Peter Rabe - Murder Me for Nickels

“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.

Conrad put the tone arm down.

“There’s a lot of hard work in this,” he said.

He meant that every which way and we took it according to taste and inclination.

First thing, a drum came on, going ratatat, and then a belter who shattered the glasswool off the ceiling.

Conrad took the record off and said, “Sorry. That was the wrong one, of course.”

“Of course,” said Pat.

Lippit smiled like a father and I fingered my patch. Very hot under that patch there.

Conrad came back with another disc. “I had to cut a few others things late at night,” he was saying. “That’s why this happened. The lady’s song,” he said to Lippit, “is a tender thing. There’s beat, I grant you, but mostly from the lilt.”

Smiles. Tone arm down.

Three beats by the instrumental, nice and normal. Then the vocal cut in.

We all waited around for a while, to get this thing straight, but nothing changed to make it any clearer.

This did not lilt. It loped. Nothing ugly. Friendly, actually. Like a friendly bear loping. I don’t have any exceptional ear for tone but my guess was, Pat was singing about one and a half registers lower. She mewed like something asleep and she buzzed like a bee and she growled like a bear.

Conrad told me later that she was about two registers lower than normal.

“What’s that strange instrument?” Lippit asked.

“Just a minute, just a minute,” said Conrad, and flipped the switch for a different speed. Pat sounded like Pat now.

When you could hear her. It was hard to hear her because the orchestra was going just a little bit crazy. There was the part which you might call “Revolt of the Mosquitoes,” and then the part which you might call “Tarantella of the Hornets.” But all more than life-size. It made Pat sound like the one who was abnormal.

“Ah,” said Lippit. “Eh-One of those modern things. Very.”

“Conrad,” I said, “better turn…” but he was doing just that at the moment, turning it off, and it stopped the music and all of us into one large silence. I don’t think any of us wanted to talk after that.

Conrad took the record off and looked at it as if he had never seen one before. Lippit touched his tie, waiting for everyone else to talk. We were the experts. I looked at Pat and it didn’t look good.

She didn’t look hurt, puzzled, upset, anything. She sat still and smiled. It might even have looked like a mysterious smile, though it didn’t to me. She looked at her hands in her lap, checking the polish on her nails. I think she was checking the nails, plain and simple, to see if they were sharp enough.

“You understand what happened,” said Conrad. “I got screwed up with the speeds.”

“He was doing ten jobs at the same time, yesterday,” I explained. “He worked till after one in the morning.”

“Oh,” said Lippit. He seemed glad there was this explanation. Or that it was over.

“What must have happened,” Conrad was saying, “when I taped the background for the Chuck Morty record and then afterwards I took it off and…”

“All we’ve got to do,” I said, “is do the thing over. That’s all. Okay, Patty?”

“I knew,” she said, “I knew there was some explanation.”

“Sure, Patty. And a simple one, too.”

“Well,” said Conrad, “I wouldn’t just say simple, you know, because if it had been that simple I would have caught it and this wouldn’t have happened. What must have happened…”

“Of course not,” said Pat. “How could it be a simple explanation. But I knew there would be some explanation.”

She was smiling all that time. Every so often she looked down at her hands, the way I’ve described it, but everything must have seemed good and sharp to her because she looked up and pushed her chair away.

“What we’ll do,” I said, “we’ll tape it right over. All right, Conrad? Set it up and…”

“No,” said Pat. “That’s awfully sweet of you but Walter here doesn’t have the time. Walter has to get back and attend to things and before that, I told him he might like to look at the plant.”

“Plant?” I said.

“He’s never seen a place like this,” said Pat. “Upstairs or downstairs.”

She didn’t object to any of Conrad’s explanations and she didn’t even protest when they were getting too technical. Conrad’s pride was getting involved. She soothed him with a smile but the smile didn’t do the same thing for me. Lippit, in the meantime, had gotten up from the piano stool and was looking around the place. His interest, he must have felt, would help to get rid of the awkwardness. “And what’s this for?” he asked Conrad, and Conrad showed him what this was for and what that was for.

I took Pat’s arm and we stood fairly close.

“Patty,” I said, “stop looking so benign.”

“What’s the difference. You know how I feel.”

“Honey, believe me I’m sorry.”

“But I believe you, Jacky. I do believe you.”