Murder Me for Nickels (19 page)

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.”

Chapter 16

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.”

“And now that we’ve heard from wee little Walter with the nursery rhymes, comes more business.”

“All right,” he said. “Second verse.”

“What sometimes happens in the business,” I told him, “is that one manufacturer rents a master to another manufacturer.”

“To lose money, of course. The one with the gold mine master wants to lose money.”

“Make money. All it means to the owner is to get more records pressed than his own plant is putting out.”

“Your pressing plant rents a master and pays the owner as much as a jobber would for each record sold?”

“For every record I press off a master I pay the owner the price per record he would get from the jobber.”

“And that’s the reason, I suppose, why everybody does it that way, huh, boy wonder?”

“No. Not everybody is doing it, because everybody else is not a friend of yours. That’s how my outfit is going to do it.”

“Break it down,” he said. “So I can hear the money.”

“The outfit who owns the master gets two cents a side, regular records.”

“All right Let’s say four cents the record.”

“The artist gets three cents, musicians’ union gets two cents, pressing in ten thousand lots costs fifteen, and the jobber gets thirty-one.”

“Bascot got less.”

“I know. That’s because you’re special.”

“And I don’t buy in ten thousand lots.”

“I’m breaking it down standard-like, Walter, and will you now shut up?”

“Okay. The record cost me fifty-five cents now.”

“And the owner of the master got his four cents. I, Loujack, Inc., paying the manufacturer his cut, can also press and sell you for the same price you used to pay Bascot.”

This was the point for him to be impressed. He was, because he didn’t talk right away. He was thinking about running the works like before, minus jobber troubles, with Benotti out.

Then he said, “And I pay you that price, Jack, you make dough off the pressing, and you make dough off the stake you got in the jukebox business. Is that how the coin falls, right-hand man?”

We had to talk that back and forth for a while. I had to show him again that I wouldn’t make a cent, that I would have to pay the owner as if he were pressing his own discs, or else I would never be able to swing this kind of deal.

“And who pays you? I just want to be sure, trusted friend, that nobody pays you.”

“I’m going to pay the cost of pressing out of my cut from the jukes, damn your little pointed head, Lippit! I’m doing it for the love of you, for the jukebox coin, and to give ourselves time till Bascot comes around!”

“And when you go broke?” He had to be nasty about it.

“Then you go broke.”

That was clear and simple. He saw it and nodded, and the fact put us on the same side again. Maybe two weeks before Benotti got back on his feet, which was two weeks for me to arrange use of the masters. Then some months, more or less, while I ran Loujack at a loss, and while Lippit and I had to knock out Benotti for good. By then we had to have a jobber. Or by then we’d go broke.

He looked up from the table and grinned.

“Too bad. Would be nice, if I could arrange it for you to go broke and not me. Shake?”

We shook.

Then he hustled me out as if we had two minutes instead of two weeks, which was more like the old teamwork relationship between him and me. I set it up to fly to Chicago and he went to keep the local pot from developing steam. And he paid for my ticket, just to show no hard feelings.

He didn’t give me what a hood might call ice. I was a businessman and called it grease. I took what I would need and did, as a matter of fact, smear my way into a number of places. There was the lunch where you didn’t taste the food and only the right-hand margin of the menu was of any importance. There were drinks where the number of rounds counted most of all, and there was even the elderly VIP who liked special services which not just any professional woman could render. All kinds of business is still business.

Anyway, I got the masters.

I got some on a press-number basis, and some on a time-rental basis, and I paid a jobber’s price every time. It was slippery going, what with all that grease, but when I left I was clean.

On the plane I looked at the big, blue nothing outside, and on the way down the ramp I said thank you to the stewardess and that it had been truly a wonderful trip. Back in town I didn’t go straight to Lippit. I went home, took a shower, changed clothes. I sat on the bed a minute and looked at the phone, and for a minute had a notion to call somebody whom I didn’t know.

Then I went to Lippit’s.

Chapter 17

H
e wasn’t home. I called the club and the desk voice said there was nobody in the room upstairs. And, further, that Mister Lippit was not in the building.

There had been changes while I was gone. Including Davy not holding down the phone.

I called the shop and the foreman answered. “Fine,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

But he always said that.

“Is there anything that could be finer?” I asked him.

“Well, Jimmy didn’t come in today. Claims he’s got a cold.”

“And Mister Lippit. Has he come in today?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because everything’s fine, I guess.”

I had enough of that and hung up.

I went to the building on Duncan and what with the shift in importance that had taken place recently I didn’t go upstairs but stayed on the ground floor.

That pressing plant was humming. The first half-dozen masters had gotten there a few days before and there was a full crew tending all the machines and a double crew at the tables in back. They weren’t even putting labels on both sides of the discs. Just on one side, and not always the same one. Mostly, they were packing. And that with more speed than care, seeing the stuff didn’t go very far.

“Keeping full time?” I asked the old man.

“Overtime.”

“Oh.”

“Never been like this, far as I recollect.”

“Miracles don’t come that often. You still on the Ted Curdy series?”

“We squeeze that in, nighttimes.”

“Overtime.”

“Double time.”

“Oh.”

“And the Shayne Combo, same thing,” said the old man.

“You finished the run of Mitch Pockard?”

“We didn’t have room. We let him go for a while.”

Those last three were Blue Beat business. The place had never worked so hard or lost so much money.

I went into the office and checked that end of it Busy, busy, busy.

“Been keeping up?” I asked the bookkeeper there.

“Reorganized it a little, the way Mister Lippit suggested.”

“Of course.”

He had a big pile of stuff on his desk.

“You need help, looks like.”

“I got help, but he’s out to lunch.”

“Oh.”

“But a good worker,” said my bookkeeper man. “A real flash with the Payables.”

“All your stuff here, that’s Receivables?”

“Payables, same as his.”

I didn’t say ‘oh’ again and I didn’t ask any more, because it would all come out the same. The place had never worked so hard catching up with the Payables.

For old times’ sake I took the elevator to the fourth floor and there was one familiar sight, anyway. Herbie at the desk, and what he said was familiar, too.

“Oo-man!” he said.

“Not again.”

“No. This one’s different. But oo-man!”

“Can she sing?”

“Ask Conrad.”

I went through to the messy room with the racks and the cables and one of the agents was there, talking to Conrad. They both looked at me and Conrad said, “You did it this time, Jack!” And the agent said, “But too bad you didn’t have her signed.”

On the other side of the window, doing phrasing with an arranger, was Hough and Daly’s own Doris, who could also sing.

“She come looking for you,” said Conrad. “First few times.”

“But you didn’t show,” said the agent.

“So you showed her.”

“But you didn’t have her signed, Jack.”

“That’s right. Just personal.”

“That’s what she said.”

I looked at her through the window but I couldn’t hear a thing.

“Is she good?” I asked Conrad.