He waved me off. “Don’t be an old woman.”
“The point is,” I said, getting up, “to be an old man.”
And I left him there to ponder that—though I doubted he would.
The black-eyed blonde’s name was Jackie Payne—Jacqueline, really, but nobody called her that except her parents, who she hadn’t seen in some time.
She was born and grew up in Kankakee, in the shadow of the state insane asylum, and as omens go, that was a hell of a one. Her parents were “real religious”—a polite way to say goddamn zealots—who had been ashamed of her wild behavior in high school, which is to say she’d been a cheerleader and in drama club.
A talent scout at the county fair—where she tap-danced and won five dollars—had encouraged her to look him up in Chicago; so, three and a half years ago, shortly after graduating Kankakee High, she had hopped the Twentieth Century east and, with the talent scout’s backing, took up residence in the Croyden, a Near Northside hotel catering to showgirls.
Let me interrupt this soap opera to mention that the Croyden was one of several such hotels on the Near Northside. A nicer example, the St. Clair—just off Michigan Avenue’s magnificent mile, at the corner of Ohio and St. Clair—catered to both typical travelers and longer-term residents; but showgirls and strippers loved the St. Clair, and many lived there, whether a few nights or a few years were involved.
The St. Clair was a classy but unostentatious hotel, twenty-some red-brick stories with a set-back penthouse. After my divorce, and the sale of our Lincolnwood bungalow, I had established my Chicago home address at the St. Clair, taking a fifteenth-floor suite; before my marriage I’d lived in a similar but smaller apartment at the Morrison Hotel, which was closer to my office; but living north of the Chicago River expanded my world to the upper levels of Windy City society.
At the St. Clair, I was just a few blocks south of the Gold Coast; from my corner suite, I could see the lake from my bedroom window, and from my living room window (looking south) I could wave to Colonel McCormick in his Tribune Tower aerie. My neighbors included the Wrigley Building and the Water Tower, as well as enough exclusive shops to send a kleptomaniac into a seizure. But the neon sleaze of Rush Street, with its cocktail lounges, pizzerias, taverns, and nightclubs, was just on the other side of Michigan Avenue, with the Chez Paree only two blocks away.
My old friend—sometime girl friend—Sally Rand had recommended the St. Clair, and Beth Short, another old flame (since sadly extinguished), had lived there briefly as well. Photographer Maurice Seymour had his studio among the businesses on St. Clair’s upper floors—conveniently next to a beauty parlor—and he had contracts with damn near every burlesque house and nightclub in town, shooting portraits of entertainers and models and, in particular, showgirls and strippers.
Nothing unusual, at the St. Clair, about seeing Gypsy Rose Lee or Ann Corio or Georgia Southern traipsing through the small, nondescript lobby, carrying suitcases jammed with their seductive wardrobes, from sheer stockings to pasties to G-strings; or Rosita Royce swaying her hips as she carried cages of doves, or Sally with her (feathered) fans—not to mention Zorita tugging along her airhole-punched trunk on wheels with the python in it.
Though the lobby had practically no sitting room, a coffee shop was off to one side, and the Tap Room—with its famous Circle Bar—was off to the other. Grabbing a cup of morning Java or a noon sandwich, you were surrounded by beautiful girls; catching a cocktail after work or in the evening, ditto. Those girls were sometimes in pin curls and little or no makeup, of course, though a man with my deductive skills knew evidence of pulchritude when he saw it.
I loved the St. Clair.
Another nice thing about the hotel was the no-questions-asked attitude of the management. When the evening before, after my confab with the Fischettis, I had escorted Jackie Payne through the St. Clair’s front revolving door—carrying her two suitcases for her, while she lugged a train case—past a newsstand on one side and a bank of pay phones on the other, across the small dark-oak lobby to the elevators and up to my suite, the guy at the desk didn’t blink. Of course, this was hardly the first time he’d spotted me with a showgirl in his lobby, if the first time for one sporting a shiner.
When Rocco unexpectedly tossed Jackie out on her sweet behind, she was flat busted (in one sense, anyway), and I’d mentioned she could camp out on my sofa, for a night or two; she had girl friends at both the Croyden and the St. Clair she could contact, and maybe move in with one, until she got a job and a little money.
“But I’d kind of like to wait until this heals up,” she said in her small sweet voice, embarrassed, pointing to the black eye. She was sitting on the plump-cushioned sage green mohair couch, legs curled up under her; I was next to her, but not right next to her. She had slipped her shoes off and her toenails were painted red; her long-sleeved pink sweater and slacks showed off her trim shapely figure, and her shortish honey blonde hair was a tousled nest of curls.
Room service had brought us up a couple of burgers with french fries, and I’d plucked cold Pabsts from my refrigerator. A coffee table by the couch was the repository for our plates and beers and my stockinged feet. We only had one light on, a lamp on the end table near me, creating a forty-watt pool of glowing light. The mood was one of casual intimacy—for complete strangers, we were surprisingly comfortable with each other.
My apartment, by the way, was functionally furnished, a page torn from a Sears and Roebuck catalog—living room, bedroom, small spare room I used as a home office, and modest kitchen. I’d dressed the living room up with a television and a radio phonograph console—the radio on, at the moment, Nat King Cole softly singing “Mona Lisa” accompanied by traffic sounds from Michigan Avenue below—but I wouldn’t kid you: the apartment was really just a hotel room got slightly out of hand.
“Haven’t your girl friends ever seen a black eye before?” I asked her.
“It’s just—Ginny, the one I’ll probably call, she warned me about Rocco, way back when, and I didn’t listen.”
“Yeah, nobody likes ‘I told you so.’”
She shrugged. “I’d rather not have to answer questions. Anyway, I heal really fast. I’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”
“You can stay as long as you like—don’t worry about it. Listen, I could even stake you to a room here at the scenic St. Clair, for a few nights, if you’d rather.”
In the dim light her heart-shaped face with the pretty features took on an angelic radiance. “Why are you so sweet to me?”
“I’m just one of those Good Samaritans you hear so much about. Why, if you weighed two-sixty and had warts all over your face and two double chins, I’d probably do the same thing…. Probably.”
She laughed at that, and we’d talked. She told me the story of her Bible-thumping parents and the talent agent, who (unbelievably) had done good things for her, though she mentioned offhandedly she’d lived with him for a while. Smalltown or not, she seemed to understand the big-city rules.
“Do I look familiar to you?” she asked, rather coyly. This was on the second beer, the burger and fries a memory.
“Sure,” I said, sipping my own second Pabst. “I saw you at the Chez Paree—you were one of the Chez Adorables.”
Which was what the chorus line there was called.
“Till six or eight months back I was, but that wasn’t what I meant. About two years ago, I was Miss Chicago.”
“No kidding!”
“Yeah, in the Miss Illinois pageant. I was in all the papers.”
“Well, sure, I remember now. How could I forget that face?” Of course, I didn’t remember her. Cheesecake photos were a dime a dozen in the Chicago press, and cute as this little doll was, she was just another showgirl…albeit one with a black eye.