Last Call at the Latin Quarter
On New Year's Day 1950, a visitor from Nashville named Robert Dunn Jr. died of knock-out drops in a Bourbon Street club, so the city formed a vice commission to investigate
The bottle arrives before anyone names a price. A woman settles in beside the stranger, warm and curious about a man so far from home.
The waiter sets down champagne nobody ordered, at a figure nobody quotes. The stranger pays, because that is what a man does when the lights are low and a pretty woman is thirsty.
Keeping him buying is her whole line of work.
She is a “party girl” or bar girl, shortened to “b-girl”.
The waiters knew their part, too. They quit bringing change. They let a man drink past his money, and when the money was gone they walked him out to the banquette and left him there like a parcel set out for the morning.
Some nights, to hurry the math, a hand tipped a sedative into the man’s glass. On Bourbon Street they called it slipping a mickey.
Robert Dunn Jr. came down from Nashville and walked into the Latin Quarter Club,…
