Stress (7 page)

The sergeant grinned with one side of his mouth. “ ‘Guess who, cocksucker.’ ”

“That was it?”

“What’d you expect,
Ironside
? Fucking ‘Freeze’?”

Battle stood. “Thanks, Sergeant. Sorry to have to crank you through it again.”

“Just so you get me back outside. I know that damn
Brady Bunch
song backwards and forwards.”

Stilwell announced he had to pee. Battle, himself feeling the effects of the coffee he’d ingested earlier, accompanied him to the men’s room. Bookfinger went along to be sociable. The room, all black-and-white 1920s Art Deco under half a century of cheap wax and grit, smelled of Lysol, industrial-strength lemons, and an officer defecating in the rear stall. The walls were a directory of penciled telephone numbers, belonging mostly to lawyers and bailbondsmen and somebody named Alice who was evidently a retired circus performer. Stilwell went on streaming against the back of his urinal a full minute after Battle had zipped up and washed his hands. Bookfinger flipped his cigarette butt into a vacant basin. No one said anything while the man in the stall flushed, pulled up his uniform pants, and went out after drying his hands on a sheet of coarse brown paper. He was a hulking black with gray in his hair and a thick bar of moustache.

“The man’s a Neanderthal,” Battle said as the door sighed shut.

Bookfinger tapped a Benson & Hedges out of his pack. “That’s Jackson with General Service. He went to Michigan on a basketball scholarship, but he flunked out and got fat.”

“I mean Kubicek. Is he always like that, or was he just rutting for my benefit?”

“He’s an arrogant asshole. Twenty more like him and the riots never would’ve gotten beyond Twelfth and Clairmont. It’s always a mistake to underestimate that old guard.”

“The department
has
twenty more like him. That’s why we had riots.”

“How old were you then, sixteen?” Stilwell flushed and turned away from the urinal. “I’d of closed this out by now except for this Ethiopian thing. We got three criminal records, three guns, and a shitload of eyewitnesses that didn’t see a thing wrong.”

“They also didn’t see Harrison’s gun until the shooting was over. Or hear Kubicek say anything before he shot him.”

Stilwell scowled at his hairline in the spotted mirror. “Well, hell, that’s good enough for me. Let’s string the fucker up.”

“Not just yet. I want to talk to someone else first.”

“Who?” Bookfinger lit the cigarette off a Cricket lighter.

“The guy in the boat.”

C
ROWNOVER COACHES HAD BEEN SERVING
A
MERICA’S
transportation needs since 1848.

In March of that year, Abner Crownover, who had left a wife and three children in England when he emigrated to Detroit to take up cabinetmaking, built and sold the first of a fleet of covered wagons to a pioneering family bound for the Oregon Territory. Lighter than the more famous Conestoga and sturdier than the Dearborn, the Crownover caught on swiftly. Ten years later, with the antebellum westward migration at its height, A. Crownover & Company was the largest private employer in a city that challenged Philadelphia for the title of wagonmaker to a restless nation.

Politics killed the dream. In 1859, Abner, an ardent abolitionist, met with John Brown on the northern end of the Underground Railroad and agreed to finance Brown’s mad plan to storm the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and procure weapons for armed insurrection against the United States. After the raid collapsed and Brown was hanged, Abner stood trial for treason. His acquittal for lack of evidence failed to save his reputation, and he was forced to sell his interest in the wagonmaking business to support himself and his second family. He died a broken man on the eve of the second Battle of Bull Run, his country aflame with civil war.

His son, also named Abner, went to work for the company at age eleven to feed his mother and three sisters. By virtue of hard work and intelligent suggestions, he rose from grease boy to regional vice president before his eighteenth birthday. Wagon trains had by this time begun to grow scarce, and as a result of his persuasion the firm turned its emphasis from cross-continental carriers to short-haul freight vehicles, passenger coaches, and finely crafted carriages for the landed gentry. Abner, Jr., himself was credited with the invention of an elaborate system of suspension that smoothed the ride to the theater and the opera and made Crownover’s distinctive coronet emblem a symbol of position and excellence in places as distant as New York, Boston, and San Francisco. In 1874, having ascended to the board of directors, Abner Crownover II sold his house on the River Rouge and took advantage of depressed stock values created by the ’73 Panic to acquire controlling interest in Crownover Coaches. He was twenty-three.

