Ask Not

Chapter 6

As the Galaxie made its way up Highway 77, through a rural landscape that might have been Illinois were it not for the occasional cotton field, the sun began to set in a vivid expressionist blaze, throwing long blue shadows across my path. Like a futuristic mirage, a skyline rose from the flat terrain, modern monuments to insurance and banking, cold stone and steel but with touches of color, the blue Southland Life towers, the red horse riding the Mercantile Bank.

I’d had much to think about on the drive back to Dallas, and a conducive atmosphere to do it in — traffic had been light, and the landscape soothingly monotonous. The panic I’d felt at hearing that murderer Mac Wallace was within easy reach of my son and ex-wife had faded — Peoples having told me that Wallace was currently in Dallas, doing a project at the Ling Company’s home base, and staying at the Adolphus Hotel.

“We kind of keep an eye on what ol’ Mac’s up to,” Peoples told me, “when he’s back in these parts.”

That was apparently a fairly new policy for the Rangers, else some “suicides” might not have occurred.

Or maybe they would have. It had only taken driving a few miles out of Waco into wide-open spaces under an endless sky to acquire enough distance to decide that Captain Clint Peoples had become a kind of rustic Ahab with a white whale called Mac Wallace. No question Wallace had killed that pitch-and-putt fucker, that was a matter of public record; but all Peoples had on Mac for the Henry Marshall murder was a crude police sketch, a lack of alibi, and a hunch.

I had asked him, “Did you bring Wallace in for a line up for your gas station attendant to make an ID?”

“Didn’t have enough to haul Mac in,” Peoples admitted. “I showed our witness Wallace’s picture, that same one from ’52 I gave you, Nate, and he said he was pretty sure that was the fella.”

“‘Pretty sure’ doesn’t cut it.”

“No, and the pump jockey isn’t cooperating anymore. Not since he got a couple of very threatening anonymous phone calls.”

That, too, indicated Peoples might have been right about Wallace in the Marshall murder, but it was still goddamn thin. Nonetheless, I would call Lou Sapperstein tonight and have him check on Wallace’s whereabouts when Joseph Plett was killed in Chicago, and do a background check on him in California. We would put the convicted killer under surveillance when he returned to Anaheim, until I was convinced he was no threat.

Of course, if he was a threat, I’d do something about it myself, since I also had a streak of Ahab in me.

But right now I was in Dallas, and Wallace was in Dallas, too, so maybe I could get a jump on this particular lead.

I didn’t bother going back to the Statler, instead pulling into the parking garage next to the Colony Club, the town’s most celebrated strip joint. In the parking garage, I got my nine-millimeter Browning in its shoulder sling from the trunk where I’d snugged it behind the spare tire. I wasn’t licensed to carry in the state of Texas, but if I was going out seeking a guy who got suspended sentences on murder one convictions, I figured better safe than sorry.

When I exited the ramp, the sidewalk was splashed with the club’s neon. Looming over me was a sign worthy of the Vegas strip, white neon on undulating orange:

and below that a marquee, black letters on white:

Welcome to downtown Dallas, where nobody lived except conventioneers, businessmen on the road, and other lonely, horny men. When the Dallas working day was done, the rush was on to bedroom communities — executives heading north to the Park Cities, lesser white-collar types to far north Dallas and select neighborhoods in Oak Cliff and Lakewood, while the labor force took buses south. No stadiums for sports to bring them back, either, and only a few movie theaters, the Capri, the Palace, the Majestic.

That meant the primary entertainment options were the girlie clubs — Abe Weinstein’s Colony and his brother Barney’s Theater Lounge. Jack Ruby’s Carousel, I noticed, on the other side of that parking ramp, was shuttered, a casualty of history.

Might seem funny that one of the classiest, most famous hotels in Dallas was right across the street from its biggest strip joint, but the twenty-two-story, Beaux Arts — style Adolphus depended on conventioneers, too. I crossed Commerce Street, dodging only light one-way traffic, figuring to eat in the Century Room.

I would eventually join the other out-of-town males at the Colony Club, if for no other reason than I had spent a couple of memorable nights with the exotic dancer named Jada (actually Janet Adams) when she played Chicago last year. But I had learned long ago not to eat at strip clubs, since food was never the attraction and when you got a hair in your soup, it had unfortunate resonance. Add to that the possibility that Mac Wallace might be dining at the restaurant in his hotel, and the Century Room it was.

Once upon a time the Century Room had been the “Hawaiian” Century, with bamboo and native bark on the walls, palm trees with coconuts, and an animated mural of volcanoes, mountains, and breaking surf tied in with a tropical rainstorm effect. Now it was space-age modern, brown and gold, looking like a high-class Denny’s. Too bad. At least the Planked Gulf Trout Adolphus hadn’t changed with the times, except for the price — a buck twenty-five after the war, two-fifty now.

What the Century Room didn’t serve me up was Mac Wallace, even though I lingered through my meal and went through two vodka gimlets. The weeknight diners at the Century Room consisted of married couples celebrating a birthday or an anniversary, couples who might have been married but probably not to each other, and lonely men-about-town. None of the latter were the pitch-and-putt slayer.

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?”

“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.