Target Lancer

CHAPTER 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it started with small talk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sounds like Dallas is doing right by you.”

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

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

“Who?”

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

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

I grinned at him. “Like Sparky?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When you and Barney shared a foxhole.”

“That’s right.”

“On Guadalcanal.”

“Skip it, Jack.”

“Well, you’re a true hero, Nate.”

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

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

Jack had been following my storied career, apparently.

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

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

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

“You punched out a sergeant?”

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

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

My Coke and Jake’s tomato juice arrived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So he had made me.

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

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

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

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

“You and Lou Nathan go way back.”

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

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

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

He found that real funny, or pretended to.

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

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

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

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

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

“Tell you what, Jake?”

“Jack. It’s Jack.”

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

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

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

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

Did he mean what I thought he meant?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure,” I said.

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

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

Hadn’t worked out that way.

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

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

“Good question.”

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

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

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

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

Jack was telling me more than I wanted to know. I had to wonder why anybody would ever trust this chatty, overactive little screwball with anything more important than a trip to the grocery store. And then it better be with a detailed damn list.

I raised a tentative hand, like a schoolkid reluctantly answering his teacher’s question. “Jack-nobody from the Company sent me to check up on you. Not from the Outfit, either. Nobody. I really was here to meet a client. I’m not going to tell you who that client is, because it’s privileged information.”

He thought about that. “Like with a lawyer.”

“Exactly.”

“… Okay.” The shark eyes blinked in the pasty, five-o’clock-shadowed face. Then he half smiled, suddenly cocky. “Anyway, why should the Outfit wanna keep tabs on me?”

“Why would they?”

“I can be trusted, can’t I?”

“Sure you can.”

The half smile turned full and feral, just the upper teeth showing as he leaned way across the table. “They were just down to see me, Nate, couple months ago. They’re gonna try again.”

I could have asked, Who? What are they going to try?

Instead I said, “That right?”

He nodded, and the smile evolved into something just slightly maniacal. “Last June, they met at the Carousel, top Outfit boys, you don’t need to know their names, Nate.”

“No I don’t.”

“They’re gonna do what they wanted to back in ’47-Chicago finally takin’ hold of the rackets in Dallas. And the cops down there, I got them in my pocket now. They love me. They come to my club, their money’s no good there.”

I just smiled and nodded. I wanted out of here. I felt I’d convinced him that I wasn’t here to check up on him for either gangsters or spooks or any combination thereof. And that seemed plenty for one evening.

But had he linked my unnamed “client” to Tom Ellison?

I could not think of a graceful way to ask.

Then I said something that may have been stupid. But it was the best I could come up with, spur of the moment: “Just so you know…” And I nodded toward the bar. “… I didn’t see anything. Not a damn thing, Jack.”

“Huh? What?”

Shit.

That high forehead ridged in thought. Then he said, “Could you be more specific, Nate?”

I’d dug this hole. Might as well jump in.

“That handoff at the bar,” I said quietly. “To that civilian-looking guy. Amnesia. It’s a real problem for me.”

And I smiled and winked at him.

Yes, goddamnit, I winked. Sue my ass.

He was studying me, his face as blank as a grape; then he smiled, small and tight, and winked back.

Yes he did.

So I had finally found my exit line when somebody came in. Maybe half a dozen patrons had entered while we’d been talking, but this one looked around (with no apparent interest in the current stripper, a Latin type working “Tea for Two Cha Cha”) and quickly spotted us and came over.

He stood there like one of the waiters, a nebbishy guy in his early twenties, maybe five nine, with rain-damp brown hair brushed to one side. Despite the weather, he looked neat in a navy water-pearled Windbreaker over a white shirt and black tie, black narrow-leg slacks, and black loafers. A slightly squashed oval face was home to a high forehead, blue-gray eyes, a slightly prominent nose, and a small, smirky mouth over a cleft chin.

He didn’t say anything, just stood there clenching his fists, looking at Jack, raising his eyebrows several times, and giving me a sideways glance, his manner accusatory.

Jack grinned up at the young man. “No, no, no, Lee-this is Nate Heller. He’s one of us. It’ll be fine. Here-take this chair.”

Lee sat next to Jack, gave me a nod. He wasn’t sure he wanted me to be “one of us.”

