Max Collins - Ask Not

“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.