"It truly is, you vision of loveliness. You can tell him I chose to call him rather than to take the law into my own hands."
"I'll relay the message."
"What in the hell is this 'taking the law into your own hands' crap about?" Fahey bellowed when he came on the line.
"I just made a command decision to stop playing hero, which should please you. I think I have the identity of the man who we're calling 'Sam White,' you know, the one who–"
"Yes, I know who you're talking about! Well, spit it out. Let's have it."
I proceeded to give the chief chapter and verse, including the name and address of the Wilson Avenue saloon, which Pickles had supplied to me.
"Very interesting," he snarled. "And just how did you happen to come by this little nugget of information?"
"Somebody I know thinks he might have seen White, or rather Whitnauer, going into a bar in Uptown."
"And how, pray tell, did this 'somebody' know what Mr. Whitnauer looks like? We haven't released the sketch to the newspapers–unless of course one somehow fell into your hands," Fahey said in a tone laced with sarcasm.
"Fergus, isn't the important thing here that we've got a bead on Whitnauer? Does anything else really matter? And since I've passed along to you what may turn out to be valuable information, I'd like something in return."
"What?"
"Has he, Whitnauer, been spotted going into the fair since the sketch got distributed?"
"Come on, Snap, think for a second. If he were seen, do you think he'd still be on the loose?"
"Good point."
"But," Fahey went on, "I will tell you this, off the record. Three visitors to the fair have been stopped and interrogated. To the ticket-sellers, they looked enough like the drawing of White, or Whitnauer, that they got detained. One was a guy with a mustache and crew cut from Medinah, Ohio, another a man with his family from someplace in Iowa, and the third a writer for a railroad fan magazine doing an article about the fair. He was really pissed off at us and threatened to sue somebody."
"I can believe it. Those journalism types can be a pretty doggone surly lot. Well, good luck with Mr. Whitnauer."
He growled. "Snap, when all of this is over, by God, you and I are going to have a very long talk."
"I look forward to it."
"I'll just bet you do," he said, slamming down the phone.
So I had done my civic duty and turned information over to the law. Feeling self-righteous, I dialed the Tribune morgue and got Hazel on the second ring.
"Believe it or not, Snap, I was just about to call you," she said.
"I'll bet you say that to all the boys."
"Only the ones I really like, and especially those who remember what I like to drink. It took me longer than I thought to assemble the clips you wanted. I kept getting interrupted by reporters needing information. The nerve of them!"
"I'll say. Some people have no consideration. Was there a lot?"
"Tons. It'll take you a while to wade through all of it. I'll admit I wasn't terribly discriminating, but I felt that when in doubt, I should let you decide if a story had value."
"That's a good line of thinking. I'll stop by the Tower after work and pick up the stuff."
Chapter Thirty-One
I got home that night toting a stuffed manila folder.
"Just what do we have here?" Catherine asked after we embraced. "Homework, perhaps?"
"Of a sort," I said, giving her an abridged summary of the day's activities and the contents of the bulging folder.
"Steven Douglas Malek," she said, hands on hips and head cocked, "I thought you had agreed to stop playing private detective and leave that sort of thing to Chief Fahey and his army."
"There is a thin line, my love, between private eye and investigative reporter."
"A line you seem to be skating on both sides of, I might add. At the risk of throwing cold water on your enthusiasm, I should point out you are not at the moment an investigative reporter, but rather a feature writer."
"You have cut me to the very quick, oh, dearest one. Inside every newspaperman, regardless of his title or assignment of the moment, beats the noble heart of an intrepid journalist, on a never-ending quest to right wrongs and pursue an unerring course of justice and truth."
"A very nice speech indeed, sir. I would consider myself chagrined if I truly thought I had wronged you. However, I remain suspicious."
"I must tell you," I said as we walked to the dinner table, "that I really do pay heed to what you say. Something else transpired today I didn't tell you about."
"Oh?"
