Murder Me for Nickels (9 page)

My toes curled temporarily and then I went to the other side of the pool. Lippit was swimming along the edge.

He had a breast stroke which kept his head above water and which pushed him along at a go-stop-go clip. I waited for him at the end of the pool. He saw me stand there and touched the rim.

“Hi. Okay?” Swish.

He made a very smart turn, a big wave, and I saw the back of his head taking off in the other direction.

It was now a matter of walking along the side of the pool, timing the conversation to his go-stop-go cycle, and to keep holding on to all the socks and shoes I was carrying. My fingers felt twisted.

“Walter. You can hear me?”

“Yes. Okay?”

“Yes. It went okay. Equipment is all shot to hell.”

“My turn is what I meant. Was okay?”

“Very smart. Walter?”

“I can hear you. Don’t yell.”

“You haven’t heard from Folsom.”

“I know that.”

“What I mean is, why haven’t you heard from Folsom?”

“Huh?”

“Why!”

“He hasn’t called.”

It was time for the turn which was just as well because I felt like starting the conversation over. The first one hadn’t been any good.

There were two swimmers standing at the edge of the pool and they were watching. They weren’t watching Lippit and his smart turn, but me.

“You’re going to crush one of those toes any minute,” said one of them. “You got a clomp slipping.”

At this point I had more slipping than a clomp. I nodded at them, rearranged my fingers, and went after Lippit again.

“Walter?”

“I can hear you. Wasn’t so good, was it?”

“Very smart. Listen, Walter. I don’t like what goes on the West Side.”

“What goes?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen Folsom. Just some of his friends.”

“I haven’t seen him either. I just told you.”

Somebody walking by knocked into me at that point, so Lippit thought all the cursing was about that. He tried to look up at me but it was the wrong angle. He kept swimming as before.

“Jack?” he said.

“I hear you.”

“You got crazy looking toes, did you know that?”

“No. I didn’t. I really didn’t, Walter.”

“What I mean is, from this angle. They’re probably all right, any other angle.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean, don’t get me wrong.”

“God forbid. When are you coming out, Walter?”

“Two more laps. Watch this turn, will you please?” and he touched, swiveled, ducked under, pushed off.

“Okay?”

“Very smart. Listen. I want you to come out and talk this thing over. I don’t like what goes on.”

“You said nothing is going on. What’s the matter with you today, Jack?”

“I don’t like those men Folsom’s got working for him.”

“I’m getting all out of breath talking to you, Jack.”

“I’m sorry. How about coming out now, Walter.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Listen. You’re just as winded now as you expect to be after all those licks….”

“Laps.”

“All right All right!”

Then came the turn again. The two swimmers were still standing at that end of the pool and they were watching me. One of them held a sock.

“You’re pacing him too fast,” said one of them. “That’s not good for him, his age.”

“You dropped this,” said the other one. He draped the sock over one of my fingers somewhere and then it was Lippit’s turn again.

“Okay?”

“Very smart.”

“What those guys say, something about my turns?”

“They think you should stop swimming. They think you’re pacing me too fast.”

“Very smart. But I can’t laugh now. I’ll swallow water.”

I quickly tried to think of a joke, a real killer of a joke, but nothing came to me. And my fingers felt as if they had been doing all the walking.

“You swim, Jack?”

“Some. Mostly summers.”

“That’s not enough, Jack. You need exercise.”

“I get that. I really do, Walter.”

There was more health talk from him and then no talk at all, this being the last lap. He had to concentrate and I tried not to concentrate on anything at all, hoping for sheer blankness to relax me. This time there was no smart turn at the end of the lap, but a wild thrashing for ultimate speed and then a great slap of the hands on the tiles. Lippit stood up in the water and breathed like a pump going. The two swimmers were still standing there.

“You made it,” said one of them.

“Made it? What in hell do you mean,
made
it?” said Lippit.

“We mean him there,” said one of the swimmers and he nodded at me. “We had this bet on he’d let go the clomp.”

But Lippit was still offended. He climbed out of the pool and huffed and puffed a few times. Then he and I walked to the door.

