Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Detroit Metropolitan Airport takes jets now. Flight time from Palermo to here is less than twelve hours.”

  “Federal agents would be waiting when he set down. They’d bundle him aboard the next flight out.”

  “Not if he buys his way out of the original deportation.”

  “Impossible. That would take millions.”

  “I said it was big.”

  “Anyone can reel off a list of names, Mr. Minor. And draw up a plot to connect them. You’re a writer, after all.” But the “mister” was back.

  “The Reuther brothers have no love for organized crime, particularly when it’s organized by Frankie Orr. The no-necks who roughed him around during the Battle of the Overpass were Frankie’s, on loan to Harry Bennett. That was before Orr found out how much untraceable cash is lying around your typical union strike fund. There are dissenters in the UAW who are only too ready to pipe that cash into Frankie’s pocket in return for a leg up in the union. In 1948 he tried to give them that leg up by shooting Walter. When he survived, an attempt was made on Victor to help him see the light. The only thing that kept Orr from finishing the job was the federal indictment that eventually got him booted out of the country. Now he wants back in. I’ll give you three guesses where he hopes to dig up the working capital.”

  “You mentioned the Ballistas. I recommended against subpoenaing them to appear before the Kefauver committee. They’re mouth-breathers, nothing more. They push slots and jukeboxes.”

  “These days they’re in the entertainment business. And they’re Frankie’s only link to his old territory.”

  “Except for his son Pasquale. Don’t forget Patsy.”

  “Why not? Everyone else has. He’s a weakling and cripple, getting along on his father’s name and the Ballista’s muscle.” I caught a flash then of the big party at the Highwayman’s Rest and the sallow youth in evening wear with his crutches leaning against the table next to him. I hadn’t made the connection before. But then the last time I had seen him he was less than seventy-two hours old, fighting for life in an incubator at Detroit Receiving Hospital.

  Leadbeater was chewing on some mental picture all his own. “I’m interested in your source.”

  “Call Anthony Battle and tell him he’s off the hook.”

  He chewed some more. “Where can you be reached?”

  I gave him my home number. It was finding its way into some interesting address books of late.

  23

  “THANKS DON’T CUT IT, Mr. Connie. I already seen Ginny and me in the canned-meat line at the government warehouse. Little Charlie don’t finish school and winds up carrying a hod for fifty cents a hour, just like me and my old man. You done saved the Battles, Mr. Connie. Saying thanks just ain’t near good enough.”

  “When you’re out of the woods you can send me a couple of tickets to your next championship bout. Leadbeater hasn’t forgotten about you yet.”

  “He sounded like it when he called. He couldn’t wait to get off the phone with me so’s he could stick it in some other sorry son of a bitch.”

  Neither could I, but not for the same reason. I can accept gratitude as well as the next man, and better than most, but I hadn’t earned it from the wrestler until I could place evidence in Stuart Leadbeater’s lap to prove that all of southeastern Michigan was in cahoots to put an over-the-hill expatriate mobster back in business. I thanked Battle for calling and cradled the receiver.

  Agnes turned over in bed and slid an imperfectly shaved thigh across my groin. The tiny bristles awakened a semblance of life in my aging member, so recently exhausted. She smelled faintly of Chanel, more strongly of me. “That didn’t sound like auto business,” she said sleepily.

  “It was, though. Kind of. I keep backing up for a longer head start. I’m so far away now I can’t see what I’m running at.”

  “What’s Leadbeater got to do with it?”

  “Nothing. Everything. A couple of years ago I read a science fiction story about a group of time travelers who were warned not to step off the path while they were hunting dinosaurs, because if they altered something no one could tell how it might affect history. Someone stepped off anyway and killed a butterfly. When they got back, everything had changed. This would just be another selling job if someone in the Navy Department had assigned Leadbeater to the Philippines instead of Point Barrow.”

  “He doesn’t stand a chance of being elected. If that means anything.”

