Murder Me for Nickels (16 page)

When the cop seemed distant and a little bit funny I realized that the pills were working. I was feeling no pain but the cop smelled no liquor so when I promised to park the car and walk home on foot he let it go at that and disappeared from view.

I wasn’t sure where I left the car, which meant I also wasn’t sure where I lived. I got there when the sun was going down, banged the door shut, got undressed, laid down on the bed. I was very thirsty but too lazy to get up. When the phone rang I reached over and put it on my stomach. I must also have put the receiver to my ear because then I heard Davy’s voice.

“Did I get you out of the bathroom or something?” he said. “I was just going to hang up.”

“No. Don’t. Where was I?”

“What?”

“Where were you, I mean.”

“Well, he’s at Mercy, all right.”

“Does he need it?”

“Mister St. Louis?”

“Yes, Davy.”

“Just let me talk. Okay, Mister St. Louis? I’ll tell you everything.”

“All right, Davy.”

“So he’s there in the hospital, and I told them I was his nephew….”

“Why nephew, David?”

“Because I wasn’t allowed to go into his room on account his family was there already.
Family
. See?”

“Yes, Davy. Please go on.”

“I’m trying. So I said we were plenty worried about this, on account of the family business, and how was he.”

“How was he?”

“Please, Mister St Louis. The family business, said the doctor, would have to be run by the family for a while, or by itself, he said, because Mister Benotti was in no shape for anything. Just for lying still on his back.”

“Ditto.”

“What?”

“Go on, Davy.”

“On account of his concussion in the head and the jaw being wired.”

I had an image of wiring for concussion or detonation or spark plugs, but said nothing about it.

“When is he going to be all tuned up again?”

“Not sure, Mister St, Louis, but not before two weeks.”

“Did you tell Mister Lippit?”

“Yes, sir. He was pleased.”

I relaxed on the bed, my martyrdom vindicated, because two weeks of an inactive opposition might well be all Lippit needed to get his business all squared away again. Somewhere along there Davy hung up. I felt pretty good on the bed, feeling no pain. It even seemed as if I could see out of both eyes again. I thought about this and that and it was a lot like a conversation. About spark plugs, plugged nickels, coin slots, slugged pickles, gauze tickles, red gore, locked door.

“If you locked the door, then how did I get in?”

“Through the keyhole.”

“No. I’m little, but not small.”

This struck me as nonsense, but when I opened my eyes she was there, real enough. I said, “Hello, Doris.”

“Hello, slugged pickle.”

“We talked about that, too?”

“I could not begin to tell you just what we did talk about.”

“You were here. I wasn’t.”

“I was never sure I was getting all of the conversation.”

She sat on the bed, hands in her lap, but then she reached over and took the phone away from my ear.

“Why, it’s dead,” she said. “You always sleep like that?”

Then she cradled it. The instrument was still on my stomach. I sat up and it wasn’t too bad.

“Am I looking at you with both eyes?”

“Sort of.”

I saw that it was dark outside of the window and asked her how long she had been here.

“Half an hour, maybe.”

“Dear Doris,” I said. “My only desire is for something to drink. You have come at the wrong time.”

“I just came to see how you were. And I tried to put your pajamas on but you wouldn’t let me move the phone.”

Yessir, there were the pajamas all right, lying next to me on the bed. I sent her to the kitchen, to bring me a drink, and put my pajamas on. When she brought me a drink it was a tall glass, and cool, filled with water. I sent her back with different instructions and told her where the bourbon was. She came back with two glasses this time, though mine was darker, and we sat on the bed for a while.

“Least you can do,” I said, “is take your shoes off.”

She took her shoes off and we talked some more. I said something nice about her singing and she said I must mean it, because there was nothing else to promote at the moment. This caused me to make a pass at her and she said, if you do that again, I’ll slap your face. That, under the circumstances, put me in a sweat and I told her to get off my bed and fetch over another drink.

It was a nice change from the rest of the day. We talked about singing a little bit more and I said I would like to give her a trial, and we had sandwiches and some more from the bottle. I held her hand and then her arm, and so on.