I proceeded to relate my decision not to visit the bar in Uptown Whitnauer patronized, but rather to turn all my information over to Fergus Fahey and his vast legion of plainclothes foot soldiers.
"I must admit that is progress of a sort," she said as we tackled our roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. "But what's with all the clippings you've brought home? That sounds to me an awful lot like police work in the guise of 'research.'"
"Look, as you know, I have a lot of admiration for Fahey and his leadership. But the Police Department in general, and the Detective Bureau in particular, tend to do things by the numbers, and they sometimes need an injection of imagination and creativity."
"That has an air of superiority about it," Catherine said, raising an eyebrow.
"Maybe, but take today, for example: If I hadn't enlisted Pickles Podgorny and his 'irregular' troops, we–and the police–would not have known the identity of the man who very well may be behind all of the fair killings."
"You still don't know if he's really the one, though."
"True enough, but at least it's a start of sorts. And maybe one or more of those clippings I brought home will further help things along."
"I still think you may be taking what Walt Disney said too seriously."
"You mean about someone possibly holding a longtime grudge against the railroads?"
"Yes. That sounds like the plot for a motion picture."
I laughed. "Well, I suppose Disney would readily plead guilty to that charge. After all, he makes movies, albeit animated ones, and he very likely thinks up a lot of their wild and wacky plots. It's possible he just can't turn off his fertile brain."
Catherine joined in the laughter, and after we had washed and dried the dinner dishes, she retreated to her favorite chair in the living room to read The Way West by A. B. Guthrie while I sat at the dining room table and started in on the large batch of clips assembled by Hazel.
She had done a thorough job, going back even farther than I had suggested. Interestingly, two of the earliest clippings she included covered rail disasters in western Indiana, close to Chicago.
The worst and most famous of these was the 1918 collision near Hammond, just across the state line from Illinois, in which a Hegenbeck-Wallace Circus train got smashed in the rear by another train, whose engineer had fallen asleep at the throttle of his locomotive. Eighty-six died, most of them circus personnel, including performers.
There also had been a collision in the small town of Porter in 1921 in which one passenger train ploughed into another at a crossover of two lines, killing thirty-seven. The engineer of one of the trains was found to be at fault for having ignored a red signal.
I spent a long time reading and re-reading the brittle, faded clippings of these two historic wrecks, mulling over whether someone who lost loved ones in one of them might now be exacting revenge on railroads in general. I finally set the articles aside, figuring because a full generation or more had elapsed since their occurrence, anyone seeking retribution would have long since acted.
I found a more likely possibility: the April 1946 Naperville, Illinois, train wreck, which I had covered for the Trib. There, one Burlington Route passenger train bound for the West rammed into the rear of another one that had stopped, shredding the rear coach. Forty-five died, with more than one hundred others injured.
The engineer of the second train, W.
W. Blaine, initially gor blamed as the one causing the crash, but six months later, according to the clips, a DuPage County grand jury "blamed the wreck on a series of unconnected negligent activities by both the railroad and the crews" of the two trains. How many people whose relatives died in the tragedy might have reason to get revenge on either the Burlington or railroads as a whole? I wondered.
Then I pulled out a batch of clippings held together by a rubber band that set me to wondering anew. The first article reported on a 1939 mishap on Chicago's Southwest Side. Under the headline THREE BOYS ON BIKES KILLED RACING TRAIN, the Page Three story recounted how eleven-year-old boys on bicycles pedaled along a street that intersected the Rock Island Lines and raced a freight train to the crossing that was moving at "approximately thirty miles per hour."
The boys skirted the lowered crossing gates and, according to eyewitnesses including the engineer, pedaled onto the tracks as the steam locomotive blew its whistle repeatedly and slammed on its brakes.
The locomotive struck all three boys, however. One died from the impact with the train while the other two got thrown through the air and died of wounds suffered when they hit the street.
