Murder Me for Nickels (4 page)

“Stop using those words!”

“You’re much better, I meant, in….”

“I
know
what you mean.”

“And all good singers are fat.”

“That’s not true. I don’t have to be fat.”

“Not at all. This was my point.”

“Walter doesn’t talk that way about me.”

“He helps your career.”

“Seriously.”

“So could I, Patty. Seriously.”

She didn’t answer right away. I could tell by her face that I had made the mistake of getting her onto the one cold and serious subject of her life. She lay still.

“You’re kidding me,” she said.

“Ever hear of Blue Beat Records?”

I could tell she had. It wasn’t a big label, but a nice, little thing for the aficionados.

“You mean you could get me on that label?”

“I could get you a trial, maybe.”

Which had been the wrong answer. If I had said yes, she would have thought I was handing a line. When instead I had said the other, she pricked up her ears, because she had caught something serious. Which is what I mean when I say that I had made a mistake.

“Listen, Jack. I want to talk to you.” She rewound her arms on my neck and looked up at my face.

“I don’t want to talk to you, Patty, honest,” and I tried to get back to the lost subject.

She didn’t say “no” this time. She didn’t say anything for a while, and I didn’t, and it felt as if we were done talking. My collar felt tight and out of place and she must have felt the same way when it came to that dress with the busted zipper because she stretched and twisted up closer and to hell with the front of that dress.

Then it struck me what a mercenary minx she was.

“Patty.”

“Huh?”

“I got nothing to do with the record business.”

“Uh.”

“I said, I got no ins with the record business.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I mean it.”

“Your stud button is digging into me.”

“I, uh, I’m sorry.”

“Take it off.”

It was hard to take it off and it was harder to talk any more and I hardly cared any more what kind of a minx she was. I heard her kick off first one shoe, then the other.

“Listen, Patty.”

“Yes, Jack.”

“I meant that, what I said.”

“Yes, Jack.”

“So let me up.”

“I’m half naked.”

“What I mean is….”

“Yes, Jack. Yes, Jack.”

“About records….”

“I
don’t
give one
damn
, Jack!”

Chapter 5

B
efore driving all the way down to the club I felt I should have a little bit more to show than the fine feeling I had about the brief bout with Benotti and the longer one with Pat. I stopped at the next open drugstore and went to the phone booth in back. I had part of a cigarette there and thought once more about the men who had shambled up Louie’s place.

One of them had smelled like a horse.

In this town there was only one tie-in with the rackets, and that was at the tracks. I’m not counting Lippit’s organization. I’m a member of that. I’m a businessman—a flexible businessman—but no racketeer. I am, granted, very flexible sometimes, which is the kick I am after and the reason Lippit pleases me, but I wouldn’t push someone like Louie. I’ll push a Benotti, be it business or no, but I’m no racketeer.

So one of them had smelled like a horse. I picked up the phone and dialed a man I knew, a good craftsman with a quarter-mile horse, with whom I had beer sometimes while we worked over a scratch sheet He was a trainer, local, and spent most of his working time out at the track.

I don’t know why they start exercising horses at four in the morning and the first explanation I would discount is what a trainer would say about that. It meant, in any case, that my man was already in bed. He groaned into the phone, that I should call back at four-thirty in the morning when he would be more himself, but I wasn’t a horse, I told him, and this would just take a minute.

“There is nothing good in any of the starts tomorrow,” he said.

“I’m not calling for that, Dinkham. I’m calling about the outfit that’s stringing the bets and the races.”

“That’s run from Chicago,” he said. “I got nothing to do with them.”

“But they got men out at the track, don’t they?”

“Nothing big,” said Dinkham. “Just handlers who bring in the ponies sometimes. The ponies that surprise everybody by winning. And bums.”

“What?”

“Bums. They give stable jobs to their bums what’s on the lam from someplace or what’s too wore out for the jobs they used to do.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m talking about them. I’m calling to ask if any new ones have come in, bums like that.”

“No. Listen, Jack, I got to get up at….”

“Wait, Dinkham. One more thing.”

