Terror at the Fair (A Snap Malek Mystery)

by Robert Goldsborough

  "And me, I was driving the darn coach," added the goateed lad. "Never knew what happened till I got a jab in the ribs from the guy riding shotgun next to me, who pointed down at–what was his name…Vic?"

  I thanked all three and scribbled their names in my notebook as Officer O'Brien came over to us. "We're askin' all of you who had a role in the pageant to stay here until the detectives have had a chance to talk to you," he said, addressing the three and then going off and telling other actors to hang around for questioning.

  I then looked up to see two plainclothes men on the far side of the stage talking to another of the actors–the shooter. I walked over and introduced myself to them.

  "We're sort of busy right now," one of the dicks snapped at me. "Oh…I remember you now. Yeah, Smart Aleck Malek, isn't it? Kindly don't bother reminding me you're a buddy of Chief Fahey. I've heard that crap from you before. It didn't cut any ice then, and it won't now. Why don't you just beat it, scandal-monger?"

  It was none other than Detective Jack Prentiss, whom I'd had a run-in with before. He didn't like reporters, which made us even, because I didn't like him. But you've got to pick your fights, and this seemed hardly the time. I retreated to a spot several yards away and watched as Prentiss and his partner, whom I didn't recognize, questioned the shaken young man who still gripped the fatal rifle.

  Every so often, Prentiss glared in my direction, as if willing me to disappear. It didn't work. After about fifteen minutes of conversation, in which both detectives scribbled notes, they started to walk away, taking the rifle with them.

  "Pardon me, gentlemen, but I'd like a couple of minutes of your time," I said to the pair, pulling out my own notebook.

  "I thought I told you before to beat it," Prentiss snarled, "and I meant it, Malek. Since you're such a buddy of the chief's, go and talk to him. You have an in there, as you've told me. We got work to do here, people to talk to. Lots of people." His partner graced me with a sneer similar to Prentiss's. They must practice it in detectives' school.

  The young man had headed quickly into the wings after his talk with the detectives, and I sprinted until I caught up with him, immediately identifying myself as a Trib reporter.

  "Go 'way. Don't wanna talk to anybody," he muttered, head down. Like the others I had spoken to, he was lean and dressed in Western garb and looked to be in his early-to-mid-twenties.

  "I'll just take a couple of minutes," I said. "I know this is a tough time for you. Those cops didn't charge you with anything, did they?"

  He shook his head, tears welling in his eyes.

  "I didn't think so. No reason they should. Any idea how your rifle happened to have a live round in it? Or was it more than one round?"

  "No idea, mister. Look, I already told those policemen everything I know. And they told me make sure to stay around here where I can be reached, for an inquest or something like that. I got nothing more to say to anybody."

  "Well, it's important we make our readers–by far the largest audience in the Chicago area–aware of your story. Otherwise, well…people might always wonder…"

  I could see him wavering, so I pushed on. "Look. I'm giving you a chance to tell your story to more than a million people. They need to know you are completely without blame in this terrible tragedy. I'm here to help you. You can see that, can't you?"

  He stared down at his boots and nodded, jamming his hands into the pockets of his Levi's and sniffling.

  "Okay, good. First, tell me your name and how you came to be part of this pageant."

  "It's…Todd Forrest."

  "How old are you, Todd?"

  "Twenty-three. I'm a part-time waiter at a little café up on Belmont near Halsted. I'm trying to break in as an actor, like a lot of the others in the cast here. I answered an ad for a part in this…show, and got cast as one of the stagecoach robbers."

  "Uh-huh. Where are you from?"

  "River town out in Iowa, Muscatine. You've probably never heard of it."

  "There's a lot of places I've never heard of, but that doesn't make them bad. Have you been in Chicago long?"

  "'Bout two years now, ever since…ever since I graduated from the University of Iowa."

  "I've heard all sorts of good things about the school. So, you auditioned for a role in the pageant, right?"

  He finally looked up and made eye contact. "Yeah, I did."

  "Any particular reason you got picked to be a bandit?"

