Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I wish you’d come to me sooner,” he said again without turning. “A large part of me wishes you hadn’t come at all. The last thing we need on the eve of launching our first major new division since we acquired Lincoln is a scandal.” I said nothing. After another minute he turned. His features were invisible against the bright glass. “This is my fault. I’m supposed to be an expert on security. That’s why Hank hired me, to shield him from Harry Bennett’s snoops while he worked out his plan to rescue the company from his grandfather. That an independent operator should waltz right in here, crack a safe under my protection, take pictures and documents, and walk out without anyone seeing him is a disgrace. In my place a Japanese officer would fall on his sword.”

  He fell silent again. For all I could see of his eyes he might have been looking around for some sharp object in the room that would suffice. I said, “If it’s any consolation, sir, all Pierpont did was force me to gather information you needed to know.”

  “I’d rather not know. Not for another year, anyway. Until the Edsel’s off the proving ground. Which brings me to the favor I have to ask.”

  The lightheadedness returned, but I didn’t reach for the candy bar. I had a feeling it wouldn’t help this time.

  “Israel Zed is harmless where he is,” he said. “He isn’t about to start telling people he’s Frankie Orr’s man, and at this point only you and I and a dying small-time racketeer know it. Orr too, of course, but he’s in exile and even if he weren’t he has no reason to expose Zed now, especially if there’s anything to this pipe dream of Carlo Ballista’s and he has hopes of coming back; if that comes to pass he’ll need Zed more than ever. So does Ford. He’s a promotional genius.”

  I was gripping the arms of my chair hard enough to hurt. The lightness was spreading. I felt that if I didn’t hold on I would float away.

  “I think you know what I’m asking,” he said.

  “I think so. I just want to hear you ask it.”

  He came away from the window, returning definition to his bold nose and mild, slightly melancholy eyes. “Don’t say anything to anyone about what you’ve told me. No one, not even Mr. Ford. I’ll handle that when the time comes. Until then, this is just between us.”

  “And just when will the time come? When the Edsel’s on the road?”

  “About then, yes. Believe me, it’s as difficult for me as it is for you. Conspiring to harbor a criminal goes against all my training.”

  “What about Pierpont? I put him on the track I just left. He’s bound to come to the same conclusion.”

  “Perhaps not. For you, getting in to see Anthony Ballista was a special privilege owing to a chance contact with Albert Brock. You said yourself he hasn’t much time left. Chances are he won’t last long enough to tell Pierpont anything.”

  “In which case Pierpont will come back and put the screws to me.”

  “You’ve stalled him this long. If he’s foolish enough to throw away his hole card and leak that information he took from your safe, I’ll know the source. We already know Reuther’s threat of a strike or a slowdown is just posturing. If Pierpont becomes a pest, tell me. I’ve dealt with the type before.”

  “What about Stuart Leadbeater?” I’d told him only as much about the lawyer-candidate as he needed to know, omitting Anthony Battle’s name. Something about the ex-G-man’s manner made me hold back certain things. “I can’t stall him for a year. The election’s in November.”

  “Leave him to me. I know a bit about politicians.” He took his place behind the desk but remained standing. “I realize what I’m asking. The nature of your work requires you to keep close contact with a man you find repugnant. You’ll have to behave as if you suspect nothing. I wouldn’t request it of anyone else I work with. Mead Bricker always says what’s on his mind, especially when he’s drinking, which is most of the time. Jack Davis wears his conscience on his sleeve. Even Hank is apt to down one too many and blurt something out just for the shock effect. Your background is entirely different. You couldn’t have survived in the newspaper business as long as you did without the ability to dissemble.”

  I no longer feared floating away. I wasn’t sure if I could conquer gravity long enough to get up out of the chair. “You’re saying I’m the only man dishonest enough for the job.”

  “Disingenuous, I think, is a better term. It will profit you in the end. Not that much time has passed since Hank himself had to play the diplomacy game that he’s forgotten what it costs. You will be reimbursed. Say, a twenty-five percent pay hike and an upgraded expense account to equal your annual gross salary?”

  I did the arithmetic in my head.

  I said, “I’d like that in writing.”

  “I thought you had little regard for the value of paper.”

