Max Collins - Ask Not

This must have been what Janet meant when she told me Rose said the “shooters who got Kennedy” had tried to kill the woman.

Flo said, “How badly were you hurt?”

She shrugged, spoke through exhaled smoke. “Not serious, bumps and bruises and scrapes, but back at the club, somebody saw those guys grab me and told Manny, and he got concerned, bless him, and drove out looking for me. He found me, all bloody and hitchhiking, and took me to the hospital there in Eunice, to the emergency room. They cleaned me up but said they couldn’t admit me because all I had was bruises and scrapes, and then I told them I was having drug withdrawal and could they help me, and they called the cops. A nice officer I met before... ’cause I worked at the Slipper from time to time and the cops knew all the girls there... anyway, this nice trooper named Fruge — it’s an easy name to remember, ’cause of the dance?”

She did a sad little pumping of both fisted arms, indicating the Frug.

“Trooper Fruge,” she went on, “took me to the little Eunice jail. I said I had something important to tell him but he said I could tell him in the morning, because he had to go to the policeman’s ball that night.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“No, unless maybe he was, but I wasn’t really on top of things, because I was coming down and I was coming down fast... I hadn’t fixed since last night... and they put me in a jail cell and I got awful hot and took off all my clothes and I was really climbing the walls. I don’t mean that as an expression. I was climbing them, trying to, anyway. So they called Fruge, at the dance I guess, do you think maybe he was doing the Frug? Ha. And anyway, he came back with a doctor, the coroner I think, who gave me a sedative and that helped. The next morning Trooper Fruge drove me over to this nuthouse in Jackson, not ’cause I was nuts or anything but they did drug withdrawal there, and on the way I told him about killing Kennedy.”

Flo said, “This was Thursday, the twenty-first.”

“Yeah, I guess it would’ve been. So I told Trooper Fruge, I said, ‘These fucking Cubans are crazy , they’re going to Dallas to kill Kennedy when he comes to town.’ I told him everything, just like I done to you — the drugs, my baby, everything. I wanted help getting my kid back, y’know? Also, I didn’t want to see Kennedy killed. Fruge had this other trooper come and hear my story and I told it again. But that was it. The two troopers just went away, and I told the doctors about Kennedy, and the nurses, and everybody just kind of nodded, ’cause they had committed me for drug withdrawal and thought I was delirious or some shit.”

I asked, “No one else came to talk to you?”

“Not till after the assassination. Jesus, I mean, I was in the hospital rec room, watching TV on Friday, and I see this news thing with people lining the streets in Dallas, and I start screaming, like a crazy person, which there was no shortage of in there, ‘Somebody’s gotta do something! They’re gonna kill the President!’ Nobody paid any attention to me. Then the cars came on the screen, the, uh, what’s it, motorcade, rolling by, and I yell to the nurses and other patients, ‘ Watch, you assholes! It’s gonna happen! It’s gonna happen!’ You couldn’t see it on-screen, but there was these pops, and then this commotion, and I said, ‘ See! See! I am not nuts!’”

“And then Fruge came back?”

“Not till Monday. Not till after Pinky had shot his girlfriend.”

“Pinky?” I said. “You mean Ruby?”

Flo asked, “What do you mean, ‘girlfriend’?”

“Oh, Pinky and that Oswald character,” Rose said, “they was shacked up off and on for years. I saw those queer sons of bitches sitting together at the Pink Door and later the Carousel, plenty of times.”

I asked, “You told this to Fruge?”

“Yeah, him and a bunch of other troopers. I played to smaller audiences in my time. Fruge said he was going to report what I said to the Dallas cops and the FBI, too, but neither of those ever questioned me. I run into Fruge a couple months later, and he said he called the FBI but they wasn’t interested in the Cubans ’cause they already had their man.”

Meaning (the late) Oswald.

“And,” Rose continued, “Fruge said he called some cop named Fritz on the Dallas PD, and told him the story, too, and this Fritz guy said he wasn’t interested, neither.”

“That would be Captain Will Fritz,” Flo said, with a glance in my direction. “He was in charge of the assassination investigation.”

“Well, whoever or whatever he was,” Rose said pleasantly, smiling as she lit up another Parliament, “he didn’t bother talking to me. Sometimes it pays to be an unreliable junkie... oh, but I’m straight now. Don’t get the wrong idea.”

“We won’t, Rose,” I said.

She shrugged, sighing smoke. “That’s all I know about the Kennedy thing. If there’s nothin’ else, I could use the bread we agreed on... Bus trip from Waco ain’t free, you know.”

This was directed at Flo, who had arranged to pay Rose two hundred for her expenses. This wasn’t strictly journalistically kosher, but I thought Flo got off cheap, even if the Waco bus trip had cost maybe fifteen bucks.

“One other thing,” I said to Rose, who was about to slide out of the booth. “You used to go out with a guy named Mac Wallace, right?”

“Yeah. Few times. Maybe... two years ago. When I was dancing at the Carousel. I cut that shit off fast.”

“What kind of guy was he?”

“Well, he’s a big good-looking guy, but kind of a creep. Very smart, but broody, like Brando. I’ll tell you one thing, he’s a bully when he’s drunk. Likes to knock a girl around. Likes to kind of... well, rape you, when it isn’t even necessary. Who needs that crap? Why? What does he have to do with the Kennedy assassination?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Probably unrelated.”

Probably.

“I’m a regular here at the Colony Club,” the fresh-looking young blonde said, then raised a cautionary finger. “Not a stripper. I’m a singer. Strictly a singer.”

“Really, Bev?” Janet said with a smile. Aka Jada had, at our final guest’s invitation, joined us in the booth for the interview, sitting next to the petite brown-eyed blonde, whose pixie-cut ratted platinum hairdo emphasized her vague resemblance to Connie Stevens. She was wearing a red-and-green plaid bandana-ish blouse, gray shorts, and minimal makeup. Almost pretty, definitely cute.

“Well,” Beverly Oliver said to her friend, giggling (she seemed barely out of her teens), “I guess you caught me, honey. I used to come up on the bus from Garland, it’s about a forty-minute ride, and enter the amateur night at the Theater Club — Abe’s brother Barney runs that. And then later here, at the Colony. But I only went down to a bikini.”

“You’d have made a mint stripping, doll,” Janet said, making her red ponytail swing with a shake of her head, grinning at her little protégée.

“Nope. I’m a singer, Sunday, Monday, and always. And an old-fashioned one. You didn’t see me here last week, Mr. Heller, ’cause I sometimes do a week at the Embers in Houston.”

I said, “Bill Peck and His Peckers back you up here?”

“No! Joe Garcia’s little orchestra. Don’t look for any Beatles or Herman’s Hermits from this girl — maybe some Pet Clark. But I’m a Joni James, Kay Starr kinda thrush. You want to hear ‘Blues in the Night’ or ‘Bill Bailey,’ you’ve come to the right chile.”

In any case, she was a natural performer, and the tape recorder didn’t faze her — she liked talking in front of it.

“‘Bill Bailey,’ huh?” I said. “Billy Daniels or Bobby Darin style?”