Murder Me for Nickels (20 page)

“Would I take her?” said the agent.

“For three-dozen reasons.”

“No,” said Conrad. “She’s good.”

I looked at her through the window but she didn’t see me. She was singing, and why shouldn’t she be good. Then I left.

I passed the restaurant downstairs and felt a little bit hungry, but that was just a reflex and it didn’t last. I got the car out of the lot and drove back to Lippit’s. I remember lighting a cigarette when I got into the car, same with another one when I stopped for a light, and then again in the apartment-house lobby. I went up six flights, rang the right bell, and heard somebody coming. Pat opened the door.

“Jack,” she said.

“Hi. Jack what?”

“Your cigarette’s out,” she said. Then she went ahead of me.

When I came into the living room Lippit came in from the other end. He looked across and nodded. “Jack,” he said.

“Hi. Jack what?”

“Jack-of-all-trades, maybe,” and he came toward me. Then he said, “Your cigarette’s out.”

“So give me a light.”

“I will give you better,” he said, “you son of a bitch,” and he hauled it up from somewhere, fast and hard. I jackknifed to the floor before it started to hurt.

It hurt plenty then, all the way from the chin to the top of the head, whether I held still where I was or whether I moved, just ever so slightly.

His feet were still close to me but then they walked away.

“You can get up,” he said. “Get up if you want.”

I didn’t want to get up and I didn’t want to stay down and what if I had stopped in the restaurant, wouldn’t that have made a difference? Crazy, I thought, and when I looked up I saw Lippit standing there and—he’s crazy, not me. One crazy bastard….

He must have seen my face as I thought that one over because just when I was ready to jump he was ahead of me, and his foot hit me in the ribs.

That was a much more sudden pain. It crashed open. It didn’t stay where it started but was worst in that spot. I fell over and stayed that way for a while.

Lippit stood there just like before with his face the same as when he had said, “Jack,” and the rest, afterwards.

Pat was by a wall and had her lip in her teeth. She had one fist in front of her face and I saw mostly her eyes.

Pat didn’t move, nor Lippit, but there was the sound.

The door to the back opened and when he came through he left it open. And he had on a new leather jacket. Otherwise Folsom hadn’t changed.

“Don’t you think, Mister Lippit,” he said, “that we should ask the lady….”

“All right, beat it,” said Lippit. “Don’t you have any sense?”

Pat left, walking quickly, and she still had her fist near her face. I could see that and her short hair dipping up and down when she walked. When she went into the room in back she squeezed to one side in the door. The other one came out, the big one, the one Lippit had beaten up the other time.

But this was a new time. This was very different I even learned the big one’s name. It was Franklin.

“Franklin,” said Lippit, “you can stay over there. No. By the chair. Sit.”

“But if he gets up …”

“He doesn’t want to get up,” said Lippit.

“I think he’s ashamed,” said Folsom.

I almost threw up.

“Stop talking crap,” said Lippit, and then, “you hear me, St. Louis?”

“I hear you.”

“So why don’t you look up?”

“I think he’s….”

“Folsom,” said Lippit. “Just shut up.”

They had a fine slave-and-master relationship. Which was normal. Nothing else was, though.

“So why don’t you look up?” Lippit said again.

“I’m waiting for you to put your foot in my neck and then stand there like that to make a proclamation.”

“You want me to make….”

Something crashed against the wall next to Franklin where Lippit had missed with the cocktail glass. I straightened up with some effort—what was keeping me down was some muscle midway down which I had not even known existed before this—and I gave the scene a look. It was painful, all around. There was big Franklin, smart Folsom, and Walter Lippit. The new working relationship. It worked in a disgusting way.

“I need a drink,” I said.

Nobody moved. Franklin looked at the broken glass next to his chair and Folsom looked up at the ceiling. Folsom was lighting himself a cigarette.

“If nobody will take offense,” I said, “I’ll try and get it myself.”

It was unpleasant going but then I had to get it myself. Nobody moved and nobody answered. I got up, got to the liquor chest, got a bottle. I was now more mad than puzzled.

“Mud in your faces,” I said. “And with glass in it.” Then I had a pull at the bottle.

