The Adjustment (20 page)
“I can give it to him.”
“Mr. Collins insists. I don’t mind waiting.”
She probably didn’t want to hear any more stupid jokes, because she got up and went into Huff’s office. A minute later he came out, looking distracted and impatient.
“Here you go,” I said. “Mr. Collins wanted you to have this.”
He took it without a word and went back into his office.
That night I finally phoned Sally at my mother’s house to let her know I was back. She was frantic, and I couldn’t tell if she was mad at me or scared or both.
“A pervert called me and asked for you, and when I told him you were out of town on business he said he was going to come over and do something terrible. Didn’t you get my telegram?”
“No. What did he sound like?”
“Like one of those telephone perverts. And he said he’d been watching me, he told me what I was wearing that morning and he got it right. I think he got a big kick out of thinking he scared me, so I just pretended to laugh and told him I’d cut off his tiny shriveled little thing if he showed.”
That was Sally, all right. If the army had taken women for combat units she would have been a natural. “I mean did he sound young? Old? Like a southerner or someone from around here?”
“He sounded like one of the Bowery Boys in the movies.”
“Don’t worry about it, baby. Those perverts are usually harmless,” I told her, and I was thinking that when I finally met up with my pen pal I might just follow Sally’s plans and carve a little piece of the son of a bitch loose.
THE PHONE RANG in the morning and I didn’t answer it. I was shaved and dressed and didn’t want to wait for Sally to make breakfast so I knocked on the bathroom door and told her I had a meeting to go to. There was no sign on the street of anybody watching the house: no suspicious cars, no strangers hiding in the trees, no men in trenchcoats and dark glasses, so I got into the car and backed out of the drive.
Fifteen minutes later I was at Stanley’s reading the morning
Beacon
’s account of a three-car wreck on West 54 that left eight dead, listening to a jovial, well-dressed fat man three stools down besmirch the honor of the counterman’s sister.
Beacon
’s account of a three-car wreck on West 54 that left eight dead, listening to a jovial, well-dressed fat man three stools down besmirch the honor of the counterman’s sister.
“There must be something wrong with the way your folks raised her,” he said, voice loud and urgent.
“Same as me and the others,” the counterman said. He was lean and wiry with big bony fists, and I was thinking the fat man might want to temper his comments. “We all came out all right.” He didn’t seem too bothered by the attack on his sister’s reputation.
The place was empty at that hour—it was ten o’clock by the time I got out of the house—which was a good thing, because the fat man was getting pretty wound up, and a large audience might have inhibited him. “It’s like she can’t help herself. She sees a man she takes a shine to, up go the legs, into the goddamn air.”
“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.
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.
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
“
T
HERE 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.
T
HERE 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, 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.”
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