Vitale looked at her.
"Maybe you'd better stay here, ma'am.
It's a pretty rough place."
"What?" Jennie said quickly. "And miss the chance of breaking in my new mink coat?"
La Paree was one of about twenty similar clubs on a street that looked like every other Strip Street clear across the country.
Its windows were covered with posters of half-naked girls – Maybellene, Charlene, Darlene and the inevitable Rosie Tookus. All were dancing tonight.
The doorman wore an ear-to-ear grin as the big limousine rolled to a stop.
He opened the door with a flourish.
"Welcome, folks. They come from all over the world to La Paree." They certainly did.
The doorman rushed into the club, where a small man in a dark suit materialized before us. A hat-check girl, in a pair of tights, took our coats.
Jennie shook her head and kept her coat on as we followed him down the dark, narrow smoke-filled room to a tiny table right in front of the stage.
A stripper was working just over our heads. The drums were taking a slow beat and she was grinding away, almost down to the bare essentials.
"Two bottles of your best champagne," I said.
This wasn't the place to order whisky. Not unless you had a zinc-lined stomach.
At the word champagne, the stripper paused in her routine, right in the middle of a bump, and looked down.
I saw her appraising eyes flick over me as she put on her most seductive smile.
Then Jennie let her coat fall back on the seat and took off her turban.
Her long blond hair caught all the flashes of light from the spot as it tumbled down around her shoulders.
As quickly as it had appeared, the stripper's smile vanished.
I looked at Jennie. She smiled back at me.
"You gotta fight fire with fire," she said.
I laughed.
A white-shirted waiter came up with two bottles of champagne in a bucket.
Quickly he put three glasses down on the table and opened the first bottle.
The cork popped and the champagne spilled down over the sides of the bottle.
He filled all three glasses without waiting for me to taste the wine and hurried off.
It was still warm but it was a good champagne.
I looked at the bottle. Heidsieck, 1937.
Even if the label was a phony, it wasn't half bad.
Then I noticed a white chit beside me on the table. Eighty dollars.
"If you'd come in a cab," Vitale said, "it only would have cost you twenty bucks a bottle."
"How much if we'd walked?"
He grinned. "Fifteen."
"'Cheers," I said, lifting my glass.
No sooner had we put down our glasses than the waiter was refilling them.
He moved quickly, slopping some over the edge of the glasses, then started to upend the bottle into the ice bucket.
I stopped him with my hand.
"Not so fast, friend.
If I don't squawk at the tariff, the least you can do is let us finish the bottle."
He stared at me, then nodded. He put the bottle into the bucket right side up and disappeared.
There was a roll of drums and the stripper went off, to a desultory clatter of halfhearted applause.
"He's over there, down at the end of the bar," Vitale said.
I turned to look.
There still wasn't much light. All I could see was a figure hunched over the bar, a glass cupped in his hands.
"I might as well go get him."
"Think you'll need any help?" Vitale asked.
"No.
You stay here with Miss Denton."
The lights went down again and another stripper came on.
As I walked toward the bar, a girl brushed against me in the dark.