Motown (18 page)

“Did you write about it?”

“In the book, finally. He’d been deported by then. I always had this idea that if I could write about it I could forget it. It didn’t work. Maybe that’s why I quit writing. What good is it if it’s not therapeutic?”

Canada said, “He’s back. Frankie is.”

Minor watched him. He went on.

“Patsy’s been spending a lot of time lately in a telephone booth across the street from the Penobscot Building. When we found out Frankie had disappeared from Sicily we asked Ma Bell for a record of long-distance calls placed to that number. It came through this morning. He’s in Puerto Rico, a place called the Pinzón Hotel in San Juan.”

“It’ll be the best one in town. Frankie was never one for rustic charm. Have you told the feds?”

“We’re sitting on it for now. They’d just yank him back and we’d have to start all over again. You don’t seem surprised he left.”

“I’m surprised he stayed as long as he did. Napoleon was on Elba only ten months, and he didn’t have TWA. When do you expect him back in Detroit?”

“Not right away. He’s working something, and whatever it is he won’t risk blowing it by calling attention to himself. Puerto Rico is American soil. He’ll be content there for a while.”

“Somebody knocked over a Negro policy operation last night on the East Side. That’s three recently, with two deaths. Think it’s connected?” He smiled at the inspector’s reaction. “I don’t write any more, but I read. A story like that has a comfortable, old-timey, Joey Machine School feel. The Orr style wasn’t all that different, for all the manicures and European tailoring.”

“It isn’t big enough. He already owns every game in town. Assuming they aren’t just independent heists, we think Patsy’s just showing off for the old man.”

“Patsy never got over starting out in an incubator,” Minor said. “You know something you’re not telling, but that’s okay. Why’d you tell me about Frankie when even the feds don’t know he’s back?”

“Because you haven’t told me everything you know about Orr and Albert Brock. And because all this you’ve been saying about not being a newshound any more is just so much bullshit. Were you in the service?”

“Four-F, both wars.” He touched the medallion at his throat.

“I was a Japanese POW for sixteen months. There was a mirror on the wall of the officer’s toilet where they took me twice a week for interrogation. The look on my face in that mirror while they were booting me around is the same one you’ve been wearing since I got here.”

Minor rested his forearms on the table. His left hand wore a University of Detroit class ring with most of the embossed letters worn off. “I spoke to Brock only that one time, after the Dearborn strike,” he said. “But I’ve been following his career. Call it guilt for that piece of crap the
Banner
ran instead of the story I wrote, but he made an impression on me. He handed out leaflets for Walter Reuther for a while, but the UAW wasn’t big enough for both of them and he took what he learned with him when he went back into trucking. Like most pioneers he was a realist. He knew that highminded idealism is no defense against brass knuckles. Thugs are cheap. He passed the hat, upped the ante, and hired some torpedoes right out from under the van lines and auto plants. A good ten percent of those heroic proles you see battling it out with strikebreakers in the old pictures are professional goons. In the process Brock had to have rubbed elbows with Frankie more than once. They were partners long before Frankie backed him for president of the local, probably even before Frankie’s father-in-law Sal switched sides. At one time, Borneo strongarms were fighting each other and collecting two paychecks. That’s something you won’t read in the history of the American labor movement.”

“Nor in Baedecker. How come you know so much, or are you going to pull out that old saw about protecting your sources?”

“Sources that need protection are generally unreliable. Whores are best. When they talk at all, they don’t lie; no reason to, they screw you for a living. I don’t look it now, but I used to know my way around the upstairs joints.”

“No wife to slow you down, huh.”

“Now you’re getting personal.”

It was said casually enough, but Canada was aware he’d stepped over some invisible threshold. He backed up. “What else did you hear?”

“The rest is rumor. Maybe a couple of union men martyred to the cause were actually eliminated from inside the ranks for reasons best known to Brock, meaning they were stealing from the strike fund or spying for the other side. A dispatcher named Pike vanished on a deer hunting trip several years ago, along with evidence tying Brock’s campaign committee to a series of hijackings in Ohio when the boss was up for re-election and the treasury was low. Even if you could prove murder you wouldn’t be able to trace anything back to him. If Frankie were that sloppy he’d have gotten life in Jackson instead of a one-way ticket to Palermo.”

