Murder Me for Nickels Read online

  Murder Me for Nickels

  Peter Rabe

  Peter Rabe

  Murder Me for Nickels

  Chapter 1

  Walter Lippit makes music all over town. For a thirty-mile radius every jukebox makes music because Walter Lippit has put it there. He sets it up, rents it out, keeps it primed, and makes music. Money music. I help to keep up the beat because Lippit’s a friend of mine and because Lippit pays me.

  It’s a fast-stepping job, since Walter Lippit doesn’t like too many helpers, but it isn’t often a rat-race kind of day because the outfit has grown up to run sweet and smooth. Though once in a while, by making everyone run around hard, Lippit makes it clear how a big, well-running outfit like his got that way. He pays me, so I run.

  When we met he was reworking the juke market for himself. I was doing nothing. I was an agent I had been handling singers, doing publicity for a record hop, all of which sounds fairly busy considering the turnover in that entertainment branch, but it isn’t always so. I had just lost my star client and made a fair pot of money on her switch to a New York-sized agency, which-at the time-left me only odds and ends and boredom. The odds-and-ends clients were a no-talent vocal, for one, and then a combo which was much too demanding for the jukes. You had to listen to it I had respect for their work and soon sent them to somebody else, but I was still pushing the no-talent vocal when I ran into Lippit.

  Now, the way you push a no-talent vocal, one way which might make you apt to run into Lippit at the same time, is to try and get discs of your vocal on all the juke machines you can find. I had the ins for it, at the time. I could go to half a dozen of the juke-machine operators and with just a little bit of this and that, they’d place my discs in their machines and you had to listen to my no-talent vocal. And then the d.j.’s would take it up, and that’s how I was an agent.

  Except, all of a sudden, there were no longer a half-dozen operators. There was only Lippit.

  He didn’t play ball. Why should he? Who was Jack St. Louis? I tried to convince him that Jack St. Louis was an old hand at the record game and that Lippit, the truck driver, should please play ball. Then he threw me out.

  So I went to the jobber who supplied the town and the territory with all the discs at that time. I went to him with this and that and a drink for old times sake, and for the next week, suddenly Lippit had no new discs for his machines.

  I explained to Lippit how this had come about, how Jack St. Louis would much rather be friends, and Lippit-needing all the help he could get at the time-said, all right, friends, shmends, and paid for his drink and mine.

  I dropped the no-talent vocal just about that time, and stayed with Lippit.

  I had no special love for my no-talent vocal. But I did have a feeling for Lippit. For the way he said no, for the way he paid for his own drinks, even then, and for the tiger-cat way he had of taking over his jungle. I liked him then and I like him now.

  I think my first stop on that morning was the jobber, to remind him he should keep strictly on time with the disc deliveries. (The jobber was always on time.) Next stop was the electric supply place which sold us little wires and solenoids, when Lippit’s machines needed wires and solenoids. I checked in to see if they were keeping their stock up to date should we suddenly need these important etceteras. (They were up to date and we did not need any.) Also that day, I saw a few downtown customers and asked how the service was and if there were any complaints (no complaints); the accountants, to ask how we were doing (fine); two of the banks (also fine). Then back home in the afternoon to change into the tux I had rented because the way this day was going I would not have the time later on, before Walter Lippit’s little party. His parties were no more high class than his work, but he would just say sometimes, “What a fine change in pace going formal some evening,” though this did not change the pace any but just added to it. He would say “tux” as if he had invented the outfit, which was very funny, considering who Lippit was.

  I don’t know all about him since pedigrees in an operation like Lippit’s did not very much matter, but once, quite a while back, I think he drove semis. He still says every so often, “There’s just two things makes me sick. The smell of diesels and the smell of greasy spoon diners.”

  With that kind of an attitude he didn’t push trucks very long. Though he stayed in the union. He must have picked a good one, and at the right time, because he never pushed trucks any more but told others to do it. That was on the east coast, Boston-New York, though he never mentions much more than to say it was east. “I used to be active out east,” was his phrase. And I think he knew a hood or two and I know he learned a trick or two because when he showed up here he had money to start with and an eye for organization.

  I don’t think he was ever a hood-which is almost being a company man-and I never saw him act as if he could be hired.

  He showed up here and felt pained, was his phrase, at the state of the union. The truckers on city deliveries were holding their own, especially with the ten or twelve men who owned or ran all the jukes in the area. Those jukes need a lot of delivering, what with new sets of discs every week. “This gave me a pain,” he had said, “which is why I took an interest.”

  It was organizational interest (his phrase again), and as a fact, it fit. All those juke owners, for example, in a while just disappeared. With Lippit telling the truckers how to truck, all those juke owners-their deliveries faulty-reaped only the spottiest income. What it came down to was that Lippit sort of gathered all of them up, beat them down, mashed them all into one, and what he ended up with was his. Thirty square miles of nickels were his, and they have been having babies ever since.

  All this to make clear then, that Walter Lippit could well afford a tuxedo and parties like that, though I don’t think there was anyone who really spoke proper English at his little parties, except maybe his lawyer. And for that matter, Lippit had never worn anything tux-like before, or at least not until this Patricia came along. Otherwise, very nice though, this Pat.

