Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14 (18 page)

His eyes narrowed; he again sat forward. “Would you like to share that information with the committee?”

“Would the chairman of the committee like to assure me I won’t be called as a witness?”

Kefauver chuckled. “You are everything you’re cracked up to be, Mr. Heller…. What do you have in mind?”

“Maybe you’d like to hire me…confidentially, of course, by which I mean only you and me and your government checkbook would know.”

“Continue, please.”

“You fund my jaunt South of the Border, where I confirm the whereabouts of your witness. I’ll wire you that information, keep Charley and Rocco under surveillance until the
federales
take over.”

“I like the sound of this. When would you do it?”

“Right away. Soon as I can book plane tickets…next few days.”

Kefauver shook his head, grinned the infinite grin, and stuck his hand across the desk. “Mr. Heller—welcome aboard the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce.”

I shook with him, but said, “Yeah, well, let’s skip the office welcome wagon…. No one but the two of us are hep to this, remember.”

“Hep…?”

“Are in the know about my role.”

“Fine.” The endless grin—a toothless version—seemed to crinkle across his face; then he added, “Always room for another talented performer here at the circus.”

I stood. “Let’s hope I’m not just another clown.”

“It could be worse, Mr. Heller.”

“Yeah, Senator?”

“Try not to get shot out of a cannon.”

Thinking that was good advice, I nodded and went out.

That afternoon around two, in the lobby of the St. Clair Hotel, red-headed Hannan, the house dick, caught me just as I was about to go up on the elevator.

“I need a moment, Nate,” he said, kind of edgy.

“Sure, Hannan,” I said, walking with him over to one side. “What cooks?”

“Not my goose, I hope—listen…I let a dame in your room.”

“Yeah? Anybody you know? Anybody I know?”

“She says she’s a friend from Texas.”

“Texas? I don’t have any girl friends from Texas.”

He gestured with open hands. “Nate, I’m pretty sure you’re not gonna mind. This is one of the best-looking babes I ever saw, built like a brick shithouse and then some…and she was real tired, just got off the bus. She had luggage with her, and no money. I felt sorry for her.”

What the hell was this about?

“Jesus, Hannan—have you seen the papers lately? I’m kind of hot right now. You might have just let some Outfit bimbo lay a trap for me.”

His eyes showed white all around. “This is a trap I’d give my left nut to lay. Look, she’s clean—I made her let me go through the suitcase, and her cosmetics case, and then she stood for a frisk.” He grinned and his eyes narrowed and kind of glazed over. “And what a frisk…. Sometimes this is a great job.”

I shook my head, not knowing whether to smack him or tip him. “Does this Texas girl fresh off the bus have a name?”

“Sure—Vera something.”

Vera Jayne Mansfield, nee Palmer—in a short-sleeve white blouse with gaucho collar and black pedal pushers ending over nicely curving calves and red-painted toenails—was asleep on my sofa in the living room of my suite, her powder blue suitcase next to her, a matching train case too. On her back, her cute face to one side, the brunette pageboy tousled, her magnificent bosom rising and falling, Vera was lost in a deep sleep, clearly exhausted.

I sat on the edge of the sofa and wondered why I wasn’t irritated with her. For some stupid reason, I was glad to see her. Maybe that she was a gorgeous girl of nineteen or so, asleep in my apartment after driving cross-country to see me, had something to do with it. Maybe if I couldn’t have the former Miss Chicago on my sofa, the almost Miss California would make a sweet substitute.

She didn’t wake till after dark. I’d been sitting in my easy chair, with a lamp on, reading the afternoon papers, when she purred and, moving sinuously, stretched and yawned and cracked her neck this way and that. Blinking a few times, she finally noticed me and beamed.

“I’ll bet you’re mad at me,” she said.

“Furious.”

“I bet you wonder what I’m doing here.”

“Visiting?”

She touched her breasts, eyes doing an Eddie Cantor. “I must look a fright.”

“Horrible.”

“I was on the bus most of last night and a lot of today.” She tasted her mouth and didn’t like it. “I’ll be right back.”

She snatched up her train case, scampered off into the bathroom, and fifteen minutes later emerged with fresh makeup and brushed hair and a big white smile. Returning to the couch, she patted the cushion next to herself with one hand, while crooking the forefinger of her other hand. It was insulting, really, even demeaning—like she was summoning a child, or maybe a dog.

I obeyed at once.

“Thanks for not being angry,” she cooed. “I didn’t call because I thought you’d try to talk me out of it.”

“Out of what?”

“Coming to Chicago to see you. To get you to help me. You know—to get work, modeling assignments, maybe some nightclub thing, in a chorus line. Doesn’t that make sense? Starting here, sort of small, and working up to Hollywood?”

This girl—who was nineteen or at most twenty—had something almost scarily intense in those wide-set hazel eyes; beneath those soft curves and that sweet face was a ferocious drive, a willingness to do whatever was necessary. Most girls who went after show biz careers were ready to settle for a husband or a sugar daddy; this girl wanted to be in show biz for one reason, and one reason only: to make it big. To be a star.

I asked, “What about Paul?”

“Paul—my husband, Paul?”

“Yeah—that Paul.”

“He’s at Camp Gordon in Georgia. Intense training for a month—no wives allowed—before he goes to Korea.”

“What does he think about you coming to Chicago?”

She shrugged, batting the big hazel eyes. “He doesn’t know. Nate, you have to understand something…. Back in high school, some boys at a party got me high and raped me, or anyway took advantage of me, I don’t really remember the details, too out of it…I just know I got pregnant. Paul was a decent-looking guy, president of his class, and he always wanted to date me. So we got secretly married my senior year and he gave my daughter a name…and a father.”