  I grinned at the religious picture on the wall opposite the bed, once the property of an acquaintance, long dead. He’d have enjoyed my situation. Not thinking things through had gotten him killed, but it had kept him out of the sort of trouble I spent my life in. “That’s the hell of it,” I said. “Getting him off my back may just clinch the election for him.”

  She propped her head up on her elbow. She looked younger with her hair loose around her bare shoulders, and she never looked her age. “You know what your problem is? You spend too much time figuring the angles. I bet if you just went ahead and did your job the way it was described to you when you were hired, you’d come out just as well as if you chased down all the loose cannons. And you’d have a lot fewer gray hairs.”

  “It’s a theory.”

  “But you won’t try it.”

  “Maybe I will. After I’ve chased down one more cannon. I need your brain one more time.”

  “Shit.” She turned over, giving me a view of her back all the way down to her right hip, fished a pack of Chesterfields and a Ronson lighter out of her purse on the nightstand on her side of the bed, and sat up to light it. “I’d hoped you wanted me for my body. Okay, shoot.”

  “Who knows where all the bodies are buried in Detroit?”

  “Narrow it down.”

  “I mean in the labor racket. Don’t say Walter Reuther. I can’t go there.”

  “Albert Brock.”

  “Next suggestion.”

  “Sorry. Brock’s your man. His hands aren’t as clean as Reuther’s, but his people are better off because Brock knows enough to put his cufflinks in his pocket before he shakes hands with the mob. He speaks their language.”

  “I interviewed him for the Banner when he was just a grunt. My editor twisted the story all around to make him look like an anarchist. He’d as soon run me over with a Kenworth as talk to me.”

  “My brother-in-law’s a twenty-year man with the Steelhaulers. He’s crazy about me. I should have married him instead of his brother. He can get you an interview.”

  “Am I lying on his side of the mattress?”

  She blew smoke at me. “I don’t ask you about your little friend at Ford. She smashes your views on good-looking secretaries all to pieces.”

  “If one more person starts following me I’m going to have to put in for a parade permit. What do the kids say? I didn’t know we were going steady.”

  “It’s a small town. Someone I know saw you with her at a ball game. Israel Zed’s secretary has a withered arm. You don’t have to be Rocky Lane to put it together.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “Does my brother-in-law bother you?”

  “I asked first.”

  “Jesus Christ. Any woman who doesn’t have to wear a bra to keep her tits out of her soup bothers the hell out of me. Does it bother me that you’re dating one? I’m not sure. My opinion of men is already tarnished, so I don’t expect much. Not that it’s any of your business—unless you say it is—but my brother-in-law is a dispatcher at McLouth and he has pictures of his wife and four daughters all over his desk. He’d sell secrets to Khrushchev before he’d betray them.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” I said, “unless you say it is. Janet Sherman’s a nice girl I’ve gone out with a couple of times and talked shop talk. She left the definite impression last time she wouldn’t mind if it went further. I left the definite impression I would.”

  “Is it her arm?”

  “No, goddamn it. It’s the twenty-five years I spent f
inding out the world smells like bad meat before she was born. I can barely keep up with you. She’d kill me.”

  “That again. Everybody gets old, Connie. You’re no pioneer.”

  “Let’s just say I’ve got enough on my plate right now without going back to the young love table for seconds.”

  “I’ll say. Politicians and union thugs. For someone who thinks he’s Bernard Baruch, you sure act like Dick Danger. Speaking of Dick.” She squashed out her cigarette in the saucer on the nightstand and reached under the covers. Her aim was remarkable.

  When she left I was ravenous. I found a frozen steak in the ice compartment of the Kelvinator, left it to thaw under the hot water faucet in the sink while I pulled on a pair of pajama pants under my robe, and had a skillet heating on the stove—I changed my plans for the evening when he told me he cooked with gas; one of my most successful print campaigns at Slauson—when the telephone rang for the second time that night. The kitchen extension, a luxury I was just beginning to take for granted after a lifetime of apartments decorated around the single unit in the living room, had a long enough cord to allow me to introduce meat to hot metal while I spoke.

  “This must be serious. You’re the first woman who ever called to tell me she got home all right.”

