Terror at the Fair (A Snap Malek Mystery)

by Robert Goldsborough

  "Will you be coming home soon, Steve?"

  "Because of the fire, I've got some catching up to do here. I'll call when I'm leaving."

  "Be careful," she said with a quiet intensity, as if sensing there might be more to my "catching up" than I let on.

  After hanging up, I chewed some more on her "German-English" discovery, and I really did briefly consider telling Fahey about it before discarding the finding as a bizarre coincidence–maybe. I then turned my thoughts to the evening ahead.

  Twilight settled over the fairgrounds as I left the pressroom and grabbed a cup of coffee and a roast beef sandwich on rye at the counter of Leo's Grubstake Diner in Gold Gulch, the southern terminus of the Deadwood Central Railroad. I even got a kosher dill, the quality of which would have pleased Pickles Podgorny.

  The faux-Western town, with its hitching posts and raised wooden sidewalks and a main street of false-front frontier-style buildings including the Silver Dollar Saloon, a nickelodeon silent movie house, shooting gallery, and "Dutch Annie's" waffle shop, was crowded with fairgoers enjoying the balmy evening.

  As I left the diner in near darkness, a train filled to capacity with passengers steamed into the Gold Gulch station, meaning it would be making the return trip north within the next half hour. That particular run concerned me on this tenth anniversary of the deaths of three pre-teen boys on their bicycles.

  It was completely dark by the time I walked north on a path paralleling the railroad track. About two blocks north of Gold Gulch, the track diverged from the path, which I left, moving over to the rails.

  I turned on my flashlight and played it back and forth across the rails and crossties, wondering whether Fahey had indeed sent more men to the neighborhood of the railroad line because of what I had told him. So far, I hadn't seen anyone who looked remotely like a detective, which probably meant he had dismissed my theory–or Walt Disney's, really–as a crackpot idea.

  I continued on for one city block, then another, and another. The tracks were clear. I began to think Fahey was right, that I was on a fool's errand, the victim, not for the first time, of my own overactive imagination, further fueled in this particular case by the fertile mind of one Walt Disney.

  I now had reached the darkest stretch of the Deadwood Central. The nearest streetlights, more than a block away at the North Western Railway's Paul Bunyan exhibit, did not penetrate the trees in this seeming wilderness-within-a-city. I found the footing uneven on the graveled roadbed of the line, and I stumbled and nearly fell twice but recovered my balance.

  The second time I righted myself, my flashlight beam caught something on the track ahead. Numerous iron bars several feet long, reinforcing bars like those used in building construction, had been lashed together by metal cable into bundles of two and three each. They had been wedged in at angles between and on the rails. I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but they looked like they could easily force a train off its tracks.

  I knelt and pulled one of the bundles of bars off the track, heaving it over against the base of the stockade fence separating the fair from Lake Shore Drive just to the west. Then as I tossed a second bundle off the tracks, I heard my name.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  "That's enough, Mr. Malek–stop right there!" The familiar voice came from a cluster of bushes some twenty feet east of the tracks. I spun around and saw a shadowy figure emerge from the foliage with a gun in his hand.

  "Well, if it isn't Mr. Rob Taylor–or should I say Schneider?" My voice had turned suddenly hoarse.

  "It is Taylor," he snapped, moving slowly toward me, a revolver trained on my midsection. The earnest, engaging youth I had come to know these last few weeks had transmogrified into a hard-edged avenger who now seemed far older than his years.

  "Taylor translates to Schneider in German, correct, Rob?" I licked my lips.

  "It does when you spell it T-A-I-L-O-R," he answered curtly. "I'm surprised you have a working knowledge of German."

  "I don't, but I had some help. So, here we are," I said, working to keep my voice calm and swallowing to generate saliva in a desert-dry mouth. "As you can see, someone very carelessly put things on the track that could do some real damage, Rob."

  "How did you find out?" he sputtered, moving to within a yard of me.

