Ask Not

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 behind 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 Capp — 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.

“You are feeling better,” she said. Then her expression grew serious. “Listen. I know you’re hurting. We don’t have to do anything. I’m pretty tired myself. But if you do feel like it...”

I reached my hand out, like the Frankenstein monster about to learn that fire is hot.

She batted that away, too, and gave me as impish a smile as she had in her. “Wait. I want to get your opinion on something. Just wait there.”

I nodded, my bruised body throbbing, but at least some of the throbbing was pleasant.

She went over to a dresser that looked like it had been salvaged from a shipwreck, and bent over, showing me the heart-shaped behind that had made her infamous, and which suddenly made me understand the meaning of cupid’s arrow imagery. She grabbed some things out, and almost ran back into the bathroom, where the steam had dissipated, and closed the door.

It didn’t take her long to come back out, leaving the door open to provide some backlighting. She was wearing a little nurse’s cap and a very short-skirted white nurse’s uniform.

“What do you think?” she asked, arms spread, palms up turned, in ta-da fashion. “It’s for the act.”

I said nothing. My mouth had dropped open and didn’t seem to be able to function for anything but sucking in air.

“It’s a little different,” she said thoughtfully, and she strutted a few steps, then shook her head, dissatisfied, saying, “Without music, without heels, it’s not the same.”

I curled my finger and she came over dutifully. I threw the sheet off. She placed a hand gently around me and stroked. “Are you sure you’re up for it? Well, I mean that’s obvious... I could use my hand like this... or my mouth like...”

As she leaned over the bed, her hair flopped over and hid her as her head descended upon my lap and she suckled me, gently, tentatively, then began a slow up-and-down motion that was hypnotic as she went gradually, so gradually, deeper and deeper, until she had all but engulfed me. At the perilous moment, I gently entwined my fingers in that red mane and eased her off.

“I don’t mind,” she said, with a smile both loving and nasty, tongue flicking, invisible eyebrows raising.

“Get on. Ride me. Ride me, cowgirl.”

“Can’t you see I’m a nurse?”

“I have a good imagination. Just... take it a little easy.”

“I’ll be gentle. I’ll be ever so gentle...”

I swallowed, gestured to the nightstand. “I have something in my wallet...”

She shook her head and the hair was a red shimmery smear around her lovely face. “It’s a safe time. Don’t worry.”

This was a notorious stripper who got around. Some might call her a slut. She could have twelve kinds of diseases. Using a rubber was an absolute must. It would be insanity otherwise. She tugged the white skirt up over the red triangle and I let her climb on. A bareback cowgirl nurse, sucking me up into the wet tight warmth that the men she danced for could only dream of.

Her intentions of being gentle were reflected in her easy, loving cadence. Which lasted almost thirty seconds before the bump-and-grind she was so famous for began, that frantic, jungle-beat gyration accompanied by long hair hanging over me and whipping me, whipping me, whipping me, as she ground into me with a hunger that expressed itself in crazy swivels, working herself into my lap like she wanted to tear me off and take me with her. She was jungle-beast noisy, too, squeals and screams, seemingly lost in the throes of orgasm throughout, and when she finally did come, the noise fell off into a whimpering.

Meanwhile my ribs were screaming — all the Demerol in the world could not have stopped it — and I was in such exquisite pain when I came that if I had died at that moment, I wouldn’t have minded.

“Next time,” she whispered, and gave me a peck of a kiss, “we’ll let it all hang out.”

She climbed off like a little girl getting off a carousel pony and padded into the bathroom, the twin globes of her fabulous behind jiggling like Grandma’s Jell-O salad under the pulled-up short white skirt. I lay back, wilted and worn, but the hurt seemed to have subsided, the hurt of my ribs that is. Because she rode me raw.

That night I woke up once, to use the john and take some more Demerol, and when I climbed in bed next to her, I was out like a switch had been thrown.

Now it was Thursday and I was feeling much better, sitting by the pool and being a letch behind my Ray-Bans. I was temporarily shacking it with a female who could make any heterosexual male’s wildest, dirtiest dreams come true, and yet I was still watching young stewardesses swim and frolic. Being a man is such a humiliating task.

Janet turned over and sat up and had me close the snap on the back of her bikini top. “You look chipper,” she said. “Is that a gun under your towel, or are you glad to see me?”

“It’s a gun. Also, I’m glad to see you.”

“Little ol’ me? I should feel honored, with all this prime cooze on the looze. So — you want to stay with me, till the end of my Dallas run? We could have a good time, Nate.”