  So I put on the tux, for the change in pace which made Lippit so happy, and got back on the rounds which hadn’t been finished. Morry’s 9-Alley Emporium was next, and did he have any complaints. He always did, but I went there anyway.

  The big place smelled of wax and of bowling shoes, and there were just two or three very slow customers. Even though it was getting dark Morry had not yet turned on all the lights. When it came to money and overhead, Morry had always been constipated.

  He was on the other side of the snack-bar counter measuring water into the coffee urn. He had a coffee formula which would not rob you of sleep. I sat down on a stool and said, “Hi, Morry.”

  He looked around; his face stayed sour. He turned back to the urn and finished his mixture. After that he came to the counter and looked at me.

  “Funeral?” he said.

  “No. I just naturally always wear a tux when I go to a bowling alley.”

  “Oh.”

  This showed how constipated he was when it came to humor and jokes. He said nothing else. No complaints, nothing. Morry always had complaints which was one of the reasons I dropped in there so often. But he turned away and watched the coffee-urn gauge and the urn as it filled up with a very light-colored liquid.

  He said, “You wanna cup of coffee?”

  “Are you mad?”

  He shrugged and said nothing else. Maybe, I thought, there was no complaint this time, about records coming in late, wrong records coming in all the time, about coins jamming and lights blinking and using up too much electricity. It was time, maybe, to bring up the other reason why I dropped in on Morry more often than not Morry had only one of our machines in his place. It was the razzmatazz kind, blinking red, white a
nd blue, and stood next to the lunch counter. Further on, through a glass door, Morry had a bar and grill attached to his alley, but he had no jukebox in there.

  I got off my stool, walked to the jukebox, and spent a coin on the blinking monster. It thumped four bars of intro and then played a sweet, friendly ballad. I thought this might help.

  “Morry,” I said, “I’ll take a cup of your coffee.”

  He folded his arms, leaned back against the cooler, and said:

  “No.”

  “No? Now what?’”

  “I don’t want another jukebox in here.”

  “Morry, all I was about…”

  “I know what was coming. No.”

  Walter Lippit would now have been proud of me. Because I smiled and laughed a little bit and made out as if I didn’t mind Morry at all.

  “Look,” I said, “what’s it cost you? Nothing. We put in the machine; we service the gadget, and you keep thirty-three and one third of the take. Which isn’t counting…”

  “The bond I pay, the service charge when the buttons don’t button, the aggravation when your monkeys don’t show up to fix what needs fixing.”

  “Morry,” I said. “Any complaints you got, tell me about them. Though I notice,” and I looked at the machine next to the counter, “that the music comes sweet and perfect.”

  “Sure. I had it fixed. I wait two days for your monkeys to show and to fix the buttons, and nothing. So I had it fixed.”

  Walter Lippit writes a contract with the places that use his machines, which says nobody fixes the gadgets except us; nobody monkeys with the wires, or else. The “or else” wasn’t any too clear in the contract, or clear in my mind, because we had no competition and there had never been any call for “or elses.” I stayed friendly.

  “If you knew what this gadget costs,” I told Morry, “and what a specialty job it is to figure those wires…”

  “It works, don’t it?”

  “Who fixed it?”

  “Electrician. A good man who shows when he’s called and don’t hang around using my alley afterwards, all for nothing, and bouncing balls down the parquette because he thinks he’s a wheel working for that Lippit’s racket.”

  Morry, I thought, had rarely been this mean. Perhaps he had in mind what was in the contract. I let that hang for a while.

  “What electrician?” And then I said, for a guess, “Somebody called Benotti?”

  “Yeah,” said Morry, “Benotti.”

  I sat down on a different stool and asked for a cup of coffee again, and this time he gave it to me and I drank it. I had not meant to stay all this time, Morry being a routine problem only, but perhaps it was different now Benotti?

  I didn’t know this Benotti. He was new in town, or maybe only his business was new, because he had rented space for an electrical repair shop and he had two or three men and a truck, I think, to go around and fix TV’s and short circuits. None of which was enough reason for me to know this Benotti, except for two things. It was the third time that Benotti had been around fixing one of our machines. A real hustler. All right, let him be. Though it was not good for morale and precedent, seeing how Morry acted.

  The other reason I knew of Benotti was that one of his men had done work for me. Electrical work, something special, though none of this had to do with the Lippit business.

  I said, “Morry. But we have a contract.”

  He looked at my stud button in front and then he looked away to make it clear he had no time for stud buttons and foolishness.

  “Where it says,” he told me, “that you got to repair and service within a reasonable time. Not two days of nothing.”

  He had even taken the trouble to read up on the contract. He was so edgy and clever about all this, Morry was annoying me. And his coffee had been lousy. I got up, smiled the warmth-and-tolerance smile, and sighed.

  “I’ll fix it so it doesn’t happen again,” I said. “No more repair men bouncing balls down your alley, no more two-day delays. All right?”

  He shrugged and watched the jukebox stack the ballad disc into the rack.

  “And you, Morry, you fix it at your end, like no more outside electricians.”

  “You threatening me?”

