Then we ran again, Jackie stumbling, but I pulled her along as we fled down the midway, cutting to the right, in front of Aladdin’s, then rounding the lagoon, heading down the midway, back toward the looming roller coaster scaffolding and the front gates.
But Jackie wasn’t making it—she seemed about to collapse, sweating, tottering, and finally I had to duck with her between two shuttered stalls, a Skee-Ball and a penny arcade, and I knelt at the mouth of the little grassy alleyway, while she leaned against the side of the stall, next to me. I was watching the midway for our pursuer, but also sneaking side glances at my fading companion.
“I’m…sorry,” she whispered, out of breath.
“Shhh,” I said, .38 poised.
“They…they gave me a fix.”
“What?”
“Be…before you got here…so they…could handle me better…didn’t want one…didn’t need one….”
I knew I should keep my eyes on that midway, but I turned to her, and she looked terrible—ghostly white, perspiration pearling her forehead, despite the breeze. “Christ, Jackie—had you already shot up?”
She nodded, swallowed, her breath heaving; she seemed dizzy, as if about to pass out.
Had she overdosed? Surely that would have taken more immediate effect; but perhaps not—perhaps what she’d been put through…and was being put through…had taxed her system, her heart….
And who the hell knew what they’d slammed into her?
“I’ll get you out of here,” I said to her.
She summoned a weak little smile. “I’ll be…all right. I’ll be…all right.”
“I’m getting you help, baby.” And I didn’t mean just tonight.
“I’ll be fine…just let me…let me catch my breath.”
I heard movement and snapped my attention back to the midway and saw him—my round-faced assassin.
He wasn’t running—he was prowling, staying low, fanning his gun out now, as if it were a flashlight in the darkness, walking close to the trees, not on the midway itself, rather on the grass, behind the benches, near the train tracks.
If he would just keep coming, keep that same pace and direction, stepping into that shaft of moonlight, I could get a good shot at the son of a bitch….
The night cracked, like a whip, and the bullet stood the little assassin up straight, as if he were coming to startled attention—and then dropped him on his face.
From in back of the fallen assassin, Tim O’Conner came into view, his expression as stunned as if he had been the one who’d been shot…not the one doing the shooting.
I left her propped against the side of the booth, whispered, “Stay put, baby,” and she nodded, as I scooted out into the midway, .38 in hand.
I wasn’t sure whether Tim had seen me or not—I guessed not, because he seemed in a sort of trance as—damn!—he fired again, his revolver belching orange as he shot down into the figure already sprawled across the little train tracks.
“This is for Bill Drury, you lousy cocksucker,” he said, and then he put one in the back of the dead assassin’s skull; the sound was like a ripe melon hitting cement.
O’Conner stood there, his revolver limp at his side now, the acrid smell of cordite heavy in the air.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
He blinked, swallowed, looked up at me with that stunned puss. “Are you? I heard the gunshot, and came running.”
Tim’s job had been to scope out the park, even as I was entering it, and take care of any sniper in the woodpile, or shut down any other sort of trap that might have been laid for me; after that, he was to position himself on the other side of the lagoon, close enough to Aladdin’s to maneuver himself no matter what took place. Shooting one of Bill Drury’s two assassins in the back was his own idea.
O’Conner seemed almost embarrassed, as he nodded down at what he’d done. “Jeez, Nate…I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” I said. “You through?”
O’Conner nodded, and I kneeled over the corpse, turning it over just enough to get at the guy’s wallet. I flipped it open and the metal of a badge caught the moonlight and winked at me.
“What the hell,” O’Conner said, leaning down. “Is he a cop?”
I nodded, reading the ID card. “Calumet City. I bet his dead partner’s got the same kind of tin in his wallet.”
This made an awful sort of sense: Tubbo Gilbert—the State’s Attorney’s investigator running for sheriff—did business with crooked cops all around Cook County, and the state for that matter. The Calumet City P.D. was a handy place to recruit a pair of contract killers whose faces would be unknown in Chicago.
O’Conner was saying, “His partner is dead, too?”
Distant sirens announced we had outworn our welcome at Riverview—the gunshots and the lights of Aladdin’s Castle had attracted neighborhood attention.
“Fill ya in later,” I said, trotting over to where I’d left Jackie, but she wasn’t leaning against the stall now—she lay prone on the ground.
“Shit!” Kneeling over her, I saw awful signs: the brown eyes were open and empty, a trail of spittle ran down her cheek. And she was motionless.
O’Conner was right there. “What is it? What’s wrong with her?”
I was trying to find a pulse. “I think she’s overdosed—help me with her! We have to get her to a hospital!”
He was bending beside her now, taking a closer look, touching her throat. “Nate—I don’t think…”
“Help me carry her!”
O’Conner’s hand gripped my shoulder. “Nate! She’s dead! We have to get out of here, unless you want to explain all of this—maybe to the State Attorney’s investigators? Leave her!”
I could have knocked his teeth down his throat for that, except for one thing: he was right.
She was dead.
“No helping her,” I said.
“What?”
“No helping her—not now.”
I kissed her forehead, and O’Conner and I went over a fence behind Spooktown, cutting through a parking lot over to Western Avenue. Blinking through tears, I was heading south on Western when the two police cars came zooming north, sirens screaming like riders on the Silver Rash.
We took a morning flight—six hours from Chicago to Mexico City on Mexicana Airlines—and rented a Jeep for the drive to Acapulco. My companion—a certain model and aspiring actress named Vera—was a cooing delight, her enthusiasm for the trip and bubbly personality going a long way toward rescuing me from the funk I’d been in for the last several days.
Arrangements for the trip had been simple; no passports were needed—just tourist cards, furnished through my travel agent—and I had press credentials, supplied by Drew Pearson, who had paved the way for me with the Associated Press office in Mexico City. As for Senator Kefauver, he made calls to the embassy in Mexico City, to arrange for a Narcotics Bureau agent stationed there to transfer temporarily to the consulate office at Acapulco. It seemed bureau director Harry W. Anslinger— unlike J. Edgar—was backing up the Crime Committee, all the way.
What I had in mind—and in due time I’ll let you in on it—would benefit both Senator Kefauver and my perennial journalistic employer Pearson, meaning I could hit them both up for paychecks and expense accounts.
Even in a funk, I looked after business.
But I had been depressed, no question, sick with sadness and shame. I had not managed to rescue Jackie Payne, though perhaps she was past rescuing: a girl who could go back to the likes of Rocco Fischetti, for drugs and show biz, might well have been past salvation. In time I would see that, but in the days—and, at times, during the weeks and months and even years ahead—I would suffer a gut-wrenching guilt thinking about abandoning that overdosed beauty queen in the grass at Riverview.
The worst of it would come late at night, when I convinced myself she may not really have been dead, and I had left her there, to die in the cold, fleeing to cover my own ass….