I swarmed after that, all over the neighborhood, trying to spread trust and cheer. Folsom was gone, Benotti didn’t show, and the fever, so to speak, was going out of the thing. I ran into Lippit after a while who was in a high fine humor, and even the cop appointment for the afternoon didn’t worry him. He was, after all, running a legitimate business, and if the police wished to keep an eye on the neighborhood, that was so much for the better. Benotti would be the troublemaker, not he, and as for the Folsom menace, good riddance.
“I am happy,” he said, “about everything.”
“I’m tired.”
“And that little eight o’clock raid in the morning,” he said, “masterful.”
I had mixed feelings about that in particular and felt that the whole thing had been much too frantic to be called masterful.
“Like a well-planted leak,” said Lippit. “Made Benotti pull back all over.”
“I would like to go home and get some sleep, Walter.”
“Calls for a party,” he said. “Last one was a dud anyway.”
Then he said I looked like hell and why didn’t I go home and get some sleep.
“You’ll see the captain in the afternoon?”
“I’ll speak to the captain,” he said.
“You’ll keep an eye out for Folsom, next twenty-four hours?”
“Don’t worry. It’s my union.”
“You’ll keep checking Benotti doesn’t wake up all of a sudden?”
“Christ, you’re nervous,” and he told me to beat it “But show at ten this evening,” he said. “Little party.”
“I’m not wearing a tux again.”
“Beat it,” and I did.
What kept me from feeling as untroubled as Lippit was the fact that I knew more than Lippit.
Or course there had been a leak. Except there had been a leak before the little eight-in-the-morning affair.
I drove a ways toward home, then stopped at a drug store. I phoned Blue Beat Recording and asked for Conrad. He took a while and I wondered why I hadn’t called from home, from my bed. At least I could have been lying down.
“Blue Beat Recording,” he said.
“I know. This is Jack.”
“I know.”
“You got the mixer, Conrad?”
“Yes. This morning. But who were those guys. Jeeze, what guys!”
“Reason I’m calling, Conrad, to let you know there wasn’t a soul at that Benotti place this morning. Not a soul, you understand.”
“I understand.”
“I thought you would. What all did you tell Frank, when you called him?”
“I just tried to tell him to get our mixer out of there, but you know how it is, he wanted to know why, and how come this call at four in the morning and…”
“You mean he wasn’t a, l, o, n, e, either?”
“What was that?”
“Never mind. What did you tell him?”
“Well, you know. Just a hint, and that I couldn’t tell him more.”
“Must have been a fat hint. Obese, even.”
“Anyway, we got the machine. What else is there?”
“Nothing, I hope. Like, for instance, in that hintful conversation you had, you didn’t just happen to drop my name, did you?”
“Of course not, Jack. You sound tired, Jack, you know that?”
“Yes. I know that. I just called to be sure I can sleep well.”
“Go ahead.”
I said good-bye and was about to hang up when he said to hold on a minute, one more thing.
“Speaking of names, there was somebody wanted to know your name.”
“What’s this, what’s this?”
“You sound tired, Jack. All I…”
“I know I’m tired but I don’t know what you’re talking about. What was all this?”
“I said: Speaking of names-like when you asked me did I tell him your name-”
“The point, Conrad. Please.”
“Somebody called up to ask what your name was. This girl.”
“ What girl?”
“There’s this girl works at Hough and Daly, this little one-I mean not so little, if you know what I mean, but short-anyway, you know whom I mean?”
“Yes, Conrad, I know whom you mean. This girl works at Hough and Daly, this little one. What else?”
“She said, what about this guy who came in the morning to pick up that mixer, this guy-and she kind of described you-very friendly description…”
“I want to go to bed, Conrad.”
“And she says this guy says he’s an agent and talent promoter and if it was true.”
“And then you said, Conrad? What did you say, Conrad?”
‘“No,’ I said. ‘No.’”
“Ohmyeverlovingsaintedname.”
“What?”
“That’s all there was to the conversation?”
“Then she said, ‘Well, of all the-.’Just like that. Well, of all the, and then she hung up.”
