Murder Me for Nickels (15 page)

He was just short of raw meat when I left him and was done.

Chapter 12

I
got out of there with a limp in my leg and a crick in my neck and what my face looked like I didn’t find out until later. But nobody bothered me on the way out The three who counted weren’t bothering anybody.

I got in the car and put up the top. Privacy mattered right then. I jockeyed the car out of there, around all the trucks which seemed to be jackknifed all over the place, and bouncing the brakes every time some kid from an office ran across the street, with coffee or a folder of papers. My timing wasn’t very good. I had thought I was done when I left that warehouse, but I was still jerking as if somebody was jabbing at me.

Two blocks away I stopped by a telephone booth. First I called Davy, the kid who read do-it-yourself things and held down a phone for Lippit. Lippit wasn’t there, he said, but that wasn’t why I had called.

“You got a car over where you are, Davy?”

“Yes, Mister St Louis.”

“Jump in and drive over to the jobber’s warehouse, Davy, moving as if you were background only, and check out Benotti for me.”

“You want me to tangle….”

“I don’t mean that Just see where he goes. Like, an ambulance might pick him up and you follow along to see where it’s going.”

“Gee.”

“Yes. And wherever he goes, try and get a line on how he feels. Try….”

“I mean, Mister St. Louis, if an ambulance is gonna cart him away, I figure he can only feel one way, which is not very good.”

“I want to know how much no good.”

“All right Wait!”

“What?”

“I never seen that Benotti. How will I know….”

“The one you can’t recognize,” I said, and let him work out the rest for himself. After all, do-it-yourself …

Then I called Lippit. He was at the union hall, talking rates and kickbacks most likely, and when the girl at the telephone said she’d send somebody up and get Lippit I told her never mind, she should have him come over and join me at this and that address. I didn’t feel like standing around in the telephone booth.

I called Spire after that, Doctor Spire, who was a legitimate doctor but with a practice so small, it assured a patient of immediate service. He was in, reading something on sleeping sickness, but if I came right over, he said, he would see me forthwith.

“And why the hurry,” he wanted to know. “Are you bleeding to death?”

That profession makes a man callous. I said no, but wanted to be damn sure he was still awake when I got there.

“You bringing a girl,” he said, “or what?”

Callous profession. I hung up.

Last call was to Hough and Daly, and I would like to speak to the girl in shipping-receiving.

“Shipping-receiving,” she said.

“Doris?”

“That depends on who you are.”

“Your friend, Jack.”

“Ah! The Ripper.”

“The Ripped. Which is why I’m calling, little sweets, to beg off this evening.”

“You’re sick.”

“Jeez, you sound matter-of-fact.”

“Why, Baaibee,” she said, “you thickumth? That better?”

“Now I am sick.”

She didn’t want to let go our evening appointment and more talk like that, but I didn’t feel in any shape for the next twenty-four hours. Her boss walked in and she had to hang up. Then I drove down to Doctor Spire’s place.

He had a two-room place over a grocery store. His office was there and his living quarters. There would not have been enough space if he had put the one in the first room and the other into the second, so instead his rooms overlapped in function. The waiting room was also the living room or the library, there being chairs, bookshelves, medical journals all over a table. This was, I think, the only waiting room where the patient could read up on the competence of his physician. The other room was more versatile even, or more cluttered. Examination table, fish tank, instrument closet, pots and pans, autoclave, hot plate, bed, with more journals on it.

When I rang, he opened the door and said, “Yes?”

“St Louis,” I said. “You don’t remember?”

“Jack?” and then, “God!”

“Just Jack is fine. Let me in.”

He let me in and told me to sit on the table in the second room. I sat carefully, not being alone on this table. The fish tank was there, murky and mysterious, and instruments under glass, some kelp under glass, and something else under glass which I was afraid to ask about.

Spire was short and bald, a tired egg. Before he came over for a close look he put his white coat on.

“Don’t want to get all spotted up,” he said, and then stood close up to my face.

“What do you see?”

“Tissue. Red and blue.”

Callous as hell. He put a thermometer in my mouth, wet cotton on various parts of my face.

“Soak things down to bedrock,” he said. “So I know what’s what.”

