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.
Through the smoke I could make out a table with a small man seated at it, way in back, off to the side—one of the worst seats in the house. Even the tables nearby were empty, affording this diminutive patron of the arts a modicum of privacy.
I thought I knew who it was—you might even say, I was afraid I knew who it was—and the thug accompanied me as I approached the little guy in the green snapbrim, who wore a gray tailored suit with a pale yellow shirt and darker yellow tie, his oval face dominated by a lumpy schnoz and close-set eyes and a blank impassivity.
Sam Giancana looked up at me and said, “Sit, Heller…. Join me here in my office.” To the thug he said, “Sally —a little breathing room.”
As the thug faded toward the bar and the stage, I sat across from Giancana at the postage-stamp table; the lighting was nil—a glass-and-candle centerpiece remained unlit, the only light near us coming from a bulb placed under a wall-hung velvet painting of a native girl with breasts the size of coconuts…not exactly
I’d brought my rum and Coke with me; Giancana was drinking coffee—he needed a shave, giving him a scruffiness at odds with his natty apparel.
“This is where Satira started, you know,” Giancana said.
“That stripper who killed her married lover?”
“Yeah—down in Havana Harbor, remember?”
I did—it had been page one stuff.
He was saying, “We paid for her defense, and the cunt paid us back by working for the competition across the street, when she got out. We trumped the bitch, though.”
“How’s that?”
He snorted a laugh. “We hired the widow of the guy she murdered. Booked her in and she out-stripped Satira.”
“That’s showmanship, Sam.”
“That’s nothing—I tried to book both of them. Wouldn’t that have stood Chicago on its ear? The murderer and the widow of her murder victim, peeling side by naked side.”
“That’s entertainment,” I said. “Little surprised to see you, gotta admit. The feds who tried to serve your subpoena think you’re in Florida somewhere—that’s what your gardener told them.”
Giancana shrugged facially, and had a sip of his coffee. “A few of us have to stick around and tend to business. I got a couple rocks left in this town I can crawl under.”
“That message you left at my office was a little vague, Sam. How did you know I’d show?”
“I know what makes you tick, Heller. You’re a fuckin’ snoop. Curiosity is in your blood.”
“And my blood is still in my veins, inside my body. I’m hoping to keep it that way.”
Giancana flashed a sick-looking grin; like Lee Mortimer, he had a gray pallor—I didn’t figure Sam for many camping trips…except maybe to bury an occasional stiff in a field.
“This is a friendly meeting,” Giancana said. He placed both his hands on the table, palms down, fingers spread. “Friendly on my part, anyway. Your friend Drury—that little scuffle we had at the Stevens…you tell anybody about