  "I didn't until just a little while ago," I told him, gauging the distance between us and maintaining eye contact. "All along, I figured it was either the guy whose name apparently is Whitnauer or possibly your boss, Fred Metzger."

  Rob cut loose with a joyless laugh, keeping the revolver trained on me with a steady hand. "That's really funny," he said, "funnier than you could possibly know."

  "I was not trying to be a comedian."

  "First, there's Whitnauer. I know you figured out he called himself Samuel White."

  "Perhaps by overhearing some of my telephone conversations through the paper-thin walls of the administration building?"

  "Yes sir, Mr. Snap Malek, right you are. Mr. Whitnauer, by the way, is no longer with us."

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning he had an accident a few days back. He was very helpful to me early on, as I guess you are aware."

  "By putting a live round into a rifle, the round that killed a young and innocent actor."

  "Yeah, for which he got well rewarded," Rob said bitterly. "But it wasn't enough. He wanted more money, the greedy bastard."

  "And if he didn't get it, I suppose he threatened to tell his story to the police."

  "So he claimed when he called me at the fair about a week or so back. At first I didn't believe him, because I figured if he did talk, it would go hard on him, too. But he was an ignorant man, illiterate, actually. And I couldn't be sure…

  "Mr. Malek, get out of my way now. I'm going to put the material back on the tracks," Rob said, gesturing with the gun.

  "Indulge this old newspaperman's curiosity, Rob. Tell me what happened to Whitnauer."

  "Let's just say I paid him a visit in his…hotel room, which I would describe as a pigsty. I told him I was bringing more money, but when I got there, I started by giving him a pint of cheap booze."

  "Which he was glad to see?"

  "Damned right. The guy was a pathetic tosspot. He drank right from the bottle, drained it in fifteen, twenty minutes."

  "And then…?"

  "Do you even have to bother asking?" Rob smirked.

  "You strangled him?"

  "Nope." He wiggled the revolver aimed in my direction as if to indicate how Whitnauer died.

  "That makes a lot of noise."

  He smirked again. "Mr. Snap Malek, in that part of Uptown, nobody even pays attention to a gunshot."

  "So you used that," I said, nodding toward the revolver.

  "Oh no. Poor Sam, he killed himself. Last I saw, he was lying on his bed with the gun in his hand. He left a printed suicide note, confessing to his sins."

  "Printed, of course, so the handwriting couldn't be checked."

  Rob shrugged. "That's part of it. Also, Whitnauer could barely write his name, so I figured a guy like him, well, the best he could do would be to print. And I made plenty of spelling mistakes in the note."

  "So you killed a destitute illiterate and four others if you count the actor, all to avenge…who, your father? Do I have it right?"

  "Don't talk about my father," he hissed, waving the pistol. "You don't know anything about it."

  "What about Metzger? Where does he fit in?"

  "You mean Uncle Fred, former last name Schneider? Oh, he knew what was going on the whole time. You might call him my accomplice in all of this, although he really hasn't got much stomach for what I was doing. In fact, he's cringing back in his office right now, waiting for me to come back and tell him how everything turned out."

  "I must say you two put on some pretty damned good acting jobs for me after a couple of the deaths."

  "Well, for me it was acting," Rob said, "although in Uncle Fred's case, he really did get shook up each time someth
ing happened. He didn't even know I'd hired Whitnauer to put a live round in the rifle. But after that, he had to go along with everything else. Besides, he hated what the railroads did to my father–his brother–every bit as much as I did."

  "And of course you got the job at the fair through your uncle."

  "You might say that in a sense, he got the job at the fair through me. You remember the name Chester Rawlings?"

  "The man who did public relations at the fair last year?"

  "Yes. He had an unfortunate accident in a subway station."

  "An accident you had a hand in, no doubt."

  "No comment."

  "So the job at the fair was open, and Fred, who already had a public relations firm, applied for the position. What if he hadn't gotten it?"