I exhaled a long malediction and then hung up, too. Now she figured I had been lying. Now she might wonder who I was. She might wonder enough to ask Franky, maybe, the guy who had worked on the mixer, or just enough to talk about it in general: the queer thing that had happened to her in the morning when this guy came over and pretended he was somebody else, and how come at the same time the Benotti shop got messed up while this no-good pretender took her out for coffee.
By far the neatest thing would be if she thought that I was a talent promoter. I would have liked that best. I know she would have.
The Hough and Daly ramp was busy this time of the afternoon. I pulled my car up to the platform, got an argument from a foreman, said something to him which I don’t remember, because the foremost thing in my mind was get in and get out and get a few hours’ sleep.
I looked through the window into the office and she was there doing work on an adding machine. She had a piece of a doughnut in her mouth and a coffee cup in one hand. With the other one she was working the machine. Very busy. She never looked up. There was a fan over her desk which made her short hair jump and flutter and which flattened her blouse up against her front. But flat isn’t really the word.
She looked up, saw me, and bit into her doughnut. Then she got up and came to the window.
“Well, of all the!” she said.
I said, “Hello, honey,” and smiled a warm, tired smile, only half of which was a fake.
“Don’t you honey me, you-you promoter.”
“But I don’t know your name. I came back because I didn’t have a chance to ask you this morning.”
“A lot of strange things going on here this morning,” she said.
“And when you called the office you didn’t leave your name, either.”
That, of course, gave her pause. She said, “Now I don’t know how much fake you are and how much promoter. If there is a difference.”
“There’s this fool working at the office, at the recording place, and when you called up…”
“I’m just wondering who’s the fool around here.”
“Not you, honey.”
“Doris.”
“Not you, Doris.”
“Then why am I talking to you?”
“To get the true slant on everything, Doris.”
“And you have that.”
“As I will show you.”
“And what’s in it for you, promoter?”
“Your talent. And call me Jack.”
“I knew it would be. Or John. Something like that.”
“So I’d like to look into this, Doris. For instance, this evening.”
“Into what?”
“Your talent.”
“No, John.”
“Jack.”
“No, Jack.”
“Just to talk about talent.”
“You mean singing.”
“That’s right. Everything like that.”
“No. Not everything.”
“All right You want to limit yourself, all right.”
“My god. You’re compliant.”
“Just tired.”
“Do you often get tired like this, Jack?”
“Just afternoons. Then, comes evening time, and I’m a new man, mostly.”
“All right,” she said. “We’ll see. We’ll see what we’ll talk about.”
I said, “All right, we’ll see what we’ll talk about.” And for a fact I couldn’t think of something more definite. I was that tired.
I met her at nine that evening in a downtown bar and how tired I must have been to have left the topic so all up in the air. She had a dress on which did nothing to interfere with the girl underneath, and the girl underneath knew all this very well. When she saw me she smiled and the message was, maybe we’ll share the knowledge. I got up on the stool next to her and she said, “Hi, promoter.”
Her tone was an arm’s length tone of voice. Business was on.
I gave her hand a squeeze, sniffed at the glass she was holding. That was all business, too. Scotch and ice.
“Let’s sit in a booth,” I said.
“You can let go of my hand. No.”
“Scotch and ice,” I told the bartender.
She swiveled around a little, so we would face each other, and we composed smiles for each to see. What they looked like, I think, was friendly joy. What it covered in her case I wasn’t sure. I think it meant, caution, speed traps.
“You have the first requisite,” I told her. “The first requisite for a performer. You arouse interest, Doris.”
“You too, Jack.”
“Why, how nice. You want to sit in a booth?”
“No. For instance, what was going on this morning, at the Benotti place?”
“Benotti place? Oh, that. Haha. Nothing.”
She went haha too and nibbled at her drink. She finished and said, “What kind of a promoter are you, Jack?”
“I can demonstrate that better than I can explain it. For example, here you are, untrained talent. Now, what I do with a singer like that-Are you listening, girl?”
She was looking into her glass, the length of the bar, anything but listening to me.
“You said you can show me better than you can explain, and then you started to show me how you promote.”
