Peter Rabe - Murder Me for Nickels

“Like hell it would have to be another jobber,” said Lippit. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” And he laughed.

He started down the steps of the loading ramp and I helped Pat down the steps because they were steep and she was wearing heels.

“You’re not looking well,” she said close to my ear. “Like a skinned cat, sweetie.”

Lippit stopped, halfway down.

“I just had an idea,” he said.

“Ohsaintcheshire smile upon me,” I said with the bad side of my face.

“How well,” Lippit said and looked at me, “how well do you know this outfit?”

“If you mean about the coffee and could…”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Yes. Don’t be stupid,” said Pat.

“Gallows humor,” I said and did a laugh with that one. “As a matter of fact, Lippit-keep walking, won’t you? — I was saying before, I wanted to talk to you about the delivery problem. A little wrinkle I thought up while lying in bed yesterday and maybe the very thing…”

“Don’t be so secretive, Jack. Don’t you think he’s being secretive, Walter?” said Pat.

“What did he say?”

“He’s got this wonderful surprise for you, Walter. I think that’s what he’s trying to say.”

“You know about it, too?” he asked her.

“He confided in me,” she told him, “at one time when he and I discussed singing. You remember the time we discussed singing, Jacky?”

“Watch your step there,” I said and looked down. “The last one is a bad one.”

I watched her pretty leg reach out and make it easy.

“As a matter of fact,” she was saying, “I was so surprised at the time, it put me flat on my back.”

She was twisting me proper, just as she had promised. She was getting her own back, but only up to a point. There she stopped.

The thing was, she was letting me tell it to Lippit, myself Which, at this point of no good coming my way from any where, made me cherish the girl out of all proportion to her misdeeds.

“Well?” said Lippit. “Well?”

“Yes,” I said. “I know this outfit well.”

“Come on man, tell me. Are they big? Are they easy? I mean suckers?”

“Easier than that, Walter. There’s only one. One big sucker.”

“Good!” He looked rapacious. “Let’s go down to the club. We got to work this thing over.”

“He’s been worked over.”

“The sucker?”

“Yeah. Me.”

I didn’t pay too much attention to Pat then, but she seemed content with her morning and left us to go to the club together. Lippit was frowning some-nothing definite yet, since he clearly had to catch up with a great deal. We were walking down the parking lot in back of the building when a window opened up on the fourth floor.

“Jack? Hey, Jack!”

Conrad was leaning out. I could tell by the hair.

“Can you hear me?” he yelled.

“If it’s important.”

“There’s this girl on the phone, Jack. You remember this girl, works for Hough and Daly? She says you promised her…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tape her. Right across the mouth, tape her,” which shows what a state I was in.

Lippit and I drove without talking, most of the way. There was just a little conversation, designed to show me the new lay of the land.

“Pretty nice for us, huh, Walter? This new development.”

“Yeah. Quite a surprise.”

He didn’t explain that any further. I drove and he sat. I said a few more things, like, “How about breakfast, Walt? I don’t think that coffee was enough,” and he’d say, “No, I think I’ve had enough. I think I’ve had all I wanted.” Or, one other time, I tried comments on Benotti developments, and what did he think of those South Side goings on, and he said there were no goings on. The Benotti business, that business at any rate, was all pretty much in the open at this point.

So he kept digesting away in allegorical fashion and by the time he and I got to this club of his, the business between him and me was pretty much in the open. At the entrance I held the door for him and he said, “You go in first, you son of a bitch. I don’t want to get stabbed in the back.”

Whereupon I told him, “Crisis brings the cleverness out in you, doesn’t it. And who’s ever heard of stabbing an ox?”

We walked across the lobby when he said, “I don’t know who. But there’s always the idiot who’ll try anything no sane person would do.”

And we walked up the stairs to the tune of, “I can see you building up to a shining example of that, buddy Lippit.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere beyond a punch in the nose.”

“Is that the motto of the physical culture department?”

“Don’t let your brains interfere with your good sense, boy.”

“Spoken like a biceps!”

He opened the door at the top of the stairs and we went into his long, misplanned room. First he yelled at Davy to get the hell out of there, and then he yelled at Davy to stick around outside somewhere, within calling distance. Anywhere within a two-block radius, I was going to add, but I didn’t want the wrong kind of levity now.

We sat down at the table, he on one side, I on the other, and the only good thing was all the feelings showed plainly.

“So what was your plan, right-hand man?” said Lippit.

“The plan was,” I said, “to help you keep playing your jukeboxes.”

“Was that the reason you snuck around behind my back and set yourself up in a legitimate business?”

He used the expression like a dirty word and I felt I should make one thing clear right away.

“Just remember it’s mine, Lippit. Not yours.”

“Sure. And you just remember that I got the union that can rock your boat.”

“How’s that going to help you?”

“It would make me feel just fine. The way I feel, it would make me feel just fine.”

“You gonna run this talk on spite or on what?”

All this helped a lot with the pressure and after a while we got down to the business again.

“You were saying, close friend of mine. You were explaining how all this was helping the partnership.”

I said, “All right. This is the notion. As long as Bascot is too scared to go against his agreement with Benotti, for that length of time, you don’t have a jobber.”

“Are you building up to the news, or is this it?”

“And no jobber, no jukebox music.”

“And you don’t draw your pay.”

He still had to talk that way, but he sounded much calmer. I, myself, had to think hard, because the thoughts were still new to me.

“The wrinkle is,” I said, “maybe we won’t need the jobber.”

“At least you said we. At least that, St Louis.”

And at least, he was using my name and no adjectives.

“Now,” I said, “we talk about my business.”

I wanted that reminder in there, knowing Lippit’s type of co-operative thinking, so he had to say again that I should not forget about his union while I was talking like a capitalist. Having balanced the big-power talks, he let me go on.

“It goes so. The record goes from manufacturer, to jobber, to us. We don’t have a jobber and we don’t have a franchise. And we haven’t got time to ask a manufacturer for a franchise. Instead this: We press our own records, and use what we press.”

“Something stinks,” he said. “You know something stinks?”

“I know. We can’t press records except from a master. We are a manufacturer without the big masters.”

“But you’re going to keep us going in spite?”

“Just listen.”

“You’re going to squeeze discs for me?”

“I can’t. I don’t have the masters.”

“And I don’t have a jobber. And I can’t buy from the manufacturer who’s got the masters, which make the discs, which built the house that Jack built.”