Target Lancer nh-14 Page 2

  I just sat and sipped my drink and pretended to watch a skinny redhead with more breastworks than seemed likely prance around in a filmy harem costume. Really, I was keeping an eye on Tom, who wasn’t any more nervous than a first-time father in a maternity-ward waiting room.

  The PR exec had fulfilled his two-drink minimum by way of a couple of martinis when a figure rose from a front-row seat and half turned to knife his way through the many tables to the bar-a burly-looking little guy with black hair whose color may have come from a bottle, and black shark eyes that searched out Tom.

  No mistaking him-this was the contact, stocky, in a nice blue suit with red-white-and-blue tie, very snappy-looking, but not enough to offset his pasty barroom complexion or his rather blank-featured oval face with its five-o’clock-shadowed jowls. He looked like a Li’l Abner caricature that Al Capp hadn’t quite finished with.

  I couldn’t hear the conversation. It was brief. Appeared friendly, the contact affable, Tom stilted. Smiles were exchanged, and the envelope handed over, casually, nothing surreptitious about it. Nobody was watching them but me. Everybody else was enjoying the redhead, who was down to her pasties now, tiny annoyances on the cantaloupe breasts, with the filmy harem pants next on the going-going-gone list.

  The stocky contact guy nodded, smiled again, shook hands with Tom, patted him on the shoulder, and threaded back through the smoke and the crowd to his waiting table. Tom had been good about not acknowledging my presence, but now he looked right at me, and I nodded as imperceptibly as possible.

  When the crowd burst into applause at the final reveal-Red plucked off her pasties and got a standing ovation out of a lot of guys, probably even those still sitting down-Tom gave the bartender a generous five-spot, and headed out.

  I waited till the next stripper, a busty brunette, had shed a few garments, then slipped out of the club myself.

  It was drizzling a little. Tom was waiting at a cab, about to get in, but pausing as I’d instructed him till he got the high-sign from me.

  I nodded at him, indicating all was well with the world, and he disappeared off into the rain-slick night.

  Me, I turned to go back into the 606.

  I knew that little guy, that contact with the nice suit and the shark eyes. I knew him to be a Hoffa associate, but more than that I just … well, knew him. He was Jake Rubinstein, from the West Side, an old acquaintance but not exactly a friend.

  He knew me, too, of course.

  Which wouldn’t have mattered, but I was pretty sure he’d spotted me.

  So I needed to go back in there and deal with him. I could start by asking him what he was doing back in Chicago. He’d been in Dallas for years, running his own strip clubs.

  Under the name Jack Ruby.

  CHAPTER 2

  The little combo was doing as jazzy a version of “Harlem Nocturne” as possible with an accordion in the lineup, the drummer giving the big exotic brunette plenty to grind to. Her name was Tura Satana and she’d come out in a Japanese kimono but was down to pasties and a skirt that was just a couple fore-and-aft wispy swatches. I was on my second rum-and-Coke and ready to forgive the Japanese for Pearl Harbor when I saw the stocky figure in the dark suit and narrow dark tie rise from his front table and make his way toward the rear of the club.

  He made a big show of noticing me, grinning and pointing his finger at me like a gun.

  I gave him a smile, and waved him over to the back booth I was hogging. He skirted the cluster of tables and made a beeline, his hand extended. I half rose on my side of what was really a semi-booth, its back to the wall, with a table and two chairs making it easier for patrons to angle toward the stage. Even from here, tucked in the corner, the view wasn’t bad.

  After we shook hands, his grip show-off tight, Jake indeed angled his chair so that he could alternate his attention between me and the bosomy Japanese stripper, who put a lot of energy into her bumps and grinds, legs spread so far that her flimsy skirt flapped and snapped between them.

  “Her I gotta book,” Jake said, as if we were in the middle of a conversation, not the start. “Gotta hand it to ol’ Lou-he’s got an eye for talent. ‘Made in Japan’ is right!”

  I was just thinking about apologizing to Miss Satana for Hiroshima myself. “Still in the club business, huh, Jake?”