I finished my drink and said, “Doris, don’t you want to be a singer?”
Now this, I felt, would bring her around to the subject This should keep her on anxious thoughts about her career and the standard reply should be, ‘Why, I’d do anything to get up there-’”
“I’d hate to get promoted into the wrong thing,” she said. “I can’t just entrust myself, my career is what I mean, to somebody I don’t know.”
“They told me at Blue Beat,” I said, “that you called.”
For just a moment that gave her pause. The fact that I knew about her call to Conrad gave me some kind of legitimacy. But then she passed right over that.
“Did you know somebody broke all those electrical things at Benotti’s while you took me out to coffee?”
I could see that it might take more than a drink or two before she was willing to change the subject. It might take all evening, which would he a shame.
“Dear Doris,” I said. “I am here to investigate you. I think you have potential. I think…”
“I know you think I have potential, Jack.”
“Yes. And all these little side issues you keep bringing up…”
“Like, who are you?”
I finished the rest of my drink and said, “May all my affairs go better than this one. All my business affairs.”
She didn’t drink to that but folded her arms on the bar and watched me try to get her off the Benotti tack.
“All right,” I said. “This morning. I was there to help out the recording place, to get their machine off that ramp.”
“You promoted that all right.”
“The rest, I wasn’t there.”
“And how did you know enough to worry about that mixer?”
“Rumor. Rumble. You know? You hear things. Besides, everybody knows Benotti is a gangster.”
“Like Lippit?”
I ordered another drink.
“I know nothing about any of that.”
“Then why are we talking here?” she asked me, and all that female suspicion was smiling at me.
My drink came and I picked it up.
“May all my affairs go better than this one.”
“You left out the part about business.”
“I wish I could.”
“But don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ll keep reminding you.”
“I’m beginning to dread the rest of the evening,” I told her. “Don’t you?”
“I’m having a nice time,” she said. “You’re such a bad promoter, I don’t dread you at all.”
The compliment was so doublejointed I let it lie. I took it for its best possible meaning, said thank you, and tried again to talk about singing careers.
“When I handle talent,” I said, “first thing is, we show mutual trust. First thing is…”
“All I know is, your name is Jack.”
That’s when Lippit’s lawyer walked in. He came up to the bar, asked for a shot, poured it down, put his change on the counter.
“What if your name is really John?” she was saying. “What if you’re John the Ripper instead of Jack and here…”
“One moment. Just one moment.”
The lawyer was turning to leave when he spotted me. He barely nodded, being either discreet or distracted, but when I waved at him to come over he came. He said, “Hi, Jack.”
I looked at the girl to make sure she had heard that. “So you’re Jack the Ripper,” she said.
“You tell my friend Doris,” I said to the lawyer, “that I’m actually in the music business. Tell her.”
“Hehe,” he went. Just like that. “Yeah,” he said, and “hehehe.”
He was either completely distracted or had some ridiculous notion that he should be discreet Either way, the next thing was, Doris did the same thing. “Hehe,” she went, and, “What nice friends you have.”
The lawyer gave a small bow, as if he had just heard a compliment. He was distracted all right. Then he looked at me and said, “You’re coming, aren’t you?”
“I am neither coming nor going. It’s been like that for a while now.”
“The party,” he said. “I’m just going up now.”
“No,” I said. “You go. I’m not.”
He nodded and left, discreet and distracted.
“What kind of a party is that?” asked the girl.
“We’re not going.”
“What I mean is, here he has to come in for a quick shot before going there.”
“It’s a lousy party and we don’t need it.”
I didn’t need it The first thing she would learn, I wasn’t a talent promoter. The next thing Lippit would learn, I had private business connections. And the least thing the girl would find out, St. Louis was a very poor liar. To hell with Lippit’s party.
“There’s a band in the next room,” Doris was saying. “You hear it?”
“Nice beat,” I said, “I know the drummer.”
“My kind of music,” she said.
Then it hit me I had made another mistake. I had the wild fear that she wanted to sing with that band, that I should go ask the boys if they’d let her sing just one number, her favorite number, for me-big promoter. It was true I knew the drummer, but what price friendship?
