Terror at the Fair

Chapter Thirteen

When I returned to the Illinois Central exhibit, I found several people clustered around the door to the dining car. Officer O’Brien stood just outside their little circle, making sure nobody drifted away as I had earlier.

“Hey, you were here before, right after they found Burnwell,” said a little guy with a mustache and a flat cap. “That one cop wearing a suit got doggone mad when you left.”

“Well, I’m back now. I’m a Tribune reporter, and I needed to phone my office.”

“About this?”

“Yeah. What’s going on inside?” I gestured toward the dining car.

“They’re interviewing all of us, one at a time,” said the woman in the hoop skirt. “I don’t know of anything we can tell them that will help.”

“They have to go through the motions, though,” I told her. “Did any of you know Mr. Burnwell very well?”

The old fellow, whose first name was Orrin, spoke up. “Like I said before, George and I used to be in charge of dining cars on this line before we retired. He was always a hard worker and took his job very seriously.”

“Did George make any enemies along the way?”

Orrin lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “Not that I know of. Oh, I suppose some of the dining car staff might have got upset with him from time to time. He was a taskmaster, but then, so was I,” he added proudly. “And I don’t think I ever made what you could call enemies.”

“Anybody else here have something to add about him?” I looked around the somber little group. They all shook their heads.

“I really didn’t know him well,” a small woman put in, “but he seemed very nice. I’m a waitress in the diner, and he was always gentlemanly, both to the staff and the customers. There aren’t enough men around like him anymore.” She began sniffling and pulled a lacy handkerchief out of a lacy sleeve, dabbing at her face.

“Was George always the last one to leave here at night?”

“Oh yes, yes sir,” Orrin said, nodding. “He had been a widower for years, didn’t have anybody to go home to, and he said being here beat sitting around in an empty apartment.”

“Where did he live?”

“Out south, around Seventy-first and Jeffrey Boulevard. He laughed about how he’d worked for the Illinois Central for forty years, and now he was commuting up here to the fair on the same darn railroad. He just couldn’t get away from the ol’ I.C., he liked to joke.”

“Uh-huh. Did he work at the fair last year, too?”

“Yessir, and so did I. We had a lot of fun serving in the diner. It seemed like the old days, when we was still working, and we even got a little bit of money for it, too.” Orrin looked down at his polished shoes and shook his head.

“Did he have any children?”

“None I’m aware of, no sir. He was all alone in the world.”

Just then, Detective Baxter opened the door of the diner and eyed our gathering at the bottom of the steps. “Okay, who’s next? Anyone?”

Nobody seemed anxious to get grilled, so I volunteered, climbing into the brown-orange-and-yellow streamlined railway car.

“You,” Baxter spat. “The reporter, right?”

“Guilty as charged,” I said with a grin. “You wanted me back here, so I’m back.”

He made a face and led me into the dining car, with its white linens and silver and a rose in a slim vase at every table, all ready for customers. At a table for four in the middle of the car sat Detective Charles Corcoran, shuffling through papers, presumably notes he had taken.

He looked up at me without enthusiasm. “Tribune man, huh?”

I nodded, sliding into a chair across from him. A stony Baxter remained standing, arms folded across his chest.

“I’ll be honest, Mr. …?”

“Malek.”

“I’ll be honest, Mr. Malek; I have never been a big fan of newspapermen.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“I doubt it. Anyway, it’s neither here nor there at the moment. Tell me, how did you happen to be at the scene—and so quickly?”

I filled him in on my ongoing assignment at the fair and my learning of what had just occurred at the New Orleans exhibit.

Corcoran still wore the dubious expression. “So you must have been around when the guy got plugged at the pageant, huh?”

“Yes, I happened to be in the audience.”

“I read the report on that business,” the detective said. “I seem to recall Detective Prentiss mentioned your name in it.”

“That so?”

“Yeah. Somehow, I got the impression he wasn’t happy to see you on the scene.”

I leaned back and fired up a Lucky Strike. “I couldn’t say. Maybe like you, he doesn’t care for newspaper reporters.”

Corcoran wrinkled his brow. “Didn’t you used to work at Eleventh and State?”

“That’s right.”

“Does that mean you’re in thick with Chief Fahey?”

“I know him, which isn’t surprising after all these years. I’m hardly in thick with him, though,” I said, brushing the question away with a hand.

The cop exhaled and looked at his notebook. “All right, as a reporter, you’re supposed to be observant. Give me your impression of the scene when you arrived this morning.”

“I must have gotten there five—maybe ten—minutes after the first ones on the job had found the body. I’m no expert, but it’s obvious Burnwell had been dead for hours. He was awful to look at.”

“All stiffs are. Did any of the people standing around act funny?”

“Most of them seemed pretty shaken. Sounded like they all liked the guy.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes, why? Have any of the people you talked to acted suspicious?”

“I’m the one asking the questions here,” Corcoran shot back as if starring in a grade-B crime film.

“Fine by me,” I said offhandedly. I already was on the shit list of one detective, Prentiss. No sense alienating a second.

“Okay, Malek, you can go,” Corcoran said curtly, glaring at me.

I rose and walked down the aisle of the dining car toward the door. My back was turned to Baxter, but I would have laid odds he glared, too.