Ask Not

by Max Allan Collins

  “I don’t know who owns it,” she said, shrugging again. “But his brother Pete hired me, so maybe that tells you something. As for Ruby, he was a loon from word go, but headlining in a Dallas club appealed to me. My ex and me had a club go bust in the French Quarter not long before, and I was on my own again, so it was a chance for a new start.”

  Flo asked, “How did it work out?”

  “Well, the Carousel never did draw like the Colony. But me, personally, I did great with the audiences. Ask Nate—men go crazy over me. But that Ruby could be a horse’s ass. He hires me because I’m … uninhibited onstage, right? ‘The sexiest thing I ever saw,’ he says. Then I go to work for him and he shuts the lights off on me and docks my pay for being ‘raunchy,’ when all I did was flash a little gash … uh, what I mean to say, Miss Kilgore, is … give the occasional customer a little peek under the G.”

  “He docked you for being too wild onstage?”

  “Yeah, and I said if he didn’t pay up, I was gonna sue him and then he threatened me.”

  I said, “With violence?”

  “Oh yeah. I took him to court on a peace bond over it. He was a hothead, ask anybody. One of those guys with a ‘little man’ complex. If some a-hole was causing trouble in the club, he wouldn’t let his bouncer take care of it, no, he had to toss the bum down the stairs himself.”

  “Did he ever hit you?”

  “No, but I thought he might. And he carried guns around all the time, waved ’em around, and I mean, he was obviously a little unstable.”

  Flo asked, “Unstable enough, hotheaded enough, to kill Lee Harvey Oswald out of love for Kennedy?”

  “Oh, he didn’t love Kennedy,” she said with a snort of a laugh, a fresh cigarette in her mouth as she lit herself up with a little silver Zippo. “He hated the Kennedys, Bobby particularly. I don’t know where they get that garbage about how he was trying to prevent Jackie from…” She played it melodramatic. “… the heartache of a trial!”

  “Did Oswald ever come into the Carousel? Did Ruby know him?”

  Janet thought about that, the vaguely oriental eyes unblinking. Drew on the cigarette, held in the smoke, let it out in a big blue cloud. Then she gestured with a red-nailed finger. “Turn that gizmo off.”

  Flo clicked it off.

  “That’s a dangerous subject,” Janet said, sitting forward, with a smile devoid of humor. “Dying is getting contagious in this town, if you discuss that subject.”

  Flo held up her hands, palms out. “Off the record, then.”

  She sighed smoke. “They knew each other, okay? Oswald came in, half a dozen times, but I don’t think he cared about the girls. He might’ve been a homo. Never looked at the stage, anyway. I figure, if a guy would rather talk to Jack Ruby than watch me strut my stuff? That’s a homo.”

  “He and Ruby were friendly?”

  “They’d sit at a table and talk. That cop joined ’em once or twice. You know, just about every cop in town came in the Carousel, for free beer and food and girls.”

  “What cop?”

  “The one Oswald wound up shooting. Tippit. He was a pal of Ruby’s. Ruby’s best friend was that cop’s landlord.”

  I saw Flo’s eyes tighten, and I had that familiar prickly sensation along the back of my neck myself.

  “And don’t ask me what they were discussing,” Janet said, shaking an open palm at us, “because I don’t know. I noticed ’em from the stage—I never circulate in a club much. Listen, it’s a little-known fact, but Ruby swings both ways.”

  Flo touched the switch on the recorder. “May I turn this back on?”

  Janet nodded, exhaling smoke out her mouth.

  Flo said, “Swung both ways. Go ahead.”

  “He was with women sometimes, but it was more like he was proving a point. And he had this funny habit of, if he got one of his dancers to put out for him? She was on borrowed time. He lost respect for her. ‘Little cunt has no class,’ he would say. And she’d be gone.”

  I asked, “Did he come on to you?”

  She grinned. “That’s the one that takes the goddamn fuckin’ cake. He asked me to move in with him.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I know! He knew I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me, really. But he liked what I stood for.”

  Flo asked, “What do you stand for?’

  Her smile was enormously self-satisfied. She seemed to sense that Flo and I had the kind of rapport that might suggest sexual intimacy, and that was giving her just a little attitude mixed in with the apprehension.

