The Adjustment

by Scott Phillips

  “Thanks, Herb. How’d you end up down here, anyway?”

  “Cousin of mine had some business associates down here. Speaking of which, you like to gamble?”

  “Once in a while. I hate to lose.” Having run a floating craps game in Italy I had come to realize that in gambling there wasn’t much reason for the house to cheat, so stacked are the odds against any individual player.

  “The place to go is the Hotel England, you ask for the management and tell ’em I sent you, they’ll treat you all right.”

  “You’re all right, Herb. Who’s the gal up front?” I asked, nodding at the beauty greeting customers at the door.

  “Vera’s her name, I wouldn’t waste time trying to get anywhere with her. Lots of guys have tried around here.”

  “Pretty girl.”

  “You’re telling me. I’m a married man, but I’d give a year of my life for one night in the sack with her.”

  “It’s just that I don’t remember seeing any girls like her down here before the war.”

  “Not many like her now. She’s from Little Rock, what passes for a city girl down here.” He laughed. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the place, it’s been good to me, and I can’t go back to New York anyway. In fact, when I got down here I was knocked out by how swank it was. I was expecting Mammy and Pappy Yokum and donkeys in front yards and booze out of jugs marked XXX, if you know what I mean.”

  On my way out I said “Good night, Vera,” and she responded with such familiarity and sweetness I almost stopped right then and there to ask her out for a drink later, but that was the wrong strategy for a girl like her.

  AT THE HOTEL England the games were hopping, and a bigger orchestra than the one at the bar was tearing through “Main Stem.” I asked for management and was pointed to a large, dark-haired man in a rumpled tuxedo who was gesticulating with his stogie to an apparently petrified subordinate, whom he then waved away with a delicate gesture of high-strung distaste.

  “Herb sent me over,” I told him.

  “Herb, huh? How do you know Herb?” he asked.

  “Just met him over at the Inside Straight.”

  “Oh, that’s great, good old Herb.” He said it with such relief it made me wish I knew why Herb couldn’t go back to New York. “Here’s the Herb special tonight.” He handed me a two dollar chip. “Good luck, pal.”

  I decided right then that I was going to bet the two dollars and nothing I’d brought with me. At the roulette table I placed the chip on the red and won, then placed chips new and old on the black and won again. Then I took my winnings and dropped them into my jacket pocket, to the consternation of the dealer, who had plainly read me as a man who would let my bundle ride until it vanished with one wrong spin.

  I played two hands of blackjack and won the second. Then I watched the craps table for a while to see if it was clean, since it was the only game I knew enough to judge by. It looked all right, but I’d watched so many craps tossed in the army the prospect of play held no joy for me. I was about to leave and spend my modest winnings on a steak dinner when I thought I saw someone I knew standing in front of a one-armed bandit. He didn’t seem to have noticed me, so I cautiously moved around the silver row of machines and peered from the other end at my old army pal Lou Arnesdale.

  He looked like shit stew warmed over the next day. His eyes were sunken and dull and he was thinner than he’d been in the army, so thin the army wouldn’t have taken him back. He was playing one of the nickel machines and looking heartbroken every time the reels clanked once, twice, thrice to their sad resolution.

  Lou Arnesdale owed me money, and from the looks of him he wouldn’t be able to pay it back any time soon. We were partners in London selling army tires to civilians via a black marketeer named Syd, one of the sweetest deals I was ever in on, and I’d done Lou a favor letting him partner up with me. It turned out that Lou had a little narcotics habit of his own, and when he got transferred out of London he took over a thousand pounds of my money. That was pounds sterling, not dollars. He hadn’t told me he was being transferred and I wasn’t able to track him down, and I certainly couldn’t report the theft; some operations are off limits even by the standards of the Quartermaster Corps, and selling army rubber is definitely such an operation.

  For a second I wondered if he was my poison pen correspondent, but it didn’t seem likely. Lou’d known me in London, not Rome. Approaching him here was a non-starter, so I decided to take a position across the street and wait for him to come out. I didn’t think it would take long, since the supply of nickels in his hand didn’t amount to half a dollar, and his luck certainly wasn’t going to get much better tonight.

