Murder Me for Nickels

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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.

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