  Todd took a deep breath. "I'm…fairly good with guns. Used to go duck hunting a lot with my dad along the Mississippi River as a kid. They–the people who did the casting for the pageant–liked that. They wanted at least some of us to look like we knew how to handle firearms, although we all were told to aim at the other guys to make it look realistic. Some of 'em just fired into the air, though."

  I nodded as I continued taking notes. "So, Todd, exactly where did you get the rifle you used today?"

  "Same place as always. At the start of every performance, each of us gets issued a replica of the Sharps 44-caliber rifles they say got used on the frontier back in the 1800s. There are six blanks in each weapon. And we fire all of them during the attack on the stagecoach. The men riding on the stagecoach do the same."

  "Who passes out the guns?"

  "Guys on the backstage crew. Then they–the rifles–get collected after our act."

  "How many of these guys are there?"

  "I dunno, two or three, I guess. I never paid much attention to them."

  "Who loads the rifles?"

  "Afraid I couldn't tell you. Maybe the same crew that gives them out."

  "Do you always get the same rifle?"

  He shook his head. "Naw. The guys passing them out don't even bother to look at us. We just line up and get handed a weapon. They usually don't say a word, except maybe 'here you are, buddy' or something like that."

  "Do you have any idea how many of your shells were live?"

  Todd began tearing up again. "Only one, I think, although 'course I didn't know it at the time. Live rounds have a slightly different sound and a stronger recoil, too. Wish I wasn't such a good shot. As I said, a lot of the actors just fire without aiming."

  "Did you know the one who…?"

  "Only to say hi to. I didn't even know his name. This was only his third or fourth performance. People are changing all the time in the cast. Some get moved to other acts in the pageant, depending on if anybody's sick or something. Others quit if they land a role in some local play. God, this is awful."

  "On that we're agreed, Todd," I said putting a hand on his shoulder. "A photographer for the paper may be taking your picture."

  "Well, I'm not going to be around here much longer," he said in a listless tone. "After I get done testifying, or whatever it is I have to do, I'm getting a one-way ticket back home to Muscatine. You can have this darn city of yours. I don't care if I never see it again."

  Chapter Nine

  The shot was on the mark, Papa, and I know it caused a death. One might say the man who died was innocent, but no more innocent than you were, so I feel no remorse, none whatever. I realize for the first time this is only the beginning. Now others will be sacrificed to atone for your suffering. I have been waiting so long for this opportunity, and at last the wait is over. Rejoice with me…

  Chapter Ten

  My phone jangled as I strode into the fair's empty pressroom. I had an idea who was calling and got it right.

  "Snap, we're getting word there's been a fatal at the fair, a shooting," rasped Hal Murray on the city desk against a backdrop of clattering typewriters and nattering voices. "But no details yet from Westcott at Headquarters. We need something for the early edition. Where in the hell have you been? This is my third call."

  "Covering said fatal, Hal. I was about to phone in an eyewitness report."

  "From who?"

  "It's whom. And from me, of course. Who d'ya think? I saw it happen, talked to the shooter, even got insulted by a police detective. All in a day's
work," I said, sighing for effect. "Now how 'bout giving me a rewrite man?"

  I spent the next fifteen minutes dictating copy, good copy, to Williamson. "No quotes from the cops?" he drawled after I'd finished.

  "The dicks out here weren't exactly in a talkative mood, Eddie, although one patrolman did complain about there being too many guns out here. I gather Westcott still hasn't called in from Eleventh and State."

  "Not far as I know, Snap."

  "Well, maybe he'll weigh in with comments from Chicago's Finest. Also, chances are you'll be hearing from me again."

  I dialed a number that had been burned into my brain years ago. "Chief Fahey's office," Elsie Dugo Cascio chirped.

  "Is our noble leader available, you vision of loveliness?"

  "Be still, my heart. It's a voice from the past, come back to haunt me and invade my dreams. As a matter of fact, he just mentioned your very name a few minutes ago. I will put you through."

  "Dammit man, does trouble just follow you around, or do you follow it? I've never figured that one out," Fahey growled.

