Free The Adjustment by Scott Phillips Page B

have a car. The one you drove in on belongs to Collins aircraft, and if you want to drive off with it later you’d better see the old man now.”
     
    WE GOT INTO another company car, an Olds identical to mine but with a different smell to it, and drove out to the southern part of College Hill. Collins’s house was large even by the standards of the neighborhood, a three-story colonnaded stone house on an enormous wooded lot. A frail, white-haired maid who looked too old to be in service answered the door and led us in to see Collins. As we passed through the ornately decorated foyer—Oriental antiques of jade and brass on an oak chest, an enormous full-length oil portrait of old Everett in jodhpurs with his goggles hanging around his neck, a burbling fountain with a statue of a spitting nymph—I caught a glimpse of one of Mrs. Collins’s paranoiac eyes staring at us from an open sliver of a sliding door. Having met my gaze she slammed the door shut with surprising vigor and produced a solid bang.
    Collins was upstairs in his room, under the covers with the lights out, when the maid led us in. “He’s expecting you,” she said.
    “Mr. Collins?” Park said. “Here with Ogden.”
    Collins mumbled something incomprehensible from his blanket.
    “What’s that, sir?” Park said.
    Collins shouted and thrashed. “Medicine, goddamnit, did he bring the fucking medicine?”
    Park looked at me in a half-panic, having evidently failed to understand that I had a mission to accomplish before I was brought into the mighty presence of the Great One.
    “What medicine is that, Everett?” I asked. It was the first time I’d ever dared to use his first name to his face.
    “You know goddamn well what medicine,” he said, saliva flying.
    “Don’t you have a personal physician to take care of such things?”
    “He won’t give me anything for the pain, says it’s not good to keep it up, anyhow I don’t even know what it was and goddamnit my ribs hurt.”
    “Come on, Park, let’s go see if we can’t get Everett a script for those ribs.”
     
    THAT NIGHT, ENSCONCED in my temporary home in the Eaton Hotel, I opened the envelope I’d found earlier in my desk. This time the note was typewritten, badly:
    You son of a BITCH I know all about you cheat Uncle sam out money and other and if you think your going to get away with it thing again cocksucker. I am a real hard man. So you should start say your payers and get ready to give me all that doh. Bet your sorry now you killed her. Do you think the rules apply to everyone but you
     
     
    Whoever he was, he knew me.

EIGHT
     
    A SENTIMENTAL TALE OF WOE
     
    M Y HINTING TO the wife that her pregnancy was not necessarily an immutable condition cost me a week at the Eaton Hotel. It also cost me more than seven thousand dollars in the form of a house not far from our apartment, a few blocks west of Hillside and south of Central, not far from Ketteman’s bakery and Cardamon’s grocery store. I bought it while I was still at the Eaton and Sally still sore at me. When I parked in front of the house and told her it was ours, a bungalow of recent vintage painted white with a comfortable little yard, her sullenness evaporated.
    The first thing I did was install a chain-link fence around the back yard. Who knew, maybe when the kid was born I’d get him a dog. Sally flew around that house hanging curtains and directing deliverymen where to put the furniture, and the week we moved in I picked up my mother at her place in Riverside and brought her over for dinner.
    She was a little wraith of a woman by then, much older than her fifty-odd years. She’d had a hard time of it since my old man died, and I wanted her to see that she always had a family to cling to.
    “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, Wayne,” she said. “Before Christmas, seems like.”
    “That can’t be right,” I said.
    “No, that’s right,” Sally said.
    “Well it’s nice to see you anyway, son,” she