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  Traffic hadn’t picked up any when I crossed Commerce again into the neon fog of the sidewalk under the Colony Club’s looming sign. For all that sleazy grandeur, the address was 1322½, meaning the nitery was one floor up, the glass-brick entry a modest recession between a liquor store and the parking ramp. Under a rounded canopy, glassed-in showcases at right and left presented racy posters and photos of Colony girls past and present, with an emphasis on Candy Barr, who’d got her start (and her name) here. Through the door with its porthole window, I went up thickly red-carpeted stairs to a small landing where an overly made-up attractive blonde in a low-cut red gown sat behind a semicircular black-leather-upholstered counter trimmed in silver. She wanted two dollars and I gave it to her.

  There was a time when two dollars got you more from a blonde like that.

  The club room was impressively large, dominated by a performance stage with an Art Moderne look that had really been something in the ’40s. In those days, you would see the likes of Louis Armstrong and George Gobel here, and Bob Hope would hop up on the stage when he was in town, to do a free bit. The strippers were just part of the show.

  Now they were the show. When I’d been here maybe ten years ago, the featured musical group was the popular George Shearing Quintet. The combo onstage tonight was Bill Peck and His Peckers. Somehow I didn’t think Johnny Carson would be booking them on The Tonight Show.

  Still, the place had remnants of class—the formidable stage, maybe twenty-five by thirty, was elevated, with a shiny black metal rail to keep horny patrons from getting too friendly with the exotics, as strippers liked to call themselves these days. Black-leather-upholstered booths and chairs, linen tablecloths, plush carpeting, and flickering candlelight added up to a dreamy ambiance.

  I’d already had those two gimlets across the street, so from my ringside seat I just ordered a Coke from a smiling, busty black-haired waitress in a tuxedo jacket and black mesh hose. The waitresses pushed champagne, which was how you got them to sit with you. You shared a bottle with them, but they didn’t drink much if any, utilizing a trick of pouring the champagne from their glasses into the ice bucket. My perky dark-haired doll tried hard, but I didn’t want her company or the champagne.

  That and wine and beer were the extent of alcoholic beverages that could be legally sold in a nightclub in Dallas. That was why there was a liquor store downstairs, and a cover charge outside. You brought a bottle in a brown bag and ordered setups.

  Getting desperate, the waitress pointed out a doorway in the back corner. “I give private dances in the VIP room upstairs. You’d love it, there’s these dark-blue mirrors and velvet couches. Real intimate and sexy. If I’m not your type, sweetie, some of the dancers are available. Just let me know.…”

  The lights came down, and I sat rather glumly through the MC, a guy named Breck Wall who used to be Jack Ruby’s man, doing a painful comedy routine with a guy in old-lady drag, a bad version of Jonathan Winters’s Maude Frickert (“My living bra just died”). The first stripper was a pretty, stacked brunette called Peggy Steele, who according to MC Wall was “The I-Don’t-Care Girl,” and she didn’t. As the Peckers played “Blue Skies,” she moved listlessly around in a dark-blue strapless gown with a glittering bodice and gradually peeled to pasties and a small rhinestone-studded bikini bottom. Then a corny comic in a red derby accompanied his tired song parodies (“How dry I am, how wet I’ll be, if I don’t find the bathroom key”) with a banjo and I decided Bob Hope probably wasn’t going to show up tonight.

  Blonde Chris Colt was next, with her “forty-fives,” a description that did not refer to the toy six-guns on her hips. To “I’m an Old Cowhand,” she pranced in a rhinestone-studded Western pants outfit that zipped off until she was wearing just two sheriff’s-badge pasties, a skimpy G-string that exposed a little tumbleweed, and white boots. This cowgirl was usually the headliner, but not with Jack Ruby’s headline stripper, Jada, on the bill—suddenly famous in the wake of the assassination.

  And Miss .45’s applause had not died down when Jada came strutting out to the Peckers singing, a capella, “Ja-da, Ja-da, Ja-da Ja-da jing jing jing.”

