Journal marches between them. Only there wasn’t a cute secretary in the place. The desks were occupied by young men in snug Hughes & Hatchers, tripping away at IBM typewriters and video terminals with all the individuality of soldier ants. A tepid rendition of “Summertime” floated out of a speaker mounted near the ceiling of each cubicle. None of the young men looked up as we walked past.
At length we came to a door next to an uninhabited cell, which I took to belong to the secretary. The door was unmarked. He tapped discreetly, and without waiting for an answer opened it and ushered me inside. The door closed behind me.
The office wasn’t very impressive. It wasn’t big enough for nine holes of golf and you couldn’t see more than half of Ontario through the picture window. Fluorescent lights concealed behind frosted glass panels in the ceiling shone down evenly over deep black pile carpeting, a bar in one corner, an Exercycle opposite that, a combination stereo and television set built into the wall, an executive desk with a glass top, telephone intercom, standard electronic calculator and a lot of paperwork in baskets, and a dozen chairs upholstered in brown leather lined up against the wall near the door, none of them in the same league as the high-backed swivel behind the desk. The walls, paneled probably in oak, were hung with the kind of prints that people working many stories above the street seem to prefer, of mills and horses and covered bridges and fresh-faced girls in yellow sunbonnets sitting under shade trees with their skirts spread about them. Every detail right out of a cartoon in Business Week, with one exception: On a built-in bookshelf behind the desk, a soiled baseball from the 1968 World Series, signed by all the Tigers and looking as out of place as Huck Finn at the Inaugural Ball.
A small, compact man in shirt sleeves who had been standing at the window with his back to me turned suddenly and I saw that he was holding the box I had sent in, still open with the ring exposed. Few Detroiters could fail to recognize the broad, square face and iron-gray hair cut into a military brush that so delighted the cartoonists on the News and Free Press , or the diminutive but powerful frame of the ex-Golden Gloves champ who had gained nationwide notoriety that September day in 1936 when, as newly elected head of the Detroit local, he led a gang of steelhaulers armed with wrecking bars and wrenches into a bloody melee with strikebreakers not six blocks from where we were standing. In the years since he had been seen haranguing crowds of gibbering truck drivers in newsreels and on television, invoking the Fifth Amendment during Grand Jury probes into union racketeering, and, more recently, in a widely circulated photograph, swamping out a cell block in gray prison garb after his conviction for assault with a deadly weapon.
He had lost his temper and knocked down a minor union official caught with his hands in the till. That would have been the end of it, except Montana’s enemies got wind of the incident and someone remembered that the former boxer’s fists were still registered as lethal weapons. He was released after serving eight months of a year’s sentence, but it had taken him two years to claw his way back to the top of the union. Every day of that period was recorded in the fresh lines in his face, the set grimness of his broad mouth, the slackening of his jowls that no cartoonist had yet been able to capture.
His pale gray eyes watched me curiously for about a minute. Finally he walked over to the desk and set down the box containing the ring, next to my card, which lay face up on the blotter.
“Amos Walker,” he said, looking at me again. “I thought I knew that name. Weren’t you in on the Freeman Shanks investigation?”
“Me and everyone else but the Texas Rangers.” I wondered where he got his information. As far as the public was concerned the cops had solved the black labor
At length we came to a door next to an uninhabited cell, which I took to belong to the secretary. The door was unmarked. He tapped discreetly, and without waiting for an answer opened it and ushered me inside. The door closed behind me.
The office wasn’t very impressive. It wasn’t big enough for nine holes of golf and you couldn’t see more than half of Ontario through the picture window. Fluorescent lights concealed behind frosted glass panels in the ceiling shone down evenly over deep black pile carpeting, a bar in one corner, an Exercycle opposite that, a combination stereo and television set built into the wall, an executive desk with a glass top, telephone intercom, standard electronic calculator and a lot of paperwork in baskets, and a dozen chairs upholstered in brown leather lined up against the wall near the door, none of them in the same league as the high-backed swivel behind the desk. The walls, paneled probably in oak, were hung with the kind of prints that people working many stories above the street seem to prefer, of mills and horses and covered bridges and fresh-faced girls in yellow sunbonnets sitting under shade trees with their skirts spread about them. Every detail right out of a cartoon in Business Week, with one exception: On a built-in bookshelf behind the desk, a soiled baseball from the 1968 World Series, signed by all the Tigers and looking as out of place as Huck Finn at the Inaugural Ball.
A small, compact man in shirt sleeves who had been standing at the window with his back to me turned suddenly and I saw that he was holding the box I had sent in, still open with the ring exposed. Few Detroiters could fail to recognize the broad, square face and iron-gray hair cut into a military brush that so delighted the cartoonists on the News and Free Press , or the diminutive but powerful frame of the ex-Golden Gloves champ who had gained nationwide notoriety that September day in 1936 when, as newly elected head of the Detroit local, he led a gang of steelhaulers armed with wrecking bars and wrenches into a bloody melee with strikebreakers not six blocks from where we were standing. In the years since he had been seen haranguing crowds of gibbering truck drivers in newsreels and on television, invoking the Fifth Amendment during Grand Jury probes into union racketeering, and, more recently, in a widely circulated photograph, swamping out a cell block in gray prison garb after his conviction for assault with a deadly weapon.
He had lost his temper and knocked down a minor union official caught with his hands in the till. That would have been the end of it, except Montana’s enemies got wind of the incident and someone remembered that the former boxer’s fists were still registered as lethal weapons. He was released after serving eight months of a year’s sentence, but it had taken him two years to claw his way back to the top of the union. Every day of that period was recorded in the fresh lines in his face, the set grimness of his broad mouth, the slackening of his jowls that no cartoonist had yet been able to capture.
His pale gray eyes watched me curiously for about a minute. Finally he walked over to the desk and set down the box containing the ring, next to my card, which lay face up on the blotter.
“Amos Walker,” he said, looking at me again. “I thought I knew that name. Weren’t you in on the Freeman Shanks investigation?”
“Me and everyone else but the Texas Rangers.” I wondered where he got his information. As far as the public was concerned the cops had solved the black labor
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