The Adjustment

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 exception,” 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, f*cking her was like f*cking 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.

“It’s just until we hire a new bodyguard. And I’ll be home as early as I can.”

She pouted, and I couldn’t get a kiss out of her as I left. That was all right; if she was mad she wouldn’t wait up.





I DROVE DOWNTOWN and met Irma and Wageknecht at the Bellflower Café and ordered some chop suey to make up for Sally’s inedible meal. The chop suey was lousy as ever, but by comparison it went down pretty well.

“It’s real white of you to call me in on this,” Wageknecht said.

“The old man promised you you’d get first crack at anything like this, and he keeps his word.”

“I been thinking maybe I could get me a license and do this kind of work full time,” he said. He looked at Irma. “Maybe you could be my gal Friday.”

“Nice try, I’d rather earn my money on my back than sitting in front of a typewriter all day.” She ground her cigarette into the ashtray and gave a little snort.

“Then you could be my partner. Like Myrna Loy and William Powell.”

“Sure, only difference is Powell’s not f*cking her, he’s chasing Cary Grant instead.”

I was quiet, wolfing down the chop suey. I signaled the girl to bring me another plate of it while they mapped out their new careers. Finally I stopped eating for a minute and added my two cents.

“I don’t know shit about the detective business, but you could sure make some money taking dirty pictures. Nester could find some way to distribute them through the mail.”

They looked at one another and nodded slowly at the wisdom of my suggestion, scenarios brewing independently in their heads and growing into the seeds of a new enterprise, the future source of a million lonesome orgasms all across this land. I felt like I’d done them a favor, getting them off of this detective nonsense, which was a sure-fire waste of time and energy.

“All right then. You brought the 35 millimeter job?” I asked Wageknecht.

“Brought the Speed Graphic with a flashgun. I figure if you mostly want to intimidate this guy, the Speed Graphic is a scarier camera.”

“Good thinking. The picture will be better, too, if we actually have to use it, which I very much doubt. Are we all ready, then? Everybody know their part?”





IT WAS NEARLY ten thirty when we walked two blocks down to the Eaton, where Burress had a top floor suite. That made it eleven thirty Eastern time, and I assumed that Burress kept conservative hours. Jerry the hotel dick was waiting for us by the kitchen entrance, and when I handed him his envelope full of cash he grinned. “You’re trouble, Ogden, but I like your style. Always a little something extra.”

We went up the service elevator and Wageknecht and I waited outside in the corridor while Jerry quietly opened the door to the suite and let Irma in. Then he went back down the service elevator, pausing to give a jaunty little salute as the doors closed. Strictly speaking I shouldn’t have been on the scene, but I had to see the look on the smug son of a bitch’s face when he realized the game was up.

Two minutes later Irma gave the signal, an eardrum-crippling whistle of the two-fingers-in-the-mouth variety, a skill I’d never mastered myself. We hurried in to find a bewildered J. T. Burress on the floor of the bedroom in his nightshirt, straddled by Irma, who wore only bra, panties, and black stockings.

“Say ‘cheese,’” Wagknecht said, just to be an a*shole, and he took the picture, the bulb in the flash gun exploding a little louder than seemed right. Burress was looking at me, and there was a dim sort of recognition in his eyes.

“You were . . . ” he said, pointing his finger at my face, “I saw you today . . . ” With that his eyes went wild and he yelped in pain.

“Oh, shit,” Irma said. “I’ve been around for this before.”

She picked up the phone and dialed. “Jerry, you’d better call an ambulance, there’s a guy up here having a heart attack.”

I drove them over to Norman’s. He was drinking alone and glad to have some company. Irma and Wageknecht were both in a funk, and once he’d heard the story Norman tried to cheer them up.

“You did good, it sounds like to me,” he said.

“That’s the way I see it,” I said. “If he lives, we’ve got a hell of a picture to send him. If he doesn’t, the problem’s solved a different way.”

Wageknecht wasn’t sold on it. “I don’t think I’m cut out for the detective business, if everyone I tail ends up dying.”

“It’s just two of them, and we don’t even know about Burress yet.”

Irma was quiet, and kept handing her glass back to Norman for more. “I kinda like the old guys. They’re generous.”

“Not this one, I’ll bet. He’s a goddamn banker, probably keeps his own dough stuffed inside his mattress.”

Norman perked up at the news that Irma liked old guys. “You know, one thing about us old guys is, we take our time and don’t jizz quite so quick as all that.” Irma and Wageknecht looked at one another, eyebrows raised.

