The Adjustment (18 page)
“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.
She knew the pills by sight, and she gave me a look that on a less poised woman might have been described as brazen. “I do get off work, every night. Tonight included, if you’re up late.”
“I plan to be,” I said, and I made up my mind to consider the rest of the week a vacation from all my cares.
VERA MADE THE week go by quickly and painlessly, for me at least, like one of those vacations where you start dreaming about setting up housekeeping. Her sexual appetite may have been diminished but her intense desire for more narcotics helped her pretend. The hycodan was more potent than the Mexican codeine she normally supplied herself with, and within the week she’d lost some of that shimmering quality in her eyes and even her hair seemed dulled and flattened, as if the dope were leeching out the chemicals from her last permanent wave. When I said goodbye I made her a gift of the remaining pills, a gesture that prompted her to give me an address and a phone number in case I ever passed through town again, but I didn’t keep them. I didn’t expect her to be around if I ever got back.
THE DOCTOR HAD been paid and moved out the afternoon before we were to leave, along with his nurse, and Collins was drinking gin and barking insults and orders at me and Park both. There was no show of gratitude for his involuntary cure, and though none was expected or required—we were being paid for our trouble—the return of the old Collins wasn’t particularly agreeable. Once he’d availed himself of one of Hot Springs’s more expensive prostitutes—more expensive and less attractive than the one I’d brought to my room that first night, just as Herb had warned—he declared himself ready to return to Wichita and save his empire.
When the time came to go I elected to make the trip by train. Park said nothing but I knew he resented having to drive all that distance weathering the old cocksucker’s abuse. There seemed to be some residual fogginess to Collins’s demeanor from his months as a narcotics fiend—it didn’t occur to him, for example, that he could make Park drive and hire an airplane himself—but nothing sufficient to alarm the board of directors, I didn’t think, and most of the time it was camouflaged by his caustic disposition.
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