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….
Other than remorse, however, repercussions for the carnage at the park never came. I never knew exactly how it was done— although I could easily guess who accomplished it—but the deaths of Jackie and those two Calumet City cops were covered up in a fashion both imaginative and thorough.
Jackie’s body was found in Lincoln Park, and the papers reported the tragic demise of a Miss Chicago turned showgirl turned drug addict. Hal Davis at the
The two cops were found in a ditch along the roadside in that stark industrial stretch north of Calumet City, in the shadow of a grain elevator. The chief of police pledged an around-the-clock search for the prime suspects, a stolen-car ring the brave detective duo had been closing in on; their records as cops were immaculate and they were buried as heroes with full honors. Their deaths were a further indication, said the press, of the peril faced by honest cops like these late Calumet City heroes and Chicago’s own William Drury.
Only a few spoilsports in the press—Lee Mortimer for one—pointed out that Calumet City was an Outfit stronghold of wide-open gambling, prostitution, and narcotics, a state of affairs only possible with police cooperation. “Putting their names in the same sentence as Bill Drury,” Mortimer wrote, “is a kind of blasphemy.”
I couldn’t help but admire the ability of Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert to stage-manage these deaths, when he had to deal with whatever officers happened to catch the call out to Riverview. Impressive. Of course, as chief investigator of the State’s Attorney’s office for these many years, he had developed remarkable clout on all levels of state and local law enforcement.
Somebody needed to do something about the son of a bitch, but as Drury’s friend and “partner” (not really an accurate designation, but that’s how the press termed our business relationship) I would have been a prime suspect should a public-minded citizen put a bullet in Tubbo’s beer-keg head.
Anyway, I had other fish to catch.
Vera and I, enjoying the warm wind stirred up by the open-air vehicle, tooled across a mere dozen or so mountain ridges along the superhighway thoughtfully provided by President Aleman, who’d been pumping Acapulco as a tourist spot. I was in sunglasses, a straw porkpie, a blue-and-tan Hawaiian aloha shirt, chino shorts, and sandals; I’d given my reddish brown hair a blond rinse. Vera was in a pale yellow shirt with flaring collar and cuffs, knotted at her midriff above canary yellow shorts; she too was in sandals and wore sunglasses. She had her hair ponytailed back and it was streaming behind her.
“I’ve been in Mexico lots of times,” Vera the Texas girl said, eyes as wide as Orphan Annie’s, “but this is something else.”
My busty companion was right. The drive to Acapulco displayed itself in green breeze-stirred grass on rolling land that occasionally jutted rock and even grew terrifying precipices above tan beaches flecked with foamy white; sleepy little communities of houses and huts of pastel stucco and tile roofs; snarls of coral vine and fields of bougainvillea, mango clumps and banana trees and tropical flowers; boats with sails of white and pea green on a sapphire sea glimpsed beyond piers and wharves with silver nets drying in the sun. I could identify with the latter—I was fishing, too, remember?
But for the fringes of beach and a flat grassy patch just big enough for a landing field, Acapulco itself was an up and down affair—a land-locked harbor of cliffs and promontories and white-gold beaches, a tropical paradise of orchids and coconut palms and parrots. Radiating out of the unpretentious plaza, with its nondescript church, were humble residential streets, while on the heights above perched the seasonal villas of the well-to-do, like pastel stairsteps climbing the hills. Between the two worlds of everyday locals and wealthy foreigners—spread out on their different levels—pockets of shantytown, like fungus, infested hillsides.
La Mirador was the first of the luxury hotels built in Acapulco, back in the early thirties, followed by maybe a dozen more; some of the shiny highrise hotels had mob investors—Moe Dalitz, from Cleveland, for one—who’d got in on the ground floor, back when Repeal was around the corner. Like Havana and Vegas, Acapulco was the kind of resort area mobsters loved—for business and pleasure.
Built on Quebrada Cliffs, La Mirador was no highrise, rather a rambling affair, rich with patios and terraces, and very open, starting with a lobby that had no walls. The beach—though it was late afternoon when we arrived—was scattered with sunbathers, taking in the declining sun, and swimmers, splashing in the foam; Vera and I saw this from a terrace above, the yellow and red and blue of beach umbrellas like polka dots on the creamy sand. Our room, however, opened onto the swimming pool area, which overlooked a magnificent waterview, white waves emerging
