers it the past. Tom Dewey started as a special prosecutor, went on to become Governor of New York State, and nearly stole the presidency out from under Give ’em Hell Harry.”

  “‘Nearly’ being the operative word. The great tragedy of politics is you’re never remembered for your early successes, only for your most recent failure. What are you proposing, Mr. Minor?”

  “You’re backing a dead horse in this anti-Communism crusade. It would be a greater tragedy if you were to be sucked down the same hole with Joe McCarthy.”

  “The nation didn’t turn its back on Senator McCarthy because he opposed Communism. It simply decided he wasn’t the champion it wanted to carry the banner. His mistake was to take on the United States Army with a former general in the White House.”

  I couldn’t resist. “The prospects of a professional wrestler being elected to high office appear somewhat less likely.”

  He set his glass on the desk without drinking from it. The small close-set eyes reflected no light. Doll’s eyes. “Who told you I had an interest in professional wrestling?”

  The temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees, and with it my opinion of myself. The second rule of survival in the information-gathering business was never to give up more than you got, and I had shattered it. In a moment I had done what Ivan Kohloff,
the Beast of Borodino, had been unable to do in ten minutes of brute athletics. Anthony Battle was down for the count.

  22

  KICK UP DUST.

  “Detroit’s a small town for its size,” I said. “The ring sports find their most enthusiastic audience here. When someone stirs them up it gets talked about. Actually, I’m surprised you think it’s such a secret. Isn’t publicity the main reason to go looking for Communists in an unlikely place like the wrestling arena?”

  “Hardly unlikely. Wrestling is popular in Russia. They understand it. If they played baseball in Moscow I’d go looking for them at Briggs Stadium. I know exactly whom I’ve approached on this matter, Mr. Minor. If there’s a leak I’ll find it. I already have a good idea where to look.”

  “That’s not important. What’s important is you’ve placed your bet on last year’s turn of the wheel. This year no one’s interested in what the commies are up to.”

  “John Foster Dulles isn’t no one. J. Edgar Hoover isn’t. I flatter myself that I am not.” He stopped leaning and slid his hands into his coat pockets, leaving the thumbs out. “You’re entirely mistaken about my motives. I’m not some political opportunist trying to hitch my wagon to the current popular notion of what counts. Nor am I some tobacco-plug Tennessee ward heeler poking about under people’s beds hunting for comical little men in black raincoats with big round bombs in their pockets. I’ve seen the enemy at close range and found nothing to laugh at.”

  “You mean when you were stationed in Alaska.”

  He didn’t seem surprised that I was familiar with his service record. “In the spring when the East Siberian seaports opened, I would watch through fieldglasses as their destroyers patrolled the edge of the Three Mile Limit. They were the best they had, and there were more of them each time. I ask you, Mr. Minor, why were they so concerned about the waters separating the Soviet Union from the United States—their ally—when the enemy lay in the opposite direction?”

  “I gave up trying to understand the military mind when Montgomery destroyed the Netherlands trying to protect them from the Nazis.”

  “We could use a few of their minds in our military. While we were busy fighting that war, they were getting ready for the next. Are you familiar with Herbert A. Philbrick’s I Led Three Lives?”

  “I caught a couple of episodes. Richard Carlson’s got to be the dullest leading man this side of Van Johnson.”

  “I’m talking about the book, not the television program loosely based upon it. It should be required reading in every public school. During the nine years he worked as an informant for the FBI among the ranks of the American Communist Party, Philbrick discovered that its leaders willfully taught and advocated the overthrow and destruction of the government of the United States by force. They spread their Marxist-Leninist filth in schools and colleges and among groups of well-meaning community-minded citizens who had no idea that through their innocent contributions they were helping to finance and foment violent revolution. In short, Mr. Minor, these gray men and women going about their everyday business in the drab guise of John and Mary Public posed, and continue to pose, a greater danger to the liberties we count sacred than the armed might of Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan combined.”

  “And Mussolini’s Italy. Don’t forget the Italians.” I had him now. Whatever public-relations team had worked the makeover on him—and I had participated on the edges of that kind of thing enough times I was appalled not to have spotted it before this—had thrown me at first, but I had been right in my prejudice. Fanatacism I could deal with. Conspiracists spent so much time doubling back on their own logic they mistook insanity for brilliance. You could sell them a refrigerator for the purpose of baking a pie. The only way they would feel insulted would be if you were to offer an explanation.

  “Forgive me, Mr. Leadbeater. You must understand that sincerity was the last thing I expected to encounter in a politician’s den.”

