Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14 (9 page)

He waved me off. “Don’t be an old woman.”

“The point is,” I said, getting up, “to be an old man.”

And I left him there to ponder that—though I doubted he would.

The black-eyed blonde’s name was Jackie Payne—Jacqueline, really, but nobody called her that except her parents, who she hadn’t seen in some time.

She was born and grew up in Kankakee, in the shadow of the state insane asylum, and as omens go, that was a hell of a one. Her parents were “real religious”—a polite way to say goddamn zealots—who had been ashamed of her wild behavior in high school, which is to say she’d been a cheerleader and in drama club.

A talent scout at the county fair—where she tap-danced and won five dollars—had encouraged her to look him up in Chicago; so, three and a half years ago, shortly after graduating Kankakee High, she had hopped the Twentieth Century east and, with the talent scout’s backing, took up residence in the Croyden, a Near Northside hotel catering to showgirls.

Let me interrupt this soap opera to mention that the Croyden was one of several such hotels on the Near Northside. A nicer example, the St. Clair—just off Michigan Avenue’s magnificent mile, at the corner of Ohio and St. Clair—catered to both typical travelers and longer-term residents; but showgirls and strippers loved the St. Clair, and many lived there, whether a few nights or a few years were involved.

The St. Clair was a classy but unostentatious hotel, twenty-some red-brick stories with a set-back penthouse. After my divorce, and the sale of our Lincolnwood bungalow, I had established my Chicago home address at the St. Clair, taking a fifteenth-floor suite; before my marriage I’d lived in a similar but smaller apartment at the Morrison Hotel, which was closer to my office; but living north of the Chicago River expanded my world to the upper levels of Windy City society.

At the St. Clair, I was just a few blocks south of the Gold Coast; from my corner suite, I could see the lake from my bedroom window, and from my living room window (looking south) I could wave to Colonel McCormick in his Tribune Tower aerie. My neighbors included the Wrigley Building and the Water Tower, as well as enough exclusive shops to send a kleptomaniac into a seizure. But the neon sleaze of Rush Street, with its cocktail lounges, pizzerias, taverns, and nightclubs, was just on the other side of Michigan Avenue, with the Chez Paree only two blocks away.

My old friend—sometime girl friend—Sally Rand had recommended the St. Clair, and Beth Short, another old flame (since sadly extinguished), had lived there briefly as well. Photographer Maurice Seymour had his studio among the businesses on St. Clair’s upper floors—conveniently next to a beauty parlor—and he had contracts with damn near every burlesque house and nightclub in town, shooting portraits of entertainers and models and, in particular, showgirls and strippers.

Nothing unusual, at the St. Clair, about seeing Gypsy Rose Lee or Ann Corio or Georgia Southern traipsing through the small, nondescript lobby, carrying suitcases jammed with their seductive wardrobes, from sheer stockings to pasties to G-strings; or Rosita Royce swaying her hips as she carried cages of doves, or Sally with her (feathered) fans—not to mention Zorita tugging along her airhole-punched trunk on wheels with the python in it.

Though the lobby had practically no sitting room, a coffee shop was off to one side, and the Tap Room—with its famous Circle Bar—was off to the other. Grabbing a cup of morning Java or a noon sandwich, you were surrounded by beautiful girls; catching a cocktail after work or in the evening, ditto. Those girls were sometimes in pin curls and little or no makeup, of course, though a man with my deductive skills knew evidence of pulchritude when he saw it.

I loved the St. Clair.

Another nice thing about the hotel was the no-questions-asked attitude of the management. When the evening before, after my confab with the Fischettis, I had escorted Jackie Payne through the St. Clair’s front revolving door—carrying her two suitcases for her, while she lugged a train case—past a newsstand on one side and a bank of pay phones on the other, across the small dark-oak lobby to the elevators and up to my suite, the guy at the desk didn’t blink. Of course, this was hardly the first time he’d spotted me with a showgirl in his lobby, if the first time for one sporting a shiner.

When Rocco unexpectedly tossed Jackie out on her sweet behind, she was flat busted (in one sense, anyway), and I’d mentioned she could camp out on my sofa, for a night or two; she had girl friends at both the Croyden and the St. Clair she could contact, and maybe move in with one, until she got a job and a little money.

