Free No Cure for Death by Max Allan Collins Page B

where the Filet O’Soul Club was, but I’d never been inside. In my mind there still lingered, from impressionable high school days, the nasty stories that filtered down from the Quad Cities, stories that collectively formed the legend of the Filet O’Soul.
    The club was in Moline (which is on the Illinois side of the Quad Cities), up on the Fifteenth Street hill where it starts to level out, just at the point where you can’t see the cars coming up over, and crossing the street becomes a jaywalker’s Russian Roulette. A lot of people drove top-speed through that little two block section, where the Filet O’Soul was just one of a cluster of small businesses that shared little in common outside of a general lack of respectability. Nice folks resented the fact that this accumulative eyesore was on a main drag like it was, but there wasn’t much a person could do about it except roar up over the hill now and then and scare hell out of pedestrians.
    But the Filet O’Soul, unlike some pedestrians, was anything but run-down. The outside was shiny black pseudo-marble—a smooth glassy dark front with no windows, with a big shiny steel door recessed in its center and a little neon sign above the door spelling out the club’s name in red against black. The Filet O’Soul was said to be an extremely clean bar, with excellent food, beautiful, efficient waitresses, the bestbartenders around, solid entertainment and reasonably low prices. The only dent in a reputation otherwise as solid as the club’s steel door was its legend: nobody white who went in ever came out in one piece.
    When I was in high school, every month or so John and I and a carload of guys would go up to see the skin flicks at the Roxy Theater, which was a couple doors down from the Filet O’Soul. I can remember the butterflies in my stomach as I’d walk past the place with my buddies, heading for the safety of the Roxy’s hard seats and stale air, trying to ignore the milling blacks smoking out front of the Filet, hoping they wouldn’t say anything, hoping they wouldn’t kill us or worse, paying dearly for the sin of the Roxy.
    Such was the feeling I had Thanksgiving morning when Jack Masters called to tell me he’d arranged a meeting for me with Rita Washington at the Filet O’Soul.
    But after a second the feeling went away, and I hadn’t, I hoped, let any of it show over the receiver to Jack. Great, I said to him, what had he told her?
    Just that I was an okay guy, he said, and that all I wanted was talk. That I was a writer, but not a reporter—just a mystery writer researching something for a story. And, since she was a part-time schoolteacher who could use the money, that there was twenty bucks in it for her.
    I told him he was awful free with my money and he said
nothing’s
free, son; then I asked him what time he’d set it for.
    Eleven o’clock this morning, he told me, and nobody’d be there but the bartenders, getting ready for the crowd that’d be in to watch the football games on TV. Rita knew one of the bartenders pretty good and he’d given the okay, Jack said.
    I thanked him for all the trouble, and he said, well, he wasn’t going to let me go up there myself night before a holiday. Hadn’t I heard what they said about the Filet O’Soul?
    The door’s steel was cold on my knuckles as I knocked. I stopped knocking and waited a few moments, was getting ready to knock again when the door opened. The man who answered was tall and lean and wore a black satin long-sleeved shirt with a red patent leather vest and black brushed corduroy pants. Skin coal black, nostrils wide, eyes dark and alert, forehead, cheekbones and chin chiselled, smile white, slow, careful and amused—he looked like a charcoal drawing, and a good one.
    “You’d be Mallory,” he said.
    I nodded, smiled liberally.
    “Rita isn’t here yet,” he said.
    “Oh,” I said.
    “You want to come in and wait?”
    “Please.”
    He opened the door and I stepped in. But