Max Collins - Ask Not

His eyes tightened as he thought back. “I met Flo earlier this year, in June I believe, on a press junket for reporters covering the film industry.”

“Where was that exactly?”

His smile broadened and his eyes looked up into the pleasant memory. “We were in Salzburg on the set of The Sound of Music. I caught her arm when she stumbled, getting onto the press bus, and I said, ‘Well, hello!’ You know, in a way that said I recognized her as a celebrity. ‘You know who I am,’ she said. ‘Who are you ? Besides my savior.’ We just hit it off like that, joking, giggling. We had drinks that night and the rest is history.”

“History of what? A love affair?”

He frowned, shifted in the booth, almost but not quite offended by my bluntness. “Oh, you don’t understand, Mr. Heller. It was definitely not a love affair, or anyway not a physical one. She was just this sweet funny lady, my bestest friend in the world. We talked on the phone every day.”

Not in Dallas they hadn’t. That was how I’d wound up in bed with her, one last time.

He was shaking his head slightly. “She was so soft, so romantic. Did you ever see her angry? I never did. I think the only conversations we had that were serious at all were about the Kennedy project.”

“You knew about the Ruby trip?”

“Oh, yes. I didn’t know she was planning to meet up with you, though.”

I didn’t bother explaining the accidental nature of that.

He was saying, “I know Mr. Felton thinks Flo and I were an item, but really we just liked each other, liked to be together, to ditch the pressures of this crazy old world and just go. ”

“Like to Rome and London.”

He shifted in his seat, his smile one-sided now. “Mr. Heller, it was strictly platonic. There was a flirty aspect to it, sure, but there was no good-night kiss when I dropped her off. It just wasn’t that kind of relationship. Not even close. I had other girls. She knew that.”

Did he? I wondered.

I gestured skyward, to the heaven that was the Regency. “I understood that you and Flo sometimes met in your hotel suite.”

“No. Maybe briefly for business, but not in the way you mean. After all, we were co-workers, Mr. Heller. I was involved in the Kennedy project, too.”

“Did you see her the Sunday she died? Did she share any materials with you from the Dallas trip?”

“I called her in the afternoon. She never said much about the Kennedy investigation on the phone, for obvious reasons. No, I don’t have any idea what happened in Dallas.”

That last statement tried a little too hard for my taste.

“I only know bits and pieces,” he said. “I was a sounding board for the Kennedy stories in her column, and also for what she was planning. I don’t know if you know this, Mr. Heller, but she was going to write a book. If she did the story for her paper, she might win acclaim, but she was after more — a big score, big money.”

“What do you think happened to Flo, Mr. Revell?”

He shrugged sadly. “It’s likely she accidentally OD’d. Took a little too many pills with just a little too much gin. She wasn’t a big person, you know. Wouldn’t take much to be too much. But... with this Kennedy stuff going on? I’m not an idiot. Of course she could have been murdered.”

“In that case, would you suspect someone involved in the assassination? Spooks or gangsters or Cubans?”

Oh my.

“I couldn’t say, Mr. Heller. It’s too terrible to think that that sweet woman, with so much talent and energy in her, could be gone. But I suppose...”

“You suppose?”

“Mr. Felton does have a lot to gain.”

Could it be that simple? A jealous husband killing a rich wife to trade her faithlessness in on a pile of money? Did Florence Kilgore’s passing have nothing to do with either Jack — Kennedy or Ruby?

Or had I run into that most unlikely of circumstances in this lunatic case — a genuinely accidental death?

By day, the French Quarter — north of Canal Street, in the so-called “downtown” section of New Orleans — provided a quaint paradise for tourists. Awaiting them were cast-iron vines, flowers, cupids, and fruits adorning tall, cement-covered brick structures painted in light shades but with splashes of bright green via shutters and woodwork. Narrow streets were there to stroll, arrayed with antiques shops, tearooms, and art studios. Best of all, world-famous restaurants often served up their exquisite cuisine in courtyards amid banana trees, palms, and other semitropical flora, their shade still soothing in September temperatures in the 80s.

But at night, this heaven was replaced by an even more seductive hell. Those fabled restaurants — Antoine’s, Brennan’s, Arnaud’s, the Two Sisters, and the rest — closed up early, as if New Orleans were some small roll-up-the-sidewalks Midwestern town; getting a real meal after nine P.M. was a trick here, but few cared. Tourists venturing into this friendly neon Hades were after the jazz, the booze, the girls; were eager to bump into gamblers and preachers, debutantes and streetwalkers, sailors and artists, bums and entrepreneurs.

From riverboat days on, the Vieux Carré had been a fever dream of throbbing rhythm, exotic color, and authentic Dixieland. Bourbon Street in particular remained a glimmering, cocksure concourse, where “No cover, no minimum” was the rule — that and minimum cover on the strippers at such flesh palaces as Casino Royale, Gunga Den, Club Slipper, and Von Ray’s Texas Tornado.

The most popular and notorious such address was 228 Bourbon, between Bienville and Conti — the Sho-Bar, open twenty-four hours with the strippers absent only in the afternoon and early evening, replaced by a piano-accompanied girl singer. The modest three-story brick structure, with typical wrought-iron balconies on its upper floors (hotel rooms, often occupied by strippers during Sho-Bar engagements), shared the block with standbys like the Old Absinthe House and the 50 °Club and new kids like the Hotsy Totsy and Bikini A Go Go, similar establishments all, but none offering the celebrated likes of Candy Barr, Sally Rand, Blaze Starr, and (this week’s headliner) Jada of Carousel Club infamy.

Outside, pulsating neon beckoned and a canopied entrance bragged up star strippers, but the Sho-Bar interior disappointed. This drab, unimpressively appointed chapel of sleaze was crammed with postage-stamp plastic-top tables facing a modest stage with faded red curtains and a tarnished brass guardrail to keep back overenthusiastic ringsiders. Latin dance teams, tap dancers, and blue comedians were among the uninspiring “incidental acts,” strictly Ed Sullivan Show rejects. What prevented a riot among customers was the girls, who delivered.

Right now a busty beehive blonde called Nikki Corvette, statuesque in a sheer black nightie over pasties and G-string, was displaying herself in various interesting ways on a red divan — allow that in a furniture store and you’d sell a shitload of divans. The four-man tuxedoed combo up there, taking up as little real estate as possible, was playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Even in Beatlemania days, most of these clubs stuck with the area’s traditional Dixieland.

The Colony back in Dallas kicked this place’s ass, but the reputation and charisma of the French Quarter — and that name stripper talent — got them by.

The bar, with a few booths, was tucked under the balcony. I ordered a rum-and-Coke, and gave the bartender a five to let Janet know I was here. In five minutes, she was sitting with me in the farthest-back booth. She was in full stage makeup but still in street clothes — jeans and a bandana-style blue-and-white short-sleeve blouse with only her white high-heel pumps to give her away.