Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Tony?” I was whispering, God alone knew why. The big room was full of noise, human and mechanical. I wasn’t disturbing anyone.

  The eyes grated my way. Into them came that glad hand expression that people who work with people turn on everyone, regardless of whether they recognize him. “That’s me. The good-looking one, I used to say.” He laughed carefully. His voice sounded like a snow shovel scraping a sidewalk.

  “I’m Connie Minor. We never met, but you might remember the name. I wrote for the Banner.”

  “Sure. I remember.” It was clear he didn’t. “Fetch me a drink of that water, will you, son? I think I got a jute mill stuck in my throat.”

  I handed him a half-filled glass with a jointed straw from the table by the bed, not flinching when his dry puckered fingers brushed my palm. The weight of the glass bent his wrist. His lips closed around the straw and he sucked until there was nothing but air. The dry gurgle set my teeth on edge. I accepted the glass and put it back.

  “I got a hose hooked up to my phizz,” he said, looking down at the Y where the sheet had sunken into his crotch. The water didn’t seem to have lubricated his vocal cords any. “Fine-looking nurse picked it up in her hand and hooked it up. Time was when just the thought of it’d give me a honey of a hard-on, but it stayed limp as linguini. Guess it’s time to dig a hole.” He laughed again, even more carefully than the first time. In the days before the Ballistas had latched on to the simple tactic of separating to confound eyewitnesses, Tony had been the charmer, the brother who distracted the marked ones with jokes while the other came up behind and slipped the wire around their throats.

  “Albert Brock got me in to see you,” I said.

  “How is Al? I ain’t seen him since—well, water over the dam. I sent a nice present when his boy got married, one of them console TVs, and not a Tele King, neither. I never got a thanks.”

  “Maybe it got lost in the mail.”

  “Maybe. Them Brocks never did think much of Charlie and me. Too bad. They had a lot of nice nookie handing out coffee and sandwiches on them picket lines.”

  “What about Walter and Victor Reuther? Get along with them?”

  “You better fetch back that glass, son. I don’t want to spit on this here floor. They mop it regular.” He made a ghastly grin. “Al Brock treated Charlie and me like rich uncles compared to them Reuthers. They run us off with truncheons during that Kelsey-Hayes strike. Frankie only sent us to help out.”

  “What did Frankie say?”

  “Oh, Frankie didn’t talk much except to tell us where to go and what to do when we got there. But he was pissed, I can tell you. I think that was the start.”

  “What was the finish?” My hand ached. I was gripping the tube frame of the gauze screen.

  He started to cough, a rolling convulsion that started with little explosions in his chest and wound up shaking the bed to its frame. I thought at first he was faking, stalling for time to think after having said too much, but then jets of pink appeared in the clear tubes stuck in his nostrils. A slender nurse with a flushed face materialized, studied the green blips on the heart monitor, fiddled with the IV bottle, and placed a hand on Tony’s chest. The fit had subsided and he lay sucking air with the whites of his eyes showing.

  She straightened, looking at me. “You won’t stay long.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I just want to ask him something and then I’ll be going.”

  Her eyes said a great deal of what she knew or had guessed about her patient. Then she was gone as abruptly as she’d come. It was all so brisk and without waste that I wasn’t sure afterward if she’d been there at all. Hospitals breed hallucinations. It’s the medicated air.

  Tony’s amber gaze was fixed on me. “Who the fuck are you?”

  I told him again, although I was sure he hadn’t forgotten. It meant nothing to him. I said again I was there on Albert Brock’s ticket. That didn’t seem to mean anything either. If I’d hoped he’d be out of his head and susceptible I was disappointed.

  I had run out of time for euphemisms and diplomacy, not that they had ever been my long suit. “I always heard you were the smart brother,” I said. “Smart enough anyway to know you won’t leave this place through the front door. Frankie’s in Sicily, and you and I know he isn’t coming back, whatever Charlie thinks. Nobody has much to lose if you tell me who put up the bounty on the Reuthers back in forty-eight. You least of all.”

