“It’s nothing to sweat about, Lou.”
“You wouldn’t kid a guy?”
“Naw.” I gave my suit coat a gentle pat over the nine-millimeter. “Just happened to drop in for a drink after a job where I needed the comfort.”
“You say so,” he said cheerfully.
He stayed another thirty seconds, which made this a near two-minute conversation, possibly a new record, before he went scurrying off to his next stop.
I had asked for and received a booth in back, close to the door and well away from the stage, in the packed little joint. I turned my eyes loose. More women patrons than there used to be-female conventioneers, or open-minded wives or girlfriends. I figured the gals were letting the overly lipsticked, somewhat over-the-hill cuties up there working their way down to pasties and G-strings warm their guys up for them. Less work to do back home or at the hotel.
This former grocery was just a single room, maybe forty feet wide and two hundred feet deep. On one side was a long bar edging three tiers of tables accommodating perhaps seventy small tables facing a postage-stamp stage where one stripper after another was accompanied by a four-piece band: drums, guitar, accordion, and bass guitar. The room was dark, with a curtain nailed to the back wall, the ceiling-mounted lighting over the stage as nakedly visible as its subjects.
There was no cover, and the rum-and-Coke Lou bought me covered half of the two-drink minimum. Not watered down, either, unless that was special treatment courtesy of the management. I let my eyes slowly travel through the fog of smoke and across the jammed-in patrons at the tables, but the backs of all these heads didn’t do much for me, despite my detective skills.
I didn’t spot anybody who looked suspicious or dangerous or in any way out of the ordinary, at least not until Tom Ellison came in, looking pinched and anxious.
A raincoat over his arm, hatless, with his blond crew cut standing up as if in fright, he was in a camel-color suit with a plaid vest-I’d suggested he wear something that stood out, to help his contact spot him, and he hadn’t let me down. Gus, the pudgy, balding manager who acted as a sort of headwaiter, came up to tell him no seating was available except at the bar, and Tom nodded and thanked him and found a stool over there.
I just sat and sipped my drink and pretended to watch a skinny redhead with more breastworks than seemed likely prance around in a filmy harem costume. Really, I was keeping an eye on Tom, who wasn’t any more nervous than a first-time father in a maternity-ward waiting room.
The PR exec had fulfilled his two-drink minimum by way of a couple of martinis when a figure rose from a front-row seat and half turned to knife his way through the many tables to the bar-a burly-looking little guy with black hair whose color may have come from a bottle, and black shark eyes that searched out Tom.
No mistaking him-this was the contact, stocky, in a nice blue suit with red-white-and-blue tie, very snappy-looking, but not enough to offset his pasty barroom complexion or his rather blank-featured oval face with its five-o’clock-shadowed jowls. He looked like a Li’l Abner caricature that Al Capp hadn’t quite finished with.
I couldn’t hear the conversation. It was brief. Appeared friendly, the contact affable, Tom stilted. Smiles were exchanged, and the envelope handed over, casually, nothing surreptitious about it. Nobody was watching them but me. Everybody else was enjoying the redhead, who was down to her pasties now, tiny annoyances on the cantaloupe breasts, with the filmy harem pants next on the going-going-gone list.
The stocky contact guy nodded, smiled again, shook hands with Tom, patted him on the shoulder, and threaded back through the smoke and the crowd to his waiting table. Tom had been good about not acknowledging my presence, but now he looked right at me, and I nodded as imperceptibly as possible.
When the crowd burst into applause at the final reveal-Red plucked off her pasties and got a standing ovation out of a lot of guys, probably even those still sitting down-Tom gave the bartender a generous five-spot, and headed out.
I waited till the next stripper, a busty brunette, had shed a few garments, then slipped out of the club myself.
It was drizzling a little. Tom was waiting at a cab, about to get in, but pausing as I’d instructed him till he got the high-sign from me.
I nodded at him, indicating all was well with the world, and he disappeared off into the rain-slick night.
Me, I turned to go back into the 606.
I knew that little guy, that contact with the nice suit and the shark eyes. I knew him to be a Hoffa associate, but more than that I just … well, knew him. He was Jake Rubinstein, from the West Side, an old acquaintance but not exactly a friend.
He knew me, too, of course.
Which wouldn’t have mattered, but I was pretty sure he’d spotted me.
So I needed to go back in there and deal with him. I could start by asking him what he was doing back in Chicago. He’d been in Dallas for years, running his own strip clubs.
Under the name Jack Ruby.
CHAPTER 2
The little combo was doing as jazzy a version of “Harlem Nocturne” as possible with an accordion in the lineup, the drummer giving the big exotic brunette plenty to grind to. Her name was Tura Satana and she’d come out in a Japanese kimono but was down to pasties and a skirt that was just a couple fore-and-aft wispy swatches. I was on my second rum-and-Coke and ready to forgive the Japanese for Pearl Harbor when I saw the stocky figure in the dark suit and narrow dark tie rise from his front table and make his way toward the rear of the club.
He made a big show of noticing me, grinning and pointing his finger at me like a gun.
I gave him a smile, and waved him over to the back booth I was hogging. He skirted the cluster of tables and made a beeline, his hand extended. I half rose on my side of what was really a semi-booth, its back to the wall, with a table and two chairs making it easier for patrons to angle toward the stage. Even from here, tucked in the corner, the view wasn’t bad.
After we shook hands, his grip show-off tight, Jake indeed angled his chair so that he could alternate his attention between me and the bosomy Japanese stripper, who put a lot of energy into her bumps and grinds, legs spread so far that her flimsy skirt flapped and snapped between them.
“Her I gotta book,” Jake said, as if we were in the middle of a conversation, not the start. “Gotta hand it to ol’ Lou-he’s got an eye for talent. ‘Made in Japan’ is right!”
I was just thinking about apologizing to Miss Satana for Hiroshima myself. “Still in the club business, huh, Jake?”
He nodded. His thinning black hair was slicked back, and his tiny black eyes glittered. Close up, his pasty face lost some of its blankness, and you could see a certain enthusiasm for living there. Also, he seemed a little nuts.
“Oh yeah. The Carousel is my baby. Right downtown. But I’m gonna move it to a bigger, even better location before long. Thinking about having two runways, to bring the girls closer to the customers.”
“Worked for Jolson. So, just the one club now? Thought you had several.”
He pawed the air like a bored lion. “Yeah, got another joint called the Vegas, where we put on these amateur nights. The yahoos love that stuff, half-drunk college girls and secretaries gettin’ up and strippin’ off. No class, them broads. But what are you gonna do? Gotta give the public what it wants.”
We’d once known each other pretty well, growing up on the West Side and sharing a friend in Barney Ross, who’d gone from tough kid to welterweight boxing champ. Barney always had more patience with Jake Rubinstein than I could ever muster. I considered Sparky (his long-ago street name) a hotheaded little shakedown artist; but Jake was jake in Barney’s eyes. After all, hadn’t they run errands a buck a pop together, for the Capone gang?