Terror at the Fair

Chapter Thirty-Six

So now what? I lifted myself from the old wooden desk chair and stepped out into the splendid early afternoon. The sky was cloudless, the sun was warm, but not too warm, and a gentle breeze wafted in off the tranquil waters of Lake Michigan, where the white sails of pleasure craft stood in sharp contrast to the flat blue backdrop. An idyllic Chicago postcard scene, a perfect August day.

I strolled the grounds, mulling my options, none of which was appealing. After a swing through the Indian pueblo village, the New Orleans street scene, and the Florida tropical gardens, I made my decision and headed for the front gate.

The taxi ride to 11th and State took ten minutes. Once inside the Headquarters building, I took the elevator straight to the third floor and Fergus Fahey’s office. There would not be any “hi-there-old-comrades” social visit to the pressroom one flight farther up.

“Well, if it isn’t himself in the very flesh!” Elsie bubbled, clapping her hands. “To what do we owe this surprise visit?”

“Ah, fair lady, above all else I wanted to see your smiling face, of course. But I also took a chance that he might be available.”

“He’s within, and as crotchety as ever.” She tilted her head itoward the closed door to his office.

“Is he by any chance expecting anyone—such as my esteemed colleague Mr. Westcott of the Tribune? Because I would prefer not to run into that particular gentleman. This is strictly a confidential visit.”

“Mr. Westcott was here late this morning, as usual. Much later, by the way, than you used to come down,” she said, waving a hand as if to dismiss Ken Westcott from further discussion. “Now, let me see if I can squeeze you in. A friend here to see you,” she mouthed into the intercom.

“I’ve told you before, I don’t have any friends,” the voice squawked. “Whoever it is, they enter at their peril.”

“Peril my foot,” I said, stepping into his office. “Yet here I am, a friend bearing gifts.” I lobbed a just-opened pack of Lucky Strikes onto his blotter and dropped into one of the two battered and unmatched desk chairs.

“My God, have they given you your old job back now?” Fahey rooted in the cigarette pack.

“Sorry to disappoint, but I am still out there along our beautiful coast, along with all those locomotives and ice skaters and water-skiers and Indians. But I need to talk, and it is very important.”

“It seems like you and I have been talking every day, sometimes more than once a day,” the chief growled as he lit up a Lucky. “Why bother making the trip over here when you can harass me by telephone?”

I leaned forward, elbows on his desk. “Fergus, you have known me for a long time, and I think you will agree that I am not easily alarmed, and I am by no means a crackpot. A pest—maybe sometimes—but a crackpot, never.”

“So stipulated,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “What comes next?”

I lit up a Lucky from the pack myself. “I wouldn’t have come over here in person and to take up your valuable time if I wasn’t worried. Make that very worried.”

“Get to the point, will you!”

“I’m scared shitless that something bad, and I mean terribly bad, is going to happen at the Railroad Fair this week, specifically Thursday.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I would say that plenty of terribly bad stuff has already happened out there.”

“True, but I think something even worse is coming.” I mentioned the case of the three boys who were killed by the train by way of a preface.

“Yeah, I remember that awful business,” Fahey said, shaking his head. “So, what makes this week so special?”

“As I’ve told you before, I’ve got this feeling that whoever—presumably our Mr. Whitnauer—is behind the fair killings is doing it to get revenge on the railroads overall.”

“So you have said, but I still think it sounds far-fetched.”

I then told him about what had happened to Josef Schneider in the years following the accident, ending with his suicide.

Fahey ground out one half-smoked cigarette and lit another. “At the risk of repeating myself, so what?”

“What I think is that this Whitnauer character is probably a relative of Schneider, maybe even a son or a nephew or a brother, and that he’s never forgiven the railroads for the way they treated old Josef, what with several of the lines refusing to hire him after a tragedy that wasn’t even really his fault.”

“I still say far-fetched.”

“Think about it, Fergus. From what my old Trib colleague Zack Yeager recalls—and he has an incredible memory as I’m sure you know—Schneider was turned down by a whole lot of railroads even though his work record had been good up to the time of the accident. So I think that our man Whitnauer is taking it out on the whole lot of them. There’s been a killing at the pageant, at the Illinois Central exhibit, at the Rio Grande ‘tunnel’, and at the water show put on by a bunch of railroads serving the South. It seems that our killer has been lashing out indiscriminately.”

