I hadn’t been a stranger over the years, and Riverview in full sway—especially at night—remained a wonderland unparalleled in the western world, or anyway on Chicago’s Northside. Ablaze with neon, flickering with banjo lights—pop-tune-blaring sound-system horns in dishes ringed by tiny flashing white lights on lamp poles—the midway was a twisty, turny paradise of sleazy nirvana. With a doll on your arm (with a doll under her arm that you’d won for her), you wound through two and a half miles of bright loud midway crammed into a three-block-by-two-block area. Frequently, the air would be torn by the shrill horrified screams of plunging patrons enjoying the park’s legendary roller coasters, sounds of terror giving way to the clanking of chains as more victims were dragged up steep wooden slopes to their delighted doom.
Like most Chicagoans, however, I hadn’t ever set foot inside Riverview in the off-season, much less after midnight. Having parked on Western, I approached the front gates—a white wide pillared archway trimmed patriotically in red and blue. Had I been here just a few weeks ago, that archway would have radiated with neon; now, in ivory-tinged light courtesy of half a moon and a scattering of stars and few streetlamps, the night reluctantly gave up dark shapes beyond the gates, like massive slumbering beasts, and the filigree outline of trees losing their leaves. I could also make out the lettering RIVERVIEW PARK on the ticket booth inside the six-foot fence, which I scaled without any problem, dropping to the cement without hurting myself or making a racket.
While the park was dark—not even security lighting of any kind—the sky glowed off to my left, strangely enough, as if a small sunrise was taking place in the midst of the night. Looming over everything, the steel lacework of the Pair-O-Chutes tower dangled its metal cables like weird tendrils. The air was crisp, almost cold; I was dressed for a night at Riverview, particularly a night I wanted to blend into—a pair of dark slacks, black gum-soled loafers, and a black horsehide jacket over a navy sportshirt.
The jacket was unzipped, to make it easier for me to get at the .38 in the shoulder holster…I had left my nine millimeter Browning at home, preferring to use this gun, which I’d taken from that elevator operator at the Barry Apartments, the night Drury and Bas were killed. Using someone else’s gun has its benefits.
Wearing black leather driving gloves that fit like a second skin, I was carrying a duffel bag I’d packed with some old catalogs and newspapers, snugging in an extra revolver, a .32 that also couldn’t be traced to me. Whoever had abducted Jackie—assuming she had been abducted and wasn’t just party to some Fischetti scheme—was under the mistaken impression I had Drury’s notebooks, tapes, and papers; so the duffel bag seemed a necessary prop.
Riverview struck me as a good choice for the bad business my adversaries were up to—in the midst of the city, the abandoned sprawl of the off-season park provided a large, deserted landscape with many vantage points for positioning lookouts (and snipers) and countless possibilities for hiding, as well as numerous opportunities for hasty exits on all sides.
That these apparent kidnappers had chosen Riverview as a drop point made me suspicious of Fischetti involvement. For one thing, this was Charley’s turf—we weren’t that far from the Barry Apartments, in fact—and only a few blocks away from where Drury had been murdered in his garage.
Also, gambling was Rocco’s sphere of mob influence, and it was well known that the Outfit got a cut of the games of chance at Riverview, in some cases ran them.
Just to my right inside the gate, lovely in the moonlight, a vast flower garden—one of numerous landscaped areas scattered throughout Riverview—seemed to be surviving the cold snap just fine. Behind the garden yawned the wooden scaffolding of the Silver Flash roller coaster, its silver-shrouded cars no doubt stored away in one of the numerous sheds and warehouses of the sleeping grounds.
What separated Riverview from a carnival or fair were the permanent buildings, from shuttered wooden carny stalls to the ornate, overgrown-gazebo affair straight ahead, housing the Tilt-a-Whirl; beyond it, to the left, the lagoon was barely visible through the thickness of trees surrounding. Train tracks ringed the lagoon, though the tiny streamlined engine and its cars were probably in storage; but the miniature railroad made me think of Rocco…
…Had he turned on Jackie, when he and his brother learned that wives could be forced to testify against their husbands, or face imprisonment? Had the lovely addicted Miss Chicago become a liability good only for bait, to lure a chump like me to her rescue?
