JoJo had called, with, as he said, “a lead into the thing.” He asked Mike to meet him at the Chez. Parlow insisted on coming along. Mike asked why.
“’Cause I don’t trust the little snitch,” Parlow said.
“Snitch he may be, but he’s a noncombatant,” Mike said.
“Well, it may take one to know one, so take me along,” Parlow said.
The sign read Under New Ownership, which meant, of course, “under the same ownership,” which meant, of course, Dion O’Banion and the North Side.
The Chez Montmartre was now called the Place Pigalle. The bad liquor was still served in coffee cups; the crap and poker games in the back room were still gaffed; the girls were new, but interchangeable with the girls of old, and they were kept in place still, under the supervision of the North Side.
One could, as before, get a passable drink; edible, overfussed food; a girl; and a floor show. The floor show’s quality depended, as always, on the biological imperatives of the manager.
“I know they’ve got to get laid,” Parlow said, “and, owning the barrel, they will shoot the encompassed fish, the chorines, which, while not sport, is, at least, sex; what, though, is the connection, which you must allow exists, between the mugs’ taste in broads, and the broads’ universal lack of talent?”
The singer nestled in the crook of the piano. She sang “Bye Bye Blackbird” as if it were a dirge for all the good in the world.
“She’s not even attractive,” Mike said.
“She is if you’re Jimmy Flynn,” Parlow said. “And look at it: This girl, mirabile dictu, he doesn’t even have to pay her, take her clothes off. She’s stark naked anyway.” Parlow nodded at the girl, who was now circulating on the floor, tweaking the necktie of this and that nightclubber, planting a kiss on a bald head, trailing across a shoulder what passed, in courtesy, for a languid hand. The singer came to the bridge.
“No one here can love or understand me / Oh, what hard-luck stories they all hand me . . . ,” she sang.
“Best bridge ever written,” Mike said.
“I won’t argue with you,” Parlow said.
The titular ownership of the Chez had passed through Teitelbaum’s widow and back to O’Banion and his consortium. There had been talk, the lads said, that Lita Grey held the philosopher’s stone which would transform her from the Discarded Woman to the Ruler of It All, but that talk had disappeared with Lita Grey.
“She opened. The Pandora box,” JoJo Lamarr had said. “How do I know? As it consumed her. You guys, famously, saw that in France.”
“What did we see?” Mike said.
“The Krauts would put a live grenade under their bodies when they died; you guys come around, turn ’em over, or looking for souvenirs, bang.”
“I’m sure that went on,” Mike said.
“You ever get any souvenirs?” JoJo said.
“I got a love bite from a fifteen-year-old Belgian girl,” Mike said, “and a souvenir of the Black Forest: paper knife, with a picture of an elf.”
“Uh-huh?” JoJo said.
“What was in Pandora’s box?” Mike said.
“Well. The secret that can get you killed,” JoJo said. “The Black Forest, they make up the fairy tales?”
“The Grimm Brothers,” Mike said.
“Yes. The Brothers Grimm,” JoJo said, “all the tales of dark forces, and beasts, and so on.”
“What are we selling?” Parlow said.
“How did the guys,” JoJo said, “make up those stories?”
“They invented them,” Parlow said.
“Yeah. I understand. But what does that mean?”
Mike looked at Parlow, who raised his eyebrows, meaning, That is either the stupidest or the wisest question I’ve ever heard, I’ll be damned if I know which.
“They just wrote down a lot of words that occurred to them,” Mike said.
JoJo nodded.
“What are you selling?” Parlow said.
“But I can’t be happy,” the singer sang, “’til I make you happy, too.” The audience broke into applause. The singer half-curtsied. The band swung into a two-step, and various men walked their women onto the dance floor.
Mike saw the thief’s retreat from the direct question. “Brings you up here?” Mike said.
“Brings me up here is: a drink, and a glance at the bare titties, neither of which, you been downstate, one can never get enough of.”
“I’m sure that it was very trying,” Parlow said.
“I heard something,” JoJo said, “which, I immediately thought, would interest you.” He looked at Mike for a moment.
“. . . Alright,” Parlow said. “Excuse me.” He rose and left the table. JoJo watched him walk across the room to the hatcheck, where he began chatting up the hatcheck girl.
“I knew that girl, I knew her father,” JoJo said. “But I can’t remember her name.”
“Why’d you want to meet here?” Mike said.
“. . . He was a cop? A fireman? A something. In Hegewisch? A cop. He got tossed, he worked as a chauffeur in Hyde Park. His name was, no, his name was . . .” JoJo looked nervously over Mike’s shoulder.
“Oh shit,” Mike said. “Aw, come on, JoJo. You’re putting me on the spot? Are you fucking putting me on the spot?” Mike looked around the room, but saw no muscle beyond the one eternal bouncer at the door.
“Why would I do that, Mike, I wouldn’t do that, and if I did that, why would I do that here?”
“Well, then, what the hell’s the name of the charade?” Mike said.
Mike felt a light touch on his shoulder. He looked around to see a fellow in a tux.
“Mr. Hodge,” the fellow said, “if you would come with me.”
The singer finished and bowed herself off, followed by the four barely clad dancers. The MC took the stage.
“Will you look at the sense of humor on these broads . . . ?” he said. “Give ’em a hand.”
The audience applauded as requested.
“Thank you,” the MC said. He adjusted his tie. “Always delighted to see the cognoscenti of this great and glowing town. It is a rare treat to see this many lovely faces not demanding child support. Drink up, you geniuses, for if you can get smashed on water and iodine you’re sittin’ pretty and you’ve got a hell of a short memory. How ’bout those girls, huh? Who wants to take ’em home to Mama . . . ? I’m marrying one of ’em. I got quite a shock, I know her as Louise, on the marriage license, they tell her, ‘Put your real name.’ Turns out, she was christened ‘Third from the Left.’”
