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...
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.
