Edsel (27 page)

“This one belongs to the Ford Motor Company. Israel Zed drives it.”

“If you knew that, why ask me?” He held out the scrap of paper, but I didn’t take it. He let it drift from his fingers. A current of air took it and spun it to the floor.

“That list was made from cars parked at the Highwayman’s Rest on Lone Pine Road. The people who drove them all had business with your brother not connected to the customer’s side of the roadhouse. What’s Zed got going with the Ballistas?”

“Nothing. Now.”

His eyes were closed. He was so near to a skeleton I got panicky, but the monitor continued to beep rhythmically. I moved closer.

A hand touched my shoulder. I jumped six inches and looked into the flushed face of the slender nurse. She moved on a cushion of air and struck like a fuse blowing.

“You’re going now,” she said.

“Five minutes.”

“You’ve had twenty. I don’t care whom you represent, you have to go.”

“I like the company.”

The nurse looked at him. His eyes were open. Their feral amber color was always a shock.

“Five minutes.” She vanished again.

I rested my hands on the bed rail. “Okay, that’s now. What about then?”

“When?”

“You’re not that far gone, Tony.”

“Okay. I don’t owe the son of a bitch nothing. Getting him to stop around and pay his respects is like pulling teeth with your toes. I told Frankie he’d live to regret throwing in with a Jew.”

“Zed knew Frankie?” I leaned in. We were breathing the same air now. I thought I could smell the medication through his skin, the morphine or whatever that was dripping into him to curb the pain.

He made that death’s-head grin. “What’s the matter, you never hear of the Frankie Orr College Scholarship Fund?”

I absorbed that. Before I could frame another question he went on.

“Old Izzy, I guess he didn’t neither, but he had a good excuse. Him being the first.”

For the time remaining to us I listened to him talk against the mechanized eternity of that floodlit room.

J
OHN BUGAS—JACK TO
his friends, of whom from certain knowledge I could identify but one, he whose name graced the company we both worked for—sat at his large neat gray desk listening to me without once looking away, as if I were a radio set airing his favorite program. His long frame in its simple blue suit remained motionless in the wingback, and his polite eyes canting back from his icebreaker nose never blinked. His shoulders were precisely parallel to the desk. He seemed of a piece with the matching desk set that occupied its top, as regulated as the framed portraits of the Ford Trinity tombstoning the walnut panels behind him. Substitute Washington, Lincoln, and Eisenhower for the two Henrys and Edsel, and the office would check in every particular with recommendations from FBI headquarters in Washington, his late employer. There was even a tasseled American flag on a stand in the corner.

When I finished, the silence crackled. His was the quietest office on the executive floor, cork-lined, with a rubber pad under the carpet and a jacket of silicone on every caster and bearing in his chair. I figured all those qualifying sessions with earphones on the Bureau target range made his ears abnormally sensitive.

“I wish you’d come to me at the start.” His pioneer inflections were gentle. Company scuttlebutt said he was embarrassed by stories about his obstreperous past and had taken steps to eradicate the frontier influence from his manner, including speech lessons.

“I was new to the neighborhood then. I didn’t know who my friends were.” I didn’t add that I still didn’t. What I had learned was just too big for me to contain.

I’d wrestled with it all day Sunday, and was still undecided when I went to bed Sunday night. Monday morning I’d awakened with the determination to lay the whole thing in Bugas’ lap. His background in law enforcement might give him a different perspective from the standard executive flank defense. In any case I wasn’t Atlas; the weight of the world was raising hell with my bursitis.

“There isn’t a chance this man Ballista is lying.”

“I doubt it.”

“His type can be convincing. Their testimony is an amalgam of inside gossip, personal fantasy, and straight dope. Even they don’t know the difference in some cases. Lie detectors are useless.”

“I know these people, sir. I’m a pretty good judge.”

“I know them too. I’ve interrogated my share.”

“Excuse me, sir, but you only know them from a cop’s point of view. I always got on with them because they thought of me as a neutral party. I was their ear to the straight world. They all had stories they were busting to tell, but I was their only safe audience. If the heat turned up they could always claim I invented it.”

“Did you invent it?”

I nodded. “That’s a fair question. I could just be spreading lies about my immediate superior because I want his job. I don’t. I’m an ad flack, that’s all I’ll ever be. You heard me tell Mr. Ford I wanted to turn whatever success I made of the Edsel into a position in the field of journalism. I know now that will never happen, but I don’t intend to slink away from advertising with my tail between my legs. I still want the chance to show you what a first-class snake-oil salesman can do when he has something worth selling. I can’t do that from Israel Zed’s office.”

