Terror at the Fair

Chapter Ten

My phone jangled as I strode into the fair’s empty pressroom. I had an idea who was calling and got it right.

“Snap, we’re getting word there’s been a fatal at the fair, a shooting,” rasped Hal Murray on the city desk against a backdrop of clattering typewriters and nattering voices. “But no details yet from Westcott at Headquarters. We need something for the early edition. Where in the hell have you been? This is my third call.”

“Covering said fatal, Hal. I was about to phone in an eyewitness report.”

“From who?”

“It’s whom. And from me, of course. Who d’ya think? I saw it happen, talked to the shooter, even got insulted by a police detective. All in a day’s work,” I said, sighing for effect. “Now how ’bout giving me a rewrite man?”

I spent the next fifteen minutes dictating copy, good copy, to Williamson. “No quotes from the cops?” he drawled after I’d finished.

“The dicks out here weren’t exactly in a talkative mood, Eddie, although one patrolman did complain about there being too many guns out here. I gather Westcott still hasn’t called in from Eleventh and State.”

“Not far as I know, Snap.”

“Well, maybe he’ll weigh in with comments from Chicago’s Finest. Also, chances are you’ll be hearing from me again.”

I dialed a number that had been burned into my brain years ago. “Chief Fahey’s office,” Elsie Dugo Cascio chirped.

“Is our noble leader available, you vision of loveliness?”

“Be still, my heart. It’s a voice from the past, come back to haunt me and invade my dreams. As a matter of fact, he just mentioned your very name a few minutes ago. I will put you through.”

“Dammit man, does trouble just follow you around, or do you follow it? I’ve never figured that one out,” Fahey growled.

“And a good afternoon to you, too, Chief Fahey. I had the displeasure earlier this very today of running into that lout Prentiss of yours. You ought to send the bastard to charm school. That is, if they offer remedial courses. He’s at the kindergarten level.”

“Okay, okay, I already know how you feel about Jack,” he said with a sigh. “Now tell me what—.” He got stopped in mid-sentence by a buzzing sound I took to be Elsie with another call.

“Gotta go,” he barked when he came back on the line. “Your Mr. Westcott is here to see me. Can’t keep the Tribune waiting, right?”

“Absolutely, I—”

“Give me your number there. I want to talk to you after I get done answering your colleague’s incisive questions.”

Twenty minutes later, my desk phone rang. The chief’s voice boomed over the wire.

“Westcott tells me you already phoned in a story including some quotes from the shooter. Mind sharing those quotes with me?”

“Not at all, but don’t you trust your attack dog Prentiss to be thorough in his own questioning?”

“No comment. Besides, I haven’t heard from him yet. And from what Westcott also told me, you happened to be an eyewitness. I’d like your slant on this, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“Okay, Fergus, fair enough.” I gave him my account of the shooting as well as a verbatim on the conversation with Todd Forrest.

“Bizarre,” Fahey muttered when I’d finished.

“True. Might have been an accident, a live shell somehow finding its way into the shipment of blanks. Could have happened at the factory or arsenal or wherever this stuff gets made.”

“Maybe,” the old copper said. “But as you know, I’m suspicious by nature. Our next move is to talk to whomever the people at the fair are who load those miserable rifles.”

“Mind if I sit in on those talks?”

A snort. “You know that’s impossible.”

“Well, you can’t blame an old newshound for trying. After all, you should be willing to give a little quid pro quo. I’ve already thrown some information your way. And I can be an extra pair of eyes and ears for you out here. You know I’m dependable.”

“I know I can depend on you to find trouble— usually for yourself. The answer is still no, Snap. There still are such things as regulations and procedures, as you are well aware.”

“Okay, I surrender—but only up to a point. How about telling me what your men find out after they’ve talked to the rifle-loaders?”

“Shouldn’t I be sharing the information with your Mr. Westcott here in the building?”

“No reason you can’t tell us both, is there?”