Another clipping, dated a few days later, reported that a coroner's jury ruled the deaths to be accidental, although parents of two of the boys claimed the engineer had not made a great enough effort to stop. They had disrupted the proceedings with shouts and threats against the engineer.
Yet another clipping, dated a few months later, reported the engineer, Josef Schneider, had quit his job with the Rock Island because of "a state of deep depression" over the accident.
The fourth and final article in the batch Hazel had bundled together for me was the obituary of Schneider, age fifty-six, in October 1942. He had hanged himself in the basement of the family home on South Sawyer Avenue. There was no mention of a suicide note.
I had of course been a reporter on the Tribune during these years, but somehow this story had eluded me, other than a vague recollection I had of the accident. I wanted to know more about the star-crossed Mr. Schneider, and I knew just who to ask.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The next morning I left the house almost an hour earlier than usual, first destination: Tribune Tower, to return the clippings Hazel had assembled for me. The paper, and by extension, the morgue, had a rule that clips under no circumstances could be taken from the building, and the last thing I wanted was to get Hazel in trouble. So at 8:35, I placed the envelope in her hands with profuse thanks, then passed through the local room, waving to a few colleagues whom I rarely saw and stopping to give my regards to Day City Editor Hal Murray.
Back in the fair's pressroom, where I remained the only occupant, I thumbed through the bulky Chicago phone directory and found the name I wanted: Zack Yeager.
Zack had been an intrepid Trib police reporter for more than thirty years before retiring in the early 1940s. Not only was he a tiger once he got onto the scent of a story, he also had a memory rivaling that of Catherine's late father, the legendary City News Bureau reporter Lemuel "Steel Trap" Bascomb.
"Yeager at this end," he answered in a gravelly tone on the second ring.
"Hello, Zack, this is a ghost from your past."
"I'm pretty good with voices, and I've gotta say this sounds a hell of a lot like the one and only Steve 'Snap' Malek, boy reporter. How'm I doing?"
"As good as ever, Zack. Tell me what's going on with you these days?"
"Arthritis, for one thing, but it's not about to stop me from getting out to Sportsman's and Hawthorne to watch the ponies run and put down a small wager now and again."
"Are you winning?"
"Now and again."
"Do you miss the exciting world of the daily deadlines?"
"You know, I did at first, Snap. The first year after I left got really tough, actually tougher on Maggie than on me, because I became such a bear around the house, a real pain in the butt. If she had bumped me off then, any jury would have ruled it justifiable homicide."
I laughed. "It couldn't have been so bad as that, Zack."
"It was pretty bad, but I adjusted. It helps that the grandkids are nearby. Our daughter, Amy, lives in Evergreen Park, so we see them all pretty often. And then there's Sportsman's and Hawthorne, as I mentioned. But how about you? Bring me up to date."
"Right now, the paper has me doing feature stuff out at the Railroad Fair."
"Oh yeah, come to think of it, I've seen a few of your bylines. Some strange things happening out there, eh?"
"I'll say. Before I get back to the fair, on a personal note, you may know I got divorced a few years back."
"Yeah, I think I had heard on the grapevine. Sorry to hear it."
"Don't be. The story has a happy ending. I'm married again, and I like to think I'm a better man this time around. My wife is Steel Trap Bascomb's daughter."
"I'll be damned! I'll be goddamned! Good for you, Snap. Now ol' Steel Trap, there was a man. We'll never see his likes again."
"Yeah, and although I had met him a few times in earlier years, I really got acquainted with him toward the end, which is how I met Catherine. Of course by then his mind was going, but he still had moments when the old brilliance showed through."
"God, I remember one time when he and I covered a fatal down near the Stockyards in '21 or '22, I think. The stiff had been trying to rob a little ma and pa store and got outdrawn by the grocer, who plugged him as he pulled out his own gun. We walked in, and Steel Trap must have been at least thirty feet away from the body, lying facedown on the floor of the store, when he said, 'That's Two-Bits Tomassini, I'd know him anywhere.'
