Terror at the Fair

Chapter Twenty-Nine

My feature on Nils Ericsson, a.k.a. Sven, the Savage Swede, ran on Page 5 of the next day’s paper, along with a two-column Phil Muller photo of the former lumberjack and wrestler. It got the best play by far of any of my features from the fair. I had gotten so I took some delight in small victories. But I nevertheless knew I was still a “feature writer,” a pejorative term in the vocabulary of the hard-news reporter.

“Very nice article you had this morning,” Fred Metzger said as he stuck his head into the pressroom. “I just wish the other papers in town gave us the kind of play the Trib does.”

“Well, in fairness to them, we’ve got more space to fill than anybody else, so I guess it figures,” I told him as I looked up from reading the tabloid Sun-Times. “Say, Fred, how do you feel about the police presence around here now?”

Metzger shook his head and scowled. “I’m aware the department has beefed up the plainclothes numbers, but there are still way too many uniformed men around for my taste. It has to make people nervous to see them.”

“I don’t think most of the visitors even notice. They’re too busy having fun. Besides, it’s just possible the extra cops are the reason we haven’t had any more incidents.”

“Could be,” he said without conviction. Just then, the phone rang in his office, and he dashed off to answer it as I tried to figure out where to get my next feature.

My thought processes got interrupted by Metzger’s keening, which cut through the thin partition like a butcher knife. “What! Oh no, oh no, no, no.”

I ran next door and saw him slumped in his desk chair, head in hand and receiver pressed to his ear. “Where? Oh Christ! Have they been called? Yes, yes. Phone the fair manager’s office. They’ll want to cancel the morning show if they haven’t already.”

He hung up and stared down at his desk blotter, head in hands. “What is it, Mr. Metzger?” asked his summer intern, Rob, who had come over from his small desk in the corner.

“Another one,” Metzger muttered, “another one, another one.”

“Where?”

“In... the water, the lake.”

“Where, goddammit? Where, Fred?” I grabbed the hunched-over PR man by the shoulders and shook him until I thought his teeth would rattle.

“Cypress Gardens,” he said, putting his head down on his desk.

“Have the police been notified?”

He raised his head long enough to nod. I tore out of the building, vaguely aware Rob followed in my wake, and I jogged northeast toward the shoreline area where the Cypress Gardens Thrill Show got performed, and where a few weeks earlier I had interviewed one of the leggy “Aqua Belles.”

The bleachers facing the water stood empty, with a sign at the entrance readong “Ten A.M. Show Canceled.” On the beach, four men, two of them in uniforms, stood over a body.

As I neared the gathering, I heard one of the uniformed men, a fair security guard, tell the others, “…and when I came by this morning about the time the fair opened, I saw somethin’ floating about fifteen or twenty feet out.” He pointed into the calm waters of the lake.

“At first I thought it was maybe a log, we get a few of them floating by, but then I seen it was... Anyhow, I waded out and dragged this poor feller in, or what was left of him.”

The body on the sand looked to be a man in his sixties and stocky, with short gray hair. His face was only slightly discolored and not bloated, indicating he hadn’t been in the water all that long.

“Any idea who he is?” asked a man in a suit, who turned out to be a tall, lean police detective with a beak-like schnozz named Moritz. I had met him once several years back.

The security guard shook his head. “Nope, although I think I’ve seen him around here. He might be somebody who worked for the water show, as a sort of janitor, I guess you could say.”

“Who are you?” Moritz suddenly realized I had become part of the little gathering.

“Steve Malek, Tribune reporter. I’m assigned to the fair full-time.”

He cast me a dubious glance. “How’d you get over here so fast?”

I explained the sequence of events in the administration building, including the phone call to Fred Metzger. “I assume somebody in fair security had phoned him about this.”

“I’m the one who did,” the other man wearing a suit put in. “My name is Carl Mason. I am one of the assistant managers of the fair. I came over here as fast as I could, and I just posted the sign canceling the morning show.”

Moritz scowled. “Know who this is?” he asked, motioning to the body.

“Yes, I do,” Mason said with a glum nod. “He’s Alec Cunningham, a maintenance man who’s assigned to the water show. His job is to clean up the area after the last show every night, then come first thing in the morning and rake this stretch of beach in front of the grandstands where the acts take place. We like it always to be looking neat here, just like the rest of the fairgrounds.”

“What else can you tell me about him?” the detective barked at Mason.

“Not a lot. I seem to remember he’s an old-time railroad man who worked at the fair last year, too. I believe he retired some years ago from the Chicago & Eastern Illinois, where he worked as a dispatcher or something similar.”

“There looks to be a good-sized lump on his head,” I said.

“Your input is duly noted,” Moritz remarked stiffly, scribbling in a notebook. “This fair is having its problems, isn’t it?” he said to Mason, pointedly turning his back on me.

The assistant manager nodded, hands in pockets, staring down at the body of Cunningham. “Anybody have anything further to add?” the detective asked.

We all—Mason, the security guard, Rob Taylor, and I—remained silent. Moritz turned to the uniformed cop with a scowl. “Get a couple more men over here and secure the area. The ME should be on his way. All right everybody, class dismissed,” he snapped. “And that definitely includes you, Mr. Tribune man.”

When I got back to the administration building, I popped my head into Metzger’s office, but he wasn’t around. “Any idea where he might’ve gone?” I asked Rob, who had walked back with me.

“No, maybe to see the fair manager. He’s really shaken.”

“With good reason,” I said, going back to my phone, where I placed a call to the Trib. “Well, it’s happened again,” I said to Hal Murray on the city desk. “Another stiff at the fair.”

“Yeah, we’re just getting the word. That place of yours has become a real bloodbath. Okay, what’ve you got for me?”

I read him my sketchy information, and he transferred me to rewrite so we could at least squeeze a bulletin into the next edition. I contemplated calling Fergus Fahey but vetoed it, at least for the present. He would be pulling his hair out by the roots, and he didn’t need me asking him questions or even giving him my eyewitness account. He could, and would, get the same information from Detective Moritz, who would no doubt mention somewhere in his report how a pesky Tribune reporter promptly happened upon the death scene.