  “Charlie always was a dreamer. He kept saying Prohibition was on its way back right up until the Japs hit Hawaii.”

  I waited for him to take that somewhere, but he seemed to have finished. I tried another door. “You know Anthony Battle? Your brother’s backing his wrestling career.”

  “Sure I know that boy. Us Tonys got to stick together, even if he don’t look Italian.” He laughed, not carefully enough. It brought on another coughing fit, but it was over quickly. No hemorrhages this time.

  “Anthony’s in trouble. He’s got a politician on his back calling him a Communist.”

  He grinned the ghastly grin that made me wish he were coughing instead. “Shit, that boy ain’t red. He’s blacker’n a cast-iron skillet.”

  “Even so he’s going to be thrown to the wolves if I don’t give the man something better. I need the name of the man who pulled the string on Walter and Victor Reuther.”

  “What’s your angle? Everybody’s got a angle.”

  “I’ve got people on my back too. It isn’t every day you get to climb out from under and drag someone else out with you.”

  “Yeah, I figured it was something like that. So what’s my angle? You gonna fix me up with a new pair of lungs?”

  “No. And if I could I wouldn’t. You earned this a long time ago. You’re as bad as they come, Tony.”

  “I ain’t sorry for a thing I done. Charlie ain’t neither. Our old man sold shoes to fat ladies to live. You know what they done to him at the store when his knuckles got too stiff and swoll up to pry size sevens onto size ten clodbusters? Stuck a mop in his hands and cut his pay by half. I guess he’s in heaven now. He should be, it’s all he ever talked about. I’m telling you what I told that stick-shaking priest come to see me the other day to hear my confession: If that’s what I got to do to make the cut, I’d just as soon shovel coal for Old Nick. At least I’d get to see all my friends.”

  “You don’t have any friends. None that wouldn’t roll over on you for a plea to a lesser charge.”

  He reached up and curled his fingers around the IV stand. The gray flesh under his arm hung like a washcloth. “If I push this thing over, half the floor will come running. You won’t wait for it if you want to leave on your own two feet.”

  “I’ll leave as soon as you take a look at this.” I shook loose a fold of butcher paper from my jacket pocket and held it in front of his face.

  He didn’t look at it right away. After thirty seconds or so he took his eyes away from mine and focused on the sheet. He let go of the metal stand, took the paper from me. “What’s this? Letters and numbers.”

  “Any of them familiar?”

  “I know the alphabet. I can do my sums. Charlie and me got through third grade.”

  “They’re license plate numbers. The second one from the top’s the one I want you to look at. It belongs to a green Lincoln Continental. This year’s model.”

  I caught the glint, although he covered it quickly. I might not have, in the full bloom of his health. Weasels are sly survivors. “I don’t look at cars much. Charlie, he likes ’em big with plenty of flash. He had an Auburn once but he wrapped it around an Edison pole. I just drove whatever got me from here to there.”

  “This one belongs to the Ford Motor Company. Israel Zed drives it.”

  “If you knew that, why ask me?” He held out the scrap of paper, but I didn’t take it. He let it drift from his fingers. A current of air took it and spun it to the floor.

  “That list was made from cars parked at the Highwayman’s Rest on Lone Pine Road.
The people who drove them all had business with your brother not connected to the customer’s side of the roadhouse. What’s Zed got going with the Ballistas?”

  “Nothing. Now.”

  His eyes were closed. He was so near to a skeleton I got panicky, but the monitor continued to beep rhythmically. I moved closer.

  A hand touched my shoulder. I jumped six inches and looked into the flushed face of the slender nurse. She moved on a cushion of air and struck like a fuse blowing.

  “You’re going now,” she said.

  “Five minutes.”

  “You’ve had twenty. I don’t care whom you represent, you have to go.”

  “I like the company.”

  The nurse looked at him. His eyes were open. Their feral amber color was always a shock.

  “Five minutes.” She vanished again.

  I rested my hands on the bed rail. “Okay, that’s now. What about then?”