“And I love dancing,” she said.
We went into the next room and danced. It was very good. She held on well, she felt good, she moved very nicely and stayed as close as was needed. I forgot about all my bad times after a while and my plans for the evening took a happier turn.
Then they changed again.
“I’m sorry,” said Doris, “but there’s no cutting in here, you know.”
She said this past my ear and across my shoulder, so I turned around to see who was doing this flattering thing.
There was Pat, Lippit’s Pat, but the way she was smiling and being polite it would have been gauche to say anything but Patricia to her.
“Why, dear,” she said. “Dear Jacky. And here I had thought, the way that lawyer was talking, that you must be involved in some miserable kind of business. But you aren’t, are you?”
“This is Doris,” I said, “who was a friend of mine, and this is Pat. Likewise.”
They smiled at each other like two Cheshire cats. I was the mouse.
It took a little arguing-not too much-and Pat took us along to the party. We walked the two blocks to Lippit’s apartment and there was conversation all the time. I don’t remember just what. It was that polite.
Lippit’s party, any other time, might have been a very nice thing. Lippit was loud and cheerful, liquor and things were spread three rows deep, the foreman was there and some other people, and there were even two girls whom I didn’t know. As it stood, I had enough with the two I did know.
First thing, Pat introduced Lippit.
“This is Mister Lippit,” said Pat to Doris, “your host and Jack’s boss.”
Doris was sweet. She hung on my arm, staying close, and said, “You must be the Lippit who doesn’t like Benotti. Jack here was telling me about that.”
“He was?” said Lippit.
“Well, what I mean is, not in so many words. But I could tell by the way he acted. Like this morning, you know. I work right next to Benotti’s place.”
Lippit laughed very loud. He went hawk, hawk, hawk, and wasn’t that something. Then Pat took Doris to the liquor table.
“Tell me something,” said Lippit “Maybe I should have invited that cop captain from this morning, too?”
Of course, he wasn’t laughing any more when he said that.
Then Doris came back, and Pat, and Lippit went away. On the way he went hawk, hawk, again and gave Doris a fatherly wink.
“Doris tells me,” said Pat, “that you’re a promoter.”
“What she means…”
“That you’re trying to help her with her singing career.”
I said, “Why didn’t you bring a drink for me?”
“We forgot,” said Doris. “We were talking.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“And I was telling Doris,” said Pat, “what a sweet dress she is wearing. Did you notice, Jack, that it doesn’t have any zipper?”
“I’m going to get me that drink.”
I had to wait at the liquor table because a fellow named Dick was ahead of me, and two girls with him. There was a blonde and a redhead and one was in front of the other. The one who stood in back was fiddling with the dress of the other.
“You got some material jammed into it,” she said to the blonde, “and I can’t get it to move up or down.”
Then she looked at me. I turned around and left without a drink.
Lippit was at the piano and Pat and Doris were, too. I could see Lippit sit down on the bench and I could see Pat talking to Doris. Then, as might happen when the party is informal and friendly, Lippit worked the piano and Doris started to sing. The girl sounded good.
Pat put her drink down on the piano because I was sure she meant to clap any moment.
Doris did not have a sweet voice. She was a belter. I should have known. But she was good.
Pat, who was smiling like never before, came over and leaned by the wall next to me.
“You like her?” she asked.
“Like her?”
“Her singing, Jack.”
“I can’t tell. There is so much talking.”
“Just shop talk,” she said. “Like between you and her.”
“She and I were dancing. She and I were just dancing.”
But Pat had her topic.
“What label is she going to sing on, promoter?”
“How do I know? All I ever said…”
“I think she said Blue Beat. Could that possibly be, Jack?”
“No. That could not be, Pat.”
“I didn’t think so either, Jack. I mean, she would almost have to know somebody there, don’t you think?”
“Yes. Such a voice.”
“Yes.”
Doris finished and Pat clapped very hard. She was the hostess. She went to the piano, took Doris by the arm, and brought her over to me.
“Jack thinks,” Pat was saying, “that something can really be done with your talent. Isn’t that so, Jack?”