“But I’d kind of like to wait until this heals up,” she said in her small sweet voice, embarrassed, pointing to the black eye. She was sitting on the plump-cushioned sage green mohair couch, legs curled up under her; I was next to her, but not right next to her. She had slipped her shoes off and her toenails were painted red; her long-sleeved pink sweater and slacks showed off her trim shapely figure, and her shortish honey blonde hair was a tousled nest of curls.

Room service had brought us up a couple of burgers with french fries, and I’d plucked cold Pabsts from my refrigerator. A coffee table by the couch was the repository for our plates and beers and my stockinged feet. We only had one light on, a lamp on the end table near me, creating a forty-watt pool of glowing light. The mood was one of casual intimacy—for complete strangers, we were surprisingly comfortable with each other.

My apartment, by the way, was functionally furnished, a page torn from a Sears and Roebuck catalog—living room, bedroom, small spare room I used as a home office, and modest kitchen. I’d dressed the living room up with a television and a radio phonograph console—the radio on, at the moment, Nat King Cole softly singing “Mona Lisa” accompanied by traffic sounds from Michigan Avenue below—but I wouldn’t kid you: the apartment was really just a hotel room got slightly out of hand.

“Haven’t your girl friends ever seen a black eye before?” I asked her.

“It’s just—Ginny, the one I’ll probably call, she warned me about Rocco, way back when, and I didn’t listen.”

“Yeah, nobody likes ‘I told you so.’”

She shrugged. “I’d rather not have to answer questions. Anyway, I heal really fast. I’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”

“You can stay as long as you like—don’t worry about it. Listen, I could even stake you to a room here at the scenic St. Clair, for a few nights, if you’d rather.”

In the dim light her heart-shaped face with the pretty features took on an angelic radiance. “Why are you so sweet to me?”

“I’m just one of those Good Samaritans you hear so much about. Why, if you weighed two-sixty and had warts all over your face and two double chins, I’d probably do the same thing…. Probably.”

She laughed at that, and we’d talked. She told me the story of her Bible-thumping parents and the talent agent, who (unbelievably) had done good things for her, though she mentioned offhandedly she’d lived with him for a while. Smalltown or not, she seemed to understand the big-city rules.

“Do I look familiar to you?” she asked, rather coyly. This was on the second beer, the burger and fries a memory.

“Sure,” I said, sipping my own second Pabst. “I saw you at the Chez Paree—you were one of the Chez Adorables.”

Which was what the chorus line there was called.

“Till six or eight months back I was, but that wasn’t what I meant. About two years ago, I was Miss Chicago.”

“No kidding!”

“Yeah, in the Miss Illinois pageant. I was in all the papers.”

“Well, sure, I remember now. How could I forget that face?” Of course, I didn’t remember her. Cheesecake photos were a dime a dozen in the Chicago press, and cute as this little doll was, she was just another showgirl…albeit one with a black eye.

“Of course, I didn’t win the state title,” she said, “and go on to Atlantic City or anything…and I didn’t have any use for the scholarship money…. College was never in the cards for me.”

“And so your friend the talent agent got you an audition for the Chez Paree.”

She nodded. “I was always a good dancer. I worked at a grocery store, in high school, to pay for ballet lessons that my parents didn’t know I was taking.”

“Which is where you met Rocco…. The Chez Paree, I mean, not the grocery store.”

She laughed and nodded again. “I know you won’t believe this, but he was really sweet, at first. Rocco, I mean. He’s no matinee idol, I admit…”

“Maybe if the matinee is a horror triple feature.”

She smiled at that, a little. “He took a big interest in me. I didn’t want to just be in the chorus—I wanted to be featured, to be a headliner someday, to sing and dance, like Judy Garland or Betty Hutton. He said he’d get me lessons.”

Rocco had encouraged her to quit the Chez Paree chorus line—she was too good for that, he’d said—and she had moved in with him, in the penthouse on Sheridan. After all, Rocco and his brothers, particularly Joey, had all sorts of show business connections.

But the lessons never happened—Rocco claimed he couldn’t find teachers worthy of Jackie’s talent—and before long, she was shoveling coal on the Fischetti model railroad.

“He was sweet for the longest time,” she said. “Then one day I asked about my lessons—I wasn’t snippy or sarcastic or anything, that’s not my way—and I’d asked lots of times before, about the lessons, plenty of times…but this time he slapped me.”

I felt my eyes tighten. “Why didn’t you leave?”