“Who’s he think he’s kidding with that accent,” said Lippit. “Like he was some kind of a lord or something?” He snorted water. “What were you clamping, anyway?”

“I was clamping clomps.”

Lippit just gave me a look and then one of the swimmers caught up with us. He was holding a sock. I said, “Thank you,” and, “just hang it on the same place,” and then we went into the locker room. While Lippit took a shower I sat on a bench and unbent my fingers. When he came back and got dressed I was well enough to dry my feet.

“Your toes look all right now,” he said.

“Yes. I was going to ask you about that.”

“But what’s the matter with your fingers?”

I said, “Walter. I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s probably just the angle, you know? I mean it isn’t like having the wrong toes or too many feet or something like that, right?”

“Christ. You are huffy today.”

“I just don’t want any more talk about it. Like I’m a freak.”

I bent down for my things and it now turned out I had two shoes, one clomp, and three socks.

Lippit saw this but said nothing. He turned away and coughed into his towel the way anyone might who’d been swimming more than was good for his age.

Chapter 9

W
e sat in that room over the swimming pool and sent the kid out to bring us some lunch. There had been one call from Folsom. He had called to say he was checking around and that he had everything under control. And there had been no action. Lippit and I sat at the table and I smoked a cigarette. He was tapping his pencil.

“By the clock,” he said, “there should have been something by now.”

“It’s maybe because Folsom scared everyone off. Or because you ripped Benotti’s phone out of his wall.”

Lippit didn’t appreciate that humor and just gave me a look.

“Did you check Chicago?” I said.

“Yes. I checked Chicago. They want my racket and sent Benotti.”

“You still think he’s an idiot?”

“No. He’s not an idiot, but this is not Chicago. I got the organization here and the bums I’m using for strong arm have union zeal. Benotti’s bums are just bums off the street.”

“That’s not likely.”

“He brought along four or five, to draw less attention, and the rest he picked out of the local gutter. That can’t match us, you know, Benotti or no Benotti.”

“And he’s who?”

“Out of retirement, so they’d have somebody down here I wouldn’t know. As if I knew gangsters or something,” he said.

“It sounds lame, Walter, to think they sent him down so you wouldn’t recognize him. Who was he?”

“I never knew him,” said Lippit. “And he was in slot machines someplace, a place I don’t even know.”

“You know how he set that up, before he retired?”

“I should give a damn,” he said.

“Maybe we should give a damn. Maybe he came down here while you didn’t know him and then when we got on to him, like now, it’s already too late. He’s already made his set-up and doesn’t care any more.”

“Like what? Pushing my drivers around?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. And I do think that just muscle isn’t enough whether you use it or he. And that maybe Benotti is no idiot and has more plans than that.”

The kid came back with a tray of coffee, ham on rye, and pickles to go with it. Lippit started eating and never took up what I had been saying. After years of a free ride with this business, maybe he was too confident and worse than retired. When we talked again he was only interested in what went on today.

“How did yours go this morning. Smooth?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very.”

“Anybody get hurt?”

“One of theirs, two of ours, but just minor.”

“And the rest?”

“What do you mean the rest? Like are they dead?”

“You didn’t have much sleep last night, I bet. How much sleep did you have, Jack?”

“None.”

I ate and he ate and then he said, “Of course they told Benotti afterwards, about what had happened, and that explains it.”

“Wouldn’t you think Benotti would hit right back when he heard about his stuff getting all busted?”

“Anyway, he didn’t,” said Lippit. “So much the better.”

I drank coffee and had another cigarette.

“Did you hear anything I said at the pool?”

“I think you said ‘very smart’ most of the time.”

“And I mentioned about Folsom’s crew, you remember?”

“You don’t like Folsom, do you.”

“He’s got a bunch of gorillas sitting around there, pining to do damage, and nothing’s happening. I’m worried about them, not Benotti.”

“I don’t like Folsom either,” said Lippit, “but this type of job is fine for him.”

“I don’t care if it’s fine for him. What I’m worried about, is he doing it right.”

“That’s what I meant. Now stop fidgeting.”