I didn’t have to answer. They both took care of the talking. They twittered back and forth for a while and before Pat went someplace else in the room, being hostess, she asked Doris to be sure and tell her everything I might explain, about how it’s done, making a singing career.
“You start with a good promoter,” said Doris.
“Yes. Of course. That’s the problem,” and then Pat went away.
I took my other nemesis out to the balcony because I felt like breathing a lot of air. We stood at the railing, six stories up, and I looked at the dark sky and Doris looked down at the lights of the city.
“What did she mean, Jack, about my dress not having any zipper?”
I said, “Just a minute,” and went inside to the table with liquor where I got a drink same as at the bar. Only much bigger. I took it back out to the balcony but had some of it on the way.
“Because actually it does have a zipper. Only hidden,” said Doris.
I had more of the scotch, getting down to the halfway mark, and paid attention to the stuff spreading inside like summer sunshine.
“Aren’t you going to answer?”
“To hell with that,” I said. “From now on, little sweets, I set the topic.”
Almost all of the evening had gone to pot. Pat catching on to my record connection, Doris catching on to my Lippit connection, and the only one missing all the connections, Jack St. Mouse. I put my drink on the railing, my hand on the girl’s back, and gave her a smart turn in my direction. When the angle was right I nipped down and hung on for a right, regular kiss.
It caught her on the point of wanting to say something or other but she gave that up. She met the change in demand and hung on, too. After a while we let go, but not too far apart. Though we had nothing to say to each other. So she moved in again, with a lot of purpose, and we did it again, like before, only feeling much more familiar.
I held the back of her neck, where the skin was lovely, I held her arm, where the skin was lovely, and I felt her cheek from close, also lovely. The summer night and the city below and the party hum must have all been romantic, though the thought is an afterthought because I paid no attention. And the girl didn’t either, I think, because she said nothing about it. When we did talk it was just to check plans.
“Like the party?” she asked.
“Lousy party.”
“I think so, too.”
“But you sang nice.”
“Don’t talk business now.”
“I’m done promoting.”
“I was noticing,” she turned a little, to look into the room. “And something else.”
“Who?”
“Your friend, Pat.”
“Coming this way and smiling like a Cheshire cat.”
“Except,” Doris said, “this one will not disappear.”
“Lousy party,” I said, and we let go enough to be able to walk. We walked back into the apartment, to the kitchen where Lippit was getting ice. We said good-bye to him first.
“Leaving already?”
“Doris has got to go to bed.”
“Already?”
“Yes.”
Then we walked out of the kitchen and almost into Pat who had been following not too far behind.
“Leaving already?”
“Doris has got to go to bed.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
In the elevator we had six floors to keep checking plans.
“You’re not tired, are you?”
“No,” she said. “Do I act tired?”
“No. But you’re going to bed.”
“I know.”
That doesn’t seem like much conversation for six floors of a city apartment, and it isn’t Then we drove to my place, she over there, me over here and both hands on the wheel. I never drive fast one-handed. I live five floors up but this time we didn’t talk at all.
Doris was wearing a little jacket and while I got the key into the door she took it off. The simple gesture, because of the state I was in, made me very tense. When the phone rang in my apartment, I almost broke off the key in the lock.
We looked at each other. Doris still had one arm in her jacket and didn’t take it out.
“I bet that phone’s right next to your bed,” she said.
“I don’t know. I think it jumped off the night table and is coming this way.”
“You’re not going to look?”
“I’m afraid to look. It might be smiling, like a Cheshire Cat.”
“It heard you,” said Doris, because right then the phone stopped ringing.
We went inside, into the bedroom, and I turned on the light. Doris still had one arm in her jacket. I went over and tore the phone out of the wall and Doris dropped the jacket on the ground.
Like I said once, her dress didn’t interfere much with the girl underneath, and in a short while it didn’t at all. Then nothing did. She sat down on the bed and waited.
“Leave the light on,” she said.
I did. I just turned the phone around because I didn’t like the look on the dial face.
“May all my affairs end like this one.”
Peter Rabe
Murder Me for Nickels