“I know we could. Not sure I could survive it, but I do know.” I stretched. Actually stretched. “I think I’d like to go to the club with you tonight.”

She smirked. “In the mood for some more quality entertainment — like those shitty comics of ours?”

“Well,” I said, and my hand around the nine millimeter grip tightened, “I am in the mood for entertainment. Has Mac Wallace been back around?”

“He was in his favorite booth last night. Why?”

She didn’t know it was Wallace who cracked my ribs. I’d told her I was mugged. She had thought that was funny, since I was a guy with a gun and yet some asshole had gotten the best of me. I thought it was a riot myself.

“Just wondering,” I said.

The bill hadn’t changed — same bad comics, same stacked strippers, from lackadaisical Peggy Steele to busty Chris Colt to gyrating Jada. The difference was that tonight I watched from the wings. This new position gave me some refreshing angles on the peelers, but also a more inconspicuous sideways view on the audience.

As promised, Wallace was in that same back booth, again pouring brown-bagged bourbon into glasses of ice, getting quietly if not noticeably sloshed. During the show’s second half, he rose and went off toward the men’s room.

I took the backstage steps to come out a door to one side of the elevated platform and cut along the side of the club. The mostly male audience — the house was about two-thirds full — saw nothing from their wide eyes but the near-naked girl onstage, a short, curvy number with a taffy-colored bouffant. Her gimmick was that pieces of her fringed outfit seemed to drop off of their own free will as she did the Twist to Bill Peck and his Peckers playing “Irresistible You.”

When I reached the men’s-room door, I taped on a hand-lettered sign (which I’d fashioned at Janet’s apartment) that said CLOSED FOR CLEANING. This was necessary because there was no lock on the door of the good-sized restroom, with its half a dozen urinals and four stalls.

Within the dreary but fairly clean yellow-walled john, one guy was washing up, another was just coming out of a stall, and Wallace was pissing at a urinal. I washed my hands, watching Wallace in the mirror while the first guy left and the guy who’d exited a shitter came over and washed his hands beside me. Both were gone when Wallace did the little dance men do to coax out those last few droplets, and he didn’t recognize me until he was washing up. I was standing nearby using a paper towel.

“Something I can do for you?” Wallace asked blandly. As before, his handsome oblong face with its baby-face plumpness was smudgy with beard, the eyes cold and dark behind the black-rimmed glasses. He was again in a black suit, though his necktie was red tonight.

“I think you already did,” I said pleasantly. “I hear Mrs. Plett’s insurance company decided to pay out her claim. Only took them two years.”

“Typical bureaucracy.” He was washing his hands, faucet running hard. He looked at me in the mirror and his smile was small and smug, his dimpled chin jutting. “Not that I’d know what you were talking about.”

“You know what I don’t get?”

“Why don’t you tell me.”

I watched him closely, figuring he might throw soapy water in my face.

“I don’t get,” I said, “how a pinko student protestor grows up to be the willing arm of a bunch of right-wing Texas fascists?”

Looking at me in the mirror wasn’t enough. He shut off the faucet and turned his head toward me, frowningly. “The President is a great man.”

I chuckled. “So that’s it. The ol’ strange bedfellows routine. Your pitch-and-putt benefactor Lyndon feathers the nests of his oil buddies, so he’s free to do good in the world.”

Tightly, Wallace said, “He’s done a lot of good.”

“I’d agree. Took a Southern conservative to push civil rights through. And there’s the war on poverty. We’ll forgive him Vietnam, ’cause he’s got to throw the military-industrial boys some kind of bone. It’s the old ends-justifies-the-means gambit. I get it.”

“You may,” he said.

“What?”

“Get it.”

And he flicked the soapy water on his hands toward my eyes, but I was ready, and ducked it, and slammed a fist into his belly. When he doubled over, I grabbed the back of his head and kneed him in the face. He didn’t go down, but he wobbled. I took out the nine millimeter and slapped him alongside the left temple, and then he went down.

He looked up at me, drunk with pain, his face smeared with red from his nose and his mouth, his eyes seeking focus, and I took him by the lapels of his undertaker’s suit coat — a little tricky with a gun in my right hand but I did it — and I hauled him over and into the first stall.

“Your face is a mess, Mac,” I said. “Let me help.”

I shoved him face-first into the toilet bowl and flushed it several times. My son called this a swirly. I called it plain old-fashioned fun.

Wallace was coughing and sputtering and spitting water when I turned him around and sat him down hard on the can and shoved the snout of the nine millimeter in his neck. My eyes bore in on his dark ones, blinking now, no longer half-lidded.