“Would you be willing to sign a paper stating that you would not accept his position if it were offered to you?”

“Only if you insisted.”

A barely discernible crease appeared in his forehead. “If you’re sincere about not wanting his job, why should I insist?”

“I’ve thrown away enough paper in my time to build a city of frame houses. I don’t value it much. I’d rather shake hands on the deal.”

The crease vanished. “That’s a good answer. Harry Bennett had a paper signed by Hank’s grandfather promising him complete control of the company after old Mr. Ford’s death. It didn’t do him much good when push came to shove.”

I wanted to ask him if it was true he and Bennett had once pulled guns on each other. I didn’t. It would have been like asking a rising starlet about her old nose. In the bland, burnished, climate-controlled atmosphere of the Glass House, such behavior was as out of place as pen wipers and open inkwells.

“I’m still not clear on what any of this has to do with the assaults on Walter and Victor Reuther,” he went on. “What did Zed have to gain?”

“Frankie Orr’s good will. Zed was a poor boy from the Jewish ghetto with a first-class mind. Frankie always had one eye on the future and saw the advantages of having a good lawyer whose loyalty he could count on, so he ponied up the cash for Zed’s education at the University of Michigan School of Law. Trouble was, when Frankie most needed him, Zed was up to his eyes in Washington politics. FDR’s brain scouts plucked him out of Detroit when the ink was still wet on his bar exam and put him to work on the Great Depression. Then came the ambassadorship to British Palestine. By then I guess he thought he was out of Frankie’s reach, and had probably talked himself into forgetting just how much he owed an old bootlegger. Frankie waited until he came back into the private sector to work for Ford, then paid him a call.”

“He threatened to expose him.”

“He had a lot less to lose than Zed if it came out whose money had taken him so far from his old man’s pushcart in the downtown corridor. That federal indictment for violation of the Mann Act wasn’t going away. Fixing the feds is expensive. He needed the money in the UAW pension fund, but the Reuthers were standing in front of it. But taking them out was only half the battle. He needed flashy legal help to take the stink off what amounted to the single largest bribe in the history of organized crime. Israel Zed had to come back into the fold. Coercing him with the threat of exposure wasn’t enough, not for the Conductor. He had to be reminded just how deep his debt went.”

I stopped. All this talking was making me lightheaded. I slipped the Hershey bar I had lately taken to carrying from my shirt pocket, peeled down the paper and foil, and helped myself to a row of chocolate squares. Candy didn’t taste nearly as good as it had in the days before it became medicine. Bugas said nothing, waiting for me to continue.

“The pimping charge was a frame.” I replaced the wrapper and returned the bar to my pocket. “The reason the feds couldn’t get anything more on him is Frankie never gave the order to kill someone to the person he expected to carry it out. He always used buffers. That way, if one of his button men bungled and got arrested he couldn’t bargain his way out by pointing a finger at Frankie. The buffers he used are anyone’s guess, probably junior execs, Frankie wannabes. Except in this one case. In this one case he made Zed carry the message to Tony and Charlie Balls.”

“Diabolical.”

“An Orr trademark. If he behaved like the silkshirt thugs you see in Syndicate movies, he’d have gone to the chair twenty years ago. As soon as Tony told me I believed it. It had his thumbprint all over it.”

“But why should he confide in you? Doesn’t he believe in the Code of the Underworld?”

“Another Hollywood invention, sir. Though I expect you ran into your share of hoods who imitated what they saw in the pictures,” I added quickly, knowing full well his job at the Bureau had mainly involved shifting documents from the In box to the Out box. “They love to gossip, as I said. So much the better if there’s something in it for them. In his case he had nothing to lose and time to kill. Terminal patients don’t draw many visitors.”

He rose for the first time since I had entered the office and strode to the window. His glossy patent-leathers, his sole affectation and likely a source of friction with erstwhile boss J. Edgar Hoover, doyen of tidy invisibility, made no sound at all on the steel-gray carpet. For a time he stood with his back to me and his arms hanging at his sides. There wasn’t much to see beyond the late-summer glare, except the new construction creeping across the pastures beyond the city limits. Like a spike driven into the trunk of a moribund oak, the Ford towers had sparked a sudden blossoming in Dearborn’s industrialization, dormant for decades. New housing projects would follow; long-barreled, low-roofed homes with attached garages and basketball hoops crowding out barns and plowed fields. Where did all the old farmers go after they sold out? You never saw them on park benches.

“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.”