The Adjustment

by Scott Phillips

  “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

  THE 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 hi
m 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.

  We had him booked in what I’d been told was Al Capone’s favorite suite in the old days. I don’t know what your average hotel suite is like in Hot Springs, but by any standards I knew Collins’s was opulent to the point of immorality. One of the bedrooms was fully interior with no windows; that was Collins’s room, which locked from the outside. The resort had had plenty of prior experience with dry-outs and water cures and, presumably, narco cases. Park and I had single rooms on either side of the suite, the other two rooms in the suite being reserved for the doctor and his nurse.

  Doctor Hargis was recommended by the manager of the resort, Mr. Clyde Furrough, with whom I’d been frank about the reason for our stay. Doctor Hargis, the manager claimed, had gotten any number of prominent hopheads off of dope, including Errol Flynn. “He’s not cheap,” Furrough warned, “but he’s effective and discreet.”

  I fell involuntarily asleep on a divan of crushed green velveteen, exhausted from the drive, the second half of which had been mine. I dreamed I was in Collins’s office, choking him as he thrashed savagely, his face ladybug red and his eyes watering, tongue protruding purple and twitching, as Miss Grau and Mrs. Caspian and the rest of the secretarial pool looked on with approval and admiration.

  I couldn’t have been more disappointed when a brisk rapping at the door woke me promptly at nine PM. It was Doctor Hargis, accompanied by a white-haired, jowly nurse whose white orthopedic shoes squeaked with the strain every time she took a step. He explained to me my part in the procedure, which consisted entirely of paying his fee, half of it up front. I wrote him a check on Collins’s personal account, which he folded neatly into quarters and put in his vest pocket. He had a pointed van dyke and round glasses that together gave him the air of an old Viennese quack, but which I suspected were intended to foster a slight resemblance to Doc Brinkley, the goat gland man, who’d been a prominent citizen of Hot Springs before he hightailed it for Mexico. I hoped Hargis’s medical credentials were less suspect than Brinkley’s, but then this was just a narcotics cure and not heart surgery.

  “By the way,” the doctor said. “You’ll need to get rid of all his medicine. Can’t have any around the suite, not even hidden.”

  “You’re not going to taper him off a little at a time?”

  “No. This is what we call cold turkey. Cut him off all at once. It’s not pleasant, but it’s the most effective method we have. So take the pills and throw them away.”

  The doctor and his nurse went into Collins’s room and I pocketed the rest of the old man’s pills, close to three hundred probably. It sounded as though his bedside manner could stand some improvement; I first heard some muttering from Collins and then some garbled but loud introductions from the doctor, followed by a bellow of outrage from the old man. Anticipating a long evening, I told Park I was going out for some air.

  At the Western Union desk I composed a telegram for Sally. I’d told her that Collins was coming down for a delicate medical procedure, that it was a secret, and that if anybody asked where I was she was to say Chicago.

  “Is it one of those monkey gland deals?” she’d asked the morning we left. “Or is it goat glands?”

  What the hell, it sounded plausible. “That’s right, Doc Brinkley’s coming back up from Mexico in secret to perform the operation. So you can see why he wants it kept quiet. Especially from Mrs. Collins. What would people think if they knew Everett Collins had the testicles of a goat?”

  I saw Brinkley once on a gambling trip to Hot Springs before I got married. He hadn’t been indicted yet, I don’t think, and he strode down the sidewalk with the bearing of an archduke in miniature. His radio shows were a staple when I was a kid, promising rejuvenation and renewed virility through the miracle of interspecies ball exchanges. Not exchanges, really, since Doc Brinkley’s operating theatre of horrors offered the poor goats nothing in return for the gift of their gonads. It might be argued that the human recipients of said testes received nothing either, since the most a transplanted pair of billygoat balls would get you was a nasty infection, and the doctor’s death rates were high. The whole business reeked of charlatanism and the carnie sideshow and for years his program was by far the best thing on the radio.

  I still listened to the Doc’s radio shows at night sometimes, beamed northward from old Mexico at wattages forbidden to American broadcasters, and sometimes felt tempted to send in a dollar for an autographed photograph of Jesus Christ or a novelty box of jumping beans. Border radio never made me despair for civilization the way “Lum and Abner” or “Baby Snooks” did.

  Once I’d sent the telegram I wandered down the street and found a saloon called the Inside Straight. I’d been expecting hillbilly music, but inside a five-piece Negro orchestra was doing a pretty good take on “Pussy Willow,” and a decent looking gal greeted me as I walked in. At the bar I ordered a drink from a dapper bartender in a white tuxedo and took a look around the place. Expensive furniture and fixtures, and a mahogany backbar that looked like a survivor of the last century.

  Standing there I fantasized that if I’d thought to bri
ng my cash from the safety deposit box I might just take the company Olds and drive it down to Mexico myself for good, leaving everyone wondering whatever happened to good old Wayne instead of overseeing a drug fiend’s unwilling detoxification and plotting to destroy another man’s reputation or force him into retirement, a man who for all I knew was a decent, hardworking type who’d been careless about an exploitable peccadillo.

  And then my bleak mood lifted of its own accord, as though I’d simply dwelt on it sufficiently to clear it out of my mind for a couple of days. I was in one of the most wide-open resorts in the country, surrounded by vice and shameless women. My expression must have changed because the bartender picked up on it and spoke.

  “Here for the waters?” he asked in a Brooklyn accent thick as Durante’s. He looked like a boxer, or maybe just someone people decided to punch in the face once in a while.

  “Not particularly,” I said.

  “Hah. Didn’t think so.”

  He didn’t press me for more, a sign of a good bartender. All my visits to Hot Springs in the past had been on a markedly lower budget than this one, and now that Collins was in the care of a medical professional I began thinking about recreational possibilities.

  “Where does a guy go to find a gal around here?”

  “Depends if he’s looking for a freebie or a paid piece of ass.”

  “In a strange place I always prefer to go for the latter.”

  “Smart man. Anything free around here is going to be very, very questionable. Where you staying?”

  “The Arlington.”

  “Class operation, but don’t ask for girls there, you’ll pay too much.” He wrote a number down on a matchbook. “Call this number and tell ’em Herb sent you.”