Murder Me for Nickels (17 page)

Pat looked gorgeous and sharp. She looked gorgeous because she couldn’t help it and she looked sharp because she was. We sat in the booth and had iced tea and neither of us bothered to play dumb any more.

“How much of the place do you own?” she asked.

“Some of it.”

“Enough to cut me a very good disc?”

“Listen, Pat….”

“I’ve been. The time on the couch, the time at the party, just now in the office, and one other thing. I walked into the wrong place at first. Downstairs here, where they boil all that black stuff and press the records. They said, no, Mister St. Louis rarely comes down here. But try Blue Beat, upstairs.”

“You could have walked into the restaurant here and they might have told you the same thing.”

“You own the restaurant, too?”

She was guessing. I told her that and sipped iced tea.

“Of course,” she said. “Would you like me to ask Walter to come help me guess? The way business is going, he might just be interested enough. The downstairs and the upstairs might just tickle his fancy.”

“I don’t see why.”

“I don’t either, Jack. Maybe a pressing plant and a recording plant can’t do him any good whatsoever. But it’s worth the question, don’t you think?”

I couldn’t think of a single glib thing to say and she had me. She had me because she was sharp. She had me because it was clear I didn’t want Lippit to know about any of this.

“So, the reason I’m here,” she said, “is to get a big, healthy boost and get a start as a singer.”

“You’re making ready to sing pretty good without anyone’s help.”

“I’d rather sing pretty. Not nasty.”

I looked at my iced tea—I didn’t like iced tea—and thought, why not let her sing. The only reason I had tried to keep her away wasn’t a good one any more. She just about knew what I owned in this building. And if I didn’t let her sing pretty, she’d do it nasty and Lippit would know what I owned.

At first, I had just kept it from him as a matter of principle, because Lippit would have wanted in. Next stage, I kept it from him because I had kept it from him, which would have made him sore. And he would want in. Last stage, he would want in for sure. I had a notion how it could save his skin with the Benotti trouble.

I said, “All right, Patty. You called it.”

“You’ll make me sound pretty?”

“So you won’t talk to Lippit nasty.”

She was a charmer. She had one sweet smile and a frank little squeeze of my hand, reaching over the table, and what did she want, after all, but to be a singer. When over a barrel, I got this rule: Trust ‘em. It’s simpler, for the time being.

I checked the time and thought Conrad ought to show pretty soon. I told Pat not to drink any more tea for the moment, because it would make her throat too insensitive. She liked hearing that, since it showed my solicitude and because it sounded like professionals’ lore. We felt almost friendly.

“Jacky,” she said, “I don’t want you to think that time on the couch—you remember that time—I don’t want you to think that was all for just this.”

“Oh, no.”

“Just to prove it to you, Jacky, we can do it again sometime.”

The logic stunned me and I almost said, oh no, again. Instead I said nothing. I sat and felt nervous with the unreal sense of peace and accord. Conrad should show about now. There would be trouble with Conrad and that would take care of the unreal feeling. Or I could call up Lippit. He should be done at the jobbers. Call Lippit and let him take care of the sense of peace. It would either turn out a joke, or who knows, maybe he had been solving things, while I hadn’t.

I went out to the lobby and called upstairs. Conrad was still in his fiberglass sanctum but would wrap things up in a minute or so.

I called the club and got Davy on the phone. No, Lippit hadn’t finished, but had called about something. He had wanted somebody to bring down the folder on last month’s deliveries.

He was still talking to Bascot He hadn’t been thrown out, driven off to the hospital, or anything like that. He was still talking and maybe it looked good.

I saw Conrad come down the lobby and I hung up the phone. Maybe he wouldn’t argue too much. Maybe that, and Pat, would turn out good, too.

He looked sweaty and rumpled and when he saw me he also looked annoyed.

“So. What is this?”

“Conrad,” I said, “due to several reasons which are none of your business….”

“What is this? You running this outfit to procure females or something?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘or something’, but I….”

“All right Females. I’ve seen her.”

“It isn’t that simple, Conrad.”

