12 August

Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, known professionally as Baby LeGrand, sat at the vanity in the dressing room of the Carousel Club, putting flesh-tone ointment on a pimple near her mouth. The narrow table was crowded with hairbrushes, coffee cups, thermos bottles, makeup kits, eight-by-ten glossies, sprays and foams, boxes of Kleenex, and it extended the length of the room, supporting four unframed mirrors. Brenda wore a bathrobe belonging to her sister.

Life Line was on KRLD, a patriotic show where they hiss at federal spending.

To get the ointment on right, Brenda had to stick her tongue against the side of her mouth, bulging the face, and this made it hard to talk. She was talking to the girl at the next mirror, Lynette Batistone, who looked barely out of high school.

"He might let you have an advance," Brenda said. "Only make sure he's in a good mood when you ask."

"I heard about his advances," Lynette said.

"This is just Jack. It's not, he doesn't expect results in other words. Who all'd you talk to, honey?"

"Molly Bright was saying."

"Never mind Molly. The thing of Jack is, he gets personal with words. This is the windbag of the world talking. But it's not like you have to fight your way out of the club."

"From what I hear. But this is strictly, you know."

"What?"

"He threatens his girls with, 'Dumb cunt,' like, Til throw you down the fucking stairs.' '

"Honey, all right, this is not a bookkeeping firm. What's a little language?"

"He gets screaming fits all the time," Lynette said.

"He will not put a hand on your body."

"Molly Bright offered she would fill in for Blaze and what happens, there's this pandemonium."

"You want to quote Molly. Let me say about Molly. If bullshit was music, she'd be a brass band. You need the money bad, go tell Jack. Just be sure to mention groceries. He reacts to anything concerning food."

Lynette was in costume, a cowgirl outfit with a riding crop and long-barreled pistol. Brenda thought the girl had talent but not an ounce of taste. What she did was not even striptease. She was doing the dirty dog basically, with added little struts and touches.

"They told me in New Orleans this Jack is up and coming."

"He owns another club."

"He owns another club. I heard that."

"The Vegas," Brenda said. "But I don't know about up and coming. I have to think on that a little."

"What are these dogs I keep seeing?"

"He has dogs he calls his family. They live at the club except for one he takes home."

"This is in case of protection."

"I don't know what he's got to protect here but just us strippers."

"I gotta go wee," Lynette said.

"The other thing of Jack is, he'll ask you if he's queer, 'Do you think I'm queer, Lynette?' 'Do I look like I'm queer to you?'

'Serious, tell me, do I strike you as queer from your experience?' I guarantee he will ask these questions. 'How surprised would you be if someone told you I'm a queer?' 'Do I talk the way a queer might talk if he's trying to hide it, or what?' "

"What am I supposed to tell him?" Lynette said.

"Doesn't make the slightest little difference. This is just Jack."

Jack Ruby came in off Commerce Street, paunchy, balding, bearish in the chest and shoulders, fifty-two years old, carrying three thousand dollars in cash, a loaded revolver, a vial of Preludins and a summons from small-claims court for passing a bad check in a department store.

He walked into the dressing room.

"Quiet," he told Brenda. "I want to hear this."

They listened to Life Line on the radio. It was a commentary on heroism and how it has fallen into disuse.

Jack sat at the second mirror, his head lowered for maximum listening.

The announcer said, "In America, not so long ago, thirty-five bright young university students in a history class were asked to identify Guadalcanal. Less than one-third of them had ever heard of it. Three thousand years of military history tell no story more splendid than the blazing heroism on Guadalcanal, every bit of it American, as truly American as the log-cabin frontier and the open range. But nobody hears it now. United Nations Day gets a hundred times the publicity."

Jack was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and white silk tie, and he carried the snap-brim fedora that put him into focus, gave him sharpness and direction, like a detective on assignment.

"I love this stuff," he said. "I get welled up something tremendous when they talk about our country. You should have seen me when FDR died, when they announced on the radio, I was in uniform crying like a baby. Where is this Randi Ryder of mine?"

"Taking a pee."

"I also have to say. Now that I'm started. You're always off somewhere in your mind. Carrying on your own conversation. You don't listen to people."

"You don't know how deep they're digging me."

"That's why there is all this yelling all night long in this place."

"I have my dogs and I."

"Which you're very welcome."

"You should know my early life, Brenda, which I'm still obsessed. My mother, this is the God-honest truth, I swear to God, she spent thirty years of her life claiming there was a fishbone stuck in her throat. We listened to her constantly. Doctors, clinics, they searched for years with instruments. Finally she had an operation. There was nothing caught in her throat, absolutely, guaranteed. She comes home from the hospital. The fishbone is there."

"Well this is just a woman and a mother."

"So help me, thirty years, my brothers and sisters, never mind. And that's the least of it. I'm just showing you some idea. My father was the drunk of all time. But I don't care anymore what they did to each other or to me. I'm not a person who maintains a malice. I feel only love and respect for those people because they suffered in this world. So forget it, I don't care, go away."

"You never married, Jack, but how come."

"I'm a sloven in my heart."

"Personal-appearance-wise, you dress and groom."

"In my heart, Brenda. There's a chaos that's enormous."

They heard the MC telling jokes out on the stage. Jack leaned toward the radio and listened some more.

"I love the patriotic feeling I get, hearing this stuff. I am one hundred percent in my feeling for this country. What else do I trust? My own voice goes creepy at times. I can't control the inner voice. There are pressures unbelievable."

"Everybody gets pressure. We get pressure. You work us seven days a week."

"I'm about halfway out of it in common terms."

"Why don't you marry your Randi Ryder? She'll straighten out your life."

"She's a famous lay in New Orleans but she won't do anything unnatural."

Somebody shouted around the corner. Visitor for Jack. He touched Brenda on the shoulder and went out of the room. It was six paces to his office, where Jack Karlinsky was sitting on the sofa with one of the dogs.

"This is my dachshund Sheba," Jack Ruby said. "Get down, baby."

Jack Karlinsky was in his sixties, an investment counselor who had no office, no business phone, no employees and no clients. At his twenty-room house outside Dallas, a Coast Guard fog light played over the grounds all night long.

"I want to know did you hear."

"Be calm, Jack. That's why I'm here. To discuss terms."

"There are people who'll speak for me out of long association. I talk to Tony Astorina on the phone."

"I know you have connections," Karlinsky said. "But this is not the same as so-and-so is connected."

"What is Cuba, nothing?"

"I understand full well you took some trips for people."

"This is when Cuba was popular in the press."

"You did some things for the Bureau too," Karlinsky said.