  "And a good afternoon to you, too, Chief Fahey. I had the displeasure earlier this very today of running into that lout Prentiss of yours. You ought to send the bastard to charm school. That is, if they offer remedial courses. He's at the kindergarten level."

  "Okay, okay, I already know how you feel about Jack," he said with a sigh. "Now tell me what–." He got stopped in mid-sentence by a buzzing sound I took to be Elsie with another call.

  "Gotta go," he barked when he came back on the line. "Your Mr. Westcott is here to see me. Can't keep the Tribune waiting, right?"

  "Absolutely, I–"

  "Give me your number there. I want to talk to you after I get done answering your colleague's incisive questions."

  Twenty minutes later, my desk phone rang. The chief's voice boomed over the wire.

  "Westcott tells me you already phoned in a story including some quotes from the shooter. Mind sharing those quotes with me?"

  "Not at all, but don't you trust your attack dog Prentiss to be thorough in his own questioning?"

  "No comment. Besides, I haven't heard from him yet. And from what Westcott also told me, you happened to be an eyewitness. I'd like your slant on this, if it's not too much trouble."

  "Okay, Fergus, fair enough." I gave him my account of the shooting as well as a verbatim on the conversation with Todd Forrest.

  "Bizarre," Fahey muttered when I'd finished.

  "True. Might have been an accident, a live shell somehow finding its way into the shipment of blanks. Could have happened at the factory or arsenal or wherever this stuff gets made."

  "Maybe," the old copper said. "But as you know, I'm suspicious by nature. Our next move is to talk to whomever the people at the fair are who load those miserable rifles."

  "Mind if I sit in on those talks?"

  A snort. "You know that's impossible."

  "Well, you can't blame an old newshound for trying. After all, you should be willing to give a little quid pro quo. I've already thrown some information your way. And I can be an extra pair of eyes and ears for you out here. You know I'm dependable."

  "I know I can depend on you to find trouble– usually for yourself. The answer is still no, Snap. There still are such things as regulations and procedures, as you are well aware."

  "Okay, I surrender–but only up to a point. How about telling me what your men find out after they've talked to the rifle-loaders?"

  "Shouldn't I be sharing the information with your Mr. Westcott here in the building?"

  "No reason you can't tell us both, is there?"

  "I guess not," the chief conceded. "Besides, it might get you off my back, although that may be too much to hope for."

  "Probably. By the way, for what it's worth, I think the kid who did the shooting is clean. Call it a reporter's intuition."

  "No reason to doubt it–yet," he said. "But even if he is clean, I've got myself one doozie of a headache on my hands."

  "Why? There's no way in the world I can see how the department could have prevented this."

  "Huh! Just try telling that to the editorial writers on your paper and those other rags you compete with. They'll all find ways to blame us. Just watch. 'Insufficient monitoring of dangerous materials, etc., etc.' The commissioner is already bouncing off the walls. He's going to be all over me."

  "I thought you and Prendergast got along pretty well."

  "We do, that's never been a problem," Fahey said. "But he's going to be feeling the heat, and when he feels it, I feel it. After all, we've got ourselves a shooting death at the city's major summertime event. An event, not incidentally, bringing in hundreds of thousands of visitors who leave behind hundreds of thousands of dollars at such places as hotels and restaurants and nightclubs. And also don't forget the taxi drivers and souvenir shops and tour buses and how much they make on all these additional visitors who flock to our fine metropolis.

  "The folks who run the exhibition are having a goddamned conniption, to say nothing of all the railroad presidents who've put up the dough to sponsor this fair. They'll be demanding we double or triple the size of our detail at the fairgrounds. Never mind that we're already stretched thin all across town, thanks to a local government, one which won't give us more men. That's all off the record, of course. So much for my two-week July escape to the calm and cool of Wisconsin."

  "You would miss the excitement of the city," I countered lamely.

  "Try me, just try me. All hell's going to break loose around here."

