Chicago Confidential

6

The black-eyed blonde’s name was Jackie Payne — Jacqueline, really, but nobody called her that except her parents, who she hadn’t seen in some time.

She was born and grew up in Kankakee, in the shadow of the state insane asylum, and as omens go, that was a hell of a one. Her parents were “real religious” — a polite way to say goddamn zealots — who had been ashamed of her wild behavior in high school, which is to say she’d been a cheerleader and in drama club.

A talent scout at the county fair — where she tap-danced and won five dollars — had encouraged her to look him up in Chicago; so, three and a half years ago, shortly after graduating Kankakee High, she had hopped the Twentieth Century east and, with the talent scout’s backing, took up residence in the Croyden, a Near Northside hotel catering to showgirls.

Let me interrupt this soap opera to mention that the Croyden was one of several such hotels on the Near Northside. A nicer example, the St. Clair — just off Michigan Avenue’s magnificent mile, at the corner of Ohio and St. Clair — catered to both typical travelers and longer-term residents; but showgirls and strippers loved the St. Clair, and many lived there, whether a few nights or a few years were involved.

The St. Clair was a classy but unostentatious hotel, twenty-some red-brick stories with a set-back penthouse. After my divorce, and the sale of our Lincolnwood bungalow, I had established my Chicago home address at the St. Clair, taking a fifteenth-floor suite; before my marriage I’d lived in a similar but smaller apartment at the Morrison Hotel, which was closer to my office; but living north of the Chicago River expanded my world to the upper levels of Windy City society.

At the St. Clair, I was just a few blocks south of the Gold Coast; from my corner suite, I could see the lake from my bedroom window, and from my living room window (looking south) I could wave to Colonel McCormick in his Tribune Tower aerie. My neighbors included the Wrigley Building and the Water Tower, as well as enough exclusive shops to send a kleptomaniac into a seizure. But the neon sleaze of Rush Street, with its cocktail lounges, pizzerias, taverns, and nightclubs, was just on the other side of Michigan Avenue, with the Chez Paree only two blocks away.

My old friend — sometime girl friend — Sally Rand had recommended the St. Clair, and Beth Short, another old flame (since sadly extinguished), had lived there briefly as well. Photographer Maurice Seymour had his studio among the businesses on St. Clair’s upper floors — conveniently next to a beauty parlor — and he had contracts with damn near every burlesque house and nightclub in town, shooting portraits of entertainers and models and, in particular, showgirls and strippers.

Nothing unusual, at the St. Clair, about seeing Gypsy Rose Lee or Ann Corio or Georgia Southern traipsing through the small, nondescript lobby, carrying suitcases jammed with their seductive wardrobes, from sheer stockings to pasties to G-strings; or Rosita Royce swaying her hips as she carried cages of doves, or Sally with her (feathered) fans — not to mention Zorita tugging along her airhole-punched trunk on wheels with the python in it.

Though the lobby had practically no sitting room, a coffee shop was off to one side, and the Tap Room — with its famous Circle Bar — was off to the other. Grabbing a cup of morning Java or a noon sandwich, you were surrounded by beautiful girls; catching a cocktail after work or in the evening, ditto. Those girls were sometimes in pin curls and little or no makeup, of course, though a man with my deductive skills knew evidence of pulchritude when he saw it.

I loved the St. Clair.

Another nice thing about the hotel was the no-questions-asked attitude of the management. When the evening before, after my confab with the Fischettis, I had escorted Jackie Payne through the St. Clair’s front revolving door — carrying her two suitcases for her, while she lugged a train case — past a newsstand on one side and a bank of pay phones on the other, across the small dark-oak lobby to the elevators and up to my suite, the guy at the desk didn’t blink. Of course, this was hardly the first time he’d spotted me with a showgirl in his lobby, if the first time for one sporting a shiner.

When Rocco unexpectedly tossed Jackie out on her sweet behind, she was flat busted (in one sense, anyway), and I’d mentioned she could camp out on my sofa, for a night or two; she had girl friends at both the Croyden and the St. Clair she could contact, and maybe move in with one, until she got a job and a little money.

“But I’d kind of like to wait until this heals up,” she said in her small sweet voice, embarrassed, pointing to the black eye. She was sitting on the plump-cushioned sage green mohair couch, legs curled up under her; I was next to her, but not right next to her. She had slipped her shoes off and her toenails were painted red; her long-sleeved pink sweater and slacks showed off her trim shapely figure, and her shortish honey blonde hair was a tousled nest of curls.

Room service had brought us up a couple of burgers with french fries, and I’d plucked cold Pabsts from my refrigerator. A coffee table by the couch was the repository for our plates and beers and my stockinged feet. We only had one light on, a lamp on the end table near me, creating a forty-watt pool of glowing light. The mood was one of casual intimacy — for complete strangers, we were surprisingly comfortable with each other.