I didn’t know of one more thing to ask him, being much disappointed with what he had said. It was a sad longshot to think that I could tie Benotti in with the syndicate, which worked out of Chicago, because one of his hoods had smelled like a horse. But Benotti, even with electrical shop, frame house, wife and kids, did not strike me like a lone electrician gone hog wild. The electrical shop showed that he was starting out with a long plan, and the rest showed that he was aiming to stay. And his bums showed—must show—that he might be well-connected.

“I’ll let you know if some new ones come in,” said Dinkham. “Okay, Jack? Some should, any day now.”

“What did you say?”

“We lost a bunch of them. We’re short of help, because a bunch of them been taking off and we’re short handed. Not that they knew anything about horses.”

“How many left, Dinkham? And why?”

“I don’t know Four, five, maybe. And they left because they got pulled out.”

“And you don’t know where they went?”

“I think they’re still in town. At least one of them is still in town because I seen him, drinking beer.”

“And smelling like a horse.”

“What was that, Jack?”

There was a note of injury in Dinkham’s tone and I did not want to insult him. I also did not think there was any more he could tell me so I said, “Nothing, Dinkham, nothing. Please go back to sleep so that you can get up with the chickens.” He was saying, “Not chickens. Horses!” when I hung up the phone. Then I drove to the club.

Actually, the place wasn’t a club, except that Pat liked the word better and so Lippit had started calling it that. This club was a cross between YMCA and community center where a member could dance, sit, swim, box, get instructions in drama, or get a good massage. Lippit, who could not do without sweaty exercise, played handball there, went to the steambath, and got himself rubbed. In addition, he paid rent on a room with chairs and a long table. He had meetings there because he did not like an office address.

And I didn’t like going there. First of all, I didn’t like Lippit’s meetings. He wasn’t running a democracy, so why have meetings? He listened to what there was and then said what he wanted done. He could have done the same thing by phone. To keep you guys on your toes, he’d say. But it just bored me.

Second of all, I didn’t like the place because it reminded me of all the right-minded foolishness which used to bother me a number of years ago. I didn’t have a very rich upbringing, just a varied one, and this cold shower health kick of fun without girls used to be a sad bother to me. It ruined sports for me and it never made me want a woman any less.

So there were the thin-legged kids wearing gym shoes as if they had Frankenstein feet, then the real addicts, all balled up with muscle, and the ones who must have started too late because the sweatshirt just brought out their stomachs. I had to walk past all that wearing this crazy tuxedo, and I went to the top floor as fast as I could.

That was another thing I didn’t like. That room. It was space left over because the architect had made a mistake in arithmetic. There were windows to the street way up in the wall, but they only made sense from the outside where they had something to do with the Greek facade. The opposite wall, where there was no street, had a row of windows too. They were long and very low to the floor and if you lay down on your stomach you could look down into the swimming pool. Or you could just sit at the big table in the middle of the room and listen to the hollow racket come out of those windows.

There was a lot of smoke hanging over the table. There were eight or ten men but Lippit wasn’t there. They all stopped talking when I came in and waited till I came up to the table. Then Lippit’s lawyer said:

“You lost a button, Jack.”

“Which is why I’m late. I hunted and hunted….”

But they weren’t really listening. They were all in a lousy mood.

“Where’s Lippit?” I asked.

“He wants you to join him,” said the lawyer. “Seeing you weren’t here when expected and no telling when you’d show up, he took off while he was still in a fairly clean mood and said you should join him. If that would be all right with you.” And he handed me a slip of paper with an address written on it.

I held it in my hand and looked at everybody at the table. “That’s why everybody sits here in a stinking mood? To tell me Lippit left?”

There was the lawyer, Lippit’s accountant, and a manager from Lippit’s shop where they fixed jukeboxes. Those three wore tuxedos same as I, because they were the only ones Lippit had invited for the little party at his place. The rest were in daytime clothes. I didn’t know all of them, but the ones I recognized were from Lippit’s own union. Which is only a manner of speaking, because Lippit did not own a union. He ran a local, however—electrical services—and the men in it handled Lippit’s equipment There was also a union which he did own, in much more than a manner of speaking, which covered the drivers who did his deliveries. The man who ran things for Lippit inside these two unions was a thin person named Folsom. He liked black leather jackets, as if he were a punk or a motorcycle cop.

