Ask Not Read online

  “Here’s a hint—it’s the day after they dug up Henry Marshall.”

  He turned toward the street, as if gazing at the fancy hotel across the way. His eyes had narrowed slightly. “So that’s what this is about? That Plett suicide?”

  Jesus! Was he admitting it?

  He saw my surprise and said, “I read about that in the papers … to continue a theme.”

  “You remember reading about a killing in Chicago that happened over two years ago?”

  He nodded, his expression smug. “I do. Got a lot of press here. It was part of the Billie Sol Estes scandal. That got lots of play in Texas, Nate.… Shall we walk?”

  We headed down the street, at an easy pace. Traffic was almost nonexistent and the sidewalks couldn’t have been more barren if the bomb had dropped.

  “Let me guess,” he said, and the slight smile was back. “Captain Clint Peoples. He told you all about how I’m President Johnson’s assassin of choice. That’s what you meant by that crack—I must ‘know people.’”

  Walking, side by side.

  “You were a golden boy,” I said, “who Senator Johnson helped out. I mean, he did keep you out of the death house, right? Since you helped him with his sister.”

  He stopped and I stopped. The night was cool, almost cold. The sky was a deep rich blue with pinpoint stars, like the fake ceiling of a strip joint. We faced each other.

  His eyebrows, heavy and dark, tensed. “How exactly did I help him with his sister?”

  “Well, probably one of two ways. Through intermediaries, like the Outfit guys back home do it, Johnson suggested you remove a mutual problem, namely that golf-course putz who was banging your wife and your girlfriend and his sister. That sounds like three people, doesn’t it, but it’s only two.”

  His small smile turned sideways. “You take liberties, Nate, with new friends. I mean, we just met.”

  “The other way would have been that you really did decide all on your lonesome that Doug Kinser needed killing … and LBJ and his crowd offered to help you stay out of jail, if you agreed not to testify and spread embarrassing sex stuff about his sister.”

  “I choose none of the above.” His eyes managed to be cold and hard while seeming uninterested.

  “In either case, Johnson and his cronies now knew they had a man who could kill in cold blood, and that might come in handy. For example, in the case of that Billie Sol Estes scandal you mentioned? A killer like that might be willing to stage a few suicides.”

  He was shaking his head, just a little. “Do you know what kind of people you’re accusing?”

  “Rich people? Powerful people? Corrupt people? That kind?”

  “There’s no truth to any of this, Mr. Heller.”

  “What happened to Nate?”

  “If you harass me, I’ll get a court order. If you go public, I’ll sue you for slander or libel. Or maybe the people you’re accusing will do something else.”

  “I’ll get depressed, you mean? Suck on a tailpipe?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Here’s an idea. Now, please don’t consider this blackmail, although that’s what it is. I don’t care to go toe-to-toe with you Texas boys. I might wind up with a branding iron up my ass or become a rare white lynching victim. But that Joseph Plett you mentioned, his wife and kids got screwed out of a $500,000 insurance settlement because the insurance company doesn’t pay out on suicide.”

  “Do I look like I have half a million dollars in my pocket?”

  “No, but Lyndon’s oil and arms buddies spill that kind of bread, not to mention that guy Edward Clark’s law firm. Pass that along as a compassionate request for the welfare of a family who became casualties in that situation comedy starring Billie Sol Estes. Why is he still alive, by the way?”

  And now a barely perceptible sneer. “You think you’re very smart, don’t you, Mr. Heller?”

  “Smart enough, generally.”

  “Maybe not this time,” he said, and he punched me in the belly.

  Fucking sucker punches, anyway.

  I was doubled over, which made it convenient for me to jam my head in his gut, though because of his blow I didn’t have much power, just enough to make him stumble back a step. He swung and missed with his right and I swung my right and clipped him on the nose, just a glancing blow. His left came around and caught me under the right eye, though not with the power his other hand might have brought. But his back was to a building and I gripped him by the sport jacket and slammed him into the stone.

