“You’ve got the wrong man,” I said. The chief smiled. He wore his hexagonal blue cap now with the raised gold embroidery on the peak. He wore his tunic. He was sitting here for revelation, he had brought in a stenographer, more cops, and an older man in plain clothes.
I said, “The F. W. Bennett Company employs an industrial espionage agency to find out what’s going on in their plants. The name of the agency is Crapo Industrial Services. Maybe you don’t know this but I think you do. They put spies on the line and if possible in the unions themselves.”
“Let’s not waste time,” the chief said.
“Red James was one of these spies. He came here two, three years ago just as the union began to organize the men. He got to be an officer of the local. He was secretary, he took minutes, he kept records, he made reports to his employer Crapo Industrial Services.”
The chief turned to the stenographer, a gray-haired woman with a mole on her chin. She closed her book. I might be setting up to finger the union but I was talking funny. True! I had found a voice to give authority to the claim I was making—without knowing what that claim would be, I had found the voice for it, I listened myself to the performance as it went on. These fucking rubes!
“The union scheduled a strike just after the new year,” I said. “The idea, see, was that if the trim line was shut down, eventually every other Bennett plant would have to shut down too because Number Six makes all the trim. So it was a big strategy of theirs and Red reported this. Right away there are layoffs, half the machines are dismantled and shipped to another plant, and the strike is up the creek.”
“And that’s why the union goons killed him,” the chief said, looking at the plain-clothes man.
“But it wasn’t them,” I said. “It looked like it should be, I myself thought for a moment it was, let me tell you, Chief, you don’t look for complications when your head’s getting beat in. Does anyone have a Lucky?”
Where was this coming from? I had learned the basics from my dead friend Lyle James. But the art of it from Mr. Penfield, yes, the hero of his own narration with life and sun and stars and universe concentrically disposed on the locus of his tongue—pure Penfield.
“I’ll try to make this as clear as I can,” I said, taking a deep drag on my cigarette and nodding thanks to the cop with a match. “I know by sight every officeholder in the local, and every national big shot who’s been in town since October. I know by sight most of the members—and this will surprise you but there aren’t that many, considering the size of the work force at Number Six. But there are people who wear the same clothes and talk the same talk who don’t work on the line and never will. And they are the ones who jumped us.”
The police chief had risen. “You better know what you’re doing, son.”
“I made them for a traveling band, one of Crapo’s industrial services,” I said. “And that’s who they were. If you really want Red James’s killers, it’s very simple. Speak to Mr. Thomas Crapo, president. You can reach him in the phone book—unless he’s on his honeymoon.”
The man in plain clothes stepped forward. It was clear to me now he was not in the department at all. He was dressed in a pin-stripe suit with a vest and a high collar and a stickpin in his tie. He had thin graying hair, and had the prim mouth of a town elder or business executive. To this day I don’t know who he was—a manager of Number Six, a town councilman, but anyway, not a cop. I knew I could work him.
“What is it you’re trying to say, young man?”
“I’ll spell it out for you, sir. The agency murdered its own operative.”
“That’s a most serious charge.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “It certainly is. But we’re in a war, we’re talking about a war here, and anything’s possible. Once the company moved the machines, Red’s days were numbered. The union found him out. That made him no longer of any use to Crapo, in fact he was worse than no use, he was a real danger.”
“What?”
“He was an angry man. They’d left him to the dogs. He knew probably as much about Crapo as he knew about the local. He wasn’t just your average fink who’s been hooked for a few dollars and doesn’t even know what he’s doing. Red was a professional, an industrial detective, and he worked for Crapo in steel, he worked in coal, he’d done a lot of jobs and this particular assignment was very crucial and only the most experienced man could be trusted with it.”
The police chief shook his head. He motioned to the stenographer to leave the room. He stood quite still and watched her close the door behind her. He turned to me he understood the reckless suicidal thing I was doing.
“But as I say, if you read your history of the trenches, the front lines at Belleau Wood, the Argonne, and so on, you find more than once the practice of sending out the patrol either to rescue or to kill their own man who has been captured—so that he doesn’t give them away. War is war, other lives are at stake and war is war.”
“I was with the Marines at Belleau Wood,” the man in the business suit said. “I know of no such story.”