“I called this meeting,” Folsom said.

“Is that why Lippit’s not here?”

I didn’t like Folsom. I thought he was more like a strike breaker than a union man. He did mostly what Lippit told him to do, which amounted to keeping the wages steady and keeping free-lance labor away from Lippit’s territorial interest, but I got the feeling that Folsom might like more. Such as not being a salary man. Such as getting cuts out of union dues or a slice out of juke machine operators. In a way Folsom might well be what Lippit had been, let’s say ten, fifteen years ago, though there was a point where Lippit had stopped. I did not think Folsom would stop.

He said, “I don’t know about you, Mister St. Louis, but Mister Lippit thought that what I have to say was important. Important enough for him to show up and take action. I knew, of course, that he was having this little party of his, some private party, as I understood, however I felt….”

“All right, all right,” I said, since he had made his point; that he was on the ball twenty-four hours, no matter how much anyone else might be goofing—including the boss. And that he knew he had not been invited, though this did not impair his high feelings of duty and loyalty. Correct, nice, and spiteful, that Folsom.

“What is your bad news, Folsom, that you should get such a charge out of it?” I asked him.

“Well, Mister St. Louis, I don’t know how you look upon it, but my boys, they don’t like it one bit. Not one bit, Mister St. Louis. And Mister Lippit agreed with me. He doesn’t like it one bit.”

“What?”

“Look at Kramer, please.”

I looked at the one he called Kramer and the man had a black eye. He was big and hefty but he had a black eye.

“And Balowski here, they broke the windows in his truck. And Epsen, they threw his tools all over the street and kicked him right there. Show him, Epsen.” But Epsen didn’t want to get up.

I said, “When did all this happen?”

“Today. And my boys and me, we don’t like it.”

I didn’t like it either. I looked at the lawyer and he nodded. “Benotti started this all at once, looks like. First I heard of it, anyway.”

I had thought that Benotti had just been scaring the jukebox operators, an easy mark like Morry perhaps, and a little guy like Louie.

“In other words,” said the lawyer, “there’s more organization behind this than we thought till now.”

“Or maybe Benotti is stupid,” I said.

“No. More like, he’s bigger than we thought.”

“And Mister Lippit,” said Folsom, “is of that same opinion, once I talked to him.”

I just nodded. The picture was getting worrisome.

“And I just hope,” said Folsom, “Mister Lippit is doing the right thing. I know he’s going to take care of this thing but I hope he’s doing it right.”

“What he means,” said the lawyer, “we had this argument here. Folsom….”

“Fight fire with fire,” said Folsom, as if he had a big audience.

“Yeah,” said the lawyer. “Anyway, Lippit wants to first try it nice. Talk things over.”

“Where is he?”

“I just gave you the address. You should join him.”

I looked at the slip and saw that Lippit had gone to Benotti’s. To try it nice and talk things over.

“Christawmighty,” I said, and then I left right away.

There weren’t so many children out on Benotti’s street any more and the lawn sprinkling was over, but there were people sitting on most of the porches. They sat and smoked or they talked in the dark. There was nobody on Benotti’s porch.

I didn’t see Lippit’s car and had the quick, useless thought that maybe he hadn’t come after all. Then I parked a little ways down, walked back, and went up Benotti’s drive. Maybe they would all be sitting in the kitchen again.

The kitchen was lit but empty. Then I heard the heavy thunks in the back of the house, which had to be Lippit walking. He had a very hard footfall when in a certain mood. He came down the hall, then into the kitchen, and when he walked through there he knocked into the table. He kept right on walking and left the table standing at an off-angle. Lippit was that big and that mad. He kicked the screen door open and so he would know I was out there before the door came flying shut with a racket I said, “Hello, Walter.”