Terror at the Fair (A Snap Malek Mystery)

by Robert Goldsborough

  Dark and mid-route it should be, then, if I had this figured correctly. It seemed the best spot to wreck a train would be close to the giant Paul Bunyan robot and our new friend Nils Ericsson, a.k.a., Sven the Savage Swede. There were no lights along the rail line at that point, and it was a straight stretch of track where the engineer could "open her up," as much as possible given the limitations of the old steam locomotive and the length of the route.

  I hiked to the spot and, as if to confirm my thoughts, the chugging train, shrouded in the nineteenth-century engine's smoke and steam, came pounding past at maybe thirty-five miles an hour, shaking the ground. I found myself being saluted by a long blast on the whistle and a wave from the cab of the locomotive. I saw it was none other than L. J. Gunderson, the retired Pennsylvania Railroad engineer whom I had interviewed during my very first week at the fair.

  The longer I spent at the fairgrounds, the more the place seemed like a small village. Everywhere I went, I encountered someone I had interviewed or been served a meal by or had coffee with. Familiar faces abounded, and several times in recent weeks, I got hailed by a wave and the call of "Hi there, Tribune man!" I will not go so far as to say these lakefront acres had become a second home, but the place grew on me–up to a point.

  That brief feeling of warmth quickly dissipated, however, and I forced myself to refocus on the issue at hand.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Tomorrow will be the big day, Papa, and I have at last picked the place. Even with all the police roaming the grounds, it is a spot where I will not be disturbed in my work. I am glad it is almost over because I can sense them closing in. I have tried to be careful, but somehow, I feel they have an idea about what is going to happen. But can they stop me before I complete my work? I do not think so. Whatever becomes of me, you will be forever remembered…

  Chapter Forty

  I walked the entire mile-long stretch of Deadwood Central track, then retraced my steps along the route in the opposite direction. I can't say what I was looking for now that I had located the area where I thought any mischief might take place, but I felt maybe, just maybe, I might find some evidence along the way of the rails having been tampered with. I saw nothing amiss, however, and I went home to Oak Park, unsure of my plan for the next day. As it turned out, much of August fourth would be taken up by unexpected events.

  Before I left home the next morning, I reached into the kitchen drawer when Catherine left the room and pulled out our one and only flashlight, slipping it into my suit coat pocket. As I rode into the city on the Lake Street Elevated, I noticed giant black clouds stacking up in the skies far to the south. These were darker than any rain clouds I had ever seen. I walked into the pressroom at the fair a few minutes before nine to hear my phone ringing. As usual, it was Hal Murray on the city desk.

  "Snap, we've got a big one, a huge fire in the Standard Oil refinery down in Whiting. Whatever you've got working right now at the fair, postpone it, cancel it. We're throwing a whole team into this. I'm looking to you to find human interest angles, the kind of stuff you do best."

  "Okay, I gotcha. What's the plan?"

  "Doherty's getting ready to drive down there, and you're right on his way. Hold on."

  He bellowed across the local room to Jim Doherty, a longtime general assignment reporter. "Hey, Malek's going to ride down with you. Here, I'll put him on the line so you two can work out the arrangements. Then I want you out the door and headed south before I blink twice, got it?"

  "Okay, Snap," Doherty said into the receiver, "you've had yourself a long enough vacation at the train fair. It's time now for a real story. Where do I pick you up?"

  I told him the main entrance, at 23rd Street, and he said he'd be there in ten minutes, fifteen tops. I called Catherine's number at the Oak Park Library to let her know the score. She wasn't at her desk, so I gave the message to a co-worker and went to the front entrance where, thirteen minutes later, Doherty's rusty prewar gray Studebaker lurched to a stop, its brakes complaining loudly.

  "Let's burn some rubber," he yelled as I hopped in and we screeched off, heading south on Lake Shore Drive and then city streets, destination: Whiting, Indiana, which lay just across the state line from Chicago's East Side, as it is known to its residents.

