Murder Me for Nickels (13 page)

“I don’t know. I think it jumped off the night table and is coming this way.”

“You’re not going to look?”

“I’m afraid to look. It might be smiling, like a Cheshire Cat.”

“It heard you,” said Doris, because right then the phone stopped ringing.

We went inside, into the bedroom, and I turned on the light. Doris still had one arm in her jacket. I went over and tore the phone out of the wall and Doris dropped the jacket on the ground.

Like I said once, her dress didn’t interfere much with the girl underneath, and in a short while it didn’t at all. Then nothing did. She sat down on the bed and waited.

“Leave the light on,” she said.

I did. I just turned the phone around because I didn’t like the look on the dial face.

“May all my affairs end like this one.”

Chapter 11

I
had a time waking her in the morning but she had to be at work. When she was good and awake I had a notion she should stay in bed a little bit longer, but she said I should take her home or she would never come back. The thought was new to me but it was a good one.

I took her home first, to change, and then to her office. The Benotti place, I could see from across the street, showed some activity. There was somebody with a broom and somebody else with a clip board and pencil and what they were working on must have been inventory.

Then I drove off, top down, for some morning air and deep breathing, a refreshing way of starting the day and more harmless, it is my feeling, when done in a convertible, than in the fanatic’s manner, such as calisthenics or hikes.

At eight-thirty I had ham and eggs, at nine o’clock it was still too early for anything. Lippit, after all, had been having a party. I spent twenty minutes or so calling a few of our places and the word was peace in each case and we’re glad it’s over. I had chitchat with a few of them—what is called customer relations work—and it was, “Why don’t you drop in sometime,” and, “Sure, Jack, the machines are fine.” In two places our service hop with the change of records was late but that happened sometimes and was not a real complaint.

At ten o’clock I rang the bell of Lippit’s apartment.

“The door’s open!”

The morning paper was in front of the door and I brought that with me.

But they didn’t pay any attention to me. I stood there with the paper in my hand and watched Lippit try to get into his jacket. He was so mad it took him twice as long as it would have taken a child.

“And if I want back talk,” he was yelling, “I’ll ask for it. And if you can’t handle a sane conversation, then don’t talk to me!”

Pat was on the couch, holding a coffee cup, but then she put it down to be less encumbered.

“And if you don’t like me to talk to your help then don’t invite them up here for a party!”

“You telling me who to invite and who not?”

“Whom, Walter.”

“I’m going nuts!”

“Good morning,” I said.

“You go to hell, too!” said Lippit.

I went back to the door and said, “All right. I’ll see you, maybe?” but then he called after me I should wait, he’d come along right away.

I stood around while he finished with his jacket and while Pat sipped her coffee as if it was poison but she liked drinking poison. Once she kicked at a glass on the floor.

The whole place was a mess. It was the standard post-party formula of cigarette butts, dead soldiers, brown dregs in the bottoms of glasses with lipstick stains on the rim. Sometimes there was a switch on the order of things and there was liquor in an ashtray and butts in a liquor glass.

I said, “How was last night?”

“I was just going to ask you the same thing,” said Pat.

“Don’t answer her.” Lippit had his jacket on but had forgotten to put on a tie. “Or you’ll end up like this room.”

I shrugged and went to the couch, meaning to sit there and wait for Lippit.

“Better not,” said Pat, “or Walter will worry that I’ll make a pass at you.”

“After last night,” he said without turning, “I wouldn’t wonder.”

They spat at each other a little while longer and I went away from that couch and sat on the window sill. In a way it was just a post-party haggle about who made a pass at whom. Not my worry. Their worry. Except, I had a notion why Pat had behaved that way.

And I don’t mean she was jealous in the antique sense of the word. Pat was modern. She and I on that couch—was it two nights ago?—that was fairly modern. Cerebral, is what I mean, and reminding of business. And then Doris had to stand by the piano and sing that song. And the chitchat about me promoting her talent. And Pat’s ambitions….

Lippit might think this was a post-party skirmish. I didn’t Maybe Pat didn’t.

I said, “You call me last night, Walter?”

“Huh?”

