The Adjustment (16 page)
When Irma came out of the bathroom, though, still toweling her torso dry, skin still pink from the hot water, a curious natural grace to the sway of her hips as she crossed the room from bathroom to bed and hopped on, I had second thoughts. I’d pay for pictures of that.
“You’re paid up for another hour,” she said. “Just in case you might want another turn.”
“I will in a little bit.”
I lay there for a little while staring at the ceiling, thinking about nothing and content to do so. She startled me out of my trance by asking me if something was eating me.
“What makes you say that?”
“You look like something’s on your mind, that’s all. Sometimes guys’ll hire a gal just to talk about stuff they can’t tell wifey or their pals.”
This wasn’t news to me. In Italy, fully a quarter of our trade was guys who just wanted a sympathetic female ear, which was fine with me as long as the hour was paid up. On a whim I sketched out my difficulties with Huff, without naming any names, and she listened attentively.
“You ought to stake out one of the queer bars,” she said when I was finished.
“I didn’t know there were any.”
“Sure, they’re just like any other bars except full of homos.”
“I know what they are, I just meant I didn’t know there were any in Wichita.”
“Sure, where do you think they hang around?”
“You know a lot about queers,” I said.
“I know a few. I didn’t tell you this, but there’s two that work for Nester.”
“Nester’s pimping men?” I didn’t think I was easy to shock, but that one came clear out of left field.
“Keep that under your hat.” She propped up her right knee and picked at the bright red nail of her little toe.
“WHAT DO YOU think about baby names?” Sally asked me a couple of days hence over a breakfast of ruined grey eggs and carbonized bacon, washed down by coffee that was too strong, a welcome relief from her usual thin and transparent brew.
“I think they should all have one.”
“I’m perfectly serious.”
“All right, if it’s a boy we name it after my father or my grandfather. If it’s a girl I don’t care.”
“If it’s a girl I was thinking about either Linda or Loretta,” she said.
People were always telling Sally she looked like one movie star or another, and the two most frequently named were Linda Darnell and Loretta Young. I wasn’t kidding when I said I didn’t care what it was named, though. “Either one’s fine with me.”
I had a little break regarding that other pain in my ass at the moment, my pen pal, in the form of another envelope postmarked St. Louis. This letter consisted of only a single line:
The wages of sin is death and you are about big of one as I ever.
But this time he included a photograph of a certain Brunela, confirming my theory that he was a former GI client from Rome. I tried to remember her last name—Castelli? Cantelli?—but failed. It was a glum, head-on shot that might have been attached to an identification card. Maybe it was a mug shot, though that would have been trickier for my correspondent to get his hands on. Brunela was surly, chronically drunk, and she was one of three in my stable who’d died during my time in Italy. She swallowed poison, which could hardly be lain at my door, but who knows how the mind of a lunatic works. In any case this fellow blamed me for Brunela’s death, and my job now was to rack my brain and try to remember who, if any, her special devotees were.
IRMA HAD PROMISED me she’d talk to one of the male whores in Nester’s employ about getting a snap of Huff in a compromising position. I was turning over in my head ways that might work and coming up short every time. I would probably have to teach one of them to use the camera, but who knew if he’d be good enough to get the shot and make it printable? We couldn’t afford another mistake like Hiram Fish.
Nester set up a meet with one of them, and Park and I sat in a booth at the Bellflower and were joined by an unexceptional looking man of about thirty.
“Brad Wageknecht. Something about some pictures you needed taken?”
Park was giving him the once-over, deep curiosity in his face. I filled Wageknecht in on our progress so far and he nodded, his eyes closed.
“First of all, a four-by-five’s too big for that kind of work,” he said. “Even 35 millimeter’s going to be spotted. What you want is a spy camera. Ever hear of a thing called a Minox?”
“No.”
“Brought one back from Germany. Spy camera, uses a tiny little film cartridge. Great pictures, you know, Swiss lenses. It would have to be indoors, at a party or a bar, though, since I don’t have any way to attach a bulb to it.”
Park was practically dancing in his chair. “You were in the war? Germany?”
“The Big Red One,” Wageknecht said.
“Fuck you, that’s not true.”
He opened his shirt, an action that drew a flinch from Park, and revealed a scar twice as long and thick as the one on my own chest. “Doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “I got nothing left to prove.”
I gave him a hundred dollar advance and the promise of four hundred more for a picture that met our requirements, and he left.
As we prepared to leave Park was very quiet, and he didn’t speak until we were in the parking lot.
“Not a chance in hell he’s queer. Hell, he’s a goddamn war hero.”
“I imagine a few of them were, Herman.”
“The hell you say.” He shook his head, a little angrily, as though he was going to have to go through his whole company in his head now and wonder which ones were and which weren’t.
TWELVE
CLYDE BEATTY’S PRIZE ORANG-OUTANG
T
HE NEXT ANONYMOUS letter arrived at the house, which actually gave me a little scare. It was one thing to know where I worked, but he’d found out awfully fast that I’d moved. It read:
HE NEXT ANONYMOUS letter arrived at the house, which actually gave me a little scare. It was one thing to know where I worked, but he’d found out awfully fast that I’d moved. It read:
You know whose going to be real interseted in that money of yours is the fBi old J Egdar will get a big laugh out of watching you hung out to dry
Also enclosed was a copy print of a more flattering picture of Brunella, in which she smiled endearingly at the photographer—was he my unnamed tormentor?—while brushing her hair over her left ear. I’d come up with a few of her paying admirers in my mind, but I was damned if I had names for any of them. I thought of them as a blur of barely distinguishing features: the balding one, the wall-eyed one, the walking Adam’s apple, the drooler.
