The Adjustment

by Scott Phillips

  “Just her nature, Sylvester,” the counterman said with a philosophical shrug.

  “I never seen any woman wasn’t getting paid for it lay down for that many men. Milkman. Mailman. The goddamn paper boy! I don’t think the little bastard even shaves yet. And it’s not like she gets any free milk or a few weeks of free newspapers out of it. A woman her age.”

  Now there was a gal I wanted to meet. When he looked down, dejected, at his untouched plate of eggs I realized that he hadn’t been needling the counterman at all; he was seeking sympathetic ears, the woman under discussion his own errant wife. It didn’t seem to me like things were going to improve short of locking the woman in question in a mental institution.

  “She wasn’t ever like this before the war,” he said, piercing the thin albumen skin of one of the yolks with his fork and then pressing it flat to watch the molten yellow ooze out of the jagged rifts. “Used to be a pretty good wife.”

  I walked into Collins’s office before noon and found Millie sitting behind her desk, eyes red. Assuming that her problem had to do with her fiancé, I took a seat across from her desk and asked what was wrong. If I was going to pound him into the dirt I wanted to know why, exactly.

  “Oh, Mr. Ogden, you haven’t heard? It’s just awful. Last night Mr. Huff got into his garage and closed the door and started his car and went to sleep.”

  Shit. This was a bad change in plans. “I need to talk to his secretary,” I said.

  “She’s not there, she had to go home. She’s very upset. And the county attorney’s got the office sealed, there are policemen there keeping people out.”

  “Sure, I guess they have to take precautions when the comptroller kills himself.”

  “Oh, nobody thinks he did anything improper. It’s a routine thing, they said.”

  Shit. If that letter and the photograph were still in the same envelope I was doomed. Huff had screwed us but good; it hadn’t occurred to me that the son of a bitch might overreact and finish himself off. I’d counted on having him as an ally in the fight with the board, if a reluctant one, and now there was the danger Collins and I might be tied to a blackmail attempt.

  “How’s his wife doing?”

  “I don’t know. She’s taken the boys somewhere, to a relative I think. It’s just awful.”

  “Where’s the boss?”

  “He went home as soon as he found out. He was very upset. He pretended not to like Mr. Huff, but I know he’s taking it very hard.”

  PARK MET ME at Red’s at five. “You really stepped into the shit this time, Ogden.” He said it like he was mad at me personally.

  “We need to find out where that photo ended up. If he burned it we’re in the clear. If it’s separate from the letter we’re as good as clear, it’d take a hell of a lawyer to put that case together. But if they’re still in the same envelope . . . ”

  “I’m not doing it.” He was sitting with his arms folded across his chest.

  “I haven’t asked you to do anything yet. We’re here to figure out how we’re going to find out what he did with the picture.”

  “Not me. I’m here to quit.”

  “Quit? Over what?”

  “That man Huff killed himself because of that stunt we pulled. It’s not right. I’m not a cop any more but I can’t let myself be involved with felonies.”

  “What the hell, Park, you’re going soft on me all of a sudden?”

  He shook his head at me. “I can hardly stand the sight of you.”

  I’m wrong once in a while about all kinds of things, but one thing I almost always get right is who my friends are, and in this case it sure threw me to have been wrong. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet, counted out two hundred dollars in fifties and handed them to him.

  “That’s your severance pay, Herman,” I said. “Good luck in the future.”

  He rose, slugged back his shot and washed it down with half his beer. Then he threw the bills onto the bar and walked away.

  THE EVENING EAGLE played the story down, describing the death as accidental in a single column on page four. The Beacon’s late edition played it big on the front page above the fold, quoting the county attorney as saying it looked like a suicide and even suggesting the existence of a note. There was even the merest suggestion of a double life Mr. Huff might have been leading, though what sort of double life was left to the imagination of the reader.

