40
“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.”