  She was an amazing-looking woman—though she was only five-foot-five or -six, her tower of flaming red hair, which somehow also reached her shoulders, conspired with high heels to make her seem larger than life. Flesh that had been creamy white in Chicago was now a dark-berry tan, her lipstick bright red, her full lips constantly flashing a wide, white Marilyn-esque smile; her wide-set blue eyes with the long fake lashes and curving eyebrows gave her the overemphasized glamour of a female impersonator, only she was definitely female.

  Her spangly, feathery white evening gown with long white gloves didn’t last long before she was down to red pasties and a half corset that showed off her full, shapely bottom. Her hourglass figure made the pert breasts seem larger than they were, and the lushness of her curvy figure was matched by a charismatic command of the stage, a laughing mastery she held over all the men in the audience.

  Those blue eyes flared with surprise and even delight, seeing me seated ringside, and she blew me a kiss. I grinned at her, and she laughed, bump-and-grinding her way over to the leopard-skin rug on which she was about to perform the explicit routine that had made Jack Ruby mad at her. So afraid he’d go to jail over it, he’d sometimes turn the lights off on the stage.

  Tonight the lights stayed on, though her pasties and G-string didn’t, and this was merely the end of the first act. She got the kind of sitting-down standing ovation only the sexiest strippers could get, and pranced off laughing. The MC came out and announced the show’s second half would begin in thirty minutes, the band taking a break as Twist music got pumped in.

  Not five minutes passed before Jada flounced out from a door beside the stage, wearing a green robe with a green feathered collar, to sit with me at my little ringside table. The lights were up and her star presence got a lot of wide eyes and whispers going around us, but nobody came over and bothered us. An autograph is not what a guy wants from a stripper.

  She grabbed my nearest hand with both of hers and leaned in and kissed the air a few fractions of an inch from my mouth—she couldn’t risk smearing that elaborate lipstick job.

  “Nathan Heller,” she said, in a rich alto thick with a Latin accent, “you are a bad boy not telling Jada you were coming to town.”

  “Hi Janet. What’s with the accent? Gonna go on the road and play Lola in Damn Yankees?”

  She gave me half a grin. She was even sexier when she wasn’t trying. Dropping the accent, she said, “These Texas chumps think I’m from Brazil,” though there was now a hint of the South. “Doesn’t hurt an exotic to be a little more exotic, and I also don’t have to explain the tan.”

  “You look good any color. You’re going on again?”

  “Better believe it, buddy—I close the show. I’m the headliner, and doesn’t that give Miss Big Titties from Big D heartburn. Ha! Me with my two tiny handfuls.”

  “You don’t hear me complaining. When did they close down the Carousel?”

  “Around when Ruby’s trial started. It was a drag there. A club like that lives and dies on big spenders, buying champagne to impress girls they’ll never get. After November twenty-two, all we got were beer-drinkin’ reporters and curiosity-seeking tourists, with dumb questions about Ruby and Oswald.”

  “Like did Ruby know Oswald, and did Oswald frequent the club.”

  “Right. Stupid shit like that.”

  “Did Ruby know Oswald? Did he frequent the Carousel?”

  “Sure. But, like, I’m gonna tell that to some hick from Iowa?”

  “I’m from Illinois.”

  “But you ain’t no hick,” she said, grinning at me. My God, that smile was as wide and glittering as a Cadillac’s front grill. “So, Nate, how long are you in town for?”

  “Not sure. Tonight at least. You busy after? When do you get off?”

  She touched my nose. “When I get off, Nate, is kind of
up to you, isn’t it? As for when I get out of here, last show’s over at midnight. You want to take me over to your hotel, or come to my place? It’s nice. It’s in Turtle Creek.”

  “You headlining strippers must make good bread.”

  “Exotics.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  Her eyebrows, already high, went higher. “You working a case? I thought you were too big a shot to work cases anymore.”

  “Please. We call them jobs.”

  That made her laugh. She was easy to make laugh. You might assume she was easy in other ways, and admittedly, like a lot of girls in Texas, she’d been to the rodeo before. But I like to think she was picky. She picked me, didn’t she?