“Bedrock? You drilling for oil?”

“All right. Bone then. Down to the bone.”

Then the bell rang and he let me sit there like that.

It was Lippit. He came in and up to the table and stopped there, by the sound of it.

“What is this?” he said to Spire. “You preparing a mummy?”

Spire laughed. It sounded like Dracula.

“Did you, ah, achieve something?” Lippit asked.

Spire took off the cotton and dabbed here and there.

“No,” I said. “But Benotti did. He owns Bascot’s.”

Lippit swore. He kept this up for a while and the doctor daubed here and there. Each little dab with a tuft of cotton felt very much worse than Benotti slamming me.

“Does Bascot look the same as you?” Lippit asked me.

“No. But Benotti does.”

“Hold still,” said Spire. “I’m anointing.”

He did that and something else with a piece of tape, so that a cut on the cheekbone would heal shut straight.

“I think I’ll go over there,” said Lippit, “and have a talk with that man. Can’t have him jumping all over my help.”

I answered something which caused the doctor to tell me to shut up or I’d end up with my tongue sewed to my nose, and Lippit should also stop talking for a moment. “It’s not good for the patient,” said Spire. We had silence for a while.

“What’s in here?” Lippit asked.

“Don’t you put your finger in it,” said Spire.

Lippit took his finger out of the tank.

“I can’t see anything in there,” he said. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been meaning to change the water.”

Then he packed gauze to one side of my face and explained about cleanliness; to keep my hands off that thing and to come back two days later for another grease job and a check.

“You can get off the table. And take your pants down.”

He was a doctor so I didn’t question it. He prepared a shot—the ampule was next to the mayonnaise in the refrigerator, the syringe was where the dishes were, and the needle—he couldn’t find the needle for a while.

“Explain to me about Benotti,” said Lippit.

I explained about Benotti and about how all the stock got broken.

“Maybe we can sway Bascot back our way,” Lippit said.

“Bascot is nothing. The way I see it, he sold out.”

“There’s a few stop-gap things we can do,” Lippit said. “I’ll try having records shipped from Chicago.”

“That’s all Benotti needs for a helping hand. He’ll deliver faster and cheaper.”

Lippit knew that. He said nothing and thought.

“I got to think of something,” he said. “Skip the jobber, maybe.”

“I don’t think the manufacturers will sell to you. Bascot’s got the franchise.”

“Skip the manufacturer maybe. Make my own.”

It was harebrained and he didn’t expect me to answer. I was just as glad.

“You got the needle yet?” I asked the doctor.

“No.”

“Keep your pants on,” said Lippit.

“Maybe in the fish tank,” I said. “You thought of that yet, Doctor?”

“Yes,” said Spire.

While Spire kept looking, Lippit kept thinking.

“We can buy through stores for a short while,” he said. “I’ll make up a data sheet with volume that’ll rock their inventory.”

“And your till.”

“I know, I know. Just to keep Benotti from getting that first foothold. Then we think of something else.”

“I know. Manufacturing.”

Spire found the needle. I don’t know where he found it and didn’t ask, but he had it on the syringe and told me to turn around.

“He can kill us in no more than a month,” Lippit said.

He talked very quietly, and as if he were thinking. This is how he talked when he was worried and when everything he thought of was very serious.

“I’m going to look into this manufacturing thing, dumb as it sounds. On a special deal, maybe I can rent masters from the big companies.”

A master is the means by which the manufacturer makes the gold. It’s the original print that makes all the records, and to lend that thing out is like agreeing to go out of business.

I didn’t answer Lippit on that, but thought I might cheer him with something else.

“Call your secret room at the club,” I told him, “and find out if Davy is back. Maybe he’s got something.”

“Do-it-yourself? How to sing your own records?”

“Yaee!” I said.

“You can put your pants back on,” said Doctor Spire.

I did and went to the waiting room, or the other room Doctor Spire had, where Lippit was sitting in an easy chair facing the window. The phone was on the window sill and the instrument next to his ear.

“You got Davy?”

He nodded and waved me off. He was listening. If his face told what he felt, he was feeling confusion.

