Though there had been adaptations and changes in outlook since, Farstar had retained its basic concept.
Here and now Adam was circumspect about the words he used because a product policy board meeting was no place to wax overly poetic, and notions about Picasso took second place to pragmatism. Nor could he speak of Rowena, though it had been the thought of her which inspired his own thinking that night. Rowena was still a beautiful memory, and while Adam would never tell Erica about her, he had a conviction that even if he did Erica would understand.
The discussion about the visual look of Farstar ended, though they would return to the subject, Adam knew.
“Where were we?” Hub Hewitson was turning pages of his own agenda.
“Page forty-seven,” Braithwaite prompted.
The chairman nodded. “Let’s get on.”
An hour and a half later, after prolonged and inconclusive discussion, the group vice-president of manufacturing pushed away his papers and leaned forward in his chair. “If someone had come to me with the idea for this car, I’d not only have thrown it out, but I’d have suggested he look for employment elsewhere.”
Momentarily, the auditorium was silent. Adam, at the lectern, waited.
The manufacturing head, Nolan Freidheim, was a grizzled auto industry veteran and the dean of vice-presidents at the table. He had a forbidding, craggy face which seldom smiled, and was noted for his bluntness. Like the company president, he was due for retirement soon, except that Freidheim had less than a month of service remaining and his successor, already named, was here today.
While the others waited, the elderly executive filled his pipe and lit it. Everyone present knew that this was the last product policy meeting he would attend. At length he said, “That’s what I’d have done, and if I had, we’d have lost a good man and probably a good car too.”
He puffed his pipe and put it down. “Maybe that’s why my time’s come, maybe that’s why I’m glad it has. There’s a whole lot that’s happening nowadays I don’t understand; plenty of it I dislike and always will. Lately, though, I’ve found I don’t care as much as I used to. Another thing: Whatever we decide today, while you guys are sweating out Farstar—or whatever name it gets eventually—I’ll be fishing off the Florida Keys. If you’ve time, think of me. You probably won’t have.”
A ripple of laughter ran around the table.
“I’ll leave you with a thought, though,” Nolan Freidheim said. “I was against this car to begin with. In a way I still am; parts of it, including the way it looks, offend my notion of what a car should be. But down in my gut, where plenty of us have made good decisions before now, I’ve a feeling that it’s right, it’s good, it’s timely, it’ll hit the market when it should.” The manufacturing chief stood up, his coffee cup in hand to replenish it. “My gut votes ‘yes.’ I say we should go with Farstar.”
The chairman of the board observed, “Thank you, Nolan. I’ve been feeling that way myself, but you expressed it better than the rest of us.”
The president joined in the assent. So did others who had wavered until now. Minutes later a formal decision was recorded: For Farstar, all lights green!
Adam felt a curious emptiness. An objective had been gained. The next decision was his own.
30
Since the last week of August, Rollie Knight had lived in terror.
The terror began in the janitor’s closet at the assembly plant where Leroy Colfax knifed and killed one of the two vending machine collectors, and where the other collector and the foreman, Parkland, were left wounded and unconscious. It continued during a hasty retreat from the plant by the four conspirators—Big Rufe, Colfax, Daddy-o Lester, and Rollie. They had scaled a high, chain-link fence, helping each other in the darkness, knowing that to leave through any of the plant gates would invite questioning and identification later.
Rollie gashed his hand badly on the fence wire, and Big Rufe fell heavily, limping afterward, but they all made it outside. Then, moving separately and avoiding lighted areas, they met in one of the employee parking lots where Big Rufe had a car. Daddy-o had driven because Big Rufe’s ankle was swelling fast, and paining him. They left the parking lot without using lights, only turning them on when reaching the roadway outside.
Looking back at the plant, everything seemed normal and there were no outward signs of an alarm being raised.
“Man, oh man,” Daddy-o fretted nervously as he drove. “If I ain’t glad to be clear o’ that!”
From the back seat, Big Rufe grunted. “We ain’t clear o’ nuthun’ yet.”
Rollie, in front with Daddy-o and trying to stem the bleeding of his hand with an oily rag, knew that it was true.
Despite his fall, Big Rufe had managed to get one set of chained cash bags over the fence with him. Leroy Colfax had the other. In the back seat they hacked at the bags with knives, then poured the contents—all silver coins—into several paper sacks. On the freeway, before reaching the city, Colfax and Big Rufe threw the original cash bags out.
In the inner city they parked the car on a dead-end street, then separated. Before they did, Big Rufe warned, “Remember, all we gotta do is act like there ain’t nuthun’ different. We play this cool, ain’t nobody gonna prove we was there tonight. So tomorrow, everybody shows their faces just like always, same as any other day.” He glared at the other three. “Somebody don’t, that’s when the pigs start lookin’ our way.”
Leroy Colfax said softly, “Might be smarter to run.”
“You run,” Big Rufe snarled, “I swear I’ll find ’n kill you, the way you did that honky, the way you got us all in this …”
Colfax said hastily, “Ain’t gonna run. Just thinkin’ is all.”
“Don’t think! You showed already you ain’t got brains.”
Colfax was silent.