  “Mr. Connie?”

  “Oh, hello, Anthony. Get another championship shot so soon?”

  “No, that don’t come up for another six months. I got so buzzed over what you done for me I forgot I owed you. I took down some license numbers like you said.”

  “License numbers?”

  “You know, from folks’ cars that come to the Rest just to see Mr. Carlo.”

  “Hell, I forgot. Second.” I found a fat ballpoint with the name and number of a garage printed on it and scribbled on the clean side of the butcher wrap the steak had come in until the ink started. “Okay, spill ’em.”

  He had seven. Two belonged to Cadillac Sedan deVilles. There was a Buick Roadmaster, two Lincolns, an Olds Starfire convertible, and a Henry J. For a man who drove a six-year-old Chevy he knew his cars.

  “What’s a Kaiser doing in that crowd?” I asked.

  “Oh, I knows that one. He run numbers down on Hastings. He don’t spend money on nothing. I hear he gots pretty near a million stuffed in his mattress.”

  “There’s always someone people say that about. When some rock ’n’ roll punk finally gets around to slitting his throat he’ll come up with a double handful of cotton batting and the dock bill on a hundred-foot yacht in Lauderdale. What about the others?”

  “They mostly comes and goes in the dark. The Starfire’s a lady. I think she’s a McGuire sister.”

  “Thanks, Anthony. I may not need this stuff after all, but I’m happy you remembered.”

  “Anything you wants, you call. I mean that, Mr. Connie.” He hung up.

  I tore off the section with the numbers on it and stuck it in a drawer under the knives and forks. I’d been distracted by my cooking and hadn’t paid much attention to what I was writing. A week went by before I looked at them again; by which time it was almost too late.

  24

  SUMMER CAME TO DETROIT as it always did, with the suffocating suddenness of two hundred pounds of wet canvas hitting a concrete slab. Buildings squirmed in the waves ribboning up from the asphalt, mattresses hung like seasick passengers over the railings of fire escapes, cars lolloped beside the curbs with their doors open while their owners stood around smoking cigarettes and waiting for the oven air inside to find its way out. The river lay as flat as hammered iron under a baked white sky.

  But in the Glass House, twelve stories closer to heaven than the streets of Dearborn, the air remained a comfortable seventy degrees, filtered and chilled and circulated by a silent central system that wrung out the perspiration and let it drip discreetly into the cutout where the dumpsters rusted. You only knew it was July when you scribbled an appointment on your desk calendar or rode the elevator down and stepped out into the deadhammer heat and sick-sweet stench of automobile exhaust. That leaden reek was enough to make anyone nostalgic for the moist fresh stink of horse manure during childhood summers when the Industrial Revolution was just a dull hum in the East and motor transport remained a hobby for the rich, along with croquet and kept women.

  I found Israel Zed not at his desk but seated on the tapestry sofa where he conducted most of his business, paging through a sheaf of papers stapled in one corner. Rare event, he was in his shirtsleeves, and his big rounded shoulders holding up a pair of black suspenders and his bowed head with its ubiquitous yarmulke looked at home among the Hebrew bric-a-brac that seemed to breed and multiply in the space, swallowing room and light and whatever dreams the architect might have entertained about the next century of corporate style. Though he had been in residence only a couple of months, the place smelled of rotted bindings, melted wax, and the shabby doom of the cloistered existence. Zed was anything but monkish, and so the effect was an illusion, created at no small cost to the Ford executive expense account. I could only guess at the clerks’ reaction in Payable when the bill came in on the seventeenth-century Talmud flaking away on the glass-and-chrome coffee table in front of the sofa.

  “Hello, Connie. Find a seat.”

  I found one—a stodgy old spinster aunt of an armchair with bowed legs and crushed-velvet cushions faded the color of rose petals imprisoned between the pages of Emily Post—but didn’t sit down on it, preferring to perch on one of its bony arms. It smelled like old newspapers. “How bad’s the diagnosis?”

