“Is what I’m saying. If he goes in the back room with a girl, that’s usually enough to satisfy him.”
“What if he doesn‘t go in the back room?” Carella asked.
“Then he’d be too fuckin timid to ask a girl to meet him on the outside. Besides, why would she?”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“Cause first of all, we exhausted when we leave here two-thirty, three in the morning. We’re on that stage shakin our asses all night long, hopin to snare as many ten-dollar bills as we can, but what does that come to? A hundred bucks maybe? The back room is where the money is. If we catch a wink from one of the tables, we go sit with the guy for twenty minutes while he tells us the story of his life and all we’re thinkin is do I buy a ticket or not, you want a hand job, a blow job, what is it you want, mister? Without being able to say none of this out loud cause he might be a fuckin cop, excuse me.”
“You said Althea bought three half-hour tickets last night,” Carella said.
“Thass right. An’ if that’s all the time she bought, then whut the boys wanted was hand jobs. Tickets woulda cost her twenty for the half-hour, she probably charged fifty, sixty to milk ‘em. When we’re doin more serious work, ahem, we usually buy an hour ticket for fifty bucks, charge the John a full C for it. What Mac does is rent space to us, you comprehend? The back room is space, that’s all. He lets us use his stage to advertise our goodies only cause his customers drink while they watchin us.”
“So if a guy went in the back room with Althea last night…”
“Yeah, it woulda been a hand job. That’s what we buy a half-hour ticket for.”
“Anybody follow her out? When she left last night?”
“Not that I seen.”
“Where were you when you saw her leaving?”
“Onstage. It was the last dance. The last dance starts at two. The place closes at two-thirty, three.”
“So she left before the last dance, is that it?”
“Guess she’d made money enough by then,” Ruby said, and shrugged again.
“How? You said a hundred is tops for G-string change…”
“Well, a hundred, a hun’twenty…”
“Okay, and if she got fifty for each trip to the back room…”
“Sixty be more like it.”
“Okay, that netted her forty on each trip. That’s a hun’twenty plus the G-string money comes to two-forty. What time do you girls start?”
“Nine.”
“If she left at two, that was five hours,” Ollie said. “Divide two-forty by five, you come up with forty-eight bucks an hour. She coulda made more workin at McDonald’s.”
“Not hardly.”
“You consider forty-eight an hour good wages?”
“Most nights we do better.”
“If two-forty was all she’d earned last night, why’d she leave half an hour before closing?”
“Maybe she was tired.”
“Or maybe she’d arranged for somebody to meet her outside and take her home,” Carella said. “Is that possible?”
“Anything’s possible,” Ruby said.
“What’d these guys look like?” Ollie asked. “The ones who went back with her.”
“Who knows what any of these creeps look like?”
“Any of them look Jamaican?”
“Whut’s a Jamaican look like?”
“This one was light-skinned, with blue-green eyes and curly black hair. Around six-two or -three, broad shoulders, narrow waist, a lovely grin, and a charming lilt to his speech.”
“If I’d seen anybody like that aroun here,” Ruby said, “I’da axed him to marry me.”
That Wednesday night, the airwaves were full of stories about Danny Gimp and his two murderers. Slain stool pigeons do not normally attract too much attention. Unless they’re killed in a place as public as a pizzeria, in broad daylight, during a week when television was panting for something sensational to captivate the imagination of the ever-salivating American viewing audience. The hanging death of a nondescript old man in a shabby little apartment in a meager section of the city was nothing as compared to two bald-faced gunmen striding into a pizzeria during the breakfast hour and blazing away like Butch and Sundance, albeit one had been black.
In a city divided by race, even the racial symmetry was reason for jubilance. For here, if nowhere else, a black man and a white man seemed to have worked in harmonious accord to rid the earth of that vilest of all human beings, the informer. Danny Gimp, unremarkable and unregarded while alive, became in death something of an inverted martyr, a man made suddenly famous by his extinction. In a world where wars were given miniseries titles, Danny and his two bold slayers stepped out of reality into the realm of truth made to seem fictitious, achieving in the space of several days a notoriety reserved for mythical bad guys and their destroyers. Killers though they were, The White Guy and The Black Guy had slain The Rat.
One would have thought, from the interest generated on television, that once the salt-and-pepper assassins were apprehended, they’d be awarded medals and a ticker tape parade down Hall Avenue.
