The Adjustment (5 page)
There was a downside to this, too; the old man was in fine form since the end of his convalescence, nastier than usual and quicker to anger. Those periods of jolly drunkenness between short-tempered hangover and havoc-wreaking, pie-eyed inebriation were shorter and rarer than before.
I caught up with them as we’d tentatively planned at a blind pig above an old carriage house at 12th and Bitting in Riverside. The proprietor was an old friend of mine, a luckless boozer abandoned years ago by a wife he never stopped thinking or talking about. He and Collins were getting along like a house afire when I arrived, and Park was sitting in a chair drinking a ginger ale.
“Keep trying to tell this sumbitch he needs a goddamn drink,” Collins said when I walked in.
“I’m driving you around, Mr. Collins, I like to be alert,” Park said.
“I’ll have a bourbon, neat,” I said to my old pal Norman. He grinned, the gin blossoms on his nose and cheeks a deeper red than usual.
Collins was in one of his professorial moods, and I had apparently interrupted a long discourse on the comparative sexual needs of men and women, which he now resumed.
“On the other hand, though,” Collins said, “we have the women who can’t settle for one man. These are a rare breed. Most become prostitutes. Others bring shame upon good families by making spectacles of themselves. When I was coming up in Michigan there was a woman in our town, the wife of a judge, no less, who was discovered to have taken on no fewer than five lovers over a period of fifteen years. Now she was a handsome woman, but what sort of wife isn’t satisfied with a judge? And we knew, we men of the town, that the judge was perfectly capable in bed because he himself was known to keep mistresses. Now not everyone admired him for it, but it was proof that he could satisfy a woman, and by extension proof that his wife was insane. The scientific term is nymphomaniac.”
NORMAN SHOOK HIS head and looked at the floor. Park sat back in his chair and drank his ginger ale while Collins went on for a while in this vein: the horrors of menstruation, women’s hormones leading eventually, inevitably, to insanity of one kind or another.
As always Norman’s face hair was unwashed and a little too long, his glasses badly smudged, and he looked like he’d rather not listen any more. “Let’s go meet some women,” I said.
Park was already out of his chair. “I know a roadhouse way out on Tyler Road has some pretty wild ones,” he said.
“Guess we might as well before I get much drunker,” the boss said. I paid our bill (I was reimbursed every two weeks for expenses, since Collins wasn’t to be trusted with great amounts of cash on these expeditions), and we took our leave. At the bottom of the rickety staircase that led downstairs the old man stumbled and fell forward, hitting the door. A stream of obscenities and animal howls erupted, and when Park tried to reach for him Collins swung a wild fist in his direction.
“Goddamn broken ribs, Jesus Christ, I need back on the fucking morphine. Ogden, you get on that first thing in the goddamn morning.” His voice broke on that second “goddamn.”
THE ROADHOUSE PARK took us to was indeed full of wild women, and the boss’s mood cleared right up on arrival. He was talking to a pretty brunette who was dressed for a much better class of place than this, and she was rubbing his sleeve and laughing with delight at whatever he was saying to her, probably an indecent proposition. Park and I had earned our keep for the night.
Park stood in the doorway beckoning me. “There’s a dark Plymouth been following us since the blind pig; I don’t know if they were on our tail before or not, but that’s my guess. Parked in the back corner of the lot, guy’s sitting behind the wheel still.”
I went through the back door and moved to the parking lot, lurking among the twenty or so cars until I spotted the Plymouth and its driver, watching the front door of the roadhouse with a camera perched on top of the dash, a new-looking Speed Graphic. It was Hiram Fish, whom Mrs. Collins occasionally entrusted with the job of following her husband around gathering evidence of his misdeeds. There wasn’t much point to it besides masochism that I could see; devout Catholic that she was, she wouldn’t be able to use the photos in a divorce case.