  “You ever meet anybody nicer than me, Morry?” And I put a dime on the counter for the cup of near-coffee.

  Morry’s face stayed sour, like the coffee he made, and his hand picked up the dime as if he himself knew nothing about it. I left, feeling none too badly about any of this, because the customer’s feelings were mostly what counted. And Morry, without question, felt good all over. He had made money on the dime I had dropped into the machine (one-third dime was his), and money on the dime I had spent on his coffee (four-fifth dime, my estimate), and on the jukebox repair by that fly-by-night outfit. Not that it would pay Morry in the long run. We were set up to make sure of that. It was strange, though, for Morry to ignore this, what with the feeling he had for all problems of loss and profit.

  I drove off fast, being late for the last stop that day, and mostly concerned about red lights all the way crosstown. The last stop that day was really Lippit’s job, with me around just for trappings. Lippit always broke a new man in himself.

  The place turned out to be a bar in a shopping center, with a big New Management sign in the window and the blue tile facade not all finished. This being supper time there was all kinds of parking space by the curb, and the bar inside looked big with no customers. Of course Lippit was there. He was leaning on the bar.

  I don’t think he had been there very long because the barkeep didn’t know Lippit’s brand. Lippit pointed up at the shelves with the bottles, and then the barkeep took down the bottle Lippit wanted. The barkeep poured out a double, a Chivas Regal double, which went in one toss. Lippit held the glass out and watched as it was refilled. The barkeep smiled, half like a strong man and half like a very weak one, because he was also the owner. Chivas Regal, it said on the little list on the wall, came at one buck a shot.

  Lippit paid attention to none of that, nipped down half his double, and watched me come the length of the bar.

  “Jack,” he said, “you don’t have to put on the dog for Mister Stonewall here,” and looked at my tux. Then he said to the barkeep, “Mister Stonewall, meet our man Jack St. Louis.”

  Stonewall and I mumbled and smiled and had a firm handshake.

  “You want a drink, Jack?” said Lippit. Stonewall’s hand became weak and fluttery.

  I said, no, I didn’t want a drink, and that I was sorry to be late, and what a nice, new place Mister Stonewall had here. Stonewall smiled, but said nothing, because he was watching Lippit finish the rest of the drink. He held that smile when Lippit set the glass down on the bar and still didn’t relax when he saw clearly what Lippit did next. Lippit pulled a handful of bills out of his pocket, pulled four ones off, and fanned them out on the bar. “I never tip the owner,” he said, pushing the price of the scotch at Mister Stonewall.

  Now Lippit was ready for business, and so was Stonewall. He was ready, it looked like, to allow Lippit free reign on installing a jukebox at every barstool in the place.

  “With the decor like it is,” said Lippit, “elegant like it is, what we should put in here is the new one hundred we just got.”

  Stonewall nodded and said, “Oh? Ah, yes-” and kept nodding his large head with no hair on it.

  Stonewall, I thought, was about the same age as Lippit, just a little past fifty, but Stonewall had hardly any hair and Lippit had all of his. Stonewall was short and had a small chest and Lippit was tall and had a large chest. And his shoulders were large, and his hands and his belly.

  I have found that a big man like that is either especially shy or especially confident. Lippit was neither. He was just sure. Like when he paid for his liquor, and when he told Stonewall about the most expensive model we carried.

  “It plays one hundred discs, makes no mechanical sounds, and it’s got a soft light inside, like a fancy cocktail loun
ge.”

  “Like Mister Stonewall’s,” I said, because Lippit paid me.

  “What else,” said Lippit “The rest is glass and black wood. And we stock this model,” he went on, “with cocktail music and wee-hours-type music. I mean class.”

  I had not heard of wee-hours-type music before and neither had Stonewall. But he nodded, shy and impressed.

  “What you get special on this machine,” Lippit told him, “is a counter which tells us which record pulls and which doesn’t. And our statistical branch figures out how long to keep the hot ones before they get tiresome and how soon to toss the slow ones, before we lose money. Before you and me lose money, huh, Stonewall?”

  I had not heard of our statistical branch before, even though I had been around for a while and was usually present when Lippit made a pitch for a new place. But he talked different every time. He was very inventive. He let each occasion inspire him afresh.

  I felt what Stonewall offered as inspiration was nothing. He nodded and smiled and waited for more. This bored Lippit, I could tell, because he stopped inventing a pitch and turned to the figures. He did not enjoy conning a mouse.

  “The machine costs as much as a good car. You couldn’t afford it. The machine is ours, we insure it, and you use it All you pay, Stonewall, is the juice to run it, which is less than your cooler back there, but with the following profit. Twenty per cent base cut on this model. The more nickels it makes, the higher your cut. Up to forty per cent, like it shows here on this contract. Now, let’s say something gets stuck. You call us. Except for willful damage, we pay all the expenses, except for repairs over fifty per month, where we cut your percentage to help with the cost. That’s still no money out of your pocket. That’s all, Stonewall, except for these figures I brought you,” and Lippit handed over a printed page.

  We had that page made up to show how profit rose in various places after a jukebox was put in. We had some wonderful statistics there, with real names and real dates and most of the rest was basically true also.