Abner’s first wife having died childless of scarlet fever, he remarried in 1876 and fathered six children, two of whom died in infancy. The eldest of the three surviving boys, Abner III, assumed directorship of the Detroit office in 1898. Edward, the youngest, was placed in charge of the upholstery shop. Harlan, born second and pronounced feeble-brained at an early age, became a dock foreman. When Abner proved himself incapable of making a decision and seeing it through—he would sign a contract with a lumber firm on Friday for the hickory required to frame the company’s popular Town and Country Phaeton, change his mind over the weekend, and dispatch a messenger to intercept the contract on Monday—his father discreetly reassigned him to the new position of Executive Director and appointed a more competent colleague in his place. Upon the colleague’s retirement in 1902, Edward ascended to the regional post widely regarded as the final step before the company presidency. By this time there was pressure among the board of directors to retool the plants in Detroit and Dearborn to provide bodies for the burgeoning automobile industry. Abner II, past fifty now and beset with health problems, resisted, believing that the motorcar was merely a rich man’s toy, beyond the means of even his wealthiest customers, and furthermore was too contrary in its mechanism for practical use. Edward, who had never gone on record in opposition to any of his father’s views, concurred.

Harlan Crownover had been considered slow-witted throughout his first thirty years, his reluctance to join in family discussions interpreted as inability to understand. Six months after taking over the loading dock at the Detroit plant, he inaugurated a system that allowed workers to offload a freight wagon in half the time with less muscular strain, almost eliminating sick days among the crew. He used the extra hours in his working day to meet with automobile pioneers, including Ransom E. Olds and young Henry Ford; convinced by their enthusiasm for their invention, Harlan canvassed the directors for support should those convictions lead to a fight.

On October 15, 1903, old Abner, with Edward in tow, stormed onto Harlan’s dock, shaking a bony fist and denouncing his second son’s conspiracy to ruin the company Abner had rescued from bankruptcy. In later years Harlan would declare his life’s brightest moment to be the time his father fired him, only to be confronted with a sheaf of letters assigning Harlan power of attorney to dispose of the largest single block of Crownover stock as he saw fit, signed by three members of the board and Edith Hampton Crownover—his mother, to whom Abner had presented ten thousand shares on the occasion of their wedding. Thus began the Harlan Crownover Era, and Crownover Coaches’ period of greatest prosperity.

Abner died in 1918, having spent his final decade and a half in forced retirement, wandering the halls of the River Rouge house he had bought back out of his first year’s dividend as board chairman and muttering to himself about family ingratitude. The sight of the belching chimneys of the Ford Rouge plant outside his windows must have seemed to him the final insult.

Harlan’s wife, the debutante daughter of a failed NewYork banker who had blown out his brains with an English dueling pistol when his books were opened, was barren. To compensate her for this lack, her husband—in his only known act of human compassion—granted her request to construct a house that would reflect the status of one of Detroit’s first families on Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe. He could hardly have realized the size of the Pandora’s Box he had opened. For months, materials arrived at the River Rouge docks by the shipload: slabs of marble from Italy, oak timbers from Germany, ceramic tiles from Mexico, carved mahogany panels from the Brazilian rain forest. From Spain came an entire eleventh-century chapel, dismantled stone by stone and packed in numbered crates for reassembly in the garden. A 1,600-piece chandelier landed from a villa in France, each crystal pendant individually wrapped in blue tissue and placed in boxes lined with shredded newspaper. Tapestries from Berne and rolls of carpet from Tehran and Cairo went directly from the hold of the
S.S. Mauritania
into a warehouse on East Jefferson to await installation. Behind the materials came the craftsmen: Greek stonemasons; Belgian cabinetmakers; Florentine sculptors; and an army of painters, carpenters, and bricklayers whose foreign chatter drowned out the general din of construction like the excited babble of immigrants at a train station. And above the peaks of the other houses in a community not known for the modesty of its dwellings rose the shining slate gables of Xanadu, sheltering thirty-six thousand square feet on a twelve-acre lot studded with stately oaks that had witnessed Chief Pontiac’s siege in 1763.

