She tapped her cigarette into a tray and released twin dragon fumes of smoke from her nostrils. The redhead, who — like her questioner — had her pile of hair pulled back in a ponytail, was sitting in a booth in the Colony Club, well before opening... just two closer to the restrooms than Mac Wallace’s booth had been.
Janet had agreed to talk to Flo and me, as well as to arrange for several other Carousel Club veterans to do the same, one of whom was due here later.
I was on the other side of the booth sitting next to Flo, across from the lovely if slightly ill at ease Janet, and between us on the tabletop was a silver-and-black Sanyo micro-pack portable tape recorder, with reel-loaded cassettes that recorded twenty minutes, then flipped over for another twenty. It was like something out of James Bond.
Janet was in a pale green blouse and darker green shorts, wearing minimal makeup. She looked good that way, but like the club around us, wasn’t done any favors by the lights being up. She was twenty-seven or — eight, and looked ten years older. She was smoking Salems.
Flo asked, “How long have you known Jack Ruby?”
“I never met Ruby before June of last year,” she said. “He came and caught my act at the Sho-Bar in New Orleans, and offered me a gig on the spot. Said he’d never seen a sexier act. Said he’d pay big money for me to headline for him, twice what he paid any other dancer.”
I asked, “Doesn’t Carlos Marcello own the Sho-Bar?”
“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?”