Wheels (68 page)

Her declaration cheered him, but even after that he remained in doubt, and was still uncertain now.
Hub Hewitson's voice cut brusquely across the Farstar presentation.
"Let's stop a minute and talk about something we might as well face up
to. This Farstar is the ugliest son-of-a-bitching car I ever saw
.”

It was typical of Hewitson that, while he might support a program, he
liked to bring out possible objec
tions himself for frank discus
sion.
Around the horseshoe table there were several murmurs of assent.
Adam said smoothly-the point had been anticipated-"We have, of course,
been aware of that all along
.”

He began explaining the philosophy behind the car: a philosophy
expressed b
y Brett DeLosanto during the af
ter-midnight session months
earlier when Brett had said, "With Picasso in our nostrils, we've been
designing cars like they rolled off a Gainsborough canvas
.”

That had
been the night when Adam and Brett had gone together to the teardown
room, moving on later to the bull session with Elroy Braithwaite and two
young product planners, of whom Castaldy was one. They had emerged with
the question and concept: Why not a deliberate, daring attempt to
produce a car, ugly by existing standards, yet so suited to needs,
environment, and present time-the Age of Utility-that it would become
beautiful?
Though there had been adaptations and changes in outlook since, Farstar
had retained its basic concept.
Here and now Adam was circumspect about the words he used because a
product policy board meeting was no place to wax overly poetic, and
notions about Picasso took second place to pragmatism. Nor could he
speak of Rowena, though
it had been the thought of her which inspired his own thinking that night.
Rowena was still a beautiful memory, and while Adam would never tell Erica
about her, he had a conviction that even if he did Erica would understand.
The discussion about the visual look of Farstar ended, though they would
return to the subject, Adam knew.
"Where were we
.”

Hub Hewitson was turning pages of his own agenda.
"Page forty-seven," Braithwaite prompted.
The chairman nodded. "Let's get on
.”

An hour and a half later, after prolonged and inconclusive discussion,
the group vice-president of manufacturing pushed away his papers and
leaned forward in his chair. "If someone had come to me with the idea
for this car, I'd not only have thrown it out, but I'd have suggested
he look for employment elsewhere
.”

Momentarily, the auditorium was silent. Adam, at the lectern, waited.
The manufacturing head, Nolan Freidheim, was a grizzled auto industry
veteran and the dean of vice-presidents at the table. He had a
forbidding, craggy face which seldom smiled, and was noted for his
bluntness. Like the company president, he was due for retirement soon,
except that Freidheim had less than a month of service remaining and his
successor, already named, was here today.
While the others waited, the elderly executive filled his pipe and lit
it. Everyone present knew that this was the last product policy meeting
he would
attend. At length he said, "That’
s what I'd have done, and if
I had, we'd have lost a good man and probably a good car too
.”

He puffed his pipe and put it down. "Maybe that's why my time's come,
maybe that's why I'm glad it has. There's a whole lot that's happening
nowadays I don't understand; plenty of it I dislike and always will. Lately, though, I've found I dont care as much as I used
to. Another thing: Whatever we decide today, while you guys are sweating
out Farstar-or whatever name it gets eventually -I'll be fishing off the
Florida Keys. If you've time, think of me. You probably won't have
.”

A ripple of laughter ran around the table.
"I'll leave you with a thought, though," Nolan Freidheim said. "I was
against this car to begin with. In a way I still am; parts of it,
including the way it looks, offend my notion of what a car should be.
But down in my gut, where plenty of us have made good decisions before
now, I've a feeling that it's right, it's good, it's timely, it'll hit
the market when it should
.”

The manuf
acturing chief stood up, his
coffee cup in hand to replenish it. "My gut votes 'yes.' I say we should
go with Farstar
.”

The chairman of the board observed, "Thank you, Nolan. I've been feeling
that way myself, but you expressed it better than the rest of us
.”

The president joined in the assent. So did others who had wavered until
now. Minutes later a formal decision was recorded: For Farstar, all
lights green I
Adam felt a curious emptiness. An objective had been gained. The next
decision was his own.

Chapter
thirty

Since the last week of August, Rollie Knight had lived in terror.
The terror began in the janitor's closet at the assembly plant where
Leroy Colfax knifed and killed one of the two vending machine
collectors, and where the other collector and the foreman, Parkland,
were left wounded and unconscious. It continued during a hasty retreat
from the plant by the four conspirators-Big Rufe, Colfax, Daddy-o
Lester, and Rollie. They had scaled a high, chain-link fence, helping
each other in the darkness, knowing that to leave through any of the
plant gates would invite questioning and identification later.
Rollie gashed his hand badly on the fence wire, and Big Rufe fell
heavily, limping afterward, but they all made it outside. Then, moving
separately and avoiding lighted areas, they met in one of the employee
parking lots where Big Rufe had a car. Daddy-o had driven because Big
Rufe's ankle was swelling f
ast, and paining him. They left the parking
lot without using lights, only turning them on when reaching the roadway
outside.
Looking back at the plant, everything seemed normal and there were no
outward signs of an alarm being raised.
"Man, oh man," Daddy-o fretted nervously as he drove. "If I ain't glad
to be clear o' that!
"
From the back seat, Big Rufe grunted. "We ain't clear o'nuthin'yet
.”