During the solitary portion of his evening Norman had gotten a pretty serious head start on his drinking, and he wasn’t doing a very good job concealing his devotion to his new friend Irma. He was wobbling a little bit even in his sitting position, and when he got up to open a new bottle he had to lean against the wall on his way across the room. Upon his return he refreshed Irma’s glass first, and then knelt in front of her as if to propose marriage, which wouldn’t have surprised me at that point.

“Do you know that you bear a very strong resemblance to the motion picture performer and artiste . . . ” Here he had to stop and collect his thoughts momentarily. “ . . . Miss Joan Blondell, whom I consider to be the most sweet and attractive of all the stars in . . . ” Another pause came, and he closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. “ . . . all Hollywood’s firmament?” This last word came at a cost of some effort, but he added no extra syllables and seemed quite pleased with himself once he’d finished.

Irma looked pleased, too, flushed and newly radiant, and she leaned down and touched her hand to his cheek. I don’t think he could have been more thrilled if it had been a handjob. “Maybe we could arrange a date sometime,” she said, and she rummaged through her handbag for a calling card.

“I would like that very much, Miss,” Norman said, accepting the card as though it were a gift of great price. I was pretty sure we had established earlier in the evening the nature of Irma’s profession; her resemblance to Joan Blondell had cured him of his aversion to paying for it, which would probably result in his being a happier man. Now he turned to Wageknecht. “And what is it you do for a living, young fellow?”

“I’m a private detective,” he said, trying the phrase on like a costume. “I used to be a whore, though.”

Norman nodded, looking like the idea was new to him. “That’s interesting.”

Wageknecht nodded. “And if the private detective business doesn’t work out, I’m thinking about taking dirty pictures and selling them.”

Norman smiled. “That’s a job I would have loved to have when I was younger,” he said.

“How serious are you about giving it up?” I asked Wageknecht.

“Pretty serious.”

I thought for a minute before I spoke again. It seemed perfect. Collins might object to Wageknecht if he knew about the whole queer business, but there was no reason for him to find out unless Wageknecht told him. And he was an ex-marine. “Wageknecht, how would you like a job as a bodyguard and chauffeur?”

“Hell, yes, I’d like it.”

“All right then, show up at Collins Aircraft tomorrow at eleven and I’ll take you down to personnel.”

“That’s swell of you, Mr. Ogden.”

“I believe I’d rather have that job taking dirty pictures,” Norman said, and not long after that he fell asleep.





DRIVING HOME AT three-fifteen in the morning I felt as though I hadn’t slept in a week, and I was ready to surrender to Morpheus. I cursed, then, when I spotted an unfamiliar vehicle parked two houses south of mine, a ’34 or ’35 Chrysler Airflow with New York MD plates, an absurdly conspicuous choice for a driver who wanted to keep his profile low.

Of all the nights for this shit-for-brains to show up in person, he’d picked tonight. The adrenaline that had pumped through my system earlier in the evening came back in force, and my fatigue evaporated. I turned at the next intersection and doubled back, parking one street west on South Volutsia. I cut between two houses and watched the Airflow for five or six minutes and satisfied myself that the driver, his head back and his mouth open, was asleep. Then I went back to the Olds and drove around the block again.

This time I backed into the driveway and slammed the door when I got out. I didn’t dare sneak a look backward at the Airflow, but I hoped my arrival had startled him awake. Feigning a drunken stagger as I made my way up to the front door, I made a show of fumbling with my keys and stumbled inside, leaving the door open.

Sally was a good, solid sleeper, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to explain to her what was happening. In a crouch, I made my way to the fireplace and grabbed an andiron, one with a nice sharp hook at the end of it, and took a position over by the front door.

A silhouette appeared, holding a gun in one hand and a satchel in the other. He moved gingerly into the room, illuminated by the lone streetlamp outside, and as soon as he crossed the threshold I brought the andiron down hard on the back of his head, and when he hit the ground I hit him again in the face.

I got some copper wiring and a large oilskin tarp from the garage and tied his wrists and ankles with the wire before wrapping him in the tarp, then locked him in the trunk of the Olds. I took his gun, a .38, and his satchel, which was made of leather and marked with the initials WGP MD, and put them in the car, then cleaned off of the linoleum and threw the bloodied dishrag into the big trash can in the garage, piling some newspapers over it in case Sally might take a load of kitchen waste out. Then I took my trusty old wheelbarrow and a shovel and, as quietly as I could, loaded them into the backseat of the Olds.

I got behind the wheel and headed out to highway 54. Just outside the little town of Augusta was an old limestone quarry where my dad used to take me looking for fossils when I was a boy. I was hoping that the abandoned foreman’s shack was still standing; even if it wasn’t, there wasn’t a house within two miles of the place. At least there didn’t used to be.