  I waved at the manager on my way out. “You win some and you lose some, huh?” I said.

  “Better luck next time,” he said, delighted to think that I’d dropped some of my own money at his tables.

  THERE WAS A newsstand across the street. I browsed until I sensed the attendant getting antsy, then I bought the new Esquire and moved a few feet down the block. It was around eleven o’clock when Lou slinked out of the casino, dejected and friendless. He walked up that side of the street and turned a corner. I crossed and peered around it to make sure he wasn’t looking back or waiting for me to catch up. He wasn’t.

  He continued up the street to a place called the Stuckey Palace Hotel and Apartments, a rundown brick building advertising weekly rates on the painted tin sign drilled into its facade. I waited until he’d had time to do whatever there was to do in the lobby, which would have differed depending on whether he was a hotel guest or a proper tenant. After five minutes had passed I stepped into a foyer and found no one on duty at the desk. Rows of mailboxes lined either side of the entry, beneath a panel affixed with the names and corresponding apartments of its inhabitants. ARNESDALE, L.P. lived in apartment 5H.

  Retribution, whatever it turned out to be, could wait a few days. I’d waited years to find Lou and hadn’t really expected ever to run across him. Now the gods had dumped him wriggling into my jaws, and I wouldn’t waste the opportunity.

  WHEN I GOT back to the hotel I called the number Herb had scrawled on the matchbook and had a girl sent up to my room. The service was cheap, as he’d promised, and mentioning his name had gotten me a further reduction in fee. When the girl showed up I let her into the room and she entered it with the élan and self-confidence of a movie star. She had jet-black hair pinned up at the crown of her skull and big black eyes that set off a slightly-too-large nose. Her walk had a nice sashay to it, and the first thing I asked after handing her the fee was for her to walk around the room a few times. When she asked me what I wanted next I told her to just get undressed and we’d think of something. She engaged me in some small talk as she performed her strip-tease, artfully tossing one garment after another over her shoulder or bending over to place it on a chair. I had a pretty good sense of her body before she’d finished and was glad I’d listened to Herb.

  “What brings you to the Springs? Business or pleasure?” Her accent was northern Midwest, maybe the Dakotas, maybe Minnesota, maybe even Ontario, and I had to wonder what sad circumstance had brought her down to this hillbilly Sodom.

  “Combination,” I said. “Started with business, now there turns out to be some pleasure involved.”

  I was thinking of the pleasure I was going to get from killing Lou, but she took it for a compliment. “I’ll try and keep you satisfied.”

  Fifteen minutes later a howling started coming from the supposedly soundproof suite next door. I didn’t think the old man had been without his medicine for long enough to produce that kind of pain; possibly he was howling at the injustice of the whole business. He had become unaccustomed over the last thirty or thirty-five years to having his demands unmet or his orders disobeyed. Then again Dr. Hargis had mentioned that his particular methods involved the application of countermedications, and that the side effects of these were sometimes unpleasant.

  “Do you hear that?”
the girl asked, tensing beneath me.

  “Yep,” I said.

  She pressed her hands to my chest to get me to stop pushing. “Shouldn’t we do something? Call downstairs?”

  “Trust me,” I said, and I rode her another five minutes to the demented music of Everett Collins’s wailing and yelling until I finally finished and rolled off of her.

  “It sounds like someone’s in pain,” she said, sitting up.

  “It isn’t. The fellow next door is an animal trainer from the Clyde Beatty Circus. He’s got Beatty’s prize orang-outang, Rusty, in there.”

  “Aren’t rangytangs dangerous?”

  “Sure, but not this one. He’s highly trained, brighter than most schoolchildren. But he’s at the end of his life now, and they get senile just like people do. He probably thinks he’s back in Borneo, running from a tiger.”

  “So Mr. Beatty put him up in a hotel?”