  “For being the kind of spectacular piece of ass,” she said, “that any red-blooded man would kill the Pope in the front window of Neiman’s to spend one night with.”

  I said, “But what you’re known for is not what he wanted out of you?”

  She shook her head, and the red ponytail swung. “No, he said I’d have my own bedroom and it would be strictly platonic. He just wanted to show me off to the neighbors, the world. To make people think he was the kind of man’s man who could rate, well…”

  “A spectacular piece of ass,” Flo said pleasantly.

  Now Janet liked her better. “Right. Listen, there’s, uh … one other thing.” She gestured for Flo to switch off the tape machine again.

  When it had clicked off, Janet said, “The morning of the twenty-second of November, last year … you know what day that was, right?”

  “Right,” Flo and I said.

  “Well, that morning, I stopped by the club. He was there early, a lot, doing business-type things, and, anyway, he’d hired me clear through the start of this year, but stopped paying me even though I was still working. This was maybe a week before the assassination I mean, that I quit. Well, I went around to collect my costumes, which are very expensive, I’m known for my fancy costumes, and also to get what back pay he owed me. I was outside his little office and I heard him on the phone. He was talking to somebody and don’t ask me who it was. I might have an idea, but do not fucking ask, okay? Anyway, he was upset. He said he didn’t want to be part of ‘this thing.’”

  Flo, sitting forward, asked, “What thing?”

  “That wasn’t clear. You need to understand, that was not clear. But I gathered he was going to be involved in some kind of … something really bad, something really big. And also he said, ‘I never been party to killing anybody in my life,’ okay?”

  I said, “But he couldn’t have been talking about Oswald—this was before Kennedy even hit town.”

  “I don’t know, Nate,” Janet said, and her nerves were showing, her hands trembling, her eyes moist. “Maybe killing that rabbity little homo was already on the program, how should I know? Or maybe Ruby didn’t want to be part of killing Jack Kennedy. If you really want a dumb goddamn stripper’s opinion.”

  I reached over and took one of her hands and smiled at her. “That’s ‘exotic dancer,’ okay?”

  She nodded and smiled a little-girl smile; she’d been one a million years ago.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “I was leaving, trying to just sneak out without being seen, and suddenly he’s back in the doorway of his rathole and saying, ‘Hey, Jada! You want something?’ And I said, oh, I could see you were busy and, you know, didn’t wanna bother. And he says, ‘I know I owe you some money, doll. Next week be okay?’ And I say sure. And he says, ‘Why don’t we bury the hatchet? Come back and work for your Uncle Jack.’ And I say, maybe, and he says, ‘But not tonight. We’re gonna be closed tonight.’ And I say fine, but I’m thinking, something big sure as hell is going down—closing the club on a Friday night? Was he kidding?”

  Flo said, “And this was before there was news of the assassination?”

  “It was before the goddamn assassination! Anyway, I went over to the Alamo Court, on Fort Worth Avenue, where I was staying, and threw everything I owned in a couple of suitcases and I jumped in my Caddy and I booked it. Jesus, people were already lined up on the street to see the President, happy as clams to be in Dal
las. Me, I just wanted out. Oh-you-tee, out. I knew I could always get work in New Orleans, and then, fuck, I hit this guy.”

  I said, “What?”

  “I struck a goddamn pedestrian, okay? I was hauling ass, but luckily he wasn’t hurt bad, just kinda clipped him, the guy, Charles Something, and I tried to give him some money but he was real pissed and yelling, so I took him over to a clinic where he got examined and stuff, X-rayed and that, and I was trying to say, I’ll pay for everything, just let me give you my name and you got my license number, but I gotta get the hell out of Dallas, okay? And they finally did.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “What do you think? I got the hell out of Dallas. I was maybe half an hour out of town when the news came over the radio.” She looked past us. “Oh. Rose is here. You should talk to her, now.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  You could see the pretty girl she once had been inside the puffy visage, before droopiness touched the big brown eyes that had witnessed too much. She had a pale indoor look rare in Texas but common to B-girls, her hair dishwater blonde with hints of gold, rising in a permanent wave over a heart-shaped face around which more blonde hair cascaded to the shoulders of a yellow blouse whose cheerfulness was offset by a frayed collar. All her features were nice, though the nose may have been missing some cartilage—men had knocked this female around; she carried abuse on her slightly hunched shoulders like the heavy load it was.