“You’re damn right it won’t be that simple, Jack-boy, because if you think I’m going to twiddle those dials for any non-musical purpose….”

“Of course not, Conrad. I wouldn’t dream….”

“Not dream, maybe, but you’d do it.”

I made a pause to break his rhythm, and then I said, “She’s going to record and you’ve got to make her sound good.”

“You’ve got it that bad?”

“No, damn it.”

“You mean she’s that bad?”

“I don’t know. All I know is, she’s got to sound good on the first try.”

“Don’t threaten me.”

“I’m not. I was going….”

“And you can’t bribe me, if that’s next.”

“You artists,” I said.

“Take her someplace else.”

“If she doesn’t sound good,” I said, “and to make a long story short, we lose B. B. and the works.”

He looked out to the street, mean and rumpled. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

“You artists,” and I took his arm to lead him to the restaurant.

“For the challenge,” he said. “I’ll do it for that.”

“Okay. You’re a craftsman. Not an artist.”

We went to the booth where Pat was waiting and on the way I told Conrad to be polite. “I’m not a sore loser,” he said and when we got to Pat he said, “Hello.” I bumped him and he said, “Hello, and how do you do?”

Pat did it much better, playing it with charm and a pretty shyness and I had to explain to her about Conrad’s manner.

“An artist all the time,” I told her, “and no room left for anything else.”

“Oh?” she said.

“He’s studying your voice and projection and so on right now. All the time like that.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You said ‘oh’ and before that it was the carriage of your head, the size of your neck, that kind of thing.”

She smiled as before, though less shy this time.

“Did you explain to him that this has got to sound good, first try, Jacky?”

“Sure he did,” said Conrad. “What can you sing?”

Everybody was more realistic than me. We went upstairs and that artist and that woman got along fine.

Conrad took her to the piano and ran her through a couple of numbers. First thing that showed, she was working the lyrics but not the melody. Her voice wasn’t bad, but it was far from singing.

“This thing you’re doing,” he told her, “is lousy poetry The guy who wrote it knows it, I know it, but you don’t. The guy who did the notes knew it so well he knocked himself out to doll the whole thing up with music. You respect that fact, lady, and you’re on your way to singing.”

She worked on that. She took that insult and others and worked like a horse. Just like a singer.

I called Lippit again while that was going on, but he wasn’t back. Good sign, this. Maybe Pat would turn from a good horse into a good singer and Lippit would swing something with Bascot that day, and when all that would be done, I’d deserve a vacation.

There was a rumble on the South Side, I learned from the foreman. Two of the drivers had seen some Benotti bums drift around. Maybe they live there, the foreman said.

I went back into the studio and this time Conrad was in his sanctum. Pat was in the soloist’s booth and Conrad was talking to her with the mike.

“Just go along with it, for the timing,” he said.

He was playing an instrumental for her which would be her background.

“Hear that?” he said to me.

Her voice and the orchestra disc were coming in on the wall speaker.

“She’s weak.”

“She’s a marvel,” he said. “She does all that with her mouth and no breathing. She thinks breathing is for getting oxygen into the blood.”

“When you tape it, add echo,” I said.

“I got the mike on in the back room right now.”

Behind the recording room was an empty room and with the door open and a mike in there to pick up the sound from a distance, Conrad got a nice volume effect. But it wasn’t enough, this time.

“Three months of work and she could be pleasant enough. Nice beat. She knows when to come in.”

But she had to come in with more, and not three months from now.

“Maybe if you told her this was for real, maybe she’d put out more.”

“She gets loud and thin. I told you about her theory of breathing. Like a doctor.”

“I just heard her go flat,” I said.

“I can tape that so she won’t know it. You will, but she won’t.”

When Pat and the record were done I was sweating. She had, you might call it, a voice three months later.

“Walk around a little,” he said into the mike. “Then we start taking.”

She nodded through the window and walked. I think she looked pleased.

“You out of your mind?” I asked Conrad.

“Well, no. You brought her up.”

“How you going to do this, for godsake, the way she sounds?”

“I’ll have her go with the background on headphones. I’ll tape her alone and put the rest of it on the tape later. I can lay around more, that way.”