That unlikely sunrise was off to my left, and I was moving in that direction anyway, since I’d been summoned to Aladdin’s Castle, which had taken the place of Hades, after the previous funhouse had, yes, burned down. Duffel bag in my left hand, my right hand poised near my unzipped jacket, I walked down the paved path, with the park-like lagoon area and its benches and miniature railroad tracks to my right. To my left were the various rides and attractions—the Dive Bomber with its two capsule-shaped cars on either end of a suspended arm; the sprawling Spooktown with its elaborate cartoony facade of ghosts and skeletons; an enormous ferris wheel, the spokes and wires of which threw shadows on me as I approached the source of illumination in the otherwise gloomy park.
Aladdin’s Castle was alive!
Alive, that is, with sequential moving lights—as if this attraction alone in the park were open for business. Book-ended on either side of the gigantic face and shoulders of a turbaned, bearded (and crudely drawn) Aladdin—his robe brightly striped red, a golden lamp in his massive hand—were the mosque-like towers of an Arabian castle. Somebody inside had thrown a switch—or two, or three—and the neon trim of spires and minarets and the progressive blinking light-bulb “jewels” of the giant’s turban and lamp were burning in the night. Even the wide-open eyes of Aladdin were moving side-to-side in their creepy trademark fashion.
Standing before the garish display—that childishly drawn yet vaguely fiendish Aladdin face, with its lumpy nose and prissy mouth, towering over me—I felt like a child again, a child too young to handle the bizarre thrills of Riverview. That the immense park lay shrouded in darkness had not been as disturbing as seeing this one attraction aglow in the night….
The door in the fence beside the minaret ticket booth stood open, and I lugged my duffel bag down a cobblestone path through Aladdin’s overgrown front yard to the stairway that lay flat against the facade and led up past the pointing beard to a doorway in Aladdin’s right shoulder. This door was open, too—and nobody asked for a ticket. Hadn’t had a bargain like this since I got those shiny pennies.
I’d been through this place with a date, a time or two, but didn’t remember the layout. Immediately I was in a maze of screen doors; all the damn things looked identical and I hit dead end after dead end, until finally I was in a hall of mirrors— looking skinny and fat in various ones, and not particularly intelligent in any.
Soon I was passing through a room with a slanted floor, having to hold on with my free hand to a railing to keep from pitching onto my ass. Then I was in a dark corridor, and tinny speakers emitted snake charmer music, telegraphing the lighted-up wall recess in which a fake cobra lunged at me; I didn’t even react to that cheap shit, but I flinched when a scimitar-wielding dummy Arab appeared on the other side of me…damn near went for the .38….
This corridor emptied me into one of those rooms with a floor of round metal disks that rotated as you stepped on them. I had to use all my concentration to make it across without a tumble, and when I entered the adjacent corridor, another dark one, somebody grabbed me from behind, one arm looping powerfully around me, while the other arm came around and a hand deftly fished the .38 out from under my shoulder.
I didn’t have time to struggle—I was simply dragged bodily through a doorway into a little bare room with unpainted wooden walls and slatted flooring, and nothing in it but a big switchbox on one wall. The cubbyhole was barely big enough for all three of us: me, the guy behind me with his arms looped around my chest, and Jackie Payne, who
was tied into a wooden chair, a handkerchief gag in her mouth.
She was conscious and her eyes were wide with alarm and concern and a hundred other things. The rope—greasy carny cord—cut tightly against her pink sweater and matching slacks…it was the same outfit she’d been wearing when I picked her up off the street corner on Sheridan…the ropes making smudgy stains, and obviously hurting her, her wrists behind her, her ankles tied together, not to the chair. Her feet were bare, which led me to think she’d been snatched out of her apartment. Her left sweater sleeve was yanked back and the tracks and bruises on her slender white arm were painfully apparent.