  It jarred him, but he managed to shove back at me, and I lost my footing and went down on my ass. He came over and kicked me in the side, but when he tried to take a second helping, I caught him by the foot and shoved him backward, his arms windmilling.

  He managed not to fall, but by the time he had regained his balance, I was facing him with the nine millimeter in my hand and about two feet between us.

  The bad thing, the really nasty thing, is that he didn’t seem to give a shit. He smiled, really smiled big for the first time, seeing the gun. He flicked the fingers of both hands in his own direction.

  “Go ahead, Heller. Shoot me. You’ll hate yourself in the morning if you don’t.”

  Shoot him with a gun that wasn’t licensed in the state of Texas. Shoot him on a public street where several cars had already gone by and not slowed down to get involved. Shoot him and let thousands of answers die with him. Shoot him and maybe go to jail, and how had that worked out for Ruby? Or Oswald, for that matter?

  He was laughing as he walked off somewhat unsteadily—from the booze or the fight or both—in the direction of that after-hours club.

  I put my gun away and hobbled back to the Colony Club, my side hurting like hell, a rib busted maybe, and somehow got up the stairs and into the nightclub, where Jada, in a plaid cloth coat and very little makeup and looking like the Janet she really was, was coming from backstage.

  She put her hands on her hips and said, “Well, look who’s here! I thought you were standing me up!”

  “I changed my mind,” I said, and passed out.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Someone once said that there was no excuse for Dallas even existing—that it sat in the midst of nothing and nowhere, the land around it dry and black and providing would-be farmers with no more than a crop of headaches and heartbreak. Calling the Trinity—alternately a trickle or a flood—a river was typical Texas bluster. No oil derricks towered in or near Dallas, nor was there gas or sulphur. Back in the 1870s, the railroad came only because some shady businessmen tricked and/or bribed the Houston and Texas Central Railway to build there.

  Nothing here happened by accident, nature, or happenstance. Men made Dallas. Men made their city a leader of banking and insurance and manufacturing, and the Southwest’s center of fashion and culture, too. In 1964 it was home to half a million people, most of whom would gladly tell you that Big D did everything bigger and better—bigger steaks, fancier parties, more air-conditioning, taller buildings, better-dressed women, better-looking girls. Or anyway that was their attitude before Jack Kennedy made their town his last stop and their improbable city became a national disgrace.

  I was staying with Janet Adams, aka Jada, stripper or (if you will) exotic dancer, in a high-rise luxury apartment house in an area once dominated by grand old homes as lovely as the trees lining the banks of Turtle Creek. Some of those lavishly landscaped residences were still there, but many had been pushed out by apartment complexes, filled with stewardesses, stenographers, salesgirls, models, and receptionists.

  It was Thursday, early afternoon. In a lounge-style deck chair, I was stretched out wearing a bathing suit but also a short terry-cloth robe, to cover up my bandaged ribs and some nasty bruising. On the cement beside me, on a towel, Janet lay on her tummy, her red hair pinned up like a crazy turban, her bikini top unsnapped, so she could soak up sun and get even darker. Periodically I rubbed some suntan lotion on her. Otherwise, I was just living behin
d my Ray-Bans, watching girls in their twenties swim and sun—a relative handful at half a dozen, mostly stewardesses I would venture, since the other single girls living here were probably at work. They were ridiculously beautiful. How I wished rubbing suntan lotion on Janet and ogling bikini-clad young women paid a living wage.

  Though this was my second day as Janet’s guest, it was my first time down by the pool. Tuesday night, Janet and two other dancers at the Colony Club had gotten me down to her car, a white Caddy convertible, parked in the same next-door ramp as my rental Galaxie. I barely remember this, but I do know that I have never had less fun in the company of eager-to-please strippers.

  I also barely remember the trip to the emergency room at Parkland Hospital. I was X-rayed, found to have two cracked (but not broken) ribs, got taped up, shot up (with Demerol), and given a five-day supply of drugs (Demerol again).

