Though this was my second day as Janet’s guest, it was my first time down by the pool. Tuesday night, Janet and two other dancers at the Colony Club had gotten me down to her car, a white Caddy convertible, parked in the same next-door ramp as my rental Galaxie. I barely remember this, but I do know that I have never had less fun in the company of eager-to-please strippers.
I also barely remember the trip to the emergency room at Parkland Hospital. I was X-rayed, found to have two cracked (but not broken) ribs, got taped up, shot up (with Demerol), and given a five-day supply of drugs (Demerol again).
I woke up in Janet’s bed late the next morning. She was there, a nurse in green halter top and short shorts, to walk me to the john, feed me some more Demerol, and put me back to bed. That evening, I got up, was able to get myself to the john and then avail myself of a tan cotton robe (no shortage of abandoned men’s clothing at Janet’s), and joined her in the living room of a very nice but very underfurnished apartment. In fact, the furnishings were right out of a thrift shop, what little there were.
We sat at yellow-Formica-topped table that June Cleaver would have tossed out around 1956, eating TV dinners and sipping cans of Schlitz in her modern kitchen. Swanson frozen fare was all she cooked for herself, she informed me. What the hell — it was better than I’d got in the service. She was still in the dark-green shorts outfit — it went really well with her red hair — and was having the meat loaf. I had Salisbury steak.
“What’s the story on this place?” I asked. “It’s got to run you one-fifty a month, easy.”
“Two bills,” she said, chewing meat loaf.
“Meaning no offense to a gracious hostess, but the interior decoration is strictly Early Goodwill.”
She grinned at me. “Don’t you get it? I’m part of the suitcase set.”
“What’s the suitcase set?”
“We’re kind of high-class nomads. You move into an apartment in one of these high-rises, then move out again in two or three months. These places offer the first month free, you know.”
Sounded more like low-class moochers to me, but I kept it to myself.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“Sure,” she said, digging into her aluminum pocket of peas. “Anyway, I don’t need a year-round residence in Dallas. I spend as much time in New Orleans.”
Working Carlos Marcello’s clubs.
“And sometimes,” she was saying, “Austin and Fort Worth, too. It’s a little circuit. I’m just winding up a two-month stint at the Colony, then a few weeks in New Orleans at the Sho-Bar, and back to Big D at the Theater Lounge, Abe’s brother’s joint.”
“I thought they were famous for their amateur nights.”
“Yeah, and boy did that use to drive Jack batty. Or battier, anyway.”
She meant her Carousel boss, Jack Ruby.
“You know,” she was saying, “he was stuck paying exotics guild minimum. And the amateur girls down the street got bupkus.”
The guild was the American Guild of Variety Artists. My old pal Barney Ross, the onetime triple-division boxing champ, did PR for the AGVA in New York. I had grown up on the West Side of Chicago with Barney. So had Ruby.
“Anyway,” Janet was saying, eating her mashed potatoes without enthusiasm, “the Theater Lounge books a headliner in, to shore up these amateur-night cunts.”
Okay, so Janet wasn’t always elegant. Like the thrift-shop furniture, she didn’t really belong here. But she had rescued me last night and was feeding me today, so she could be as vulgar a little cunt as she pleased.
While she was getting ready for work — she did her makeup at home, because the Colony’s dressing room was shared by all the dancers — I used the kitchen phone.
I got Lou Sapperstein at home, and he was cross with me: “Where the hell have you been? I pressed the desk clerk at the Statler till he admitted you weren’t in your room last night.”
“I stayed overnight with a stripper friend.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check in! I was about ready to start calling the hospitals, or the Dallas city morgue.”
I explained that I’d taken a beating from a suspect in the Plett murder.
“Get something to write with,” I advised him.
“Okay, but first, the whole Plett job, this whole Texas trip of yours... something really crazy happened. Something good, maybe even great, but crazy as hell.”
“What?”
“This afternoon Mrs. Plett gets a call from that insurance company and is told she’s getting the full half a million. They told her they were doing a reappraisal of certain cases, and that the circumstances of her husband’s death were questionable enough that her double-indemnity claim would be honored. Two years after the fact! You ever hear of such a thing?”
“No. She called and told you all this?”
“Yes. She wanted to know if we were responsible for her good fortune”
“What did you say?”
“I said I believed we were. Were we, Nate?”
“Probably.”
I gave him a brief rundown on Mac Wallace, per Captain Peoples and my own experience — minus the suspicions about LBJ and JFK — and how I’d told Wallace our investigation would cease if our client got her money.
“I’m a little surprised,” I said, “that it came from the insurance company. I didn’t know how the payoff would happen, but never figured on that way.”
“Well, it’s a Dallas-based company, if that tells you anything.”
I also told Lou that even though the insurance company had come belatedly through, I wanted Wallace’s whereabouts at the time of Joseph Plett’s “suicide” looked into. And that when Wallace returned to California, he was to be kept under surveillance until further notice.
“That could be expensive, Nate.”
“We’ll be getting fifty grand from Mrs. Plett.”
“True. This guy Wallace is very likely a contract killer.”
“More like an in-house assassin.”
“And we’re going to let him walk?”
“Our job is to get our client satisfaction, and if that insurance payout does the trick, then we walk away.”
He gave me a long-distance sigh. “Agreed.”
“Was the client happy?”
“Very. Nothing about clearing up her husband’s suicide was even mentioned. For that kind of dough, who needs consecrated ground?”
“Then it’s over.”
I told Lou I’d likely be heading home tomorrow, and we said our good-byes.
In her living room, Janet positioned me in a threadbare armchair before a little black-and-white portable TV on a wheeled stand before she left for work that evening. I had taken some Demerol with my Schlitz and I fell asleep in the chair before The Beverly Hillbillies turned into The Dick Van Dyke Show. I dreamed a weird episode of the latter staring the A-1’s receptionist, Millie.
When Janet nudged me awake, the TV was hissing with snow on the screen.
“You shouldn’t have slept in that chair,” she scolded. Her blue eyes narrowed under a high bare forehead — she wore no makeup and her painted-on stripper eyebrows were gone, leaving only the faint shadow of shaved-off real ones. She should have looked grotesque, but her pretty eyes and cute nose and full sensual mouth made up for any shortcomings.