Rollie, in front with Daddy-o and trying to stem the bleeding of his
hand with an oily rag, knew that it was true.
Despite his fall, Big Rufe had managed to get
one set of chained cash bags over the fence with him. Leroy Colfax had the
other. In the back seat they hacked at the bags with knives, then poured the
contents-all silver coins-into several paper sacks. On the freeway, before
reaching the city, Colfax and Big Rufe threw the original cash bags out.
In the inner city they parked the car on a dead-end street, then
separated. Before they did, Big Rufe warned, "Remember, all we gotta do
is act like there ain't nuthun' different. We play this cool, ain't nobody
gonna prove we was there tonight. So tomorrow, everybody shows their faces
just like always, same as any other day
.”

He glared at the other three.
"Somebody don't, that's when the pigs start lookin'our way
.”

Leroy Colfax said softly, "Might be smarter to run
.”

"You run," Big Rufe snarled, "I swear I'll find 'n kill you, the way you
did that honky, the way you got us all in this . .
.”

Colf ax said hastily, "Aint gonna run. just thinkin'is all
.”

"Dorft thinkl
You showed already you ain’
t got brains
.”

Colfax was silent.
Though he had not spoken, Rollie wished he could run. But to where? There
was nowhere; no escape, whichever way you turned. He had a sense of his
own life seeping out, the way blood was still seeping from his injured
hand. Then he remembered: The chain of happenings leading to tonight had
begun a year ago, when the white cop baited him, and the black cop gave
a card with a hiring hall address. Rollie's mistake, he recognized, had
been to go there. Or had it? If what had overtaken him had not happened
in this way, there would have been some other.
"Now listen good
.”

Big Rufe had said, "we
all in this together, we stick together. If nobody of us four blabs, we
gonna be okay
.”

Perhaps the others believed. Rollie hadn't.
They parted then, each taking one of the paper sacks of coins which Big
Rufe and Colfax had divided in the back seat of the car. Big Rufe's was
bulkier than the others.
Choosing his route cagily, conscious of the implications of the paper
sack of coins if he should be stopped by a police patrol, Rollie
reached the apartment house on Blaine near 12th.
May Lou wasn't in; she had probably gone to a movie. Rollie bathed the
gash in his hand, then bound it roughly with a towel.
After that he counted the money in the paper sack, dividing the coins
into piles. It totaled $30.75-less than a day's pay at the assembly
plant.
If Rollie Knight had had the erudition or philosophy, he might have
debated, within himself, the nature of risks which human beings take
for
trifli
n
g
amounts such as $30.75, and their degrees of losing. There
had been earlier risks which frightened him-the risk of refusing to be
swept along into deeper involvement with plant crime, and the risk of
backing out tonight, which he could have taken, but didn't, when Big
Rufe thrust the gun into his hand.
These risks had been real, not just imagined. A savage beating,
accompanied by broken limbs, could have been ordered for Rollie by Big
Rufe as easily as groceries are ordered from a store. Both men knew it;
and that way Rollie would have been a loser too.
But in the end the losing could have been less than the total
disaster-life imprisonment for murder-which threatened now.
In essence the risks which Rollie chose to take, and not to take, were those which-in degree -face all men in a free
society. But some, within the same, society, are born with cruelly limited
choices, belying the hoary bromide that "all men are created equal
.”

