The Betsy (1971) (27 page)

Junior nodded. He sat back in his chair, the surprise still etched on his face.

“I will still own personally forty-one percent of the stock,” Loren continued. “Which will be disposed according to my will after my decease among members of my family, the foundation and certain other people and charitable projects as I may elect.”

He picked up the glass of water and sipped from it. “Beginning with the next meeting of the board of directors I shall place a proposal before the board which will, in effect, pass the control of the company from one man, myself or my son, at the moment, into the hands of the five-man executive committee, presently headed by myself and upon my retirement by my son. The head of the committee will have no vote on policy unless there is a tie vote between its members, in which case he will have the right to cast the deciding vote.”

He took another sip of the water. “Until my retirement I will remain as a director and chairman of the board of the company, while my son will continue as president and chief operating officer, bound to carry out the policies of the executive committee and the board of directors. Upon my retirement, my son will assume the chairman’s duties in addition to carrying on with his own.”

He fell silent for a moment, looking down at his hands. Then he looked up again. “There is more, gentlemen, much more to my proposal, but there is no point in my going into it at the present time. Other points cover such items as pension plans and profit-sharing for executives, special insurance and similar side benefits for the employees of the company. Before you leave, Miss Walker will give each of you a folder containing all the details of these proposals as well as those I have spoken about.”

He rose to his feet. “I guess that about covers all I have to say at the moment. Thank you, gentlemen.”

They rose with him. Quickly Melanie distributed the folders. Within a few minutes, all of them had gone except Junior. He sat in the chair looking at his father.

“May I have a word with you?” he asked.

Discreetly Melanie disappeared from the room.

“Come, have a drink,” Loren said.

Junior followed him to the bar. Loren poured himself a Canadian; he looked at his son: “Still drinking cognac?”

“I’ll take whiskey,” Junior said.

Loren nodded. He poured a good shot into Junior’s glass. “Ice?”

Junior nodded.

Loren walked behind the bar and took some ice from the bucket on the shelf. The ice tinkled in the glass he gave Junior. He stayed behind the bar and picked up his own drink. “Cheers,” he said. He threw the whiskey down his throat and was reaching for the bottle while Junior was still sipping at his.

Silently he refilled his shot glass. This time he sipped at it slowly while looking at his son. Junior’s face was thin and pale and there were blue circles under his eyes from lack of sleep. He waited for his son to speak.

After a moment, Junior reached into his pocket, took out an envelope and placed it on the bar, without speaking.

Loren looked at it. “What’s that?”

“Open it and see,” Junior said. “The envelope’s not sealed.”

Quickly Loren took the paper from the envelope. It was neatly typed on Junior’s personal stationery.

To the Chairman of the Board

and

the Board of Directors of

Bethlehem Motors Company, Inc.

Gentlemen:

I hereby tender my resignation as president and chief operating officer of Bethlehem Motors Company, Inc. I also tender my resignation as a member of the board of directors of that company as well as officer and/or director of any of its subsidiary companies. All such resignations to be effective immediately.

Very truly yours,

Loren Hardeman II

Loren looked at his son. “What do you want to do a thing like that for?”

“You know, Father, when you called this meeting tonight,” Junior replied, “I thought it was for the purpose of firing me.”

Loren looked at him steadily. “What made you think that?”

“Two things,” Junior answered. “One, you got your stock back and, with it, complete control of the company. Two, I deserved it. I gave you enough reasons. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you did.”

“It makes sense except for one thing,” Loren said slowly. “You tell me. It seems easy enough for a man to fire an employee, but how does a man go about firing his son from being his son?”

Junior looked at him steadily. “I made war on you where no war existed.”

“We did enough damage to each other,” Loren said quietly. He began to tear the letter in half. “Long ago when I said all this would someday be yours, I meant it. I haven’t changed my mind. You’re still my son.” He placed the torn halves of the letter back in the envelope and gave it to Junior.

Junior took the envelope, looked at it silently for a moment, then put it in his jacket. He looked up at Loren. He blinked back his tears. “Thank you, Father,” he said huskily.

