“You’ve thrown all you’re going to throw, you bastard.”
“I wish I were saying that, Lippit. So help me, I wish that very much.”
“Mister Lippit,” Folsom started, but Lippit didn’t want to hear from him. I kept going.
“I don’t get very much of this, Lippit, but I get the part that stinks the most. I turn my back, and in slides that crapper over there.” Folsom got red, but nothing else. “I turn my back,” I went on, “and the only straight-running business I’ve ever been in runs into the red so fast, it’s going to drown you just as fast as me. I come back here, to this idiot’s haven, and…”
“I’ve had it,” said Lippit. He was hoarse. “I’ve had it from you, brother, and the only reason you’re still standing up on two feet is because I was hoping to see how you’d slime your way out of this.”
We were really hating each other straight across that room. He held still and I held still but there was a big swatch of hate across which you could have walked as if it was a road.
“I’m a little older than you,” he said, with that scratch in his voice, “so I’ve known more double-crossers than you, come to think of it.”
“Which accounts for the way you’ve made your way up?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re my crowning achievement. You’re so high up there, St. Louis, I’m too dizzy to look.”
“That you are, Lippit. Much too dizzy.”
“In a little while from now, we’ll see who’s off balance.” He threw his cigarette into a tray and then he practically spat.
“I used to think this one here, I mean Folsom, was the rat of the pack. He switched over to Benotti, you recall that?”
“Stands to reason,” I said.
“He switched to Benotti because you ran him off.”
“The way it really was,” said Folsom, talking edgy like glass, “the way I explained it to you, Mister Lippit…”
“Well, he’s back,” said Lippit. He didn’t look at Folsom, which cut the man off worse than anything. “He’s back, doing a job both ways while being at it.”
“He would. True to type.”
“He left Benotti because the crap there was worse than here, when you used to be in the picture.”
“Or because he came to think that Benotti might not be the winning side?”
Folsom was dying to say something then, but Lippit was still going.
“Well, he came back with the goods that really opened the door. He came up and he showed that he’s no rat, compared to you.”
“Mister Lippit I don’t…”
“What? You don’t like me to call you a rat? There’s nothing but rats, Folsom, nothing but! You think there’s such a thing like doing business with angels? There’s no such thing!”
“They play harps,” I said. “Not jukeboxes.”
“Idiots play jukeboxes,” he said, which showed what he thought of his customers. “But you really got to be the worst kind of idiot to start playing around with me! Tell him, Folsom.”
His chance, and he was too stirred up by the emotion of it He let out a sound like a crow, smiled at Lippit, then got cut off again.
“First thing he learns at Benotti’s,” said Lippit, “was that queer thing about the day when we all thought there was going to be a rumble.”
“The day he made his own, including enemies?”
“You got your last little laughs now, St. Louis, so I won’t interfere. I’m talking of the time when Benotti held still. When he pulled all his brain busters off the street.”
“Maybe he was afraid of Folsom.”
“When I tell you to run down and get me some cigarettes, do you run down because you’re afraid?”
“Because I love you, Lippit.”
“Because I pay you! Because I’m the head man!”
“That compares to Benotti?”
“He pulled his hoods back because he was told! The head man says pull, and he does it.”
“I’m mystified.”
“I just bet! Because you tipped him to lay low!”
“I’m mystified,” I said again, to cover the blank astonishment. “Your stupidity mystifies me.”
“That’s what I found out,” said Folsom. “That you tipped it that day, and Benotti should lay low.”
“That’s right. Benotti and me have been ever so close, to the tune of a gash here, an X-ray there, and I pay his hospital bills.”
“Then how come,” Lippit asked me, “you had such a sweet, easy time breaking down Benotti’s supply place?”
“On your orders.”
“I’m laughing. Now you laugh this off, St. Louis. Who carted your high-priced recording machine back to that record place where you make funny records?”
I didn’t need to answer. Those had been Benotti men, and Lippit seemed to know that, too.
“Would you say they’d just up and say yessir to a Lippit man when he asks them to lay down on their job and instead do him a personal favor of cartage?”
It looked bad. I took the cap off the bottle I was holding in my hand and took a long swallow. Then I said, “So help me, they were stupid and it just worked out that way.”
“A dumb answer doesn’t make you look any more honest, St. Louis.”
“I didn’t say I was honest. I say I didn’t double-cross you.”
“Is that why I didn’t know until now how you tied up all kinds of helpful little businesses?”
I wanted to say that it had never hurt him, that it had nothing to do with him, and that it was now going to pot so we could handle Benotti. But he had it down, ironclad, his way. I took another drink.
And I made up a few nasty sayings in my head, of which the most innocent went something like, a friend in business is no friendly business is no friendly business is, and so on in three-quarter time.
“What’s next with him?” Folsom was saying.
“I haven’t got the time,” said Lippit.
“If you want…”
“Like I said,” Lippit told him, and then he got up.
He went into the back room and when he came back he was tying his tie.
“You still here?”
“I didn’t think we were through.”
“Beat it.”
“Walter. Listen to me-”
“Beat it, before I spit and hit the rug by mistake.”
By dint of too much at one time and the liquor on top of it I went fairly dead inside and so managed to just turn and go. I left.
I went downstairs and if nothing else was going to stay whole I’d do just the little bit I could do for sanity and get down to the Duncan building. Stop those lousy runs of pressings, stop that lousy run on my pocket, send the masters back, close the shop, take a break, let the time move over a little. I walked all the way down, for the exercise, and made up a song which had a rhyme and didn’t need reason. It went: The reason I’m partial to strippers, is because they look dressed in slippers. There was more, but it didn’t rhyme.
I went to the parking lot, found my car, got my keys out of my pocket.
“And now give it to me.”
He was polite enough, so I gave them to Folsom. Also Franklin was standing behind me, big enough. Then we all drove off in my car, Folsom the chauffeur, and I sat in the back and had another drink.