  He nodded. His thinning black hair was slicked back, and his tiny black eyes glittered. Close up, his pasty face lost some of its blankness, and you could see a certain enthusiasm for living there. Also, he seemed a little nuts.

  “Oh yeah. The Carousel is my baby. Right downtown. But I’m gonna move it to a bigger, even better location before long. Thinking about having two runways, to bring the girls closer to the customers.”

  “Worked for Jolson. So, just the one club now? Thought you had several.”

  He pawed the air like a bored lion. “Yeah, got another joint called the Vegas, where we put on these amateur nights. The yahoos love that stuff, half-drunk college girls and secretaries gettin’ up and strippin’ off. No class, them broads. But what are you gonna do? Gotta give the public what it wants.”

  We’d once known each other pretty well, growing up on the West Side and sharing a friend in Barney Ross, who’d gone from tough kid to welterweight boxing champ. Barney always had more patience with Jake Rubinstein than I could ever muster. I considered Sparky (his long-ago street name) a hotheaded little shakedown artist; but Jake was jake in Barney’s eyes. After all, hadn’t they run errands a buck a pop together, for the Capone gang?

  Tom Ellison had played bagman tonight, delivering a packet of cash to a guy who had, ironically enough, served his first jail term for scalping football tickets, and who’d first risen to mob prominence in the late thirties by acting as bagman for the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers union.

  Jake eventually got caught in a struggle between two union leaders, one of whom was shot and killed in an incident where the union’s chief bagman became a principal player in a cover-up that resulted in the Teamsters taking over the union. I’d been in the middle of that and had been happy to come out of it without anybody’s blood on me, especially my own.

  I knew Jake Rubinstein, all right. But I’d had little to do with Jack Ruby.

  I’d seen him in Dallas a few times-the Outfit had sent him there in the late forties, as part of a Chicago takeover attempt on that wide-open town’s gambling, prostitution, and other rackets. But the Lone Star State coppers didn’t want to play, and it fizzled. Ruby had stayed on, in the strip-club business, a sort of exile. I presumed he’d continued to do the Outfit’s bidding, from time to time, but knew no details.

  That left Jake and me in an awkward position. We knew each other well but hadn’t talked in years. Add to that, if he’d spotted me, he was wondering what the fuck I was doing here. Like I’d spotted him and was wondering what the fuck he was doing here.

  So it started with small talk.

  “What do you hear from Barney?” I asked.

  “Quite a bit, really. You know, them amateur nights? I was trying to get Barney’s help and advice in shutting some of the competition down, with this non-pro stripper bullshit. He has an in with the AGVA.”

  That was the American Guild of Variety Artists. Somewhere in there among the violinists and sopranos and ballet dancers they represented were strippers. That is, “exotic dancers.”

  Barney worked for the Milton Blackstone Advertising Agency in New York, where his celebrity had made him a successful press agent. Like Tom Ellison, though Tom never won a welterweight championship.

  The music way up front wasn’t loud enough to make conversation difficult, but we did have to lean in a little to talk.

  “So, what,” I said, “you’re trying to get these amateur nights banned?”

  “Fucking A. Then maybe I can turn the Vegas back into a respectable joint. You know, I’m hoping to book Candy Barr in there. When her parole’s up on that pot bust, anyway. Broad’s got two of the most famous busts in America, huh?” He
cackled at that.

  “Sounds like Dallas is doing right by you.”

  “I’m doin’ right by it. Place’s a shithole. When the boys sent me down there, fuck-why not California, or Florida? I had to make my own way, Nate. But you can do that in America, can’t you?”

  “Sure. Look at me. Horatio Alger, eat your heart out.”

  “Who?”

  “Nothing. Can I buy you a drink, Jake?”

  “Sure. But it’s Jack now. Jake’s history.”

  I grinned at him. “Like Sparky?”

  He grinned back. “Well, there’s still some spark left in the old kid yet, Nate.”

  I waved a waiter over. Half a dozen guys in white shirts with black ties and black trousers handled all two-hundred-some customers in the 606, no female staff other than onstage. I ordered a Coke minus the rum this time, and Jake-Jack-asked for tomato juice.

