Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  I said I hadn’t.

  “Westerns are bullshit. It doesn’t hurt when it happens but once it starts it doesn’t let up. The shoulder is one of the worst places you can get shot and live. It fucks up your leverage for months. Even sex is hell. Not that I’ve a right to bitch. They shot my brother Victor and he lost an eye.”

  “They got the men that shot you, I heard.”

  “They got a witness who changed his story more often than Hudson’s changes its window. Now the son of a bitch he fingered is suing the union. Anyway he’s a stalking horse. I’ve put Pierpont here on retainer to flush out the real culprits.”

  I took a sip to cover my smile. I’d never heard anyone use the word culprits out loud before. The club soda tasted like boiled water. I never knew what anyone ever saw in it without some kind of nail. “Pierpont’s a detective?”

  “Best in Detroit.” The little man twirled his hat on the end of his fist. “Progressive Investigations, Ink. Three offices on the second floor of the Buhl Building. Eight employees: five investigators, three clerical. I’m heading this one up myself, you know?”

  “How long have you been on it?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Three weeks, and I’m all you’ve come up with?”

  He stuck out his jaw. It was skin over bone with three white whiskers poking out of it. “Not just you. I got leads up the ass.”

  “He’s already come up with more than the police have in seven years,” Reuther said. “Do you know the Ballista brothers?”

  The question threw me. The FBI had snared Antonio and Carlo along with a dozen others in an investigation of the Detroit-Toledo Black Market during the war. The case fell apart, federal evidence-gathering practices having made no improvements since Dillinger.

  “Not personally,” I said. “Frankie Orr barely let Tony and Charlie Balls hold his coat when I knew that crowd. They were street soldiers: a hundred to break a leg, five hundred to do great bodily harm less than murder, on up.”

  “Their rates are steeper now. Do you know what a carpet joint is?”

  “A roadhouse with an advertising budget.”

  “They’ve got one on Lone Pine Road, the Highwayman’s Rest. They run the Oakland County pinball and jukebox concession out of it, but they’re still the Ballistas and they keep their hand in whenever a heavy weight needs lifting. On top of the standard scare tactics and bribery, they stay out of prison by being identical twins. On those rare occasions when the police manage to scrape up an eyewitness who will testify against one of them, he goes free because the witness can’t tell if it was Tony or Charlie he saw wrapping a pipe around somebody’s skull. It’s a built-in hedge against incarceration. If they had anything more than the brains God gave a turnip, they’d be running a good deal more than Frankie Orr’s errands while he’s taking the sun in Sicily. As it is I doubt they can even count high enough to figure their weekly take. They dump the bills out onto a table and divide them in two piles with a baseball bat.”

  “You think one of them pulled the trigger on you?”

  “Not just on me. You’re forgetting Victor.” His right hand flexed in his pocket. The rubber ball had had its rest. “I’m not interested in the Ballistas, beyond what they can tell me about who picked up the tab on Victor and me. Since that’s unlikely, I invited you here.”

  I took a large swallow of club soda, not that its lack of flavor was growing on me. It was close in that shut-up room with the furnace going and my armpits were beginning to stick. “I don’t want to sound like an ungrateful guest, Mr. Reuther. If it weren’t for Jerry I’d just be wasting my time having lunch with a pretty girl. I have to ask why me.”

  “My union colleagues are all agreed my brother and I were targeted by dissenters inside the UAW. Lord knows there are plenty of them; the very existence of a labor union depends upon a healthy population of malcontents. I smell a larger breed of rat. Union crabs didn’t pull Dick Frankensteen’s coat over his head and throw him down the steps of the Miller Road overpass and me after him. They didn’t open fire with a machine gun on unarmed employees at Rouge.”

  “You think someone at Ford hired Tony and Charlie to take you out?”

  He smiled for the first time. It took some of the heat out of the room. “Sonny Ford may not have inherited many of his grandfather’s characteristics, but he has one thing the old man didn’t have: a publicist working around the clock to keep his face clean. He can endow all the hospitals and orphanages he wants, but he can’t change the fact he’s a Ford. I think he or someone close to him would find any of my critics in the UAW easier to work with if I were out of the picture.”