"When I asked where he had run into this Two-Bits character before, he told me it was back in 1907, when he covered the courts, they had hauled Tomassini in for kiting checks. A minor thing like that fifteen years before, and damned if Steel Trap didn't remember it–even the month in '07 when it happened, April! I'm surprised he didn't remember the exact date."
"Incredible story, Zack."
"Yeah, but I have a feeling you didn't call up just to hear me reminisce about the great old days chasing down stories and finding ways to screw the opposition out of scoops."
"I seem to recall you've got a damned good memory yourself."
"Nothin' like Steel Trap, though. Like I said, with him, they threw away the mold."
"Well, let me test you, if you don't mind. Do you happen to remember a railroad engineer named Josef Schneider?"
I could hear a deep exhale at the other end. "Oh yeah, Snap, I remember very well, too well. A sad, sad story. Does this have anything to do with your Railroad Fair?"
"Maybe, but I'm not sure. Tell me about Schneider."
"Well, do you know about the three kids who got hit by his train?"
"Yeah, I do now. I vaguely remember when it happened, but my own memory got a jogging when I read the clips yesterday about the whole business, including the inquest and the suicide. Can you fill in some blanks for me?"
"A few of them, anyway. I was at the inquest, and it got nasty, Snap, I mean really nasty. The parents of these kids, they were damned near out of control, particularly when the deaths got ruled an accident."
"They thought he should have been able to stop the train, is that it?"
"Yeah, but others on the scene said it was impossible; the train was just going too fast. The kids apparently had waited until the last possible moment to race in front of the engine. It sounds like they were playing some sort of 'chicken.'"
"Well, it also sounds like it pretty well ended Schneider's life, too."
"Yeah, you're absolutely right. It didn't help matters that he was a German immigrant who spoke with a heavy accent. As you probably remember, residual resentment of Germans because of the First War lingered in a lot of neighborhoods, and there were more bad feelings by the late thirties, what with Hitler on the scene by then."
"That all adds up to a formula for trouble," I said.
"Sure does, and the
trouble started right there at the inquest. After the 'accident' verdict, the kids' parents shouted things like 'Dirty Kraut' and 'You bloody damned Heinie.' Somebody even called him a Nazi, which of course made no sense whatever. The bailiff and a couple of cops had to clear the room. The screaming continued in the hall and even out on the street."
"I gather the hatred followed the poor bastard for the rest of his life."
"You gather right. I didn't follow what happened next real closely–I had a lot of other stuff to keep me busy at the time–but I do know Schneider left the Rock Island just to get away from all the hassle he got, not only from the parents of the dead kids but from their neighbors as well. They all made him a scapegoat for what happened."
"Then what?"
"After a year or so, he tried to get his old job back, but apparently the Rock Island worried about his mental condition, possibly with some justification, and they turned him down cold. Next, he tried to catch on with several other railroads in the area, I think the Santa Fe, the C&EI, the Monon, the Milwaukee Road, and maybe even a few others, too. I'm fuzzy on the details.
"But it was no dice. Apparently the word had gotten around the railroads about him being unstable. Also, or so the story went at the time, these other lines were worried if they hired him, they'd catch all manner of crap from the families of those kids."
"Sort of an informal blackball, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, that's a good way to put it, and I guess you know the rest."
"The suicide?"
"He hanged himself in the basement of his house. I didn't go to the funeral, but Don Haggerty did." Zack referred to a longtime Trib police reporter who had died a few years back.
"Did you ever talk to Haggerty about it–the funeral, I mean?"
"I did, because I had been curious about the whole situation over the years. Sort of an American tragedy, you know?"
"Uh-huh. Somebody could sure write a novel about it, all right. Did Haggerty find out anything at the funeral?"
Terror at the Fair (A Snap Malek Mystery) Page 12