“Did you check Chicago?” I said.
“Yes. I checked Chicago. They want my racket and sent Benotti.”
“You still think he’s an idiot?”
“No. He’s not an idiot, but this is not Chicago. I got the organization here and the bums I’m using for strong arm have union zeal. Benotti’s bums are just bums off the street.”
“That’s not likely.”
“He brought along four or five, to draw less attention, and the rest he picked out of the local gutter. That can’t match us, you know, Benotti or no Benotti.”
“And he’s who?”
“Out of retirement, so they’d have somebody down here I wouldn’t know. As if I knew gangsters or something,” he said.
“It sounds lame, Walter, to think they sent him down so you wouldn’t recognize him. Who was he?”
“I never knew him,” said Lippit. “And he was in slot machines someplace, a place I don’t even know.”
“You know how he set that up, before he retired?”
“I should give a damn,” he said.
“Maybe we should give a damn. Maybe he came down here while you didn’t know him and then when we got on to him, like now, it’s already too late. He’s already made his set-up and doesn’t care any more.”
“Like what? Pushing my drivers around?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. And I do think that just muscle isn’t enough whether you use it or he. And that maybe Benotti is no idiot and has more plans than that.”
The kid came back with a tray of coffee, ham on rye, and pickles to go with it. Lippit started eating and never took up what I had been saying. After years of a free ride with this business, maybe he was too confident and worse than retired. When we talked again he was only interested in what went on today.
“How did yours go this morning. Smooth?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very.”
“Anybody get hurt?”
“One of theirs, two of ours, but just minor.”
“And the rest?”
“What do you mean the rest? Like are they dead?”
“You didn’t have much sleep last night, I bet. How much sleep did you have, Jack?”
“None.”
I ate and he ate and then he said, “Of course they told Benotti afterwards, about what had happened, and that explains it.”
“Wouldn’t you think Benotti would hit right back when he heard about his stuff getting all busted?”
“Anyway, he didn’t,” said Lippit. “So much the better.”
I drank coffee and had another cigarette.
“Did you hear anything I said at the pool?”
“I think you said ‘very smart’ most of the time.”
“And I mentioned about Folsom’s crew, you remember?”
“You don’t like Folsom, do you.”
“He’s got a bunch of gorillas sitting around there, pining to do damage, and nothing’s happening. I’m worried about them, not Benotti.”
“I don’t like Folsom either,” said Lippit, “but this type of job is fine for him.”
“I don’t care if it’s fine for him. What I’m worried about, is he doing it right.”
“That’s what I meant. Now stop fidgeting.”
Then he said what I needed was some sleep and I should go home and get some and not get on his nerves. He’d stay at the phone in the meantime because he had some other work to do anyway, and he got his briefcase off the floor and took stuff out. Papers, folders, that kind of thing. I sat a while longer, smoking, and when he started to make business calls I suggested, just reasonably suggested, he should stay off that phone and give the incoming calls a chance at a time like this. Then he blew his stack. Lippit does that without transition. I was too jumpy to listen, so I went home.
I undressed, went to sleep immediately, woke up immediately. The phone.
“This is Davy, Mister St Louis.”
“Yes.”
“Mister Lippit said for me to tell you he’s down at the place on Liberty and Alder, straightening out some trouble, and you should come, too.”
“What trouble?”
“Beatings. That kind of thing.”
“Benotti showed?”
“Nobody showed, which is why the fight, Mister Lippit said.”
I said okay and hung up. I had told this to Lippit, how the natives were restless, but horsing around in the swimming pool had been more important, so now Sahib Lippit had to look into the unrest himself. I got dressed fast to see how he was doing.
It looked much the same in the bar at Alder and Liberty. The cat was on the jukebox. Actually, that’s as far as it went with the similarity.
None of the apes was trying to play cards. They were standing around. There wasn’t even one drinker at the bar and all the barstools were turned over. A lot of the bottles in back of the bar had rolled over and broken their little necks. The bartender had a mouse under one eye but nobody paid any attention to him.
The big one stood at the jukebox, like before, and Lippit stood in the same place where I had been standing for the earlier argument. This argument though, was different. “Yes, sir,” said the big one to Lippit.
“And I don’t give one damn,” Lippit was yelling, “what you think is a good reason to blow your stack.”
“Yessir, Mister Lippit. Only this one here,” and he looked at the bartender, “says not to hang around any more and to get out. And that’s not what Folsom explained to us.”
“He explain to you what you got hired for? And don’t yessir me again.”
“He did, sir.”
“You’re to beat up the opposition, not the customers!”
“Folsom was here and I explained to him how things were going. About this one here saying we should get out.”
“So he said to break up the joint?”
“He said, keep him in line. Didn’t he say keep him in line?” and the big one looked at his pack mates.
They all said, yessir, he said keep him in line.
“You mean to tell me, you son of a bitch,” Lippit was yelling, “you just did your duty?”
“Yessir.”
“You had too goddamn much fun to be doing your duty!”
“I don’t like you to be calling me no son of a bitch, Mister Lippit,” said the big one.
He wasn’t using the same tone of voice he had been using with me. So it wasn’t that. But Lippit has a completely different boiling point than mine, and even an alien chemistry in the brain. Everything he did made sure sense to him, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it.
“When I’m done,” he roared, “I want everybody to get out of here quiet as a mouse!”
“Yessir.”
“And I want you mice to take that mouse here with you, when I’m done!”
He then proceeded to get done.
The ape was bigger but Lippit was better. He swung at the other one’s head but didn’t bother to connect. He did make a connection with the solar plexus. The ape said, “Whoof.”
But the whoof seemed to be the only damage because the big one hauled out immediately and got into a crouch. Maybe he had been a boxer some time ago. He took that kind of stance. Except his swing spoiled it. The swing opened him up again and Lippit didn’t seem to care whether or not he got hit. He walked in there and flicked at an eye. This put him too close for any real damage.
The swing curled up around the back of his head, and the only problem for Lippit was to get his distance