“I guess not,” the chief conceded. “Besides, it might get you off my back, although that may be too much to hope for.”

“Probably. By the way, for what it’s worth, I think the kid who did the shooting is clean. Call it a reporter’s intuition.”

“No reason to doubt it—yet,” he said. “But even if he is clean, I’ve got myself one doozie of a headache on my hands.”

“Why? There’s no way in the world I can see how the department could have prevented this.”

“Huh! Just try telling that to the editorial writers on your paper and those other rags you compete with. They’ll all find ways to blame us. Just watch. ‘Insufficient monitoring of dangerous materials, etc., etc.’ The commissioner is already bouncing off the walls. He’s going to be all over me.”

“I thought you and Prendergast got along pretty well.”

“We do, that’s never been a problem,” Fahey said. “But he’s going to be feeling the heat, and when he feels it, I feel it. After all, we’ve got ourselves a shooting death at the city’s major summertime event. An event, not incidentally, bringing in hundreds of thousands of visitors who leave behind hundreds of thousands of dollars at such places as hotels and restaurants and nightclubs. And also don’t forget the taxi drivers and souvenir shops and tour buses and how much they make on all these additional visitors who flock to our fine metropolis.

“The folks who run the exhibition are having a goddamned conniption, to say nothing of all the railroad presidents who’ve put up the dough to sponsor this fair. They’ll be demanding we double or triple the size of our detail at the fairgrounds. Never mind that we’re already stretched thin all across town, thanks to a local government, one which won’t give us more men. That’s all off the record, of course. So much for my two-week July escape to the calm and cool of Wisconsin.”

“You would miss the excitement of the city,” I countered lamely.

“Try me, just try me. All hell’s going to break loose around here.”

Fahey had it right. The next day, each of the four papers led with the shooting, and my first-person piece drew the Tribune’s banner headline: GUN DEATH AT RAIL FAIR. Also, all four dailies, per the chief’s prediction, carried editorials demanding both an immediate investigation and increased police presence at the fair. The Herald-American, true to its Hearst roots, ran its editorial in a box out on Page One under the headline ARE WE SAFE ANYWHERE? The answer, according to the editorial: a resounding “no!”

When I arrived in the fair’s pressroom the morning after the shooting, I found reporters already there from the Daily News and the Sun-Times. “To what do we owe this honor?” I asked the two, both of whom I had crossed paths with on occasion over the years.

“You know goddamn well, Malek,” said raw-boned, lantern-jawed Dave Stapleton of the News, who’d been with the paper as a crime reporter at least as long as I had worked for the Trib. Despite all those years he had been in Chicago, he still spoke with a voice that gave away his Texas roots. He lit a Chesterfield and sat on one corner of the desk with a DAILY NEWS sign taped to it. “Understand you saw the shooting here yesterday.”

“Yeah, Snap, give us the rundown,” put in the blocky, cigar-chomping Chick Cavanaugh of the Sun-Times, who had started out on the predecessor tabloid Times in the late ’20s and had covered the St. Valentine’s Day massacre up on Clark Street, as he was quick to tell anyone he met.

“You could have found all of it in my story this morning, lads, assuming you took the time to read it.”

“Ah, I see we’re full of ourselves today after getting the line story in the God-almighty Tribune,” Stapleton said, cocking his head and flicking ashes from his cigarette onto the wood-plank floor.

“For the record, I’ve gotten lots of line stories,” I told him, yawning.

“Don’t go acting smug just because your fat, rich paper can afford to keep a man out here full-time and the rest of us can’t,” Cavanaugh huffed.

“Now calm down, both of you,” I said. “For old times’ sake, although I don’t recall any old times to speak of with either of you, I’ll recap what I saw here yesterday, and then you’re on your own.”

They pulled out their reporter’s notebooks and scribbled as I recounted the events at the pageant. I had just finished up when Fred Metzger walked into the pressroom.