On one occasion during the war, the old bitch had shown the old man a set of photos and demanded an explanation. They showed him at a party in the company of a homely and heavily made-up woman wearing only panties, garter belt, and black stockings, a getup similar to which most of the women in the background were also wearing. The men were in shirtsleeves and most wore paper hats marked with stars and stripes. He explained to the Mrs. that this was a birthday party for Uncle Sam, and that as defense contractors he and some of his colleagues were required to attend. When he added that the girl with him was a good patriotic American girl whose contribution to the war effort was made horizontally, Mrs. Collins slapped him. He backhanded her in response, knocking her into a cabinet filled with little porcelain figures, some of which fell off their shelves. She started crying, picking up the shards of the precious little things, and he left the house looking for a fight or a fuck or both. Or at least that’s the way Collins told me the story; I was in Italy at the time, or maybe still in England, fighting the Nazi menace in my own roundabout fashion.
In any event, Fish represented a threat to my status quo, and I didn’t like the looks of him anyway, with his little pencil moustache like a slick villain in a movie and his too-perfectly brilliantined hair. Not to mention there was always something a little shady about these ex-cops who take up snooping, just one step removed from window peepers and dickflashers, as far as I was concerned. I retraced my steps and went all the way around the building, then crept, doubled over, to Collins’s Packard. I opened up the right rear door and grabbed the baseball bat I kept stashed under the front seat.
Then I rose to my full height and strode across the gravel to Fish’s Plymouth. He tried frantically to start it up, but before he got it into gear I’d already smashed the windshield, spiderwebbing the glass badly enough to prevent its operation until the shards were busted out. Fish scrambled out the driver’s door.
“You crazy son of a bitch, what the hell you mean busting my windshield?”
I swung again, left-handed this time, and caught him in the shin. He went down in hysterics and I got him a good one on the forearm. I could hear bone cracking, and I figured he was probably out of commission for the evening.
A crowd had formed at the door of the roadhouse. Park was walking towards me, saying something conciliatory to a concerned stranger who was wondering whether I needed bringing to heel. I reached into the front seat and grabbed Fish’s Speed Graphic, took out the film holder and pulled the sheet out of it, then opened half a dozen more he had laying on the seat. I didn’t know if they contained latent images of Collins or not; I scattered the raw negatives onto the gravel. Then I set the camera on top of the Plymouth’s hood and clipped it like Ted Goddamn Williams. It flew a good twenty feet and banged into a Studebaker.
“Mr. Ogden,” Park was saying.
“Yeah.”
“Are you listening? This is important.”
“Yeah.”
“Mr. Ogden, I’m the bodyguard. It makes me look bad when you take it upon yourself to do something like this. I’m still new, I know, but next time just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
“You’re a good man, Park. Let’s have a drink.” I was well pleased at having hired him. We walked back inside and found the old man ensconced in a booth with his brunette, rubbing the inside of her thigh, completely unaware of the activity outside.
I GOT HOME exhausted at two in the morning and was relieved to find the lights out in the apartment. I undressed and got into bed and closed my eyes, and just as I began to relax into a state conducive to sleep the lamp came on.
“You son of a bitch,” she said, up on one elbow. Then she wheeled around and got out of bed, looking like she might hit me.
I was in worse trouble than I’d first assumed. “What the hell?” I said.
“If you won’t tell me what’s wrong I can’t fix it.”
Despite herself she was starting to cry. I was in bad trouble, I knew it; she hadn’t ever cried in my presence beyond her eyes getting a little wet, not even on the occasion of her mother’s death.
She struggled to get control and spoke again. “You don’t love me any more.”
Jumping Jesus, what do you say to that? “Course I do, baby, what are you talking about?”
She swallowed. She was regaining some of her control. “You’re out and about almost every night, I eat dinner with your mother more often than with you, ever since I told you about the baby you’ve barely touched me. You like that boss of yours more than me.”
