Terror at the Fair

Chapter Eighteen

The next several days at the fair were uneventful, the highlight such as it was being my interview with a cowboy in the rodeo show put on by a group of western railways. Fred Metzger told me this Montana-born cowpoke was some kind of champion bronco-buster who had won awards at events like the Calgary Stampede and the Cheyenne Frontier Days. That may well be, but he had about as much to say as the old Indian from the reservation whom I had talked to my first day on the job at the fair.

This sample from the interview is all you need:

Me: So, tell me what it takes to be a top bronco-buster.

Cowboy: Ya gotta show ’em who’s the boss, ya know? That’s the secret, right there.

Me: How do you pull that off?

Cowboy: By letting ’em know right from the start, yes sir, right from the very doggone start, that you are in charge.

Me: Do you talk to them? Do you do something else to establish control?

Cowboy: It’s all in the way ya mount ’em, the way ya ride ’em, that lets ’em know they can’t mess with ya.

Me: Can you describe that?

Cowboy: Now it’s real hard to say. But you know what I mean. All ya gotta do is watch me.

In fact, I didn’t know what he meant, and I knew even less when, an hour after we had talked, he got thrown over the head of a bronco after being on him for less than a few heartbeats.

I had a feature story to file, though, and I tried to make the best of it, describing the cowpoke as “a lean, leathery, raw-boned son of the rugged Montana mountains and plains, a man of few words in the finest tradition of such taciturn cinematic Western heroes as John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Randolph Scott.”

I went on to depict the rodeo itself and “the cheering youngsters in the stands who squealed with delight as they watched the riders desperately try to stay on their angry, snorting, wildly bucking charges.” I made no mention, however, of my subject’s embarrassingly short ride. Who am I to let specifics get in the way of a good story?

As the week wore on, it became obvious the police presence had intensified throughout the fairgrounds. I saw a lot of uniforms, as well as several men in suits whom I recognized to be plainclothes detectives. I even spotted Jack Prentiss himself once, and we looked daggers at each other, reflecting our mutual distaste, although no words got exchanged.

One morning I called Fergus Fahey. “Don’t you have enough to do out there on the lakefront without harassing me?” the chief snarled.

“Hey, I’m not harassing you, I’m just keeping in touch with an old friend. I didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten all about you.”

“I should be so fortunate.”

“But I thought maybe you missed our daily conversations. I do.”

“Snap, don’t beat around the bush with me. I know you too well. You just want to learn what we’ve found out about the deaths out there.”

“Well, since you mention it…”

“Isn’t it enough that I keep your man Westcott briefed every day?”

“How’s he doing, by the way?”

“No comment.”

“That bad, huh? I’m really sorry to hear it, Fergus, but it wouldn’t hurt you to fill me in, too. After all, I can be a real asset to you out here, another set of eyes and ears.”

“Your allegiance is to your paper, not to the police department,” he said dryly.

“And your allegiance is to the department, not to any of the papers, mine included. That doesn’t mean we can’t help each other.”

He exhaled into the receiver. “Not much to report. We’ve talked again to the young actor who pulled the trigger, and it seems obvious he’s clean. As for the two rifle-loaders still on the job, they swear they only put blank cartridges into the weapons. And neither one of them knew the third one, White—or so he called himself. They said in the few days they all had worked together, he didn’t say anything about himself except he originally came from someplace in Europe, although he wasn’t specific. He never mentioned where he lived in Chicago, or whether he had a family. They described him as one very closemouthed customer.”

“And your men have checked out all the Samuel Whites in the phone book, I suppose?”

“You suppose right,” he muttered. “For the record, there are seven in all, none living on Clarendon, and every last one of them got a visit from us. Two are Negroes, which lets them out. And not one of the other five speaks with anything resembling even a slight foreign accent. Also, all but one is employed and can account for their time on the day of the shooting. The other is seventy-seven years old and has been retired since before the war. Oh, and the suburban directories got checked, too. Three more Samuel Whites, none with an accent. There, have I now filled you in enough?”

“On that particular situation, yes. What about the strangling?”

“Dammit, Snap, I can’t spend all day talking to you, not the way things are crashing down around us here. If you haven’t noticed, the heat is on the department to make your cursed train fair as safe as those tons of gold stored underground at Fort Knox.”

“Nothing on the strangling then?”

“No! We’ve interviewed everybody we could find who knew the dead waiter—neighbors, former co-workers on the railroad, even members of his Baptist church in the South Shore neighborhood. Nobody—not one single soul—had anything bad to say about the man. He apparently had no enemies, no debts, no affairs with married women, no apparent vices such as gambling or whoring. Now if you’ll excuse me, Elsie just walked into my office and handed me a sheet of paper saying Commissioner Prendergast wants to talk to me. He’s under the gun, which of course means I am as well. Looks like we’ll have to face an inquisition from your colleagues in the news business.” Before I could respond, the line went dead.

The next day’s papers all had pieces on a press conference in which Prendergast, Fahey, and Mayor Martin Kennelly reiterated the city’s commitment to keep the Railroad Fair safe, and the mayor insisted the two deaths on the grounds were merely an aberration. Unfortunately, violence at the exposition was about to become less an aberration, more a common occurrence.