The Adjustment - By Scott Phillips Page 0,1

more coffee?” the counterman asked, tapping the portraits of the dead. “Lady was fucking the Fuller Brush man while he was away is what I think. He found out about it and she killed him.”

“Fuller Brush men take a Christian oath not to fuck housewives.”

“Milkman, gardener, eggman, I don’t know. One of ’em.” He had a very distracting deformative growth on the left side of his nose that made his whole face look lopsided. It had almost the exact texture and color of a cauliflower, with several thick black hairs curling outward from it. This, I’m guessing, was why he was stuck on the overnight shift. “All’s I know is after a while a wife gets restless with a man gone. You see that picture of the two of ’em?”

I reopened the Star to page four for another look at their portraits. Harold was a burly, round-faced man with the look of a petty tyrant, whereas Christine, looking a good deal younger than her forty-eight years, beamed forth from her photo with the enthusiastic smile of a girl. It was easy to picture her as a flapper right out of John Held, Jr., and just as easy to picture that same girl waking up one morning twenty-five years on and, upon finding herself married to Wallace Beery, trying to work out where he’d hidden the key to the gun closet.

“She ain’t hard to look at, for a gal her age, is all I’m saying,” the counterman said. “I’d’ve fucked her.” He pulled the paper close to that cauliflower tumor, squinting. “Look how popeyed she is, though. Maybe she was hooked on pep pills. Those people get all kinds of crazy ideas in their heads.”

An old man came in, shuffling and wheezing, and joined in the discussion; his son had known the murdered man slightly. “Cruel man, Lamburton. Wouldn’t let her travel to see her mother once, for instance, when the old lady was sick. I expect it only got worse after he’d been gone a while.” He took off his scarf and his thick woolen overcoat and ordered a bowl of chili, which he proceeded to slurp like a small child. Coat off, he was revealed as a tall man bent over rather than a short heavyset one; his hands were enormous, hammy, broken-knuckled things, so dry there were cracks at the joints, filled in with dried blood like blackened spackle.

After a while a gaunt young man in a white coat came in and ordered coffee and eggs, followed by a couple of middle-aged women with their nurse’s caps still on. At ten after three I sauntered down to where Broadway turns into Nichols Parkway. After ten minutes sitting in the cold on the stoop of Vickie’s building she showed up, looking good for a woman who’d just wrapped up a ten hour shift of waking people up for shots and getting ordered around by twenty-five-year-old interns. She put her finger up to her lip to keep me quiet and opened her front door. Once inside she turned on a lamp and shut the door; it was still pretty dark in there, with her walls painted a curious mallard green.

“Wasn’t expecting to see you anytime soon, Wayne.”

“Unexpected business trip, just came up this afternoon. Thought I’d look you up.”

“Lucky me, I guess.”

We necked for a minute, then started dancing towards the back of the apartment where the bedroom was. Then she stopped me and pointed to the couch.

“Sit down for a minute, I got something to show you before we go any further.”

I did as I was told and after a few seconds’ rustling around in the bedroom she came back out holding a folded sheet of Armed Services stationery, which she stuck into my hand.

“I want you to read this before we get started, Wayne,” she said, and then she went into the kitchen.

The letter was from her husband, an Army MD who claimed to have seen some awful things before the peace. Now he was in Vienna in the American sector taking care not just of our own but the Krauts as well, in particular their malnourished orphan children. The Captain tended toward the purple end of the epistolary spectrum, both in describing the rickety tots in his care and in his choice of endearments, and the whole thing smelled to me of rosewater and horseshit. At “Eternally, your Jeffrey” I rolled my eyes skyward one last time, folded the thing up, and called her back in.

“So?” I