“Theoretically that last one would be Patsy’s red wagon, not Frankie’s. There’s only so much you can do from across the ocean.”

“Where were you in nineteen forty when Stalin had Trotsky killed in Mexico?”

“Rumors don’t spend,” Canada said after a moment. “I need something I can show the mayor.”

“What do you want to do, topple Brock or scare him off?”

“He doesn’t scare.”

“I’d hate to see him fall,” Minor said. “Whatever he’s done he’s done for the union. The Steelhaulers know that, and it’s why they keep voting for him in spite of the occasional attempt by some full-of-himself politician to discredit him. You don’t claw your way to the top of an organization like that without getting blood and dirt under your nails, and only one man in a million can play ball with the Sicilians without giving them the field. Whoever follows him might as well hand them the key to the front door, because we only get one Brock to a generation, and the next one won’t have his luck.”

Canada smiled. “For a hard-nosed old bloodhound you sound an awful lot like a convert.”

“We graduated from the same class. The current breed of journalist spends more time combing his hair than grubbing around after a lead, and the next generation of union executive will come straight out of business school without knowing a clutch from a catfish. If us dinosaurs don’t stand up for each other, who will?”

“Does that mean you won’t help me?”

Minor produced a ballpoint pen and wrote a name and a telephone number on his paper napkin, which he slid across to the inspector. “Hang on to it. When I was young we didn’t give out ladies’ numbers.”

“Who is she?”

“Just mention me and tell her what you want. Whether she gives it to you is up to her.”

“Is this … ?” He left it unfinished.

“Her aunt was. I almost married her.”

Their waitress came over for the first time since she had served their meals. Canada paid the bill and the two went out into the brassy afternoon light. The alley that ran past the warehouse, paved with sun-bleached asphalt that had long since begun to degenerate back to the cracked earth beneath, ended at the river. Rusty iron rails crossed it in several places among piles of broken concrete. The riverfront on the other side was more of the same. Windsor always reminded the inspector of a boy constantly correcting his stride to match his father’s, even when the father stumbled.

Connie Minor was also looking at the river. “A lot of good whiskey came in over that water, under it too; there’s still a tow cable down there someplace. A lot more was just plain moose-sweat. The Canucks caught on early that it didn’t have to be good to make a profit.”

“Miss those times?”

“Not for a minute. I had them. That’s why I cut the kids more slack than most, even with all that’s happening in the colleges. If you don’t screw up early and often you won’t have any stories to tell when you get to be my age.”

“I’m fifteen years younger than you and there are some stories I’d just as soon not have to tell.”

“That’s the hell of it, Inspector,” Minor said. “You don’t get a choice.”

F
ORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES
, the sampler read.

Enid Kohler had put her handbag in its usual drawer in the file cabinet and sat down behind her desk before she saw the package, wrapped in white paper without any writing on it and tied with cord. The wrapping tore away from a polished wooden frame, obviously antique, and the needlepoint sentiment worked into brown burlap with brittle thread that had once been scarlet. It was probably eighty years old.

“The kid in the head shop didn’t want to part with it,” Rick said. “He had it hanging over the cash register for luck. I had to buy an incense burner and a rock poster with it. Ever hear of a group called the Swinging Blue Jeans?”

She looked at him standing in the doorway to the next room. He had on a polo shirt and chinos, no more Brooks Brothers. “You’re early.”

“Pammie let me in. She’s upstairs. I wanted to make the sampler myself, but I couldn’t get the hang of it over the long weekend.” He paused. “An oral answer is sufficient.”

“What you said made me mad as hell,” she said. “I’m not some giggly schoolgirl with a crush on the history teacher.”

“No argument. The little wire that connects my mouth to my brain breaks sometimes. I’m sorry.”