My apartment, by the way, was functionally furnished, a page torn from a Sears and Roebuck catalog — living room, bedroom, small spare room I used as a home office, and modest kitchen. I’d dressed the living room up with a television and a radio phonograph console — the radio on, at the moment, Nat King Cole softly singing “Mona Lisa” accompanied by traffic sounds from Michigan Avenue below — but I wouldn’t kid you: the apartment was really just a hotel room got slightly out of hand.

“Haven’t your girl friends ever seen a black eye before?” I asked her.

“It’s just — Ginny, the one I’ll probably call, she warned me about Rocco, way back when, and I didn’t listen.”

“Yeah, nobody likes ‘I told you so.’”

She shrugged. “I’d rather not have to answer questions. Anyway, I heal really fast. I’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”

“You can stay as long as you like — don’t worry about it. Listen, I could even stake you to a room here at the scenic St. Clair, for a few nights, if you’d rather.”

In the dim light her heart-shaped face with the pretty features took on an angelic radiance. “Why are you so sweet to me?”

“I’m just one of those Good Samaritans you hear so much about. Why, if you weighed two-sixty and had warts all over your face and two double chins, I’d probably do the same thing... Probably.”

She laughed at that, and we’d talked. She told me the story of her Bible-thumping parents and the talent agent, who (unbelievably) had done good things for her, though she mentioned offhandedly she’d lived with him for a while. Smalltown or not, she seemed to understand the big-city rules.

“Do I look familiar to you?” she asked, rather coyly. This was on the second beer, the burger and fries a memory.

“Sure,” I said, sipping my own second Pabst. “I saw you at the Chez Paree — you were one of the Chez Adorables.”

Which was what the chorus line there was called.

“Till six or eight months back I was, but that wasn’t what I meant. About two years ago, I was Miss Chicago.”

“No kidding!”

“Yeah, in the Miss Illinois pageant. I was in all the papers.”

“Well, sure, I remember now. How could I forget that face?” Of course, I didn’t remember her. Cheesecake photos were a dime a dozen in the Chicago press, and cute as this little doll was, she was just another showgirl... albeit one with a black eye.

“Of course, I didn’t win the state title,” she said, “and go on to Atlantic City or anything... and I didn’t have any use for the scholarship money... College was never in the cards for me.”

“And so your friend the talent agent got you an audition for the Chez Paree.”

She nodded. “I was always a good dancer. I worked at a grocery store, in high school, to pay for ballet lessons that my parents didn’t know I was taking.”

“Which is where you met Rocco... The Chez Paree, I mean, not the grocery store.”

She laughed and nodded again. “I know you won’t believe this, but he was really sweet, at first. Rocco, I mean. He’s no matinee idol, I admit...”

“Maybe if the matinee is a horror triple feature.”

She smiled at that, a little. “He took a big interest in me. I didn’t want to just be in the chorus — I wanted to be featured, to be a headliner someday, to sing and dance, like Judy Garland or Betty Hutton. He said he’d get me lessons.”

Rocco had encouraged her to quit the Chez Paree chorus line — she was too good for that, he’d said — and she had moved in with him, in the penthouse on Sheridan. After all, Rocco and his brothers, particularly Joey, had all sorts of show business connections.

But the lessons never happened — Rocco claimed he couldn’t find teachers worthy of Jackie’s talent — and before long, she was shoveling coal on the Fischetti model railroad.

“He was sweet for the longest time,” she said. “Then one day I asked about my lessons — I wasn’t snippy or sarcastic or anything, that’s not my way — and I’d asked lots of times before, about the lessons, plenty of times... but this time he slapped me.”

I felt my eyes tighten. “Why didn’t you leave?”

She was staring at her hands in her lap. “I don’t know... For quite a while, the beatings were real occasional — ’cause he was drunk or in a bad mood or I said the wrong thing. Somehow I convinced myself each time was a fluke. He’d apologize. Give me flowers. Be sweet again.”

That was the pattern of these woman-beating bastards.

She was saying, “Anyway, I knew I couldn’t get my job back at the Chez Paree, ’cause he and his brothers were in business with the owners. And nobody in town would hire me if Rocco said don’t hire me, right?”

“Right.”

“It’s a beautiful penthouse — I was alone a lot. You didn’t see some of the rooms, with the Italian Renaissance antiques — Charley picked them out; that was his passion, antiques, before he started in on that modern stuff; he gave those pieces to Rocco.”

Hadn’t she realized she was in a well-appointed prison?

She went on. “I’d use the piano — I can play a little — and practice my singing. Sometimes Rocky was gone for weeks at a time. There are servants, I was waited on hand and foot, fed like a queen, treated like I was still Miss Chicago or maybe Miss America, after all... except by Rocco, when he got mad.”