  “Bad as it gets. By which I mean I have no idea what it signifies. An acquaintance on Grand sent me these figures this morning at my request. They represent General Motors’ second-quarter profit picture as they would have their stockholders believe to be gospel. I don’t need to tell you this is top-secret stuff. It doesn’t go public until Monday.”

  “Has Harley Earl designed a grille funnier-looking than ours?”

  “No,” he said; and the fact he didn’t respond to the exploratory needle suggested he was concentrating in another direction. “You know Hank’s pledged to match them model for model. That’s why he threw out his grandfather’s demand to return to the one-model company of prehistoric days and established a five-model hierarchy to compete with Buick, Cadillac, Chevy, Olds, and Pontiac.”

  “I didn’t know. I guess it makes sense.” Why not? The whole of the present was traveling on borrowed gas. I hadn’t seen a fresh idea since belt loops.

  “According to these figures the medium-price segment among automobile consumers is in remission. The steam from V-J Day is playing out, the Russkies are monkeying around in outer space, Uncle Miltie’s losing in the ratings; call it what you will, but the number of buyers looking for something in the middle range between the Bel-Air and the Eldorado has shrunk seven percent. Even allowing for poor-mouthing to avoid hefty taxes and salary hikes for employees, we’re looking at a diminishing market with a year still to go before the Edsel hits the showroom.”

  Someone dropped an icicle down inside my shirt collar. Discontinued models don’t carry bonuses or early retirement. “H. P. Curtice could be wrong. He’s throwing a bundle down that rathole of a tech center in Warren. That would give anyone cold feet.”

  “He’s never been wrong yet. The Corvette was a bigger gamble than the tech center and it paid off. You can call Hank a copycat if you like, but he didn’t turn this company around in eight short years by betting on the wrong player.”

  “The market will probably bounce back. You said yourself we’re a year away.”

  He smoothed down the top sheet. “I’m advising Mr. Ford to cut back production on the Edsel thirty percent. Maybe more. We can’t risk dumping a hundred thousand units of an untested model into an unstable economy.”

  “That’s no good, boss. We’ve got the dealers fired up to sell a hundred thousand. You can’t fill them full of smoke, then kick them in the belly and expect them to blow out only thirty percent. It’s all or nothi
ng when it comes to incentive.”

  “I know a bit about incentive. John Maynard Keynes and I spent some time discussing it when we were helping FDR pull the world out of the Great Depression. It doesn’t do much for incentive to have shiny new cars piling up at the dealerships and no takers.”

  “If you won’t gamble you can’t win.”

  “This is Detroit, not Las Vegas. I’m making the recommendation.” He slid the papers into the portable safe he used for a briefcase. “You needn’t worry, Connie. We’re not gutting the American Dream. Just modifying it. We’ve already trimmed the car down from a high-end super-Mercury to something the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit can expect to finish paying for in five years. We took some of the power out of the engine but redirected it toward the windows and seat adjustments. We’re keeping the Teletouch transmission and adding a rotating drum speedometer. It still spells class.”

  “Junking it up doesn’t make it a better car.”

  He smiled his square perfect goyim smile. “We aren’t in the business of making better cars, just more expensive ones with new features to make last year’s model look like a pair of high-top shoes and make people ashamed to take it out of the garage. The first car we ever made was the best. It climbed mountains and crossed deserts on a teaspoonful of gas and any kid with a pair of pliers could fix anything that went wrong with it. It’s all been downhill since the Model T. We just add lights and horns and whistles so people won’t notice.”

  “What makes you so sure they won’t?”

  “The record speaks for itself. White Christmas is just Holiday Inn, with Technicolor and an inferior cast to boot. They didn’t even bother to change the score. Even so it made a lot more money than the original. See, we’re smarter than the Chinese. When some old Mandarin whom everyone trusted declared that everything that could be invented had been, they stopped inventing. That was a thousand years ago. Now we’ve got the bomb, Moscow has the bomb, and Mao Tse-Tung rides a bicycle to the office.”

  “Would he get there any quicker if he had a bomb?”

  His grin set in concrete. “Anything new from layout and design?”