Edsel by Loren D. Estleman

businesses that occupied them thinned out and were replaced by streets of new houses with picture windows, power-clipped lawns, and shrubs shaped like bunches of broccoli, so close to the architects’ visions that any one of them could be photographed and superimposed on the original sketch with nary a line out of place. Only the odd tricycle in the front yard or basketball hoop mounted over the garage door broke the uniform pattern of row upon row of long ground-hugging brick and aluminum-cased ranch-styles laid end to end like pipe. But the surgical process by which this new way of living was delivered from the old was caesarean, and anything but antiseptic. Here and there the neat lines were spoiled by mounds of raw earth with grubby yellow bulldozers crawling over them like ants, clearing lots for new foundations. Muddy runoff from the eyesores etched brown tributaries in the emerald sod next door and oozed down the gutters in front.
    At length Pierpont swung into a paved driveway exactly like its neighbors on both sides and stood on his brakes to avoid rear-ending a two-year-old Chevy Bel-Air parked in front of the garage. When the Hudson stopped rocking I pried my fingers off the dash and got out. Terra firma hadn’t felt so good since I rode the car ferry across the Straits of Mackinac in the middle of a November storm. That time I’d at least had confidence in the pilot.
    Of course the house was a ranch-style, with steps leading up from the trough of the driveway to a brief porch of unfinished cement. A picture window the size of a neighborhood movie screen was blanked out by drapes the color of washed-out gold. I’d never seen one covered before. Generally they seemed to exist as much for the casual passerby to glean an idea of the owners’ daily routines as for the owners to see out; which made sense, the view of the opposite side of the street being the same from each side.
    “Who’s his landlord?” I asked Pierpont. “William J. Levitt?”
    “What’d you expect, the Manooghian Mansion? Walter’s a working stiff.” The little man squashed the bell with his thumb. The Kong twins remained behind in the car.
    Between the bing and the bong, the door swung inside, framing a Negro as big as a davenport. He had on a plaid sport coat and twill trousers that stopped two inches short of his black steel-toed high-tops, exposing a pair of white athletic socks. I figured he had an aversion to mud puddles. He was completely hairless and his head reminded me of a medicine ball. It was that big, for one thing, and for another a series of perfectly vertical stitches started at the crown and came down like seams to the thick mantel of bone that hung over his eyes. I couldn’t think of any object that would cause an injury like that, so I decided he had had it done according to some fashion I wasn’t aware of. Miss one issue of Esquire and you’re behind the whole season.
    The socks were the tip-off. They were an integral part of the unofficial uniform worn by union employees from New York’s garment district to the avocado farms of southern California. There was a rigidity about the practice that approached fanaticism. I wanted to show him my expired press union card, but I was afraid he’d eat it.
    His eyes, invisible and without luster in the shadow of their bone carapace, were something you took on faith, like the presence of a big cat in the darkness of its den at the zoo. I sensed when they shifted from me to Pierpont. At that point he shuffled aside, allowing electric light to leak out onto the porch for the first time. As he moved, his coat opened briefly and I saw the checked grip of an automatic pistol with thick rubber bands wound around it to prevent it from sliding down inside his pants.
    Pierpont placed a palm against my back, gently but with pressure. I walked around the Negro’s big stomach and descended two steps into a sunken living room carpeted wall to wall in the same gold as the drapes in the