"Fair enough, Mr. Disney."
"All right then, here we go. I'm sorry to say this, but it seems to me your man is almost sure to strike again. Do you happen to know the date when that accident happened, the one where those boys got killed?"
"No, but I can easily find out."
"By all means I suggest you do so, as soon as possible. It is entirely possible your man will commit his biggest crime of all on the anniversary of that very day, if by some chance it happens to come during the run of the fair."
"Hmm. As long as you are indulging in what Ward Kimball calls 'flights of fancy', do you have any suggestion as to what form the crime will take?"
"I have been thinking a good deal about that as well. If I really desired to create the maximum amount of havoc at your city's wonderful homage to railroading, I would stage something truly spectacular, specifically a derailment."
"Oh, you must mean on one of those historic trains that goes across the stage in the pageant?"
"No sir, I said a maximum amount of havoc, which means loss of life, possibly in sizeable numbers, Mr. Malek. Few people would likely be harmed if one of the slow-moving pageant locomotives left the rails."
"True. I don't know what that leaves then," I told him.
"Of course you do–it's obvious! The Deadwood Central Railroad, the wonderful frontier line running the full length of the fairgrounds, with those nineteenth-century Western steam locomotives and open-air passenger cars, cars with a lot of the visitors jammed into them. Just think what could happen if one of those trains left the rails and tipped over, or worse yet, rolled over."
"With all due respect, that seems pretty far-fetched," I said.
He chuckled. "Well, Mr. Malek, I warned you I've been accused of possessing an overactive imagination. It comes from helping to dream up those wild and wondrous movie plots, I suppose. Anyway, you can do with this as you please. I suppose the police would dismiss the theory out of hand."
"Very possibly. But you've given me something to think about."
"Good. I would be very pleased to learn from you how all of this plays out."
"I will be sure to let you know, Mr. Disney. I really appreciate your interest." He gave me his private telephone line at the studio.
Seconds after I hung up, I dialed the number of the Tribune's morgue. Hazel answered.
"I have a small favor, oh blessed lady of the archives."
"Fire away, buster."
"Would you be so kind as to check one of those clips you pulled together for me? It's the sad story about the three boys killed by a freight train on the South Side back in 1939. I need to know the exact date it happened. I should have written it down, of course, but I didn't."
"Well, shame on you," Hazel chided. "I'll be right with you." She probably was gone no more than ninety seconds, but it seemed like a week before she came back on the line. "I've got it right here, Snap. August 4, 1939."
Today was August 2nd.
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 wer
e 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.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The time has almost come, Papa. On Thursday, exactly ten years will have passed. At last, your spirit will be able to rest in peace. Everything is almost in order. It will come after dark, and it will make news, lots of news, both here and across the country, maybe even across the world.
Afterward, I will send messages to all of the local newspapers and the radio stations and the television stations, telling them why all of these things have happened at the fair. Everyone will remember you once again, Papa, and the way you suffered unjustly because of the railroads. This has been the railroads' turn to suffer. Those whose loved ones have suffered and will suffer at the fair will hate the railroads. They will then hate the railroads as I have hated them, Papa…
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Back at the fair after my session with Fahey, I found it difficult to concentrate, although I had committed to a late afternoon interview with a man who had been dubbed "the world's greatest rail fan" by one of the railroad enthusiast magazines. He turned out to be a heavyset, good-natured fellow of fifty-five wearing a striped locomotive engineer's cap and a red-and-yellow Hawaiian-style shirt covered with painted metal pins bearing the insignias of what he said were "every doggone Class I railroad there is in the whole of the U.S.A."
This was Millard Wilhelm of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He claimed to have ridden more than a half-million miles on trains in the United States and twenty-seven other countries and said he had a dozen photo albums to prove it. I didn't ask to see them.
"Where have you managed to find the time for all of this world traveling?" I asked Wilhelm as we sat drinking coffee in a booth at the Railhead Inn on the fairgrounds.
"Well, for one thing, I'm single, always have been," he drawled, stroking his salt-and-pepper goatee. "The other thing is that my daddy, may the Good Lord rest his soul, made himself a whole lot of money in oil. So…well, I have never had the need to go to work," he added without the slightest hint of embarrassment.
He went on to describe his most memorable trips, including one through eastern Turkey–Anatolia, as he called it–in which his train got held up in rugged mountain country by bandits on horseback waving rifles who went through the cars relieving passengers of their money and jewelry.
"Funniest doggone thing, though," Wilhelm drawled with a chuckle. "When they came to me, I pulled out my American passport and held it up, and they backed away, arms in the air like I was holding a gosh-darned gun on them rather than the other way around. One said something like 'mer-i-can' to the others, and they just smiled and bowed and moved on to rob the other folks in the coaches.
"They never got away with a red cent, though." He laughed. "Somehow the local lawmen found out what was going on and they came galloping up on their own darn horses, nabbing the bunch of them."
"Interesting. Do you figure the Turkish cops were in on the whole thing?"
"Can't say for sure, but I doubt it, because they did return everybody's money and other stuff to them."
If nothing else, I did get a decent light feature out of the afternoon's time, and the affable Mr. Wilhelm kept my mind off more serious matters for an hour or so, regaling me with tales of his other trips. Of course, Phil Muller showed up to take pictures of "the world's greatest rail fan," even promising to mail him a print of one of the shots at no charge.
"Hey Snap, can't you find some more people to write about like our water-skiing cutie from down in Alabama?" Muller asked after the porky Wilhelm had waddled off to see the "Wheel's-a-Rolling" pageant. "Seems like the last several people you've interviewed have been old or fat or dowdy or worse, all three."
"Sorry to disappoint you, Phil, but I'm af
raid the sad fact is only a small minority of the people on this planet look anything like the young lady of whom you speak," I told him. "Just be happy you've gotten to spend so much time this summer out here in the sunshine and the blue skies and the cool zephyrs wafting in off our beautiful lake."
"Geez, you're almost poetic, Snap," he said, "but I'd still like to get some more cheesecake stuff."
"Okay, here's an idea, you incorrigible old lecher. Get yourself down to the water show, or to the ice ballet on the rink right next door to it, and take a bunch of group shots of some of the young lovelies who are performing. I'll bet anything whichever picture editor is working today will be delighted to run one of them on the back page with a caption. And just think of the fun you'll have."
"Thanks! I guess I should have thought of that myself."
"Yes, you should have. But there's no charge for the idea."
Muller trotted happily off toward the water and ice shows in search of feminine pulchritude while I returned to my desk in the pressroom to write about the self-styled world's most-traveled train passenger, who had the photo albums to prove it. After I had finished the piece and dictated it to Thompson on the rewrite desk, I set off in the direction of the Deadwood Central Railroad, which ran along the west edge of the fair, paralleling Lake Shore Drive but separated from it by a high wooden stockade fence enhancing the Wild West feeling the railroad sought to create.
Nothing would have shattered the "frontier" image for people riding the vintage train more quickly than a view of the taxis and heavily chromed, sleek postwar automobiles careening on the eight-lane road at well above the posted speed limit.
I walked along beside the Deadwood Central's track, trying to guess where a saboteur intent on a derailment might be expected to strike. First off, I figured that with the ever-earlier sunsets of these late summer days, Whitnauer probably would look for the least-lit stretch of track and wait until after dark to act. He also would choose a place where the train went the fastest, presumably at about the midway point between the two terminal stations.
Terror at the Fair (A Snap Malek Mystery) Page 14
