Wild Cards

“Yep.” She cocked her head and her ears flopped coquettishly. “If you think the kids teased me with that before my card turned, you should have heard them after.” She turned, falling back on the sofa, and laughed as her breasts bounced with the springs. “I was seven and mad for bunnies. Had some as pets, had the slippers, had them sewn on my clothes, Bugs Bunny pajamas, the works. Even rabbit wallpaper and bunny cutouts my mom glued on my lampshade. Plus all the books. The Velveteen Rabbit, of course, and the March Hare and the White Rabbit from Alice, and Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny from Beatrix Potter. But my favorite was Rabbit Hill, this old kids’ book that won the Newbery Medal.” She looked troubled then, but then most wild cards did when discussing the trauma of their card turning.

Nick also put together her age now with what she’d said. “You were one of the first,” he realized. “You changed back in ’46 when the blimps blew.”

She gave him a wide-eyed look like a frightened bunny. “Yeah, on Wild Card Day. In ’46.” She looked away. “All I knew is that I had an awful fever like the kid in The Velveteen Rabbit, then I dreamed about … Rabbit Hill … and I woke up like this.” She looked up at him and her ears twitched. “What about with you?”

“What?” Nick asked. “What about what with me?”

“What was it like when you turned your card?”

“I’m not a wild card,” Nick denied on reflex. “I’m a nat.”

“You sure?” Julie asked, her ears perking up a bit straighter. “You asked me the way us cards ask each other, like you already knew what it’s like.” She tilted her head the other way. “Don’t worry. If you’re up the sleeve, it’s okay.”

Hef was right. Clever bunny indeed. But all Nick said was, “Sorry, really, I’m just a nat.” He then added, since it was true and gave him cover, “I’m just from Hollywood. Lots of jokers end up there for B movies. Makes easy costuming for monsters.”

“That’s exploitative,” Julie remarked disapprovingly, sitting there naked beside a pile of costumes.

“It’s a job,” Nick pointed out.

Julie gave a wry grin. “Speaking of which, since I’m already nude, wanna do my centerfold?”

“Centerfold?”

“Hey, aim high. Worst Hef can do is say no.” She grinned wider, fishing around in the pile of props until she came up with a circlet of braided wheat. “What better Miss March than the March Hare?”

With that, she placed it on her head, reaching up and pulling it down over both ears. On any other model, it would have looked like a head wreath for a harvest queen or a classical accessory for a Gilded Age tableau of the Greco-Roman goddesses, the wheat sheaf crown of Demeter/Ceres. But on Julie Cotton, tilted rakishly askew like the halo of a hungover angel, it made her resemble Tenniel’s illustration of the Mad Hatter’s chum from the Mad Tea Party.

“Got a teacup?” Nick asked.

“Oh yes.” Julie produced one from her pile of rummaged props. “And I’ve got something even better …” With that she hopped over to the bookshelf, doing a mad little dance en route with terpsichorean grace before pulling down a volume.

She flipped it open, revealing a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with hand-tinted illustrations. The page she’d chanced on bore the illustration of Alice and the Cheshire Cat.

A scrap of paper fluttered out, landing on the floor in between them. Nick reached down and picked it up. The penmanship was round and feminine, European in style, with two words: possible costume.

Nick showed Julie. “Lownes wants the Playboy Club girls to be dressed up as sexy kittens.”

“The Pussycat Dolls.” Julie rolled her eyes, then raised her teacup and the book, thumbing forward a couple pages to show the illustration for the Mad Tea Party. “Rather than fake kittens, wouldn’t it be better if the first Playboy mascot were an actual bunny girl?”

She was audacious, he gave her that. Playboy had yet to even feature a black girl. “You need to sell that to Hef, not me,” was all Nick told her as he took the first photo.

Julie was easy to work with, eager and almost ridiculously photogenic. She donned a gentleman’s waistcoat and pocket watch to give the impression of the White Rabbit, assuming the White Rabbit was a young woman with large breasts. “I’m late! I’m late!” she cried, holding a running pose with a ballerina’s poise, purposefully pointing her ears back to give the impression that she was racing like the wind.

Nick used half a roll of film for that, getting her from multiple angles.

Julie cycled through her pile of props: A carrot and a shotgun made for Bugs Bunny. An Edwardian red woolen wrap and a series of three poses made for Peter Rabbit’s sisters, Flopsy, Mopsy, and, of course, Cottontail. The Velveteen Rabbit was less obvious, but a beautiful nude reclining on divan with an assortment of vintage children’s toys was still a sexy pose.

“So what’s Rabbit Hill about?” Nick asked, changing film, remembering back to childhood. He’d never read the book, but he’d thought it was relatively new, not a reprint of a forgotten classic. He recalled a cover with a rabbit hopping gaily over a hill. There’d been a new copy on the shelf at his school library, but the book had looked too cutesy to bother with, so it hadn’t crossed his recollection till she’d mentioned it now.

“Um, rabbits. On a hill.”

“I sort of expected that.” Nick thought back. “The rabbit on the cover was naked, right? Bouncing in the air but standing up?”

