I had asked him, “Did you bring Wallace in for a line up for your gas station attendant to make an ID?”
“Didn’t have enough to haul Mac in,” Peoples admitted. “I showed our witness Wallace’s picture, that same one from ’52 I gave you, Nate, and he said he was pretty sure that was the fella.”
“‘Pretty sure’ doesn’t cut it.”
“No, and the pump jockey isn’t cooperating anymore. Not since he got a couple of very threatening anonymous phone calls.”
That, too, indicated Peoples might have been right about Wallace in the Marshall murder, but it was still goddamn thin. Nonetheless, I would call Lou Sapperstein tonight and have him check on Wallace’s whereabouts when Joseph Plett was killed in Chicago, and do a background check on him in California. We would put the convicted killer under surveillance when he returned to Anaheim, until I was convinced he was no threat.
Of course, if he was a threat, I’d do something about it myself, since I also had a streak of Ahab in me.
But right now I was in Dallas, and Wallace was in Dallas, too, so maybe I could get a jump on this particular lead.
I didn’t bother going back to the Statler, instead pulling into the parking garage next to the Colony Club, the town’s most celebrated strip joint. In the parking garage, I got my nine-millimeter Browning in its shoulder sling from the trunk where I’d snugged it behind the spare tire. I wasn’t licensed to carry in the state of Texas, but if I was going out seeking a guy who got suspended sentences on murder one convictions, I figured better safe than sorry.
When I exited the ramp, the sidewalk was splashed with the club’s neon. Looming over me was a sign worthy of the Vegas strip, white neon on undulating orange:
and below that a marquee, black letters on white:
Welcome to downtown Dallas, where nobody lived except conventioneers, businessmen on the road, and other lonely, horny men. When the Dallas working day was done, the rush was on to bedroom communities — executives heading north to the Park Cities, lesser white-collar types to far north Dallas and select neighborhoods in Oak Cliff and Lakewood, while the labor force took buses south. No stadiums for sports to bring them back, either, and only a few movie theaters, the Capri, the Palace, the Majestic.
That meant the primary entertainment options were the girlie clubs — Abe Weinstein’s Colony and his brother Barney’s Theater Lounge. Jack Ruby’s Carousel, I noticed, on the other side of that parking ramp, was shuttered, a casualty of history.
Might seem funny that one of the classiest, most famous hotels in Dallas was right across the street from its biggest strip joint, but the twenty-two-story, Beaux Arts — style Adolphus depended on conventioneers, too. I crossed Commerce Street, dodging only light one-way traffic, figuring to eat in the Century Room.
I would eventually join the other out-of-town males at the Colony Club, if for no other reason than I had spent a couple of memorable nights with the exotic dancer named Jada (actually Janet Adams) when she played Chicago last year. But I had learned long ago not to eat at strip clubs, since food was never the attraction and when you got a hair in your soup, it had unfortunate resonance. Add to that the possibility that Mac Wallace might be dining at the restaurant in his hotel, and the Century Room it was.
Once upon a time the Century Room had been the “Hawaiian” Century, with bamboo and native bark on the walls, palm trees with coconuts, and an animated mural of volcanoes, mountains, and breaking surf tied in with a tropical rainstorm effect. Now it was space-age modern, brown and gold, looking like a high-class Denny’s. Too bad. At least the Planked Gulf Trout Adolphus hadn’t changed with the times, except for the price — a buck twenty-five after the war, two-fifty now.
What the Century Room didn’t serve me up was Mac Wallace, even though I lingered through my meal and went through two vodka gimlets. The weeknight diners at the Century Room consisted of married couples celebrating a birthday or an anniversary, couples who might have been married but probably not to each other, and lonely men-about-town. None of the latter were the pitch-and-putt slayer.
Traffic hadn’t picked up any when I crossed Commerce again into the neon fog of the sidewalk under the Colony Club’s looming sign. For all that sleazy grandeur, the address was 1322½, meaning the nitery was one floor up, the glass-brick entry a modest recession between a liquor store and the parking ramp. Under a rounded canopy, glassed-in showcases at right and left presented racy posters and photos of Colony girls past and present, with an emphasis on Candy Barr, who’d got her start (and her name) here. Through the door with its porthole window, I went up thickly red-carpeted stairs to a small landing where an overly made-up attractive blonde in a low-cut red gown sat behind a semicircular black-leather-upholstered counter trimmed in silver. She wanted two dollars and I gave it to her.
There was a time when two dollars got you more from a blonde like that.
The club room was impressively large, dominated by a performance stage with an Art Moderne look that had really been something in the ’40s. In those days, you would see the likes of Louis Armstrong and George Gobel here, and Bob Hope would hop up on the stage when he was in town, to do a free bit. The strippers were just part of the show.
Now they were the show. When I’d been here maybe ten years ago, the featured musical group was the popular George Shearing Quintet. The combo onstage tonight was Bill Peck and His Peckers. Somehow I didn’t think Johnny Carson would be booking them on The Tonight Show.
Still, the place had remnants of class — the formidable stage, maybe twenty-five by thirty, was elevated, with a shiny black metal rail to keep horny patrons from getting too friendly with the exotics, as strippers liked to call themselves these days. Black-leather-upholstered booths and chairs, linen tablecloths, plush carpeting, and flickering candlelight added up to a dreamy ambiance.
I’d already had those two gimlets across the street, so from my ringside seat I just ordered a Coke from a smiling, busty black-haired waitress in a tuxedo jacket and black mesh hose. The waitresses pushed champagne, which was how you got them to sit with you. You shared a bottle with them, but they didn’t drink much if any, utilizing a trick of pouring the champagne from their glasses into the ice bucket. My perky dark-haired doll tried hard, but I didn’t want her company or the champagne.
That and wine and beer were the extent of alcoholic beverages that could be legally sold in a nightclub in Dallas. That was why there was a liquor store downstairs, and a cover charge outside. You brought a bottle in a brown bag and ordered setups.
Getting desperate, the waitress pointed out a doorway in the back corner. “I give private dances in the VIP room upstairs. You’d love it, there’s these dark-blue mirrors and velvet couches. Real intimate and sexy. If I’m not your type, sweetie, some of the dancers are available. Just let me know...”