“I’m sure she ain’t fucking my brother any more, ’cause I broke both his arms and told him stay the shit away from my house and my wife. Now my mom and pop are sore at me along with him and the wife.”
“Rough,” I said.
“You said it. At least the wife’s not straying any more.”
“That’s good,” I said in as neutral a tone as I could manage, wanting neither to egg him on to further violence nor to suggest any sort of disapproval on my part.
“She knows damn well anybody she messes with is gonna bleed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know, things are a little better with her since you got me that job, though.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
Janice the b-girl had been watching us from her post down the bar. At length she arose and sashayed over to us on her skinny legs.
“How’s about introducing me to your big strapping friend, Wayne?” she said. I didn’t remember telling her my name, but what the hell.
He stuck his hand out. “Elmer Rackey.”
“I’m Janice,” she said as I signaled the bartender to bring her a drink. When he brought it I saw him looking at her in a pinched, hateful way and it struck me that he looked at everybody that way except for his idolized, roundheeled Barbara.
By that point Janice was well into another well-polished apocryphal anecdote featuring herself as the central sufferer. This one involved having her broken-down old Ford stolen right after she’d filled it up, and having it recovered by the police with its tank empty.
“That was a whole week’s ration of gas, Elmer. Lordy, I asked those cops how I could get the gas replaced, meaning was there some way I could get the ration stamps replaced legit, you know? And this big mean cop says to me, ‘you try it, lady, you’ll spend the rest of the war in the can, ’cause we don’t take to black marketeers here in Wichita.’ Can you imagine saying that to a poor woman who’s just lost her whole week’s ration of gas? I had to walk to work all week except when I caught a ride with a girlfriend.”
“Wish’t I could get my hands on the dirty son of a bitch that stole it, that’s all I can say,” Rackey said, the last clause barely audible. There was a murderous, distant glint in his eyes that gave me pause and made me consider once again how to keep this guy out of trouble until the day I might need him.
SALLY WAS ASLEEP when I got in, the dinner dishes drying in the rack next to the sink. By the light of a brand new lamp I sat in my dad’s favorite chair and read through a manuscript my grandfather had left him, an autobiography whose details and generalities I was unable to verify or credit, though I had heard him tell some of the same stories on his various visits. It was like listening to him talk, though, and the unpublishable randiness of the thing corresponded with my memories of him. In the early thirties he caused a scandal when, staying with us for the summer, he embarked on a liaison with a married, fortyish cashier at the Orpheum theater, an undeniably attractive redheaded woman with a pronounced lisp but no other obvious debilities. He was around ninety at the time and quite proud of the fact that her husband had threatened to kill him and never made good on the threat.
THAT ANONYMOUS PEN pal of mine was right about at least one thing: I had made a nice illicit bundle off of Uncle Sam. In the little safe in the basement that contained among other things my discharge papers and my Purple Heart—probably the only one ever awarded for getting stabbed by a rival pimp—was a whole lot of illicit cash I’d managed to smuggle back from Europe. The army doesn’t make that easy, believe me, but if anybody has an edge in that domain it’s a supply sergeant. I wasn’t able to bring it all; not to toot my own horn, but I wasn’t as greedy as all that anyway. I let the whores have some of it, in hopes they could band together and find a protector more worthy of them than my predecessor had been. I was busy with the combination, preparing to replace my grandfather’s manuscript inside, when the door above the stairs creaked open, startling a sharp intake of breath and an audible gasp from me.
“Wayne, sweetie?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just wondering if that was you down there.”
Annoyed at the interruption, and a little red-faced at having the shit scared out of me like that, I snapped. “Coming down to check was foolish. If it hadn’t been me, then it would have been a burglar. You could have been raped or killed.”
She didn’t react the way she’d been doing lately. Instead she came downstairs and put her soft, cool white hand on my cheek. “Are you doing okay, honey? I know you don’t really like the work at Collins.”
Her solicitousness caught me off my guard, and I stammered a reply to the effect that I was perfectly happy working there, that I’d do anything for her and the baby.
“I was just thinking tonight how much you always wanted to be a pilot,” she said.
“That was a long time ago.”
“But I know you still think about it. Would you like to take flying lessons?” she asked. “I’m sure you could get some kind of cut rate, working for Collins.”
It was sweet of her, wrong though she was. I stood and kissed her. “You go on to bed, now, and I’ll be up in a minute.”
She climbed the stairs, turning once to give me a loving, blushing look over her shoulder, and I resumed opening the lock.
The amount inside was a little over five thousand dollars, and I hadn’t yet spent a dime of it, not even on the down payment on the house. It was unworthy of me and I knew it, but the nagging fear that my dear wife might somehow get into the safe weighed upon me. The poison penman must have designs on the money, too, and despite my determination not to let the little shit get the better of me, I resolved to go to the Third National Bank downtown in the morning and rent a safety deposit box.
MAYBE IT WOULD have been wisest to wean Collins off the dope at that early stage, but I wasn’t about to give up the advantage I held over him. His own physician wouldn’t have allowed him opiates except under hospital conditions, and he was too well-known in Wichita to risk approaching another doctor. And cagey and evil though the old bastard was, he didn’t have the specific, hard-won skills necessary to procure illicit goods without consequence.
But Groff was getting nervous about dispensing the volume of Hycodan that Collins now required–-already there was one weekly prescription in my name and one in Park’s—and he gave me the name of a Dr. Briggs who would show great empathy for a man enduring the chronic pain of broken ribs, particularly a man as wealthy and well-connected as Everett Collins.
