Max Collins - Ask Not

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.