  The black smoke towering ahead of us obliterated the sky. "Christ, it looks like the end of the world," Doherty said in awe. "I got no idea how close to this we'll be able to get."

  "Jim, I've got a feeling we're going to be told just how close we can get."

  "Yeah, and maybe even that's closer than we want to be. This nightmare apparently started right around dawn, from what I've been told. Murray's phone call roused me out of bed early. I wasn't supposed to start today until noon."

  "I assume we've already got somebody there, right?"

  "Thomis, and I think Gowran, too. And one or two photogs as well. Snap, it looks like this is going to be something that one day you can tell your grandchildren about."

  Chapter Forty-One

  As we approached Whiting on Indianapolis Boulevard, the skies grew ever darker until day turned to almost total night, although it was not yet noon. We felt the heat from the fires, turning an already hot day into a hellish one.

  "Looks like this will be about it," Doherty announced as we came to an intersection in a residential neighborhood where a police barricade had been put up. We parked on the street in front of an aged clapboard bungalow and got out, walking in the direction of the smoke and the now-visible flames, a few blocks away.

  "Sorry, but nobody's allowed any closer than this," a uniformed Whiting cop on foot told us. He looked to be about nineteen.

  "Reporters, Chicago Tribune," Doherty said as we both whipped out our press cards. The young patrolman seemed uncertain at first, then nodded soberly and waved us through.

  "All right, but be plenty careful, though," he said. "There are still a lot of explosions poppin' off all over the place."

  "We should split up now," Doherty told me. "I'm going to meet Thomis at the Salvation Army tent–it's supposed to be at the corner of 119th and Indianapolis Boulevard. You'll be able to get coffee and doughnuts there. I guess you'll be doing the feature stuff, right?"

  "That's the word I got from Murray, and when he barks, I listen."

  "Okay, let's see…it's 11:05 now," he said, looking at his wristwatch. "How about we meet back here at the car at 3:30?"

  "Fine by me," I told him, marching off down a street of bungalows in this resolutely working-class town, notebook in hand. I had looked at a street map of Whiting in Doherty's car as we drove down, so I had a pretty good sense of the small burg's layout.

  Sirens wailed from all directions, and the heat blistered the paint on the houses. A black Pontiac sedan rumbled down the street with four loudspeakers mounted on the roof blaring. "Attention, attention please, everyone keep away from all manhole covers…gasoline has entered into the sewer system…there's a danger of explosions in the sewers…attention…attention…"

  The closer I got to the big Standard refinery, the more I was reminded of the bombed-out streets of Berlin just after the surrender in the spring and summer of 1945, when I briefly served as a foreign correspondent for the Trib. I passed a frame bungalow with its screened front porch blown off and lying in splintered ruins in the street. A few doors down, another house had been lifted completely off of its concrete foundation and set back down at a crazy angle, with part of the basement now exposed and most of the windows shattered. God knows what shape the interior was in.

  In the next block, an automobile, a thirties-vintage brown De Soto, lay upside-down like a dead animal on the wooden rubble of what until a few hours ago had been a garage.

  I came upon a lanky man in a dirty white T-shirt and Levi's standing in the street gaping at another house, which had lost most of its porch and chunks of its shingled roofing. He looked at me blankly and shook his head. "Lord above," he said repeatedly.

  "Your place?"

&nbs
p; "Yeah, such as it is."

  I flashed my press card. "I'm a Chicago Tribune reporter. Is everybody okay?"

  "Come down from the big city, eh? Yeah, we're okay, only by the grace of God," he said in a quaver. "The wife and I were still in bed this morning when the big blast hit. My first thought was it must be an atomic bomb, like the ones we dropped on Japan to finish them off back in '45. I served on Okinawa at the time those babies hit. When I came home from the war, I thought I was through with explosions forever."

  "So, your family…?"

  "My wife and little one–she's just four–are okay, again by our Lord's grace. They're with my sister across the state line over in Homewood right now." He jerked his thumb in a westerly direction.

