Edsel (11 page)

Squeeze, squeeze. What had begun as therapy for the shoulder chewed up by the shotgun blast had become a fixation. If the muscles hadn’t recovered by now they never would.

He changed his tack. “Do you shoot pool?”

“I tried a few times. I was banned from the billiard room at the Press Club after I tore my third felt.”

“It isn’t like life. Each ball has its own number and color. You can tell them apart. When I joined labor I thought it was us and them, the suits on one side and the coveralls on the other. One of my best friends on the line at River Rouge gave Harry Bennett a list with my name on it. The only time I ever saw him in a coat and tie was at his funeral.”

“Natural causes, I hope.”

Squeeze, squeeze. “I learned from the experience. I have people in Personnel at Ford. The files there have you down as a public relations consultant hired by Israel Zed. I find that fetchingly vague. When you don’t know what a man’s duties are it’s hard to tell when he’s doing something he shouldn’t be. I do have to wonder why a Glass House executive has been spending so much time on the floor at Rouge.”

“Glass House?”

“The new building on American has more windows than the rest of Dearborn put together. May I see your hands? No, the other side. I’m not going to rap your knuckles.” His eyes flicked over my palms. “What has a man with so few calluses in common with a foundry foreman? Or a quality control worker in the assembly plant? Or any of the other dozen or more people you’ve been pestering with questions from the docks on the river to the sixteenth hour?”

“If you talked to them you know the questions I’ve been asking are all about the operation, not about them or their fellow employees. What does a spy care how the doors are hung on a Fairlane?”

“What does a PR man care?” He stopped squeezing the ball. “My sources aren’t all employed in factories. You were a newspaper reporter. Reporters are paid to gather information. What’s Zed planning to do with the information you’ve been gathering at Rouge?”

“Zed wouldn’t know what to do with it if I gave it to him. I’m gathering it for myself.”

“Bullshit.”

I let out air. For the first time since Pierpont trotted out the walking artillery at Schaeffer I wasn’t afraid for my skin. It’s difficult to be nervous in the presence of a man who’s more nervous than you or anyone else you ever met. “If you know I was a reporter you know that was twenty years ago. I’m a pitchman. Zed hired me to pitch the E-car. All I knew about cars going in is who to take them to when they stop working. This is homework. Selling the car is the first real chance I’ve had to make good since I left newspapering. It helps to know what you’re selling.”

He rolled the ball over in his palm, pushing it with his thumb. Agnes and I had gone to see
The Caine Mutiny
at the Roxy over Christmas and I thought of Bogart’s Captain Queeg and his steel ball bearings. “What’s your drink? Jerry.”

Pierpont scuttled behind a midget bar in the room’s gloomiest corner, paneled in knotty pine to match the walls. A light came on above it, striping a row of bottles on the Formica top. He placed his hat on an unoccupied section.

“No alcohol,” I said. “I’m on a special diet.”

“Diabetic, right?”

I knew a sharp pang of distress. “I didn’t know it showed.”

“I wouldn’t know what to look for if it did. I said I have sources. Club soda, Jerry. Scotch for me, neat.” Reuther looked down, saw what he was doing with the ball, colored a little, and put it in his pocket; I guessed he’d seen the same movie. He was wearing loose slacks and penny loafers. In the extra light I saw that his button-down Oxford shirt was pale blue, not white. He made a lot of appearances on television, which banned white for its effect on camera lenses. The gentleman’s conservative white shirt shaped up to be the next casualty of the cathode tube.

I wasn’t thinking about shirts right then, however. Something in my host’s new manner told me I was about to be confided in by the man who ran the most powerful labor union in the most powerful country in the world.

“H
AVE YOU EVER BEEN
shot, Minor?”

Reuther and I were both holding glasses now. J. W. Pierpont, having switched off the bar light, had returned to his original place, hat in hand. I had already decided the headpiece served the same purpose for him as the rubber ball did for his employer.

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 give 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.

T
HE 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?”