Loren nodded. He didn’t speak, for he didn’t trust his own voice.

“I’ll try not to let you down again,” Junior said. “I’ll do the best I can.”

“That’s all anyone can do,” Loren said.

They were silent for a moment, then Loren came around the bar and embraced him. They were very still, then Loren stepped back. “You go on home and get some sleep, son. You look like you can use it.”

Junior nodded and started for the door. He turned and looked back. “It will be just like old times, won’t it, Father?”

Loren smiled. “Just like old times.”

Junior returned his smile. “Good night, Father.”

“Good night, son.” Loren waited until the door closed before he turned back to the bar and poured himself another drink.

Melanie came into the room. “Let me do that for you,” she said, taking the glass from his hand. She went behind the bar and put ice cubes in his glass and then gave it back to him. “Everything all right?”

He nodded wearily, tasting his drink. He looked at her. “It’s been a long day.”

“I’ll go upstairs and draw you a hot bath,” she said. “It will make you feel better.”

She came around the bar and started for the door.

“And don’t you go putting all those damn perfumes in it,” he called after her. “You make me smell like a French whore.”

She smiled back at him from the doorway. “Stop complaining,” she said. “You know you love it.”

He came out of the bathroom, the towel wrapped around his middle, his hairy chest and shoulders shining blackly in contrast with the white towel.

“I’m relaxed.”

“Do what I tell you,” she said. “I know how hard you worked today.”

Obediently he crossed to the bed and stretched out on his stomach. Her fingers were strong as they dug into his neck, bit by bit they moved over his shoulders and down onto his back. Slowly the muscles loosened under her hands.

“How does that feel?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said. He rolled over on his side. “But I’m getting a hard-on.”

“I know,” she said, looking at him. “You always do.”

“What are you going to do about that?” he laughed.

“It’s a muscle just like any other,” she grinned mischievously. “It can be handled.” She took his penis in her hands and slowly pulled the foreskin down, revealing the reddish purple swollen head. At her touch, his erection came to full stand. Holding his phallus in one hand, she gently stroked his testicles with the other, then slowly began to move her hand up and down.

“You have a beautiful cock,” she said, fascinated by the giant strength of him. She bent toward him, her tongue delicately licking him. She pushed his phallus back against his stomach and took one of his testicles in her mouth, then the other. Finally she let her open mouth travel up the length of his penis until she covered its head with her lips.

He sank his fingers into her hair and turned her face up to him. “I want to fuck,” he said.

“Yes, yes.” She got to her feet and began to undress. Her breasts tumbled free from her brassiere and she pulled off her girdle, revealing her lush, full hips and the heavy black triangle beneath her belly.

He pulled her down on the bed and began to roll over on her.

“No,” she said quickly. “You relax. Let me do it for you.”

He fell back and she got to her knees over him. Holding his penis in one hand, her other hand balancing herself against his chest, she lowered herself onto him slowly, guiding him into her.

Impatiently he grabbed her buttocks and pulled her toward him. The air spilled from her lungs in a gasp. “Christ! You fill me up!”

Slowly at first, then more rapidly, she began to grind herself against him. His hands reached up and he squeezed her breasts and pulled them toward his face. He took her nipples in his mouth and sucked until they were bright red and swollen.

She pulled back from him and reached down behind her back until she found his testicles with her hand. They were hard and tightly knotted at the base of his shaft. She felt her orgasms approaching and began to shudder as they wracked her body. She felt his testicles swell in her fingers and begin their discharge. A fiery liquid heat began to sear her loins.

“Loren! Loren!” she cried, falling against him in the throes of their mutual orgasm. She clung to him until she stopped the aching shudder and she felt the wet of him flooding back out of her down the sides of her legs onto him.

Slowly she felt him relax inside her, then she rolled off him suddenly. Holding her cupped hand over herself so that she would not spill on the rug, she started for the bathroom. “You wait there,” she said. “I’ll come back and wash you off. I want you to rest.”

