Jackie—who had crawled in bed in just the sheer panties—was asleep and the lights of the night were filtering in off the lake, bathing her in blue-tinged ivory. She looked lovely, childlike, her face puffy from crying, but also from youth; her mouth had a swollen bruised look that had nothing to do with Rocco’s abuse. When she turned toward me, the covers pulled down off her mostly naked form, I reached over to pull them back up, and tuck her in, like daddy’s little girl.
That was when I noticed the needle tracks.
This morning, in the cold light of day, we had talked about it, at my kitchen table, over the breakfast I’d prepared.
“I’ve been on it for six months,” she said.
“Why? Doesn’t make any sense, Jackie—a smart, talented kid like you, with ambition enough to buck her parents and pay for her own dance lessons….”
She wasn’t looking at me; she was staring down into the eyes of her sunny-side up eggs. “I got depressed. Rocky, when he was acting nice, said he could help me. Get me medicine. So I wouldn’t be blue.”
Wrapped up in the silver robe I’d first seen her in at Fischetti’s, she didn’t look at all bad—she certainly didn’t look like a junkie, and her young, pretty features, sans makeup, served her well.
“He got you medicine, all right,” I said.
She was shaking her head, stealing a look at me, now and then. “I was so damn depressed, I would have tried anything…including razor blades. Now…what am I going to do, Nate? I don’t even have a supplier—Rocky gave me the stuff, himself.”
“That fucking asshole.”
She heard the rage in my voice, and it startled her, scared her. Her eyes were wild, a hand held like a claw at the side of her face as she said, “You’re going to kick me out, too, aren’t you?” She looked down into her coffee cup; she hadn’t eaten a bite of her toast and eggs. “You’re going to throw me out on the street. Just like Rocco!”
“Shut up.”
The wild eyes dared me. “You want to slap me? Go ahead! Slap me!”
I almost did. But instead I just said, “When’s it going to get bad for you?”
She sighed, swallowed—air, not food. “Sometime this morning it’ll start.”
“Jesus.”
“I…I might be able to call a girl I used to know at the Chez Paree. I think she’s still at the Croyden. She smoked reefers all the time…she’s got a connection, maybe I could—”
“But you don’t have any money, Jackie. It costs thirty bucks a day, at least, to support a habit like yours.”
The eyes stayed wild but the voice turned timid. “Maybe…maybe you could loan me some. If I can have my medicine, I can get myself put together and go out and get a job—maybe now that Rocco doesn’t want me anymore, I can get a job singing or dancing somewhere.”
I shrugged, stirring sugar into my coffee. “You could always strip. You did a hell of one for me last night.”
I’d meant that as a dig, but instead it had only got her going.
“I think I could do that…. I think I could stand to do that. It’s dancing, right? It’s a kind of dancing.”
I looked at this girl, this sweet smalltown girl, and knew how close she was to the abyss.
“You’ll get a job, all right,” I said. “You’ll be over at the Mayfair Hotel with the other hookers.”
Horror filled the brown eyes, including the black-and-blue one. “No…. No I would never do that. How can you say that? Last night you were so kind…. How can you….” And she put her right hand over her face and began to cry.
She was trembling a little too, but I was afraid it had more to do with the stuff she was starting to crave than any sorrow or shame she might be feeling.
I sat forward. “Now listen to me—a friend of mine got hooked on morphine. He was on it for years, and he kicked it. You’ve only been riding the horse for a few months. Do you want to get off it?”
Shuddering, she said, “Oh yes…oh yes.”
“I can help arrange that. I’ll have to make a few calls, but I can arrange it.”
Her eyes searched my face. “How can I pay for that…for treatment?”
“I’ll float you a loan.” I had a sip of coffee. “And until we can get you into the right clinic, I’m going to make a few other calls.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Somebody’ll be around this afternoon with what you need.”
“Do I…understand you right?”
“You do. For the next few days, I’ll support your habit. The guy who comes around, he’ll be colored. You can trust him, far as it goes. You’ve got the works?”
“The what?”
Christ, she was a junkie and she didn’t even know the lingo. Can you beat that? A sheltered drug addict. Fucking Rocco Fischetti.
Patiently, I asked, “You have your own needle and so on?”
“In my suitcase, yes.”
“Do you have something nice to wear?”
“What? Why?”
“Because once you’ve had your medicine, and’ve had a chance to relax, I want you to make yourself presentable. We’re going out tonight.”
She was shaking her head, as if trying to clear her ears. “You’re taking me out?”
“That’s what I said.”
So when I came back to the St. Clair—after my meeting with the Kefauver crowd, and my encounter with Sam Giancana and Bill Drury, at the Stevens—she was herself again…a lovely, doll-faced innocent in a dazzling black cocktail dress, black crepe off-the-shoulder V-neck top and ruffled tiers of black net over a taffeta skirt. The sleeves of the black top, however, came down midforearm, covering sins. Pearls at her throat, cherry lipstick, white gloves….
“Do you approve?” she asked, bright as a penny, again outstretching her arms in tah dah fashion.
Her medicine had done wonders.
“You’re a knockout.”
She took my arm; she smelled wonderful—Chanel No. 5. “Where are we going tonight, my love?”
I grinned at her. “My pal Frankie is opening, tonight.”
“Frankie? Sinatra? Isn’t he…isn’t that…the Chez Paree?”
“That’s right.”
She looked horror-struck. “But Rocco and his brothers are bound to be there….”
“I know.”
“Oh, Nate…Rocco could start something.”
“One can always hope,” I said.
Like most of us in Chicago, the Chez Paree—that garish, glitter-and-glamour nightclub at Fairbanks Court and Ontario—had humble roots: the Near Northside’s fabled bistro had once been just another warehouse, before Ben Hecht’s artist pal Pierre Nuytens turned it into a fortress of festivity in the late twenties. A few years later, tired of paying off cops and fending off gangsters, Nuytens sold his Chez Pierre to Mike Fritzel, an old hand in the nightclub game, who, with Joe Jacobsen, immediately redubbed the gaudy barn the Chez Paree, inviting “the Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” Sophie Tucker, to crack a bottle of bubbly over the building’s name plate. Twenty years later, Sophie was still returning annually to celebrate that christening with maudlin tunes and filthy jokes.
The bright, immense showroom seated five hundred, and presented entertainment of the first magnitude, including such $10,000-a-week stars as Jimmy Durante, Henny Youngman, and Martin & Lewis, with orchestras like Ted Lewis, Paul Whiteman, and Vincent Lopez, all augmented by the prettiest chorus line in America. Add fine dining (not your typical nightclub’s third-rate food at cutthroat prices), and the joint almost didn’t need its backroom gambling casino, the Gold Key Club, to make it the top after-dark spot in town.
Almost.
Not that the celebrated showroom didn’t have drawbacks: its very size and noonday-sun brightness seemed at odds with the postwar trend for intimate clubs. Then there were the massive square pillars, causing patrons viewing problems; an art moderne pastel wall mural of the planets that dated the joint; and all those linen-covered tables mashed together treating high-class customers like passengers in steerage. Plenty of good seats to be had, though, arranged as they were around the dance floor onto which the Chez Paree showgirls frequently spilled down from the stage/bandstand to do their elaborate production numbers.