  I woke up in Janet’s bed late the next morning. She was there, a nurse in green halter top and short shorts, to walk me to the john, feed me some more Demerol, and put me back to bed. That evening, I got up, was able to get myself to the john and then avail myself of a tan cotton robe (no shortage of abandoned men’s clothing at Janet’s), and joined her in the living room of a very nice but very underfurnished apartment. In fact, the furnishings were right out of a thrift shop, what little there were.

  We sat at yellow-Formica-topped table that June Cleaver would have tossed out around 1956, eating TV dinners and sipping cans of Schlitz in her modern kitchen. Swanson frozen fare was all she cooked for herself, she informed me. What the hell—it was better than I’d got in the service. She was still in the dark-green shorts outfit—it went really well with her red hair—and was having the meat loaf. I had Salisbury steak.

  “What’s the story on this place?” I asked. “It’s got to run you one-fifty a month, easy.”

  “Two bills,” she said, chewing meat loaf.

  “Meaning no offense to a gracious hostess, but the interior decoration is strictly Early Goodwill.”

  She grinned at me. “Don’t you get it? I’m part of the suitcase set.”

  “What’s the suitcase set?”

  “We’re kind of high-class nomads. You move into an apartment in one of these high-rises, then move out again in two or three months. These places offer the first month free, you know.”

  Sounded more like low-class moochers to me, but I kept it to myself.

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, digging into her aluminum pocket of peas. “Anyway, I don’t need a year-round residence in Dallas. I spend as much time in New Orleans.”

  Working Carlos Marcello’s clubs.

  “And sometimes,” she was saying, “Austin and Fort Worth, too. It’s a little circuit. I’m just winding up a two-month stint at the Colony, then a few weeks in New Orleans at the Sho-Bar, and back to Big D at the Theater Lounge, Abe’s brother’s joint.”

  “I thought they were famous for their amateur nights.”

  “Yeah, and boy did that use to drive Jack batty. Or battier, anyway.”

  She meant her Carousel boss, Jack Ruby.

  “You know,” she was saying, “he was stuck paying exotics guild minimum. And the amateur girls down the street got bupkus.”

  The guild was the American Guild of Variety Artists. My old pal Barney Ross, the onetime triple-division boxing champ, did PR for the AGVA in New York. I had grown up on the West Side of Chicago with Barney. So had Ruby.

  “Anyway,” Janet was saying, eating her mashed potatoes without enthusiasm, “the Theater Lounge books a headliner in, to shore up these amateur-night cunts.”

  Okay, so Janet wasn’t always elegant. Like the thrift-shop furniture, she didn’t really belong here. But she had rescued me last night and was feeding me today, so she could be as vulgar a little cunt as she pleased.

  While she was getting ready for work—she did her makeup at home, because the Colony’s dressing room was shared by all the dancers—I used the kitchen phone.

  I got Lou Sapperstein at home, and he was cross with me: “Where the hell have you been? I pressed the desk clerk at the Statler till he admitted you weren’t in your room last night.”

  “I stayed overnight with a stripper friend.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check in! I was about ready to start calling the hospitals, or the Dallas city morgue.”

  I explained that I’d taken a beating from a suspect in the Plett murder.

  “Get something to write with,” I advised him.

  “Okay, but first, the whole Plett job, this whole Texas trip of yours … something really crazy happened. Something good, maybe even great, but crazy as hell.”

  “What?”

  “This afternoon Mrs. Plett gets a call from that insurance company and is told she’s getting the full half a million. They told her they were doing a reappraisal of certain cases, and that the circumstances of her husband’s death were questionable enough that her double-indemnity claim would be honored. Two years after the fact! You ever hear of such a thing?”

  “No. She called and told you all this?”

  “Yes. She wanted to know if we were responsible for her good fortune”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I believed we were. Were we, Nate?”

  “Probably.”

  I gave him a brief rundown on Mac Wallace, per Captain Peoples and my own experience—minus the suspicions about LBJ and JFK—and how I’d told Wallace our investigation would cease if our client got her money.

  “I’m a little surprised,” I said, “that it came from the insurance company. I didn’t know how the payoff would happen, but never figured on that way.”

