That last statement tried a little too hard for my taste.
“I only know bits and pieces,” he said. “I was a sounding board for the Kennedy stories in her column, and also for what she was planning. I don’t know if you know this, Mr. Heller, but she was going to write a book. If she did the story for her paper, she might win acclaim, but she was after more — a big score, big money.”
“What do you think happened to Flo, Mr. Revell?”
He shrugged sadly. “It’s likely she accidentally OD’d. Took a little too many pills with just a little too much gin. She wasn’t a big person, you know. Wouldn’t take much to be too much. But... with this Kennedy stuff going on? I’m not an idiot. Of course she could have been murdered.”
“In that case, would you suspect someone involved in the assassination? Spooks or gangsters or Cubans?”
Oh my.
“I couldn’t say, Mr. Heller. It’s too terrible to think that that sweet woman, with so much talent and energy in her, could be gone. But I suppose...”
“You suppose?”
“Mr. Felton does have a lot to gain.”
Could it be that simple? A jealous husband killing a rich wife to trade her faithlessness in on a pile of money? Did Florence Kilgore’s passing have nothing to do with either Jack — Kennedy or Ruby?
Or had I run into that most unlikely of circumstances in this lunatic case — a genuinely accidental death?
Chapter 17
By day, the French Quarter — north of Canal Street, in the so-called “downtown” section of New Orleans — provided a quaint paradise for tourists. Awaiting them were cast-iron vines, flowers, cupids, and fruits adorning tall, cement-covered brick structures painted in light shades but with splashes of bright green via shutters and woodwork. Narrow streets were there to stroll, arrayed with antiques shops, tearooms, and art studios. Best of all, world-famous restaurants often served up their exquisite cuisine in courtyards amid banana trees, palms, and other semitropical flora, their shade still soothing in September temperatures in the 80s.
But at night, this heaven was replaced by an even more seductive hell. Those fabled restaurants — Antoine’s, Brennan’s, Arnaud’s, the Two Sisters, and the rest — closed up early, as if New Orleans were some small roll-up-the-sidewalks Midwestern town; getting a real meal after nine P.M. was a trick here, but few cared. Tourists venturing into this friendly neon Hades were after the jazz, the booze, the girls; were eager to bump into gamblers and preachers, debutantes and streetwalkers, sailors and artists, bums and entrepreneurs.
From riverboat days on, the Vieux Carré had been a fever dream of throbbing rhythm, exotic color, and authentic Dixieland. Bourbon Street in particular remained a glimmering, cocksure concourse, where “No cover, no minimum” was the rule — that and minimum cover on the strippers at such flesh palaces as Casino Royale, Gunga Den, Club Slipper, and Von Ray’s Texas Tornado.
The most popular and notorious such address was 228 Bourbon, between Bienville and Conti — the Sho-Bar, open twenty-four hours with the strippers absent only in the afternoon and early evening, replaced by a piano-accompanied girl singer. The modest three-story brick structure, with typical wrought-iron balconies on its upper floors (hotel rooms, often occupied by strippers during Sho-Bar engagements), shared the block with standbys like the Old Absinthe House and the 50 °Club and new kids like the Hotsy Totsy and Bikini A Go Go, similar establishments all, but none offering the celebrated likes of Candy Barr, Sally Rand, Blaze Starr, and (this week’s headliner) Jada of Carousel Club infamy.
Outside, pulsating neon beckoned and a canopied entrance bragged up star strippers, but the Sho-Bar interior disappointed. This drab, unimpressively appointed chapel of sleaze was crammed with postage-stamp plastic-top tables facing a modest stage with faded red curtains and a tarnished brass guardrail to keep back overenthusiastic ringsiders. Latin dance teams, tap dancers, and blue comedians were among the uninspiring “incidental acts,” strictly Ed Sullivan Show rejects. What prevented a riot among customers was the girls, who delivered.
Right now a busty beehive blonde called Nikki Corvette, statuesque in a sheer black nightie over pasties and G-string, was displaying herself in various interesting ways on a red divan — allow that in a furniture store and you’d sell a shitload of divans. The four-man tuxedoed combo up there, taking up as little real estate as possible, was playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Even in Beatlemania days, most of these clubs stuck with the area’s traditional Dixieland.
The Colony back in Dallas kicked this place’s ass, but the reputation and charisma of the French Quarter — and that name stripper talent — got them by.
The bar, with a few booths, was tucked under the balcony. I ordered a rum-and-Coke, and gave the bartender a five to let Janet know I was here. In five minutes, she was sitting with me in the farthest-back booth. She was in full stage makeup but still in street clothes — jeans and a bandana-style blue-and-white short-sleeve blouse with only her white high-heel pumps to give her away.
She reached across the table and clasped my hands with both of hers. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you, baby. I’ve missed you.”
“You look great. Doing all right? Any... problems?”
She shook her head and the tower of red hair bobbled just a little; her makeup was typically over the top, green eye shadow, heavy eyebrows, lipstick as red as a candied apple — she was everything a man could want, but would never admit.
“You’re carrying your little .22 in your purse?”
She nodded. “There hasn’t been anything like trouble, Nate. Uncle Carlos was in a few nights ago and he talked to me, so friendly and sweet. You know I’m staying upstairs, right? I probably shouldn’t. I mean, I’m sleeping with that little rod under my pillow.”
“Rod” was such a silly old term. Yet there was nothing at all silly about her concern.
Her lips smiled, her eyes begged. “Why don’t you bunk with me while you’re in town, Nate?”
“What, two rods can live safer than one?”
“Don’t make light.”
“Why don’t you come stay at the Roosevelt with me? That’s one joint Marcello doesn’t own.”
She looked past me. “When I think of poor Rose, her... her skull crushed like a fuckin’ melon. Jesus!” She shuddered.
Her hands were still clasping mine. I moved my hands around so I was clasping hers, and I squeezed. “Rose was a loose cannon, honey. She was a junkie and a flake. They know you have your head on your shoulders.”
Her chin crinkled. “Well, it could be on the shoulder of a road getting squished, you know. And Flo Kilgore, she was no junkie whore.”
“Not a whore, but maybe a... junkie of sorts.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was addicted to pills and she drank too much. It may have been accidental. And that was Manhattan — all the other deaths have been in Texas, and maybe a couple in Louisiana. I’m going to look into those.”
She gave me a smirk of a half smile. “You don’t think Uncle Carlos has friends in New York?”
I didn’t want to tell her that if Flo had been murdered, those responsible were likely CIA, not mob. That would spook her... so to speak.
“Flo may have been murdered,” I said with a nod. “But there’s no question that Rose was killed.”
She shivered. “And I set up that interview with her for you and Miss Kilgore. Nate, you gotta do something about this. You have got to stop these fuckers.”