“ENID TELLS ME YOU’RE doing a fine job.” Rick got up from the card table to shake Wendell Porter’s hand. It was a long bony hand attached to a lot of shirtcuff; the sleeves of his three-button gray herringbone jacket were the least bit too short for him. He was taller than he looked on television, and up close Rick could see that the charmingly disheveled appearance of his dark tousled hair was more barber’s artifice than Ivy League carelessness. He had thick black eyebrows and deep vertical creases in his face that washed out under studio lights, making him look younger onscreen. Rick knew he was in his middle forties. The famous Harvard accent was less pronounced in person.
“I just make calls, ask questions, and write down the answers,” Rick said. “It’s pretty hard to screw that up.”
“You’d be surprised.” Porter glanced at Pammie, immersed in a telephone interview, and leaned closer to Rick. “It isn’t easy getting people who know what they’re doing when you don’t pay. Actually, though, I was referring to that phone number you gave Lee Schenck. Enid says Commander Whozis was a fount of accident information.”
“Some of them drop their guards when they go home.”
“It’s handy to have someone around who understands the policeman’s mind.”
Rick wondered what that meant.
“What time is it?” Porter asked.
Rick looked at his watch. “Almost eleven.”
“I’m due up at the Farm at noon. Would you care to come along? Pammie can manage here. Enid says Lee told her you asked about it.”
This was going too well. He was still turning over the policeman comment.
“I’d be honored, Mr. Porter.”
“Wendell.”
They stopped in the entryway, where Enid looked up from her typing. Today she was wearing a blue silk blouse and a paisley scarf secured with a gold pin. Her hair was up. Rick could see blue highlights in it.
“We’re going up there now,” Porter said. “If Washington calls, tell them I’ll get back to them. Let them stew.”
“Think they’ll call?”
“Probably not.”
“Want me to prepare a press release about the no-show yesterday?”
“Not this time. Half the media is convinced I’m one of these conspiracy freaks now. Let’s wait a little before we convince the other half. Oh, and call Caroline and ask her if we’re still on for dinner. I haven’t touched bases with her since I got back.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Rick fell in behind Porter’s lanky stride. So far, a cool “Good morning” was all he had been able to get out of Enid since yesterday’s jackass comment about her doing needlepoint for Wendell.
Porter’s car was a maroon Volvo sports coupe, six years old but in excellent condition. It was equipped with seat belts, the first Rick had ever seen except on airplanes. Porter gave him an approving glance when he hooked his up without waiting to be asked, secured his own, and they pulled out of the little lot. Rick was surprised when the safety lobbyist sped up to catch the light at Jefferson and changed lanes to pass an Olds 88 lumbering along at just below the limit; he’d been prepared for a demonstration in geriatric roadsmanship. The most persistent rumor about Porter said he didn’t have a driver’s license, had in fact never learned to drive. Rick now made his mind a blank page on the subject of Wendell Porter.
“Enid says you worked for the Times,” Porter said. “I used to have friends there. Maybe we know some of the same people.”
“I doubt it, sir. Wendell. I was a leg man for one of the columnists. I didn’t spend much time in the offices.”
“Which columnist did you work for?”
“Jake Greenburg.”
“Jake died, I heard.”
“I heard that too.”
“Drank himself under. Godawful way to go.”
“I heard cancer,” Rick said. “Jake was a teetotaler when I knew him.”
“Guess I have him mixed up with someone else.”
As Porter worked the clutch and brake, Rick noticed his expensive oxblood loafers were scuffed and run down slightly at the heels. Everything about the man’s carefully rumpled aspect made him think of those tables people bought brand new in department stores and clobbered with chains and hammers to make them look like something from a junk shop.
“I haven’t been very subtle, have I?” Porter said then. “I’m sorry if I sound like I’m giving you the third degree. You’re older than the average Porter Group volunteer and I’m a little paranoid. I’m pretty sure the automobile people have detectives on me.”
“I’m thirty.”
“I’d have thought older. Not that you look it; you could pass for twenty or less. It’s more of an attitude thing. Maybe it’s just my gray hairs showing. Young people are so much more mature than they were when I was one of them.”
“A lot of people think they’re slipping. Smashing the windows of recruitment centers and all.”
“At least they give a damn about something. If they didn’t, I’d be a group of one.” They wound up the ramp of the northbound Chrysler, past Receiving Hospital and a billboard advertising the 1966 Rambler.
“Small as it is, the group makes a lot of noise,” Rick said. “We employ professional lobbyists in Washington, and my wife handles the legal side through her firm. But dedicated young people like Enid and Lee and Pammie supply the blood. With a few exceptions they’re not around long, but while they’re here, look out.”
“Burnout factor that high?”
“Youth wants change now and when it doesn’t come right away they lose interest. Staffing’s my biggest headache, that and trying to sprinkle salt on the tails of certain politicians.”
“Enid one of the exceptions?”