  “Consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds, Mr. Bugas,” I said, “I’m not as stupid as I look.”

  A faint smile grazed his lip. It was the kind undertakers jack up onto dead faces. “I’ll have my personal attorney draw something up. There’s no sense bothering the company firm with this.”

  I stood and shook his hand. His grip was solid, the way they rehearsed it in Washington. I snicked the door shut behind me on the way out, making no more noise than wolf-bait.

  By the elevators I ran square into Israel Zed and Janet Sherman. Zed had on gray gabardine. Janet wore a long-sleeved leaf-print silk blouse and a green skirt and carried her handbag slung from the crook of her short arm.

  “Hello, Connie,” Zed said. “Business with Dick Tracy?”

  “He was just asking me how things were going. Hello, Janet.”

  “Connie.” She had been cool to me since the night I had sent her home from my door.

  “How are they? We haven’t talked in a while.”

  “Not bad. I’ll have some new dummies on your desk before five.”

  “Good, good. Plans for lunch? Janet and I thought we’d hop to Greektown.” The expression on his big face said a positive response to the invitation would be poor office etiquette.

  “Thanks, I had my fill of moussaka and saganaki by the time I was twelve.”

  The elevator doors sloughed open. “Suit yourself. Don’t work the day away. Life’s too short.”

  I watched the doors close. My stomach sank with the car. Secretaries shouldn’t date their married bosses. Especially that secretary, and that boss.

  29

  DAVY CROCKETT’S COONSKIN CAP was everywhere in 1956.

  Fess Parker wore it first, for Walt Disney.

  Jackie Gleason wore it on The Honeymooners in his capacity as member in good standing of the Loyal Order of Raccoons, Bensonhurst Chapter.

  So many little kids wore them to a Saturday Felix the Cat matinee at the Roxy that the theater’s insurance company declared the practice a fire hazard and threatened to cancel its policy.

  Estes Kefauver, like Crockett a Tennessee native, wore it to celebrate his Democratic nomination for vice president under Adlai Stevenson. It didn’t help.

  Agnes and I watched the election returns on her spanking new color console Admiral in the living room of her duplex in Madison Heights. It had a round picture tube, a speaker covered with orange cloth shot with glittering gold threads behind diamond-shaped wooden slats, and sliding doors with recessed handles that concealed the screen when the set wasn’t in use. Too common now to be a status symbol, the domestic oracle seemed to have entered a new stage of delicacy, pretending to be a credenza.

  In the cheesy cloakroom studio set-up with numbers clacking into place on the wall behind the talking heads, the blues looked gray, the reds were beige, and even Edward R. Murrow’s bourbon-flushed basset hound features might have been cast in dirty plaster of paris. I didn’t see much color at all until a commercial came on for Sergeant Preston of the Yukon in blazing primaries, after which the ghost of Preston’s scarlet tunic continued to haunt the screen like an incarnadined Marley until the Nevada ballots were counted. Until that night I’d been monkeying with
the notion of diverting some of my improved finances toward a color set of my own. Now I gave some thought to replacing the old gas four-burner in the kitchen with a Hotpoint electric range.

  California was just reporting in when Agnes sprang up off the sofa and snapped the knob. The picture imploded into a pinpoint and took its time fading. “Four more years of that grinning skinhead. It’s enough to make you want to move to Canada.”

  “Stevenson doesn’t have that much more hair. At least when Ike smiles he doesn’t look like someone’s pulling out his toenails with a pair of pliers.” I helped myself to a handful of potato chips from a bag with a woman’s silhouette in red on a field of yellow.

  She put her hands on her hips, facing me with the TV at her back. She had on Capri pants and a fuzzy pink sweater that flattered her clean figure. Some people just aren’t intended from the start to submit to gravity and changing metabolism. “Is that what we’ve come to? Choosing our leaders on the basis of their bridgework? Why don’t we stop kidding ourselves and elect Errol Flynn?”

  “Can’t. Foreign-born. I’d run Randolph Scott. A cowboy actor would know how to deal with the Russians.”

  “We’re the Russians.”

  I crunched chips and waited. She could never leave a line or a TV dinner alone.

