Terror at the Fair

Chapter Forty-Six

After a one-day recuperation at home, I persuaded Catherine I had recovered enough to return to the fair. It seemed strange to walk into the pressroom knowing Fred Metzger and Rob Taylor would never be back, although as I started to sit down, I heard noises coming from next door.

I found a slender, balding man in a business suit whom I did not recognize going through the filing cabinets and other papers in the public relations office. He turned as I entered.

“Oh, hello, hope I am not disturbing you,” he said amiably. “My name is Gene Hayes, I’m one of the many assistant managers at the fair.”

He held out a hand, and as we shook, I introduced myself. “Oh yes, Steve Malek, everybody here knows you, especially after what happened two days ago. I believe you are the only full-time newspaperman on the grounds, correct?”

“Yes. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Oh—now the police have, er, finished going through this office, I’ve been sent in to see what’s in the files and also to try to figure out just how we are going to cover public relations during the last few weeks of the run.”

“Afraid I can’t suggest a PR boss for you, although I can recommend an assistant.”

“Really? Who might that be?”

“Her name is Charlene Miller, and she’s a student at Mundelein College up on the North Side. She currently is working as one of the ticket sellers at the main entrance, but clearly she’s being wasted there. She was a great deal of help to me a few weeks ago on a project, and I highly commend her. She’s lively, eager, and a quick learner.”

“Well, that’s very thoughtful of you, Mr. Malek. I’ll look into it today. Thank you so much.”

As it turned out, Charlene spent the rest of the fair’s run working as a public relations assistant to a bright young man brought in from one of the local P.R. firms. I got the impression seeing them in the office next door that they might end up being more than working colleagues.

I now faced the problem of figuring out where to find my next feature. I might just have to begin wandering the grounds in search of interesting people and events. Or maybe I could start leading tours, showing visitors where the various murders had taken place.

My reverie got interrupted by the telephone’s jangling. “Snap, have you got a few minutes to talk?”

“For you, Fergus, always. To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

“Your colleague Westcott, and of course by extension the others in the pressroom here, all know what I’m about to tell you, but I figure I owe you an update.”

“I guess maybe you do. Shoot.”

“We went through Metzger’s office there at the fair, but we found nothing of interest. Ditto his home, but Taylor’s place was quite another story.”

“Hmm. Where did he live?”

“With his mother, on the Far South Side—the house they moved to not long after Josef Schneider’s suicide.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Just wait till you hear. We got a search warrant, and a team rifled the place. The mother went into hysterics as our men pored over her dead son’s effects, and she had to be restrained by a matron who fortunately had been brought along. The woman swore in both German and English the whole time our dicks were there. She even taught them some new curse words.

“But enough. Several notebooks were filled with Taylor’s handwritten ravings—I don’t know how else to describe them. A lot of it consisted of diatribes against the railroads and how they had destroyed his father.”

“The young guy turned out to be a real case,” I observed.

“Yeah. He also had a fat scrapbook filled with clippings from every newspaper in town about the accident, the inquest, and a follow-up investigation by the railroad that cleared his father.

“Speaking of his father, one of these notebooks, the spiral-bound kind students use, had nothing in it except notes and letters to the old man.”

“That’s interesting. He had saved them all these years, huh?”

“No, that’s just it! He had been ‘writing’ to old Josef Schneider right up to the other day. Every letter neatly done in longhand.”

“Weird, all right,” I said.

“These letters, some just a few sentences, others a page or two, described how he was going to kill somebody at the fair. Others got written after the deeds had been done, so to speak. He kept repeating how he did all of this as a way of avenging his father.”

“My God, that’s macabre. The papers are going to love this.”

“There’s more. I don’t know if you remember, but the man who headed up public relations at the fair last year died after he fell off a subway station platform in the Loop and got hit by a train as it pulled in.”

“Fergus, I think I know what you’re going to tell me.”

“Maybe you do. One of Taylor’s hand-written epistles, told about Mr. Chester Rawlings and how he happened to fall onto the subway tracks.”

“Let me take a wild stab. He got pushed by one Rob Taylor, who had hinted as much to me on that last awful night.”

“Here, I owe you this. Let me read from his notebook: Chester was such a very nice man, a very gentle man, Papa, and I truly hated what I had to do. Truly I did. I had followed him for several days, getting used to his habits. Finally, he was right where I wanted him to be. The platform at the Monroe Street stop was crowded, and he stood close to the edge. Wonderfully close to the edge. I reached in with one arm and gave a nice, strong shove just as the train entered the station, then I merged back into the crowd as they all began screaming. I don’t think he felt a thing. But I had no choice, Papa. I had to fulfill our destiny.

“How’s that for macabre, Mr. Deadline Man?”

“It ranks right up there. As I said before, the papers will love this. They’ll all run wild with it in tomorrow’s editions and in the days to come. Is the heat off of you and your bosses now?”

“Sort of,” Fahey said sourly, “although the Crime Commission and the other civic groups are claiming we should have got onto Taylor a lot sooner. They don’t say how we should have known about him, but then, they’re great at playing the old ‘Monday morning quarterback’ game. Sooner or later the quote ‘poor police work’ is bound to turn up in at least one of the papers.”

Fahey had it right, as so often is the case in his predictions about the press. The exact quote, from the head of the Crime Commission, did indeed pop up in a Sun-Times story the very next morning. I was also right, not surprisingly, in my own prediction that the papers would have a picnic with the discovery of Rob Taylor’s maniacal writings.

FAIR KILLER’S RAVINGS BARED! read the Trib banner, while the Sun-Times went with LETTERS REVEAL MIND OF YOUNG MADMAN! Even the normally sedate Daily News could not contain itself, opting for MURDERER WROTE DAILY TO DEAD FATHER, while Hearst’s Herald-American, to be expected, topped everybody with DEPRAVED KILLER SPELLED IT ALL OUT FOR US!