Terror at the Fair

Chapter Twelve

Figuring I needed time to noodle on story ideas, I got to the fair earlier than usual the next morning — 8:20 by my dependable Elgin watch. I had just settled in at the desk when an excited Rob Taylor, Metzger’s summer intern, dashed into the PR man’s office, panting.

Metzger quickly closed his door, but through the plywood wall I could catch snatches of the young man’s excited conversation: “…on the ground... first thing this morning... just lying there... awful, awful!”

I’d heard enough and barged into the little office. “What’s going on?”

Metzger got flustered and swallowed hard, looking at his intern. “Rob here says he was over at the... the New Orleans French Quarter, and there’s—”

“There’s a body on the ground there, and, and...” Rob sputtered, waving his arms.

“Let’s go right now!”

“Wait,” Metzger said. “We need to—”

“You can come or not, but I’m on my way,” I shouted over my shoulder. The New Orleans exhibit was only a few hundred yards away, and after a three-minute trot, I found myself in the square that had been made to look like a slice of the Louisiana city’s French Quarter.

A cluster of people had gathered at a decorative fountain in the center of the plaza. I elbowed my way through the small crowd and spotted the object of their attention.

On the pavement next to the ornate fountain lay a thin, gray-haired man in a red shirt and long white waiter’s apron. His tongue protruded and his sightless eyes stared skyward. His slack mouth was open. The cause of death seemed apparent: a knotted loop of twine embedded in his thin neck. I had seen enough corpses over the years to know the guy had been dead for hours.

“Who is this?” I barked above the sobbing of a hefty woman in braided hair and an apron who knelt beside the body.

“George Burnwell,” said an ashen-faced old fellow beside me who looked like he might keel over any second. “Like me, he is—was—a waiter at the Café St. Louis.” He tilted his head toward an archway leading, I knew, to a train dining car adjoining the street scene as part of the Illinois Central Railroad’s elaborate exhibit.

“Has anybody called the police?” I looked around at the grim faces.

“We all just got here to open up for the day,” said a woman in a ruffled blouse and a red hoop skirt. “When we came in, we found…” She sniffled and gestured toward the body.

At that moment, one of Chicago’s Finest barreled into the courtyard, out of breath and followed by an equally puffing Fred Metzger. The law came in the form of the very same uniformed cop, O’Brien, who had arrived on the scene shortly after the stagecoach shooting.

“All right, all right, don’t anybody leave here,” he ordered. “There’s detectives on the way who’ll want to talk to all of you. Who found him?”

“Actually, several of us did, sir,” the hoop-skirted woman volunteered. “We all arrived at just about the same time.”

“Now ain’t this just convenient, though,” he snarled, hands on hips.

“But, don’t you see, it’s the same each day,” she insisted. “We are told to be here at 8:30, which gives us an hour to get everything set up, what with the gates opening at 9:30 and all.”

“Well, he musta got here first today,” Officer O’Brien said, shaking his head and looking down at the body.

“More likely, he never left last night,” pronounced the old waiter next to me, who had somewhat composed himself. “George, he was in charge of the dining car, like in the old days on the I.C. when we both worked as stewards running those grand diners on the Panama Limited and the City of New Orleans. In a restaurant, you would have called us maitre d’s. Every night here, he stayed around to tidy up after the rest of us went home. He was a real perfectionist. Everything had to be just so.”

“Well, then he must have—” O’Brien halted in mid-sentence as two square-jawed, grim-faced plainclothes dicks in fedoras strode up. I was pleased to note neither of them was Jack Prentiss.

The senior man of the pair, who identified himself as Corcoran, swiftly took over. “I’m going to want to talk to everybody here, one by one. Someplace private we can go?”

“Detective, I’m Fred Metzger, in charge of public relations at the fair. My office is close by, or if you prefer, we can use the dining car, which is part of this exhibit. I’m sure the Illinois Central folks won’t mind.”

“But, we’re opening to the public in a little while to serve brunch,” a tall, dark-haired fellow in a business suit said plaintively.

“The diner sounds fine to me. You’ll just have to open up later than usual today,” Corcoran replied crisply. “Murder trumps everything else.”

Having effectively silenced any objections, the detective and his partner led the gathering through an archway between the quaint stuccoed buildings and toward the dining car. I turned in the opposite direction, heading for the pressroom and a telephone.

“Hey you, where you going?” barked Corcoran’s sidekick, whom I later learned was named Baxter.

“I’m a Tribune reporter. Hafta file a story. I’ll check in with you later.”

“Get back here,” he bellowed, but I had already left New Orleans.

“What in God’s name is going on at your damned fair, Malek?” Hal Murray on the city desk demanded in his usual machine-gun cadence after I had given him a quick rundown from my desk in the empty pressroom.

“Like Chief Fahey has been saying for years, trouble just follows me. I’ll give rewrite a few graphs for the two-star, then I’ve got to get back and see how the cops are doing.” I proceeded to dictate the bare essentials, including the dead man’s name. Seconds after I’d hung up, the phone rang. It was Fahey.

“I just got word about this latest—” He uttered one of those words the Tribune will not print. “Fill me in.”

“Isn’t that what you have a whole regiment of men for? To fill you in?”

“Yeah, but I like to hear what you think, too.”

“I’m honored, Fergus, I really am. I haven’t got a lot for you, I’m afraid, but I did get to the scene a little ahead of the uniformed man and your guys.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Anyway, as we speak, Detective Corcoran is interviewing people over at the Illinois Central exhibit, where it happened, along with his sidekick.”

“That would be Baxter.”

“Okay. I’ve never met either of them. Anyway, it seems the victim, old fellow, name of Burnwell, got garroted sometime last night, probably as he was closing up. You probably already know that much.”

“Sort of, yeah. Give me your take.”

“Eh... I don’t have one. The guy was a retired railroad employee. Used to work in the dining cars, for what it’s worth.” Fahey spat a Tribune no-no word again.

“Yeah, it’s one hell of a mess, all right,” I sympathized. “I’d better get back there. Baxter got sore when I broke from the group gathered around the body to call the paper. Before I go, anything new to tell me about the earlier mishap?”

A snarl came over the wire. “Things are run in a pretty casual way out there along the lake,” Fahey said, “and the employees, such as they are, seem to drift in and out like day laborers. Three men loaded blanks into the rifles at the pageant every day, and one of them didn’t bother showing up again after the shooting. He had filled out an employment card when they hired him, but the address he put down on North Clarendon doesn’t exist. For that matter, he probably doesn’t exist either, at least under the name he put down.”

“Which was?”

“White, Samuel White. To top if off, the Social Security number he put down also is a phony. I already gave all this to your replacement, of course, and presumably, he passed it along to those other leeches up in the pressroom.”

“Did the guys who White worked with give you a description of him?”

“Yeah, I also fed it to your replacement.”

“How ’bout feeding it to me, too? After all, I’m still on the Trib payroll.”

Fahey made a production of growling.

“Come on, Fergus, humor an old friend.”

“Seems I’ve been humoring you for years now. I’ve come to feel like it’s part of my job description. Okay, according to his fellow rifle-loaders, he was pretty ordinary. Somewhere in his mid-forties, about five-ten, brown hair, mustache, mole on his right cheek. He talked with what was described as some sort of a slight foreign accent, although they weren’t sure what—possibly German or Swedish.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s it. Now you know what we know about him.”

“All right, thanks. I’ll be talking to you, Fergus.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Each time we speak, I get a new headache.”

“Take two aspirin and call me in the morning,” I told him, hanging up before he could mount a retort.