  "The National Guard came around and forced us to leave, said there's a chance the blasts aren't done yet, that they could go on for days, what with all the gasoline around. I snuck back to take a look at the place. Other than the porch, I think we'll be okay."

  If there aren't more explosions, I thought, taking down his name and address.

  Farther along, I met another man standing on the sidewalk, hands on hips and head down. He turned out to be a local cab driver, whose own bungalow had been somehow spared.

  "Tribune man, huh? Yeah, you might say I dodged a bullet, but my next-door neighbor Marty wasn't so lucky–a big chunk of steel pipe flying through the air ripped open one whole side of his house," the cabbie said, gesturing toward a yellow frame cottage whose dining room lay open to the air, its table and several chairs shattered by the pipe, which was imbedded in the far wall. "Fortunately, nobody got hit by the pipe."

  "Where were you when it all started?" I scribbled notes.

  "Just getting up to begin my shift behind the wheel. At first I thought it must have been an earthquake, and so did my wife. I can tell you the whole house rattled. Right then and there, we both thought we were done for."

  "Is your wife all right?"

  "Yeah. She's in a Red Cross shelter, pretty shaken but otherwise okay. The soldiers let me come back to see if the cab's drivable. It's got a flat tire and one cracked window, but at least the engine turns over. Not that I'm going to do any driving today, or anytime soon." His laugh had no mirth behind it.

  I passed three uniformed, armed National Guardsmen, probably on the lookout for looters. They gave me questioning looks until I showed my press card, finally putting it under the brim of my hat where it should have been in the first place.

  "Chicago Trib, huh? I would be real careful if I were you, sir," one of the soldiers said respectfully, taking off his helmet and wiping his grimy brow with an equally grimy handkerchief. "We were just talking to a manager from the oil company, who told us they're all real worried right now that a giant tank of naphtha, three million gallons' worth, could blow at any time. The flames keep getting closer to it."

  "Thanks for the warning," I replied, and no more than fifteen seconds later, an explosion shook the ground, sending a ball of flames rocketing skyward and staggering all four of us with a blast of heat that felt like a giant oven had suddenly been thrown open.

  "It's the naphtha tank!" One of the guardsmen pointed toward the fireball streaking across the dark sky like some spaceship in a Buck Rogers comic strip. "Oh Lord, I hope those oil workers left there when we did." Squaring their shoulders, he and his helmeted comrades turned and bravely jogged in the direction of the latest horror.

  I spent the next several hours walking the debris-littered streets of Whiting interviewing others who had stories to tell: the woman out at sunup hanging out laundry on a backyard clothesline when the first blast hit, its impact knocking her and all the clothes to the ground…the grocer on Indianapolis Boulevard who had gone into his store early to restock his shelves and was there when an explosion blew in both of his display windows…the Standard Oil maintenance man who loudly cursed his company's safety measures as he picked up chunks of wood and slices of asbestos roofing that had blown into his scruffy front yard from neighboring houses…and the eighty-six-year-old pensioner sitting on his front porch who refused to leave his house and told me he "always knew something like this would happen with all that damnable gasoline around."

  I wanted to ask the old fellow why in heaven's name he had chosen to stay in Whiting, what with all of that damnable gasoline he mentioned, but I figured given the current miserable situation here, the last thing he needed was some wise-guy Chicago reporter asking such a question.

  At 3:30, I waited next to Doherty's soot-covered car when he came up, face blackened by the heat and smoke. "You look like somebody who's ready to do a vaudeville act in blackface," he japed.

  "If you could see yourself, you wouldn't laugh," I fired back.

  "Oh… Geez, yeah," he said as he slid behind the wheel and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. "Well, they can't say we didn't see combat. You phoned anything in yet?"

  "Nope, never came anywhere near a pay phone that worked. I found one on a street corner, blown over and with a dead instrument inside."