  She may never have been a headliner, but even now she had a nice figure, making it easy to buy her as a credible act on a strip club bill, drenched in the forgiveness of red and blue stage lighting. Easier still to imagine her working the dingy mini-trailer-park bordellos behind bars and gas stations along scrubby strips of highway, and providing a lonely man a shabby fantasy that led to temporary relief.

  I’d have been surprised if she were past thirty, even if she did look near forty. Her slightly hooded eyes and her languid manner confirmed drug addict, but she wasn’t high at the moment, sitting across from Flo Kilgore and me.

  The tape recorder was fine with our guest. She chain-smoked Parliaments as we talked. Maybe she thought filter-tip cigarettes were healthier. Well, she was right in a sense—they were healthier than shooting heroin, which is what Rose Cheramie (“That’s my stage name, I like it better than Melba Marcades”) had been on, last year, on the evening of November 20.

  “I don’t mind talking,” she said in a husky, even ravaged, alto, “and I’m not afraid, hell, I talked to all sorts of cops about this and nobody seems to give a shit. So what’s the harm?”

  “We appreciate your willingness to be interviewed,” Flo said, but the stripper didn’t need much interviewing. She launched right in, in a Texas drawl that managed to sound lazy and rapid-fire at once.

  “I’m not as young as I used to be, and I never was no frisky firecracker like Jada. So stripping is just one way to make money for me. Sometimes, when gigs’re slow, I turn a trick or two. Guess I trick more than strip these days, and also, not often, when things get tough, y’know, I run dope sometimes. This particular time I was doing it for Jack Ruby, before he got himself famous. Years ago, I used to strip at his old club, the Pink Door. It’s closed now.”

  Sitting forward, Flo asked, “You ran illegal drugs for Jack Ruby?”

  Rose laughed; it was like sandpaper rubbing against itself. “That makes it sound like he was the boss. He was no big shot. Just another goddamn go-between. They got layers, these bent-nose boys, like a cake. Anyway, Pinky—that was his nickname back in the Pink Door days, I never did call him Sparky like some do—he does what he’s told, like any small fish. The run I was making was from Miami to Houston, but we was stopping off in Dallas. To pick up the money…” She raised her black, mostly painted-on eyebrows. “… among other things, to say the least.”

  I asked, “You had the dope with you, Rose?”

  She shook her head, exhaling smoke. “No, we’re picking up the stuff, and I was only along so a girl could make the trade, money for smack. It’s less … conspicuous. I mean, the guys with me, these two were hard-core badasses and looked it. I figured them for Italians at first, but turned out they was Cuban. Shouldn’ta surprised me. Y’know, you can’t shake a stick in Miami without hitting one of them Cuban spics.”

  “So I hear,” I said, watching her light up a fresh Parliament off a book of matches labeled GAEITY CLUB.

  Waving out the flame, she said, “The plan was, pick up the money to pay for the stuff in Dallas, then go to Houston and check in to the Rice Hotel, meet up in a bar with this sailor comin’ into Galveston, give sailor boy the cash for the ten kilos, and then hightail it back to Dallas and trade the dope for my kid.”

  I frowned at her and Flo was wincing in confusion.

  “Trade for your kid, Rose?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “I was kinda bein’ forced into this thing. They was blackmailing me to do it. One of ’em was holding on to my baby boy for, you know, collateral. On the plus side, I was gettin’ eight grand.”

  Gently, Flo said, “Rose, it’s the assassination we’re investigating. You do understand that?”

  “You mean, what does running dope have to do with shit?” Nobody smiled at the unintentional pun. “Thing is, these Cuban pricks got to talkin’ loose in front of me. It was a long trip and we got friendly, had a couple three-ways at motels. Felt like a vacation to me, though they was making sure we was making good enough time to get to Dallas when they was expected. These guys, they seemed … really keyed up, ya ask me. They was laughin’ way too much.”

  I asked, “Drunk?”

