Edsel by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online Page B

secondhand off the surfaces of the crystal chandeliers and the copper plating back of the bar. The few women seated at the tables had the look of guests, as of a men’s club whose Old Guard had died off sufficiently for it to declare Ladies Night. You could order anything you liked from the leather-bound menu as long as it was beef, chops, fish, or salad. If you wanted dessert, there was Carl’s around the corner.
    The maître d’, fortyish and appropriately effeminate, with an advancing forehead and lively violet eyes, had apparently been briefed, for he took no notice of my open-necked knit shirt and zipper jacket when I told him the party I was meeting and conducted me through a sea of business suits and striped ties to a corner booth. Israel Zed was standing there as if he’d been waiting in that position right along, large in gray worsted with a shadow stripe and the ubiquitous black cap. He took my hand and turned me toward the table. “Mr. Ford, Connie Minor.”
    It would be some time before I learned that one didn’t “have lunch with Mr. Ford,” in the usual sense of the phrase.
    Intimate, one-on-one meetings with the Boy King—he was thirty-seven at the time I met him, but the youthful title would remain as long as the gaunt gray ghost of Henry the First continued to stride through the offices, showrooms, and assembly plants of the company he founded—were nonexistent, for he was inseparable from the three men who shared the booth with him that day. For a terrible moment I was paralyzed by the sudden realization that I had no idea which of the four was my new employer. Zed made no indication by look or gesture, and although I had seen Ford’s face hundreds of times in newspaper photographs and in newsreels, I was at a loss to identify his remarkably ordinary features in person.
    Ford solved the problem for me by lifting himself slightly and extending a large fleshy hand. That description implies more physical activity than was actually employed. I was pretty sure that despite the impression of rising, his buttocks never left the leather seat, and the proffered hand barely cleared his side of the table so that I had to reach all the way across to grasp it. His grip itself was neither weak nor strong; it wasn’t there. The sensation was as of plunging my hand into a feather pillow. He was a large soft bear of a man with thick dark hair parted on one side, baby-fat cheeks, and small light eyes that never gave the impression of making contact even when they were looking right into mine. I remembered my one meeting with his grandfather, five volcanic minutes alone with the stolid Yankee energy in that lean old frame, the hard, searching glitter in those deep-set eyes, and I understood the reasoning behind the rumors of a secret adoption in the family. There in the grandson’s presence I couldn’t recall ever having met a man who had so little effect on me. And potentially that made him as dangerous as anyone I’d known since Frankie Orr.
    Other introductions followed. I shook hands with beefy Mead Bricker, gray, bespectacled Jack Davis, Ford’s allies from the days when bully-boy Harry Bennett ran the company with his army of strikebreakers and Svengali-like influence over Old Henry, and John Bugas, the former FBI bureau chief whom Ford had lured over from government service to turn Bennett’s corporate spies and enable the
    Crown Prince to wrest control of the company from the palsied hands of its founder. Tall and lanky when he rose to shake my hand, Bugas exhibited a rough frontier charm that might not have been all artifice, helped along by frank dark eyes slanting away from a nose like the prow of an icebreaker and a shy smile that showed no teeth. My instincts in the presence of so much self-effacement were the exact opposite of what they might have been half my life before. In an old-style gunfight I’d have picked him as my first target.
    It was a tankful of sharks, and yet as we took our seats I