“It was the British who did it,” I said quickly. “I disremember the place and time, but it wasn’t the Americans, it was the British and the French, and of course the Huns they did that all the time. But you don’t have to believe it. Look at the chief here. First thing he thinks, a Crapo man is killed, it’s the union who killed him. Why not, who would think different! And if he can make that case, if Crapo can trick him into making it, look what he’s accomplished. He’s set the union back twenty years. They’re no union anymore, they’re hoods and killers, nobody wants them, no working stiff wants comrades like that, not even Roosevelt wants that. Why, that in itself is enough to make it worthwhile—just to get the union defending itself from charges, just putting suspicion in people’s minds—that’s worth one op’s life, I can tell you.”
“All right, son,” the chief said, coming around to the front of the desk.
“I know my rights,” I said. “You are all witnesses. I’m telling you the truth as I know it, it’s out now, it’s out in this room and will be on every wire service in the country if you got any ideas of changing my testimony.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” said the man in the business suit.
“This boy lies,” the chief said. “He lied before and he’s lying now. He’s a punk from New Jersey who we found with a gun and the widow’s insurance money in his kick. He’s making this all up.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I made up Tommy Crapo and I made up Crapo Industrial Services, didn’t I? Or did I get it from the newspaper? That must be it, they must advertise in the newspaper. I can give you Red James’ op number, the one he put on his reports, but that’ll be made up too. I can give you the Illinois plate number of a cream-colored La Salle coupe with white sidewalls, but that’s made up too. It’s all made up. Buster is made up too, he doesn’t exist.”
“Who is Buster?”
“Buster who got Mrs. James to waive her rights for two hundred and fifty Industrial Services’ dollars. Oh listen, mister, why doesn’t anyone ask the right questions around here? Look at this, a roomful of ace detectives and not one of them thinks to ask how I know so much, how I knew Lyle James, how I got to be his friend, what I’m doing in this lousy town. Is it an accident? Do you think I like going around getting my arm broken and stitches taken in my face? Do you think I do this for laughs?”
An amazing current, a manic surge, I couldn’t stop talking, listen Clara, listen! “I wonder at the human IQ when professionals cannot see through disguises. But if I was wearing a regular suit like this gentleman, if I was wearing my own suit and tie and my face was washed and my hair combed, then you would listen, oh yes. And if I told you Lyle Red James was not just an operative for Crapo but a double operative, that he really worked for the union, that they made him not two weeks after he came to this town, because you know, don’t you, he was not much good, he was a fool, a hillbilly, a rube, I mean they saw him comin
g! And they made him, and showed him how if he kept working and nobody the wiser, he’d get not only his pay envelope from Bennett and not only his salary from Crapo but his payoff from the union’s cash box! Why, this strike at Number Six was a decoy! They never intended to strike Jacksontown, that was to send the company on a wild-goose chase shipping its damn machines every which way. Oh yes, gentlemen, when that strike comes, and it is coming, the birds will be singing in Jacksontown, it will be a peaceful day at Number Six and you won’t know a thing till you hear it on the radio.”
“What’s this?” the businessman said. “What strike? Where?”
“Or maybe that isn’t a good enough reason for taking care of Lyle Red James, that he was a dirty double-crossing Benedict Arnold.”
It was an amazing discovery, the uses of my ignorance, a kind of industrial manufacture of my own. And the more it went on, the more I believed it, taking this fact and that possibility and assembling them, then sending the results down the line a bit and adding another fact and dropping an idea on the whole thing and sending it on a bit for another operation, another bolt to the construction, my own factory of lies, driven by rage, Paterson Autobody doing its day’s work. I was going to make it! This was survival at its secret source, and no amount of time on the road or sentimental education could have brought me to it if the suicidal boom of my stunned heart didn’t threaten my extinction.
“What strike, how do you know these things!” The businessman was beside himself. “Who is this fellow?” he said. “Damn it all, I want the truth. I want it now.”
The police chief went back behind his desk and sat down. He looked at me, fingered the corners of his mouth. He lifted his hat and ran his fingers through his hair and put his hat back on.
“You don’t like Crapo very much, do you?”
“We fancy the same girl,” I said.
“And that’s why you’re fingering him—or trying to?”
“No more than he’s done to me, Chief,” I said. “But I got a better reason: I don’t condone killing and neither does Mr. Bennett.”
“Mr. who Bennett?” he said, frowning terribly.
“Mr. F. W. Bennett of Bennett Autobody. Is there any other?”
Here the man in the suit found a chair near the wall and sat down and glared at me.
