Terror at the Fair

Chapter Nineteen

Thursday dawned clear and fresh, one of those precious July mornings making Chicagoans forget for a while the miseries of a long and dreary winter. I rode into the city on a swaying Lake Street Elevated train whose windows had been opened and whose passengers seemed by outward appearance to be uniformly at peace with the world. The same held true on my streetcar ride south from the Loop to the fairgrounds.

On both legs of the trek, I alternated between reading the Tribune and planning my day at the fair. Through Fred Metzger, I had lined up an interview with the governor of Washington State, coming to the fair under the auspices of the Great Northern Railway to promote his corner of the continent as a vacation destination—one easily and comfortably accessible by Great Northern trains, of course. My questions to him would include whether the rainy climate in Seattle and its environs depressed its populace, or whether what we in the rest of the country had heard and read was an unfair depiction of a vibrant city in a picturesque setting.

My spirits dampened the instant I entered the pressroom at the fair. A uniformed and grim-faced police sergeant had just walked out of Metzger’s office.

“What’s going on?” I asked as I entered his sanctum and saw the rotund flack slouched behind his desk, looking like a man whose sure-thing horse had just finished last at Sportsman’s Park.

“Another death,” he moaned. “This one in the Moffat Tunnel.”

It took me a few seconds to realize what he was talking about. As I had learned early on at the fair, the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad had built a truncated replica of the historic tunnel as part of its exhibit. They had hauled in tons of boulders and created a miniature “mountain” with a tunnel in it and an arched stone portal mimicking the real one at one end of the six-mile-long rail passageway deep beneath the Colorado Rockies.

“My God, what’s the story on this one?” I asked the deflated press agent.

He shook his head, eyes glazed, and slouched even lower into his chair. “A man who works as a movie projectionist in the little theater the Rio Grande operates at the end of its tunnel was found lying dead in the tunnel this morning. He must have had a heart attack, from the looks of it.”

“Well, at least it wasn’t violence,” I said by way of trying to soothe him. It didn’t help.

“What difference?” He moaned, throwing up his hands and letting them drop limply into his lap. “It’s still news for you and for everybody else. It will be in all the papers and on the radio and even on the television now, for those who have sets.”

“I certainly can’t argue the point. Well, I’d better get over to the exhibit.” But before I could leave the building, I heard my desk phone ringing.

“Malek? We’re just getting word of yet another stiff out at your choo-choo fair!” It was Hal Murray on the city desk.

“Just heard about it myself. I’m headed over there now.”

“Shake a leg, will ya, Snap? I’m gonna need some on-the-scene stuff for the two-star. Thank God we’ve got you out there.”

“Yeah, thank God indeed,” I muttered. “Like I’ve been saying for years, what would all of you do without me?” I didn’t wait for his reply, cradling the phone and sprinting out.

Five minutes later, I arrived at the realistic (I assumed) mockup of the Moffat Tunnel portal. Two uniformed coppers and a like number of detectives formed a circle around a body lying on a railroad track just inside the tunnel. Several other people formed a larger arc around them, all looking on in a stunned, respectful silence.

I edged through the outer ring and identified myself to one of the plainclothesmen, who knelt next to the corpse, a stocky, bespectacled man who looked to be somewhere in his sixties. The hatless dick and his partner both were new to me. Fergus Fahey apparently rotated his men at the fair, which was fine by me as long as Jack Prentiss got rotated out permanently. In this, I probably hoped for too much.

“How long has he been dead?” I asked the kneeler, a burly specimen in a blond crew cut.

“Dunno,” he snapped. “Medic’s on the way and can give us an idea.”

“I found him right there, around eight, already dead,” a man in a security guard’s uniform put in. “His face was blue and his lips, they looked kinda purple-like. And he had a little foam around the mouth. Ticker musta gave out on him.”

“We don’t know that,” the crew cut dick snapped. “Let’s not go jumping to conclusions until we have all of the facts, huh?”

“Who is he?” I asked, turning my head to take in the whole gathering.

“Jack Openshaw, John technically,” answered a short, skinny fellow sporting a trim gray mustache and a badge proclaiming him to be a Rio Grande guide. “I take people through the tunnel, explaining how it got built and giving them all sorts of statistics on its cost, length, and so on. You’d be surprised how interested some folks are.

“As you can see, the tunnel isn’t very long, just enough to give folks an idea what the real one’s like inside,” continued the guide, who clearly liked to hear his own voice. “The track is just there to make it more realistic. Nothing runs on it. At the far end down there we’ve got a little movie theater where we play a film about our line, the Denver & Rio Grande Western, and all that great part of the country where we operate. Jack, he is... he was our projectionist.”

I nodded. “Think he could have been lying here since last night?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’ve already asked,” the detective snarled, looking fiercely up at me from his crouch. “Just who’s running things around here, the Chicago Police Department or some self-important newspaperman?” He mouthed the last word as if it were contagious.

“Sorry,” I told him, motioning the guide with a cock of my head to step away from the little crowd and join me a discreet distance away. He picked up on it, and we walked from the gathering unnoticed, eventually sitting on a bench under a tree, well beyond earshot.

“So, as I started to ask, was Mr. … Openshaw lying there all night?”

“Oh no, no, not at all,” answered the guide, named Merle Wills. “In fact, Jack and I left the grounds together last night. But he always got here early every morning, earlier than he had to, really. He was the nervous type, wanting to make sure everything was just so. He said he operated just the same way when he worked for the railroad.”

“The Rio Grande?”

“Yes. He worked as a brakeman, retired about three years ago now. He was really excited when he got the chance to come here to work at the fair.”

“So, did you work for the railroad as well, Mr. Wills?”

He nodded. “As a station agent in a bunch of small Colorado towns. Places you’ve likely never heard of like Canon City and Buena Vista and Malta and Dotsero, some of ’em not much more than wide spots in the road. Like Jack, I retired a few years back, and the railroad gave me a chance to come here and work for the summer. They even paid my way in from Colorado on the Denver Zephyr and they’re paying my way back after the fair’s done, as well, which I call a darned good deal.”

“Were you at the fair in ’48, too?”

“Oh no, this tunnel is a brand-new thing this season,” Wills replied. “Jack was here a year ago, though, also running a projector for movies about the railroad and Colorado.”

“I gather you knew him pretty well.”

“Not really. Oh, I did know who he was when we both worked on the Rio, of course; the railroad’s really a small community when you come right down to it. In truth, I’ve had a lot more contact with him in this short time at the fair than in all those working years put together.”

“Had he ever mentioned anything to you about his health?”

Wills chewed on his lower lip and shook his head. “No sir, not to me, he didn’t. He seemed to be in pretty good shape for his age.”

“And you say he always got here first in the morning?”

“Yeah, said he liked to get an early start. On his way here from the rooming house where he stayed, he would always get coffee and a newspaper and sit in the little theater for close to an hour, all by himself. He said it helped loosen him up and get him ready for the day.”

“Do you know whether he had a family?”

“Got divorced years ago now. Come to think of it, I don’t even know if he ever had any kids. He never mentioned any. If I was to guess, I’d say no.” Wills narrowed his eyes at me. “Seems like you’re asking an awful lot of questions about a man who just keeled over and died, natural-like. This isn’t like those other two men who... is it?”

“I honestly don’t know, Mr. Wills. But I will be very interested in what the medical people find out,” I said, leaving him and heading back to my typewriter to file a few paragraphs for the two-star edition in my never-ending efforts to keep the Tribune’s almighty city desk happy.