Peter Rabe - Murder Me for Nickels

“I’ll let you know if some new ones come in,” said Dinkham. “Okay, Jack? Some should, any day now.”

“What did you say?”

“We lost a bunch of them. We’re short of help, because a bunch of them been taking off and we’re short handed. Not that they knew anything about horses.”

“How many left, Dinkham? And why?”

“I don’t know Four, five, maybe. And they left because they got pulled out.”

“And you don’t know where they went?”

“I think they’re still in town. At least one of them is still in town because I seen him, drinking beer.”

“And smelling like a horse.”

“What was that, Jack?”

There was a note of injury in Dinkham’s tone and I did not want to insult him. I also did not think there was any more he could tell me so I said, “Nothing, Dinkham, nothing. Please go back to sleep so that you can get up with the chickens.” He was saying, “Not chickens. Horses!” when I hung up the phone. Then I drove to the club.

Actually, the place wasn’t a club, except that Pat liked the word better and so Lippit had started calling it that. This club was a cross between YMCA and community center where a member could dance, sit, swim, box, get instructions in drama, or get a good massage. Lippit, who could not do without sweaty exercise, played handball there, went to the steambath, and got himself rubbed. In addition, he paid rent on a room with chairs and a long table. He had meetings there because he did not like an office address.

And I didn’t like going there. First of all, I didn’t like Lippit’s meetings. He wasn’t running a democracy, so why have meetings? He listened to what there was and then said what he wanted done. He could have done the same thing by phone. To keep you guys on your toes, he’d say. But it just bored me.

Second of all, I didn’t like the place because it reminded me of all the right-minded foolishness which used to bother me a number of years ago. I didn’t have a very rich upbringing, just a varied one, and this cold shower health kick of fun without girls used to be a sad bother to me. It ruined sports for me and it never made me want a woman any less.

So there were the thin-legged kids wearing gym shoes as if they had Frankenstein feet, then the real addicts, all balled up with muscle, and the ones who must have started too late because the sweatshirt just brought out their stomachs. I had to walk past all that wearing this crazy tuxedo, and I went to the top floor as fast as I could.

That was another thing I didn’t like. That room. It was space left over because the architect had made a mistake in arithmetic. There were windows to the street way up in the wall, but they only made sense from the outside where they had something to do with the Greek facade. The opposite wall, where there was no street, had a row of windows too. They were long and very low to the floor and if you lay down on your stomach you could look down into the swimming pool. Or you could just sit at the big table in the middle of the room and listen to the hollow racket come out of those windows.

There was a lot of smoke hanging over the table. There were eight or ten men but Lippit wasn’t there. They all stopped talking when I came in and waited till I came up to the table. Then Lippit’s lawyer said:

“You lost a button, Jack.”

“Which is why I’m late. I hunted and hunted…”

But they weren’t really listening. They were all in a lousy mood.

“Where’s Lippit?” I asked.

“He wants you to join him,” said the lawyer. “Seeing you weren’t here when expected and no telling when you’d show up, he took off while he was still in a fairly clean mood and said you should join him. If that would be all right with you.” And he handed me a slip of paper with an address written on it.

I held it in my hand and looked at everybody at the table. “That’s why everybody sits here in a stinking mood? To tell me Lippit left?”

There was the lawyer, Lippit’s accountant, and a manager from Lippit’s shop where they fixed jukeboxes. Those three wore tuxedos same as I, because they were the only ones Lippit had invited for the little party at his place. The rest were in daytime clothes. I didn’t know all of them, but the ones I recognized were from Lippit’s own union. Which is only a manner of speaking, because Lippit did not own a union. He ran a local, however-electrical services-and the men in it handled Lippit’s equipment There was also a union which he did own, in much more than a manner of speaking, which covered the drivers who did his deliveries. The man who ran things for Lippit inside these two unions was a thin person named Folsom. He liked black leather jackets, as if he were a punk or a motorcycle cop.

“I called this meeting,” Folsom said.

“Is that why Lippit’s not here?”

I didn’t like Folsom. I thought he was more like a strike breaker than a union man. He did mostly what Lippit told him to do, which amounted to keeping the wages steady and keeping free-lance labor away from Lippit’s territorial interest, but I got the feeling that Folsom might like more. Such as not being a salary man. Such as getting cuts out of union dues or a slice out of juke machine operators. In a way Folsom might well be what Lippit had been, let’s say ten, fifteen years ago, though there was a point where Lippit had stopped. I did not think Folsom would stop.

He said, “I don’t know about you, Mister St. Louis, but Mister Lippit thought that what I have to say was important. Important enough for him to show up and take action. I knew, of course, that he was having this little party of his, some private party, as I understood, however I felt…”

“All right, all right,” I said, since he had made his point; that he was on the ball twenty-four hours, no matter how much anyone else might be goofing-including the boss. And that he knew he had not been invited, though this did not impair his high feelings of duty and loyalty. Correct, nice, and spiteful, that Folsom.

“What is your bad news, Folsom, that you should get such a charge out of it?” I asked him.

“Well, Mister St. Louis, I don’t know how you look upon it, but my boys, they don’t like it one bit. Not one bit, Mister St. Louis. And Mister Lippit agreed with me. He doesn’t like it one bit.”

“What?”

“Look at Kramer, please.”

I looked at the one he called Kramer and the man had a black eye. He was big and hefty but he had a black eye.

“And Balowski here, they broke the windows in his truck. And Epsen, they threw his tools all over the street and kicked him right there. Show him, Epsen.” But Epsen didn’t want to get up.

I said, “When did all this happen?”

“Today. And my boys and me, we don’t like it.”

I didn’t like it either. I looked at the lawyer and he nodded. “Benotti started this all at once, looks like. First I heard of it, anyway.”

I had thought that Benotti had just been scaring the jukebox operators, an easy mark like Morry perhaps, and a little guy like Louie.

“In other words,” said the lawyer, “there’s more organization behind this than we thought till now.”

“Or maybe Benotti is stupid,” I said.

“No. More like, he’s bigger than we thought.”

“And Mister Lippit,” said Folsom, “is of that same opinion, once I talked to him.”

I just nodded. The picture was getting worrisome.

“And I just hope,” said Folsom, “Mister Lippit is doing the right thing. I know he’s going to take care of this thing but I hope he’s doing it right.”

“What he means,” said the lawyer, “we had this argument here. Folsom…”

“Fight fire with fire,” said Folsom, as if he had a big audience.