  "Well, I managed to call in about ten graphs using a phone hookup at the Salvation Army. You want to stop someplace on the way back and phone the desk?"

  I said I did, and we pulled up to the curb at a Rexall drugstore along South Chicago Avenue back in the city, our smudged faces drawing stares from the customers sitting on stools at the soda fountain. I slid into a phone booth at the rear of the store, dropped in my nickel, dialed the paper, and talked first to Murray, then dictated a piece to the rewrite desk, which took almost a half hour.

  "I suppose you're ready to call it a day?" Doherty asked when we were back on the road heading northward.

  "No, you had better drop me off at the fair. I've got some unfinished business."

  "Well, I'll be damned, this man is a genuine hero," he said, taking both hands off the wheel briefly to clap. "After surviving the fiery furnaces of hell, he plunges right back into his beat. Are you angling for a bonus, Snap?"

  "That will be the day." I laughed. "Truth to tell, I'm not exactly in love with this fair posting, but maybe if I keep the higher-ups happy, they'll let me go back to playing police reporter again, along with all the big boys like yourself."

  "Well, not that my word means anything in the halls of power, but it's just where you belong, Snap, not writing fluff at some railroad exposition. Although I've got to say, the assignment there has ended up being a lot more interesting than you probably figured. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect you bumped all these people off yourself, just to remind the boys on the news desk that you haven't lost your touch as a crime reporter. Kill 'em, then write about 'em."

  "I'm not quite that desperate to get my old job back," I answered with a laugh.

  "Well, whatever happens, good luck," Doherty said, as he dropped me at the front gate of the fair and rumbled off.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  I got more stares as I showed my pass and entered the grounds, heading straight for the nearest men's room. With face scrubbed reasonably clean, I shuffled into the empty pressroom and dropped into my chair. I stretched my limbs, feeling whatever energy I had left was about to make an exit and that I was powerless to stop its exodus.

  I probably hadn't dozed off for more than a minute or two when my phone rang. Expecting it to be Murray on the city desk, I picked up the receiver and growled "Yes, yes, I'm back, I'm back. What do you need now?"

  "Oh Steve, I'm so glad I got you," Catherine said breathlessly. "I've been–"

  "Ouch, sorry for the rude greeting, my darling. I thought for sure somebody at the Tribune was bugging me again."

  "That's perfectly okay, I'm just glad to hear your voice. I've been calling you all afternoon, hoping you were all right. As I know you can imagine, the explosion and fire in Whiting is all over the news on the radio."

  "I'm not surprised. It was like nothing I've ever seen–or ever hope to see again."

  "You are all right, aren't you?"

  "Yeah, a little on the sooty s
ide, you might say, and my face feels like I fell asleep on my back on a tropical beach, but otherwise, all my moving parts seem to be in good working order."

  "Good. There's…another reason I'm calling, though."

  "Oh?"

  "I've been thinking over all the things you've said to me about the people and the goings-on at the fair, and about one name in particular. Anyway, I had a lull at the library early this afternoon, and something just jumped out at me while I was daydreaming. I don't know whether I ever told you this, but for no particular reason, I took a couple of years of German at the good old Oak Park and River Forest High School."

  "No, you never mentioned it, but what's the point here?"

  "Well, it may really be nothing, but I went back into the stacks at the library to see if my memory was correct."

  "Go on. You've got my attention."

  "It was correct–my memory, I mean," Catherine said. She then proceeded to lay it out for me. At first, the whole thing seemed preposterous and unlikely, but on the other hand…

  "That's…interesting," I said, digesting what she had told me.

  "Steve, you'll take it to the police, right?" Her voice had an edge.

  "I'll tell them, of course, but they may just brush it off. Hell, Fahey already thinks I've lost some of my marbles, the way I've been tossing off theories about the killings."

  "Well, this may just be a weird coincidence, but I thought I had better tell you."

  "I'm glad you did, and I am going to pass it along to Fergus."