“No,” said Pat. “I did.”

“Whatever for?” Lippit wanted to know.

“Just for kicks,” said Pat “That’s all.”

“Brother,” said Lippit. “Bu-rother.”

It showed how mean Pat had felt and how much Lippit was out of it.

“That all you going to say?” Pat asked him. She put her coffee cup down and got ready for him.

Lippit had his tie on, his jacket, and now he grabbed his hat.

“I’m getting out of here,” he said, and we started walking.

“Jeez, you’d think she and me here was married.”

When we closed the door Pat said, “Bu-rother.”

That’s all she did. So far.

We drove down to the service depot where Lippit had his trucks, storage, and a shop for repairs. It was just normally busy there and, with the coffee break on, even homey. We went past the work benches and the half dozen jukeboxes on dollies and on to the back where the foreman had a cubicle to himself. Lippit sat down at the desk and I stood around next to it.

“Bu-rother,” Lippit said. “You’d think home might at least be as peaceful as work.”

I lit a cigarette and said, “Don’t get married.”

“That’s right. That’s why I don’t.”

We dropped that nonsense when the foreman came in. He nodded and made a comment about the nice party from the night before.

“Drop that subject,” I told him.

Then he went to the urn in the shop and brought us some coffee. We sipped and Lippit said, “Anything?”

“No,” said the foreman. “Just the usual.”

“Like what?”

“Like those machines from the Markus Company. We got a breakdown someplace. It’s one of those Markus machines.”

“Junk,” said Lippit. “Bargains. I hate bargains.”

“You got eight more on order,” said the foreman.

“That’s been canceled,” I said. “A week ago, Walter?”

“Yeah. I canceled a week ago.”

“Nothing else much,” said the foreman. “Just Jimmy and Don are late.”

“How long has that been going on?”

“Well, not Don. He’s regular. Just Jimmy off and on.”

“He’s no bargain, you know,” Lippit said into his coffee. “He just drives deliveries and could be replaced.”

“He’s all right,” said the foreman. “Not what I’d call trouble.”

Electrical repairs don’t make much of a racket and the sounds from the shop weren’t anything much. There was nothing to listen to and the three of us by the desk didn’t have much to say.

“Late on what?” I asked the foreman. “What are the two drivers late on?”

“Pickups,” said the foreman. “Today is change day.”

“You mean it’s past ten in the morning,” Lippit wanted to know, “and nobody’s been out putting in the new records?”

“Like I said, Don and Jimmy ain’t back yet from the jobber.”

Lippit picked up the phone and called up our jobber. He asked for shipping and receiving and had an argument with the guy who handled our weekly order.

“All fouled up,” said Lippit when he hung up the phone. “Lots of apologies but plenty fouled up.”

“Don and Jimmy’s okay,” said the foreman. “Like I told you.”

Nothing else went on that day, except routine which was handled by the shop. And some to-do about Lippit’s union. Nothing special, just what had to be done since Folsom was fired.

But the next day I was busy, starting early in the morning. It was public relations work of a hopeless kind. Maybe two hours of that, and then I went to see Lippit.

He was in that room he had in the club. He had been talking shipping rates with a trucking man and when I came in they were on the small talk. I took maybe five minutes of that and then I fiddled the radio. When I had it good and loud Lippit looked up, from the middle of a sentence about pennant prospects.

“You’re bothering me, Jack.”

“This is nothing,” I said. “Nothing yet.”

“What?”

“Business.”

“So talk.”

“Send him out.”

Lippit sent the trucker out, after offering a guest dip in the pool, or a steam bath if the trucker preferred, but the trucker preferred to stay as he was. He left and Lippit said, “Turn down that damn radio.”

“You like this kind of music?” I didn’t turn it off, just down.

“That’s egghair music,” he said.

“You make it sound terrible, Walter. Either say egghead, or longhair, but not the other.”

“Whichever. I don’t get it.”

“In that case, Walter, here is what I suggest you might do. Go to Casey’s Tap Room, on Adler, and listen to an Etude by Chopin with your beer. Or sit down in Morry’s Bowling Emporium and take in those wild licks by a cat called Handel. Or if your taste….”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.”