“Bring some aspirin with you. My head feels like it’s in a vise.”

“Okay,” she said.

A few minutes later, when she came out, he seemed to be sleeping peacefully, his face turned away from her on the pillow. Silently she knelt on the floor beside the bed and washed him with the warm washcloth, then gently patted him dry.

His hand moved toward her as she started to get to her feet. “You sleep,” she said softly. “You need it.” She walked back to the chair and picked up her brassiere.

“Melanie!” His voice was hoarse and strange.

“Try to sleep, Loren,” she said gently, fastening the brassiere and picking up her girdle.

“No, Melanie!”

Something in his voice made her look at him as she was poised, one foot through her girdle. He was turning toward her. But there was something wrong in the way he was moving. It was almost as if she were watching a slow motion film and everything he was doing took just too much effort.

Finally, he made it almost to a sitting-up position in the bed, his wide, agonized eyes staring at her. The words seemed to come thickly from his lips. “Melanie! I’m sick. Call the doctor!”

Then slowly, as if the words had taken all the strength he had, he began to tumble forward. She leaped to catch him, but his weight proved too much for her and he slipped from her arms and rolled heavily to the floor.

“Loren!” she screamed.

The Detroit evening papers the next day carried banner headlines and pictures of what came to be known as the Battle of River Rouge. Bennett’s flying squad descended upon the unsuspecting union organizers in force. Frankensteen and Walter Reuther were in the hospital, the latter with a back broken in three places after being dragged down a flight of thirty-six steps. Several others were also hospitalized, among them a pregnant woman who had been kicked in the stomach. But perhaps what incensed the press even more was that after Bennett’s boys had finished with the union people they turned on the reporters and photographers, working them over and breaking cameras. It was reported by them as one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of American labor relations.

Because of the tremendous news impact of the River Rouge story across the nation, the story about Loren Hardeman was relegated to the inside pages. There was a small headline in column four of page two of
The New York Times
of May 27th, 1937.

LOREN HARDEMAN ILL

Detroit, May 26
—Loren Hardeman I, chairman of the board and founder of Bethlehem Motors, is resting comfortably in a Detroit hospital, doctors report, after an operation for the removal of a benign brain tumor which had been troubling Mr. Hardeman for some years.

 Chapter Fourteen

John Bancroft, vice-president of sales, Bethlehem Motors, swiveled around in his chair as Angelo came into his office. He rose, the salesman’s smile broad on his face, his hand outstretched. “Angelo! It’s good to see you.”

His grip was a salesman’s grip. Firm, hearty, impersonally friendly. Angelo returned his smile. “Good to see you, John.”

“Sit down,” Bancroft said, returning to his seat behind his desk.

Angelo sat down silently and lit a cigarette. He came right to the point. “I got your message. I’m here.”

Bancroft looked uncomfortable. “I’m glad you came. We have problems.”

“I know that,” Angelo said. “What’s so special about yours?”

“I’m starting to lose dealers.”

“Why?” The surprise was evident in Angelo’s voice. “I thought we had more requests for new dealerships than we ever had before.”

“We have,” Bancroft admitted. “But they’re all fringe dealerships. Used-car men trying to upgrade, foreign-car dealers who are not making out too well with their own lines trying to get in on something new. The big problem is that ninety percent of them haven’t enough money to back up their sales with an adequate service department. The other ten percent check out all right, but most of those are in areas where we are already well represented.”

“That still doesn’t add up to losing dealers,” Angelo said.

A worried look knitted the salesman’s brow. “In the last two months I’ve been getting letters from our established dealers. Some of them with us ever since the company started. They’re beginning to worry about discontinuing the Sundancer. They’re afraid the Betsy won’t hold their place in the market for them. I’ve got almost four hundred letters like that.” He paused for a deep breath. “But what’s even worse, we’ve gotten cancellation notices from about ninety dealers. Chrysler, Dodge and Plymouth got about half of them, Pontiac and Buick about thirty, American Motors about ten, Mercury four, and Olds one.” Despite the air-conditioning, he mopped his brow. “They were all good producers. God only knows if the new ones can match them.”