  “He was very fond of this particular ape. Wanted him to end his days in luxury. Actually I believe he thought the waters might bring his reason back.”

  She narrowed her eyes, having caught me up. “You,” she said. “You work for the circus, don’t you?”

  “I’m not really free to say one way or the other.”

  “Do you think there’s any possibility Mr. Beatty is going to come and visit his monkey before he passes?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “My gosh, if he does, would you call back and ask for me? I love the circus. If I could have run away and done that I would have.”

  “I’ll call you if he comes,” I said, lacking the heart to disabuse her of whatever remained of the dreams of a Midwestern girl who’d run away and ended up joining a whorehouse instead of the circus.

  THE NEXT NIGHT at eleven o’clock, having spent most of the day at the hotel playing cards with Herman Park and listening to Collins’s screams, I stepped out onto the street. I’d only been out once, to the bus depot to meet a man the desk clerk had recommended as a source of illicit goods. The man was a strapping young hayseed who seemed not to have taken to farming. He wore his fedora at an angle meant to be rakish, but that made him look as though someone had recently knocked it askew without his noticing. His enormous Adam’s apple danced as he spoke, and for the exorbitant price of fifty dollars he let me have a cheap revolver and a lead sap. Thinking that we were haggling, I’d made a counteroffer of thirty, expecting to pay forty, but he held firm. “Saps are illegal. You get caught selling a blackjack you could get time.”

  I was happy to get the sap as a backup plan. I figured on shooting Lou and making a run for it, but I worried about the noise, and I did like the idea of beating him to death with it, if I could get him unconscious quickly enough to avoid a lot of screaming. God knew I’d had enough of that for one day.

  Now it was night, warm and humid, the sap weighing down my jacket pocket. The only time I’d ever used such a thing was in London, a token of esteem from Syd the black marketeer, who called it a cosh and described with unseemly gusto his favorite methods for its proper use.

  Figuring it was probably still early for Lou to be returning I stopped in at the Inside Straight to thank Herb for his advice. Herb wasn’t in, though, his replacement a taciturn rustic with ill-fitting dentures who served me my drink and scowled. The orchestra was the same but having an off night, plowing through Whiteman instead of swinging to Ellington, and the place had a dingy feel it hadn’t had the night before.

  The lovely Vera was still at the door, though, looking even better than the night before. I must have been pretty openly paying more attention to her than to the music, because the bartender finally spoke to me. “You’ll never get anywhere with her. She’s got no sex drive.”

  Did this toothless backwoods Adonis take any rejection from a female as evidence of lack of libido? I pressed him for details, expecting to hear a grudge-fueled hard-luck tale. Instead he gave me a real nugget of useful information.

  “She’s hooked on codeine. Spends a hell of a lot of dough on it, and it kills any desire she used to have to open her legs.”

  I finished my drink and headed for the door, and Vera tilted her head at me in disappointment as I left. I imagined I saw a bit of wooziness in her eyes, but that was probably the power of suggestion. “Just one tonight?” she asked, like a good hostess making sure to quickly learn the habits of anyone who showed the slightest sign of becoming a regular source of money spent.

  “Just one,” I said. “I’m Wayne, by the way.”

  “I’m Vera. But you know that.”

  “See you later,” I said, and gave her a happy glance over my shoulder as I went.

  BEFORE I HEADED out on the night’s real business I headed up to my room to where I’d stashed Collins’s remaining supply of Hycodan. Ten pills seemed about right for a start, and I headed back down to the street and hightailed it for Lou’s.

  A FEW MINUTES later I was standing outside the front of his building. I walked around the corner to examine the western facade; from the street there were no lights visible on the fifth floor. Once again there was no one to slip past at the front desk of the Stuckey Palace Hotel and Apartments, and I followed the path worn into the stairwell carpet up to the fifth floor. I’d brought a few things I thought might be useful for picking Lou’s lock, but to my considerable surprise found that he hadn’t locked his door. I looked around the apartment and found nothing of value; no doubt everything but his clothes had been pawned to feed his habit.

