Edsel by Loren D. Estleman Page A

week?”
    “More like a month. I was moving from my last job.”
    “Are you a slow healer, Mr. Minor?”
    “I’m slower at most things than I used to be.” I wondered where my clothes were.
    “How is your urine?”
    “As compared to what?”
    “Do you have to empty your bladder frequently? Several times during the night?”
    “Don’t you?”
    “Do you have to go right now?”
    “I can wait till I get out of here.”
    “I’m guessing you take in as much as you put out. Are you extremely thirsty at the moment?”
    “I wouldn’t turn down a gallon of water and a beer chaser. Does any of this have a point or are you charging me by the hour?”
    “Have you ever been treated for diabetes?”
    Something caught in my stomach.
    “A doctor told me I was a borderline case a long time back. It kept me out of the army. I’ve always thought I grew out of it.”
    He smoothed down the pages on his clipboard. “Chances are you’re no longer borderline. I’d like to get you upstairs next week for tests. If it is diabetes mellitus, we’re going to have to sit down and discuss some changes in the way you live. Dramatic changes.”

PART TWO
The Glass House

9
    A ND THE LEAVES ON THE TREES planted in boxes along Woodward Avenue went from sooty green to brackish orange and fell, and snow fell the color of rust and was pushed into piles like slag along the curbs, and the long coma of winter in southeastern Michigan passed into soggy spring, muddy, pot-holed spring; and young men in dirty yellow hard hats whose ancestors paddled birch canoes up the Detroit River laid plywood and plastic between the gaunt steel ribs on American Road in Dearborn and puttied sheets of glass the size of barn doors into their frames, and a wall of glass twelve stories tall and two city blocks wide glittered in the sun rising over the Ford Administration Center. Israel Zed conducted me on a tour of offices lined with silver-papered insulation while an April rain the consistency of thirty-weight oil smeared the windows and rataplaned the uninsulated roof. Everything smelled of sawdust and glue.
    “This is where you’ll work. Unless you’re one of those who thinks a view is distracting.”
    The view at the moment was of Wayne County farmland as seen through an aquarium. The fields were plowed quicksand and the scattered houses and barns looked hunkered down, their shingled roofs shining like wet asphalt. The room, doorless, naked-joisted, and floored with sheets of plywood stenciled BAY CITY LUMBER, looked as if it would hold enough hay to feed all the sodden cows on all those farms for a season. “How many do I share it with?” I asked.
    “Nobody shares here. Let the Russians share. Believe me, you’ll need every square inch of it. You’ve got about six weeks to think about what kind of carpeting you want and whether you prefer wallpaper or paneling. I’m getting mahogany myself. I considered oak, but that’s too much like a synagogue. I understand you toured Rouge again yesterday. Did you see anything you hadn’t the first dozen times?”
    I was growing accustomed to the way Zed changed subjects in midstream. “Not quite a dozen,” I said. “Nearer ten. This time I used the lapel pin and got down on the floor to talk to some foremen. Did you know they fired a worker last month for putting an empty Coke bottle in the box frame of a Fairlane to create a mysterious rattle? The foreman thinks he was paid by GM.”
    His envelope-flap mouth dipped down, dragging creases from its corners to the sides of his Semitic nose. “You might want to stay away from the line for a while. The workers become suspicious when people in suits start hanging around.”
    “I never wear a suit when I go to Rouge.”
    “You don’t look like someone who doesn’t a lot of the time. And you don’t look like someone who’s accustomed to coveralls. They have a sense for that kind of thing.”
    “I’m just trying to learn the business the way Mr. Ford