She was staring at her hands in her lap. “I don’t know…. For quite a while, the beatings were real occasional—’cause he was drunk or in a bad mood or I said the wrong thing. Somehow I convinced myself each time was a fluke. He’d apologize. Give me flowers. Be sweet again.”

That was the pattern of these woman-beating bastards.

She was saying, “Anyway, I knew I couldn’t get my job back at the Chez Paree, ’cause he and his brothers were in business with the owners. And nobody in town would hire me if Rocco said don’t hire me, right?”

“Right.”

“It’s a beautiful penthouse—I was alone a lot. You didn’t see some of the rooms, with the Italian Renaissance antiques— Charley picked them out; that was his passion, antiques, before he started in on that modern stuff; he gave those pieces to Rocco.”

Hadn’t she realized she was in a well-appointed prison?

She went on. “I’d use the piano—I can play a little—and practice my singing. Sometimes Rocky was gone for weeks at a time. There are servants, I was waited on hand and foot, fed like a queen, treated like I was still Miss Chicago or maybe Miss America, after all…except by Rocco, when he got mad.”

I was sitting closer to her now: I took her hand and held it, squeezed it gently. “I can’t imagine you doing anything that would ever make me mad.”

Jackie wasn’t looking at me; her voice was soft and small—barely audible above Vic Damone singing “You’re Breaking My Heart” on the radio.

“The last few weeks,” she said, “Rocky would just yell and slap me and hit me without me even saying anything. I think…I think he had just got tired of me. I see that all the time with his trains.”

“His trains?”

“Yeah. He would send away for expensive model trains and when the delivery man brought them, he would tear into the packages like Christmas. And for a week, maybe two, he’d sit and play with that new train in that room of his—hour after hour, with this dumb little smile on his face. Then he’d get bored and put them on the shelf…and buy something new.”

After that we talked about me, for a while. About my marriage, and how my wife had cheated on me and ruined everything, and about my son, who was going to be three years old in a few days, and how I wouldn’t be there to see it. That made her sad, and she came closer, very close, and put her arms around me, and kissed me, very soft, very tender….

I was twice her age, and then some, but I didn’t give it a thought: she’d been living with Rocco Fischetti, who was older than me and a homely fuck to boot.

So I had no pangs of conscience about accepting affection from this girl, who badly needed some affection herself, right now. Most strippers, most showgirls, were much younger than me, and damaged goods; this was nothing new. But she had this special sweetness, like she’d wandered off the set of an Andy Hardy picture into
Little Caesar.

She asked me to switch off the light and I did, and then in the dimness of unreal blue-tinged city light coming in from Michigan Avenue, she tugged off the pink sweater by its long sleeves, revealing a white lacy bra, which I undid for her. Miss Chicago was not as voluptuous as the would-be Miss California I’d been with not so long ago, but she was stunning nonetheless, with uptilting breasts that made perfect handfuls and a dramatic rib cage and a tiny waist.

That she was a dancer became obvious when she stood before me, arms outstretched, naked to the waist, with the formfitting slacks still on. There was something fabulously sexy, wonderfully dirty, about her standing there in just the slacks, with her hands on her hips and the cupcake breasts thrust forward for my viewing pleasure; the experience tickled her lips into a smile, even as my mouth gaped open like an idiot staring at Mount Rushmore.

That baby doll face took on a brazen confidence as she watched me drink in her bare loveliness; then she turned her back to me and unzipped her slacks at the side and shimmied out of them, swaying to Patti Page singing “The Tennessee Waltz,” leaving only a second skin of sheer white panties over a rounded tight behind, the sweep of her back dimpling above the cheeks.

She looked over her shoulder at me, and giggled at the sight of my reaction, and came over and sat on my lap, a child asking Santa for toys, her arms around my neck, and we kissed and kissed, and nuzzled each other’s throats and ears, and she moaned as I kissed her breasts, the tips hardening under my lips….

Finally she stood before me again, with her back to me, and slid the panties down, dropping them in a puddle, then turned and held her arms out again—tah
dah!—showing
all of herself to me, the slightly muscular dancer’s legs, the tufted pubic triangle as brown as her eyes, her faint smile inviting me to her.

I stood and she began undressing me; drunk from her beauty—and three beers—I allowed her to do all the work, and finally we were both naked, standing there, the small shapely thing plastered to me, her sweet face turned upward, wanting kisses, aching for affection, hooded eyes yearning for love.