Mike was led through a curtain just off the stage. He squeezed by the last of the dancers. They were lifting off their headdresses and placing them on the rack just offstage.
Mike smelled the sweat and powder from their dressing room. The chorus hurried down the narrow corridor, stripping themselves naked as they filed into the dressing room. Mike was directed down the corridor and up a narrow staircase.
The room was paneled in black walnut. An enormous chesterfield took up one wall. Jimmy Flynn sat behind the partners desk once occupied by Weiss and Teitelbaum. He stood as Mike was passed into the room.
He said, “You want a drink?”
“No thank you,” Mike said.
Flynn said, “Then sit down.”
Mike sat on the couch. Flynn walked around the desk. He took the partner’s chair and turned it, and sat facing Mike. He rubbed the top of his head for a moment.
“Look,” he said. “Instead of the preface, here it is: your, your work, it gets back to us, is taking you into an area, you don’t want to go.”
“Alright, what are we talking about?” Mike said. “’Cause you don’t want me, I presume, just, hang up my hat, and move to Michigan, or die, or something, or why’m I here?”
The man did not speak.
“Give me a hint,” Mike said. “You know who I am.”
“I know who you are,” Flynn said, “and you have the reputation of being an okay guy, that’s right.”
“Well, then, why don’t you . . . Let me start again,” Mike said. “If you don’t mean to shoot me: tell me what you do mean, and perhaps we’ll work something out.”
“I’m in a hell of a position. Nobody wants to hurt you,” Flynn said, “this fucking thing has hurt you enough. Look . . .”
Mike left the office, and began down the stairs leading through backstage and out the front. The chorus was on, singing and dancing to “The Oceana Roll.”
“To see the smoke so black, come from the old smokestack / It’s floatin’ up to heaven and it won’t be back . . .”
Mike turned away, toward another staircase at the far end of the corridor. The floor show was heard, filtered, through the sets and flats stacked at the rear of the stage. Mike had been “given the warning,” and he needed to sit down.
A half-open door gave onto a small carpenter shop. The shop was empty. Mike went in and sat at the carpenter’s bench. The cheap Masonite board above the bench was covered in chalk drawings of props and scenery. Elevations and plans were pinned into the board, as were several yellowing publicity photos of the chorus.
“‘This fucking thing has hurt you enough,’” he thought. “‘This fucking thing has hurt you enough.’”
He had been, politely, asked to back off his investigations into the deaths of Ruth Watkins and Jackie Weiss. They were connected, as far as he knew, solely by proximity to jewelry belonging to the late club owner.
And the request came from the Chez, Mike reasoned, so the two murders must have been connected to the Chez. Very well. But were they connected to him?
In what had the “thing” hurt him enough? Only in the loss of Annie Walsh.
An old man’s voice said, “What are you doing here?” Mike turned to see the man, quite obviously the stage carpenter. He was a black man. His coveralls were ancient, and washed, over the years, to the consistency of silk; a flat carpenter’s pencil sat in his coverall pocket. He wore a clean blue shirt, buttoned tightly at his neck and wrists, and a four-in-hand string tie, not seen since before the War. He might have been in his late sixties.
“What are you looking at?” he said. He spoke with a trace of a Southern accent and with formality, as a man who had previously had a different life. A teacher, perhaps, Mike thought.
“I beg your pardon,” Mike said, and rose.
“What are you looking at?” the man said.
“I was looking at nothing,” Mike said. “I came down from the office, I got turned around.”
“Who are you?” the man said.
“My name is Hodge,” Mike said. “I’m a reporter.”
“Are you here about her?” the man said. He nodded his head toward the Masonite board.
“Did you expect someone to come about her?” Mike said.
“She’s dead,” the man said. “I told the police.” He was anxious, and lied badly.
“I’m not here about her,” Mike said. Whoever she might have been, Mike thought, the man was doing a pathetic job of protecting her. Mike turned away, to spare the man his lie. He found himself looking at the publicity photos of the chorus girls tacked to the wall.
“She’s dead,” the man said. “She’s dead. And she didn’t do it.” He motioned Mike away from the photos.
“Alright,” Mike thought, “somebody’s dead and her picture’s on the wall. She’s dead. And she didn’t do it. Who is she?” He used the photo grabber’s trick. The City Desk sent them to the homes of the bereaved, to steal a photo of a deceased or accused in the confusion. If there were multiple choices, the picture grabber would ask, “Do you have a photo of your son?” If there were photos of several likely candidates, the picture grabber would exploit any opposition, saying, “I just want to know, which one is he?” He’d move his hand over the photos. When he reached the right one, the defiant or reluctant family member would look away. “Works every time,” Poochy had said. “Every time.”
Mike leaned back toward the chorus girl photos; the carpenter turned with him. He scanned them, left to right. At the last-but-one, the carpenter lowered his eyes. The photo showed a reed-thin flapper, half-naked, miming abandon in a pose indicating some sort of free-form dance.
“She didn’t do it,” the man said.
“She didn’t do what?” Mike said. “She didn’t do what?”
“She didn’t take anything out of the safe,” the carpenter said.
Mike looked at the photograph. It showed a white woman in her early twenties, with a crooked, winning smile and wide-set eyes. Mike had seen the image before in the Girls of All Nations photograph. She was the “Hawaiian” girl with the ukulele.
The photo was inscribed, “To Pops, Affectionately, Lita Grey.”