Tom Ellison had played bagman tonight, delivering a packet of cash to a guy who had, ironically enough, served his first jail term for scalping football tickets, and who’d first risen to mob prominence in the late thirties by acting as bagman for the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers union.
Jake eventually got caught in a struggle between two union leaders, one of whom was shot and killed in an incident where the union’s chief bagman became a principal player in a cover-up that resulted in the Teamsters taking over the union. I’d been in the middle of that and had been happy to come out of it without anybody’s blood on me, especially my own.
I knew Jake Rubinstein, all right. But I’d had little to do with Jack Ruby.
I’d seen him in Dallas a few times-the Outfit had sent him there in the late forties, as part of a Chicago takeover attempt on that wide-open town’s gambling, prostitution, and other rackets. But the Lone Star State coppers didn’t want to play, and it fizzled. Ruby had stayed on, in the strip-club business, a sort of exile. I presumed he’d continued to do the Outfit’s bidding, from time to time, but knew no details.
That left Jake and me in an awkward position. We knew each other well but hadn’t talked in years. Add to that, if he’d spotted me, he was wondering what the fuck I was doing here. Like I’d spotted him and was wondering what the fuck he was doing here.
So it started with small talk.
“What do you hear from Barney?” I asked.
“Quite a bit, really. You know, them amateur nights? I was trying to get Barney’s help and advice in shutting some of the competition down, with this non-pro stripper bullshit. He has an in with the AGVA.”
That was the American Guild of Variety Artists. Somewhere in there among the violinists and sopranos and ballet dancers they represented were strippers. That is, “exotic dancers.”
Barney worked for the Milton Blackstone Advertising Agency in New York, where his celebrity had made him a successful press agent. Like Tom Ellison, though Tom never won a welterweight championship.
The music way up front wasn’t loud enough to make conversation difficult, but we did have to lean in a little to talk.
“So, what,” I said, “you’re trying to get these amateur nights banned?”
“Fucking A. Then maybe I can turn the Vegas back into a respectable joint. You know, I’m hoping to book Candy Barr in there. When her parole’s up on that pot bust, anyway. Broad’s got two of the most famous busts in America, huh?” He cackled at that.
“Sounds like Dallas is doing right by you.”
“I’m doin’ right by it. Place’s a shithole. When the boys sent me down there, fuck-why not California, or Florida? I had to make my own way, Nate. But you can do that in America, can’t you?”
“Sure. Look at me. Horatio Alger, eat your heart out.”
“Who?”
“Nothing. Can I buy you a drink, Jake?”
“Sure. But it’s Jack now. Jake’s history.”
I grinned at him. “Like Sparky?”
He grinned back. “Well, there’s still some spark left in the old kid yet, Nate.”
I waved a waiter over. Half a dozen guys in white shirts with black ties and black trousers handled all two-hundred-some customers in the 606, no female staff other than onstage. I ordered a Coke minus the rum this time, and Jake-Jack-asked for tomato juice.
“You don’t drink, either?” he said with an impish smile.
“I had two rum-and-Cokes already. But I’m not a big boozer. Don’t tell me a club man like you is a teetotaler?”
He squinted his little black eyes, shook his head. “Bad for you. Like cigarettes. Don’t touch ’em. I don’t see you draggin’ on one, neither.”
“Only time I ever really smoked,” I said, “was in the service.”
“When you and Barney shared a foxhole.”
“That’s right.”
“On Guadalcanal.”
“Skip it, Jack.”
“Well, you’re a true hero, Nate.”
“A true hero who got out on a Section Eight.”
“Don’t give me that fuckin’ noise. Barney told me. You got the Silver Star. They mentioned that in that Life article, too, right?”
Jack had been following my storied career, apparently.
“Hell,” he said, “me? I spent the whole damn war in the South.”
“Well, my understanding is the Japs never got past Birmingham, so you did fine.”
He didn’t find that funny. He damn near looked like he might cry. “Only action I saw was when I punched out a fucking sergeant.”
“You punched out a sergeant?”
“Goddamn right! He called me a Jew bastard! Wouldn’t you punch him?”
Jake was a lot more Jewish than me, despite my last name. With my reddish-brown hair and blue eyes, I took after my Irish mother, not my Jewish pop, who had been apostate and raised me that way. But I would have given that sergeant his due beating, all right-just not where or when I could be made for it.
My Coke and Jake’s tomato juice arrived.
He raised his red-brimming glass in a toast and I clinked my Coke with it as he said, “L’Chayim,” and we nodded at each other, then sipped.
Another dancer was onstage now, visible through the blue-smoke haze. The little combo was doing its best with David Rose’s big-band “The Stripper.” Didn’t really make it, but nobody cared-the blonde onstage, Leslee Lynn, had a nice smile and nicer legs in mesh stockings that showed under the fox-fur stole she’d strutted out in, and would soon be ridding herself of.
“So what brings you to Chicago, Jack? Talent hunt?”
He was turned toward the blonde, nodding as he took in her graceful, sexy moves to the clumsy music. “Yeah, a guy has to keep a finger on the pulse.”
“Is that what he has to keep his finger on.”
The bullet head turned my way. His smile was boyish, in a sleazy kind of way. “Lou says this girl is a class act. She’s a University of Chicago grad, he tells me.”
“What healthy male wouldn’t want to see her diploma? So you’ll hit a lot of the clubs in town, looking for dancers?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “You go where the best shows are, at least in the Midwest and South. There are some talented gals in Frisco and Hollywood, but why ship them in, when there’s Fort Worth and New Orleans in my own backyard?”
We both watched the fox stole as it drifted to the floor and got dragged behind Leslee’s confident stride. She wasn’t as busty as the other girls, but she knew how to work the crowd.
“Class,” Jack said admiringly. “Your average stripper? Just ain’t got no class.” Without looking at me, he added, “And how about you, Nate? What brings you to the 606?”
So he had made me.
You didn’t need to ask a Chicagoan like Nate Heller what he was doing in a joint where good-looking girls took off their clothes. No. He’d seen me, all right.
“I met a client here earlier,” I said.
Had he seen me duck out, after Tom? And come back in?
“We finished our business,” I said, “and I decided to stick around and partake in a little culture.”
“You and Lou Nathan go way back.”
“That we do. But truth be told, nowadays the Chez Paree is more my speed.”
He nodded, half smiled, then sighed dreamily. “Someday. Someday that’ll be me, booking Sinatra and Sammy Davis.”
“Booking Sammy Davis in Dallas? You are ambitious.”
He found that real funny, or pretended to.
The combo moved onto “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in honor of Leslee’s heart-shaped pasties (I may have been in my fifties, but I had twenty-twenty vision).
Jack turned his back on the stripper and showed me a different kind of smile. The kind with no teeth. Accompanied by hooded eyes.
“We been friends a long time, Nate,” he said.
Not really, but I gave him another little half toast and said, “Maxwell Street days.”