Edsel (12 page)

“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 vote 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.”

“Maybe he does and that’s why he left.”

“What?” He had been having another wheezing fit.

“Nothing. Thanks, Chet. I’ll forget about that fifty you owe me.”

“What fifty?”

“I guess that makes two of us. How’s the fishing?”

“How the hell should I know? I get mine at the Swordfish Lounge on Oceanview.”

“Some things don’t change, do they?” I thanked him again and broke the connection.

The receptionist at Channel 4 had never heard of Lionel Banks, but I asked for Dick Westerkamp’s line and the local anchorman’s secretary gave me an Ypsilanti number.

“Hello?”

“Lionel Banks?”

“You have him.”

It was a Negro drawl, shortened a little by education and, I suspected, some personal effort.

“My name is Connie Minor. I got your name from Chet Mooney. I understand you used to work with him.”

“That’s not true.”

I hesitated. He was stonewalling. I was sorting out a new approach when he said, “Working
with
someone implies you both work. I was so busy tracking down leads and conducting interviews and writing his column for him it took me two years to find out I was the one doing all the work. If you’re a friend of his I’m sorry.” He stopped long enough to get angry at himself for injecting the note of subservience. “I’m sorry for
you.
He’s a user.”

“If that’s the kind of news you’re feeding Westerkamp and Garroway, I wouldn’t sign any mortgages if I were you. Every newshawk in Detroit has had Chet’s number since the Bank Holiday.”

“Who are you?”

I repeated my name.

“Where have I heard of you?”

“If I could read minds I wouldn’t be calling you for information. I used to write for the old
Banner.
Maybe you remember my byline.”

“Oh sure. My daddy—I used to get up at four and go with my father to help load the papers into his delivery truck. Your column was always on the front page. I can still smell that crappy newsprint and cheap ink. Connie Minor. I thought—”

“No, just in advertising.” I told him what I needed.

The line had not cleared entirely of suspicion. “That’s a tall order. What’s the trade?”

“Just a second.” I leaned over, turned up Frankie Laine, and stuck a finger in my open ear to shut out the whoops and whip-cracks of “Mule Train.” “I’m with sales and promotion at Ford. We’re working up a major campaign. Someone in the press is going to get an early look inside those soaped windows at the dealership. I don’t know why it shouldn’t be you.”

“Make that a promise and I’ll see what I can do.”

I said a promise was what it was.

“You want to talk to Anthony Battle. We went to school together at Mumford. The Ballistas own his contract.”

“Contract?”

“I don’t know if you’d call it athletic or theatrical. He’ll be at the Olympia tonight at seven-thirty. He’s taking on the Beast of Borodino for the World Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.”

“Jesus.”

“If you prefer ballet, that won’t get you next to Tony and Charlie Balls.”

“There’s a scoop. What can a musclehead tell me I can’t hear from Edward R. Murrow?”

“That’s up to you. Anthony hasn’t lasted as long as he has by sharing everything he hears with just anyone. But he gave me the results of the national Steelhaulers election two hours before anyone else had them. Westerkamp opened with the Albert Brock victory that night.”

“What costume should I look for?”

“No costume. He isn’t a gimmick man like Crybaby MacArthur or the Peruvian Giant. Anthony just wrestles. That’s how you’ll know him. He stands out like a pretzel in a bowl of corn flakes.” He breathed. “So when does this new wonder car come out?”

“Two years.”

Something, probably his hand, smothered his mouthpiece for a moment. Negroes didn’t swear in white people’s ears if they could help it. “I guess I ought to have asked that up front,” he said then. “I’m hoping in two years I won’t need the boost.”

“Welcome to the club.”

I hung up feeling the first honest-to-Christ rush I’d had in twenty years. It was made up of two parts excitement to three parts terror. I was in no kind of shape to trade blows with that class of citizen that makes its point with power tools. On the other hand, I was too old to spend all my time at the office listening at keyholes. If there was one lesson I retained from the dead days, it was if you wanted the straight story you had to go to the source; even if that meant sitting through a tag-team bout featuring Bobo Brazil and Percival E. Pringle.

B
UILDINGS, IT HAS BEEN SAID
, age much more quickly than humans, and with good reason. Stand any healthy person up in the same spot for twenty-seven years, expose him to a hundred and eight seasons of blasting sun, petrifying cold, grapeshot hail, and the city’s daily menu of soot and exhaust, and he will have lost more than a century. The Olympia, gaunt brick barn that it was, had occupied the same lot on Grand River since 1928, hosted thousands of hockey games, labor rallies, political shit-slinging contests, and a couple of wedding receptions, and showed every event in one scar or another. It was built on a foundation of broken molars and the skeletons of at least two bootleggers that I knew of, and the cost overrun on its construction had started one prominent local family fortune that was still trying to redeem itself through endowments and donations to charity. It was an ugly old monument to no architectural style at all, but I found its friendly, dirty face reassuring as I hiked six blocks from the nearest rational parking space toward the greasy light coming through its windows, unwashed since before Black Friday. The side streets were medieval, with dark spaces like missing teeth among the wrecks parked at the curbs. Stadiums are always found in bad neighborhoods. It’s a rule of some kind.

A banner slung like a diaper across the front of the building advertised PROFESSIONALS OF WRESTLING-WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP in black letters two feet high. The line waiting to purchase tickets had spilled out onto the sidewalk. I ducked down Hooker Street, waited five minutes at that entrance while a ticket-taker argued a woman in her seventies out of her lethal-looking umbrella, and bought a cheap seat in the balcony.