“Sounds like you got yourself a nice guy. A good catch.”

“Paul really helped me out—but he doesn’t understand my ambition.”

“Why don’t you divorce him, if you’re unhappy with him?”

“I’m not unhappy. He’s going to Korea—when he gets back, if he’s willing to go out to Hollywood with me, I’ll give him a chance. I owe him that much. In the meantime, I have a dream to pursue.”

I shook my head. “Vera, I don’t know if Chicago’s the best place to do that.”

“What about modeling jobs?”

“Well…. The Patricia Stevens agency I have an in with; I’ve done some security work for them. And there’s no denying you would make a swell swimsuit model.”

“Oh, Nate—you’re wonderful.”

“I can’t guarantee anything, Vera…”

“Thank you…thank you…thank you for not being mad at me.”

She put her arms around my neck and kissed me with those soft full lips. The only light on was the lamp by my chair, and I got up and switched it off, and returned to her on the sofa, where she was already unbuttoning her blouse.

Vera was a married woman—sort of—and I was still in the throes of an emotional attachment to another beauty queen. And I should have either thrown this one out on her pretty behind, or just been a friend to her, helping her make some connections in the big town.

About two minutes later, she was naked on my lap, her hips churning, my pants around my ankles, and I was deep inside her, my face burrowed first in one generous breast, then the other. Her devil-may-care, giddy sexuality was infectious, but she noticed something different about me, and—slowing but not stopping the motion of her hips—she placed a soft tender hand against my face and her eyes were caring as she stared into me, saying, “You’re hurting, aren’t you, Nate? Why are you hurting?”

“Nothing…it’s nothing….”

“Vera Jayne’ll make you forget…or die trying….”

I was the one who almost died—we did it on the kitchen table next, after I’d fixed us sandwiches, and eventually we even got around to the bedroom. It was close to midnight, with Vera curled up against me, her full lips smiling in slumber, when the phone on the nightstand rang.

Catching it on the first ring, hoping not to disturb my guest, I said, “Hello.”

“Nate…Nate….”

It was Jackie!
…
and she sounded strange
…
out of breath
…
was she crying?

“What is it, baby?” I said into the phone.

Vera, half-awake now, looked up at me, propping herself on an elbow.

“Nate,” Jackie said. “Please help me…you have to help me….”

“Where are you?”

“Riverview. A lad…”

“A lad? Baby, what—?”

Now another voice came on the line, a male voice, rather high-pitched but gruff. Was this the “lad” she was referring to?

“She’s hurting, Heller. She needs a fix.”

“Who the fuck—”

“Bring those notebooks to Aladdin’s Castle.”

“Notebooks?”

“Don’t play dumb. We know your pal Drury gave ’em to you—notebooks, diaries, tapes, the works. Come alone. Before one a.m., or the next injection this junkie slut gets is forty-five caliber.”

And the phone clicked dead.

Sitting up in bed, clutching the receiver, eyes and mouth wide open, I must have looked like a madman, because Vera backed away as she said, “What’s wrong?”

“I have to go somewhere.” I swung over and sat on the edge of the bed; then I was using the phone again—dialing this time. “You’ll have to stay here, Vera.”

“Where are you going?”

“Riverview.”

“What’s Riverview?”

“An amusement park—the world’s largest.”

“Well that sounds like fun! Take me along!”

“They’re closed for the season, Vera.”

“Then why…?”

“Quiet,” I said, as the party I was phoning responded.

“Yeah?” the sleep-thick male voice said. “Who is it? You know what the fuck time it is?”

“Tim,” I said to Bill Drury’s ex-cop partner. “This is that call you asked me to make.”

Riverview amusement park—bordered on the north by Lane Tech high school, on the east by Western Avenue, on the west by the Chicago River, and on the south by Belmont Avenue— had been a fixture of the Northside as long as I’d been alive. In fact, one of its rides—the Pair-O-Chutes—loomed over that part of town like a Chicago Eiffel Tower; actually that’s what it had originally been called—the Eye-Ful tower, an observation deck that had been condemned by the city and cannily turned by the Riverview management into a freefall parachute drop. From miles around, you could see the oil well-like structure, crosshatched against the sky.

Some of my earliest and fondest childhood memories were of the so-called “world’s largest amusement park”—free entrance passes were routinely mailed out all across the city, and the park refunded the two-cent streetcar fare for kids (a big table of shiny pennies awaited inside the front gates), encouraging customers for what was already a bargain-packed extravaganza.

When I was a kid, I’d held onto my stomachful of cotton candy and popcorn through the wild ride that was the Jack Rabbit roller coaster, only to be defeated by the Crazy Ribbon, with its barrel-shaped cars rolling and twisting back and forth down an inclined track. Dreams during my adult life on occasion had returned me to the funhouse called Hades, a hell of a ride through dark passageways filled with flashing figures and unearthly noises.

And my memory still tingles with other vivid images of Riverview: the freak show with the Tattooed Lady, the Rubber Man, and Pop-Eye (not the sailor but a guy who could force his eyeballs to jut from their sockets); midget fire eaters; hootchie-kootchie dancers; the African Dip (colored guys dressed like jungle warriors who taunted you into hurling baseballs at them— “Hey man, that ain’t the gal you was here with
las’
night!”); and of course every kid’s favorite, the Monkey Races, where you bet on the driver of your choice among the tiny terrified creatures “steering” cars of various colors, cute little critters but if you petted them you’d get nipped—don’t say you weren’t warned.

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….