Then he said what I needed was some sleep and I should go home and get some and not get on his nerves. He’d stay at the phone in the meantime because he had some other work to do anyway, and he got his briefcase off the floor and took stuff out. Papers, folders, that kind of thing. I sat a while longer, smoking, and when he started to make business calls I suggested, just reasonably suggested, he should stay off that phone and give the incoming calls a chance at a time like this. Then he blew his stack. Lippit does that without transition. I was too jumpy to listen, so I went home.

I undressed, went to sleep immediately, woke up immediately. The phone.

“This is Davy, Mister St Louis.”

“Yes.”

“Mister Lippit said for me to tell you he’s down at the place on Liberty and Alder, straightening out some trouble, and you should come, too.”

“What trouble?”

“Beatings. That kind of thing.”

“Benotti showed?”

“Nobody showed, which is why the fight, Mister Lippit said.”

I said okay and hung up. I had told this to Lippit, how the natives were restless, but horsing around in the swimming pool had been more important, so now Sahib Lippit had to look into the unrest himself. I got dressed fast to see how he was doing.

It looked much the same in the bar at Alder and Liberty. The cat was on the jukebox. Actually, that’s as far as it went with the similarity.

None of the apes was trying to play cards. They were standing around. There wasn’t even one drinker at the bar and all the barstools were turned over. A lot of the bottles in back of the bar had rolled over and broken their little necks. The bartender had a mouse under one eye but nobody paid any attention to him.

The big one stood at the jukebox, like before, and Lippit stood in the same place where I had been standing for the earlier argument. This argument though, was different. “Yes, sir,” said the big one to Lippit.

“And I don’t give one damn,” Lippit was yelling, “what you think is a good reason to blow your stack.”

“Yessir, Mister Lippit. Only this one here,” and he looked at the bartender, “says not to hang around any more and to get out. And that’s not what Folsom explained to us.”

“He explain to you what you got hired for? And don’t yessir me again.”

“He did, sir.”

“You’re to beat up the opposition, not the customers!”

“Folsom was here and I explained to him how things were going. About this one here saying we should get out.”

“So he said to break up the joint?”

“He said, keep him in line. Didn’t he say keep him in line?” and the big one looked at his pack mates.

They all said, yessir, he said keep him in line.

“You mean to tell me, you son of a bitch,” Lippit was yelling, “you just did your duty?”

“Yessir.”

“You had too goddamn much fun to be doing your duty!”

“I don’t like you to be calling me no son of a bitch, Mister Lippit,” said the big one.

He wasn’t using the same tone of voice he had been using with me. So it wasn’t that. But Lippit has a completely different boiling point than mine, and even an alien chemistry in the brain. Everything he did made sure sense to him, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it.

“When I’m done,” he roared, “I want everybody to get out of here quiet as a mouse!”

“Yessir.”

“And I want you mice to take that mouse here with you, when I’m done!”

He then proceeded to get done.

The ape was bigger but Lippit was better. He swung at the other one’s head but didn’t bother to connect. He did make a connection with the solar plexus. The ape said, “Whoof.”

But the whoof seemed to be the only damage because the big one hauled out immediately and got into a crouch. Maybe he had been a boxer some time ago. He took that kind of stance. Except his swing spoiled it. The swing opened him up again and Lippit didn’t seem to care whether or not he got hit. He walked in there and flicked at an eye. This put him too close for any real damage.

The swing curled up around the back of his head, and the only problem for Lippit was to get his distance again.

This was a problem because the ape held on.

Hit the ribs? Muscle. Hit the kidneys? Muscle. Hit the head? Break your knuckles.

Lippit solved this by ducking his head. He ducked it right into the big one’s nose. But before the other one thought of letting go, Lippit had to do this thing several times. It went wham, wham, wham, and then squish.

The big one let go just enough for another type grip—maybe he had also been a groaner at some time—but that was enough for Lippit. Lippit liked distance for his style. He got his distance by slamming his hands on the ears of the other one. Open hands. They make a tremendous racket inside the head, and if it does not break the eardrum, it at least feels like it.