“You put the background volume down for her, so she shows, and you come up with a whispering take.”

“I’ll cut her at seventy-eight instead of thirty-three. I can pump more volume into seventy-eight.”

Then he said all right into the mike, and told her to get ready. He said he’d start the background when he went so with his finger and she should come in on the third. She said she didn’t know what he meant by the third and he said he’d go so with his finger. Then he turned on the tape, then her background record, then put both hands on the mixer panel. I said, “Bless all the little wires,” and got out of there. I had headache.

Chapter 15

C
onrad, I found out the next day, had worked very hard with the girl, making something like fifteen takes, getting her tired, the way he liked his performers, sending her home late, staying himself until after midnight. There had been two more sessions, there was the background he had to put under her solo, and there was the dub he had to cut, so she could listen to a finished record next morning. Conrad himself did not seem to get tired.

Nothing else sprung in the rest of the business, such as the rumble the foreman had mentioned, or such as Lippit’s talk with the jobber that day. Last time I called he hadn’t been back, and after that Doris showed up, and I had just one phone call, Pat, sounding sweet and tired. But it was the wrong time—like I said, Doris was there—and what Pat said on the phone, I had to let pass. I disconnected the phone after that call—there was a gadget to do this at this point—so I didn’t hear from Lippit till the next day. Doris was better news anyway. Much better.

We met at the studio the next morning. Everybody looked fine. Pat, brilliant and smiling, as the occasion demanded. It was a premiere. Lippit, keen and interested, as Pat demanded. Conrad, bushed.

Conrad was setting it up for playing the record and Pat hung around with him, watching every move. Lippit sat down on the piano stool and I went over to have a quick talk. I lit a cigarette and said, “So?”

“We’ll see, I guess.” He was rubbing his face. “Pat tells me you know these people and you were helping out to set her up the right way.”

“What I meant….”

“Damn nice of you,” he said. “Would be nice not to get bugged with that topic any more.”

I, too, thought that would be damn nice.

“About yesterday,” he said. “I couldn’t reach you by phone.”

“What happened?”

Lippit seemed tired. He had been up most of the night, he explained, trying to set something up.

“Because Bascot didn’t come through.”

He went plink, plink on the piano and I looked at my cigarette ashes.

“You made it look good for him, if he keeps delivering?”

“So good I was losing money just talking about it.”

“And nothing?”

“Nothing. What took the time, he got his lawyer to come over. He would have liked to keep our account, is the point, but the business sold to Benotti, lock stock and barrel, didn’t give him the free hand. That’s what the lawyer came over for, to see if Bascot, he’s just manager now, could make a deal.”

“No?”

“No. Breach of contract, for one, and Benotti’s more personal methods for another.”

“I know about those.”

“Yeah.”

“But he’s still out at Mercy.”

“That’s right. Recuperating while I go under.”

“Anything to the rumble at the South end?”

“Nothing. Just some of his bums with nothing to do.”

“You going to buy records through dealers?”

“If I want to go broke, yes,” he said. He rubbed his face again and watched Conrad and Pat come through the door with the record.

“What I need is,” he said, “some way to get discs at a jobber’s price.”

“There’s nobody close enough for you to buy into.”

“There’s got to be some other way. Some other way, Jack. We’ll have to talk about that.”

He stopped and smiled. Now came the premiere.

“Have you two been talking?” said Pat, and she smiled, too.

“Just a little,” I said. “We’re all anxious to hear.”

“I bet you are,” she said, but never stopped smiling.

And if nothing else works, I was thinking, before Lippit goes under, I’ll try this one other way. As I said once, I liked him. And the money. I thought about this and related things while Conrad put the disc on the turntable. Pat’s record didn’t interest me any more. Conrad knew his magic.

The song was a ballad which sounded best with a tender lilt. The orchestra worked it that way, and Pat’s little voice, the way Conrad had cut it, would come out that way, too. A voice with no depth and volume can be made to sound sweet. Children sing that way. Taping at thirty-three and cutting at seventy-eight would help with the depth.