  Millie had spoken of Huff’s wife taking their sons to stay with relatives. Huff’s office was sealed while the county attorney and the CPAs looked over the books, but would his house be sealed as well? It was worth a try. The Eagle’s brief article had published his College Hill address, and at nine I drove past a large, darkened, two-story house and saw no evidence anyone was home. Of course Mrs. Huff might have been the sort to retire early, particularly the day after her husband’s death, but I felt reasonably sure the house was empty. If it wasn’t I’d find out soon enough.

  At midnight I returned and parked two blocks away on Roosevelt. I walked down the sidewalk with as much nonchalance as a midnight stroller has any business feeling, and when I arrived at the house I walked around back as quietly as I could. At the end of the driveway stood the garage where Huff had done it; if the envelope was in the car at the time of the suicide then it was likely the police already had it, and if by some miracle it was still in there untouched I would have to raise the garage door to get to it, difficult if not impossible without making an attention-getting racket. So I would leave that until after my search of the house, as a last, desperate resort.

  I wrapped my handkerchief around my fist and broke a glass pane in the door, stuck my arm through, and unlocked it. I crept through the kitchen and turned on my flashlight, careful to aim it low lest its beam alert an insomniac neighbor. A grey cat with extremely thick fur and a flat face meowed at me and purred, rubbing itself against my ankles, and I opened the refrigerator and put some milk in its empty bowl.

  I climbed the stairs and examined the bedrooms. There were three, one occupied by the adults and two others filled with the accoutrements of children, specifically boys. In the hallway were family pictures indicating that there were four of them, and in the most recent of these the boys ranged from about a gap-toothed, towheaded six to a surly, crew cut fifteen.

  I returned downstairs. At the rear of the house next to the kitchen was a small room Huff had apparently been using as an office. I went through the desk and found nothing of use, and was about to leave when I saw something on the wall: It was my letter, stuck there by thumbtack, as though he had sat there contemplating it before his act of self-destruction. Unaccompanied by that letter, the photo was powerless to do me or Collins harm, and it was with an audible sigh that I tore it from the wall and stuffed it in my shirt. And then I spotted something that might have been the corner of a piece of typing paper overhanging the corner of a bookcase. I reached for it; it was stiffer than typing paper, and sure enough, flipping it over I found Huff’s picture. The inconsiderate son of a bitch had left it lying around where his wife, or one of his sons, was eventually bound to find it. I did him a favor and took it and, as I let myself out, wondered whether Merle Tessler in Kansas City would be interested in getting Wageknecht’s negatives. There was a market for everything, why not this?

  FOURTEEN

  ON PROPOSITIONING A WIDOW

  “THERE WAS A gal I met barnstorming, had a trick snatch.” We were at Norman’s, and Collins was at the garrulous stage of his nightly inebriation. “Trick how?” Norman said, his tone full of awe. He had known nothing but standard issue pussies in his sheltered life, and even those seemed to him miraculous.

  “She worked for the carnival. I’d run into her two, three times a year, and she was always up for it. Liked pilots. Liked pretty much anything in pants, probably.”

  “I thought you said women who needed more’n one man were nuts,” Norman said. “Ants in the pants equals rocks in the head.”

  “She was an excepti
on,” the old man said, showing a bit of the prickliness that was sure to surface fully blown by evening’s end; I really did need to find a successor to Herman Park before long. “Her name was Carlotta, or at least that was what she was calling herself then. Probably used to be Ethel or Laverne or Myrtle until she joined the carnie. Anyhow, she could squirt cold cream out of it and hit you right in the goddamn face. Shit, if they could have sold tickets to it they could have made some real kale. And boy oh boy, fucking her was like fucking no other woman alive. She pretty much ruined me. I suppose I’ve spent the rest of my life searching for another woman like that.”

  “So how’d you end up married to Mrs. Collins?” Norman asked without apparent fear of getting an earful of abuse in return. I couldn’t quite figure out whether Norman simply hadn’t learned how to avoid tetchy subjects with Collins, or whether he just didn’t mind the abuse the old geezer piled on him.

