Ask Not

by Max Allan Collins

  “You are feeling better,” she said. Then her expression grew serious. “Listen. I know you’re hurting. We don’t have to do anything. I’m pretty tired myself. But if you do feel like it…”

  I reached my hand out, like the Frankenstein monster about to learn that fire is hot.

  She batted that away, too, and gave me as impish a smile as she had in her. “Wait. I want to get your opinion on something. Just wait there.”

  I nodded, my bruised body throbbing, but at least some of the throbbing was pleasant.

  She went over to a dresser that looked like it had been salvaged from a shipwreck, and bent over, showing me the heart-shaped behind that had made her infamous, and which suddenly made me understand the meaning of cupid’s arrow imagery. She grabbed some things out, and almost ran back into the bathroom, where the steam had dissipated, and closed the door.

  It didn’t take her long to come back out, leaving the door open to provide some backlighting. She was wearing a little nurse’s cap and a very short-skirted white nurse’s uniform.

  “What do you think?” she asked, arms spread, palms up turned, in ta-da fashion. “It’s for the act.”

  I said nothing. My mouth had dropped open and didn’t seem to be able to function for anything but sucking in air.

  “It’s a little different,” she said thoughtfully, and she strutted a few steps, then shook her head, dissatisfied, saying, “Without music, without heels, it’s not the same.”

  I curled my finger and she came over dutifully. I threw the sheet off. She placed a hand gently around me and stroked. “Are you sure you’re up for it? Well, I mean that’s obvious.… I could use my hand like this … or my mouth like…”

  As she leaned over the bed, her hair flopped over and hid her as her head descended upon my lap and she suckled me, gently, tentatively, then began a slow up-and-down motion that was hypnotic as she went gradually, so gradually, deeper and deeper, until she had all but engulfed me. At the perilous moment, I gently entwined my fingers in that red mane and eased her off.

  “I don’t mind,” she said, with a smile both loving and nasty, tongue flicking, invisible eyebrows raising.

  “Get on. Ride me. Ride me, cowgirl.”

  “Can’t you see I’m a nurse?”

  “I have a good imagination. Just … take it a little easy.”

  “I’ll be gentle. I’ll be ever so gentle.…”

  I swallowed, gestured to the nightstand. “I have something in my wallet…”

  She shook her head and the hair was a red shimmery smear around her lovely face. “It’s a safe time. Don’t worry.”

  This was a notorious stripper who got around. Some might call her a slut. She could have twelve kinds of diseases. Using a rubber was an absolute must. It would be insanity otherwise. She tugged the white skirt up over the red triangle and I let her climb on. A bareback cowgirl nurse, sucking me up into the wet tight warmth that the men she danced for could only dream of.

  Her intentions of being gentle were reflected in her easy, loving cadence. Which lasted almost thirty seconds before the bump-and-grind she was so famous for began, that frantic, jungle-beat gyration accompanied by long hair hanging over me and whipping me, whipping me, whipping me, as she ground into me with a hunger that expressed itself in crazy swivels, working herself into my lap like she wanted to tear me off and take me with her. She was jungle-beast noisy, too, squeals and screams, seemingly lost in the throes of orgasm throughout, and when she finally did come, the noise fell off into a whimpering.

  Meanwhile my ribs were screaming—all the Demerol in the world could not have stopped it—and I was in such exquisite pain when I came that if I had died at that moment, I wouldn’t have minded.

  “Next time,” she whispered, and gave me a peck of a kiss, “we’ll let it all hang out.”

  She climbed off like a little girl getting off a carousel pony and padded into the bathroom, the twin globes of her fabulous behind jiggling like Grandma’s Jell-O salad under the pulled-up short white skirt. I lay back, wilted and worn, but the hurt seemed to have subsided, the hurt of my ribs that is. Because she rode me raw.

  That night I woke up once, to use the john and take some more Demerol, and when I climbed in bed next to her, I was out like a switch had been thrown.

  Now it was Thursday and I was feeling much better, sitting by the pool and being a letch behind my Ray-Bans. I was temporarily shacking it with a female who could make any heterosexual male’s wildest, dirtiest dreams come true, and yet I was still watching young stewardesses swim and frolic. Being a man is such a humiliating task.