Though he had not spoken, Rollie wished he could run. But to where? There was nowhere; no escape, whichever way you turned. He had a sense of his own life seeping out, the way blood was still seeping from his injured hand. Then he remembered: The chain of happenings leading to tonight had begun a year ago, when the white cop baited him, and the black cop gave a card with a hiring hall address. Rollie’s mistake, he recognized, had been to go there. Or had it? If what had overtaken him had not happened in this way, there would have been some other.
“Now listen good,” Big Rufe had said, “we all in this together, we stick together. If nobody of us four blabs, we gonna be okay.”
Perhaps the others believed. Rollie hadn’t.
They parted then, each taking one of the paper sacks of coins which Big Rufe and Colfax had divided in the back seat of the car. Big Rufe’s was bulkier than the others.
Choosing his route cagily, conscious of the implications of the paper sack of coins if he should be stopped by a police patrol, Rollie reached the apartment house on Blaine near 12th.
May Lou wasn’t in; she had probably gone to a movie. Rollie bathed the gash in his hand, then bound it roughly with a towel.
After that he counted the money in the paper sack, dividing the coins into piles. It totaled $30.75—less than a day’s pay at the assembly plant.
If Rollie Knight had had the erudition or philosophy, he might have debated, within himself, the nature of risks which human beings take for trifling amounts such as $30.75, and their degrees of losing. There had been earlier risks which frightened him—the risk of refusing to be swept along into deeper involvement with plant crime, and the risk of backing out tonight, which he could have taken, but didn’t, when Big Rufe thrust the gun into his hand.
These risks had been real, not just imagined. A savage beating, accompanied by broken limbs, could have been ordered for Rollie by Big Rufe as easily as groceries are ordered from a store. Both men knew it; and that way Rollie would have been a loser too.
But in the end the losing could have been less than the total disaster—life imprisonment for murder—which threatened now.
In essence the risks whic
h Rollie chose to take, and not to take, were those which—in degree—face all men in a free society. But some, within the same society, are born with cruelly limited choices, belying the hoary bromide that “all men are created equal.” Rollie, and tens of thousands like him, hedged in from birth by poverty, inequality, scant opportunity, and with the sketchiest of education providing poor preparation for such choices as occur, are losers from the beginning. Their degree of losing remains the only thing to be determined.
Thus, the tragedy of Rollie Knight was twofold: The darker side of the earth that he was born to, and society’s failure to equip him mentally to break away.
But thinking none of this, knowing only bleak despair and fear of what would come tomorrow, Rollie thrust the $30.75 in silver beneath his bed, and slept. He did not awaken later when May Lou came in.
In the morning, May Lou dressed Rollie’s hand with a makeshift bandage, her eyes asking questions which he did not answer. Then Rollie went to work.
At the plant, plenty of talk was circulating about the murder-robbery of the night before, and there had been reports on radio, TV, and in the morning newspaper. Local interest in Rollie’s area of Assembly centered on the bludgeoning of Frank Parkland, who was in the hospital, though reportedly with mild concussion only. “Just proves all foremen are thickheaded,” a humorist pronounced at break time. There was immediate laughter. No one seemed distressed by the robbery, or greatly concerned about the murdered man, who was otherwise unknown.
Another report said one of the plant managers had had a stroke, brought on by the whole affair plus overwork. However, the last was clearly an exaggeration since everyone knew a manager’s job was a soft touch.
Apart from the talk, no other activity concerning the robbery-murder was visible from the assembly line. Nor, as far as Rollie could see, or hear through scuttlebutt, was anyone on the day shift questioned.
No rumors, either, tied any names to the crime.
Despite Big Rufe’s warning to the other three, he alone failed to show up at the plant that day. Daddy-o conveyed the news to Rollie at midmorning that Big Rufe’s leg was so swollen he could not walk, and had reported sick, putting out a story of having been drunk the night before and falling downstairs at home.
Daddy-o was shaky and nervous, but had recovered some of his confidence by early afternoon, when he paid a second call to Rollie’s work station, obviously wanting to gab.
Rollie had snarled at him, low-voiced, “For Cri-sakes quit hangin’ round me. And keep that stinkin’ mouth shut!” If anyone blabbed, causing word to spread, Rollie feared most of all it would be Daddy-o.
Nothing more that was notable occurred that day. Or on the one after. Or through an entire week following that.
As each day passed, while Rollie’s anxiety remained, his relief increased a little. He knew, however, there was still plenty of time for the worst to happen. Also he realized: while the sheer numbers of lesser unsolved crimes caused police investigations to ease or end, murder was in a different league. The police, Rollie reasoned, would not give up quickly.
As it happened, he was partly right and partly wrong.
The timing of the original robbery had been shrewd. It was the timing also which caused police investigation to center on the plant night shift, even though detectives were unsure that the men they sought were company employees at all. Plenty of auto plant crimes were committed by outsiders, using fake or stolen employee identification badges to get in.
All the police had to work with was a statement by the surviving vending machine collector that four men were involved. All had been masked and armed; he believed all four were black; he had only the vaguest impressions of their physical size. The surviving collector had not seen the face of the briefly unmasked robber, as had his companion who was knifed.