  “Someone like Israel Zed.”

  “One of several things Zed and I have in common is an infinite capacity to hate. You know Hitler’s ovens claimed the European branch of his family.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “It’s not so unusual when you figure there are at least six million Jews who lost relatives the same way. Zed’s special gift is his ability to focus that rage constructively—I should say destructively—and eliminate his opponents. That’s another thing we have in common,” he added.

  “It makes sense. What doesn’t is why you’re telling me all this.”

  He took the ball out of his pocket, flipped it back and forth from one hand to the other for a minute. Finally he walked over to the pool table and placed it in the exact spot on the rail where he’d taken it from. Without letting go he scowled down at it while the light from the hanging lamp painted shadows under his jowls. Pierpont cleared his throat restlessly, a crackling sound like dry kindling. When Reuther looked up, his eyes glittered in the shade of the bony mantel of his forehead. “You need information to gather information. I thought you might find it useful.”

  “I haven’t been in the information-gathering business in twenty years.”

  “It’s in the blood,” Pierpont put in. “You know? I mean, if you were any good at it to begin with.”

  Reuther said, “A lot of people think union executives spend all their time looking after the affairs of the rank-and-file. In a way we do, but only indirectly. Most of my working day goes into developing sources of information. The only real power comes from knowing more about the people you’re going up against than they know about you. When your opponents can buy and sell you and the box you came in a hundred times over, it means twenty-hour days and no weekends or holidays. Sometimes the point gets lost and you forget you’re here for any other reason than to muck around in someone else’s shit. I canceled an appointment with a United States senator for this meeting. He’s waffling on a labor bill that will enable striking employees to draw unemployment. That’s how important it was I talk to you. Please tell me why you’re shaking your head.”

  “I’m no spy. I can’t even bluff at poker. It’s a Greek thing. Everything I’m thinking shows. Anyway, why should I spook for the UAW? I’m not a member.”

  “That’s what makes you ideal. Russian spies are American. And I think you’ll help us out. The Ford Motor Company will survive if the E-car fails, but you won’t. A lot of things can happen between the docks at Rouge and the sixteenth hour. The E-car can gum up in a slowdown on the line. The tap screw that secures the universal joint to the steering assembly can come up short one turn. An automobile has fifteen thousand parts and three ways to go wrong for each part. No one man can make a car a hit, but it takes only one to make it fail. All I need is the finger I use to dial the telephone.”

  Pierpont’s voice crackled. “Walter don’t play jacks and hopscotch. You know?”

  I looked away, at one of the painted windows. I felt the way I had when the doctor at Henry Ford Hospital told me I was diabetic. The way a dog must feel when someone takes a tuck in its leash.

  “What do you want to know?”

  The atmosphere lifted a little. Reuther selected a stick from the rack and picked up the chalk. “Just keep your ears open for now. Jerry will be in touch.”

  “If I g
ive you something good, really good,” I said, “will you cut me loose?”

  “I don’t cut people loose.” The chalk squeaked. “What would be your definition of good?”

  “The name of the man who gave the order.”

  “Anyone can pronounce a name.”

  “His name, and the evidence to convict him.”

  Squeak, squeak. There would always be a substitute for the rubber ball. My memory of Walter Reuther is of a nervous man with his finger on a big trigger.

  “Do that,” he said finally, “and I’ll put Eisenhower behind the wheel of the first car off the line.” He sank the three and the seven in one shot. The noise was like an axe splitting hickory.

  12

  THE RAIN HAD STOPPED when Pierpont and I left the house. The sun peered around a corner of the overcast like a beaten serf, drying the mud on the asphalt in crusted patches like dead skin. When the Hudson’s motor cut in the detective gave the key another twist to make sure, tearing a grating howl from the starter that made my teeth ache. We started forward with a chirp, scraped the oil pan on the curb on the corner, and came within an inch of a five-year stretch for manslaughter involving a fat woman with a shopping cart in the middle of McNichols. The instructor who gave him his license must have been blind, deaf, and autistic.