Rollie, and tens of thousands like him, hedged in from birth by poverty,
inequality, scant opportunity, and with the sketchiest of education
providing poor preparation for such choices as occur, are losers from the
beginning. Their degree of losing remains the only thing to be determined.
Thus, the tragedy of Rollie Knight was twofold: The darker side of the
earth that he was born to, and society's failure to equip him mentally
to break away.
But thinking none of this, knowing only bleak despair and fear of what
would come tomorrow, Rollie thrust the $30.75 in silver beneath his bed,
and slept. He did not awaken later when May Lou came in.
In the morning, May Lou dressed Rollie's hand with a makeshift bandage,
her eyes asking questions which he did not answer. Then Rollie went to
work.
At the plant, plenty of talk was circulating about the murder-robbery
of the night before, and there had been reports on radio, TV, and in the
morning newspaper. Local interest in Rollie's area of Assembly centered
on the bludgeoning of Frank Parkland, who was in the hospital, though
reportedly with mild concussion only. "Just proves all foremen are
thick
-
headed," a humorist pronounced at break time. There was immediate
laughter. No one seemed distressed by the robbery, or greatly concerned
about the murdered man, who was otherwise unknown.
Another report said one of the plant managers had had a stroke, brought
on by the whole affair
plus overwork. However, the last was clearly an exaggeration since
everyone knew a manager's job was a soft touch.
Apart from the talk, no other activity concerning the robbery-murder was
visible from the assembly line. Nor, as far as Rollie could see, or hear
through scuttlebutt, was anyone on the day shift questioned.
No rumors, either, tied any names to the crime.
Despite Big Rufe's warning to the other three, he alone failed to show
up at the plant that day. Daddy-o conveyed the news to Rollie at
midmorning that Big Rufe's leg was so swollen he could not walk, and had
reported sick, putting out a story of having been drunk the night before
and falling down stairs at home.
Daddy-o was shaky and nervous, but had recovered some of his confidence
by early af
ternoon, when he paid a second call to Rollie's work
station, obviously wanting to gab.
Rollie had snarled at him, low-voiced, 'Tor Cri-sakes quit hangin' round
me. An
d keep that stinkin' mouth shut!
" If anyone blabbed, causing word
to spread, Rollie feared most of all it would be Daddy-o.
Nothing more that was notable occurred that day. Or on the one after.
Or through an entire week following that.
As each day passed, while Rollie's anxiety remained, his relief
increased a little. He knew, however, there was still plenty of time for
the worst to happen. Also he realized: while the sheer numbers of lesser
unsolved crimes caused police investigations to ease or end, murder was
in a different league. The police, Rollie reasoned, would not give up
quickly.
As it happened, he was partly right and partly wrong.
The timing of the original robbery had been shrewd. It was the timing
also which caused police investigation to center on the plant night
shift, even though detectives were unsure that the men they sought were
company employees at all. Plenty of auto plant crimes were committed by
outsiders, using fake or stolen employee identification badges to get
in.
All the police had to work with was a statement by the surviving
vending machine collector that four men were involved. All had been
masked and armed; he believed all four were black; he had only the
vaguest impressions of their physical size. The surviving collector had
not seen the face of the briefly unmasked robber, as had his companion
who was knifed.
Frank Parkland, who was struck down instantly on entering the janitor's
closet, had observed nothing.
No weapons had been discovered, no fingerprints found. The slashed cash
bags were eventually recovered near a freeway, but provided no clue,
apart from suggesting that whoever discarded them was headed for the
inner city.
A team of four detectives assigned to the case began methodical sifting
through names and employment dockets of some three thousand night shift
employees. Among these was a sizable segment with criminal records. All
such individuals were questioned, without result. This took time. Also,
part way through the investigation the number of detectives was reduced
from four to two
,
and even the remaining pair had other duties to
contend with.
The possibility that the wanted men might be part of the day shift, and
had remained in the plant to stage the robbery, was not overlooked. It
was simply one of several possibilities which the
police had neither time nor manpower to cope with all at once.
What investigators really hoped for was a break in the case through an
informer, which was the way many serious crimes, in greater Detroit as
elsewhere, were solved. But no information came. Either the perpetrators
were the only ones who knew the names involved, or others were remaining
strangely silent.
The police were aware that the vending concessions at the plant were
Mafia-financed and run; they knew, too, that the dead man had Mafia
connections. They suspected, but had no means of proving, that both
factors were related to the silence.
After three and a half weeks, because of a need to assign detectives to
newer cases, while the plant murder-robbery case was not closed, police
activity slackened off.
The same was not true elsewhere.
The Mafia, generally, does not look kindly on any interference with its
people. And when interference is from other criminals, repercussions are
stern, and of a nature to be a warning against repetition.
From the instant that the man with the Indian features died from the knife
wound inflicted by Leroy Colfax, Colfax and his three accomplices were
marked for execution.
Doubly assuring this was that they were pawns in the Mafia-Black Mafia
war.
When details of the murder-robbery were known, the Detroit Mafia family
worked quietly and effectively. It had channels of communication which the
police did not.
First, feelers were put out for information. When none resulted, a reward
was quietly offered: a thousand dollars.
For that much, in the inner city, a man might sell his mother.
Rollie Knight heard of the Mafia involvement and reward one week and two
days after the debacle at the plant. It was at night and he was in a dingy
Third Avenue bar, drinking beer. The beer, and the fact that whatever
official investigation was going on had not, come close to him so far, had
relaxed a little of the terror he had lived with for the past nine days.
But the news, conveyed by his companion at the bar-a downtown numbers
runner known simply as Mule-increased Rollie's terror tenfold and turned
the beer he had drunk into bile, so that he was hard pressed not to vomit
there and then. He managed not to.
"Hey
!
" Mule said, after he conveyed the news of the Mafia-proffered
reward. "Ain't you in that plant, man
.”