“You must be feverish,” she said.

“Yes. Somebody better stay for the night.”

She said she didn’t want to sit up all night and I said, of course not, but before she lay down she got up to do something about her clothes getting wrinkled. She got undressed and put on a pair of my pajamas which didn’t fit, of course, and gave her a misleading shape. Then she lay down next to me and turned off the light because the glare was giving me a headache. She held my head and said, “Boy, what a fever,” and put it down on herself, like on a pillow. That was all right, but then I wasn’t sleepy. I said, “Listen. The pajamas make me self-conscious. I don’t like to make love to my own pajamas.”

Her skin felt cool, as if I did have a fever, and she got tense and then stretched.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ve caught your fever.”

She had, and it got higher before it was done.

Chapter 13

S
he had to go to work in the morning and, as a matter of fact, was gone when I woke. The pajamas had disappeared and the dishes and bottle, but there was a note on the night table which said that the pajamas were no good anyway and had been put in the laundry, the dishes were where they belonged and the bottle she had hidden. “To promote early recovery from all kinds of damages. Too bad,” said the postscript, “and today is my day off. Doris.”

She didn’t have a phone, according to the book, and when I called her office, they said, yes, this was her day off.

Maybe she would come back in the evening, I thought, and went to the bathroom.

The damage looked more confirmed today, one side of my face looking more filled out than the other, but my color was almost normal. There was the patch, with the cut under it—itching—and one eye slitty.

I showered, keeping my head out of the water, and I shaved, one side more than the other. Then I dressed for a slow day at home, and had ham and eggs in the kitchen and coffee, which I took with me to the phone. I called the club.

Lippit wanted to know how I was and then he said he was fine, too. He was off for a talk with Bascot and in the meantime had ordered filler discs and selected hits from out of town, just in case. Stop gap, for the time being. It looked like we would ride this thing out The jukebox operators had not been approached by the Benotti crowd. All was peaceful.

Like once before, I thought. When the hoods didn’t show, but the jobber got snagged.

“And a guy by the name of Conrad called,” Lippit said. “He was trying to reach you.”

“
What?
”

“Conrad. I don’t know the guy, but he said he knew you.”

I sighed, part relief and part worry, and then I said, yes, I knew who that was, and it wasn’t important.

“He didn’t say it was important. He just said he was trying to reach you.”

Maybe he had called while I had been in the shower. Or while the phone had been off the hook.

Lippit said I should rest for the day and I said thank you and he should stay in touch. Then I called Blue Beat.

I didn’t get Conrad. Herbie answered the phone and said Conrad was taping background for yesterday’s vocal, one of those teen-age turmoil groups who were doing well around town. This was not for the Blue Beat label. This was paid for by their agent.

“Conrad tried to reach me,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling back.”

“Oh! About the girl. Oo-man! Nice.”

“Singer?”

“I don’t care. Oo-man!”

“What did she want?”

“She said she knew you and this was a surprise for you. Oo-man would I like to be….”

“Shut up, Herbie, will you please?”

“What I mean is, any time she….”

“I got that. What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Little?”

“Little?
Certainly
not, Mister St. Louis.”

“What I mean is….”

“I know what you mean. And she said she’d be back, say at two.”

“To see me, or Conrad?”

“To surprise you. She wants to cut a tape.”

I hung up on the next oo-man bit and had some of my coffee.

I don’t like surprises. I especially didn’t like any surprises at that time, under those circumstances, and with me trying to take a rest for the day. I knew I had told Doris I’d give her a try some time, but that needed preparing, in more than one way. So I checked the time—noon almost, checked my patch—tickling on the inside, and got dressed for the street. I remembered I didn’t have my car and walked.

The inside of the building on Duncan is quiet. The entrance is dark, cool and quiet, the elevator is slow like an old man, and the tenant list tells you very little. It says things like B. B. Recording, Duncan Service, Inc., Lieb Associates, Modern Times Co., that kind of thing. I have no idea what any of those offices did.