I laughed at that, and she gave me a look of pure snake venom. Beautiful and feminine as she was, she was a big girl nonetheless, and she’d hit me before, and hard. “Baby, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I can’t stand the son of a bitch.”
“Then why are you out with him every night?”
“Because since I got back, that’s what my job is. Babysitter. Didn’t you ever wonder why the head of the Publicity and Marketing Department doesn’t go in to work most days until ten in the morning? My job is to keep a muzzle on the old man, and the only public relations I do is keeping the old pervert out of the
Beacon
and the
Eagle
.”
Beacon
and the
Eagle
.”
She wiped both cheeks with the heels of her palms. “You aren’t seeing somebody else?”
“Hell, no, why would I? I got the sweetest piece of tail in the state right here at home.” Despite herself I had made her giggle. “If you doubt me you can come along some night and watch me and the bodyguard sitting around watching the boss carouse.” In fact Collins would love that; he’d probably make a pass at her, pregnant or not.
“If you’re not seeing somebody else how come we’re down to four or five times a week any more?”
“Every night’s a tall order, baby. I’m thirty-one years old, and coming home late the way I do . . . half the time you’re asleep anyway.”
“I’m not asleep right now,” she said with the suggestion of a smile, lifting her nightie and exposing that exceptionally lovely torso. I stared at her body, her pubic hair especially black against her slightly swollen winter-white belly, nipples wide and erect, and said a little prayer of thanks for this heaven-sent carnal bounty.
DOCTOR EZRA GROFF kept a little house just west of Hillside he’d reconfigured as a doctor’s office, with two examining rooms and a little surgery in the back. For a long time he’d been the town’s most reliable angelmaker, but toward the end of the thirties there was a local crackdown and he started referring girls in trouble to out-of-town docs like Beck in Kansas City. Enough girls of prominent birth had been helped out of sticky situations that he avoided prosecution, and his practice had survived, though it couldn’t be said to have thrived. I was the only patient in the waiting room at ten in the morning.
His elderly nurse Lois had me fill out some paperwork, since I hadn’t been in since ’41. Her bright red hair had gone pinkish and she’d put on a good deal of weight, which may have accounted for the slight limp she’d taken on since I saw her last. She chatted amiably while I wrote, talked about what a precocious little boy I’d been, insisting on knowing the Latin names for treatments and ailments and body parts when I was as young as five. I liked Lois. According to my father, she’d been Dr. Groff’s girlfriend as well as his nurse in the old days, long before Dr. Groff’s wife was carted off to the state lunatic asylum at Larned. I wondered if they were still at it.
In the examination room I sat on the table with my shirt needlessly off on nurse Lois’s instructions. The whole place smelled like mercurochrome and ammonia and mold.
“Well, young Ogden,” Groff said when he came in, stubbing a dead butt into the ashtray. “Back from the war, I see.”
“Back since spring,” I said.
“And what’s troubling you that the VA can’t fix for free?”
“It’s for a friend.”
He snorted. “It always is. This friend, what’s her name?”
What the hell, this was one old man who knew how to keep a secret. Everett Collins.”
Groff’s wild grey eyebrows lifted, and I couldn’t tell whether he was dubious or impressed. “Go on.”
“He broke a rib or two, got sucker-punched by a big farm boy in a road house.”
“Painful, broken ribs. Awful bad.”
“That’s the thing. He wants to know if I can’t get him a prescription for some morphine.”
“I want to make sure I understand. This is the same Everett Collins that founded Collins Aircraft?”
“The same. I’m working for him.”
“All right. You don’t want morphine, it’s too hard to administer properly. I’ve got something new, just as good and not as addictive.”
“The prescription needs to be in my name, for discretion’s sake.”
He nodded, eyes closed. His eyelids were veined and purplish. “Of course.” He grabbed a pad and started writing. “It’s called Hycodan, what we call a semi-synthetic opioid. Cross between codeine and thebaine, if that means anything to you.”
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