“SENATOR HART CALLED JUST before quitting time,” Enid said. “I made an appointment for him to see Wendell Friday. At PG. That’s the first time a politician has offered to come to him.”
“What’s that make, three?” Rick asked.
“Four, with Romney. That was just a courtesy call, so he can tell the press he’s been in touch when they ask. But he’s a Republican governor, and he was president of American Motors. He must have been swallowing bile the whole time.”
Rick had never seen her so animated. They had had dinner at the Grecian Gardens in Greektown, a tough place to get a reservation since the notoriety of the Christmas list, but the only restaurant in town where Rick could be certain they wouldn’t encounter any of his old police acquaintances; then gone to the Lafayette Bar to hear the Greek band. They had ouzo brought to their corner table, where Rick liked to watch the clear anise-flavored liquer cloud up when water was added. He was surprised when Enid drank hers straight. Ouzo was slightly less treacherous than the Viet Cong.
Orange light from the candle in the cut glass on the table crawled over her interesting bone structure as she watched the band getting ready for the next set. She had changed at the office into a rubycolored silk dress with a V-shaped neckline that didn’t plunge as far as the blouse she’d worn earlier, but that for some reason Rick found sexier. He poured more water into his drink. “What did Wendell say?”
“He was still in his meeting last time I called. I left a message for him to call me at my place after eleven.” She looked at the thin gold watch on her wrist. “I assume we want to watch that special report on the news.”
“I was going to ask your TV set or mine.”
She let that slide. “Just because I didn’t welch on our bet doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you for throwing dice with PG’s future. You’ve only been with us a couple of weeks. What do you know about the years of work that made your little parade worth more than three lines in the police column?”
“My high school algebra teacher defined ‘work’ as an act of accomplishment,” he said after a moment. “If nothing is accomplished, what you’ve been doing isn’t work. All I did was kick the chocks out. You built the wheels.”
“Everything you do and say comes down to wheels. I know the real reason you joined Wendell’s Wonders.”
He made his face expressionless. “I’m listening.”
“You wanted a job where you could talk about cars all day without being told you’re boring. You couldn’t care less about politics. You haven’t discussed them once since I’ve known you, but I could write a book about cars just from what you’ve told me.”
“Son of Hell On Wheels?” His grin was genuine, fueled by relief.
“I went out once with a young man who loved old movies,” she said. “The older the better. They were his whole life: Citizen Kane, The Birth of a Nation, Stagecoach—you name the picture, if it was more than twenty years old he could replay it scene by scene and recite the credits down to who catered the wrap party. It turned out his parents fought all the time when he was growing up and the only theaters he could afford to hide out in were the revival houses. The night before the morning his parents decided to file for divorce he saw Anthony Adverse and War and Peace back to back. What were you hiding from?”
“No hiding. My father worked at Dodge Main. When he had enough saved up to buy a new Dodge on his employee discount he gave me his old Model A to fool around with. I was thirteen, and what I didn’t know about cars would fill Cobo Hall. By the time I got that piece of junk back on the road and sounding like anything but a bucket of nails falling downstairs I qualified for master mechanic.”
“Sounds like hell.”
“To you maybe. I was in heaven the whole time. First day I took it out was the best day of my life. If it wasn’t for gas rationing I’d have driven clear to Chicago.”
The band started up, the manic strings banishing conversation. Enid looked at her watch again and jerked her head toward the door. He paid up and they left.
Above the lights of Greektown, the night was a narrow black shaft with stars punched out of it. A young man with a tattered beard and hair to his shoulders passed them, humming “Summer in the City.”
Enid said, “There wasn’t any gas rationing in nineteen forty-nine.”
“Sorry?”
“I worked it out. If you’re thirty now like you wrote on your application, you were thirteen in nineteen forty-nine. The war ended in forty-five.”
“Whoops.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“You sold yourself short. You could’ve gotten away with twenty. On your looks, anyway. I suspected for some time you were older than you said. Why’d you lie?”
He told the truth. “I thought Wendell would be more likely to take on a kid.”
“Thirty’s no kid.”
“It is from this side.”
They stopped at the Camaro. “We don’t have time to drive to the office and pick up my Mercedes,” she said. “Would you come by and give me a lift in the morning?”
“I still don’t have seat belts.” He unlocked and opened the door on the passenger’s side.
She climbed in, and this time he got to see her legs. “You can’t be a fanatic all the time.”