B. B. Recording, of course, was my place. You go from the big, quiet, cool corridor, into the small, noisy, hot studio. First thing is a desk and a cable snaking across the floor. There is a phone on the desk, but the cable is for something else. Conrad explained it to me once, but I forget what. There are signed photos on the wall—I know one of them; it’s of Conrad—and posters of high school hops. The agents like the place looking that way. It impresses the talent. Next comes a room which is hard to describe, containing, as it does, tape and record racks, coffee urn, coats and hats, chairs piled with sheet music, disc cutter, tape splicer, sink and towel. There is that cable across the floor and another one hanging in midair and a window which shows the big room for the sessions. The cables in that room defy count, but you can see mikes standing all over, piano, bandstand stuff, and the soloist’s booth. Draped like shrouds across parts of the ceiling is fiberglass batting, to catch dust and kill echoes. One of the things hangs down vertically and Conrad does not permit tacking it up. It fell down that way while they were taping a mountain-type ballad and the record sold two hundred thousand.

Conrad himself was in the holy of holiest, a closet with fan, light, chair, and the mixer. There was a mike on top of the mixer and another window showed the recording room. Conrad, who had curly hair, gray and blonde, was pushing the headphone back down over his ears. The claim goes that his hair is so wiry, it not only pushes the headphone up and away from his ears, but causes special static. He tapped the mike and said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry!”

The combo in the recording room stopped one after the other.

“Milton,” he said, “I get a nice ping on your pickup but your bass washes out. Move your mike down.”

The pianist did.

“And Skinny is early all the time. You’re early on the bridge and on the break. You got to follow the fiddle.”

Skinny was on the horn and there was an argument. I could see through the window but I couldn’t hear it.

“I got the earphones turned off,” Conrad said into the mike, “so don’t waste your breath.” Then he smoothed them down and said, “I just want you to be better than that West Coast clan. You’re good as them, but I want you better.”

Talk rough and carry a lollypop, is the way you do it with musicians, was Conrad’s opinion.

“All right, this is live,” he said. “You take two, you four, and Skinny builds it for eight. After that, just get back together.”

I sat around in the room with the sink and waited for Conrad to finish. But he jockeyed the combo till they looked ready to drop. “It’s got to sound tired,” I could hear him say. He was working them up to it.

Once I talked to an agent who dropped in for coffee and once I got a word with Conrad, but not enough to make sense.

“What’s the name?” I asked him when he stopped the music again.

“‘I got nothin’ but want a little more.’”

“I don’t mean the piece. The girl.”

“Nice. But I meant to talk to you about that.”

“That’s why I’m here. I want to….”

“Later.”

He put the headpieces down over his ears and talked to the mike again.

I had coffee, I watched the clock, I told Herbie to be sure and let me know soon as she showed. He said, “Why? Are you worried?” and I said, “Yeah. I’m worried.” He liked that and patted his hair and I went down to the restaurant, nervous.

I used the phone there and called Lippit but he wasn’t around. The foreman told me one of the drivers had spotted a Benotti man on the South Side run, and Davy said Lippit was at the jobbers. I called his apartment on an off-chance but Pat didn’t know anything and was in a hurry to hang up on me. I took a short walk and before two o’clock went back to the studio.

Herbie was grinning and grimacing. “Oo-man,” he said.

“Is Conrad done?”

“No. But….”

“Bring her out here,” I said. “She and me are leaving.”

“Sorehead,” he said, and went to get Doris.

I sat on the desk and when Herbie opened the door again I got up and got ready with a busy smile. I should have been readier than that. Pat walked in.

Chapter 14

I
asked her to come down to the restaurant with me and she said no. I asked her to step out into the corridor with me and she said no. I suggested that she wouldn’t get anyplace here, if I walked out and left word to ignore her, and she said, “I had a notion you might be pretty important in this place.”

“Yes mam,” said Herbie, the idiot. “Mister Conrad listens to him.”

She came with me, as far as the restaurant downstairs, after I left word for Conrad to come down when he was done taping.