Angelo dragged on the cigarette. After a moment, he spoke. “I don’t get it. The Mazda Rotary with the Wankel engine has dealers begging for it from coast to coast and we have trouble. What is it?”

“Most of them are probably the same fringe dealers who are coming to us. They’ll take a shot at anything new. Besides Mazda is trying to crack the American market. They’re supplying financing for the service departments.” He looked across the desk at Angelo. “If we had to do that we’d need another fifty million dollars to spread across the country. That’s why Mazda is concentrating only in California and Florida. If they can take off in those markets and build up a demand, they hope they won’t have to finance the rest of the country.”

Angelo nodded. “And we’re locked in. We’ve got to go across the country in one shot because we’re already there.”

“Now you’re getting it,” Bancroft said.

Angelo put out his cigarette. “What do we do?”

“I can give you my answer from a sales point of view. I can’t answer for your production problems.”

“Go ahead,” said Angelo.

Bancroft’s voice was deliberate. “One, don’t discontinue the Sundancer. That will keep the dealers from worrying too much. Two, follow the Japanese plan for infiltrating the market by concentrating on limited testing areas and building up demand. If it takes off, we can expand slowly and in two or three years, when we’re in solid, drop the Sundancer.”

“And if we drop the Sundancer now?”

“My best guess is that we’ll lose a net of six hundred more dealers after picking up the new ones.”

Angelo got out of his chair and walked thoughtfully to the window. “I need the Sundancer plant to build the Betsy engines.”

“I know that,” Bancroft said. “But with only about seven hundred dealers left throughout the country we’re out of business even before the car is on the market.”

Angelo knew what he meant. They had averaged out the dealerships at four new cars a week, counting on at least fifteen hundred dealerships. That was six thousand cars a week, three hundred thousand a year. They broke even at two hundred and twenty thousand units. Seven hundred dealers would only add up to one hundred and forty thousand units and that would be disaster. A one-hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar loss the first year.

He walked back to Bancroft’s desk. “Who else have you told about this?”

Bancroft returned his gaze steadily. “Nobody. I just put the figures together and you’re the first one I’ve talked to about it. But Loren Three returns from his honeymoon tomorrow and I have to alert him before the board meeting on Friday.”

Angelo nodded. The Friday board meeting was for the express purpose of reaching a decision about the Sundancer. “I appreciate your telling me, John.”

The salesman smiled. “Look, Angelo, you know I believe in the Betsy as much as you do. But I can’t make the arithmetic work.”

“I understand,” Angelo said. “Let me give it some thought. Thank you, John.”

He was halfway down the corridor to his own office when the thought struck him. He turned and went back to the sales manager.

Bancroft was on the telephone. He looked up in surprise at Angelo’s return. He finished his call and put down the phone.

Angelo said, “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that suddenly, in the last two months, you begin to get dealer letters all bearing the same message?”

“I don’t know,” Bancroft answered. “I never really thought about it. We usually go through something like this at the end of every car year.”

“As many letters?”

Bancroft shook his head. “No. Normally we get like twenty to forty or fifty. Usually from dealers who blew their quotas and are looking to squeeze us. All companies go through the same thing.”

“Have you read all the letters?”

Bancroft shook his head. “I have to. That’s my job.”

“Is there any one particular item or thought that seems to be almost the same language common to the letters?”

Bancroft looked thoughtful for a moment. He pressed the intercom on his telephone. “Bring in the file on the last batch of dealer letters.”

A moment later his secretary came in with several folders in her hand. She placed them on his desk and left the office. John opened the folders and began glancing through them.

Angelo waited silently as the sales manager skimmed through letter after letter. Almost ten minutes passed before Bancroft looked up, a strange look on his face. He looked down at the letters again, this time picking up a pencil and circling lines in several of the letters in red. A moment later he handed some of them to Angelo. “Just read those lines.”