  “Well, it’s a Dallas-based company, if that tells you anything.”

  I also told Lou that even though the insurance company had come belatedly through, I wanted Wallace’s whereabouts at the time of Joseph Plett’s “suicide” looked into. And that when Wallace returned to California, he was to be kept under surveillance until further notice.

  “That could be expensive, Nate.”

  “We’ll be getting fifty grand from Mrs. Plett.”

  “True. This guy Wallace is very likely a contract killer.”

  “More like an in-house assassin.”

  “And we’re going to let him walk?”

  “Our job is to get our client satisfaction, and if that insurance payout does the trick, then we walk away.”

  He gave me a long-distance sigh. “Agreed.”

  “Was the client happy?”

  “Very. Nothing about clearing up her husband’s suicide was even mentioned. For that kind of dough, who needs consecrated ground?”

  “Then it’s over.”

  I told Lou I’d likely be heading home tomorrow, and we said our good-byes.

  In her living room, Janet positioned me in a threadbare armchair before a little black-and-white portable TV on a wheeled stand before she left for work that evening. I had taken some Demerol with my Schlitz and I fell asleep in the chair before The Beverly Hillbillies turned into The Dick Van Dyke Show. I dreamed a weird episode of the latter staring the A-1’s receptionist, Millie.

  When Janet nudged me awake, the TV was hissing with snow on the screen.

  “You shouldn’t have slept in that chair,” she scolded. Her blue eyes narrowed under a high bare forehead—she wore no makeup and her painted-on stripper eyebrows were gone, leaving only the faint shadow of shaved-off real ones. She should have looked grotesque, but her pretty eyes and cute nose and full sensual mouth made up for any shortcomings.

  “Tell it to the Demerol,” I groaned. “That stuff put me out like Cassius Clay.”

  She helped me out of the chair. She’d already hung up her cloth coat, and was in a red-and-brown plaid lumberjack shirt and jeans and sandals. Her flaming mane was pulled back in a ponytail with enough hair for a real pony’s tail. Even minus stripper wardrobe, she was a cartoon of a woman. But in a good, Al Ca
pp–drawn kind of way.

  Once I got up, I realized I was feeling better. But I didn’t argue when she led me into the bedroom and deposited me there, tucking me under a cool sheet.

  “Get to sleep,” she said, turned off the light, and walked briskly into the adjacent bathroom, closing the door, leaving only a slash of bright light under it. Shortly the sound of the shower began. I could hear her singing in the echoing booth. Took me a minute, muffled as it was, but then I made it out: “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”

  That made me smile. Dino, hitting the charts, knocking the Beatles off their perch. Sorry, Sam.

  Then she started singing “Love Me Do,” and maybe my son had the last laugh at that.

  I propped myself up in bed with two pillows, working to find a position that didn’t strain my aching ribs. Well, they didn’t ache that much after the Demerol, anyway. There wasn’t much bruising showing, either, as mummy-like bands of adhesive tape covered the majority of my purple badges of honor.

  The door opened and let steam out and she was poised there in the fog of it. She pulled a shower cap off and lots of red hair escaped, wild and undisciplined, and she began toweling off her curvy body. No pasties, no G-string. Just a woman with a classic hourglass figure, no skinny Vogue model this, more an escapee from Cabaret magazine. Her breasts rode her rib cage as if she was serving them up, like cupcakes on trays, and her pubic triangle was trimmed way back, the better to stay within the confines of her G-string onstage. That nether hair matched her head’s improbable flame color. If only her hairdresser knew for sure (as the TV ads speculated), he or she was doing double duty.

  “Are you up?” she asked, still framed in the doorway. Light poured out, providing moody illumination in the otherwise dark bedroom.

  “Are you kidding?”

  She smiled, and padded over like a little girl, jiggling in all the big-girl places. She was giggling, too, which was cute as hell coming from such an experienced broad. She stood next to me where the sheet tent-poled and she batted playfully at it, making it wave hello at her, as she grinned and licked her lips.