  “So, Janet, are you, uh, tied down to anybody right now?”

  “You mean am I between marriages? Yes. Am I shacked up with anybody? No. I gave up men for Lent.”

  “Lent is over.”

  “That makes this your lucky night. So—is it an interesting job? You do know this town is a real drag these days, right? At least in the club we get out-of-towners, though not near enough.”

  “Why a drag?”

  “Ah, hell, Nate, ever since Kennedy got killed, this burg is under a cloud. Everybody feelin’ guilty, feelin’ sorry for themselves. Talk about a bad rep. Tourism is way the hell down. Who wants to come to a town with a police department like ours?”

  “Oh I don’t know,” I said. “Look how fast they caught Ruby.”

  It would have taken a beat for most strippers to get that joke, but Janet was sharp and she exploded with laughter. When she laughed like that she made a very unladylike, unsexy honk that made me like her all the more.

  I glanced around, now that the lights were up, to see if Mac Wallace had strolled over from the Adolphus for a little entertainment. Despite his protestations of morality, he was a guy who had been, after all, attracted to a very wild bisexual wife and for that matter the President’s scarily out-of-control sister.

  Josefa Johnson, by the way, was deceased. Died under vaguely suspicious circumstances, according to Captain Peoples—a cerebral hemorrhage, Christmas day, 1961. Contrary to state law, there was no autopsy, no inquest, the death certificate signed by a doctor who hadn’t examined the body; she was promptly embalmed and buried. Peoples saw the hand of the LBJ’s hit man in this—and it was even thinner than his Henry Marshall theory.

  Still.

  “Lights up there are pretty bright,” I said. “You probably can’t see the audience very well.”

  “Not that bright. I can make eye contact. I saw you sitting here, didn’t I? Why?”

  “You come out and sit out front like this, sometimes?”

  “You think you’re the only man in my life? But I’m not reduced to pushing the champagne, I’ll have you know.”

  “Just wondered if you’ve seen this man,” I said, and I showed her the 1952 photo of Mac Wallace.

  “Well, sure I have,” she said, as if speaking to the village idiot. “He’s been in here three or four times a week all month. He’s here right now.”

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded toward the back, where I had to swing all the way around in my seat to see.

  And I saw, all right, saw him in one of the pink booths lining the rear wall—the dark hair, the black-rimmed glasses, five o’clock shadow on a handsome oval face. He wore a dark suit and a dark tie, very undertaker-looking, and he was pouring from a bottle of booze into a glass of ice.

  “I didn’t see him come in,” I said.

  “He was here before the show went on. I think maybe he was upstairs with one of the girls. One of the strippers who doesn’t get billing, and could use a little cash.”

  “They like to be called exotics,” I said, which was as witty as I could manage feeling this poleaxed.

  She got up and leaned over and gave me another almost kiss. “Honey, I got to get ready for my next set. You be good. And if you can’t be good…”

  “Be careful,” I said, “yeah I know.”

  I was facing the stage again. Checking my watch, I could see the show’s second half would start in about ten minutes. Wallace didn’t seem to be going anywhere, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I tipped a waitress a buck to show me to a table toward the back, putting his booth just behind me to my left. When the lights came down, I would be able to adjust my chair to keep track of him without being obvious.

  I did just that.

  The second act was strictly strippers, the three girls who didn’t receive name billing, then the cowgirl and finally Jada again, doing an even wilder routine. My attention was on Wallace, however, who was sitting sullenly working on his bottle, a pint of Jack Daniel’s. He put it away slowly, but he put it away.

  When the lights came up at midnight, there was no last call, because public imbibing, even the BYOB variety, was illegal past the witching hour. The Colony did serve sandwiches and coffee, and about a quarter of the audience stayed for that. But Wallace just sat there sipping bourbon on ice (he’d gone through several setups), and I overheard two waitresses arguing over who would tell him to stop.

  “Not me,” my tuxedoed dark-haired doll from earlier whispered. “He’s got a bad temper, particularly when he’s tight.”

  The other waitress, a blonde, whispered, “He doesn’t look tight.”

