hoop skirt, foot arched; another slowly peeled stocking fell, and then she stood, stepping ever so ladylike out of her hoop skirt. She was about to step out of her lacy pantaloons as well when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.
“You pay to get in or what?” Jack Barger asked. The balding little Jew with the gone-out cigar in the corner of his mouth and the expensive but slept-in-looking brown suit was the owner of the theater, so he had a right to ask.
“No,” I said. I was standing in back, next to a bored, uniformed usher who was looking at something he’d just picked out of his nose. “I told the girl at the box office I was here to see you.”
Barger put a disgusted look on a puss that was naturally sour anyway, nodded toward the light. “Is that me?”
Across the darkened theater and its bumpy sea of male heads, I could tell at once that the stripper, who was now parading across the stage in lace panties and blue pasties before a cheesy plantation backdrop, was not Jack Barger.
“I’d say no,” I said.
“You ain’t kidding when you claim to be a detective, are you?” he said, typically. Barger was one of those guys whose kidding always seemed to be on the square; I’d known him, casually, for years, but sensed no affection in his sarcasm. If so, it was deep down.
He crooked and wiggled his forefinger at me in a “come along” motion. Though he was barely ten years my senior, he treated me like a kid. But I had a feeling he treated everybody that way.
I followed him through the small, rather bare lobby, with its seedily uniformed ushers and well-stocked concession stand and embarrassed uniformed girl behind it and all-pervasive popcorn smell, toward some stairs. The Rialto, which was on State Street just up the block and around the corner from my office on Van Buren, was the Loop’s only burlesque house. The exterior was flashy enough, with the bright lights and usual promises-CHARMAINE AND HER BROADWAY ROAD SHOW, 250, GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, with the window-card cheesecake displays and life- size standees to prove it, and of course, on the Rialto screen, this week’s cinema masterpiece,
Judging from how fast and loud the pit band was belting “Swanee River,” now, heaven was well within view.
But not to me. I was following Barger up the jogs of the stairs to the level of purgatory housing his office, a cubbyhole next to the projectionist’s booth.
The office was, like the theater itself, stark-a dark-wood desk and some metal file cabinets and a few framed photos of strippers and baggy-pants comics on one of the pale cream pebbly plaster walls; each and every one of the photos hung crooked.
“You look like something the cat drug in,” Barger said, sitting behind his cluttered desk, lighting up a new cigar. It smelled like wet leaves trying to burn.
I sat across from him, topcoat in my lap. I still had on the suit I’d traveled in, and I didn’t just have bags under my eyes, I had valises. I hadn’t slept well on the plane; the flight had been bumpy, and so were my thoughts regarding my two conflicting clients, Montgomery of SAG and Bioff of the IATSE.
“I been out of town,” I said.
“So I gathered from what you said on the phone,” he said, picking some tobacco off his tongue. “I’m disappointed in you, Heller. Taking work from a rat bastard like Willie Bioff. Don’t quote me.”
“Don’t worry. I’m on Bioff’s payroll, not president of his fan club.”
He shook his head. “Who’d have thought Nate Heller’d be another of Willie Bioff’s whores.”
“Who’d have thought Jack Barger would.”
He laughed humorlessly. “Fair enough,” he said.
“Speaking of Pegler,” I said, “Fair Enough” being the name of his column, “that’s why I’m here.”
He squinted at me. “Westbrook Pegler? The big-shot columnist? What would he want with a minor-league Minsky like me?”
Barger’s humility was false; while he was certainly no Minsky, he was the king of the local grind circuit. And in a convention town like Chicago, that meant money.
“He’s looking to smear Bioff,” I said.
“I’ve seen Pegler’s stuff,” Barger nodded, unimpressed. “He makes a living out of hating the unions, and Bioff’s as good a place as any to start giving unionism a bad name.”
“This has to do with the power the Stagehands Union is building in Hollywood, you know.’’
He expressed his disinterest with a wave of the hand in which the cigar resided, embers flying. “Don’t give me history lessons on Willie Bioff and George Browne. I been around that block so many times your head’d spin. No, far as I know, Westbrook Pegler ain’t been in my establishment. Not unless he likes young tits and old jokes.”
“He doesn’t seem the type,” I admitted. “But he might send somebody around to pump you.”
“Nobody pumps Jack Barger for information.”
“It might not be direct; somebody might come around under false pretenses and-”
“Do I look stupid to you, Heller? Do you think I’m going to advertise what those bastards done to me? That’d make me look like a schmuck, and if Frank Nitti found out I’d been vocal, which he would, I’d wake up with a hole in my head in a goddamn ditch.”
He was talking to me like I was an insider; if I handled this right, I could open him up like a clam.
“I’m not working for Nitti,” I said. “I’m working for Bioff. And I’m only in it for the dough.”
He pointed the cigar at me. “Be careful who you go whoring for, my friend. Those sons of bitches are murderers and thieves. Grow up.”
I knew Barger primarily from the occasional drink he’d have with Barney and me in Barney’s cocktail lounge, when it was still below my office, and just around the corner from the Rialto. He and Barney were friends, hit it off fine, but Barney’s more Jewish than I am. I always felt Irish around guys like Barger.
So I gave
He stirred in his chair. “What’d you think, I don’t have stagehands? Not that I should pay those lazy bastards anything for what little they do. Move some scenery here, carry a prop there. They should pay
The best way to keep Barger talking was to make him think I already knew more than I did. This required some calculated guessing, which as sluggish as I was from the sixteen-hour plane ride was going to be a good trick.
But I jumped right in-casually: “Browne must’ve been a phantom on your payroll since the Star and Garter days.”
He didn’t hesitate in confirming that: “To the tune of a hundred and fifty smackers a week, the drunken bastard.”
The Star and Garter, a burlesque house at Madison and Halsted, had been Barger’s mainstay prior to the success of the Rialto, which the “minor-league Minksy” opened during the World’s Fair in ’33; the Rialto’s Loop location was closer to the fair, and less threatening for tourist trade, than the Star and Garter’s Skid Row neighborhood.
“Of course a hundred-and-fifty’s cheap,” I said, “compared to what Bioff’s hitting you for, these days. By the way, he said, ‘Give my regards to my partner Jack.’”
Which Bioff had in fact said, and which proved to be what opened Barger’s floodgate: “That arrogant little pimp! Partner! The first time I ever talked to him, what, must’ve been four years ago anyways, he walked in here with Browne and said, ‘Kid,’ called me
