Terror at the Fair

Chapter Thirty-One

I got home that night toting a stuffed manila folder.

“Just what do we have here?” Catherine asked after we embraced. “Homework, perhaps?”

“Of a sort,” I said, giving her an abridged summary of the day’s activities and the contents of the bulging folder.

“Steven Douglas Malek,” she said, hands on hips and head cocked, “I thought you had agreed to stop playing private detective and leave that sort of thing to Chief Fahey and his army.”

“There is a thin line, my love, between private eye and investigative reporter.”

“A line you seem to be skating on both sides of, I might add. At the risk of throwing cold water on your enthusiasm, I should point out you are not at the moment an investigative reporter, but rather a feature writer.”

“You have cut me to the very quick, oh, dearest one. Inside every newspaperman, regardless of his title or assignment of the moment, beats the noble heart of an intrepid journalist, on a never-ending quest to right wrongs and pursue an unerring course of justice and truth.”

“A very nice speech indeed, sir. I would consider myself chagrined if I truly thought I had wronged you. However, I remain suspicious.”

“I must tell you,” I said as we walked to the dinner table, “that I really do pay heed to what you say. Something else transpired today I didn’t tell you about.”

“Oh?”

I proceeded to relate my decision not to visit the bar in Uptown Whitnauer patronized, but rather to turn all my information over to Fergus Fahey and his vast legion of plainclothes foot soldiers.

“I must admit that is progress of a sort,” she said as we tackled our roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. “But what’s with all the clippings you’ve brought home? That sounds to me an awful lot like police work in the guise of ‘research.’”

“Look, as you know, I have a lot of admiration for Fahey and his leadership. But the Police Department in general, and the Detective Bureau in particular, tend to do things by the numbers, and they sometimes need an injection of imagination and creativity.”

“That has an air of superiority about it,” Catherine said, raising an eyebrow.

“Maybe, but take today, for example: If I hadn’t enlisted Pickles Podgorny and his ‘irregular’ troops, we—and the police—would not have known the identity of the man who very well may be behind all of the fair killings.”

“You still don’t know if he’s really the one, though.”

“True enough, but at least it’s a start of sorts. And maybe one or more of those clippings I brought home will further help things along.”

“I still think you may be taking what Walt Disney said too seriously.”

“You mean about someone possibly holding a longtime grudge against the railroads?”

“Yes. That sounds like the plot for a motion picture.”

I laughed. “Well, I suppose Disney would readily plead guilty to that charge. After all, he makes movies, albeit animated ones, and he very likely thinks up a lot of their wild and wacky plots. It’s possible he just can’t turn off his fertile brain.”

Catherine joined in the laughter, and after we had washed and dried the dinner dishes, she retreated to her favorite chair in the living room to read The Way West by A. B. Guthrie while I sat at the dining room table and started in on the large batch of clips assembled by Hazel.

She had done a thorough job, going back even farther than I had suggested. Interestingly, two of the earliest clippings she included covered rail disasters in western Indiana, close to Chicago.

The worst and most famous of these was the 1918 collision near Hammond, just across the state line from Illinois, in which a Hegenbeck-Wallace Circus train got smashed in the rear by another train, whose engineer had fallen asleep at the throttle of his locomotive. Eighty-six died, most of them circus personnel, including performers.

There also had been a collision in the small town of Porter in 1921 in which one passenger train ploughed into another at a crossover of two lines, killing thirty-seven. The engineer of one of the trains was found to be at fault for having ignored a red signal.

I spent a long time reading and re-reading the brittle, faded clippings of these two historic wrecks, mulling over whether someone who lost loved ones in one of them might now be exacting revenge on railroads in general. I finally set the articles aside, figuring because a full generation or more had elapsed since their occurrence, anyone seeking retribution would have long since acted.

I found a more likely possibility: the April 1946 Naperville, Illinois, train wreck, which I had covered for the Trib. There, one Burlington Route passenger train bound for the West rammed into the rear of another one that had stopped, shredding the rear coach. Forty-five died, with more than one hundred others injured.

The engineer of the second train, W. W. Blaine, initially gor blamed as the one causing the crash, but six months later, according to the clips, a DuPage County grand jury “blamed the wreck on a series of unconnected negligent activities by both the railroad and the crews” of the two trains. How many people whose relatives died in the tragedy might have reason to get revenge on either the Burlington or railroads as a whole? I wondered.

Then I pulled out a batch of clippings held together by a rubber band that set me to wondering anew. The first article reported on a 1939 mishap on Chicago’s Southwest Side. Under the headline THREE BOYS ON BIKES KILLED RACING TRAIN, the Page Three story recounted how eleven-year-old boys on bicycles pedaled along a street that intersected the Rock Island Lines and raced a freight train to the crossing that was moving at “approximately thirty miles per hour.”

The boys skirted the lowered crossing gates and, according to eyewitnesses including the engineer, pedaled onto the tracks as the steam locomotive blew its whistle repeatedly and slammed on its brakes.

The locomotive struck all three boys, however. One died from the impact with the train while the other two got thrown through the air and died of wounds suffered when they hit the street.

Another clipping, dated a few days later, reported that a coroner’s jury ruled the deaths to be accidental, although parents of two of the boys claimed the engineer had not made a great enough effort to stop. They had disrupted the proceedings with shouts and threats against the engineer.

Yet another clipping, dated a few months later, reported the engineer, Josef Schneider, had quit his job with the Rock Island because of “a state of deep depression” over the accident.

The fourth and final article in the batch Hazel had bundled together for me was the obituary of Schneider, age fifty-six, in October 1942. He had hanged himself in the basement of the family home on South Sawyer Avenue. There was no mention of a suicide note.

I had of course been a reporter on the Tribune during these years, but somehow this story had eluded me, other than a vague recollection I had of the accident. I wanted to know more about the star-crossed Mr. Schneider, and I knew just who to ask.