“Are you sure?”
That pale face was deadpan, now — the softness of self-pity replaced by something hard and cold and resolute. “Dead fucking sure,” he said.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I rejoined Lou, who was starting a new cigarette.
“What did he want?” Lou asked, exhaling a wreath of smoke.
“Absolution,” I said, as we headed back down the graveled road.
Lou smirked. “Boy, did he come to the wrong guy.”
The phone call seemed more than a little mysterious. I didn’t take it myself — it came in during the morning, when Lou and I were at the Drury funeral. When I drifted in after lunch, Gladys gave me the cryptic message: “Silver Palm, Bas client, come alone, 3 P.M.”
I
What disturbed me was that someone was connecting me to Bas — my former affiliation with Drury was well known; but Bas had only hired me a few hours before he was killed... a new record among A-1 clients.
I found a parking place for the Olds a block and a half away, and walked to the Silver Palm, which nestled under the El on Wilson Avenue near Broadway. My trenchcoat collars were up again — it was cold and drizzling, sending the streetwalkers and dope peddlers into the recesses of doorways for cover. This once respectable stretch had, during World War Two, developed into a war zone of burlesque houses, room-by-the-hour hotels and tattoo parlors, designed to service the servicemen from Fort Sheridan and the Great Lakes Naval Station, taking advantage of the Wilson Avenue express stop on the North Shore Electric railway.
The palm tree motif promised by the neon sign in the smeary window was half-heartedly maintained inside the surprisingly high-ceilinged room, with its faded South Sea hula-girl murals, fake thatched-hut roofing, and velvet paintings of topless native babes. The joint was crowded with chairs and little tables, with plenty of seats to furnish views from every angle, if you could see through smoke thick enough to slice and sell as bacon.
On a raised stage behind an endless bar, a slightly overweight/overage henna-haired stripper in pasties and G-string was bumping-and-grinding for the benefit of an exclusively male audience running from mouth-breathing dirty old men (whose raincoats weren’t as nice as mine) to sailor boys whose wide-eyed expressions indicated naked jiggling female flesh in the raw may have been a new experience for them.
On a Friday, in the middle of the afternoon, the place was maybe half-empty — call it half-full, optimist that I am. Strippers between their onstage stints, wearing diaphanous robes, joined slatternly B-girls to filter through the small crowd, conning customers into buying them watered-down drinks, while almost-attractive waitresses in frayed aloha shirts and tight slacks provided mixed drinks, bottled beer, and bored expressions. Most of the seats at the bar were taken — as this provided the best view of the Silver Palm’s cut-rate pulchritude — but I managed to find one toward one end.
I ordered a rum and Coke from a bartender who looked like he doubled as a bouncer, and watched as the henna-haired broad gave the crowd a flash of pasty-less bosom and bounded off, pleased with herself.
A bleached blonde of about fifty, weighing in at maybe two hundred pounds at five foot three, strutted out in a red-and-yellow muumuu and growled wisecracks into a microphone — “Big Mary, your mistress of ceremonies, but don’t get any ideas.” She worked blue enough to get a few laughs, and stayed on only a minute before introducing the next stripper, wisely not wearing out her welcome.
A slender brunette minced out overdressed in a Southern hoop skirt affair with Scarlett O’Hara bonnet, and she was down to her petticoats when I got the may-I-cut-in tap on the shoulder.
A thug with a flat nose, dead eyes, and broad shoulders — all wrapped up in a double-breasted blue suit with a blue-and-gray tie and a pearl gray fedora — was standing there like a potted plant with a shoulder holster.
“Yeah?” I said.
Suddenly I realized the thug was looking past me at the brunette, who was taking off her bra to reveal perky little titties with tasseled pasties. For a second I thought the guy wanted my seat; then he blinked and looked at me and remembered why he’d come over.
“Table toward the back,” he said, thickly. He gestured with a bratwurst of a pointing finger.
