THE BUILDING WAS LESS than five years old, a yellow brick construction designed to continue the pleasing horizontal lines of Grosse Pointe’s tiny select business district, and sheltered, along with Caroline Porter Associates, a number of doctors’ offices and accounting corporations whose names were embossed on the directory in the glass-and-chromium lobby. The elevator doors sliced open on the third floor directly across from a glass wall with the legal firm’s name lettered in gold on the door. When Enid opened and held it for Rick and his burden of files, conditioned air touched his face like spring mist.
A receptionist behind a white desk with thin steel legs repeated their names over a Princess telephone and asked them to have a seat. Rick wondered if her beehive hairstyle violated the city’s ordinance against skyscrapers.
He deposited the files on a glass coffee table with copies of the Saturday Evening Post fanned across its top and wandered around the reception area while Enid made herself comfortable on the tweed sofa. The walls were paneled in blond wood and decorated with Picasso prints in steel frames; the Blue Period, to match the carpet. In a little while they were joined by a man Rick’s age in blue worsted and glasses with tortoiseshell frames. “How are you, Enid?”
“Busy, as always.” She took his hand and rose. “Rick Amery, Ronald Engler. Ronald is Mrs. Porter’s assistant.”
Rick touched a dry hand without calluses. He wanted to ask Engler if a new carpet meant a change of wardrobe, but chose an inanity instead. The neutral-colored eyes behind the glasses let him go when the hand did and passed to the files. “Is that the stuff? How did Wendell get all that into three hundred and sixty pages?”
“This is only the portion Caroline asked about,” Enid said. “The rest would fill this floor.”
“Where does he get his ideas?”
“From the obituaries.”
Rick grinned.
“Caroline said to show you right in.” Engler had edited out the exchange.
Rick picked up the files and he and Enid followed the assistant down a silent hallway lined with framed certificates of merit from a dozen community organizations, some of whose names were familiar to Rick. At the end Engler tapped lightly on a door made of the same pale wood as the paneling and opened it without waiting for an answer. They walked in past him.
“Thank you, Ronald.”
It was a dismissal. Engler backed out, drawing the door shut. The office, a corner room, was roughly the size of the ground floor plan at PG, furnished with antiques and an Oriental rug on a parquet floor, and looked more like a Victorian parlor than a place of business. Windows in adjacent walls, hung with ivory satin drapes tied like funeral bunting, looked out on the business section and a wedge of Lake St. Clair, flaring like bright metal under the climbing sun. The walls were beige and uncluttered, bearing only a framed diploma from the University of Michigan and an eight-by-ten photograph of Caroline Porter shaking hands with John F. Kennedy.
The woman herself was standing behind a maple table arranged with desk items, smiling the smile she had smiled for JFK, showing only a thin line of white teeth between bright red lips. Her blond hair was up in its customary Princess Grace style and she was wearing a gold bolero jacket with blue embroidery over a pale silk blouse with a frothy jabot at her throat. Her skirt was brown broadcloth, snug but not tight. Rick saw no jewelry, not even a wedding band.
“Enid, thank you for coming. I know what your schedule is like.”
The voice, a contralto, held the same cordial tone she had used to get rid of her assistant. The Cosmopolitan article Rick had read had claimed that when addressing the bench she could go from a throaty purr to the crack of a steel whip instantly.
“Anything to keep Wendell out of court,” Enid said. “When he’s there he’s not helping the Porter Group.” She introduced Rick.
A slender hand fluttered in his and was gone. He’d been expecting a firm, manly grip and it caught him off guard; which he supposed was the intention. Gray eyes made contact with a static crackle. “You don’t look like the fetch-and-carry type.” She inclined her head a fraction of an inch toward the stack of accordion files, which he had deposited on a low tea table in a conversation area consisting of a settee and matching straight chair and rocker, upholstered in petit-point.
Enid said, “Rick’s new. He plans to be an expert by the end of the week. Is it all right if he stays?”
The red lips tightened almost imperceptibly. There were deep commas at the corners that could no longer be passed off as dimples. “If he doesn’t mind being bored. It’s not like Perry Mason.”
“You’re an improvement over Raymond Burr,” he said. “I hope that’s not out of line.”
“Hardly. In any case I’m used to it. There weren’t many women in my class in law school, and I’ve heard all the jokes about briefs. Would anyone like tea or coffee before we get started?”
Rick and Enid declined and they went over to the conversation area. Rick waited until the women were seated, then took the rocking chair. Enid, on the settee, reached for the top file on the stack.
“I’ll look at the material later,” Caroline said. “I just need to ask a few questions about your methods of obtaining information.” In the straight chair, she crossed her legs, exposing a trim calf and ankle encased in nylon. Rick could see his reflection in the toe of her blue pump.
Enid said, “Most of our sources are named in the book. I can’t discuss the ones that aren’t. That was a condition of the information.”
“The attorney-client privilege applies. I need those names.”
“Why?”
“General Motors’ attorneys are charging libel. That’s the one area in American jurisprudence where the accused is required to prove his innocence; in other words, that the claims Wendell made in the book are true. I’ll need affidavits.”
“That would mean exposing them in open court. Some of them work for GM. They’d lose their jobs.”
“It may not come to that. The affidavits would be kept under lock and key and introduced only if every other strategy fails.”