  “He’s one of those gentleman drunks. You know, he says excuse me after he belts you one?”

  I had spent the second half of the show trying to figure out what my move was with Wallace. If he hadn’t been drunk, or anyway tight, I might have just approached him, introduced myself, and said I wanted to talk to him. Like I would with any witness or potential suspect. But I decided to try a less direct approach.

  I got up, and was walking past his booth in the direction of the men’s room when I stopped and pointed at him in friendly way, smiling tentatively, and with a little slur in my voice said, “I know you, don’t I?”

  He was tipsy, so I was tipsy.

  “I don’t think so,” he said in a mellow baritone touched with a tinge of Texas, his eyes half-lidded, dark and cold behind the lenses of the dark-rimmed glasses. His face was smudgy with beard—five o’clock shadow turned midnight blue. There was a slight plumpness to his cheeks and under his dimpled chin, adding a touch of baby-face to his slightly dissipated leading-man looks.

  I didn’t overplay. No need for a full-on drunk act. The Colony Club already had enough corny comics.

  “Maybe I don’t,” I admitted, then pretended to think. “Or did I see you in the paper? While back. Is that it?”

  A small smile appeared under a Roman nose—just a curl at either corner of his rather full, sensual mouth, showing a slice of white teeth, startlingly so against the dark need-to-shave.

  “I know you, though,” he said.

  “Yeah? So where do we know each other from?”

  The teeth disappeared but the slight smile otherwise remained. He nodded next to him in the booth, motioning me to join him.

  What the hell—I slid in. Plenty of room.

  He said, with an even slighter slur than the one I’d already abandoned, “You’re Nate Heller.”

  Shit.

  “So where do we know each other from?” I repeated, somewhat lamely.

  “I know you from magazines,” he said. “Life. Look. I even read about you when I was in college—true detective magazines.”

  He was in his early forties and I was in my late fifties, so that was possible.

  “That’s who I am all right,” I said pleasantly, as if we were still just a couple of guys striking up a conversation in a bar.

  “‘Private Eye to the Stars,’” he said. “Isn’t that something? And you worked on Lindbergh, too. And the Harry Oakes case in Nassau.”

  He really had read those true detective magazines. That slur had gone from his voice, but his talkativeness bore the fluidity and slight over-enunciation of somebody inebriated trying not to show it.

  I snapped my fingers. “And
that’s where I know you from! I read an article in one of those magazines, too—on that murder you committed. Five-year suspended sentence for first-degree murder. You must know people, Mr. Wallace.”

  The smile disappeared. He didn’t frown, though—he had a soft-lipped, blank look that was much worse than a frown.

  “Call me Mac,” he said, and offered his hand.

  I shook it, and his grasp was rather limp, and clammy, like shaking hands with a corpse.

  “And I’m Nate. A couple of guys who made it into the true detective mags, having a little impromptu reunion. Too bad they don’t serve liquor after midnight in this town.”

  He shrugged. His tie was snugged up, giving him a formal look. What kind of guy sat drinking brown-bag bourbon all night and never loosened his damn tie?

  “There’s a little joint down the street,” he said, “called the University Club that has a deal with the police. We could go down there.”

  “Well, okay. I’m buyin’.”

  “All right.”

  On the way out, I asked the black-haired tuxedoed waitress to let Janet, that is, Jada, know that I had run into an old pal, and that I would catch up with her tomorrow night. I let Wallace lead the way out, since I was not anxious to get pushed down a flight stairs, maybe in a sudden fit of despondency.

  On the street he paused to light up a cigarette in front of the closed liquor store. He asked me if I wanted one and I said no, that smoking was one bad habit I didn’t have. A group of four businessmen emerged from the Colony, sloshed, and staggered over to the Adolphus.

  Then Wallace said, “I’m not stupid, Heller. Just be straight with me. Who knows? Maybe I’ll answer your questions.”

  “Why not start with, where were you on May 22, 1962?”

  He gave me a dead-eyed baby-face stare. “I should know that, should I? That’s just fixed in my memory, is it?”