“Ah, Mr. Stapleton, Mr. Cavanaugh, I see you picked up your press credentials at the front gate,” he said, gesturing toward the badges they wore. “Wonderful to have you here,” he exuded, mopping his brow with a well-stained handkerchief. “You can help keep Mr. Malek company. Now, can I give you both a tour of the grounds?”

“Speaking for myself, just the place where the shooting happened,” Stapleton snapped. “I don’t know about Chick here, but I also need to talk to the guy who fired the rifle.”

“Oh, I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” Metzger said with a frown and a shake of the head that made his jowls jiggle. “He’s, well... he’s not available, as I understand it. I believe he has left the acting troupe here. I assumed you both had come to cover the grand scope and color of the fair and—”

“Oh, cut the crap, flack,” Cavanaugh snarled. “My paper leaves that kind of fluff to our nice lady feature writers, people like, well... like Malek here.” He sent a sneer my way, but before he took another breath, I yanked the cigar out of his yap and ground it under my heel.

“Next time, you overstuffed tub of lard, I’ll turn your nickel stogie around and jam it down your throat ash-end first,” I hissed, looking down at him and giving his wrinkled tie such a yank he almost toppled over forward. “Got it?”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Metzger whined. “Please, there is no need to get belligerent. We’re all here to do honor and justice to the fair.”

“Maybe you are,” Stapleton drawled to the PR man. “Me, I’m here looking for a story, and frankly, I don’t give two horned owl hoots about whether what I find does justice and honor to the fair or not. You’re paid to be a flack, I’m sure as hell not. Sorry to put it so starkly, but this is the way things are, like it or lump it.”

“I’ll second that,” Cavanaugh said, looking at me reproachfully as he straightened his tie and tried without success to square his rounded shoulders. “Somebody got himself shot dead here, which makes it news. More news by far than anything else going on around this overblown train carnival.”

“Even though it was just an accident?” Metzger asked in a querulous tone.

“Just who says it was an accident?” Stapleton crossed his arms over his chest. “Hey Malek, has anybody talked to the people who loaded those doggone rifles?”

“I haven’t got the foggiest idea, Dave,” I told him. “As your loud-mouthed, sawed-off crony here from the Sun-Times said, I’m just a feature writer now. Why bother asking me anything?” They’d gotten enough information from me for one day. Let them burn up some shoe leather.

“You wouldn’t be jiving us now, would you?” Stapleton’s eyes narrowed. “Once a police reporter, always a police reporter, I say.”

“That so? Well, I’ll think about those words while I’m interviewing one of the long-legged lassies who water ski at the Cypress Gardens Water Show out in the lake. But then, such fluff wouldn’t interest either of you hard-bitten, tough-guy crime chasers. Gotta run, boys.”

In fact, I did interview one of the nubile blonde lovelies in the water show, a copy of the original version in Florida underwritten by one of the railroads transporting Chicagoans south to the warm weather come wintertime. Sure enough, none other than Phil Muller showed up to take the photos, and he took plenty of them—far more than necessary.

As for the young lady, one Melissa Sue Harkness, age nineteen, of Dothan, Alabama, she didn’t have a lot to say, other than her being “honored to be chosen for this wonderful opportunity to present our show to the wonderful people of Chicago and all the other visitors to the fair,” a phrase she used three times in a voice that could melt ice cubes while still in the refrigerator.

I dutifully filed a few paragraphs, knowing full well my words would play second-fiddle to one of Muller’s cheesecake shots, which the picture editor, himself a lover of the feminine form, probably would spread across at least three columns.

That chore completed, I wandered through the crowded fairgrounds, looking for feature material. So far, I had got a few story suggestions from the paper, but I’d done each of them—including the water-skiing belle—and no further inspiration came forth from the Tower, although Metzger had proved to be a decent source of ideas.

My wristwatch told me it was just about time to knock off for the day, so I vowed to come in fresh in the morning, filled with ideas. As it would turn out, a story would present itself, but not the kind of story I expected.