  But for once Collins’s reply was gentle, rueful even. He sketched a vision of young Mrs. Collins as a beautiful Irish colleen, only a generation removed from County Mayo. Splendid to look at, with a quiet disposition he took to be shyness. At that point he was tired of barnstorming, setting the stage for the first incarnation of Collins Aircraft Company in a converted barn in Saginaw, and he thought it was time to marry. It wasn’t until after the wedding that he realized that what had seemed timidity was in fact just a generalized dislike of humanity. “I would have caught on to her before I married her except she drove me temporarily crazy.”

  “Crazy how?” Norman asked.

  “She wouldn’t let me touch her. ‘That’s for marriage, Everett.’ And when I say no touching I’m not talking about having her suck my cock or even getting a quick feel of her tits, either. I’m saying she wouldn’t let me touch her on the shoulder or the arm. And she had a hell of a figure, too, in those days. These days she looks like a two-hundred-fifty-pound Sister of the Blessed Virgin Mary with a droopy left eye and a cane, but back then I’d have given a year of my life for a night with her. And you know, for once in my life I thought I loved someone. So on our wedding night I found out that she thought sex was a damned chore and strictly necessary for the production of babies, and once I’d popped a load in her she said that’s it until next month.”

  Driving back to the east side of town Collins was so agitated I was beginning to think some of the effects of those months on Hycodan might be permanent. He blamed me for Park’s defection, and all the way out there he grumbled about how I was a shit excuse for a driver and no bodyguard at all.

  “And Huff isn’t supposed to be dead, he’s supposed to be working for us now,” he said.

  I reminded him that he’d signed off on the plan, that he’d been delighted to see the incriminating photograph.

  “Doesn’t matter. Now I’ve got to go to the goddamn funeral and act like I’m sorry the son of a bitch is dead. And I still don’t know how the board’s going to vote. He didn’t have a vote, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Shit, who knows if he could have changed any of theirs.”

  “There are still ways of influencing votes.”

  “How? You going to dig up the goods on the whole board? In a week’s time?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  SINCE HE LEFT no note there was no proof Huff had put out his own lights, so he got a funeral mass at St. Bridget’s of Galway. The large crowd was a testament to the popularity Minnie Grau had spoken of, and I was surprised to see that the officiating priest was none other than my old childhood pal Joe McGill. I hadn’t seen him since before the war and though he’d grown a little rounder and slightly bald, there was still a childish air about him, as though he were merely posing as a priest and terrified someone was going to catch him out in his masquerade.

  Huff’s sons sat with their mother, the youngest one crying silently and the older ones ranging in aspect from sullen anger to shell shock. They looked like fine boys, and I was proud to have spared them the discovery of the eight-by-ten. The newly minted widow was surprisingly attractive, younger looking in person than in the family photographs hanging in her upstairs hallway; perhaps a rejuvenating effect of the dark veil. She had nice legs, tapering down to a pair of heels that, even in black, were perhaps a little high for a funeral. Dr. Freud would have said she was sending out a subconscious signal, seeking some of the sexual attention she had certainly been missing for the last few years, and I wondered what Emily Post had to say about how soon after a funeral it was proper to proposition a widow.

  In the audience I spotted several board members, including Lamarr, Burress, and Latham. A well-lobbed grenade would have taken care of our problems right then and there, and I felt a pang of nostalgia for my quartermaster days. If they’d been a trio of inconvenient bird colonels back in the European Theater of Operations it would have happened, though not without some complications for your trusty supply sarge. Ordinance, of course, was the trickiest item in a black marketeer’s inventory, since it was more strictly accounted for than morphine or liquor, and since the QM Corps didn’t handle it ourselves a dangerous bargain would have to be made, but for those three turdapples I would have pulled it off.

  Lamarr squirmed in his pew like a man infested with a crippling dose of the crabs, his eyes bulging and wild, forehead glistening with sweat, the inch-thick layer of suet beneath his skin turning it the color of clotted cream. His demure, pretty wife sat next to him with her gloved hands in her lap and ignored him, never guessing how lucky she was to be married to a banker and not an army officer.