  “I mean it,” she said. “Khruschchev doesn’t have to bury us. We’re already doing a good job of digging ourselves under a pile of atomic waste and red-baiters and plastic radios that cost more to fix than they do to throw away and replace with a cheaper model that lasts half as long. We’re the enemy, not the Communists.”

  “I knew if I hung around long enough you’d give up on Kerouac and start quoting Pogo.”

  “Why not? I’d sooner vote for a comic-strip character than anyone who’d run with a thug like Nixon. Did you know that when he was in charge of rubber rationing during the war his best friend was in the tire business?”

  “I expect Ike will keep him in line.”

  “Until his next heart attack.”

  “Do yourself a favor and stop chewing on the state of the nation. Whoever wins, we lose. I don’t know why something that happens every four years should come as such a surprise to so many people.”

  “If you think that way I’m surprised you decided to vote.”

  “I was only interested in one of the races. Which reminds me.” I got up and walked around her to turn the set back on. A girl singer with capped teeth was wondering where the yellow went. I tried channels 4 and 7, but Huntley and Brinkley and John Daly were still wading through the national returns. The smaller stations were all showing movies and every third one seemed to be Stella Dallas. I came back to 7 just as the local feed was starting. Sander Vanocur, seated in a set even more cramped with a painted plywood background, was reading figures from sheets passed to him by a hand belonging to someone beyond the camera. A number of small communities had changed mayors; Wall Street was losing momentum for the first time since Truman canned MacArthur and people were beginning to worry about their Christmas bonuses.

  Five minutes of vaguely familiar names and ambiguous numbers crawled past before the grave anchorman turned to the results in Wayne County. In the race for prosecutor, Stuart Leadbeater finished six thousand votes behind his Democratic opponent. “A dark horse early in the campaign,” Vanocur intoned, “Leadbeater appeared to be closing the gap in September with a media barrage allegedly fueled by rumors of heavy financial support from an undisclosed source, then dropped back when the rumors proved to be without basis and his war chest rang empty. Despite a last-ditch effort to attract attention with a bizarre claim concerning subversive activities in the field of professional wrestling, of all places, Leadbeater failed to recapture his late-inning momentum.”

  “That should restore some of your faith,” Agnes said.

  “I’d have to have had some first.” I turned off the set. Leave it to me. Bugas. I know a bit about politicians. Enough anyway to know what it meant to lead one to the edge of the trough, then kick it over. The picture made my back prickle.

  Agnes stuck a Chesterfield between her lips and fired it up off a table lighter shaped like a palomino. “I wish you’d tell me about Leadbeater. Frank’s getting you in to see Albert Brock; it had something to do with this, didn’t it? Is Brock the one who pulled the rug out from under his campaign?”

  “No. Even Brock isn’t that big. No one man is. I’m not being mysterious, just tired. Sometime I’ll tell you the works. You’ll think it’s a fish story. Maybe I will, too, by then.”

  “You get tired a lot, chiefly when I want you to tell me something.”

  I had no answer. I’d been prepared for a pleasant evening of television watching and poking fun at each other’s politics. It was turning into something else and I hadn’t the energy for it.

  “You don’t talk, Connie. We don’t talk. I’d get more company out of a parakeet.”

  “We talk all the time. What do you call what we’re doing now?”

  “We’re forming words and stringing them into sentences. It’s all very civilized and about as enlightening as stuffing envelopes. I don’t know, maybe it’s not your fault. Maybe it’s your background. Maybe Greeks don’t talk, or maybe it’s the fact that you were a reporter and spent most of your time asking questions and listening to the answers. In my family we yelled and screamed and shook our fists. It sounded like World War Three, but we all knew what everyone else was about.”

  “That’s Italians for you. I stopped going to their weddings when I lost my hard hat.”

  “See, that’s my point. The most I ever get out of you is some cynical comment that says we’d all be better off if we took cyanide. We’ve worked together and slept together, but I didn’t even know what your job was at Ford until you’d been there almost two years. Would you have told me if we were married?”

  “Is that what this is about? What I do at Ford?”