I met Dr. Briggs at his office in the same downtown building that housed my dentist’s surgery. He was about sixty years old, with receding salt and pepper hair, black, round-framed eyeglasses and a leering smile. He was only too glad to fill my prescription, and another in the name of Herman Park. “How about methadone?” he asked. “Has he tried anything beyond Hycodan? Lot of doctors, Groff among them, have an awful lot of faith in whatever’s the newest drug on the market, but some of the old ones are better, if you ask this old sawbones.” He went on to rhapsodize about the effects of this braintickler and that one, to the point that I began to wonder how the old coot had managed to hang onto his license to practice medicine all these years.
I promised him I’d ask the old man to think about it and headed for the nearest Rexall to fill the script. After reading the prescription, the druggist appraised me in a manner that bordered on disrespect, and though I affected not to notice I made a mental note to skip this particular pharmacy in the future.
When I dropped off the pills I stopped for a chat with Millie Grau, who had been treating me like the greatest thing to hit Collins Aircraft Company since the introduction of the Airmaster. “Mr. Collins just wasn’t himself while you were gone. I don’t know exactly what happened last week but I guess he got drunk and fired you again, didn’t he?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“I wish he’d quit that drinking, he does things he regrets so often any more.”
“How’s that?”
“Firing you, firing Mr. Cook.”
“I took it upon myself to fire Mr. Cook while Mr. Collins was convalescent.”
“Well, things like that. And I guess you know about poor Miss Gladstone from the secretarial pool.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
She looked down at her shoes, flushing. I looked down too, though my focus was on her legs. “The girl who had to go away to Kansas City for a week. None of that would have ever happened but for his drinking. I’ve been praying so hard, but you know what? He has to want to stop on his own.”
I was newly impressed with Miss Grau. I’d always thought of her as a very pleasant and desirable girl, but I’d never attributed much to her in the way of smarts or insight. She was clearly the one person on earth the boss confided in, the only soul in all creation to whom he felt able to confess his multitude of shames and vulnerabilities. I hadn’t suspected the old boy still had that capacity; she was the last, tenuous connection between Everett Collins and the human race.
NINE
THE ENEMIES LIST
I
WAS SPENDING A little more time around the plant in the daytime and letting Herman Park take up a little bit more of the slack at night, preferring to carouse on my own, and the old man had picked up on the fact that I wasn’t around as much on his nocturnal excursions.
“What the hell are you hanging around here in the daytime for? That’s not what I pay you to do.”
“Thought it might be good to spend some time around the house in the evening, what with the wife expecting and all.”
He grunted and frowned. “I’m taking some flack for keeping you on, you know.”
He leaned back in his big leather chair and picked up one of the wooden models on his desk, an early Airmaster with black fuselage and golden wings. He moved it through the air, following it with his eyes and making a sputtering engine sound, the opiates having rendered him so boyish that it was hard to hate him, almost.
“That’s good of you,” I said.
“It’s Huff and that crowd on the board that’s been trying to replace me with the Missus. They think you’re a bad influence on me.” Down towards the carpet the Airmaster dove, saved at the last minute from disaster by the sure hand of its designer, who performed a couple of tricky loops on the way back skyward, still making that engine sound in the back of his throat. “And you’re paid too much versus what you actually do around here. You have some enemies in your own department, you know.”
“Mrs. Caspian,” I said.
“Nah, the big gal likes you, she’s the one who’s headed off an open rebellion down there.”
I was stunned to learn this about Mrs. Caspian, who’d never addressed a civil or unnecessary word to me in the entire time I’d known her. “I thought they all liked me okay down there.”
“There’s someone else they figure should be department head. I was thinking maybe I’d transfer you.”
“It’d be the same any place else. The fact is I ought to be on your personal payroll and not the company’s, but it’s your company and you run it the way you see fit.”
“You got that right, boy. Anyway, watch yourself around Huff.”
“Hell, I don’t even know him.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s the comptroller, he knows what you make, and he hears what goes on in your department. Which is pretty damned irregular. Thing is, see, Huff would love to see me carted out of here in a straitjacket so’s he could run the financial side his way, but that’s not going to happen, is it?” He brought the Airmaster down onto his desk for a perfect three-point landing, and I was impressed to note that its Lilliputian tires actually spun.
“How do you know all this?”
“Miss Grau keeps her ears open and tells me everything there is to know around this godforsaken place. Everybody talks to her, and a lot of people figure she probably doesn’t like you because you’re a bad seed and encourage my degenerate tendencies.” He laughed, as if that were the most ridiculous idea he’d come across all week.
I DROVE TO Stanley’s at Kellogg and Oliver and ordered a cup of coffee from a heavy, slouching waitress whose weak chin managed some sort of structural alchemy that made her wide face rather pretty. She stared at me after she brought the coffee, her manner neither hostile nor flirtatious, just curious. I did my best to ignore her as I wrote down a list of my known nemeses on a yellow legal pad.
I started with all the men in my department, and parenthetically added Mrs. Caspian to the list, albeit with a pang of guilt after hearing that she’d stood up for me. Until I could verify that, though, I would treat her as a possible quisling, just like everyone in the Publicity and Marketing Department.
Then I wrote down the name of Ernest J. Huff, the comptroller. I added the three members of the Board of Directors with whom he was allied: Mr. J.T. Burress, Mr. Wilbur Lamarr, and Mr. George Latham. The four of them had opposed Collins on matters of wartime production and postwar retooling, and I assumed they were the ones trying to replace the old man with his compliant wife. I put Mrs. Collins on there, too, just for the hell of it.