“Ooh, that’s a good idea!” Julie exclaimed. “Let’s do that!”

With that she leapt onto the sofa and began bouncing, not so much like a child on a bed as a naked woman on a trampoline. Nick began to take photos, Julie’s glorious breasts bouncing for all to see, “all” in this case meaning him and the camera.

And maybe someone using the peephole. Nick felt a presence there, the electrical energy the hazy outline of a living being but with the telltale nuggets of a flashlight.

He wasn’t a professional dancer, unless you counted a bit part in the men’s water ballet in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but a swimmer and actor could still do sudden leaps. Nick did, angling the Argus to get a wild action shot of Julie while in the background snapping the spying eyes. The peephole snapped shut and the flashlight batteries completed their circuit as they retreated, the hazy human energy along with them. Nick continued shooting Julie until the film roll was exhausted and so was she.

He was a bit, too, and also curious if the spy in the secret passage would come back. “Want to take a break?” he asked. “Look at the albums from the Everleigh Club?”

Julie smiled. “Hef said something about those. They’re here?”

“I think so.” Nick picked a spot on the love seat with the best angle on the closed peephole, which now looked like nothing more than a strip of carved laurels.

Julie, still nude, picked up the open album and brought it back to the love seat so they could both look at the pictures.

The Everleigh Club girls modeled bustiers and corsets, some sporting headbands with oversize poppy rosettes to each side, the fashion of the era. White ink, neatly penned onto the album’s black paper, gave the names of the girls and the various special occasions. This album, dated 1902, featured a visit from the smiling, bearded, and mustached Prince Henry of Prussia. Ada and Minna Everleigh, the club’s eponymous proprietresses and madams, posed with the prince, a bevy of girls about them.

Julie giggled as she paged through the rest of the album, but Nick was distracted by the dual tasks of trying to monitor the peephole and the very close presence of a beautiful naked woman snuggled into the love seat beside him.

“Let’s look at another!” Julie closed that album and picked the next at random: 1908. Highlights included a tableau with the girls costumed as Eskimos, a pair of selkie maids in sealskin coats, and a polar bear played by a large woman clothed only in a polar bearskin rug, all fawning over Admiral Peary, the famed polar explorer. A page on, another nude woman played mama bear, but this time with a brown or at least sepia-tone bearskin rug, hunted by none other than Teddy Roosevelt. Beside TR, playing his guide and gun bearer while looking directly at the camera and grinning ear to ear, stood a young man with pale skin, dark hair, and dark soulful eyes, and an amusingly upturned pug nose.

“It’s Pug!” Julie exclaimed, pointing to TR’s pug-nosed guide.

Nick read the caption: Our intrepid guide, Gary Peterman, leads President Roosevelt to the lair of Ursula, the She-Bear!

“Who’s ‘Pug’?” Nick asked.

“Um, a child actor,” Julie answered. “He’s a friend of Will’s.”

“Here he is again.” Nick pointed to the next page, where Teddy Roosevelt posed formally if cheerfully with Ada Everleigh while Minna was escorted by Gary Peterman, again with the goofily charming grin, giving both thumbs up to the camera like the world’s cheeriest Roman emperor.

“Child actor?” Nick questioned. “I assume you mean on stage, right? Because this guy’s at least twenty and these photos are from 1908.”

Julie bit her lip and looked at Nick anxiously. “Um, yeah. On stage. Pug’s career didn’t make it into talkies. I mean silents. But he was hoping to start it up again.”

“Again? Is he still around? He must be in his seventies.”

“Um, I hope so. Will will want to find him. And he needs to see these. Sorry.” She got up, clutching the photo album to her ample chest as if it were the most precious thing in the world, and ran out of the room like the White Rabbit late for a croquet date with the Queen of Hearts. Naked croquet.

Nick felt the presence at the peephole again and took a picture of the eyes that appeared the moment it was opened. The peephole shut as quickly and the flashlight batteries retreated. Nick suspected Gwen and Constance. But eyes were distinctive and there were a lot of Playmate photos. What was more intriguing was Julie and Will. For as much as they maintained a playful affability, Julie was possibly Will’s daughter. They acted like they had a shared history, but not necessarily a sexual one.

But more to the point, Will had mentioned that he was a bastard, his mother an actress, his father presumably a rich and powerful man, but one who could be undone by scandal. Will Monroe, perhaps not the illegitimate son of F. W. Murnau, but the bastard son of Ada or Minna Everleigh and one of their prominent guests? Prince Henry of Prussia would certainly explain Will’s Germanic look, as would the Dutch origins of the Roosevelt dynasty. And Gary “Pug” Peterman, the former child actor, then apparently Ada and Minna’s trusted majordomo? Who better to act as surrogate father to the famous madams’ unacknowledged son and nephew?

This also explained Will’s interaction with Kennedy and for that matter Hefner. Teddy Roosevelt was long dead, Prince Henry likewise, but the senator was the closest Monroe might come to actually meeting his father, or at least a man like him. And Hefner was the closest thing Chicago had to a carriage trade brothel keeper like the Everleigh sisters.