“Bill Black isn’t in the combo anymore,” she said when they went on break. “Ailing.”
We were sitting close in a booth for four, a martini for her, a vodka gimlet for me.
“Used to be Elvis’s backup band,” I said, showing off.
“That’s old news. Early this year, they opened for the Beatles — at the Beatles’ request — on their first American tour.”
“They’re going to be here next week.”
“Bill Black?”
“The Beatles.”
She smiled a little. “Surely not at Club 3525.”
“Only after hours. They’re going to be at Memorial Auditorium a week from tonight.”
This was Friday. Since Monday, we had interviewed fifteen witnesses, and Flo had plenty of material for an assassination exposé, perfect to appear right after the Warren Commission announced its results, at the end of the month.
But she remained disappointed that I hadn’t been able to arrange an interview with Jack Ruby. That seemed out of the question, for this trip anyway, because we were both set to fly out tomorrow, her to New York and What’s My Line?, and me to Chicago and the A-1 Detective Agency.
I had talked to Barney Ross on the phone several times, in his office at the Milton Blackstone ad agency in Manhattan. Though we had all grown up on the West Side, Barney was much closer to Ruby than I was.
“Belli’s not going to be involved in the appeal,” Barney said, meaning Ruby’s famous defense lawyer. “His new defense team is led by a guy named Clinton. Sam Houston Clinton.”
It would be.
“I got feelers out,” Barney said, “to find somebody I know who knows this guy. If I can get the new man to pass my message along to Sparky, you’ll get in.”
Sparky was Ruby.
I said, “They may want you as a character witness again.”
Barney, as a famous ex — boxing champ, had testified for Ruby at the Oswald murder trial. Ruby had been convicted in March. Justice moved fast in Texas. Or anyway something moved fast.
“Maybe not,” Barney said, and sounded embarrassed. “Some people say my testimony worked against Jack. Because of my drug habit.”
Barney, who’d been a Marine and served with me in the Pacific, had come back from Guadalcanal addicted to morphine, whereas I’d come back mildly nuts enough to rate a Section Eight. Checking himself into a VA hospital for help, Barney had famously kicked the monkey on his back.
But the prosecution had used Barney’s addiction — and that as kids, he and Ruby ran errands for Al Capone — to suggest Barney was some kind of mobbed-up lowlife. In the scheme of things, his testimony hadn’t mattered, but it had been an embarrassment for the ex-champ.
“You know,” Barney was saying, “I helped raise money for the defense, on the first trial, and I’ll offer to do the same on the next one.”
“That should get a lawyer’s attention.”
“They say money talks.”
“And whispers and screams. Just see what you can do.”
I told him I’d be in Dallas through Saturday.
I’d also been on the phone with Captain Clint Peoples in Waco, calling him about checking on Rose Cheramie’s seemingly absurd story. Just yesterday the Ranger had called me back, confirming it.
“Everything the Cheramie girl told you lines up with what the trooper, Frank Fruge, says,” Peoples reported.
“So what?” I said. “It could still all just be a wild story she told Fruge.”
“Well, keep in mind Fruge did find her along the roadside where she’d been dumped. And because of the Kennedy angle, he checked up on the details of her story.”
“Yeah? Such as?”
“Seems the girl mentioned names in the drug scheme — of the boat, of the sailor, and the hotel in Houston where she had a reservation under an alias, which she also gave the trooper.”
“And it all checked out?”
“To a tee. Fruge even took her to Houston to work with the Customs people, for her to help them take the drug ring down. But apparently word got to her accomplices and the thing fell apart.”
“I didn’t know about that. She didn’t mention it.”
“Well, Nate, the key thing is, the Customs folks say the names she gave ’em were all known for criminal narcotics activity. And that Rose’s story remained consistent with no discrepancies.”
“Thank you, Clint. I appreciate this.”
“It might be a good lead into the Kennedy killing.”
“Yeah, if anybody was investigating it.”
“Aren’t you, Nate?”
“Don’t spread it around. Listen, Clint, you said the Rangers keep tabs on Mac Wallace.”
“Well, this Ranger does.”
“He’s checked out of the Adolphus, you know.”
“I do know. Early this week. What you may not know is he’s back in California, at his day job for Ling in Anaheim. Home of Disneyland?”
I had a sudden flash of following Wallace into the “It’s a Small World” boat ride and drowning him.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll have my A-1 people out there confirm that.”
Right now the Bill Black Combo was playing their big hit, “White Silver Sands,” inspiring Flo to drag me out on the little dance floor to Twist to it. The crowd was old enough that in the subdued club lighting I could get away with it. You might consider it just plain sad that a man zeroing in sixty would make a fool out of himself that way, but it made my spine pop and saved me a trip to the chiropractor.
We were on the dance floor when Janet AKA Jada came in — I’d asked her to join us after her last set at the Colony. She had left her stage makeup on and wore a lime-green fringed go-go dress that barely covered what Jack Ruby used to turn the lights down to conceal.
Seeing me doing the Twist made her laugh giddily, and who could blame her? She joined us on the dance floor (to “Don’t Be Cruel”) and we were a threesome, if not exactly like the one Rose Cheramie made with those two Cubans. Whether any of this crowd knew she was the famous/infamous Jada of the Carousel, I couldn’t tell you.
But when she started to go to town, smiling big, eyes flashing, unleashing tendrils from the tower of red hair, the rippling fringe going a hundred miles an hour, the other dancers (including Flo and me) simply gave up and gathered around, clapping to the band’s infectious beat and smiling just as big as Janet.
When the combo started in on “Harlem Nocturne,” nice and easy and jazzy, Janet latched on to me for a slow dance, and Flo — with a funny little smile — graciously capitulated, heading back to the booth.
With her curvy body plastered to me, Janet buried her face in my neck. “Why don’t you come home with me tonight?”
“It’d be rude.”
“I can’t believe you’d rather fuck that skinny bitch than me.” She ground herself into my groin. Soon she murmured into my ear, “Hello there. I remember you...”
“First of all,” I whispered, “she’s not a bitch. She’s a lovely woman, and she isn’t skinny. She’s got a nice figure.”
“As nice as mine?”
“And second, I’m not fucking her. I’m working for her as an investigator. You know that.”
“You’ve fucked her before, though, right?”
“This is a pretty swanky club for that kind of talk.”
“I thought so.”
We moved in a little circle on the crowded dance floor, smoke floating like fog, or was that steam?
“Anyway,” I managed, “we aren’t an item, you and me. You can’t be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous in general, Heller.”
“Oh?”
“I’m just jealous tonight...”
Adjusting my trousers as I came down off the slightly elevated dance floor, glad for the subdued lighting, I let Janet lead me by one hand to the booth, where I slid in beside Flo, and Janet slid in after me. In four decades as a private eye, I’d never been so pleasantly surrounded.