Whoever he was he seemed to be having trouble making up his mind as to whether he was going to kill me or turn me in or fuck my wife. This one was postmarked St. Louis like the last two, and I wondered what his business was there, and when he’d be done with it.
A BOARD MEETING scheduled for later in the month seemed a logical time for the conspirators to launch an attack on the old man, whose normal short-tempered demeanor had been replaced by a glassy, demented calm, whose permanence was punctuated by rages more severe and without apparent cause than usual. We needed him off the Hycodan, at least temporarily.
I met Park for lunch at Stanley’s. It was two PM, so most of the lunch crowd was gone by the time we sat down. “How’s the boss the last couple of days?”
“Worse. You know how for a while he was okay while he was dosed? Any more he’s either hurting for it or he’s a sleepwalker. Thirty of the damned things a day. Costing a fortune, not that that bothers him.”
“Are we agreed, then, that we need to get him off it?”
“I guess so. I don’t think it’s going to be easy.”
“I don’t guess it is, but I’ve got an idea. You ever been to Hot Springs?”
“Down in Arkansas? Nope.”
“I talked to a man at the Arlington Hotel about a suite. Place’s got an interior bedroom that’s practically soundproofed so he can yell all he wants.”
“How come you can’t take somebody else along? What about that crazy man you got a job down on the floor?”
“You’re the driver, Park. We can’t take the train, God only knows what kind of messes he’d get into in public. And you’re the bodyguard, too, don’t forget.”
“I don’t know. What if he dies? I think they do sometimes, coming down off morphine.”
“It’s not morphine, Park, you know that.”
He was eating a grilled cheese sandwich, picking at the fries that came with it and dunking them in his coffee, a habit I found so distracting that I wouldn’t have hired him had he tried it during our first interview.
“Whatever you call it, we better talk to that doctor before he tries kicking it.”
PARK WAS RIGHT. A couple of laymen like us might have killed a man going through withdrawal, especially a man of Collins’s years. I spent the afternoon finalizing the plans for the trip to Hot Springs and phoned Ezra Groff, who disapproved of the plan.
“You ought to just gradually reduce his dose,” he said with some irritation at my failure to heed his advice. “I told you at the start, this stuff isn’t as addictive as morphine or heroin. It’s my belief that the man could get down to a reasonable daily dosage and do just fine.”
PARK POINTED OUT to me that a departure from Collins Field, or even Wichita Municipal, might spark rumors. Add to that neither one of us knew a pilot we could trust, so we started out on US 160 eastward two mornings later in the company Olds with Collins in the back seat, looking out the window at nothing and nearly catatonic. He didn’t even know where we were going or why; so passive had the old geezer become in his dependence on his medicine it was enough to tell him that if he wanted his dose he’d have to go on a ride to get it.
We stopped in my Dad’s hometown of Cottonwood and had a late lunch at the Jayhawk diner on Lincoln. The counterman was a chubby fellow with a shiny red face, and when he recommended the hash, Park and I ordered it. Collins refused to speak a word and got nothing, which seemed to suit him fine. I asked him if he was sure he didn’t want some coffee, and he half-growled, half-muttered something unintelligible but seemingly heartfelt. When I asked him to repeat it he shouted loud and clear: “I don’t drink coffee any more because it makes me want to piss and I can’t. Satisfied?”
The only other customers in the diner at that hour, a pair of old ladies, laughed furtively behind their hands, and the counterman worked his toothpick around in his teeth and looked like he wasn’t quite sure whether to throw us out.
“Sorry, Mister,” I said. “Our Dad’s a little bit confused these days.”
He nodded and forgave us. “My father-in-law’s getting that way.”
DESPITE ANOTHER DOSE of his medicine the boss was irascible and combative on the late afternoon leg of the trip, and he went berserk when Park accidentally let slip that the purpose of the trip was the narcotics version of a drying-out cure.
“I’ll be dipped in shit if I’ll let my employees dictate to me when and whether I’ll be taking one goddamn medicine or another! By all that’s fucking holy, you will stop this vehicle right now and surrender the wheel!”
“Sorry, Mr. Collins, I can’t do that,” Park said.
“All right, goddamn it, I’ll get a ride with somebody else,” he said, and with that he grabbed the door handle and tried to exit the Olds, which at that moment was hurtling down the road at about sixty per. I reached over the seat and grabbed Collins by his arm while Park pulled over to the shoulder.
“What do we do now?” Park asked as Collins thrashed in a fruitless effort to free himself from my grasp.
“Get the trunk open.”
DESPITE COLLINS’S SELF-INFLICTED infirmity, getting him into the trunk wasn’t easy, and once we’d closed it he kicked at the lid with a ferocity I’d rarely seen, even from him. He kept kicking as we drove on, more and more feebly as the shadows along the side of the road lengthened, and about five minutes after the kicking stopped Park turned to look at me.
“You figure there’s any air getting into that trunk?” he asked.
“Probably.”
“What if there isn’t?”
“Then we’ll make up a story and end up either in jail or looking for jobs without references.”
It was late when we got in to Hot Springs, and we got the boss out of the trunk by the side of the highway before heading in to the Arlington, as pulling inert bodies out of trunks was frowned upon in your swankier establishments, even in Hot Springs. Collins was conscious but confused and cranky while I checked in, but no more so than he’d been for the last few weeks.
As I finished filling out the registration form and deposited a sizeable company check with the clerk, Collins stood closer to me than convention dictates, and said in a lucid, clear tone: “As soon as I’m off this stuff and potent again, I’m going to bang that pretty wife of yours like a goddamn gong.” It didn’t sound like a threat, more a well-reasoned prediction. The desk clerk, his aplomb greater than any I could have summoned at that moment, failed to display the slightest sign of having heard.
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