The language was different in each of the letters but the thought was basically the same. They were all concerned that the turbine engine could prove dangerous and might explode at high speeds.

John was still marking letters when Angelo spoke. “It’s beginning to make sense.”

Bancroft put down his pencil and looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

“Did you ever hear of an outfit called the Independent Automobile Safety Organization?”

“Yeah. It’s run by a slimy bastard by the name of Mark Simpson. I threw him out of my office a half a dozen times but he keeps coming back every year.”

“What’s he looking for?”

“Basically it’s a shakedown, I guess.” Bancroft reached for a cigarette and lit it. He pushed the pack toward Angelo. “But he’s clever about it. He runs this rag which is sent out to a national mailing list; it gives a phony evaluation of cars and makes a great point of its honesty because it doesn’t accept advertising.”

“What does he do?”

“I’m not quite clear,” Bancroft said. “I never got that far into it with him. As near as I can make out, however, he either owns or has interests in some used-car lots across the country. You know the kind. Dealer dumps. Really new cars but with fifty to a hundred miles on them to qualify as used. He intimated that if a hundred Sundancers were made available to him, the car would get a good rating. That’s when I threw him out of the office.”

“Do you know if any of the companies do business with him?”

“None of them. They don’t like him any better than we do.”

“Then how does he stay in business?”

“Dealer pressure on the local level,” Bancroft answered. “Dealers are always running scared. They figure giving him a few cars won’t hurt and besides it helps them make their quota.”

“I have a feeling he’s the man behind this,” said Angelo. “We found out he was the man behind our trouble out West.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Bancroft said. “Simpson doesn’t do anything unless there’s something in it for him. What the hell can he gain by keeping the Betsy off the market?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out,” Angelo answered. “The kind of campaign he’s running has got to cost a lot of money. From the looks of it he’s getting all around the country.”

“Where do you think he’s getting it?” Bancroft asked. “He’s not the kind of man who puts out on spec.”

Angelo looked at him. “I don’t know. But whoever he’s getting it from doesn’t want us to get the Betsy on the road.”

“It’s not the other companies,” Bancroft said. “I know that. They’re happy to let us do the pioneering. Do you think it might be the gasoline outfits?”

Angelo shook his head. “No. We’ve already got arrangements made with all the national gasoline chains. They’ve agreed to have kerosene pumps at all their stations when we come out on the market.”

They both fell silent. Angelo walked to the window. A freight train was pulling from the yards, filled with automobiles, their colors shining brightly in the sun. He watched the train move slowly out of the yard and then went back to Bancroft’s desk.

“You get on the phone and talk to every one of those dealers,” he said. “Find out if Simpson or anyone connected with him actually spoke to them.”

“What good will that do?”

“There has to be something illegal about what he’s doing and maybe we can prove it. Slander, libel. I don’t know. I’m going to turn that over to the lawyers and let them figure it out.” He took a cigarette from the package on Bancroft’s desk. “Meanwhile you reassure them that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the car. Tell them about our tests.”

“They’ll think I’m bullshitting them,” John said. “Simpson’s line seems to back up the trouble we had when Peerless killed himself; and they read all about that in the papers.”

“Then you invite every one of them to come out to our testing grounds at our expense and actually see how the car performs,” said Angelo. “That ought to convince them.”

“I don’t know whether it will convince them,” Bancroft said. “But they sure as hell will come. I’ve never known a dealer yet who turned down an all-expense-paid trip to anywhere, even if it was only across town.”

Angelo laughed. “I’ll leave that to you. Meanwhile I’ll see what I can learn on my end. We’re not dead yet.”

“I’m beginning to feel better,” Bancroft said. “At least we’re doing something instead of just being sitting ducks.” He rose to his feet. “We still can’t afford to ignore any of this.”

“I don’t intend to,” Angelo said. He looked at the sales manager. “I didn’t take on this job to destroy this company and I intend to do what’s best for it, whether or not it fits into my personal preferences.”