Terror at the Fair

Chapter Forty-Four

The high-pitched screeching still haunts me the most, that nerve-jangling sound of steel-on-steel, or whatever surfaces they use for the brakes on ancient trains. I rolled over on my side and found myself staring at the wheels on one of the passenger cars of the Deadwood Central train. Above me, I heard the chattering voices of the passengers.

“Oh dear, what’s happened?” “Why did we stop so quickly?” “I almost fell off my seat.” “Look, what’s that poor man doing lying down there, bleeding and everything?”

“That poor man” happened to be me. I stood on rubbery legs, anxious to get as far away as possible from being the center of attraction for the riders on this fated run.

I walked up to the panting locomotive. Its engineer and fireman had climbed down out of the cab and were talking to a man in a rumpled business suit, who turned out to be none other than Homicide Detective Jack Prentiss.

“…and I applied the brakes as quickly as I could,” one of them was saying breathlessly. “But... but, I couldn’t stop, I… Oh, how is he?”

“Looks to be dead,” Prentiss said. “But it is not your fault, not at all.”

“I killed a man,” he wailed. I recognized him as L. J. Gunderson, the retired Pennsylvania Railroad engineer whom I had interviewed weeks ago.

“The detective is right, Mr. Gunderson,” I said. “It is not your fault. You shouldn’t worry about what happened. I saw it all. The man your train hit threw himself onto the tracks. He’s a mass murderer. He killed—”

“Hold on right there,” Prentiss snapped, red-faced, the veins standing out in his neck. “This is strictly a police investigation, and you got no business being here, and shooting off your yap, Mister Newspaper Hotshot. By the way, I have to say you look like holy hell.”

“You would, too, Detective, if you had been rolling around on the ground wrestling with an armed madman and trying to stop him from derailing this train,” I yelled back. “His name is Rob Taylor, although it used to be Schneider. He is an intern in public relations here, and he’s behind the killings at the fair, every damned one of them. His uncle, Fred Metzger, who’s the public relations honcho, is an accomplice and chances are you can find him in his office in the Administration Building right now.”

Prentiss shot me a glance that made it clear I was not welcome anywhere within his sight. “If you want to talk to me about this, I’ll be in the fair’s pressroom after I’ve cleaned up,” I snarled to him over my shoulder as I limped off.

In the men’s room, using paper towels, I did the best job I could of cleaning the caked blood off my face. Then I went to the fair’s dispensary, where a grandmotherly-type nurse in a starched white uniform swabbed the cut on my forehead and applied a bandage to it.

“You look like you have had yourself quite a fall,” she said with genuine concern.

“Yes I did, but it could have been a whole lot worse.” I thanked her and went to the pressroom, just in time to see a blubbering Fred Metzger in handcuffs being escorted out of his office by two uniformed cops and a detective. He looked at me and shook his head between sobs.

At my desk, I immediately dialed Catherine.

“I wondered when I’d hear from you,” she said. “Are you coming home soon, Steve?”

“I’m going to have to stay a little longer, my love. There’s been some trouble, and the police want to talk to me.”

After a pause of several seconds, she exhaled. “Are you all right?”

“Absolutely, never better—although I did run into a little snag here and there. Everything seems to have worked itself out, though. I’ll fill you in when I get home.”

I could tell she wasn’t satisfied with my explanation, but I insisted everything was fine and told her I had to go to a meeting before I could leave the fair. Just as I hung up, my “meeting” filled the doorway of the pressroom. It was, of all people, a grim-faced Chief of Detectives Fergus Sean Fahey.

“I’ve seen you looking better,” he observed, lumbering in and slumping into a swivel chair at the rarely used Daily News desk.

“Well, if this isn’t a switch now,” I said with bonhomie. “You visiting my office. Well, I’m nothing if not a good host, Fergus. I just happen to have a pack of Luckies with me,” I told him, tossing them over along with a book of matches from the Rock Island Lines’ “Fiesta” dining car.

He lit up and considered me. “I’m here because I didn’t want to send Prentiss to talk to you, given the feelings you have for each other. There’s been enough violence at this damned fair. Now that I’m here, I don’t know whether to congratulate you or chew you out,” he murmured.

“Well, I’ll accept congratulations, if it will help you decide,” I told him, lighting up myself. “I take it from what Prentiss said that Taylor is dead.”

“Train hit him, as I guess you know. Didn’t run over him but knocked him clear. The impact did the job, though. Why didn’t you let us know what you were doing?”

“Frankly, because I didn’t think anyone would believe me. But also, I sort of expected to see some of your men patrolling the Deadwood Central tracks after what I said about today being the anniversary of those kids’ deaths.”

“Well, something happened to change things,” Fahey said in a low voice. “Whitnauer is dead. His body got found today. I tried to call you here several times and got no answer.”

“I was otherwise occupied, at a refinery down in Whiting.”

“Oh yeah, right. Some of our uniforms are down there now, helping out the local force. Anyway, it turns out Whitnauer had been dead for days. People living in the flophouse in Uptown smelled, well... you know what they smelled, and it was not a rat. Somebody finally broke into the locked room and then called us. It looked like he shot himself.”

“Which was how it was supposed to look,” I said. “Taylor told me about how it all happened just before he made his final move. By the way, Fergus, how did our intrepid Mr. Prentiss happen to show up along the track so soon after Taylor got hit?”