  “When?”

  “You’re not that far gone, Tony.”

  “Okay. I don’t owe the son of a bitch nothing. Getting him to stop around and pay his respects is like pulling teeth with your toes. I told Frankie he’d live to regret throwing in with a Jew.”

  “Zed knew Frankie?” I leaned in. We were breathing the same air now. I thought I could smell the medication through his skin, the morphine or whatever that was dripping into him to curb the pain.

  He made that death’s-head grin. “What’s the matter, you never hear of the Frankie Orr College Scholarship Fund?”

  I absorbed that. Before I could frame another question he went on.

  “Old Izzy, I guess he didn’t neither, but he had a good excuse. Him being the first.”

  For the time remaining to us I listened to him talk against the mechanized eternity of that floodlit room.

  28

  JOHN BUGAS—JACK TO his friends, of whom from certain knowledge I could identify but one, he whose name graced the company we both worked for—sat at his large neat gray desk listening to me without once looking away, as if I were a radio set airing his favorite program. His long frame in its simple blue suit remained motionless in the wingback, and his polite eyes canting back from his icebreaker nose never blinked. His shoulders were precisely parallel to the desk. He seemed of a piece with the matching desk set that occupied its top, as regulated as the framed portraits of the Ford Trinity tombstoning the walnut panels behind him. Substitute Washington, Lincoln, and Eisenhower for the two Henrys and Edsel, and the office would check in every particular with recommendations from FBI headquarters in Washington, his late employer. There was even a tasseled American flag on a stand in the corner.

  When I finished, the silence crackled. His was the quietest office on the executive floor, cork-lined, with a rubber pad under the carpet and a jacket of silicone on every caster and bearing in his chair. I figured all those qualifying sessions with earphones on the Bureau target range made his ears abnormally sensitive.

  “I wish you’d come to me at the start.” His pioneer inflections were gentle. Company scuttlebutt said he was embarrassed by stories about his obstreperous past and had taken steps to eradicate the frontier influence from his manner, including speech lessons.

  “I was new to the neighborhood then. I didn’t know who my friends were.” I didn’t add that I still didn’t. What I had learned was just too big for me to contain.

  I’d wrestled with it all day Sunday, and was still undecided when I went to bed Sunday night. Monday morning I’d awakened with the determination to lay the whole thing in Bugas’ lap. His background in law enforcement might give him a different perspective from the standard executive flank defense. In any case I wasn’t Atlas; the weight of the world was raising hell with my bursitis.

  “There isn’t a chance this man Ballista is lying.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “His type can be convincing. Their testimony is an amalgam of inside gossip, personal fantasy, and straight dope. Even they don’t know the difference in some cases. Lie detectors are useless.”

  “I know these people, sir. I’m a pretty good judge.”

  “I know them too. I’ve interrogated my share.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but you only know them from a cop’s point of view. I always got on with them because they thought of me as a neutral party. I was their ear to the straight world. They all had stories they were busting to tell, but I was their only safe audience. If the heat turned up they could always claim I invented it.”

  “Did you invent it?”

  I nodded. “That’s a fair question. I could just be spreading lies about my immediate superior because I want his job. I don’t. I’m an ad flack, that’s all I’ll ever be. You heard me tell Mr. Ford I wanted to turn whatever success I made of the Edsel into a position in the field of journalism. I know now that will never happen, but I don’t intend to slink away from advertising with my tail between my legs. I still want the chance to show you what a first-class snake-oil salesman can do when he has something worth selling. I can’t do that from Israel Zed’s office.”

  “Would you be willing to sign a paper stating that you would not accept his position if it were offered to you?”

  “Only if you insisted.”

  A barely discernible crease appeared in his forehead. “If you’re sincere about not wanting his job, why should I insist?”

  “I’ve thrown away enough paper in my time to build a city of frame houses. I don’t value it much. I’d rather shake hands on the deal.”

  The crease vanished. “That’s a good answer. Harry Bennett had a paper signed by Hank’s grandfather promising him complete control of the company after old Mr. Ford’s death. It didn’t do him much good when push came to shove.”