I was sitting closer to her now: I took her hand and held it, squeezed it gently. “I can’t imagine you doing anything that would ever make me mad.”

Jackie wasn’t looking at me; her voice was soft and small — barely audible above Vic Damone singing “You’re Breaking My Heart” on the radio.

“The last few weeks,” she said, “Rocky would just yell and slap me and hit me without me even saying anything. I think... I think he had just got tired of me. I see that all the time with his trains.”

“His trains?”

“Yeah. He would send away for expensive model trains and when the delivery man brought them, he would tear into the packages like Christmas. And for a week, maybe two, he’d sit and play with that new train in that room of his — hour after hour, with this dumb little smile on his face. Then he’d get bored and put them on the shelf... and buy something new.”

After that we talked about me, for a while. About my marriage, and how my wife had cheated on me and ruined everything, and about my son, who was going to be three years old in a few days, and how I wouldn’t be there to see it. That made her sad, and she came closer, very close, and put her arms around me, and kissed me, very soft, very tender...

I was twice her age, and then some, but I didn’t give it a thought: she’d been living with Rocco Fischetti, who was older than me and a homely fuck to boot.

So I had no pangs of conscience about accepting affection from this girl, who badly needed some affection herself, right now. Most strippers, most showgirls, were much younger than me, and damaged goods; this was nothing new. But she had this special sweetness, like she’d wandered off the set of an Andy Hardy picture into Little Caesar.

She asked me to switch off the light and I did, and then in the dimness of unreal blue-tinged city light coming in from Michigan Avenue, she tugged off the pink sweater by its long sleeves, revealing a white lacy bra, which I undid for her. Miss Chicago was not as voluptuous as the would-be Miss California I’d been with not so long ago, but she was stunning nonetheless, with uptilting breasts that made perfect handfuls and a dramatic rib cage and a tiny waist.

That she was a dancer became obvious when she stood before me, arms outstretched, naked to the waist, with the formfitting slacks still on. There was something fabulously sexy, wonderfully dirty, about her standing there in just the slacks, with her hands on her hips and the cupcake breasts thrust forward for my viewing pleasure; the experience tickled her lips into a smile, even as my mouth gaped open like an idiot staring at Mount Rushmore.

That baby doll face took on a brazen confidence as she watched me drink in her bare loveliness; then she turned her back to me and unzipped her slacks at the side and shimmied out of them, swaying to Patti Page singing “The Tennessee Waltz,” leaving only a second skin of sheer white panties over a rounded tight behind, the sweep of her back dimpling above the cheeks.

She looked over her shoulder at me, and giggled at the sight of my reaction, and came over and sat on my lap, a child asking Santa for toys, her arms around my neck, and we kissed and kissed, and nuzzled each other’s throats and ears, and she moaned as I kissed her breasts, the tips hardening under my lips...

Finally she stood before me again, with her back to me, and slid the panties down, dropping them in a puddle, then turned and held her arms out again — tah dah! — showing all of herself to me, the slightly muscular dancer’s legs, the tufted pubic triangle as brown as her eyes, her faint smile inviting me to her.

I stood and she began undressing me; drunk from her beauty — and three beers — I allowed her to do all the work, and finally we were both naked, standing there, the small shapely thing plastered to me, her sweet face turned upward, wanting kisses, aching for affection, hooded eyes yearning for love.

Then she was on the couch, lips open, arms open, legs open. I said I would get something, meaning a rubber, and she said, no, it’s a safe time, don’t use anything, I want to feel you inside me, and the warmth of her swallowed me, and her eyes rolled back in her lovely face as her hips churned with a desperation that made me drunker still and the intensity was dizzying, like a fever dream, and when she came, she cried, and maybe I did, too.

She kept crying, my little black-eyed blonde, and I held her and comforted her, for all the shit she’d been through, soothing her, kissing her, loving her, consoling her, assuring her I’d be there, and finally I took her hand and led her to my bedroom, where she slept with me that night.

On my back in bed, naked as the day I was born but with considerably more scars, staring at the ceiling like a man in a trance, I felt physically and emotionally drained. Making love with Vera Jayne had been a joyful carnival ride; making love with Jackie had been a different kind of ride entirely.

Jackie — who had crawled in bed in just the sheer panties — was asleep and the lights of the night were filtering in off the lake, bathing her in blue-tinged ivory. She looked lovely, childlike, her face puffy from crying, but also from youth; her mouth had a swollen bruised look that had nothing to do with Rocco’s abuse. When she turned toward me, the covers pulled down off her mostly naked form, I reached over to pull them back up, and tuck her in, like daddy’s little girl.

That was when I noticed the needle tracks.

This morning, in the cold light of day, we had talked about it, at my kitchen table, over the breakfast I’d prepared.

“I’ve been on it for six months,” she said.

“Why? Doesn’t make any sense, Jackie — a smart, talented kid like you, with ambition enough to buck her parents and pay for her own dance lessons...”