  I turned out the lights again and sat down in Lou’s threadbare easy chair and picked at the loose threads on the armrests. I hoped he wouldn’t be too long; it wouldn’t do for Lou to come home and find his would-be killer asleep in his front room.

  Around twelve-fifteen the door cracked open and Lou entered. “Hello, Og. Long time,” he said before he flicked the switch.

  I had the revolver trained on his silhouette when the light came on. Lou was smiling.

  “You robbed me, Lou. We were partners.”

  “No honor among thieves, Ogden, isn’t that what they say?”

  “Partners, Lou.”

  “What can I say? I had a monkey on my back the size of King Kong and dope peddlers after my hide and Uncle Sam offered me a transfer and I took it.”

  “Along with your money and mine.”

  “I know.”

  “And you still haven’t kicked. All this time and you’re still fixing, throwing all your money away.”

  “Nope, I kicked two years ago, after I got discharged. Dishonorable. You know how fucking hard it was to get a dishonorable discharge in the middle of that war? Damned hard.”

  “Doesn’t look much like you kicked.”

  Another smile, rueful and without guile. There was forgiveness in it, fondness, even. “I did, though.”

  “Don’t you want to know how I tracked you down?”

  That smile again, patient and saintly. He looked seventy years old, and he was two years younger than I was. “Saw you last night at the casino, made damn sure you saw me.”

  “You wanted me to follow you.”

  “Yep. Came home an hour earlier than usual just so you’d know where to go.”

  Just then it hit me that he might be planning something of his own, but that look in his eyes belied any such notion. “You thought you could talk me into letting you off?”

  He sank down into the recently vacated easy chair, seemingly exhausted. “Not at all.”

  “Then you know why I’m here.”

  “Og, I ain’t hooked any more. I’m sick.”

  “Sick how?”

  “Cancer. Plus I got the sugar diabetes so bad you could take my piss and make wine out of it. Course with the kidney troubles I don’t produce much of that. One doc says I’m dead in three months, other one says I could last two years.”

  “So you think I’m going to give you a pass because you’re sick.”

  “Hell, no. I’m expecting you to kill me, just like you meant to.”

  I
stared at him and knew he was telling the truth. He winced from a sudden pain, clutched his side, a single shameful tear coursing down his stoic left cheek.

  “I can’t take two years of this, can’t take three months even. Don’t have the balls to do it myself. Jesus Christ sent you to me, Og. You’re my angel of death.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said, and I moved for the door. I nearly gave him the revolver and told him to be a man and do it himself, but in the end I just walked out the door without looking back, my revenge more severe than I’d pictured it and, curiously, less satisfying.

  On my way through the lobby a poorly-shaven bald man called out to me. “All visitors must be announced,” he said, his voice high in pitch and adenoidal. In a better mood I might have insulted his ancestry or told him where to go, maybe even broken his arm, but tonight I said nothing.

  I WALKED AWAY in the wrong direction and ended up in a section of town even seedier than Lou’s. Passing a dark doorway I was startled by the appearance of a raspy-voiced stranger.

  “Help a fellow out?” he asked. I couldn’t see him well but he was young and unshaven, and I almost reminded him that the depression was over. On second thought I pulled the gun from my coat and, after letting him get a good, long look at it, offered it to him, butt first. He stared without taking it.

  “Go on, take it. Go earn yourself a living.”

  With some reluctance, even a smidgeon of fear, he took it and pocketed it. “Thanks, bub.”

  I turned and walked back in the other direction, toward the hotel. When I got to the Inside Straight I stopped back in and Vera greeted me by name, touching me ever so slightly on the sleeve as I passed her. I stopped as though an interesting but absurd thought had just come to me unbidden.

  “Say, Vera, I don’t suppose you ever get off work, do you? I’m here for a week with nothing to do.” With an effort to appear casual I pulled a couple of Hycodans from my shirt pocket and displayed them before tossing them back out of sight.