  Collins sat toward the front, looking solemn next to Mrs. Collins, who looked the way I imagined she always must have in church: deep in contemplation of the divine mysteries of creation, first and foremost among these being why a just God would unite indivisibly one of his most pious and chaste creations with a syphilitic, drunken, promiscuous heathen of a husband.

  Toward the back sat Millie Grau, wiping her eye with the corner of a handkerchief. To her left was a stiff with a clerical collar and slick blond hair, arms folded across his chest and avoiding her touch so scrupulously that I knew it was Donald. He looked as though the sound of the Latin mass and its attendant papist pageantry was tormenting his Lutheran soul to the point of distraction, and at several points in the proceedings I saw him blow out exasperated sighs.

  The sound of Joe’s Latin didn’t suit me, either, though for different reasons. Having been raised by a classics scholar and freethinker I had rarely ever had occasion to hear church in Latin, and my old pal’s pronunciations sounded outright wrong to my ears. This was unfortunate, because it inspired an inappropriate urge to laugh, and I forced myself to conjugate verbs in Greek in order to drive the other language from the forefront of my mind. I hoped the concentration on my face read to my fellow mourners as pained supplication for the safe passage of Huff’s soul heavenward.

  J.T. Burress stood up in the middle of the proceedings and headed for the rear. I followed him, having paid all the respects I considered due. Outside Burress stood smoking a cigarette and looking agitated. He must have flown in from New York, and I didn’t imagine he was happy about the prospect of two airplane trips to Wichita inside of a month. His suit was too heavy for a Kansas day in May, and he looked like he was about to drop. He had on the only pair of pincenez glasses I’d seen in years, and he glanced over at me as though trying to place me. Most likely he’d seen my picture in whatever reports he’d been getting from Huff or Lamarr or Latham, whichever of them had been doing the grunt work in the effort to oust the boss and me.

  “Heck of a thing, isn’t it?” I said as I approached.

  “Certainly is. Man in his prime like that.” He hawked up a little bit of phlegm and, after a moment’s silent debate, swallowed rather than spit on the church steps in front of the hearse driver and some stranger.

  “Wonder what made him do it?”

  “It was an accident. If it weren’t we wouldn’t be standing outside a Catholic church, I’ll
tell you that.” He looked away, turning slightly so that there could be no mistaking his intentions. The conversation was over. Maybe he’d figured out who I was, or maybe he just didn’t like my looks, or maybe it was the shit-eating dopey grin I’d put on for his benefit.

  Old J.T. had been a friend of Collins’s since the founding of the company, one of the first financiers to put money into the enterprise, and I almost admired the sangfroid with which he’d turned on his old pal. He looked like he hadn’t taken a good dump in years, like he was just counting the days until he was laid out like Huff, like the only joys he had left were screwing over friends and attending funerals.

  DINNER THAT NIGHT was another abomination from a ladies’ magazine, involving a can of cream of mushroom soup, some undercooked potatoes, and a very bad cut of beef boiled into tastelessness, the whole thing seasoned with a great deal of salt. I suspected my dear wife of improvisation, since no sane editor could have allowed such a recipe into print as she had prepared it. I ate about a third of it like a soldier, avoiding the hardest of the potato chunks and complimenting her resourcefulness. When I was done she looked defeated and small, and I assured her it had been delicious. “I’ve got to take the old man out to a roadhouse later,” I said.

  “How come he can’t drive himself?”

  “Because he gets drunk when he goes out, and if he got killed I’d be out of a swell job.”

  “How come somebody else can’t drive him?” she wanted to know.

  It was a good question, especially since I wasn’t really driving the old man around that night, having managed to pawn the job temporarily off on the equally heavy-drinking Rackey. Probably Collins would have been better off driving his own car, but I wasn’t worried about that tonight.