  He didn’t appear to have heard me. “For all their devious methods, Communists understand simplicity. They prey upon minds that are unable to grasp an abstract thought. Dick divides his apple equally among four friends. Nikita divides the wheat crop in the Ukraine equally among one hundred eighty million comrades. That’s the beauty of wrestling to their plans. There’s a good guy and a bad guy. The bad guy is direct and aggressive, the way America has been throughout seven wars. The good guy is sneaky; his way of fighting is complex, his holds difficult to understand and even more difficult to escape. In just that way Russia drew the Nazis deep into its wilderness before closing the trap. And so by compelling the unsuspecting fan to root for the hero’s tangled tactics against the brute honesty of his evil opponent, the Communists slowly and subtly win converts to their unholy cause. It doesn’t matter to them whether it takes years or generations. They waited four hundred years to overthrow the Czar.”

  He had begun to frighten me. It wasn’t so much his theories as the casually conversational way he laid out this magoozlum of overcooked angst, like the neighborhood know-it-all explaining how radiation worked based on his possession of a glow-in-the-dark watch. When you dissected the translated text of an address by Hitler or Stalin it didn’t go back together, and indeed fell apart at the touch of a reasonably sharp scalpel. What made it work was the delivery; that, and the speaker’s unshakeable conviction that he was saying things that everyone knew were true but lacked the courage and the ability to put them into words everyone could understand. Fifty years ago, even forty, this kind of spellbinder could have seen the limits of his influence from the podium he stood behind, the egg crate he used to lift himself a few inches above the level of the pavement where his listeners stood. Radio and now the cathode ray had swollen those limits beyond even the speaker’s imagination. But the pitiless glare of the television arc light would have done no service to the bug-eyed demagoguery of a Hitler, the foam-flecked doomsaying of a Stalin or a Huey Long, magnifying as it did the ugly distortion of a shouting face. It would have embraced the chiseled chin, rumpled hair, and cool mannerly sociability of this eastern-bred young Turk. His poison would glide down the coaxial cable and spill out into a thousand living rooms like notes from Liberace’s piano, gently, insidiously, challenging you not to hum the tune all the following day. This was a new creature for a new jungle, incalculably dangerous.

  I said, “I can see you’ve given this a great deal of thought.”

  “Not nearly as much as the people on the other side, nor for nearly as long. Why are you here really, Minor, and who do you represent? I don’t know Henry Ford personally, but from what I’ve heard he wouldn’t send a PR man to discuss politics.” Although he placed no emphasis on the change, there was significance in his having jettisoned “mister.” With it went the gloves.

  “He would if he didn’t want to attract attention. It’s a delicate business whenever the public and private sector make contact.”

  He stretched an arm across the overcarved desk and snapped the switch on the intercom. “Miss Heimdall, please see if you can get Henry Ford on the line. Try the new Administration Center in Dearborn.” He straightened. “I have no doubt you’ll pardon my suspicion once we have this settled. These days it’s difficult to follow the rules of baseball. Even baseball. Yalta changed everything.”

  Not to mention Mickey Mantle. “Cancel that call,” I said.

  “Belay that, Miss Heimdall.” He flipped off the intercom and leaned back against the desk, folding his hands in front of him.

  “I’m a friend of Anthony Battle’s,” I said. “He hasn’t told anyone else about the conversations you’ve had. He just wanted to ask my advice.”

  “I thought as much. That it was Battle, I mean. He’s the only man I’ve approached on this matter who seemed reluctant to cooperate.”

  “It isn’t that. He doesn’t know the first thing about Communists or Communism. He thinks Karl Marx is the brother Groucho never talks about.”

  “That’s just where the Party finds the b
est hunting. Among those who haven’t yet made up their minds.”

  “He’s a wrestler, not an idealogue. All he wants is to be left alone.”

  “He’s an unwitting dupe. I saw that from the first. It doesn’t make him any less dangerous; quite the contrary. The Reds thrive on ignorance. Understand, it’s not Battle I want. If I’m to find the source of the corruption in his profession, I’ll need names. His unwillingness to provide them can only lead me to one conclusion.”

  “Most of the people he associates with don’t even have names. They call themselves Bobo and Leaping Larry and the Sheik. Their conversation runs to better holds and improved brands of jockstraps. You tell me how that’s going to save America from the godless horde from the East.”

  Leadbeater’s long upper lip skinned back from a pair of abnormally long and sharp canines. No doubt a trip to the orthodontist was in the offing before the November elections. “I offered him a way out. It’s plain he doesn’t want it. Your presence here is evidence enough of that. I’ve yet to hear one good reason why I shouldn’t just go ahead and pull the plug on Mr. Battle.”

  “I can give you something better than Reds behind the wainscoting.”

  “A clever phrase. I’ll have to remember it. Be more specific.”

  “I can lay in your lap the names of people involved in the biggest criminal conspiracy to hit this area since the Ferguson-O’Hara grand jury investigation of 1939.”

  His lip came down. Maybe his gums were just drying out. “You were part of that investigation, if I recall my reading. Names, you said?”

  “Walter Reuther. Victor Reuther, his brother. The Ballista brothers, Tony and Carlo. And Frankie Orr.”

  “Orr’s in Sicily.”