The guy shoved me past her, into a corner of the shack-sized room, and positioned himself opposite me, with Jackie in between, giving me my first good look at him—actually, my second good look, because not long ago I’d had another memorable view of him, when he and his partner were heading right at me, about to run me down in that maroon coupe in Little Hell.
This was the tall, lanky one, with the harelip scar through his mustache. Hatless, he had neatly combed longish brown hair, his eyes brown and cold, his cheek bones rather sharp—he was like a pale Apache; I put him in his late twenties, though there was experience in that hard face. He wore a glen plaid brown suit that had a tailored look and a silk green-and-brown striped tie; he was a natty son of a bitch, for a guy training my own .38 on me. Well, the elevator operator’s .38.
“You don’t have to die,” he said.
This was not the voice I’d heard on the telephone: so there was at least one more of them…probably the other mustached assassin, the smaller, round-faced one.
“Sooner or later, we all do,” I said.
That snake charmer music was still playing, distantly, over scratchy speakers.
The mustache curled into a small smile. “Well…it can be sooner, if you insist. You got what I want?”
He meant the Drury notebooks. I hefted the duffel bag.
“That’s it?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
“It’s not gym clothes,” I said. Truthfully.
Her eyes agonized now, Jackie—tied tight in her chair—was looking back and forth between us, as if she were following a tennis match with life-and-death consequences. Maybe she was.
As he pointed the .38 at me with one hand, he reached his other hand into a suitcoat pocket. Then he tossed something, which clunked on the wooden floor at Jackie’s feet. A pocket-knife—a good-size one.
“You give me what’s in that bag,” he said, “and I’ll just go. And by the time you cut the little junkie loose, I’ll be long gone. You’ll have what you want, I’ll have what I want.”
“Where’s your partner?”
A tiny shrug. “He might be anywhere. Maybe he’s up on top of the Pair-O-Chutes. Maybe he’s sitting in a ferris wheel car.”
“Somewhere he can shoot me from, you mean.”
But the pale Apache was shaking his head. “We don’t want to shoot you.”
Fuck him—I’d witnessed him and his partner killing Bas. I hadn’t come forward about what I’d seen, but the threat of my doing so still hung over them—which was part of why we were here at Riverview tonight, besides the fun and games of Aladdin’s Castle. To remove that threat.
The only thing keeping me alive was their need to get what they thought I had: the Drury papers.
“All right,” I said to him, as Jackie looked at me with affection and desperation in those big brown eyes. “I suppose if you wanted to shoot me, I’d be dead by now.”
“That’s right,” he said, accepting that as my actual line of thinking.
“You mind if I ask you who you’re working for?”
“Just give me the damn bag, okay?”
I held out the duffel bag, assertively—right out in front of Jackie’s face. “Take it, then. Fucking take it!”
The pale Apache winced in thought. Too much thinking is bad for some people. But it was clear he now figured I’d booby-trapped the bag somehow…maybe put a real cobra in it. After all, we had snake charmer music playing in the background….
He sneered at me; natty as he was, that mustache could use a trim. “You open it—slowly. Show me everything that’s in there, one item at a time…make a pile on the floor.”
“Okay.” I pretended to be trying to juggle the bag into a workable position. I gave him a frustrated look, saying, “Can I put the bag down?”
Sighing with impatience, he nodded.
I crouched and unzipped the duffel bag; he was watching me carefully, the gun poised to blow me away at the slightest sign of treachery. My hand found the .32 and I fired it up at him through some newspapers and the canvas of the bag itself, which muffled the sound almost as well as a silencer, and the son of a bitch never had time to realize what had happened, much less squeeze the trigger of the .38.
He just stood there for a moment, with the little blue hole in the middle of his forehead, like a third eye, and his other two eyes weren’t seeing any better than the new one; reflexes severed, his body flopped like a stringless puppet right about where I was supposed to pile the notebooks and tapes. The splash of blood and brains on the wooden wall behind him would have looked fine in a frame at Fischetti’s penthouse.
Jackie had an astonished expression—not as astonished as that dead mustached fucker, but astonished enough. He fell at her feet, so I shoved him aside to get at that pocket-knife, and flipped it open and started cutting her loose— the guy had played fair, providing a nice sharp blade, and I was able to free her within a minute…though that minute seemed like an eternity, since I couldn’t be sure the shot…however muffled…might not have carried well enough for the partner to hear.