  "Interesting you should ask, but then, you're a skilled reporter. I like to think I'm a very good planner. After the fair ended last season, I went to visit Mr. Rawlings in his office, looking for a job. While there, I managed–it wasn't hard–to filch a piece of his stationery and an envelope. The very day of his fatal accident, the Railroad Fair received a letter from him on his letterhead saying he had a serious heart condition, and if should anything happen to him, he highly recommended Fred Metzger for the position."

  "Incredible."

  "Thank you, I thought so," Rob said smugly. "But lest you think I'm totally coldblooded, let me remind you about the sad state of life for our family after my father's train hit those boys."

  "It had to be rough."

  "You can't possibly know–nobody can. Now, Mr. Snap Malek, I am going to the tracks. Don't try to stop me. I'll take care of you later." Rob skirted around me, keeping the gun trained on my stomach. Backing up, he went over to the fence to get the iron reinforcing bars I had thrown there.

  He bent to pick up one of the bundles with his left hand, and his gun barrel briefly pointed down as he bent over. In that instant, I heaved my flashlight at him, and my years as a strong-armed outfielder with a neighborhood baseball team paid off. I scored a direct hit on his right temple. He groaned and the gun discharged as he put his other hand to his forehead.

  His second groan was louder, more of a scream, really, and I realized he had shot himself in the leg. He keeled over and I got on him in an instant, picking up the revolver and pulling the last of the iron off of the rails as he lay beside the tracks writhing and moaning.

  "My father was over forty when I was born," Rob said through gritted teeth, "but he still should be alive today. He'd be only sixty-six, if only things hadn't been…

  "You couldn't begin to imagine what it was like," he went on, the words coming in gasps. "After the…accident, everybody…everybody hated my father. Called him names…painted swastikas on my parents' sidewalk, or on their doors. Broke the windows with rocks. The neighbors asked us to move, said we brought violence to the block.

  "We moved again…but we couldn't hide, and the harassing went on. No railroad would hire him…he tried, tried again. They all said he had mental–"

  Rob grimaced in pain and gripped his leg. I retrieved my flashlight, which surprisingly still worked, and played it on his pants, where blood had begun to soak through.

  Rob's next groan was accompanied by blinding pain–my pain! My face got raked by something sharp and hard. The revolver, I later figured out. Rob had picked it up off the ground, where I had carelessly set it down, and he slashed it across my forehead, opening a gash, sending blood spurting down into my eyes.

  I must have yelled, although everything from that moment on for the next several minutes became a blur in more ways than one. Still groaning, Rob dropped the gun and crawled to where the bundles of metal lay, trying to drag them back onto the tracks.

  I got up, felt the world spinning, then dropped to my knees, wiping blood out of my eyes. Now I crawled too, and we engaged in what might laughingly be called a wrestling match if it hadn't been such a pathetic performance on both our parts.

  I'm pretty sure I grabbed him by the shoulders and forced him to let loose of the metal bars. He then drove a fleshy fist into my face. There wasn't much force behind the punch, but it was enough to knock me back and start another eruption of blood, this time from my nose. As I struggled to right myself, the train's whistle sounded from the south.

  Rob heard it, too. The ground began to vibrate slightly, and he made one final effort to pick up the bars. Failing, he began to cry, his sobs sounding like hiccups. The ineffective headlight beam of the old locomotive materialized down the tracks and became larger.

  He swung his fist one last time, a blow to my arm I barely felt, although he followed it with a shove that pushed me away from the track. Half-crawling, he scrambled past me and, too late, I realized what was happening.

  As the locomotive pounded toward us, it loomed larger to me than it had seemed before, perhaps because it was night and I lay on the ground just an arm's length from the tracks. Just before the coal-burning, smoke-and-steam spewing beast thundered past, Rob threw himself onto the rails. The only scream I heard was my own.

  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 hand
cuffs 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."