“Just a minute,” he said into the phone. He covered the mouthpiece and looked at me. “Where did you send that boy, the insane asylum?”

“Why do you ask?”

“He says he got there and one guy was sitting on the loading ramp with his legs pulled up and every time a female walked by he would moan like a hound dog. And….”

“That wasn’t Benotti.”

“And another one was sitting on top of a rack, like a monkey, and everybody should walk around the rack in a big circle so they wouldn’t step on his ears.”

“His ear.”

“Oh. That’s all right then. For a minute there, I thought somebody was nuts.”

“That wasn’t Benotti, either. Let me have the phone.”

“Of course not. Benotti’s in that fish tank over there, is what I think.” Then he gave me the phone.

“Davy?”

“Yes, Mister St Louis.”

“There were just those two?”

“And then they got picked up by a car.”

“You didn’t see Benotti then.”

“He was the one I guess they took off in the ambulance. That was before I got there.”

“You know where they took him?”

“Mercy Hospital.”

“Go over there, Davy, and try to find out how he is.”

“How am I going to do that? I mean….”

“Tell ‘em you’re his son, or a friend, anything like that. Find out how he is, when he’s getting out, that kind of thing. You know, do-it-yourself.”

“Yessir,” and he hung up.

I put down the phone and Lippit said, “I know. You hit him so hard he fell apart and one of him is on top of that rack and the other half of him is out there on that ramp.”

I took a cigarette out and smoked with one side of my face.

“He’s at Mercy. And please don’t say, at whose mercy.”

“I won’t.”

“And Davy will check back in at the club, to tell how the patient is doing. I myself,” I said, “want to go home.”

Lippit nodded. He got up but kept looking out of the window.

“If he’s out of commission,” he said, “we might swing it yet.”

“He’s more than one man.”

“His outfit is punks,” said Lippit. “I checked enough to know that. He’s the head and punks don’t have a head.”

My face hurt and I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll take you home,” he said. “Pat’s bringing the car.”

“Thank you. I got my own.”

“Maybe you didn’t notice,” he said, “but one eye is closing.”

Spire came into the room with a small box of pills.

“For the pain,” he said. “I just found them.”

I swallowed one of them and put the rest into my pocket. Pat drove up outside.

I felt I would rather drive with one eye or one arm than go with Pat right now, so when Lippit and I got out to the street I could take only about five minutes of Pat.

“Bu-ruther,” she said, and, “You know something, feller? You remind me of somebody I know, you poor thing.”

I took another one of those pain-killer pills and swallowed it.

“Where’s the car?” said Lippit.

She pointed across the street and started walking, but when I didn’t come Lippit stopped and she did, too.

“You with him or with me?” she asked him.

But Lippit was in no mood for banter. I don’t think he and she were over the chore I had witnessed that morning.

“Save it,” he said. “I’ve got enough troubles.”

“By the looks of it,” she said, “Jack is the one with the troubles. What was it, a sausage machine or Benotti?”

“A sausage machine,” I said. “Which looked like him.”

“You coming or aren’t you?” Lippit asked me. I told him I’d drive myself and, if possible, I just wanted to be left alone till next morning. Lippit said okay and all he would do before then is let me know what Davy had to say. Lippit looked serious when he said this, and sounded that way, so that Pat caught it.

“Things are bad?” she asked.

“They got the jump on me,” he told her. “Benotti sewed up our source of discs.”

She nodded and said, “Maybe you should have listened to Jack. The time he was arguing with you to plan all this long range.”

That night, in his apartment, she had been in the next room. He had told her to go to bed and she must have heard everything while we had been talking. It showed real interest on her part.

“Maybe there’s a way to reorganize all of this, and you can beat the freeze you got from the jobber.”

It showed real interest and that she was not only pretty.

Lippit nodded and did not seem to be listening, but when he took her across to the car he was holding her arm and they looked real close again.

I had just a few more troubles before getting home, such as not being used to driving with one eye puffing shut and such as the color of red over what little I could see. This included the green lights. I went stop and go by the yelling behind me. Then I went go when I should have gone stop because a street repair gadget was going yak-yak-yak down the street. It was breaking up the pavement, and then I broke up the traffic.