“Take it away from him,” said Lippit.

Franklin came over, all muscled eagerness. I held the bottle out to him and let it drop on his foot.

“Never mind,” yelled Lippit. “Get back to your chair.” Franklin limped back and I reached down for a fresh bottle.

“Leave it,” said Lippit. “Leave it sit, St. Louis.”

I kept it in my hand but didn’t open the bottle. “I won’t throw it,” I said. “I just need a drink.”

“You’ve thrown all you’re going to throw, you bastard.”

“I wish I were saying that, Lippit. So help me, I wish that very much.”

“Mister Lippit,” Folsom started, but Lippit didn’t want to hear from him. I kept going.

“I don’t get very much of this, Lippit, but I get the part that stinks the most. I turn my back, and in slides that crapper over there.” Folsom got red, but nothing else. “I turn my back,” I went on, “and the only straight-running business I’ve ever been in runs into the red so fast, it’s going to drown you just as fast as me. I come back here, to this idiot’s haven, and….”

“I’ve had it,” said Lippit. He was hoarse. “I’ve had it from you, brother, and the only reason you’re still standing up on two feet is because I was hoping to see how you’d slime your way out of this.”

We were really hating each other straight across that room. He held still and I held still but there was a big swatch of hate across which you could have walked as if it was a road.

“I’m a little older than you,” he said, with that scratch in his voice, “so I’ve known more double-crossers than you, come to think of it.”

“Which accounts for the way you’ve made your way up?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re my crowning achievement. You’re so high up there, St. Louis, I’m too dizzy to look.”

“That you are, Lippit. Much too dizzy.”

“In a little while from now, we’ll see who’s off balance.” He threw his cigarette into a tray and then he practically spat.

“I used to think this one here, I mean Folsom, was the rat of the pack. He switched over to Benotti, you recall that?”

“Stands to reason,” I said.

“He switched to Benotti because you ran him off.”

“The way it really was,” said Folsom, talking edgy like glass, “the way I explained it to you, Mister Lippit….”

“Well, he’s back,” said Lippit. He didn’t look at Folsom, which cut the man off worse than anything. “He’s back, doing a job both ways while being at it.”

“He would. True to type.”

“He left Benotti because the crap there was worse than here, when you used to be in the picture.”

“Or because he came to think that Benotti might not be the winning side?”

Folsom was dying to say something then, but Lippit was still going.

“Well, he came back with the goods that really opened the door. He came up and he showed that he’s no rat, compared to you.”

“Mister Lippit I don’t….”

“What? You don’t like me to call you a rat? There’s nothing but rats, Folsom, nothing but! You think there’s such a thing like doing business with angels? There’s no such thing!”

“They play harps,” I said. “Not jukeboxes.”

“Idiots play jukeboxes,” he said, which showed what he thought of his customers. “But you really got to be the worst kind of idiot to start playing around with
me!
Tell him, Folsom.”

His chance, and he was too stirred up by the emotion of it He let out a sound like a crow, smiled at Lippit, then got cut off again.

“First thing he learns at Benotti’s,” said Lippit, “was that queer thing about the day when we all thought there was going to be a rumble.”

“The day he made his own, including enemies?”

“You got your last little laughs now, St. Louis, so I won’t interfere. I’m talking of the time when Benotti held still. When he pulled all his brain busters off the street.”

“Maybe he was afraid of Folsom.”

“When I tell you to run down and get me some cigarettes, do you run down because you’re afraid?”

“Because I love you, Lippit.”

“Because I pay you! Because I’m the head man!”

“That compares to Benotti?”

“He pulled his hoods back because he was told! The head man says pull, and he does it.”

“I’m mystified.”

“I just bet! Because you tipped him to lay low!”

“I’m mystified,” I said again, to cover the blank astonishment. “Your stupidity mystifies me.”

“That’s what I found out,” said Folsom. “That you tipped it that day, and Benotti should lay low.”

“That’s right. Benotti and me have been ever so close, to the tune of a gash here, an X-ray there, and I pay his hospital bills.”