  “You don’t drink, either?” he said with an impish smile.

  “I had two rum-and-Cokes already. But I’m not a big boozer. Don’t tell me a club man like you is a teetotaler?”

  He squinted his little black eyes, shook his head. “Bad for you. Like cigarettes. Don’t touch ’em. I don’t see you draggin’ on one, neither.”

  “Only time I ever really smoked,” I said, “was in the service.”

  “When you and Barney shared a foxhole.”

  “That’s right.”

  “On Guadalcanal.”

  “Skip it, Jack.”

  “Well, you’re a true hero, Nate.”

  “A true hero who got out on a Section Eight.”

  “Don’t give me that fuckin’ noise. Barney told me. You got the Silver Star. They mentioned that in that Life article, too, right?”

  Jack had been following my storied career, apparently.

  “Hell,” he said, “me? I spent the whole damn war in the South.”

  “Well, my understanding is the Japs never got past Birmingham, so you did fine.”

  He didn’t find that funny. He damn near looked like he might cry. “Only action I saw was when I punched out a fucking sergeant.”

  “You punched out a sergeant?”

  “Goddamn right! He called me a Jew bastard! Wouldn’t you punch him?”

  Jake was a lot more Jewish than me, despite my last name. With my reddish-brown hair and blue eyes, I took after my Irish mother, not my Jewish pop, who had been apostate and raised me that way. But I would have given that sergeant his due beating, all right-just not where or when I could be made for it.

  My Coke and Jake’s tomato juice arrived.

  He raised his red-brimming glass in a toast and I clinked my Coke with it as he said, “L’Chayim,” and we nodded at each other, then sipped.

  Another dancer was onstage now, visible through the blue-smoke haze. The little combo was doing its best with David Rose’s big-band “The Stripper.” Didn’t really make it, but nobody cared-the blonde onstage, Leslee Lynn, had a nice smile and nicer legs in mesh stockings that showed under the fox-fur stole she’d strutted out in, and would soon be ridding herself of.

  “So what brings you to Chicago, Jack? Talent hunt?”

  He was turned toward the blonde, nodding as he took in her graceful, sexy moves to the clumsy music. “Yeah, a guy has to keep a finger on the pulse.”

  “Is that what he has to keep his finger on.”

  The bullet head turned my way. His smile was boyish, in a sleazy kind of way. “Lou says this girl is a class act. She’s a University of Chicago grad, he tells me.”

  “What healthy male wouldn’t want to see her diploma? So you’ll hit a lot of the clubs in town, looking for dancers?”

  “Sure.” He shrugged. “You go where the best shows are, at least in the Midwest and South. There are some talented gals in Frisco and Hollywood, but why ship them in, when there’s Fort Worth and New Orleans in my own backyard?”

  We both watched the fox stole as it drifted to the floor and got dragged behind Leslee’s confident stride. She wasn’t as busty as the other girls, but she knew how to work the crowd.

  “Class,” Jack said admiringly. “Your average stripper? Just ain’t got no class.” Without looking at me, he added, “And how about you, Nate? What brings you to the 606?”

  So he had made me.

  You didn’t need to ask a Chicagoan like Nate Heller what he was doing in a joint where good-looking girls took off their clothes. No. He’d seen me, all right.

  “I met a client here earlier,” I said.

  Had he seen me duck out, after Tom? And come back in?

  “We finished our business,” I said, “and I decided to stick around and partake in a little culture.”

  “You and Lou Nathan go way back.”

  “That we do. But truth be told, nowadays the Chez Paree is more my speed.”

  He nodded, half smiled, then sighed dreamily. “Someday. Someday that’ll be me, booking Sinatra and Sammy Davis.”

  “Booking Sammy Davis in Dallas? You are ambitious.”

  He found that real funny, or pretended to.

  The combo moved onto “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in honor of Leslee’s heart-shaped pasties (I may have been in my fifties, but I had twenty-twenty vision).

  Jack turned his back on the stripper and showed me a different kind of smile. The kind with no teeth. Accompanied by hooded eyes.

  “We been friends a long time, Nate,” he said.