  I wanted to ask him if it was true he and Bennett had once pulled guns on each other. I didn’t. It would have been like asking a rising starlet about her old nose. In the bland, burnished, climate-controlled atmosphere of the Glass House, such behavior was as out of place as pen wipers and open inkwells.

  “I’m still not clear on what any of this has to do with the assaults on Walter and Victor Reuther,” he went on. “What did Zed have to gain?”

  “Frankie Orr’s good will. Zed was a poor boy from the Jewish ghetto with a first-class mind. Frankie always had one eye on the future and saw the advantages of having a good lawyer whose loyalty he could count on, so he ponied up the cash for Zed’s education at the University of Michigan School of Law. Trouble was, when Frankie most needed him, Zed was up to his eyes in Washington politics. FDR’s brain scouts plucked him out of Detroit when the ink was still wet on his bar exam and put him to work on the Great Depression. Then came the ambassadorship to British Palestine. By then I guess he thought he was out of Frankie’s reach, and had probably talked himself into forgetting just how much he owed an old bootlegger. Frankie waited until he came back into the private sector to work for Ford, then paid him a call.”

  “He threatened to expose him.”

  “He had a lot less to lose than Zed if it came out whose money had taken him so far from his old man’s pushcart in the downtown corridor. That federal indictment for violation of the Mann Act wasn’t going away. Fixing the feds is expensive. He needed the money in the UAW pension fund, but the Reuthers were standing in front of it. But taking them out was only half the battle. He needed flashy legal help to take the stink off what amounted to the single largest bribe in the history of organized crime. Israel Zed had to come back into the fold. Coercing him with the threat of exposure wasn’t enough, not for the Conductor. He had to be reminded just how deep his debt went.”

  I stopped. All this talking was making me lightheaded. I slipped the Hershey bar I had lately taken to carrying from my shirt pocket, peeled down the paper and foil, and helped myself to a row of chocolate squares. Candy didn’t taste nearly as good as it had in the days before it became medicine. Bugas said nothing, waiting for me to continue.

  “The pimping charge was a frame.” I replaced th
e wrapper and returned the bar to my pocket. “The reason the feds couldn’t get anything more on him is Frankie never gave the order to kill someone to the person he expected to carry it out. He always used buffers. That way, if one of his button men bungled and got arrested he couldn’t bargain his way out by pointing a finger at Frankie. The buffers he used are anyone’s guess, probably junior execs, Frankie wannabes. Except in this one case. In this one case he made Zed carry the message to Tony and Charlie Balls.”

  “Diabolical.”

  “An Orr trademark. If he behaved like the silkshirt thugs you see in Syndicate movies, he’d have gone to the chair twenty years ago. As soon as Tony told me I believed it. It had his thumbprint all over it.”

  “But why should he confide in you? Doesn’t he believe in the Code of the Underworld?”

  “Another Hollywood invention, sir. Though I expect you ran into your share of hoods who imitated what they saw in the pictures,” I added quickly, knowing full well his job at the Bureau had mainly involved shifting documents from the In box to the Out box. “They love to gossip, as I said. So much the better if there’s something in it for them. In his case he had nothing to lose and time to kill. Terminal patients don’t draw many visitors.”

  He rose for the first time since I had entered the office and strode to the window. His glossy patent-leathers, his sole affectation and likely a source of friction with erstwhile boss J. Edgar Hoover, doyen of tidy invisibility, made no sound at all on the steel-gray carpet. For a time he stood with his back to me and his arms hanging at his sides. There wasn’t much to see beyond the late-summer glare, except the new construction creeping across the pastures beyond the city limits. Like a spike driven into the trunk of a moribund oak, the Ford towers had sparked a sudden blossoming in Dearborn’s industrialization, dormant for decades. New housing projects would follow; long-barreled, low-roofed homes with attached garages and basketball hoops crowding out barns and plowed fields. Where did all the old farmers go after they sold out? You never saw them on park benches.