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
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