Fahey rubbed his chin. “And you are thinking this Whitnauer is related to Schneider, like maybe his son?”

“Could be,” I said. “If Schneider were alive, he’d be about sixty-three, and from the descriptions, Whitnauer looks to be in his forties.”

“So, to repeat myself, why do you think something is going to happen this particular week?”

I wasn’t about to tell Fahey that the theory had been put forth by Walt Disney, or he would have kicked me out of his office and slammed the door behind me. As it was, the whole business did indeed seem implausible. But I pushed on.

“Because the anniversary of the accident is this Thursday. The tenth anniversary. I have this hunch that Whitnauer plans to kill a whole slew of people this time.”

“Go on,” Fahey said cautiously, coming forward in his chair. At least I had his attention now.

I took a deep breath. “Okay, here goes. The best way to hurt the maximum number of people at the fair is to sabotage the old-time train—it’s called the Deadwood Central—that carries people along a track from one end of the fairgrounds to the other. A hundred or more on every ride, packed into these open-sided excursion cars.”

“You mean this... Whitnauer loony would dynamite the train?” Fahey threw up his hands in disbelief.

“Probably not dynamite it,” I told him. “More likely, he would do something else to cause it to derail, like somehow mess with the tracks. As I said, those passenger cars are probably full on just about every trip. Even though the old train likely doesn’t go more than about thirty miles an hour or so, you can imagine what would happen if that whole damn thing left the tracks and the cars rolled over.”

He made a face. “It sounds to me like a third-rate movie plot.”

“I won’t argue the point, but look at what’s happened at this fair already this summer. Whoever would have predicted that?”

“Yeah, but you don’t have any idea if the crap that’s been going on out there has anything to do with this Schneider business. There’s no evidence whatever of a connection,” Fahey said. “Besides, it’s possible that Whitnauer, if that’s really his name, has left town, or at least stopped hanging out at that saloon up on Wilson Avenue.”

“Fergus, would you be willing to swear that he hasn’t been back at the fair, maybe even multiple times, since the shooting?”

“Just what is that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s be realistic. How many people go through the gates every day? Twenty thousand? Thirty? Forty? Also, the girls manning the ticket windows are practically kids. Would you trust them to spot a man they’ve seen in a sketch, a man who may have drastically altered his appearance?”

“Some of my men are at those gates every day, too,” he snapped.

“Okay, granted, but you told me yourself that several people have gotten stopped and questioned because somebody thought they might be Whitnauer. After you’ve made a few mistakes like that, the tendency of a cop or a fair employee is to back off for fear of embarrassing visitors—and yourself as well. That’s simply human nature. I say that if the man wants to get into the grounds badly enough, he will. Besides, it’s entirely possible he could even wade in from the east through the shallow water at night. The fair hasn’t got the lake fenced off.”

“You’re really reaching now, Snap,” Fahey said, shaking his head.

“Oh yeah, I suppose I am. But you haven’t found Whitnauer, and the deaths have kept happening. Seems like if you’re going to err, it should be on the side of caution.”

Fahey lit yet another Lucky and frowned, but it seemed like he was considering what I had said. “So you say the anniversary of those kids’ deaths is the day after tomorrow?”

“Yes, August fourth.”

“All right, I’m going to have some conversations. In the meantime, you are going to keep everything that was just said in this room off the record. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly. Then what?”

“Then we’ll see,” he murmured, suddenly calm. In all the years I have known him, I’ve never been sure which Fergus Fahey I was more comfortable with: the one who vented and turned red or the one who clammed up and wore a poker face. In truth, I suppose I was more comfortable with the former version because I knew just where I stood.

“Well, I should get back to the fair,” I told him. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do, or anything I should know. Remember, as I’ve said before, I can be among your eyes and ears at the fair.”

“Right,” he answered absently, swiveling around and looking out the window. I said good-bye to his broad back and left.