  Fahey had it right. The next day, each of the four papers led with the shooting, and my first-person piece drew the Tribune's banner headline: GUN DEATH AT RAIL FAIR. Also, all four dailies, per the chief's prediction, carried editorials demanding both an immediate investigation and increased police presence at the fair. The Herald-American, true to its Hearst roots, ran its editorial in a box out on Page One under the headline ARE WE SAFE ANYWHERE? The answer, according to the editorial: a resounding "no!"

  When I arrived in the fair's pressroom the morning after the shooting, I found reporters already there from the Daily News and the Sun-Times. "To what do we owe this honor?" I asked the two, both of whom I had crossed paths with on occasion over the years.

  "You know goddamn well, Malek," said raw-boned, lantern-jawed Dave Stapleton of the News, who'd been with the paper as a crime reporter at least as long as I had worked for the Trib. Despite all those years he had been in Chicago, he still spoke with a voice that gave away his Texas roots. He lit a Chesterfield and sat on one corner of the desk with a DAILY NEWS sign taped to it. "Understand you saw the shooting here yesterday."

  "Yeah, Snap, give us the rundown," put in the blocky, cigar-chomping Chick Cavanaugh of the Sun-Times, who had started out on the predecessor tabloid Times in the late '20s and had covered the St. Valentine's Day massacre up on Clark Street, as he was quick to tell anyone he met.

  "You could have found all of it in my story this morning, lads, assuming you took the time to read it."

  "Ah, I see we're full of ourselves today after getting the line story in the God-almighty Tribune," Stapleton said, cocking his head and flicking ashes from his cigarette onto the wood-plank floor.

  "For the record, I've gotten lots of line stories," I told him, yawning.

  "Don't go acting smug just because your fat, rich paper can afford to keep a man out here full-time and the rest of us can't," Cavanaugh huffed.

  "Now calm down, both of you," I said. "For old times' sake, although I don't recall any old times to speak of with either of you, I'll recap what I saw here yesterday, and then you're on your own."

  They pulled out their reporter's notebooks and scribbled as I recounted the events at the pageant. I had just finished up when Fred Metzger walked into the pressroom.

  "Ah, Mr. Stapleton, Mr. Cavanaugh, I see you picked up your press credentials at the front gate," he said, gesturing toward the badges they wore. "Wonderful to have you here," he
exuded, mopping his brow with a well-stained handkerchief. "You can help keep Mr. Malek company. Now, can I give you both a tour of the grounds?"

  "Speaking for myself, just the place where the shooting happened," Stapleton snapped. "I don't know about Chick here, but I also need to talk to the guy who fired the rifle."

  "Oh, I'm afraid I can't help you there," Metzger said with a frown and a shake of the head that made his jowls jiggle. "He's, well…he's not available, as I understand it. I believe he has left the acting troupe here. I assumed you both had come to cover the grand scope and color of the fair and–"

  "Oh, cut the crap, flack," Cavanaugh snarled. "My paper leaves that kind of fluff to our nice lady feature writers, people like, well…like Malek here." He sent a sneer my way, but before he took another breath, I yanked the cigar out of his yap and ground it under my heel.

  "Next time, you overstuffed tub of lard, I'll turn your nickel stogie around and jam it down your throat ash-end first," I hissed, looking down at him and giving his wrinkled tie such a yank he almost toppled over forward. "Got it?"

  "Gentlemen, gentlemen," Metzger whined. "Please, there is no need to get belligerent. We're all here to do honor and justice to the fair."

  "Maybe you are," Stapleton drawled to the PR man. "Me, I'm here looking for a story, and frankly, I don't give two horned owl hoots about whether what I find does justice and honor to the fair or not. You're paid to be a flack, I'm sure as hell not. Sorry to put it so starkly, but this is the way things are, like it or lump it."

  "I'll second that," Cavanaugh said, looking at me reproachfully as he straightened his tie and tried without success to square his rounded shoulders. "Somebody got himself shot dead here, which makes it news. More news by far than anything else going on around this overblown train carnival."

  "Even though it was just an accident?" Metzger asked in a querulous tone.

  "Just who says it was an accident?" Stapleton crossed his arms over his chest. "Hey Malek, has anybody talked to the people who loaded those doggone rifles?"