The lights came down, and I sat rather glumly through the MC, a guy named Breck Wall who used to be Jack Ruby’s man, doing a painful comedy routine with a guy in old-lady drag, a bad version of Jonathan Winters’s Maude Frickert (“My living bra just died”). The first stripper was a pretty, stacked brunette called Peggy Steele, who according to MC Wall was “The I-Don’t-Care Girl,” and she didn’t. As the Peckers played “Blue Skies,” she moved listlessly around in a dark-blue strapless gown with a glittering bodice and gradually peeled to pasties and a small rhinestone-studded bikini bottom. Then a corny comic in a red derby accompanied his tired song parodies (“How dry I am, how wet I’ll be, if I don’t find the bathroom key”) with a banjo and I decided Bob Hope probably wasn’t going to show up tonight.
Blonde Chris Colt was next, with her “forty-fives,” a description that did not refer to the toy six-guns on her hips. To “I’m an Old Cowhand,” she pranced in a rhinestone-studded Western pants outfit that zipped off until she was wearing just two sheriff’s-badge pasties, a skimpy G-string that exposed a little tumbleweed, and white boots. This cowgirl was usually the headliner, but not with Jack Ruby’s headline stripper, Jada, on the bill — suddenly famous in the wake of the assassination.
And Miss.45’s applause had not died down when Jada came strutting out to the Peckers singing, a capella, “Ja-da, Ja-da, Ja-da Ja-da jing jing jing.”
She was an amazing-looking woman — though she was only five-foot-five or — six, her tower of flaming red hair, which somehow also reached her shoulders, conspired with high heels to make her seem larger than life. Flesh that had been creamy white in Chicago was now a dark-berry tan, her lipstick bright red, her full lips constantly flashing a wide, white Marilyn-esque smile; her wide-set blue eyes with the long fake lashes and curving eyebrows gave her the overemphasized glamour of a female impersonator, only she was definitely female.
Her spangly, feathery white evening gown with long white gloves didn’t last long before she was down to red pasties and a half corset that showed off her full, shapely bottom. Her hourglass figure made the pert breasts seem larger than they were, and the lushness of her curvy figure was matched by a charismatic command of the stage, a laughing mastery she held over all the men in the audience.
Those blue eyes flared with surprise and even delight, seeing me seated ringside, and she blew me a kiss. I grinned at her, and she laughed, bump-and-grinding her way over to the leopard-skin rug on which she was about to perform the explicit routine that had made Jack Ruby mad at her. So afraid he’d go to jail over it, he’d sometimes turn the lights off on the stage.
Tonight the lights stayed on, though her pasties and G-string didn’t, and this was merely the end of the first act. She got the kind of sitting-down standing ovation only the sexiest strippers could get, and pranced off laughing. The MC came out and announced the show’s second half would begin in thirty minutes, the band taking a break as Twist music got pumped in.
Not five minutes passed before Jada flounced out from a door beside the stage, wearing a green robe with a green feathered collar, to sit with me at my little ringside table. The lights were up and her star presence got a lot of wide eyes and whispers going around us, but nobody came over and bothered us. An autograph is not what a guy wants from a stripper.
She grabbed my nearest hand with both of hers and leaned in and kissed the air a few fractions of an inch from my mouth — she couldn’t risk smearing that elaborate lipstick job.
“Nathan Heller,” she said, in a rich alto thick with a Latin accent, “you are a bad boy not telling Jada you were coming to town.”
“Hi Janet. What’s with the accent? Gonna go on the road and play Lola in Damn Yankees?”
She gave me half a grin. She was even sexier when she wasn’t trying. Dropping the accent, she said, “These Texas chumps think I’m from Brazil,” though there was now a hint of the South. “Doesn’t hurt an exotic to be a little more exotic, and I also don’t have to explain the tan.”
“You look good any color. You’re going on again?”
“Better believe it, buddy — I close the show. I’m the headliner, and doesn’t that give Miss Big Titties from Big D heartburn. Ha! Me with my two tiny handfuls.”
“You don’t hear me complaining. When did they close down the Carousel?”
“Around when Ruby’s trial started. It was a drag there. A club like that lives and dies on big spenders, buying champagne to impress girls they’ll never get. After November twenty-two, all we got were beer-drinkin’ reporters and curiosity-seeking tourists, with dumb questions about Ruby and Oswald.”
“Like did Ruby know Oswald, and did Oswald frequent the club.”
“Right. Stupid shit like that.”
“Did Ruby know Oswald? Did he frequent the Carousel?”
“Sure. But, like, I’m gonna tell that to some hick from Iowa?”
“I’m from Illinois.”
“But you ain’t no hick,” she said, grinning at me. My God, that smile was as wide and glittering as a Cadillac’s front grill. “So, Nate, how long are you in town for?”
“Not sure. Tonight at least. You busy after? When do you get off?”
She touched my nose. “When I get off, Nate, is kind of up to you, isn’t it? As for when I get out of here, last show’s over at midnight. You want to take me over to your hotel, or come to my place? It’s nice. It’s in Turtle Creek.”
“You headlining strippers must make good bread.”
“Exotics.”
“I stand corrected.”
Her eyebrows, already high, went higher. “You working a case? I thought you were too big a shot to work cases anymore.”
“Please. We call them jobs.”
That made her laugh. She was easy to make laugh. You might assume she was easy in other ways, and admittedly, like a lot of girls in Texas, she’d been to the rodeo before. But I like to think she was picky. She picked me, didn’t she?
“So, Janet, are you, uh, tied down to anybody right now?”
“You mean am I between marriages? Yes. Am I shacked up with anybody? No. I gave up men for Lent.”
“Lent is over.”
“That makes this your lucky night. So — is it an interesting job? You do know this town is a real drag these days, right? At least in the club we get out-of-towners, though not near enough.”
“Why a drag?”
“Ah, hell, Nate, ever since Kennedy got killed, this burg is under a cloud. Everybody feelin’ guilty, feelin’ sorry for themselves. Talk about a bad rep. Tourism is way the hell down. Who wants to come to a town with a police department like ours?”
“Oh I don’t know,” I said. “Look how fast they caught Ruby.”
It would have taken a beat for most strippers to get that joke, but Janet was sharp and she exploded with laughter. When she laughed like that she made a very unladylike, unsexy honk that made me like her all the more.
I glanced around, now that the lights were up, to see if Mac Wallace had strolled over from the Adolphus for a little entertainment. Despite his protestations of morality, he was a guy who had been, after all, attracted to a very wild bisexual wife and for that matter the President’s scarily out-of-control sister.
Josefa Johnson, by the way, was deceased. Died under vaguely suspicious circumstances, according to Captain Peoples — a cerebral hemorrhage, Christmas day, 1961. Contrary to state law, there was no autopsy, no inquest, the death certificate signed by a doctor who hadn’t examined the body; she was promptly embalmed and buried. Peoples saw the hand of the LBJ’s hit man in this — and it was even thinner than his Henry Marshall theory.