  Janet turned over and sat up and had me close the snap on the back of her bikini top. “You look chipper,” she said. “Is that a gun under your towel, or are you glad to see me?”

  “It’s a gun. Also, I’m glad to see you.”

  “Little ol’ me? I should feel honored, with all this prime cooze on the looze. So—you want to stay with me, till the end of my Dallas run? We could have a good time, Nate.”

  “I know we could. Not sure I could survive it, but I do know.” I stretched. Actually stretched. “I think I’d like to go to the club with you tonight.”

  She smirked. “In the mood for some more quality entertainment—like those shitty comics of ours?”

  “Well,” I said, and my hand around the nine millimeter grip tightened, “I am in the mood for entertainment. Has Mac Wallace been back around?”

  “He was in his favorite booth last night. Why?”

  She didn’t know it was Wallace who cracked my ribs. I’d told her I was mugged. She had thought that was funny, since I was a guy with a gun and yet some asshole had gotten the best of me. I thought it was a riot myself.

  “Just wondering,” I said.

  * * *

  The bill hadn’t changed—same bad comics, same stacked strippers, from lackadaisical Peggy Steele to busty Chris Colt to gyrating Jada. The difference was that tonight I watched from the wings. This new position gave me some refreshing angles on the peelers, but also a more inconspicuous sideways view on the audience.

  As promised, Wallace was in that same back booth, again pouring brown-bagged bourbon into glasses of ice, getting quietly if not noticeably sloshed. During the show’s second half, he rose and went off toward the men’s room.

  I took the backstage steps to come out a door to one side of the elevated platform and cut along the side of the club. The mostly male audience—the house was about two-thirds full—saw nothing from their wide eyes but the near-naked girl onstage, a short, curvy number with a taffy-colored bouffant. Her gimmick was that pieces of her fringed outfit seemed to drop off of their own free will as she did the Twist to Bill Peck and his Peckers playing “Irresistible You.”

  When I reached the men’s-room door, I taped on a hand-lettered sign (which I’d fashioned at Janet’s apartment) that said CLOSED FOR CLEANING. This was necessary because there was no lock on the door of the good-sized restroom, with its half a dozen urinals and four stalls.

  Within the dreary but fairly clean yellow-walled john, one guy was washing up, another was just coming out of a stall, and Wallace was pissing at a urinal. I washed my hands, watching Wallace in the mirror while the first guy left and the guy who’d exited a shitter came over and washed his hands beside me. Both were gone when Wallace did the little dance men do to coax out those last few droplets, and he didn’t recognize me until he was washing up. I was standing nearby using a paper towel.

  “Something I can do for you?” Wallace asked blandly. As before, his handsome oblong face with its baby-face plumpness was smudgy with beard, the eyes cold and dark behind the black-rimmed glasses. He was again in a black suit, though his necktie was red tonight.

  “I think you already did,” I said pleasantly. “I hear Mrs. Plett’s insurance company decided to pay out her claim. Only took them two years.”

  “Typical bureaucracy.” He was washing his hands, faucet running hard. He looked at me in the mirror a
nd his smile was small and smug, his dimpled chin jutting. “Not that I’d know what you were talking about.”

  “You know what I don’t get?”

  “Why don’t you tell me.”

  I watched him closely, figuring he might throw soapy water in my face.

  “I don’t get,” I said, “how a pinko student protestor grows up to be the willing arm of a bunch of right-wing Texas fascists?”

  Looking at me in the mirror wasn’t enough. He shut off the faucet and turned his head toward me, frowningly. “The President is a great man.”

  I chuckled. “So that’s it. The ol’ strange bedfellows routine. Your pitch-and-putt benefactor Lyndon feathers the nests of his oil buddies, so he’s free to do good in the world.”

  Tightly, Wallace said, “He’s done a lot of good.”

  “I’d agree. Took a Southern conservative to push civil rights through. And there’s the war on poverty. We’ll forgive him Vietnam, ’cause he’s got to throw the military-industrial boys some kind of bone. It’s the old ends-justifies-the-means gambit. I get it.”