That much we had in common.

Jack gestured with an open palm. “Nate, this is Lee. Lee Os-”

“Osborne,” the young man said, his voice slightly high-pitched, about a second tenor. He extended his hand. I took it, for a quick, perfunctory shake. The hand was damp, maybe perspiration, maybe rain.

“Nate’s that famous private eye you probably read about,” Jack said.

I winced. You know how modest I am.

Lee shrugged, shook his head. Then he turned to Jack and said, “We should talk.”

“You can talk in front of Nate.” Ruby grinned. He was showing off. “Jesus, Lee-you really don’t know who this guy is!.. This is the fixer who put Mongoose together.”

Jesus! How much did this screwy bastard know?

Lee turned his gaze on me now, the smirk gone, then smiled just a little and half nodded. “Pleasure, sir. Honor. Didn’t mean to be rude or anything.”

“Hey,” Jack said, “you two should get along famously! You’re both Marines.”

I gave the kid a reassuring little smile. “Semper fi, Mac.”

Now Lee grinned. Shyly, but he grinned. “Semper fi. Were you in the big one?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“Where’d you serve?”

“Pacific Theater.”

Jack whispered, “Silver Star, kid. This character won the Silver Star.”

“Shut up, Jack,” I said pleasantly.

“Wow,” Lee said. His expression was somber now. “It’s a real honor, sir. I, uh, served in the Pacific, too, but nothing so … so perilous.”

“Where, son?”

“Japan.” He lowered his voice. “Radar operator. U-2 base.”

“Impressive.” That put this kid in the CIA’s lap. “So you’re, uh … involved in some of Jack’s anti-Castro activities?”

Suddenly Lee’s face blossomed into a smile so boyish, he might have been auditioning to play Henry Aldrich. “You might say that.”

Jack leaned over toward me, chummily conspiratorial. “Let me tell you what this kid is good at, Nate. He goes onto these colleges campuses-University of Illinois, today…”

“Urbana,” Lee put in.

“… and he puts on this big pro-Castro act. Gives out pamphlets, gets in with any pro-Castro student organizations, looks into any leftist student activities at all, and … well, you tell him, kid.”

The smug smile was back. “Let’s just say we come up with a lot of names.”

I frowned. “You care about which students lean left?”

Jack interceded. “It’s more … professors with those kind of leanings.”

“Guys, I hate to spoil the party, but I vote Democrat.”

Jack squinted at me, openly irritated. “This isn’t about Democrat and Republican, Nate. It’s about anti-Communist. Come on, Nate! You of all people.”

A waiter came over and Lee ordered a ginger ale. That was us-just three clean-cut American veterans avoiding liquor in a strip club.

Lee said, “Mr. Heller, I voted for JFK. I admire him. And his family. They’re interesting Americans.”

“I’m sure they’d be flattered.”

Jack said, “Hell, I voted for him, too. I see he’s coming to visit you, Nate.”

That threw me. I knew Jack Kennedy a little, though it was his brother I’d been close to, until we had a falling-out last year. I hardly expected a “visit” from either one of them.

I said, “What do you mean?”

“Oh, it’s been in all the papers. Week from tomorrow, he’s coming to town. Gonna see Army beat the shit out of Navy, at Soldier Field. Be a big motorcade and everything.”

“Is that right?” I said, not really giving a damn. Standing on a crowded street waving at Jack Kennedy was not my idea of a good time.

I nodded at the kid. “Nice meeting you, Lee. Some free advice? I would try not to be led too far astray by this old racetrack hustler.”

“Nate, you never change,” Jack said, smiling, shaking his head.

I slid out of the booth, then paused next to them before heading out. “You gonna be in town long, fellas?”

Jack said, “Few days. Couple more clubs I wanna check out. Lee’s heading back tonight-friend of his has a private plane. Wish I rated. Hey!.. Wish I could afford her.”

Up onstage, the headliner-Evelyn West, “the Girl with the Chest”-was parading around to “Buttons and Bows” in a cowboy hat, riding a kid’s stick horse with her trademarks hanging out.

“Yeah, Jack,” I said, heading to the door, putting on my own non-cowboy hat, giving the pair a little salute of a wave. “Just the kind of class act that’s perfect for you.”