“Just giving you the names would be a violation of the promise of anonymity. Even if you got the affidavits, which I doubt you could, we might win acquittal at the expense of never developing another source. PG would be crippled. Which is what GM wants. They couldn’t care less who comes out ahead in court.”
“We aren’t being sued for four million dollars. Wendell is. Perhaps if you were named in the suit you wouldn’t be quite so protective of others.” The whip cracked.
Enid crossed her legs. “Why don’t you ask Wendell?”
“I did. He referred me to you. You did enough of the research to qualify for a shared byline; even he doesn’t know the names of all your contacts.”
“I’m sorry.”
The two women watched each other across a silence. Rick wondered what was in it besides secret sources.
Caroline pointed a blue toe at the files. “I assume there are documents in here to support the allegations Wendell made on the pages I quoted to you. Are they originals?”
“Some are. Most we had photocopied. GM would have missed them if we kept them all.”
“Were they stolen?”
“Well, nobody sneaked into the General Motors Building at midnight with a flashlight and a crowbar, but technically—yes, they were smuggled out by people without authority to remove them from the building.”
“Evidence obtained by illegal means is tainted.”
“Only if it was obtained by the police. Consumer groups enjoy certain liberties not available to law enforcement.”
“I’m talking about how it will look in court,” Caroline said. “A lot depends on which judge we draw. Some of them haven’t practiced in a long time and know less about the law than our Perry Mason fan here.” She measured him a small amount of her JFK smile; then it went away. “I wish Wendell had let me read the book before it went to press. I could have saved PG a fortune in legal fees.”
“By castrating the book?” Enid’s tone was mild.
“Castration is a poor choice of terms between us, isn’t it?” Caroline consulted a yellow legal tablet. “On eleven May nineteen sixty-four you conducted a telephone interview with an unnamed source connected with General Motors. The subject was the ventilating system on the Corvair. Did you tape the interview?”
Rick didn’t hear Enid’s answer. Her expression hadn’t changed after the castration comment, but an arc of raw hostility had passed between the two women and he had felt it, as if he’d touched a spark plug wire. In its wake he knew a blissful warmth spreading through him, an old familiar sensation, and he remembered what it was he had liked—needed—about going undercover. A suspicion confirmed was like a sexual release.
There were no more such confrontations, however, and his attention drifted. He found himself wondering what Caroline Porter would be like in bed. His experience of these gimlet-eyed career women had taught him that the tailored jackets and below-the-knee skirts usually concealed the sort of underwear you saw in stag films, mainly the S/M kind; before the night was through their lacquered nails had skin and blood under them. Maybe that was what had sent Porter looking. From there Rick thought about how Enid would be in comparison, and in that pleasant frame of mind he waited out the end of the meeting.
“I’ll have more questions when I get into the material.” Caroline laid aside the legal tablet and stood. “Thanks again for making the time.”
Enid rose. The two smiled at each other. Rick got up. This time Caroline’s hand lingered a moment before sliding away. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Amery. I’m sorry you had to come on when everything’s standing on end.”
“I get the impression that’s the normal state,” he said. “It was a pleasure, Mrs. Porter.”
“Caroline.”
They were halfway back to the office before Enid spoke. “Now that you’ve met her, what do you think?”
Rick slowed down to let an empty paper sack blow across the street in front of the Camaro. The wind had come up and a pepper of drops appeared on the windshield, scouting a summer storm. “I think Lee’s got a lot to learn about women. She belongs in the Arctic like a chili pepper.”
“Lee’s only seen her in passing. She almost never comes to the office.” She watched the grainy scenery.
“So she’s not one of Wendell’s Wonders. A gun doesn’t care if it’s being pointed by a cop or a crook. It just does its job.”
“Cops and crooks don’t marry their guns.”
He decided not to press it. He switched on the radio in the middle of the Batman TV theme, punched up another station in a hurry. WJR News was in progress.
“… as developments continue to unfold in the Detroit Police Department’s ongoing investigation of the so-called ‘Christmas list.’ On the labor front, Albert Brock, national president of the American Steelhaulers Association, announced his endorsement today of former Michigan Governor G. Mennen ‘Soapy’ Williams for the Democratic nomination for United States Senator. Citing what he called Detroit Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh’s ‘disgraceful labor record’ …”
A blue-and-white Tactical Mobile Unit powered past them, its siren drowning out the announcer, before Rick could pull over to make room. It swung onto Cadieux, lights wobbling. Rick turned off the radio. “Politicians. How’s Wendell getting on with Washington?”
“Like lead and feathers,” Enid said. “I don’t suppose you have President Johnson’s home number.”
“Sorry. What he ought to do is con a congressman onto the Farm, give him a ride on the test track.”
“He’s not ready to go public with the Farm. He wants to be sure of his results before the local authorities find out about it and shut it down for violation of some ordinance or other. A lot of communities in the area depend on General Motors for jobs. But it’s not a bad idea. Don’t tell me you’re converted.” She was looking at him now.
“I don’t like seeing some poor schnook getting picked on. Big company like that has better things to do than turn loose its lawyers”—he’d almost said spies—“on a guy just because he wrote a book. That’s not supposed to be what this country is about.”
“A lot of people are saying that kind of thing these days. I think the kids are right about as often as I feel like spanking them. Maybe we ought to stage a sit-in at the Federal Building, get the TV stations involved.”
Rick said, “I’ve got a better idea.”