“This is my friend Nita,” I told her. “Nita, this is Marguerite.”
“Call me Elaine,” she said with a frozen smile. “I’m only Marguerite at the Classic Cat in L.A. Listen, a couple of things.”
Cheerily I said, “Yes?”
“First, I don’t get off till five. Which means we don’t get off till after that, if you catch my drift. And second, threesome costs more — even B.Y.O.B.”
Nita asked, “Bring your own bottle?”
“Bring your own babe,” the dancer said to her. Then to me: “And there’s one more thing. Mister, I didn’t drug you or anything. You passed out, must’ve been tying one on or something, and I helped get you to the doc’s. He said he could get you back on your feet. That’s all I know so don’t bother going there. I did you a favor. That’s between you and the doc and leave me the fuck out of it.”
My right hand rested on the table, still kind of waving the hundred, clutched between the thumb and middle finger of my right hand. “No, that’s not going to fly, Elaine.”
An eyebrow went up. She was a pretty thing, a little hard, but I even liked the pug nose, or maybe what it might represent. I handed her the C-note. When she had it, I clutched her wrist. Hard.
The other eyebrow joined the first one up near her hairline.
“You were party to a kidnapping,” I said, softly, smiling a little. “And what’s worse, it was mine.”
“Listen, mister—”
“You listen. I will overlook that you slipped me a nail-polish Mickey Finn. We’ll just let that slide by.”
Her eyes flared. “What the hell do you want then?”
“I want you to accompany us to the FBI and share everything you know about Dr. Joseph W. Bryant.”
Her features tightened. “What is it you think I know?”
I shrugged. “You tell me. But I figure you either have, or used to have, a polka-dot dress in your closet.”
That chilled her. The blood drained from her face and she tried to talk but nothing came out. Nita and I were staring coldly at her and that couldn’t have been fun.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked her.
“Some... some kind of investigator or something.”
Apparently I’d finally found somebody from Hollywood who didn’t see me as the Private Eye to the Stars.
“Elaine,” I said, “the doc told you and your friend Susie, back at the Classic Cat, that he’s the hypnotist who programmed Sirhan Sirhan.”
She shook her head and all that brunette hair seemed to shiver. “He told us a lot of crazy things. He’s a regular of ours. Digs threesomes. We see him together, all the time, and he brags about all sorts of—”
“No. You know it’s more than talk. You helped him kidnap me, remember? You do know that kidnapping is a Class A felony? If I go to the FBI about that—”
Her hands came up, palms out, and it stopped me.
She leaned in, looked at me, looked at Nita and back to me. Her voice was very soft and had a tremor, like a poor radio transmission.
“All right,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk about anything else — no girl in the polka-dot dress shit. Get me? That night... you know what night I’m talking about... I did what I was asked to and had no fucking idea where it was going. None. I was high and thought I hallucinated it all for the longest time. Now I’m in it up to my ass and... I’ve kept my head down and now you’re asking me to... I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I kept my voice low and steady. “I have friends at the FBI. I have enemies at the LAPD and in the CIA, but I’m tight with the FBI. And if I give them your name with my belief about what all you’ve been involved in, they will come looking for you, and they will land hard. You’ll be in that proverbial world of hurt, which is right where you don’t want to be.”
Her features wrinkled up like a crushed paper cup, and she glanced back toward the stage and then at me. “You don’t understand. He’s here. He’s here tonight. Right now!”
“Who is here?”
Her words came in a rush. “The doc!” She leaned closer. “Look, like I said, I work till five. I’ll go with you to the FBI. Just don’t say anything to the doc. He’ll be out of here before me. All he handles is the intermission, puts on his little show, and then he’s gone. You need to crawl into some quiet corner where he can’t see you.”
And she got up and scurried backstage.
Nita and I looked at each other.
“What the hell?” I asked her, blinking.
“What the hell?” she asked me, blinking back.
But we took Elaine’s advice and went back to the bar and found the most out of the way spot over at one end and settled in, not knowing what to think.
That was when Dr. Joseph W. Bryant, in a red coat and yellow tie worthy of a ringmaster, came through the red backstage curtains as if he had brought them along with him. His flared pants were a bright floral print and he wore a corny gold sultan’s turban. The audience laughed and a few whistled and one or two cheered and got a smiling bow out of him. The doc had clearly performed here before. With his Coke-bottle glasses magnifying his eyes, Bryant brought to mind Shemp in the Three Stooges playing a swami. I saw Carson at a table with a showgirl, amused, perhaps by the Carnac the Magnificent turban.
Standing at the top of the dance floor in his full six three and nearly four-hundred pounds — the stage behind him, the band on a break and the go-go girls, too — he said, “For those of you who don’t know me, allow me to introduce myself — I am Dr. Charles W. Bryant, M.D., J.D., F.A.I.T.H., F.A.C.M.H. That’s a lot of alphabet soup that spells out the world’s most prominent hypnotherapist.”
His pause and lifted chin, thrusting his Amish beard forward, prompted applause and more hooting and such. Nita and I had our backs to him, watching in the mirror behind the bar.
“But do not fear,” Bryant said. “I also have a degree of sorts in show business — starting out as I did as Tommy Dorsey’s drummer.”
Chuckles.
“And tonight we’re here at the Pussycat A Go-Go to have some fun.” He began to pull chairs away from tables and made a row of four of them facing the audience, saying, “I am looking for four female volunteers! If you have participated in one of my demonstrations before, please do not raise your hand.”
The doc filled the chairs with young women, all of whom were fetching examples of the female gender, no surprise in a room filled with off-duty showgirls.
Soon the hypnotist was putting them under: “Your arms are limp as a rag doll. Your legs are limp as a rag doll. You are deeper and deeper relaxed. Deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper relaxed...”
He then put them through their paces, telling them to stand with their hands free, heels together. Then to look up at the ceiling, taking a deep breath. To close their eyes and start breathing normally and then count. Told them, when he touched each one on the shoulder, that he wanted them to visualize themselves as steel, and himself as a magnet, pulling them toward him — he did this with each lovely woman individually, and they would fall forward where Bryant would catch them.
“One way to cop a feel,” I said to Nita, who smirked and nodded.
All of it was a pretty common hypnotist schtick. He told them their arms were made of stone and they were unable to force them down; he got them laughing as they watched a funny movie; had them cheering a racehorse on and then hiding the winnings; feeling pricked by a nonexistent pin and jumping accordingly; then thinking they were naked — two of the women didn’t bother covering themselves with their hands.