“Then how come,” Lippit asked me, “you had such a sweet, easy time breaking down Benotti’s supply place?”

“On your orders.”

“I’m laughing. Now you laugh this off, St. Louis. Who carted your high-priced recording machine back to that record place where you make funny records?”

I didn’t need to answer. Those had been Benotti men, and Lippit seemed to know that, too.

“Would you say they’d just up and say yessir to a Lippit man when he asks them to lay down on their job and instead do him a personal favor of cartage?”

It looked bad. I took the cap off the bottle I was holding in my hand and took a long swallow. Then I said, “So help me, they were stupid and it just worked out that way.”

“A dumb answer doesn’t make you look any more honest, St. Louis.”

“I didn’t say I was honest. I say I didn’t double-cross you.”

“Is that why I didn’t know until now how you tied up all kinds of helpful little businesses?”

I wanted to say that it had never hurt him, that it had nothing to do with him, and that it was now going to pot so we could handle Benotti. But he had it down, ironclad, his way. I took another drink.

And I made up a few nasty sayings in my head, of which the most innocent went something like, a friend in business is no friendly business is no friendly business is, and so on in three-quarter time.

“What’s next with him?” Folsom was saying.

“I haven’t got the time,” said Lippit.

“If you want….”

“Like I said,” Lippit told him, and then he got up.

He went into the back room and when he came back he was tying his tie.

“You still here?”

“I didn’t think we were through.”

“Beat it.”

“Walter. Listen to me—”

“Beat it, before I spit and hit the rug by mistake.”

By dint of too much at one time and the liquor on top of it I went fairly dead inside and so managed to just turn and go. I left.

I went downstairs and if nothing else was going to stay whole I’d do just the little bit I could do for sanity and get down to the Duncan building. Stop those lousy runs of pressings, stop that lousy run on my pocket, send the masters back, close the shop, take a break, let the time move over a little. I walked all the way down, for the exercise, and made up a song which had a rhyme and didn’t need reason. It went: The reason I’m partial to strippers, is because they look dressed in slippers. There was more, but it didn’t rhyme.

I went to the parking lot, found my car, got my keys out of my pocket.

“And now give it to me.”

He was polite enough, so I gave them to Folsom. Also Franklin was standing behind me, big enough. Then we all drove off in my car, Folsom the chauffeur, and I sat in the back and had another drink.

Chapter 18

W
alter Lippit had a pretty place out in the country. We have country with hills, with woods, with fields, and with lakes. Lippit, because of enough money, had all of this. The house wasn’t big but sat pretty. All the landscapes came together where he had built it and the lake came even close enough to make shiny patterns on the living room ceiling.

I sat with the view of the lake and a hill. I might have had the view with the fields or the woods, except Folsom and Franklin had decided it this way. No difference to me. I sat in the room with the chintz and the pine paneling, and my closest friend was the bottle I held.

The light patterns on the ceiling were getting independent. Folsom and Franklin were in the same room, but I didn’t want anything from them. I just sat.

“Watch him,” said Folsom.

“He’s drunk,” said Franklin.

Folsom came around to the front of the chair and stood looking at me. Then he slapped my face.

“Yeah. He’s drunk.”

I kept sitting.

Franklin went to look out of the big window and looked bloated against all that light. And peaceful, I should think. He was feeling all right.

Folsom went into the next room—woods view from that one—and maybe was reading the paperbacks. Lippit had a library there. Nothing but paperbacks, in case it rained over the weekend.

The patterns on the ceiling were like cold water all over.

He wasn’t reading in there. He was on the phone. He was muttering and cackling at the country exchange but they only listen in on connections which have been completed. Before that happened, it took a while. Leisure. All is slow leisure and country-type pleasure, and the reason I would marry a stripper, she’d look good in even
one
slipper—

Now the ceiling moved, and not the patterns.

I looked away from there and listened. I even put the bottle down. Spill on the rug, if you want, but not on my pants.

“Yeah. No. I’m not in town. No.”

That was clear enough, and true to boot.

“It comes off like we said. Yessir, like we said.”

Maybe he meant my head? Where would I then have the hangover? In thin air?