  “You may,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Get it.”

  And he flicked the soapy water on his hands toward my eyes, but I was ready, and ducked it, and slammed a fist into his belly. When he doubled over, I grabbed the back of his head and kneed him in the face. He didn’t go down, but he wobbled. I took out the nine millimeter and slapped him alongside the left temple, and then he went down.

  He looked up at me, drunk with pain, his face smeared with red from his nose and his mouth, his eyes seeking focus, and I took him by the lapels of his undertaker’s suit coat—a little tricky with a gun in my right hand but I did it—and I hauled him over and into the first stall.

  “Your face is a mess, Mac,” I said. “Let me help.”

  I shoved him face-first into the toilet bowl and flushed it several times. My son called this a swirly. I called it plain old-fashioned fun.

  Wallace was coughing and sputtering and spitting water when I turned him around and sat him down hard on the can and shoved the snout of the nine millimeter in his neck. My eyes bore in on his dark ones, blinking now, no longer half-lidded.

  “Listen, Mac, I don’t care whether you killed Henry Marshall, President McKinley, or Cock Robin—none of that is my business or my concern. You saw to it that my client got her payout from the insurance company, so we’re square.”

  “What … what … what…”

  I had no idea what he was asking, but I answered anyway: “This isn’t my way of thanking you for that, it’s my way of settling the score for the other night. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, I understand you live in California.”

  He frowned, beads of water running down his face like tears that started at his scalp. His hair, which wasn’t very long, nonetheless looked stringy as seaweed.

  “My ex-wife and my son live out there,” I said. “Why would I tell you that? Because it’s only fair, since I will kill you or have you killed if you are ever seen anywhere near them or where they live. You may think you are one deadly motherfucker, and you might think you could find me and kill me. And probably you could. But I employ just under one hundred hard-ass ex-cops, any one of whom would just love to teach you how to really rig a fake suicide. Do I make my point?”

  He just looked at me, gulping air, face running with water droplets.

  I slapped him—just with my hand, not the gun.

  “Do I make my point?” I asked again.

  He swallowed and nodded.

  “Good,” I said.

  And left him there.

  * * *

  This time I followed Janet home, my rental Galaxie tagging after her convertible Caddy like an eager puppy. I was feeling pretty damn good. I was feeling no pain on Demerol, and a man in his late fifties had just kicked the ass of a hard case maybe fifteen years younger. Mac Wallace was an evil fuck, but I had put the fear of God in him. Or the fear of Heller, anyway.

  And in bed, I took the lead, bending my redheaded benefactor over the edge of her bed, entering her that way, and the bump-and-grind was under me now and slower this time, with a yearning that made both of us very happy and maybe a little sad, because I’d already told her I was leaving tomorrow.

  She was leaning back in bed, sheet at her middle, perky pointed titties bared, and she was smoking. Apparently she didn’t know it was a cliché. I didn’t crave a smoke, though earlier I had felt the urge, right before I cornered Wallace. But I hadn’t succumbed. One must maintain control, after all.

  “You wrapped up your job, huh?” she said.

  “I did.”

  “Somebody said Mac Wallace limped out of the club, looking like he got his clock cleaned.”

  “Do tell.”

  “You did that, didn’t you?”

  “I sure did.”

  “You be careful, Nate. Don’t get cocky.”

  “I thought you liked me cocky.”

  “That Mac Wallace character has important friends.”

  “Does he, now?”

  “I hear he works for Big Oil.”

  “No, he’s with an electronics company.”

  She shrugged. “One of the girls who dated him says he works for that nut with the window.”

  “What nut with what window?”

  “Some Big Oil guy who owns the Texas School Book Depository. You know, where Oswald shot his rifle out the window? If you believe that shit. Anyway, this Big Oil guy removed the window and made some kind of display out of it, in his home. Like it was a damn…” She shuddered. “… trophy or something.”

  She had my attention.

  I said, “Who told you this?”

  “One of the girls I know from the old Carousel days. Rose Cheramie. She said they tried to kill her, too.”

  “Who tried to kill her?”

  “Some of the shooters who got Kennedy. Look, you gotta consider the source. Rose is a junkie.”