Frank Parkland, who was struck down instantly on entering the janitor’s closet, had observed nothing.
No weapons had been discovered, no fingerprints found. The slashed cash bags were eventually recovered near a freeway, but provided no clue, apart from suggesting that whoever discarded them was headed for the inner city.
A team of four detectives assigned to the case began methodical sifting through names and employment dockets of some three thousand night shift employees. Among these was a sizable segment with criminal records. All such individuals were questioned, without result. This took time. Also, part way through the investigation the number of detectives was reduced from four to two, and even the remaining pair had other duties to contend with.
The possibility that the wanted men might be part of the day shift, and had remained in the plant to stage the robbery, was not overlooked. It was simply one of several possibilities which the police had neither time nor manpower to cope with all at once.
What investigators really hoped for was a break in the case through an informer, which was the way many serious crimes, in greater Detroit as elsewhere, were solved. But no information came. Either the perpetrators were the only ones who knew the names involved, or others were remaining strangely silent.
The police were aware that the vending concessions at the plant were Mafia-financed and run; they knew, too, that the dead man had Mafia connections. They suspected, but had no means of proving, that both factors were related to the silence.
After three and a half weeks, because of a need to assign detectives to newer cases, while the plant murder-robbery case was not closed, police activity slackened off.
The same was not true elsewhere.
The Mafia, generally, does not look kindly on any interference with its people. And when interference is from other criminals, repercussions are stern, and of a nature to be a warning against repetition.
From the instant that the man with the Indian features died from the knife wound inflicted by Leroy Colfax, Colfax and his three accomplices were marked for execution.
Doubly assuring this was that they were pawns in the Mafia-Black Mafia war.
When details of the murder-robbery were known, the Detroit Mafia family worked quietly and effectively. It had channels of communication which the police did not.
First, feelers were put out for information. When none resulted, a reward was quietly offered: a thousand dollars.
For that much, in the inner city, a man might sell his mother.
Rollie Knight heard of the Mafia involvement and reward one week and two days after the debacle at the plant. It was at night and he was in a dingy Third Avenue bar, drinking beer. The beer, and the fact that whatever official investigation was going on had not come close to him so far, had relaxed a little of the terror he had lived with for the past nine days. But the news, conveyed by his companion at the bar—a downtown numbers runner known simply as Mule—increased Rollie’s terror tenfold and turned the beer he had drunk into bile, so that he was hard pressed not to vomit there and then. He managed not to.
“Hey!” Mule said, after he conveyed the news of the Mafia-proffered reward. “Ain’t you in that plant, man?”
With an effort, Rollie nodded.
Mule urged, “You find out who them guys was, I pass the word, we split the dough, okay?”
“I’ll listen around,” Rollie promised.
Soon after, he left the bar, his latest beer untouched.
Rollie knew where to find Big Rufe. Entering the rooms where the big man lived, he found himself looking into the muzzle of a gun—the same one, presumably, used nine days before. When he saw who it was, Big Rufe lowered the gun and thrust it in his trousers waistband.
He told Rollie, “Them crummy wops come, they ain’t gonna find no pushover.”
Beyond his readiness, Big Rufe seemed strangely indifferent—probably, Rollie realized later, because he had known of the Mafia danger in the first place, and accepted it.
There was nothing to be gained by staying, or discussion. Rollie left.
From that moment, Rollie’s days and nights were filled with a new, more omnipresent dread. He knew that not
hing he could do would counter it; he could only wait. For the time being he continued working, since regular work—too late, it seemed—had become a habit.
Though Rollie never knew the details, it was Big Rufe who be trayed them all.
He foolishly paid several small gambling debts entirely with silver coins. The fact was noticed, and later reported to a Mafia underling who passed the information on. Other pieces of intelligence, already known about Big Rufe, were found to fit a pattern.
He was seized at night, taken by surprise while sleeping, and given no chance to use his gun. His captors brought him, bound and gagged, to a house in Highland Park where, before being put to death, he was tortured and he talked.
Next morning Big Rufe’s body was found on a Hamtramck roadway, a road much traveled at night by heavy trucks. It appeared to have been run over several times, and the death was listed as a traffic casualty.
Others, including Rollie Knight—who heard the news from a terrified, shaking Daddy-o—knew better.
Leroy Colfax went into hiding, protected by politically militant friends. He remained hidden for almost two weeks, at the end of which time it was demonstrated that a militant, like many another politician, has his price. One of Colfax’s trusted companions, whom each addressed as brother, quietly sold him out.
Leroy Colfax, too, was seized, then driven to a lonely suburb and shot. When his body was found, an autopsy disclosed six bullets but no other clues. No arrest was ever made.
Daddy-o ran. He bought a bus ticket to New York and tried to lose himself in Harlem. For a while he succeeded, but several months later was tracked down and, soon after, killed by knifing.
Long before that—on hearing of Leroy Colfax’s slaying—Rollie Knight began his own time of waiting, and meanwhile went to pieces.
Leonard Wingate had trouble identifying the thin female voice on the telephone. He was also irritated at being called in the evening, at home.