Peter Rabe - Murder Me for Nickels

“If you locked the door, then how did I get in?”

“Through the keyhole.”

“No. I’m little, but not small.”

This struck me as nonsense, but when I opened my eyes she was there, real enough. I said, “Hello, Doris.”

“Hello, slugged pickle.”

“We talked about that, too?”

“I could not begin to tell you just what we did talk about.”

“You were here. I wasn’t.”

“I was never sure I was getting all of the conversation.”

She sat on the bed, hands in her lap, but then she reached over and took the phone away from my ear.

“Why, it’s dead,” she said. “You always sleep like that?”

Then she cradled it. The instrument was still on my stomach. I sat up and it wasn’t too bad.

“Am I looking at you with both eyes?”

“Sort of.”

I saw that it was dark outside of the window and asked her how long she had been here.

“Half an hour, maybe.”

“Dear Doris,” I said. “My only desire is for something to drink. You have come at the wrong time.”

“I just came to see how you were. And I tried to put your pajamas on but you wouldn’t let me move the phone.”

Yessir, there were the pajamas all right, lying next to me on the bed. I sent her to the kitchen, to bring me a drink, and put my pajamas on. When she brought me a drink it was a tall glass, and cool, filled with water. I sent her back with different instructions and told her where the bourbon was. She came back with two glasses this time, though mine was darker, and we sat on the bed for a while.

“Least you can do,” I said, “is take your shoes off.”

She took her shoes off and we talked some more. I said something nice about her singing and she said I must mean it, because there was nothing else to promote at the moment. This caused me to make a pass at her and she said, if you do that again, I’ll slap your face. That, under the circumstances, put me in a sweat and I told her to get off my bed and fetch over another drink.

It was a nice change from the rest of the day. We talked about singing a little bit more and I said I would like to give her a trial, and we had sandwiches and some more from the bottle. I held her hand and then her arm, and so on.

“You must be feverish,” she said.

“Yes. Somebody better stay for the night.”

She said she didn’t want to sit up all night and I said, of course not, but before she lay down she got up to do something about her clothes getting wrinkled. She got undressed and put on a pair of my pajamas which didn’t fit, of course, and gave her a misleading shape. Then she lay down next to me and turned off the light because the glare was giving me a headache. She held my head and said, “Boy, what a fever,” and put it down on herself, like on a pillow. That was all right, but then I wasn’t sleepy. I said, “Listen. The pajamas make me self-conscious. I don’t like to make love to my own pajamas.”

Her skin felt cool, as if I did have a fever, and she got tense and then stretched.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ve caught your fever.”

She had, and it got higher before it was done.

She had to go to work in the morning and, as a matter of fact, was gone when I woke. The pajamas had disappeared and the dishes and bottle, but there was a note on the night table which said that the pajamas were no good anyway and had been put in the laundry, the dishes were where they belonged and the bottle she had hidden. “To promote early recovery from all kinds of damages. Too bad,” said the postscript, “and today is my day off. Doris.”

She didn’t have a phone, according to the book, and when I called her office, they said, yes, this was her day off.

Maybe she would come back in the evening, I thought, and went to the bathroom.

The damage looked more confirmed today, one side of my face looking more filled out than the other, but my color was almost normal. There was the patch, with the cut under it-itching-and one eye slitty.

I showered, keeping my head out of the water, and I shaved, one side more than the other. Then I dressed for a slow day at home, and had ham and eggs in the kitchen and coffee, which I took with me to the phone. I called the club.

Lippit wanted to know how I was and then he said he was fine, too. He was off for a talk with Bascot and in the meantime had ordered filler discs and selected hits from out of town, just in case. Stop gap, for the time being. It looked like we would ride this thing out The jukebox operators had not been approached by the Benotti crowd. All was peaceful.

Like once before, I thought. When the hoods didn’t show, but the jobber got snagged.

“And a guy by the name of Conrad called,” Lippit said. “He was trying to reach you.”

“ What? ”

“Conrad. I don’t know the guy, but he said he knew you.”

I sighed, part relief and part worry, and then I said, yes, I knew who that was, and it wasn’t important.

“He didn’t say it was important. He just said he was trying to reach you.”

Maybe he had called while I had been in the shower. Or while the phone had been off the hook.

Lippit said I should rest for the day and I said thank you and he should stay in touch. Then I called Blue Beat.

I didn’t get Conrad. Herbie answered the phone and said Conrad was taping background for yesterday’s vocal, one of those teen-age turmoil groups who were doing well around town. This was not for the Blue Beat label. This was paid for by their agent.

“Conrad tried to reach me,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling back.”

“Oh! About the girl. Oo-man! Nice.”

“Singer?”

“I don’t care. Oo-man!”

“What did she want?”

“She said she knew you and this was a surprise for you. Oo-man would I like to be…”

“Shut up, Herbie, will you please?”

“What I mean is, any time she…”

“I got that. What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Little?”

“Little? Certainly not, Mister St. Louis.”

“What I mean is…”

“I know what you mean. And she said she’d be back, say at two.”

“To see me, or Conrad?”

“To surprise you. She wants to cut a tape.”

I hung up on the next oo-man bit and had some of my coffee.

I don’t like surprises. I especially didn’t like any surprises at that time, under those circumstances, and with me trying to take a rest for the day. I knew I had told Doris I’d give her a try some time, but that needed preparing, in more than one way. So I checked the time-noon almost, checked my patch-tickling on the inside, and got dressed for the street. I remembered I didn’t have my car and walked.

The inside of the building on Duncan is quiet. The entrance is dark, cool and quiet, the elevator is slow like an old man, and the tenant list tells you very little. It says things like B. B. Recording, Duncan Service, Inc., Lieb Associates, Modern Times Co., that kind of thing. I have no idea what any of those offices did.

B. B. Recording, of course, was my place. You go from the big, quiet, cool corridor, into the small, noisy, hot studio. First thing is a desk and a cable snaking across the floor. There is a phone on the desk, but the cable is for something else. Conrad explained it to me once, but I forget what. There are signed photos on the wall-I know one of them; it’s of Conrad-and posters of high school hops. The agents like the place looking that way. It impresses the talent. Next comes a room which is hard to describe, containing, as it does, tape and record racks, coffee urn, coats and hats, chairs piled with sheet music, disc cutter, tape splicer, sink and towel. There is that cable across the floor and another one hanging in midair and a window which shows the big room for the sessions. The cables in that room defy count, but you can see mikes standing all over, piano, bandstand stuff, and the soloist’s booth. Draped like shrouds across parts of the ceiling is fiberglass batting, to catch dust and kill echoes. One of the things hangs down vertically and Conrad does not permit tacking it up. It fell down that way while they were taping a mountain-type ballad and the record sold two hundred thousand.