Max Collins - Ask Not

“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.

The soaring Statler Hilton had a Space Age look that screamed 1960s but was already almost ten years old. Its twenty stories were home to 1001 rooms and as many hotel employees, its innovations including conference rooms on lower floors, a mammoth ballroom with no pillars, and a heliport “taxi” service for the rich, though most guests were more impressed by the 21-inch custom TVs by Westinghouse in every room. The front of the hotel was the fork of its Y-shape, a concave facade that looked as cool as a cocktail but had the unintended by-product of creating an eddy that scooped up any trash blowing down the street to circulate by the front entrance like soiled confetti.