The house was in Highland Park, a brick colonial on a half acre with a car port and cedars in the yard. He parked in the port and she let them in the side door. They walked past an automatic washer and dryer and up a step into a kitchen full of stainless-steel appliances. It reminded him of the kitchen in a new restaurant.
“Was this your parents’ home?”
“Yes. We had a cook but I let her go; I don’t entertain much. This room always makes me feel guilty. I never learned to cook. I make a great pot of coffee, but you know that. Shall I?”
He said yes and leaned on a counter while she charged an electric percolator. “What’s it like to grow up rich?”
“I don’t have anything to compare it to. My parents argued about money, and I’m told that’s universal. By the time I knew we were wealthy it was too late to take on airs.”
“Any sisters or brothers?”
“None. You?”
“One sister. She left home before I got to know her. She’s a grandmother now. I guess that makes me a great-uncle, but I haven’t seen her since our father’s funeral. Her husband drives a Rambler.”
“Do you judge everyone by the car he drives?” She plugged in the percolator.
“Pretty much. I paired you with the Mercedes in the PG parking lot the moment I saw you. The Volkswagen had to be Pammie’s.” He felt a twinge when her name popped out.
“What are you going to do about her?”
“I’m taking suggestions. No one ever had a crush on me before.”
“Talking helps.”
“Believe it or not, I thought of that. She won’t talk back.”
“An unnatural state for Pammie. Keep trying. That’s a small room for the two of you to spend all day in not talking.”
“I’d do better if she had a carburetor and a drive shaft.”
“It’s almost eleven.”
They crossed through a foyer with a curved staircase and antique chairs against the walls and entered a parlor with a fireplace, chairs of lesser vintage but more comfortable design, and a color television in a cabinet with doors that swung to, concealing the screen. Enid opened the doors and turned on Channel 4. Credits scrolled over a freeze-frame of Bill Cosby and Robert Culp.
The fireplace mantel bristled with family photographs in gold frames. In one, a grave little girl wearing a winter coat and knitted tam with her hands hidden in a white fur muff posed between a couple in their late twenties outfitted for winter. A church building reared behind them.
“Blessed Sacrament.” Enid saw him looking. “Easter, nineteen forty-six. I’ve never known it to fall on a warm day in Michigan.”
“You don’t look happy.”
“I wanted to be Jewish like my Uncle Hans. He took the picture. My father converted to Catholicism when he married my mother and Hans was the only one on his side of the family who’d have anything to do with us after that. He was my favorite person in the whole world. That’s him on the end of the mantel.”
It was a portrait in an oval frame of a Satanic-featured young man in a jacket and glistening tie. He had a cocky smile and Enid’s dark coloring. “Was he killed in an accident too?”
“Somebody shot him to death in his home in nineteen fifty. They never convicted anybody, but the police thought it was one of his old partners who was paroled from Jackson earlier that year. Uncle Hans was a bootlegger,” she said. “He and my father used the money to buy real estate during the Depression.”
“I wondered where the capital came from.”
She adjusted the color on the set during a Chesterfield commercial. “I never knew anything about it until my uncle was killed and reporters started hanging around. He and my father didn’t talk like the Bowery Boys or carry violin cases. Anyway, maybe that’s part of why I use my money and time in support of a good cause like Wendell’s. If my parents weren’t killed in an accident I suppose I’d be working for the March of Dimes.”
They sat through a Vietnam report, an anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC, and a gushy announcement that Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow were engaged to be married, before the parade story came on, virtually unchanged from the noon presentation. When it was over, Ven Marshall scowled at the camera and said, “Who is Wendell Porter? A look at the career of the self-described consumer advocate after these messages.” Then a pump jockey in immaculate coveralls and a bow tie offered to put a tiger in their tank.
Enid left the room and came back carrying the percolator, two cups, and containers of cream and sugar on a flat tray. Rick moved some magazines so she could set the tray on the coffee table. Pouring, she said, “We seem to have upstaged the political fundraiser.”
“One drunken politician looks pretty much like all the rest.” He sat back with his cup. Her coffee could float stove bolts.
The report was a three-minute montage of clips, with an objective voice-over, of Wendell Porter fielding hostile questions at a press conference, being interviewed outside a courtroom during one of his many appearances as the defendant in a lawsuit, lecturing on auto safety at Wayne State, and signing copies of Hell On Wheels for a long line of customers at the downtown Hudson’s, as well as a glimpse of Caroline, eyes unreadable behind rose-tinted glasses, steering her husband through a gang of reporters in a corridor of the City-County Building, trailing a string of “no comments.” It ended with a shot of the closed door of Fred Donner’s office in the General Motors Building and the information that when the board chairman had finally been located and asked for a statement on Wendell Porter’s parade, he had asked. “Who is Wendell Porter?”