  “Not that drunk. And not hopped up, neither. They just kept makin’ these weird, in-jokey comments—‘Things to do,’ one of ’em says, like he’s reading off a list. ‘Go to Dallas. Pick up money. Kill the President. Go to Houston. Pick up dope.’”

  Flo and I exchanged glances.

  Rose blew out smoke. “When I was in the backseat, sleeping—they thought—they got really loose-lip about it. ‘We’re gonna kill that lying son of a bitch.’ ‘That bastard is gonna pay.’ And do you know who they was talkin’ about? John Kennedy is who! This was … the Wednesday night before it happened.”

  I asked, “What did you think about that, Rose?”

  “I thought it was fucked up. I thought maybe I should bug out, maybe find a cop or something and try to stop it. They had a fucking rifle with a scope in the trunk, you know. So when we stopped for an overnight, after the three-way and they got drunk and fell asleep, I kinda … well, I didn’t call the cops. See, everybody thought I was clean, I was straight, but really I was still using. I thought a taste might help make this Kennedy thing go away. I had two cardboard boxes of my crap in the trunk, next to that rifle? Clothes of mine and baby clothes and also down in there, hidden away, was my works.”

  “Works?” Flo asked.

  “Needle and so on,” I said quietly.

  Flo mouthed, “Oh,” and nodded.

  “So the next morning,” Rose went on, “they saw my works in the john and the geniuses figure out I wasn’t clean and had junk along, and yelled at me and slapped me around and I just kind of took it. I figured they needed me, so they’d get over it. I was the contact for the sailor, you know? We keep driving, and driving, and then we stop in this little shit bump, Eunice—we’re in Louisiana now—and it’s like maybe five thou pop, but they like to party in that little town, and we stopped at the Silver Slipper Lounge, a bar that Ruby had a piece of. Maybe the Cubans were contacting somebody, maybe they were just thirsty, I dunno. I knew the place a little, I tricked there before, they had little trailers out back. Manny was a nice man, Manny Manuel I mean, the manager?”

  “Rose,” I said, “can we stay on the subject please?”

  She gave me a flirtatious look. “I am on the subject, Handsome. I’m all over the subject.” Then her expression grew serious. She flicked ash into a tray.

  “See, I’d been thinking
about what they was saying about the President, just kind of getting in a real funk about it. I tried to make myself think they was kidding or something, but they were for real, man. They were part of … part of something bigger than they were, and it excited their asses. This sounds crazy, but it’s almost like they were doing the dope run so that if they got picked up, that would be what it was for.”

  As opposed to killing the President.

  “So we’re drinking and talking, and I say something like, ‘What do you wanna kill John Kennedy for? What did he ever do to you? He’s got a wife and kids, you know.’ And one of them Cubans says, ‘The Bay of Pigs is what,’ but the other one is already swinging on me. Right there in the damn nightclub. He cold-cocks me and I’m off the chair and on the floor, and when I wake up, Manny is pushing the Cubans through the door and outside, tellin’ ’em he doesn’t run that kind of joint. Manny helps me up and I thank him and I go back outside and they’re waiting, they grab me and they toss me in the backseat and one Cuban crawls in back after me and the other gets behind the wheel and peels out. They’re going maybe fifty and we’re out of town now with nobody around when the Cuban with me in the backseat opens his door and I get kicked out and go rolling. The car screeches to a stop, and then I see them both get out, and one opens the trunk. I try to get to my feet ’cause I think they’re going for that rifle, but they was just after my boxes of stuff, and they tossed them on the roadside and just took off.”

  This must have been what Janet meant when she told me Rose said the “shooters who got Kennedy” had tried to kill the woman.

  Flo said, “How badly were you hurt?”

  She shrugged, spoke through exhaled smoke. “Not serious, bumps and bruises and scrapes, but back at the club, somebody saw those guys grab me and told Manny, and he got concerned, bless him, and drove out looking for me. He found me, all bloody and hitchhiking, and took me to the hospital there in Eunice, to the emergency room. They cleaned me up but said they couldn’t admit me because all I had was bruises and scrapes, and then I told them I was having drug withdrawal and could they help me, and they called the cops. A nice officer I met before … ’cause I worked at the Slipper from time to time and the cops knew all the girls there … anyway, this nice trooper named Fruge—it’s an easy name to remember, ’cause of the dance?”