“Listen, Mac, I don’t care whether you killed Henry Marshall, President McKinley, or Cock Robin — none of that is my business or my concern. You saw to it that my client got her payout from the insurance company, so we’re square.”

“What... what... what...”

I had no idea what he was asking, but I answered anyway: “This isn’t my way of thanking you for that, it’s my way of settling the score for the other night. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, I understand you live in California.”

He frowned, beads of water running down his face like tears that started at his scalp. His hair, which wasn’t very long, nonetheless looked stringy as seaweed.

“My ex-wife and my son live out there,” I said. “Why would I tell you that? Because it’s only fair, since I will kill you or have you killed if you are ever seen anywhere near them or where they live. You may think you are one deadly motherfucker, and you might think you could find me and kill me. And probably you could. But I employ just under one hundred hard-ass ex-cops, any one of whom would just love to teach you how to really rig a fake suicide. Do I make my point?”

He just looked at me, gulping air, face running with water droplets.

I slapped him — just with my hand, not the gun.

“Do I make my point?” I asked again.

He swallowed and nodded.

“Good,” I said.

And left him there.

This time I followed Janet home, my rental Galaxie tagging after her convertible Caddy like an eager puppy. I was feeling pretty damn good. I was feeling no pain on Demerol, and a man in his late fifties had just kicked the ass of a hard case maybe fifteen years younger. Mac Wallace was an evil fuck, but I had put the fear of God in him. Or the fear of Heller, anyway.

And in bed, I took the lead, bending my redheaded benefactor over the edge of her bed, entering her that way, and the bump-and-grind was under me now and slower this time, with a yearning that made both of us very happy and maybe a little sad, because I’d already told her I was leaving tomorrow.

She was leaning back in bed, sheet at her middle, perky pointed titties bared, and she was smoking. Apparently she didn’t know it was a cliché. I didn’t crave a smoke, though earlier I had felt the urge, right before I cornered Wallace. But I hadn’t succumbed. One must maintain control, after all.

“You wrapped up your job, huh?” she said.

“I did.”

“Somebody said Mac Wallace limped out of the club, looking like he got his clock cleaned.”

“Do tell.”

“You did that, didn’t you?”

“I sure did.”

“You be careful, Nate. Don’t get cocky.”

“I thought you liked me cocky.”

“That Mac Wallace character has important friends.”

“Does he, now?”

“I hear he works for Big Oil.”

“No, he’s with an electronics company.”

She shrugged. “One of the girls who dated him says he works for that nut with the window.”

“What nut with what window?”

“Some Big Oil guy who owns the Texas School Book Depository. You know, where Oswald shot his rifle out the window? If you believe that shit. Anyway, this Big Oil guy removed the window and made some kind of display out of it, in his home. Like it was a damn...” She shuddered. “... trophy or something.”

She had my attention.

I said, “Who told you this?”

“One of the girls I know from the old Carousel days. Rose Cheramie. She said they tried to kill her, too.”

“Who tried to kill her?”

“Some of the shooters who got Kennedy. Look, you gotta consider the source. Rose is a junkie.”

“She’s at the club now? I don’t remember a Rose dancing.”

“No, she’s working a club in Waco this week, I think.” She drew in smoke and then let it out her nose in twin trails. “Shit, what is it with that goddamn Kennedy thing? Why can’t everybody forget about it and get on with their goddamn fucking life?”

“You mean, like those tourists at the Carousel?”

“Yeah, them, and these damn reporters. I’ve had this one, this really famous one actually, hounding the hell out of me.”

“Who?”

She shrugged, irritated a little. “You know that showbiz columnist, the one that’s on that dumb game show Sunday nights?”

I sat up sharply. “You don’t mean Flo Kilgore, do you?”

Flo had written an article exposing the chicanery surrounding the death of Marilyn Monroe; based largely on my investigative work, the piece might have won the Pulitzer, if her editor hadn’t spiked it, giving in to pressure from the Kennedy White House.

“Yeah, that chinless dame,” Janet said. “I’m surprised you didn’t run into her at the Statler, ’cause that’s where she’s staying. What’s that show she’s on? I’ve Got a Secret?”

“What’s My Line?,” I said numbly.

“Well, I’ve got a secret... I got a bunch of ’em.” She pointed at one pert bare breast. “And I intend to keep ’em to myself. I’ll live longer that way.”

Looked like I wasn’t leaving Dallas just yet.