“Yes!” Enid jumped up and flipped off the set. She leaned back against it with her hands on the top. “First thing tomorrow I want you to call the station and ask for a print of that film.”
“Even the last part?”
“Especially the last part. We’ll show it everywhere Wendell appears, including before Congress. A month from now, ‘Who is Wendell Porter’ will be as famous as ‘Let them eat cake.’”
“Are we going to behead Fred Donner?”
“Better than that! We’ll castrate the fucker.” She stopped and raised a hand as if to clap it to her mouth. Rick didn’t know if she’d been embarrassed by the profanity or her choice of castrate. Had she detected a reaction to Caroline’s use of the word when they were in her office?
Before he could cover, a telephone rang. She left the room. He poured himself more coffee. Instead of perking him up it had the curious effect of deepening his ouzo buzz. He wondered if it was doing the same for Enid.
She returned. Her eyes were bright. “That was Wendell. He saw the story on Washington television. NBC picked it up. I told him about all the calls. I haven’t heard him this excited since his book went into a fifth printing. He loves my idea of showing the film.”
“Did you remind him whose idea the parade was?”
She hesitated only a second, long enough for him to stand up. They met halfway. Her lips were softer than he’d anticipated, her body harder; she was all supple muscle and nails puncturing his shoulders.
“Right now,” she said when they stopped for oxygen. “You saw the stairs?”
“What’s the hurry? We’ve got all night.”
“If I change my mind we’ll avoid doing something we’ll both regret.”
“Let’s go.”
His memory of her bedroom was cashmere shadows and platinum light and stretched satin where the shadows broke. She smelled of blossoms remembered on the dark side of a hill. On the bed they melded and separated and found the stroke and rode the shadows and the light. It was better than expected, better than shoving the Camaro flat-out down a long straight stretch of smooth road.
“Hello?”
“You motherfucker.”
“Excuse me?”
“You back-stabbing bastard. You piss-poor excuse for an undercover.”
“Oh, hello, Dan. What time is it?”
“I didn’t call you up to give you the time, you son of a bitch, you candy-assed—”
Rick laid the receiver bottomside-up on the nightstand, switched on the lamp, and looked at the alarm clock. Just past four. He’d left Enid’s house at two and had been asleep forty-five minutes. He sat up and picked up the receiver. Dan Sugar had paused for breath.
“What’s on your mind, Dan?”
“I been trying to get you all night. Where were you?”
“My mother lives in Miami Beach. You sure don’t sound like her.”
“Did you know what Porter was planning to pull today—yesterday? Because if you didn’t, what the hell is Donner paying you for?”
“I’m the one who thought it up.”
The silence on the other end ran long enough for Rick to wonder if they’d been cut off. “Dan?”
“You mother-fucker, you back-stabbing bastard, you—”
“You’re stealing your own stuff, Dan. I’m supposed to be working for Porter, in case you forgot. Would you like it better if I sat around in a trenchcoat and dark glasses, taking notes and snapping pictures with a little Jap camera?”
“Nobody said you had to make GM look like shit. Porter was doing that okay before you came along.”
“If I thought it would work as well as it did I might’ve kept it to myself,” Rick admitted. “Anyway I’m in solid with Wendell. He’d trust me with the key to his wife’s chastity belt.” He felt his second twinge that night. It could have been the ouzo. He had a headache like an icicle pressing against an exposed nerve.
“So what do we get for all this trust?”
Rick told him about Porter’s letter to Enid. He could almost hear Sugar rubbing his hands. But his response was guarded.
“Sure she ain’t burned it by now?”
“If she hung on to it long enough for Pammie to get a peek at it, there’s no reason to think she got rid of it since. It probably means a lot to her. And there might be others.”
“Get it. Get them.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Fuck working on it. Steal it.”
“I’m an undercover, not a second-story man.”
“You’re a thief that got caught with his hand in the glove compartment of a fucking T-bird. Get your hooks on the letters and shoot them to me. We got to get our licks in before this parade shit blows up too big to pop.”
“I’ll get them,” Rick said.
“Good.” Sugar breathed. “Sorry about that thief crack, but you need to remember you ain’t working for the cops now. You don’t get title free and clear to no Z-28s for smelling like lime water and lavender.”
Rick said he’d be in touch and pegged the receiver. He sat up for a while afterward, hoping for his headache to get worse. He’d earned it that night.
At least that.