“You prefer Vivaldi?”

“Which?”

“Happy’s Icecream Parlor.”

“Turn off that damn radio!”

“That was Wagner’s
Valkyrie
. Moishe’s Delicatessen.”

He said something but I didn’t catch it all because of the speed of his delivery. When he was done he got up and started to pace.

“How’d all those crazy records get on those jukes?”

“It’s what Don and Jimmy brought over.”

“Don’t they look at the crap they pick up?”

“You know damn well they don’t. We get the jobber’s list unless we ask for specials.”

Lippit paced and mumbled.

“It’s every place like that?” he asked.

“Armenian folk music at the rec hall of Irish Patriots,
Tosca
at the Teens Tavern, which goes well with the malteds, and….”

“Never mind.”

He grabbed up the phone and called up the jobber but before he got really wild he banged down the receiver. It was cramping his style. He went down there in person and I was along. A fine performance, and he meant every word of it. And it worked. He got the jobber to pick up all the wrong records and it wouldn’t cost Lippit a cent.

This was done. This was fine.

But the next day it was still as far as it had gone. We now didn’t have a box with a full quota of records and most of them were without current hits.

I went down to the jobber.

The place was big and dark. It was in one end of a warehouse in a street full of truck terminals. The disc jobber, who supplied a territory including three towns, used space which was higher than wide, a long hall with racks which did not reach the ceiling, because the ceiling was two stories up. You can’t pile records very high. The weight adds up and the bottom ones break. The racks were all over the place, making long, criss-cross alleys. The office part was on the second floor of the attaching warehouse and I got up there by a metal staircase which wound up to the door which had been put through the wall.

This place was all utility, too. Just a big room with factory windows, the walls green-painted cinderblock, a girl typing, a man with a desk full of ledgers, a wall of files, a half-glass partition. Bascot, the jobber, had his desk at that end.

I walked in, and when the iron door clanked shut the girl looked up from her machine and stopped typing. She had the stoop, dry hair and glasses of the girl who would have her kind of job forever.

I knew her and she knew me, but she didn’t say hello. She tried to smile but she only nodded, and because her machine had made the only sound in the office it was now very quiet.

“Bascot in, girl Friday?”

“Mister Bascot?”

“Yes. Bascot. I don’t know about the Mister yet. I’ll first talk to him.”

Then I heard the little sound a door makes when you try not to make any sound at all, the door on the other side of the partition, and I went in unannounced. He knew I was there, anyway.

The door was just hissing shut on the pneumatic gadget and I walked past Bascot’s empty desk, empty chair, and out of his empty office.

He was just partway down the stairs. They led out to the street or you could take a door which went back to the storage space.

“Bascot,” I said. “I’m happy to find you in.”

I could just see the top of his head and that he was trying to get out to the street.

“Wait up. I’ll walk with you.”

He didn’t want that. He turned to the door which went to the warehouse and there he went through this little act of just having heard me. Puzzled stop, look around at the air, distracted recognition.

“Oh. St. Louis,” he said.

I caught up with him and tried to ease everything with a smile of gladness.

“I almost missed you.”

Maybe I should have first practiced the smile with a mirror, because by the looks of Bascot it had not come off. He seemed to think I was glad that I could now take a bite out of him.

“I’m in a hurry, St. Louis. How about tomorrow?”

Bascot, it was true, was always in a hurry. He had a big forehead with permanent wrinkles, worry wrinkles about having to hurry, and he had a nervous pout which he did with his mouth, very quickly and about every two minutes. It was meant to resettle his plate. And his clothes showed hurry. Tie half down, collar curled under, vest buttoned wrong. If there were such a thing as a set of two left-footed shoes, Bascot would wear them.

“Today,” I said. “Because I’m in a hurry.”

“All right Come in here.”

Nasty, too. He went into the warehouse but didn’t open the door enough for me to get through. I had to open it again myself and when I was through he was standing there by a rack.

In spite of the summer outside, the warehouse seemed chilly. That was because of the two-story ceiling. Or maybe it was Bascot’s manner.