With the ropes in a pile at her bare feet, Jackie stood—she weaved for a moment, put a hand to her head; she seemed groggy.
“You okay?” I said, slipping an arm around her waist. I’d already retrieved the .38 from my late host, the .32 consigned to a jacket pocket. “Can you make it, baby?”
She nodded, tugging her sleeve down over the bruises and tracks, and I went to that control box and found a switch in the OFF position labeled HOUSE LIGHTS, and another in the ON that said MASTER GIMMICK; I hit both switches, and when I walked her out of there, occasional bare work bulbs unmasked the mysterious corridor of Aladdin’s Castle as unpainted plywood. With my arm still around her waist, we moved down a sloping ramp that I seemed to remember would take us out.
The exit awaiting us was one of those big rolling barrels, so awkward to navigate without falling comically ass over teakettle; but it wasn’t rolling now. Before we could duck through it into the night, I paused, kissed her forehead, looked into those dazed-looking brown eyes, and said, “His partner’s out there, somewhere.”
She nodded. “Yes—he’s smaller.”
“Round face, also has a mustache.”
“Yes! They just showed up at the apartment…came into the den and grabbed me. I don’t know how they got in….”
“That can wait. But here’s the plan.”
I told her that right behind Aladdin’s Castle—separated by one knee-high fence and another somewhat higher one—was a parking lot; beyond that parking lot, and another fence, Western Avenue, along which my Olds was parked, in front of the quiet clapboard houses of the residential neighborhood in Aladdin’s backyard. I would go out first—to see if I drew any fire (but I didn’t say that)—and when I signaled her, she would join me, we would duck around the side of the building, and she was to climb the fences first as I covered her with the .38.
“Got it?”
She nodded; but she seemed woozy.
“Jackie, you have to get ahold of yourself.”
She nodded again, more assuredly. Then she touched my face and looked up at me with a longing expression. “You really do care about me, don’t you?”
It sounded childish—and both absurd and slurred—yet it was so tender my heart broke, a little. She was another man’s wife…and I suspected that man had sent her here to die.<
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“You know I do,” I said, and I kissed her—a short, sweet kiss.
Then, .38 in hand, I ran through the barrel, and exited into the crisp, somewhat breezy night; I was on a platform that, if I followed it to some stairs, would present another round of adventures in the other wing of the castle. I would pass on that privilege.
I slowly scanned the landscape—the thickness of trees surrounding the lagoon, empty benches, the idle railroad, the empty expanse of paved midway, curving around the lagoon at left and right. The tower of the Pair-O-Chutes adjacent to the castle seemed to me an unlikely spot for a sniper—no elevator went up there, after all, only those dangling chains (whose chutes and harnesses were in storage), and I doubted my round-faced adversary was hanging up there by a chain or two, waiting to get a good shot off.
I looked at the castle’s next-door neighbor on the other side—could someone be up in one of those ferris wheel cars?
I hopped off the platform, motioning for Jackie—waiting on the other side of the barrel—to stay put. Moving as silently as possible, I stepped out into the castle’s lawn, one slow step at a time, listening for any sound that might give movement away.
Nothing.
Nothing but the wind rustling the tarps and rattling the shutters of Riverview in hibernation, the scaffolding of various roller coasters whining and creaking; and the occasional honking car horn and other late-night traffic sounds of the nearby streets.
Where was the son of a bitch? Had he heard the shot and panicked and fled? Had he positioned himself elsewhere in the park—was he roving the midway, to see if I’d enlisted backup, despite warnings to the contrary?
If he’d seen me, he’d had plenty of opportunity to take a potshot.
I turned toward the barrel—which was positioned as if at the end of one of the giant Aladdin’s sleeves—and waved at Jackie to join me, which she did. At my direction, she took the lead, as we ducked around the side of the castle, and I moved in circles, gun fanned out, trying to be ready whatever direction the shit might fly from.
Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14 Page 20