  “What made Reuther settle on you?” I asked when we were in thick traffic and relatively immobile. “There must be a dozen detective agencies listed in the Yellow Pages before Progressive.”

  “Fourteen. Only that ain’t where he found me. I was with the Pinkertons when the UAW sat down at GM in Flint. Christmas thirty-six it was.”

  “The Pinkertons were hired as strikebreakers.”

  “Heads is what we broke mostly. Not that we had no monopoly. Old John L. Lewis laid into me personal with a steam wrench. Eight weeks in St. John’s with a tube hooked to my pecker. Listen.” He swept off his hat, baring that obscene dome, and rapped his knuckles above his right temple. The sound was like a ballpeen hammer striking a hubcap wrapped in cotton. “My old mother’d be proud. We never could afford sterling when I was a kid. You know?”

  “What made you change sides?”

  “Pinks cut me loose with a month’s severance and no disability. A man’s got to eat, you know? Plus I know how that side handles things.” He slammed the Panama back on. “I should of figured an outfit that made its money smashing workers all to hell ain’t going to look after its own. You might say old John L. done me a favor when he let light into my brain pan.”

  I glanced back over the seat, toward the two big men watching the scenery slide past. It was certainly the most interesting company I’d been in since I’d left journalism.

  “I happened to be looking out the window when your ride dropped you off,” Janet Sherman said. “I’ve been stood up for blondes and redheads, but this is the first time anyone ever threw me over for the man in American Gothic.”

  She was seated at her desk in the office outside Israel Zed’s, fingers resting on the keyboard of a battleship-gray Underwood electric whose motor whirred like a tank: Sherman’s tank. Her black hair was pinned back and she wore a white silk blouse with a frothy jabot at her throat, business attire, but the short left arm made her dip her shoulder to touch the keys and she looked as if she were posing for a glamor shot. She had on white-framed reading glasses with an Oriental slant that accentuated the exotic tilt of her eyes.

  “Has anyone ever told you you look like Nancy Kwan?” I asked.

  “Gene Tierney, more often. And you’re not off the hook. I waited in the parking lot twenty minutes.”

  “Would you believe me if I told you I was kidnapped?”

  “By who? Pa Kettle at the wheel?”

  “You didn’t see Gorgeous George and Strangler Lewis in the backseat?”

  “If you don’t want to be seen with me, please say so. I’ve heard all the excuses. They try to be polite, but the kindest came from Eddie Grabowski in seventh grade. He said he wasn’t good enough to dance with someone whose arms didn’t match.”

  At least you could have ice cream later without going into shock. Aloud I said, “I’m sorry. Something came up and I didn’t have a chance to call and cancel. I hope you’re giving rain checks.”

  She sat back, crooking her right arm automatically to de-emphasize the difference. “No, I’m sorry. I had an idea we could be friends, but I’m acting like I wanted something more. Do you like baseball? I have a friend who can get tickets to the Tigers’ first home game.”

  “Terrific. I’ll buy the hot dogs.”

  “Are they on your diet?”

  “Probably not. But if anyone takes a picture of me eating yogurt at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull I’m through in this town.”

  She was laughing when I left. A troubled sort of laugh. I hoped we were going to be just friends. I was having enough trouble with Agnes, and all her limbs were the same size as their mates.

  In the office, still on Schaeffer, I snapped on the cheap Bakelite radio that came with the furnishings and dialed the News. I hated having the radio on when I worked but it was the only way to make a call in privacy in that fishbowl. I asked the unfamiliar voice that answered for Chet Mooney. He had never heard of him, so I got the city desk, where I learned that Mooney had retired the week before. City shunted me over to Personnel, who gave me a number where he could be reached in Florida.