Fifteen minutes later I was pulling into the quarry road. I hoped my bashful correspondent wasn’t dead, because I wanted to find out a few things before he checked out.

I shone my flashlight into his leather satchel: inside was a sadist’s bounty of torture tools: knives, pliers, duct tape, and an assortment of medical supplies, including syringes and surgical instruments and small bottles of drugs. It seemed impossible that my tormentor was a doctor, given the analphabetical quality of his notes, but that may have been a ruse.

I took the wheelbarrow and shovel from the back seat, opened the trunk, and heaved the oilskin bundle into the barrow. It let loose a grunt when it hit, and I loaded the medical bag and copper wire on top of it. Then I marched to the foreman’s shack, halfway around the rim of the quarry with the shovel balanced over my shoulder and the .38 in my pocket, the wheelbarrow bouncing and jiggling in the dark, the flashlight’s beam shining crazily over the path ahead.

I dumped the barrow out when I got to the foreman’s shack and hauled him inside. Very carefully I untied the wire that held the ends of the tarp closed and found that he was breathing.

From his back trouser pocket I took his wallet and learned that he was not a doctor, nor were his initials WGP. His driver’s license identified him as Ralph Joseph Gardner, of Astoria, Queens, New York, as did a Veteran’s Administration Employee’s Identification card. Apart from a Social Security card and seven dollars, that was all the wallet contained.

With the flashlight in his squirrely eyes I knew him right away. He was a PFC who’d tried to sell me a stolen army jeep in Rome, gap-toothed in front and sunken-chested, who walked with a peculiar stiff-legged gait as though he was imitating John Wayne. “Hell, you’re a fence, ain’tcha?” he’d said, insulted that I wouldn’t fork over for a set of wheels that would have got me court martialed. I remembered him spending lots of his pay on whores, though not whether he was particularly attached to one girl or another.

I considered the possibility of killing him right then and disposing of him somehow before the sun came up. I was still curious about him, though, about how he’d settled on me as the villain in his imaginary love story, so I slapped him in the face, hard. He stirred, his eyes unfocused and bleary, and then he got a load of me and tried to yell. Only a hoarse rattle came out, though, and I thought maybe I’d knocked him stupid.

“How are you, Ralph?”

“Go to hell.” He was slurring, but I didn’t think he was drunk.

“So what’s your beef with me? Still mad about that jeep?”

“Lemme go,” he said, pulling at the wire.

“I didn’t kill Brunela, you know. She killed herself.”

“Same as. Lousy pimp. She loved me.”

“She was a pro. She didn’t love you.”

“She listened to me. She was going to come to America with me when the war was over.”

“Brunela f*cked you for money, just like she did a thousand other guys. She listened to your sob stories because you were paying her to. And I didn’t kill her.”

“You pimped her.”

I shook my head, exasperated at his refusal to face reality. “But I didn’t turn her out. She’d been working two or three years already by the time I came on the scene. The fact is I improved her working conditions. Made her last six months or so bearable, the way I see it.”

The funny thing about it was, old Ralph didn’t seem very scared. He was pissed off, sure, but I really don’t think he’d figured out that his number was up. “You think the rules don’t apply to you, Ogden. Just the rest of us.”

“I can’t quite figure you out,” I said. “You’re smart enough to track me down halfway across the country, and dumb enough to fall in love with a hooker.”

“And you cheating Uncle Sam while guys like me was getting killed fighting.”

“Ralph, you were stealing jeeps from the army. And I see you’re still stealing cars. I’m guessing the Airflow and the bag both belong to one of your Administration docs. How’d you find me, anyway? I know you work for the VA, but I can’t believe they’d let an illiterate work as a file clerk.”

“I got a lady friend in the filing department, helps me out.”

“Shit, Ralph, you should have been satisfied with that. A job and a girl, that’s the American dream. You probably would have had your own car before long. House with a lawn. Now what have you got to look forward to?”

“Going to make you pay for what you did to Brunela. And then I’m going to f*ck that wife of yours. She’s some potato.”

“You mean tomato, you dumb shit.” I was tired of the sound of him and tired of the sight. He was just about to say something when I picked up the shovel.

“Hey, wait. You can’t kill me.”

“Sure I can,” I said, and I dragged him by the legs out the broken doorframe of the shack. He was struggling pretty hard and I thought I’d better shut him down quickly, so I swung the shovel over my shoulder like a golfer. That finally put a scare into him, and he let loose a terrified wail as I brought the blade down sideways and hard on his head. His piteous wail didn’t end with the impact but wound down over two or three seconds, like a radio that’s been turned off.

A dozen yards from the shack I began to dig.