She wasn’t looking at me; she was staring down into the eyes of her sunny-side up eggs. “I got depressed. Rocky, when he was acting nice, said he could help me. Get me medicine. So I wouldn’t be blue.”

Wrapped up in the silver robe I’d first seen her in at Fischetti’s, she didn’t look at all bad — she certainly didn’t look like a junkie, and her young, pretty features, sans makeup, served her well.

“He got you medicine, all right,” I said.

She was shaking her head, stealing a look at me, now and then. “I was so damn depressed, I would have tried anything... including razor blades. Now... what am I going to do, Nate? I don’t even have a supplier — Rocky gave me the stuff, himself.”

“That fucking asshole.”

She heard the rage in my voice, and it startled her, scared her. Her eyes were wild, a hand held like a claw at the side of her face as she said, “You’re going to kick me out, too, aren’t you?” She looked down into her coffee cup; she hadn’t eaten a bite of her toast and eggs. “You’re going to throw me out on the street. Just like Rocco!”

“Shut-up.”

The wild eyes dared me. “You want to slap me? Go ahead! Slap me!”

I almost did. But instead I just said, “When’s it going to get bad for you?”

She sighed, swallowed — air, not food. “Sometime this morning it’ll start.”

“Jesus.”

“I... I might be able to call a girl I used to know at the Chez Paree. I think she’s still at the Croyden. She smoked reefers all the time... she’s got a connection, maybe I could—”

“But you don’t have any money, Jackie. It costs thirty bucks a day, at least, to support a habit like yours.”

The eyes stayed wild but the voice turned timid. “Maybe... maybe you could loan me some. If I can have my medicine, I can get myself put together and go out and get a job — maybe now that Rocco doesn’t want me anymore, I can get a job singing or dancing somewhere.”

I shrugged, stirring sugar into my coffee. “You could always strip. You did a hell of one for me last night.”

I’d meant that as a dig, but instead it had only got her going.

“I think I could do that... I think I could stand to do that. It’s dancing, right? It’s a kind of dancing.”

I looked at this girl, this sweet smalltown girl, and knew how close she was to the abyss.

“You’ll get a job, all right,” I said. “You’ll be over at the Mayfair Hotel with the other hookers.”

Horror filled the brown eyes, including the black-and-blue one. “No... No I would never do that. How can you say that? Last night you were so kind... How can you...” And she put her right hand over her face and began to cry.

She was trembling a little too, but I was afraid it had more to do with the stuff she was starting to crave than any sorrow or shame she might be feeling.

I sat forward. “Now listen to me — a friend of mine got hooked on morphine. He was on it for years, and he kicked it. You’ve only been riding the horse for a few months. Do you want to get off it?”

Shuddering, she said, “Oh yes... oh yes.”

“I can help arrange that. I’ll have to make a few calls, but I can arrange it.”

Her eyes searched my face. “How can I pay for that... for treatment?”

“I’ll float you a loan.” I had a sip of coffee. “And until we can get you into the right clinic, I’m going to make a few other calls.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Somebody’ll be around this afternoon with what you need.”

“Do I... understand you right?”

“You do. For the next few days, I’ll support your habit. The guy who comes around, he’ll be colored. You can trust him, far as it goes. You’ve got the works?”

“The what?”

Christ, she was a junkie and she didn’t even know the lingo. Can you beat that? A sheltered drug addict. Fucking Rocco Fischetti.

Patiently, I asked, “You have your own needle and so on?”

“In my suitcase, yes.”

“Do you have something nice to wear?”

“What? Why?”

“Because once you’ve had your medicine, and’ve had a chance to relax, I want you to make yourself presentable. We’re going out tonight.”

She was shaking her head, as if trying to clear her ears. “You’re taking me out?”

“That’s what I said.”

So when I came back to the St. Clair — after my meeting with the Kefauver crowd, and my encounter with Sam Giancana and Bill Drury, at the Stevens — she was herself again... a lovely, doll-faced innocent in a dazzling black cocktail dress, black crepe off-the-shoulder V-neck top and ruffled tiers of black net over a taffeta skirt. The sleeves of the black top, however, came down midforearm, covering sins. Pearls at her throat, cherry lipstick, white gloves...

“Do you approve?” she asked, bright as a penny, again outstretching her arms in tah dah fashion.

Her medicine had done wonders.

“You’re a knockout.”

She took my arm; she smelled wonderful — Chanel No. 5. “Where are we going tonight, my love?”

I grinned at her. “My pal Frankie is opening, tonight.”

“Frankie? Sinatra? Isn’t he... isn’t that... the Chez Paree?”

“That’s right.”

She looked horror-struck. “But Rocco and his brothers are bound to be there...”

“I know.”

“Oh, Nate... Rocco could start something.”

“One can always hope,” I said.