  “Hell, no, it’s not what this is about.” She dragged deeply on the cigarette. The tip glowed as fiercely as her eyes. Leaking smoke out several orifices, she stabbed it out in a heavy glass ashtray. “I’m going to change something I said, about you asking questions and listening to the answers when you were in the newspaper business. You never listened to anyone in your life. You had all the answers written in your head before you asked the questions. It’s no wonder the profession deserted you. You stunk at it.”

  “Agnes, it isn’t my fault Stevenson lost. A lot of other people voted Republican.”

  I ducked just in time. The ashtray whistled past my ear, struck something that rustled, and thumped the carpet without breaking; pre-war goods. She made claws of her fingers, curled them into fists, and squeezed her eyes shut hard enough to cause a headache. I’d seen her angry, but not like this. I was suddenly afraid she was having a stroke. But when she opened her eyes she was breathing normally.

  “Don’t you think I know you’re in trouble?” She laid the words out carefully, like cards in a game of solitaire. “That you’ve been in trouble for a long time? At first I thought it was a woman, and when I found out you were running around with one half your age it seemed to explain a lot. Then I wasn’t so sure, and when you asked about Leadbeater I knew it was much more serious. Well, I thought, this is good, now he’ll open up; he needs me after all. But you never did. You don’t need me. You don’t need anybody. You’re as self-damn-sufficient as a goddamn diesel locomotive. So why am I wasting my time on you?”

  “My problems are mine. Who am I to dump them in someone else’s lap?”

  “That’s one of the reasons for having a lap. For my having one.” Her eyes were brimming.

  “I’ve been alone my whole life, Agnes. You can’t expect me to just go ahead and do something I have no preparation for.”

  “I’m asking you to do just that. Is it that hard?”

  The big television set was still cooling off. The tubes ticked and crackled.

  “There’s no point to it now,” I said. “It’s working
itself out.”

  She let out a chestful of air, picked up the pack of Chesterfields, and shook another one out. “Go home, Connie.”

  “We took your car, remember? I was sleeping here tonight.”

  “I’ll call you a cab. I’m sorry. I just can’t handle any more of you tonight.” She lifted the receiver off her pink Princess, pressing down on the standard with her other hand out of habit to keep it from following.

  “I’m sorry too.”

  I wasn’t, though, then. I was hollow. The break was ragged; we went out a couple of times after that night, but we didn’t sleep together. I called her the last time around Christmas. The silences on the line were hard on my thickening eardrums. Years later I heard she was seeing a Kennedy delegate, but by then I was having trouble picturing what she looked like. It’s only recently I’ve begun again to see her clearly, and her dead five years.

  30

  AT 6:03 ON A MONDAY morning late in September 1957, with an hour and a half to sleep before I had to get ready for work, a virgin set of tires squished to a stop in my driveway and a pair of horns tuned deliberately off-key, B-sharp and E-flat, tore me out of some damn dream in which I was running in slow motion toward an appointment I was late for with someone I didn’t know in some location I’d forgotten. I’d had the dream the first time shortly after I started at Ford, and it had recurred just enough since for me to recognize it and have some control over it, which was why the interruption annoyed me. I made a face at the alarm clock, untangled myself from the sheets and blanket, and lurched to the window overlooking the corner of the porch roof. It was Indian summer and the sunlight lay in a brazen trapezoidal patch on the grass and asphalt in front of the house.

  It was emerald-green with a white top and elliptical white cutouts along the rear fenders. The tires were whitewalled, and the chrome plate on the divided front bumper and around the tandem sealed-beam headlights and all over the fish-mouth grille glowed with silver fire in the damp morning light. It was the top-of-the-line Citation, and its 124-inch Mercury chassis filled the driveway almost to the curb. While I was looking at it from the window, Israel Zed, who was standing next to it on the driver’s side, leaned in through the open window and whomped the horn a second time. In spite of my grogginess that was the thing I most liked about the car at that moment, that virile horn. It was a clarion, an audio erection that managed to capture the youth and audacity of a Klaxon while filtering out the schleppy comedy and pushing its essence through the brass section of the New York Philharmonic. It was the end product of 10,000 years of evolution, conception, invention, revolution, and celebration, but its provenance was as old as the first full-throated bellow of a tree-dwelling half-ape over the body of his vanquished foe.