  I didn’t like Chet Mooney. He had been a News crime reporter during the city’s most dramatic criminal period, and as far as I knew he had never stepped outside the circle of his desk in the city room, the home he had built on Lake St. Clair with his wife’s inherited auto money, and a back table in the Anchor Bar where he bought drinks for more active reporters whose guards fell down after the third Scotch and whose anecdotes crept under Mooney’s byline the following day. Having caught on to his method, a trio of scribes from the Times, Free Press, and Banner on one occasion had coached a cub from the Freep to accept Mooney’s invitation and feed him an apocryphal story, planning to expose and discredit him when it appeared in the News. It had to do with the sanguinary death at the hands of his wife of a city councilman in the arms of a police stenographer in Room 114 of the Book-Cadillac Hotel. The plot backfired when publisher Will Scripps, who happened to have had lunch with the deceased councilman only an hour previously, saw Mooney’s account in typesetting and junked it before the edition went to press; Mooney was suspended for a week, but his aw-shucks style had so captured readers who had had enough of truth in their daily diet that a flood of angry letters to the editor persuaded Scripps to reinstate him, assigning him his own opinion column; opinions not being as dependent upon the facts as was hard news. A columnist he had remained, and the city’s unofficial voice, commenting avuncularly upon the passing scene with his toe twisting quaintly in the dirt until his retirement. Along the way he had published a couple of memoirs of the Detroit Is My Beat variety and gravel-voiced his way through a prepared script on WWJ radio every weekday from 11:00 to 11:05 A.M. for sixteen years. It’s a unique feeling to turn on the radio on your way to the unemployment office and hear one of your own experiences read back to you by the man who had appropriated it.

  No, I didn’t like Chet Mooney; and I didn’t want to call him. But he was the only acquaintance left from my newspapering days still in the business—or anyhow still close to it—and in a position to give me what I needed to keep Walter Reuther from hanging an anchor around the neck of my last chance to make something of my lot.

  “This is Chet Mooney.”

  He sounded different from the way I remembered, even as recently as his radio spot. The shanty Irish lilt, laid on so much more thickly in recent years over that hardscrabble voice, like coal sliding down a chute, was almost entirely absent, and the voice itself was hollow and without energy, the tone of a very old man just this side of an oxygen tent. I drew no triumph from this evidence of dissipation. Mooney had been two years behind me at the University of Detroit and was too young to v
ote for Coolidge.

  “Chet, this is Connie Minor. Do you remember me?”

  The wheezing noise on his end of the line was either laughter or a tobacco hack or bad wires. “Jesus, Connie, I thought you were dead.”

  “No, just in advertising. I hear you cleaned out your desk.”

  “Yeah, well, things never were the same after the war. They cut four inches off my column to save paper and never put ’em back. When that little shit Jimmy Scripps told me I had to rotate with gardening tips from the A.P. I told him to shove it up his ass. So he gave me a gold watch and here I am watching a bunch of fat kikes browning their blubbery butts in Fort Myers.”

  I’d heard WWJ had employed a team of editors just to scissor the anatomical, scatological, and ethnic references out of Mooney’s taped broadcasts. He recorded them at fifteen minutes and they aired for five. “It’s a young world. They kicked Churchill out too. I need a favor, Chet.”

  “I’d like to help you out, Connie. Truth is I’m busted out. What Grace left me barely covered the bungalow. My pension checks come down Old U.S. 12 by broken bicycle.”

  “I’m not putting the arm on you. Not for money. I need a contact. All mine are dead or in Alcatraz.”

  “What kind you need?” Talk of contacts had always softened him up. He was like a semi-literate flattered to be asked to lend his one book.

  “Someone who can put me in touch with one or both of the Ballistas. I understand neither of them has a phone.”

  “Telephones can be tapped. Those boys are primitive, not stupid. What’s keeping you from just driving out to Oakland County and spending a couple of bucks on beer and the slots?”

  “You know it isn’t that easy.”

  The pause on his end was just long enough to tell me he didn’t know. All his instincts as a journalist were summed up in his monthly bar tab.

  “Lionel Banks is the guy you want,” he said. “These days he makes Dick Westerkamp look like he knows what he’s talking about at Channel Four and feeds things to Dave Garroway in New York. I don’t know if giving him my name will do you any good, though. He used to do legwork for me at the News, but ever since Tee Vee discovered him he don’t know me.”