THE REPORTER SENT BY Channel 4, a former J. L. Hudson’s menswear salesman in his twenties who wore his hair and dressed like JFK, complained that he had landed the parade beat; Rick overheard him telling one of the technicians that he had covered a Negro funeral procession on the Fourth. The cameraman, a white-haired Wallace Beery type in a Hawaiian shirt and baggy-kneed slacks, groused that the sun was too bright and the shadows too sharp. The sound engineer, nineteen and covered with acne, snarled that he’d been rushed out of the station with only two reels of tape. They were the bitchiest crew Rick had ever encountered. He paced the sidewalk in the shade of the Fisher Building, ignored by the TV people, checking his watch every few seconds and ducking into the building periodically to call the office from a pay telephone. The security guards had begun to take notice of the young man in jeans and a gray work shirt with the tail out and the sleeves rolled above the elbows.
So far it was a disaster. One truck had vapor-locked on the Lodge Freeway, creating a backup from Howard Street to the Edsel Ford interchange, two others had been stopped by the police for minor traffic infractions and detained because their work orders were incomplete—discount towing services, Rick was learning, didn’t save enough to offset the hassles—and most of the rest were late. He’d hoped to line them up on Third and bring them en masse around the corner and down Grand Boulevard between the erect finger of the Fisher and the accordion construction of the General Motors Building, but the scant four tow trucks he had waiting there, with their crushed and wrinkled burdens suspended by their rear axles from chains, suggested nothing more out of the ordinary than a bad accident. He’d arranged for fifteen, down from the original fifty because of the logistical problems involved. He’d already broken up two fistfights among the drivers, who had been waiting more than an hour in the ninety-degree heat. Now a couple of them were arguing spiritedly about whether Chester Goode or Festus Haggen was the better sidekick for Marshal Dillon on Gunsmoke. Rick had thought the jig was up twenty minutes into the vigil when a police cruiser pulled up behind the last truck and two officers got out, but the older of the partners remembered Rick from his Plainclothes Division days and agreed, no questions asked, to hold off any more inquiries pending the outcome. So far he had proven as good as his word, Rick’s first break that day. But it couldn’t last, and anyway if they didn’t get rolling soon they would miss the Twelve O’clock News and the event would lose a third of its impact.
He wondered what had been so wrong with working part-time at the Kwik-Pro Garage.
The young Kennedy look-alike approached. “What’s the holdup? I’m covering a Democratic fundraiser live at noon.”
“Can you give me a half hour?”
“I can give you twenty minutes. As it is we’re going to have to make a flying run past the station to drop the stuff off for editing.”
“I’ll check on my people.”
Inside the cool marble walls of the Fisher Building, Rick turned his back on the guards and dialed the office. Enid answered.
“Anything?” he asked.
“I just got off the phone with five of the services,” she said. “Four of them haven’t had radio contact since the last call, but that truck on the Lodge is back on its way. Are we paying traffic tickets?”
“Tell them only if most of our players are here in fifteen minutes.” He hung up.
He went out the Third Street exit, past the arcade of glassed-in shops and the parking lot, where the asphalt pulled at the soles of his shoes and the rows of stationary vehicles appeared to be losing their vertical hold in the heat ribboning up from the pavement. Horns were honking in the street. When he got there the tow trucks were lined up along the curb to the corner of Lothrop and beyond, sealing off traffic behind the Fisher; new red GMCs and old green Dodges and blue Fords with the names and telephone numbers of the services lettered neatly on the doors and rusting Internationals with wired-on license plates and fenders missing. Thirteen in all; the idling of their engines sounding like lions snoring in a pit. Each one had in tow a late-model General Motors car in need of body work: Corpus delicti, physical evidence of accidents foreordained the moment they left the plant.
As he walked around to the Grand Boulevard side to tell JFK Junior to get his people ready, Rick caught himself singing under his breath. “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade, with a dee-dee-dee-dum-dum-dum-dee-dee-dum… .”