“I’m a special confidential operative,” I said. “I was sent here by Mr. F. W. Bennett personally to check on the Crapo organization. Their work has been falling off lately. Mr. Bennett takes nothing for granted, especially not the loyalty of gangsters. I worked into the confidence of Crapo’s chief man in Number Six, Lyle James. Mr. Bennett himself arranged for the next door to be available. He thought I had a better disguise to be married and so I brought with me a lady”—here I faltered—“I happened to be serious about. This is the unofficial part, Chief, and I expect every man in this room to keep quiet about this part. I met this lady when she was with Mr. Crapo and we took to each other. We couldn’t help it. And, well, he is not a man to forgive, as you can see by my condition and the circumstance of my being here before you.”
And now there was silence in the room.
“You are awful young to be what you say,” said the police chief. He turned to the others. “It’s too crazy. Jacksontown don’t need stuff like this. There are so many holes in this story it’s like a punchboard. Why should Mr. Bennett need to do these things, you tell me? And if he did them, why would he find some kid like this not old enough to wipe the snot from his nose? No, I’m sorry, Mr. Paterson,” he said, “you’re smart enough to throw the names around, but you were a punk when we pulled you in and as far as I’m concerned you’re still a punk.”
“My name isn’t Paterson,” I said. I smiled and looked at the man in the suit and vest. “It’s easy enough to check,” I said. “In my billfold on a piece of paper is the phone number of Mr. Bennett’s residence at Loon Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. You may not know about that place, it’s his hideaway. Call him for me. I get a phone call of my choosing anyway, isn’t that the law? That’s who I choose to call. Tell him also I’m sorry about the Mercedes. It may be on the lot of Buckeye State Used Cars in Dayton, Ohio. But it may not. Tell him I’m very sorry.”
I thought in the silence that ensued they could hear my heart beating its way back to survival.
“Yes, sir,” the chief said, “and who should we say is calling?”
One of the men laughed. I was livid with rage. Oh Penfield. Oh my soul. I could barely get the words out. “You stupid son of a bitch,” I said to the chief. “Tell Mr. Bennett it’s his son calling. Tell him it’s his son, Joe.”
I don’t remember the names of towns I remember the route, southwest through Kentucky and Arkansas, across northern Oklahoma and the top of the Texas Panhandle and then into New Mexico, a spooncurve that I thought would drop us gently into the great honeypot of lower California.
We drove through small boarded-up towns, we drove down dirt rut roads and through hollows where shacks were terraced on the hill beside the coal tipple. We drove through canyons of slag and stopped to pick up chunks of coal to burn in the stoves of our rented cabins. The road went along railroad tracks, alongside endlessly linked coalcars loaded and still.
We drove over wood-paved iron bridges I remember rivers frozen with swirls of yellow scum I remember whole forests of evergreen glazed in clear ice, shattered sunlight, I had to strap a slitted piece of cardboard over my eyes to see the road.
In January the thaw and false spring in the Southwestern air and when we were stopped at a roadside picnic grove for our lunch we could hear the thunderous cracks and groans of rivers we couldn’t see. But then it froze again, cold and snowless and I remember stretches of brown land treeless swells of hardscrabble imbedded with rotted-out car frames and broken farm tools.
We had problems with the truck blown tires batteries fan belts oilsmoking flipping up the vented hood hot to the touch it was a journey fraught with peril. But you didn’t have to think. It was simple, life was staying warm keeping on the move finding food beds being thrifty. We met people in trucks loaded like ours with furniture and we talked with them and gave the appraising looks of peers, the few chilled humans in motion. But most of the time we had the road to ourselves.
I bought the newspaper wherever we were. In Arkansas and Oklahoma lots of people were robbing banks, it seemed to me important to come into a town looking respectable. People on the go did not have social standing. The eyes of the waitresses in the cafés or the grudging grim men and women who rented rooms. I held the baby like a badge. Cleanliness, propriety, the cheerful honest face, mediation in a cold suspicious land. I made a point of tipping well and flashing my roll, I didn’t like that moment of hesitation before the man cranked up the gas tank or the landlady took the key off the board.
In every state Sandy noticed the Justice of the Peace signs in front of clapboard houses. I told her they were legalized highway robbers who lifted travelers of five- and ten-dollar bills I said they handed out jail sentences to hobos but she knew them from the movies as kindly old men who would open their doors late at night to marry people they had wives in hair curlers and ratty bathrobes who smiled and clasped their hands Sandy and I were not mental intimates.