  Not really, but I gave him another little half toast and said, “Maxwell Street days.”

  He didn’t bother clinking my glass. The beady black eyes were like buttons trying to sew themselves on me. “So, you … you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Tell you what, Jake?”

  “Jack. It’s Jack.”

  “Yeah, like the president. Tell you what?”

  “You’d tell me, somebody sent you? Was having you check up on me? You know, keeping tabs?”

  “Who would be keeping tabs on you, Jack?”

  He sighed. Shook his head. “When it’s Nate Heller sitting there? That’s the thing. You’re connected to more places than AT and T. Could be Outfit. Could be union. Could be … company.”

  Did he mean what I thought he meant?

  I didn’t ask, but he answered anyway: “Company as in…” And this he whispered. “… Mongoose.”

  That made the back of my neck prickle, and that didn’t happen very often these days.

  But I didn’t play along. I played dumb. He wouldn’t buy it, but I played dumb.

  “Mongoose, Jack?” I was whispering, too. That probably gave it away. Just the same, I said, “What the hell’s Mongoose?”

  “Operation Mongoose,” he said, and he touched thumb and forefinger to his lips and made the twisting, locking motion that meant his lips were sealed. Like one teenage girl assuring another at a slumber party.

  Operation Mongoose was not a phrase I heard every day. It was in fact a phrase I wished I’d never heard. Several years ago, following a high-level request, I had put the CIA in touch with various organized-crime figures, so they could pursue a common goal: eliminating Fidel Castro.

  I sipped the Coke. “I’m not part of that anymore, Jack.”

  “You were a big part of it, though.” The black eyes glistened now; it was almost like there was life in them. “You didn’t think a small cog like me would know, huh? Ha.”

  I managed not to say, Fuck no, I didn’t think an insignificant worm like you, Jake, would be involved in a top secret government assassination mission.

  Instead, I just said, “No, I can see where you’d be a major player.”

  For example, picking up a few grand in an envelope in a strip club.

  “But I do wonder,” I went on, “who would have shared that information with you? I mean, discretion being the better part of valor and all.”

  “Not important,” he said, shrugged, and sipped tomato juice. “Thing is, we’re both patriots, Nate. Heroes. We saw something evil, a cancer growing too close to our borde
rs, and we did something about it.”

  “Okay. Fine.” I found it best not to mention that Fidel was alive and well. “But it has nothing to do with why I’m here tonight.”

  “You were here to meet a client, I heard you the first time.” He leaned in. “You wanna know what the sick joke is, Nate? The sick fucking joke?”

  Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Once upon a sorry damn time, we … I … helped transport guns and jeeps and you-name-the-fucking-arms into Cuba for Castro. To help him take out that prick Batista.”

  Well, that wasn’t quite right, was it? The idea surely had been to get on Castro’s good side just in case he got rid of Batista, who the mob guys already had in their pocket. To make sure the casinos stayed open, the narcotics kept moving, with the money still flowing, no matter which Cuban prick was in power.

  Hadn’t worked out that way.

  I said, “Guys like us, Jack, aren’t cut out for politics.”

  He shook his head, but he was agreeing with me. “Naw, hell, you’re right. We’re just the foot soldiers. Who only make the whole fucking thing possible. Where would democracy be without guys like us, Nate?”

  “Good question.”

  “But I made up for it.” He leaned in again, deeper, and he went sotto voce: “You would not believe how many trips back to Cuba I made since. This time helping out real freedom fighters. Also…” He thumbed his chest. “… I’m the guy who kept Santo in touch, when that bearded bastard had him cooped up.”

  I hoped he didn’t mean Santo Trafficante. The Tampa don who was among the most powerful and nastiest alive. Or dead, for that matter.

  Jack wasn’t whispering now, but nobody else could hear. The band was playing a spirited “Peppermint Twist,” and a tall acrobatic redhead in a green bikini was doing an equally spirited twist.

  “After all Santo done for Castro,” Jack was saying, “he locks him up like a common criminal. Keeps him in for damn near two years! Without me makin’ the occasional trip, Santo wouldn’ta knowed what the fuck was goin’ on back stateside.”