  “She’s at the club now? I don’t remember a Rose dancing.”

  “No, she’s working a club in Waco this week, I think.” She drew in smoke and then let it out her nose in twin trails. “Shit, what is it with that goddamn Kennedy thing? Why can’t everybody forget about it and get on with their goddamn fucking life?”

  “You mean, like those tourists at the Carousel?”

  “Yeah, them, and these damn reporters. I’ve had this one, this really famous one actually, hounding the hell out of me.”

  “Who?”

  She shrugged, irritated a little. “You know that showbiz columnist, the one that’s on that dumb game show Sunday nights?”

  I sat up sharply. “You don’t mean Flo Kilgore, do you?”

  Flo had written an article exposing the chicanery surrounding the death of Marilyn Monroe; based largely on my investigative work, the piece might have won the Pulitzer, if her editor hadn’t spiked it, giving in to pressure from the Kennedy White House.

  “Yeah, that chinless dame,” Janet said. “I’m surprised you didn’t run into her at the Statler, ’cause that’s where she’s staying. What’s that show she’s on? I’ve Got a Secret?”

  “What’s My Line?,” I said numbly.

  “Well, I’ve got a secret … I got a bunch of ’em.” She pointed at one pert bare breast. “And I intend to keep ’em to myself. I’ll live longer that way.”

  Looked like I wasn’t leaving Dallas just yet.

  CHAPTER

  8

  The soaring Statler Hilton had a Space Age look that screamed 1960s but was already almost ten years old. Its twenty stories were home to 1001 rooms and as many hotel employees, its innovations including conference rooms on lower floors, a mammoth ballroom with no pillars, and a heliport “taxi” service for the rich, though most guests were more impressed by the 21-inch custom TVs by Westinghouse in every room. The front of the hotel was the fork of its Y-shape, a concave facade that looked as cool as a cocktail but had the unintended by-product of creating an eddy that sc
ooped up any trash blowing down the street to circulate by the front entrance like soiled confetti.

  On a more positive note, that concave front also allowed for a Vegas-like drive off Commerce Street, and I pulled my rental Galaxie in and got myself out. It was mid-morning, a sunny, pleasant day, not as humid as other trips of mine to Dallas. I had a room here that I hadn’t slept in for the last two nights.

  That meant I was in the brown H.I.S. suit I’d worn interviewing Captain Peoples in Waco, not to mention during my dustups with Mac Wallace. So my clothing was a little ripe, even if I had showered occasionally over the past several days, though I hadn’t bothered shaving yet this morning. The doorman must have been used to eccentric Texan millionaires—they said H. L. Hunt went around in near rags—and gave me no attitude as I handed him my keys for the valet parking.

  After wandering through an impressive lobby with atomic-design carpet and floating staircases, I selected an elevator in facing banks under a futuristic metal lighting grid, all very Buck Rogers, but on the rear wall was a map of Texas that seemed somehow a relic. The ride up was accompanied by Mantovani’s strings butchering “I Believe in You”—another of this hotel’s innovations, but not a welcome one: elevator music.

  My room, 714, at first seemed to have no bed, just modern furnishings in rust, yellow, and brown (with matching abstract-shape drapes) dominated by a couch, which Detective Heller deduced was actually a twin bed with one side flush to the wall, along which propped-up cushions provided seating for two, facing the TV opposite.

  I took a long, hot shower, letting the jetting water drill me like a friendly machine gun. First thing this morning, at my request, Janet had removed the adhesive strips that had mummied around me, supporting my ribs. The ER doc at Parkland had been good enough to have a sweet-looking young brunette nurse shave away the body hair before he’d applied the bandages. I’d been in so much pain, I barely noticed her.

  So the strips had come off, and I was sore, but I was still on Demerol tablets, cutting the dose in half to keep me alert. And to make the pills last longer.

  I finally shaved, splashed on some Prince Matchabelli aftershave (Black Watch), slipped into some dark-gray Jaymar Sansabelt slacks, a gray-striped Van Heusen shirt with a dark-gray narrow knit tie, and a Madisonaire sport coat from Lytton’s in Chicago.