“Somebody heard a shot and told one of the uniformed men on the grounds. He went to Jack, who happened to be on duty tonight, and…” He turned a palm over.

“I can tell you a lot about that shot, Fergus.” I proceeded to describe those last frantic minutes leading up to Rob Taylor’s death.

Fahey looked for an ashtray and, failing to find one, flicked the ashes from his Lucky onto the plank floor, grinding them under his heel. “So, what made you suspect this Taylor in the first place?”

“As you know, I had what at first seemed like an out-of-left-field idea the fair killings were the work of somebody seeking revenge against railroads—all railroads. So I went through the Trib’s clips on train mishaps, and that 1939 case of the three kids on bikes getting killed by a train jumped out at me.

“I mentioned this to my wife, whom you have of course met, and gave her all the details, including the name of the train’s engineer, Schneider. Earlier today, Catherine called me and said she had looked up ‘Schneider’ in a German-English dictionary and found it translates to ‘tailor’ in our very own mother tongue. Schneider was also the original last name of Fred Metzger, Rob’s uncle and the PR head at the fair whom your guys hauled out of here in manacles a few minutes ago.”

“I know,” Fahey said, leaning back and running a hand through his hair. “So these guys were both related to the engineer?”

“His son and his brother. As Rob and I struggled like two kids on a grade school playground a few minutes before he died, he told me how his father had been persecuted by the parents of the dead kids, among other people. Being a German immigrant, he still spoke with an accent.

“After the accident, he couldn’t find work on any railroad—they all apparently figured him for a mental case. To top it off, he got called all sorts of names, including ‘Nazi,’ and his houses got vandalized. I say houses because the family moved a couple of times to get away from the harassment. They never did escape it, though, and the old man finally hanged himself in his basement.”

“I gather Taylor was behind the shooting at the pageant, too?”

“Yeah. He either had a hand in hiring Whitnauer, or ‘Sam White’ if you prefer, at the fair or got to him once he began working there. Then, and maybe your men will find out how, he got hold of a live round and had Whitnauer load it into one of the rifles.”

“He couldn’t possibly have known a single shell would kill someone, though.”

“No, he got ‘lucky’ there, if you can use such a word to describe a tragedy. The fellow who fired the fatal shot, as I think you know from his questioning, had been something of a hunter as a kid, shooting ducks with his father out along the Mississippi River. He knew his way around weapons.”

Fahey nodded. “And I gather from what you started to say a minute ago, Rob Taylor told you about the flophouse shooting?”

“He did, figuring I wasn’t going to be around to tell anyone else about it. He admitted the killing and said he also printed the ‘suicide’ note.”

“So you were right. He didn’t want the handwriting traced back to him, or compared against Whitnauer’s.”

“I was only partly right, Fergus. Sure, Taylor didn’t want the handwriting checked against his own. But as to comparing the note to Whitnauer’s writing, it wasn’t going to happen. The poor bastard couldn’t read or write.”

“Jesus. He killed an illiterate?”

“Yeah. And for what it’s worth, I’ll give you a theory—unproveable, of course. I think Taylor may have originally planned only the shooting at the pageant, nothing more. When that resulted in a death and garnered all manner of publicity, he got excited and emboldened and realized he could wreak really big-time revenge against the railroads. So, he started his killing spree.”

“Maybe,” Fahey said. “Like you said, we’ll probably never know. As long as you’re dealing out theories, why do you figure Taylor killed the illiterate? Was the guy going to squeal?”

“So Taylor claimed to me. He said Whitnauer wanted more money or he’d go to the police. That may or may not be true, though. I’m afraid I may be indirectly to blame for what happened. As you can see, the walls in this place are just plywood, and it’s not hard to hear between rooms, especially if you’re trying to. Metzger’s office is right next door, and it had to be easy enough for him and his nephew to overhear my phone calls. You’ll recall I talked to you about Whitnauer.” I did not bother to add that I’d also discussed Whitnauer on the phone with Pickles Podgorny.

“At that stage, I had no idea Taylor was our man, with his uncle as an accomplice,” I went on. “So I inadvertently ended up playing right into their hands.”

Fahey lit another Lucky and watched the smoke rise toward the ceiling. “We’ll go through the office, of course, and both their homes. Do you know anything about whether either one was married and had a family?”

“I have no idea. He never mentioned anybody. The fair’s executive office probably has the particulars on Metzger, and maybe Taylor as well.”

“Another question, and here I’m just asking for your speculation: Do you think Taylor planned to kill himself right from the start?”

“No. I believe he threw himself in front of the train only after I had prevented him from sabotaging it. He was beaten and he knew it, so he may have seen killing himself as his only option.”

The chief scowled. “What a nightmare this has turned into.”

“True, but at least the killings are over now.”

“That may be, but there’s likely to be all manner of investigations, both within the department and by those civic do-gooder groups that like nothing more than to let us know they are not happy with our performances.”

“A lot of tut-tutting, right?”

“All that and a lot more, Snap, including periodic cries for change in the upper echelons of the department. You’ve been around long enough to know how things work. It’s pretty predictable. Well, I’ve got to touch base with the commissioner, among others,” he said without enthusiasm, rising slowly and walking out into the night.