No sooner was the manor house at The Oaks completed, in 1922, than the Crownovers set sail for Europe. While Harlan met with financiers and industrialists in London, Paris, Weimar, and Rome, wife Cornelia descended upon the museums and auction houses. Back home, servants worked far into the night opening and unpacking crates she had shipped. Into the foyer they carried a marble bust by Michelangelo of a prosperous Venetian merchant; over the arch in the Great Hall they hoisted an eleven-by-twenty-foot Tintoretto of Babylonian maids bathing in a spring, encased in a bronze frame weighing half a ton; along the walls in the parlor they arranged the only known complete set of Louis Quatorze chairs outside the palace at Versailles; and from the west wing to the east, starting at the rooftop observatory and ending in the vast flagged basement, maids in white aprons and footmen in breeches and leggings filled shelves with porcelain vases from Pompeii, jeweled masks from Constantinople, Athenian reliefs, Gothic shields, Viennese miniatures, Portuguese lace, and a curious jewelry box made of native Corsican woods, said to have been a gift to Josephine from Napoleon to commemorate their betrothal.

Following a party in celebration of the return of the master and mistress from abroad—attended by the Henry and Edsel Fords, the Horace Dodges, the Walter P. Chryslers, the Pierre DuPonts, and deaf old Thomas Edison in his rumpled evening clothes with stubby yellow pencils poking out of the vest pocket—The Oaks featured prominently in
Harper’s
,
The Literary Digest
, and newspaper rotogravure sections throughout the country. Like Hollywood’s Pickfair and the Astor House in New York, the mansion with its seventeen bedrooms, two kitchens, and tiled ballroom became a set piece for the New Gilded Age and the place to stop for persons of note on their way between coasts. Charlie Chaplin stayed there while researching
Modern Times.
Herbert Hoover, resting during his whistle-stop campaign for the 1928 Republican presidential nomination, shot pool in the game room with Harlan and discussed the stock market. Johnny Weismuller swam in the Olympic-size pool. All through Prohibition the champagne gushed from the stock in the cellar while the grace and charm of Cornelia Crownover contributed to the inebriation of the guests and softened the regret of the morning after.

With Repeal came Depression. Retrenching after his 1929 losses on Wall Street, Harlan slashed wages and increased hours at his plants in Detroit, Dearborn, and along the river. When the fledgling American Federation of Labor and United Auto Workers hit the bricks, Crownover Coaches locked them out, replacing the strikers with non-union labor. Picketers assaulted the scabs on their way through the gates and punctured the radiators of trucks carrying coiled steel and hardwood planks to the loading docks. Pinkerton detectives waded into human seas with truncheons, splintering wrists and staving in skulls. Retired bootleggers struck back with brass knuckles and blackjacks. A Lewis gun mounted on a tripod fired orange tracers into a crowd blockading the assembly plant in Wyandotte. A Remington rifle resting on the hood of a Packard snatched a security officer out from under his cap at the foundry on East Jefferson.

In 1938, pressured by his directors and the threat of a federal investigation, Harlan Crownover signed a three-year contract with the union guaranteeing wages and overtime pay. Sixty-five now, embittered in spirit and his eyesight failing, he lapsed into semi-retirement, placing the company’s day-to-day operation in the hands of his closest confederate, a former
Wunderkind
he had hired after his father’s ouster to oversee the transition from carriages to convertibles.

His wife had other plans. Four years after finishing The Oaks and crowding it with treasures, she had found the house strangely empty. What was needed, she had decided, was to fill its stately rooms with the laughter of children. In the fall of 1926 the Crownovers had adopted a nine-month-old boy whom they named Abner IV. Two years later an infant girl, Caryn, had joined the household. From an early age the daughter received lessons in ballet and the piano, while the son was drilled in the arts of responsibility and leadership. Only twelve and a half when his adopted father stepped down, young Abner was incapable of taking his place, but his mother was determined that when the time came he would not be overlooked.

Meanwhile the
Wunderkind
shone. A youthful and energetic fifty at the time of his promotion, Francis Brennan caught the scent of gunpowder from the east that summer before the invasion of Austria and went to bat lobbying for defense contracts in Washington. The news that Henry Ford had gotten there first didn’t faze him. By Pearl Harbor he had completely overhauled the downriver plants and, subcontracting from Ford, set them to work around the clock, cranking out cockpits and bridges for the B-29 bombers and Liberty ships Henry was putting together at Willow Run and Rouge. On D-Day, thirty percent of the materiel pouring onto the beaches at Normandy contained parts manufactured by Crownover.