Her face lost its porcelain cast. In a sleeveless silk blouse and pleated slacks with her black hair loose to her shoulders, she looked no older than twenty. “That would have done all along. You didn’t need the visual aid, but it’s sweet. You must have looked all over town.”

“Let’s just say I’ve seen enough beaded curtains and macramé in the last three days to last me until nineteen eighty.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“Is there someplace nearby?”

“That’s right, you never got the tour. This way.” She led him past the staircase and down a short hall to a fully furnished kitchen painted in pastel colors and paved with swirly linoleum. Sunlight shot through a window looking out on a jungle of poppies and forsythia. She lifted the lid off a coffee pot on the electric stove, looked inside, and turned on the burner. “Pammie always remembers to change the pot and always forgets to put heat under it. It’ll be a few minutes. Juice?”

“Anything but grapefruit.”

From the two-toned refrigerator she took a pitcher of orange juice, shook it up, and filled two flowered glasses from the cupboard. They clinked glasses. Sipping, she leaned back against the counter. “What did you think of the Farm?”

“It was a jolt.”

She laughed. “Wendell told me what happened. Are you sold on seat belts?”

“I never thought they didn’t work. If I had a family I’d probably insist on them.”

“Bachelors aren’t any more indestructible than family men. You ought to know, you’ve been gathering statistics.”

“Ever read Orwell?”

“You don’t have to give up your freedom in return for protection,” she said. “You men and your dangerous toys. What’s the point in trying to get yourself killed?”

“That’s not the object. The object is to see how close you can come without actually doing it.”

“That’s crazy.”

He considered retreating. But he’d established himself as devil’s advocate, and to change directions now would be suspicious. That was the part he hadn’t missed about undercover, the cakewalk. “Most of us are passengers,” he said. “Life’s like that. Driving a car is one of the few times when you feel like you’re in control.”

“Right up until you go flying through the windshield.”

“I didn’t say you’re in control, just that you feel like it.”

“Is that why you drive a car with a speedometer that goes up to a hundred and fifty when the speed limit on the expressway is seventy?”

“That Mercedes of yours is no tricycle.”

“It was a gift from my father.”

He used his tongue to pry a string of orange pulp from between two teeth. He hated fresh-squeezed. “Did he give you the ten thousand you donated to the Porter Group?”

“In a way. It was what his life insurance paid.”

He drank his juice, hoping for more pulp; when he was picking his teeth he wasn’t talking.

“He ran into a truck making a wide turn at an intersection,” she said. “They pronounced him dead on arrival at the hospital. My mother never regained consciousness and died a week later of a cerebral hemorrhage. The car wasn’t that badly damaged. They might both have survived if they were wearing seat belts.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That was three years ago. I didn’t need the money from the insurance, so I gave it all to PG. That was before the Farm, before
Hell On Wheels,
when Wendell was unknown outside of speaking engagements at women’s clubs. My mother had been quite taken with him when he appeared at hers. Anyway, when he got the check he invited me in to tour the office. It was in an old building in East Detroit then, not nearly as nice as this, and his bookkeeping system was a wreck. I didn’t work summers in my father’s real estate office without learning something. I offered to help. I’m still helping.”

Rick said, “He has a talent for attracting just the people he needs for each job. Hal Bledsoe was with American Motors, Günter Damm raced cars for a living, you helped organize a business—”

“—and you were a newspaperman,” she finished. “You have a way of getting information out of people without their noticing. You should have been a detective.”

He met it head on. “I hung around them some. It was the job. Things rub off.”

The pot had been percolating for some time. She took two mugs down from the cabinet. “How do you take it?”

“Cream no sugar.” When she was through with it he looked at the mug she’d handed him. It carried an advertisement for the 1964 Corvair.

She smiled and poured herself a slug of black coffee. “It came free through the mail. You’d be surprised how many lists you wind up on once you begin writing for information. GM’s computer hasn’t made the connection yet between Wendell and W. G. Porter, Esquire. All our pens say General Motors. Wendell gets a big kick out of using them to sign his press releases.”

“He gets a big kick out of the whole thing, doesn’t he? I mean he’s not your stereotypical bluenose alarmist.”