Porter throttled around two trucks hauling separate halves of a mobile home up the slow lane. “Enid’s special. I honestly don’t know what PG would have done without her these past three years.”
“That’s a long time between paychecks.”
“Enid needs a paycheck like I need a Swiss bank account. Her father owned the land that Southfield stands on today.”
“What made her choose PG?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“She doesn’t care much for me.”
“She can be distant sometimes. Don’t let it throw you.”
Detroit leveled out into the neighborhoods, rows of low houses gridded between broad flat streets laid out like perpendicular raceways, a motorists’ town. In Hamtramck they got off on Caniff, passed shops and bakeries bearing signs with Ukrainian and Polish names, and took Mound Road straight up through the enormous suburb of Warren. North of Twelve Mile Road the General Motors Technical Center sprawled for blocks, looking like a well-tended college campus. Its brick buildings housed the automotive Goliath’s Engineering, Research, Styling, and Manufacturing departments.
“Indian country,” Porter mused. “Whenever I drive past the place I think I know how a northern Negro must feel passing through Mississippi. I’m half surprised a mob of thirty-year men doesn’t block the road and pull me out of the car and string me up for treason. I worked for GM two years.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It was on the line, in the Westland assembly plant. I hung doors on Chevies. The job saw me through two years at the University of Michigan.”
“I thought you were from back East.”
“I was born and raised in Boston. Then my father moved the family out to Ypsilanti and invested everything he owned in Tucker.”
“Um.”
“I was studying law at the U of M. When Tucker went belly up it was either drop out of school or finance my own education. If it weren’t for GM and a Harvard scholarship I’d probably be checking cars in and out of a parking lot somewhere. On the other hand, if it weren’t for GM, Tucker wouldn’t have been hounded out of the automobile business in the first place. You could say I had an ambivalent youth.”
“So that’s what turned you against them?”
“Personal vengeance is expensive and not all that satisfying. My father believed in Pres Tucker. So did I. He cared about the people who would ride in his cars. Seat belts, disk brakes all around, padded dash, pop-out windshield. I saw one of his cars roll over on the test track. The driver walked away without a scratch.”
“He was probably wearing a helmet.”
“A helmet doesn’t protect your arms and legs and spine. It won’t do you much good when you catapult through a fixed windshield because there’s nothing to stop you when the car stops suddenly.”
Rick said nothing. He’d already alienated one important source by speaking his mind.
“Not everyone can look back at a specific incident in his life and identify it as the turning point,” Porter said. “Watching that test driver climb out of that car with nothing worse than a bad case of nerves was mine. Until then I’d been planning to go into corporate law. I switched to civil liability. I’m not the lawyer Caroline is, but I won two important cases of negligence against dealerships after their faulty servicing led to accidents. That was good enough for a while. Then it occurred to me that I could be a lot more effective by preventing the accidents from happening in the first place. That’s when I became a lobbyist.”
“Tough decision. Economically speaking.”
“Not so tough. I gave up my shot at real money when I turned my back on corporate. Also I had the good fortune to marry well. The pro-industry press has made a lot of that, but when I met Caroline she was fresh out of law school with an office over a credit orthodontist’s and one client.”
“You?”
Porter nodded. He’d stopped to let a redhead in a sundress walk her dog across the street. “I won’t quote Lincoln at you on the subject of lawyers who represent themselves. She’s built a large and successful firm on her efforts on behalf of the Porter Group and the Porter Group’s raked in an impressive number of national headlines over her victories in court.”
“Sounds like the perfect union.”
“Yes, it does.” Porter was silent after that. Rick registered the silence and stored it away.
“Sounds like you’re having trouble in Washington, though.”
“It’s hard to organize a senate subcommittee on auto safety when the senator’s always busy somewhere else. The automotive industry employs a lot of people, and a lot of them vote. I suppose it’s naive to expect a politician not to act like a politician, but I can’t get it through their heads that victims of fatal accidents can’t vote.”
“Maybe if you didn’t harp so much on seat belts. They’re kind of radical compared to the other things, disk brakes and padded dashes.”
“Brakes stop cars, not people. And if you have a seat belt you don’t need a padded dash.”
“I can’t help thinking about all those people you hear about who survive terrible accidents because they’re thrown clear.”
“You hear about them because it almost never happens. Most injuries occur after the initial impact, when the victims are still bouncing.” Porter glanced sidelong at his passenger. “I can tell you’re not convinced.”
They were out in the country now, rolling down a straight two-lane blacktop with barns and fields on both sides. Rick wondered how far they were going and what they’d find when they got there.
“There’s no arguing with statistics,” he said. “We’ve gotten along for almost seventy years without strapping ourselves to our cars. What’s next, training wheels?”
“My friend, you’d be right at home with those officers who denied parachutes to our flyers in World War One because they thought having them would inhibit their courage in combat. Changing your mind will be my good deed for today.”
Rick didn’t like the sound of that.