Enid had a portable Sylvania on her desk with built-in rabbit ears extended almost to the ceiling and she and Pammie and Lee Schenck were gathered in front of it when Rick got back to the office. When he saw the young reporter onscreen he was afraid he’d missed it. Then he recognized the dining room of the Pontchartrain Hotel in the background and realized he was looking at the political fundraiser. A well-known local lobbyist wearing a straw boater with WILLIAMS lettered on the red, white, and blue band had a hand on the reporter’s shoulder and what looked like the start of a three-day drunk.
“Did they show anything yet?”
“Just a teaser.” Enid straightened. She wore a violet silk suit and a floral-print blouse with an open neck that showed cleavage. “It came and went so fast you couldn’t see anything. What are we going to see?”
“This for starters.” He unfolded a citation for holding a parade without a permit and laid it on the desk.
“That’s all? After all that advice I gave you about going limp when they carried you away?” Lee was disappointed.
“Maybe it’ll come in handy some other time. I was too close to it to tell how it went. I about had a heart attack when the lead truck started coughing and sputtering in the middle of Grand. The gas gauge was laying on empty. But it made it through.”
He looked at Pammie, who was absorbed in a commercial. She hadn’t said ten words to Rick since Friday when she’d run out of the office clutching her poems. She had on shorts and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. No more dresses.
“What did the police say?” Enid asked.
“‘Get these buckets of shit out of here.’ Which I did, at about five miles an hour. It looked—”
Lee said, “Cool it.” Speedy Alka-Seltzer’s beaming face had been replaced by Ven Marshall’s stern one. But the next story was a man-on-the-street interview spot gathering local reaction to Monday’s march by Martin Luther King to the Chicago City Hall, where thousands of Negroes and whites had cheered as he taped a list of demands to the front door in emulation of his namesake, Martin Luther.
“There’s a man,” Lee said.
Rick said, “I wonder if he got a permit.”
And then they were looking at the pasture-wide expanse of Grand Boulevard and the angled verticals of the General Motors Building, before which crawled a phalanx of trucks towing the carcasses of automobiles sacrificed on the altar of speed before safety. The angle of the shot made the procession appear to stretch on forever.
“Corvairs, Chevelles, Impalas, Toronados, Furies, Coupe de Villes,” intoned the young reporter’s voice from off-camera, deeper and more authoritative than it had sounded in person. “The top of the GM line, none of them more than a year old and all of them, according to a spokesman for the Porter Group who asked to remain anonymous, badly damaged in accidents that could have been prevented on the assembly line. Based on statistics gathered by the controversial organization of consumer advocates, each of the fifteen demolished cars in the parade represents sixteen hundred accidents annually.…”
“Where’d you get those figures?” Enid asked.
“Same place he got the other two cars,” Rick said. “Thirteen’s unlucky, so I included the no-shows. These TV people can’t count.”
“… is not known whether General Motors Chairman Fred Donner, who was unavailable for comment, was in his office at the time of the demonstration,” finished the reporter, now onscreen. “In front of GM World Headquarters, this is Robert Wicks, reporting for Channel Four News.”
The anchorman came back on. “Who is Wendell Porter? Tonight at eleven, Channel Four examines the career of this modern-day David locked in a struggle with an industrial Goliath.”
Even Enid cheered.
Lee disappeared into the kitchen and came back a minute later carrying a champagne bottle and four water glasses tucked in the crooks of his arms. “This has been in the fridge since Hell On Wheels went bestseller.” He set the glasses down on the desk. “He had to go to Washington and we called off the party. It’s Establishment, but what the hell.”
They cheered again when he freed the cork. It dented the plaster in a corner of the ceiling and landed on the file cabinet. “Only a splash for you, Pammie,” he said, wetting the bottom of the fourth glass. “You’re a minor.”
“Guess I always will be.” Her eyes made brief contact with Rick’s. Then she snatched up the glass.
Lee raised his. “Confusion to the enemy.”
They drank. Rick looked at Enid. “To dinner.”
“You forgot the terms,” she said. “One favorable comment, in the form of a telephone call or a telegram, from someone in authority. That hasn’t happened.”
The telephone rang.