Murder Me for Nickels Read Online Free PDF Page B

so that you can get up with the chickens.” He was saying, “Not chickens. Horses!” when I hung up the phone. Then I drove to the club.
    Actually, the place wasn’t a club, except that Pat liked the word better and so Lippit had started calling it that. This club was a cross between YMCA and community center where a member could dance, sit, swim, box, get instructions in drama, or get a good massage. Lippit, who could not do without sweaty exercise, played handball there, went to the steambath, and got himself rubbed. In addition, he paid rent on a room with chairs and a long table. He had meetings there because he did not like an office address.
    And I didn’t like going there. First of all, I didn’t like Lippit’s meetings. He wasn’t running a democracy, so why have meetings? He listened to what there was and then said what he wanted done. He could have done the same thing by phone. To keep you guys on your toes, he’d say. But it just bored me.
    Second of all, I didn’t like the place because it reminded me of all the right-minded foolishness which used to bother me a number of years ago. I didn’t have a very rich upbringing, just a varied one, and this cold shower health kick of fun without girls used to be a sad bother to me. It ruined sports for me and it never made me want a woman any less.
    So there were the thin-legged kids wearing gym shoes as if they had Frankenstein feet, then the real addicts, all balled up with muscle, and the ones who must have started too late because the sweatshirt just brought out their stomachs. I had to walk past all that wearing this crazy tuxedo, and I went to the top floor as fast as I could.
    That was another thing I didn’t like. That room. It was space left over because the architect had made a mistake in arithmetic. There were windows to the street way up in the wall, but they only made sense from the outside where they had something to do with the Greek facade. The opposite wall, where there was no street, had a row of windows too. They were long and very low to the floor and if you lay down on your stomach you could look down into the swimming pool. Or you could just sit at the big table in the middle of the room and listen to the hollow racket come out of those windows.
    There was a lot of smoke hanging over the table. There were eight or ten men but Lippit wasn’t there. They all stopped talking when I came in and waited till I came up to the table. Then Lippit’s lawyer said:
    “You lost a button, Jack.”
    “Which is why I’m late. I hunted and hunted….”
    But they weren’t really listening. They were all in a lousy mood.
    “Where’s Lippit?” I asked.
    “He wants you to join him,” said the lawyer. “Seeing you weren’t here when expected and no telling when you’d show up, he took off while he was still in a fairly clean mood and said you should join him. If that would be all right with you.” And he handed me a slip of paper with an address written on it.
    I held it in my hand and looked at everybody at the table. “That’s why everybody sits here in a stinking mood? To tell me Lippit left?”
    There was the lawyer, Lippit’s accountant, and a manager from Lippit’s shop where they fixed jukeboxes. Those three wore tuxedos same as I, because they were the only ones Lippit had invited for the little party at his place. The rest were in daytime clothes. I didn’t know all of them, but the ones I recognized were from Lippit’s own union. Which is only a manner of speaking, because Lippit did not own a union. He ran a local, however—electrical services—and the men in it handled Lippit’s equipment There was also a union which he did own, in much more than a manner of speaking, which covered the drivers who did his deliveries. The man who ran things for Lippit inside these two unions was a thin person named Folsom. He liked black leather jackets, as if he were a punk or a motorcycle cop.
    “I called this meeting,” Folsom