Max Collins - Ask Not

“Did Oswald ever come into the Carousel? Did Ruby know him?”

Janet thought about that, the vaguely oriental eyes unblinking. Drew on the cigarette, held in the smoke, let it out in a big blue cloud. Then she gestured with a red-nailed finger. “Turn that gizmo off.”

Flo clicked it off.

“That’s a dangerous subject,” Janet said, sitting forward, with a smile devoid of humor. “Dying is getting contagious in this town, if you discuss that subject.”

Flo held up her hands, palms out. “Off the record, then.”

She sighed smoke. “They knew each other, okay? Oswald came in, half a dozen times, but I don’t think he cared about the girls. He might’ve been a homo. Never looked at the stage, anyway. I figure, if a guy would rather talk to Jack Ruby than watch me strut my stuff? That’s a homo.”

“He and Ruby were friendly?”

“They’d sit at a table and talk. That cop joined ’em once or twice. You know, just about every cop in town came in the Carousel, for free beer and food and girls.”

“ What cop?”

“The one Oswald wound up shooting. Tippit. He was a pal of Ruby’s. Ruby’s best friend was that cop’s landlord.”

I saw Flo’s eyes tighten, and I had that familiar prickly sensation along the back of my neck myself.

“And don’t ask me what they were discussing,” Janet said, shaking an open palm at us, “because I don’t know. I noticed ’em from the stage — I never circulate in a club much. Listen, it’s a little-known fact, but Ruby swings both ways.”

Flo touched the switch on the recorder. “May I turn this back on?”

Janet nodded, exhaling smoke out her mouth.

Flo said, “Swung both ways. Go ahead.”

“He was with women sometimes, but it was more like he was proving a point. And he had this funny habit of, if he got one of his dancers to put out for him? She was on borrowed time. He lost respect for her. ‘Little cunt has no class,’ he would say. And she’d be gone.”

I asked, “Did he come on to you?”

She grinned. “That’s the one that takes the goddamn fuckin’ cake. He asked me to move in with him.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I know! He knew I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me, really. But he liked what I stood for.”

Flo asked, “What do you stand for?’

Her smile was enormously self-satisfied. She seemed to sense that Flo and I had the kind of rapport that might suggest sexual intimacy, and that was giving her just a little attitude mixed in with the apprehension.

“For being the kind of spectacular piece of ass,” she said, “that any red-blooded man would kill the Pope in the front window of Neiman’s to spend one night with.”

I said, “But what you’re known for is not what he wanted out of you?”

She shook her head, and the red ponytail swung. “No, he said I’d have my own bedroom and it would be strictly platonic. He just wanted to show me off to the neighbors, the world. To make people think he was the kind of man’s man who could rate, well...”

“A spectacular piece of ass,” Flo said pleasantly.

Now Janet liked her better. “Right. Listen, there’s, uh... one other thing.” She gestured for Flo to switch off the tape machine again.

When it had clicked off, Janet said, “The morning of the twenty-second of November, last year... you know what day that was, right?”

“Right,” Flo and I said.

“Well, that morning, I stopped by the club. He was there early, a lot, doing business-type things, and, anyway, he’d hired me clear through the start of this year, but stopped paying me even though I was still working. This was maybe a week before the assassination I mean, that I quit. Well, I went around to collect my costumes, which are very expensive, I’m known for my fancy costumes, and also to get what back pay he owed me. I was outside his little office and I heard him on the phone. He was talking to somebody and don’t ask me who it was. I might have an idea, but do not fucking ask, okay? Anyway, he was upset. He said he didn’t want to be part of ‘this thing.’”

Flo, sitting forward, asked, “What thing?”

“That wasn’t clear. You need to understand, that was not clear. But I gathered he was going to be involved in some kind of... something really bad, something really big. And also he said, ‘I never been party to killing anybody in my life,’ okay?”

I said, “But he couldn’t have been talking about Oswald — this was before Kennedy even hit town.”

“I don’t know, Nate,” Janet said, and her nerves were showing, her hands trembling, her eyes moist. “Maybe killing that rabbity little homo was already on the program, how should I know? Or maybe Ruby didn’t want to be part of killing Jack Kennedy. If you really want a dumb goddamn stripper’s opinion.”

I reached over and took one of her hands and smiled at her. “That’s ‘exotic dancer,’ okay?”

She nodded and smiled a little-girl smile; she’d been one a million years ago.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I was leaving, trying to just sneak out without being seen, and suddenly he’s back in the doorway of his rathole and saying, ‘Hey, Jada! You want something?’ And I said, oh, I could see you were busy and, you know, didn’t wanna bother. And he says, ‘I know I owe you some money, doll. Next week be okay?’ And I say sure. And he says, ‘Why don’t we bury the hatchet? Come back and work for your Uncle Jack.’ And I say, maybe, and he says, ‘But not tonight. We’re gonna be closed tonight.’ And I say fine, but I’m thinking, something big sure as hell is going down — closing the club on a Friday night? Was he kidding?”

Flo said, “And this was before there was news of the assassination?”

“It was before the goddamn assassination ! Anyway, I went over to the Alamo Court, on Fort Worth Avenue, where I was staying, and threw everything I owned in a couple of suitcases and I jumped in my Caddy and I booked it. Jesus, people were already lined up on the street to see the President, happy as clams to be in Dallas. Me, I just wanted out. Oh-you-tee, out. I knew I could always get work in New Orleans, and then, fuck, I hit this guy.”

I said, “What?”

“I struck a goddamn pedestrian, okay? I was hauling ass, but luckily he wasn’t hurt bad, just kinda clipped him, the guy, Charles Something, and I tried to give him some money but he was real pissed and yelling, so I took him over to a clinic where he got examined and stuff, X-rayed and that, and I was trying to say, I’ll pay for everything, just let me give you my name and you got my license number, but I gotta get the hell out of Dallas, okay? And they finally did.”

“What did you do then?”

“What do you think? I got the hell out of Dallas. I was maybe half an hour out of town when the news came over the radio.” She looked past us. “Oh. Rose is here. You should talk to her, now.”

You could see the pretty girl she once had been inside the puffy visage, before droopiness touched the big brown eyes that had witnessed too much. She had a pale indoor look rare in Texas but common to B-girls, her hair dishwater blonde with hints of gold, rising in a permanent wave over a heart-shaped face around which more blonde hair cascaded to the shoulders of a yellow blouse whose cheerfulness was offset by a frayed collar. All her features were nice, though the nose may have been missing some cartilage — men had knocked this female around; she carried abuse on her slightly hunched shoulders like the heavy load it was.

She may never have been a headliner, but even now she had a nice figure, making it easy to buy her as a credible act on a strip club bill, drenched in the forgiveness of red and blue stage lighting. Easier still to imagine her working the dingy mini-trailer-park bordellos behind bars and gas stations along scrubby strips of highway, and providing a lonely man a shabby fantasy that led to temporary relief.