A Death in Pilsen

Chapter 11

On Sunday night I drove back to Horvath’s, pulling into a parking place across the street at precisely seven-thirty. Marge Blazek, raincoat collar pulled up tight around her neck against the April gusts, was standing under a street light a few doors away.

“Over here,” she called as I stepped out of the coupe. “I thought it would be better if we weren’t seen in there together again.”

“It doesn’t bother me any,” I said, “but it’s your hangout, so it’s really your decision. Without you, though, how am I going to identify these guys, other than Rollins, whom you’ve already pointed out?”

“I’ve been in the bar already, checking it out for you. The only one there now is Ben Barnstable, who’s hard to miss. He’s wearing a brown leather jacket and Levi’s, and he’s sitting at the far left end of the bar. I stopped in to have a drink a little while ago and told everybody that I’d probably return a little later. If I do come back, I’ll give you a casual ‘hello,’ that’s all.”

“I don’t mean to drive you away from your favorite hangout just because I’m muddling around in there,” I told her.

“No, no, it’s okay. I probably spend too much time in the joint anyway. Besides, I don’t want that gang to think I’m some sort of a snitch.”

“I get you. All right, maybe I’ll see you later tonight, maybe I won’t,” I said over my shoulder as I headed across the street to Horvath’s.

The room was fairly crowded and even smokier than on my earlier visit. Barnstable was indeed hard to miss, even from behind. He was nearly half a head taller than anyone else sitting at the bar, and a quick glance told me he must be at least twenty or thirty pounds heavier than in his days as a light heavyweight. I sauntered over to an open, stool-less spot at his left and nodded my greetings to the bartender. “Evening, Maury. I’ll have a Schlitz on draught.”

He eyed me warily but said nothing, then drew the beer and placed it on a limp coaster in front of me.

“Windy night, huh?” I said to Barnstable, who was nursing a highball.

“Sure is, mate. Like to blow me right over, big as I am.”

“Name’s Steve Malek,” I told him, holding out a paw.

“Howdy. Ben Barnstable,” he drawled, shaking hands with a strong grip.

I tried to look surprised. “Really? Hey, that would be ‘Big Ben’ Barnstable?”

“That’s me all right,” he said, his square-jawed, freckled face lighting up with a lopsided ‘aw-shucks’ grin worthy of Jimmy Stewart. He must have been a pretty good boxer, because his face was essentially unmarked — no cauliflower ears like so many former boxers sport, one thin scar above his left eyebrow, and a nose that had been slightly displaced to the right.

“Hey, this is really something. I was in the crowd up at the Marigold Gardens back in ’39, I think it was, when you went ten rounds with Kid McCoy. That was one helluva bout. You knocked him down four times, if I remember right.”

“You sure do remember right,” he nodded, the grin even wider. “What you might not recall is that he knocked me down three times, himself. That boy could punch. He had a left that could rearrange your face.”

“I knew that he’d decked you. But you won on a split decision, if I remember it right, didn’t you?”

“Darn right. The referee, Tommy Carstairs it was, gave me the edge by a pretty good margin. The two judges each had it closer, but one of ’em gave me the nod. That was prob’ly the best fight of my career.

“That and the time I went six rounds against Jimmy Braddock, although I took a pounding in that one. I was lucky the Mick didn’t knock me out. He had me on the ropes in the fourth and again in the fifth, although I gave him somethin’ to remember in the sixth, a right cross that made his eyes roll right up outta sight. Thought I had him knocked out then, but damn, he was tough. His knees buckled when I gave him that right, but the Mick never went down.”

“Back to your fight with McCoy. He even had a shot at the light-heavy crown once, didn’t he?”

“Right you are... Malek, isn’t it? He got knocked out by Gus Lesnevich in a title bout a few years ago now. ’Course, that’s no disgrace. Gus has knocked out lots of people. I wouldn’ta wanted to face him, although I never got the chance.”

“I used to walk to the Marigold up there at Grace and Halsted when I lived on Clark Street. I was there when the young Joe Louis KOed Buck Everett back in ’34 or so. I also saw Johnny Bratton and Lee Savold knock people around in that ring.”

“Darn, those are great names, and the Marigold’s a great place,” Barnstable agreed. “I still go up there to watch the bouts. Had my first Chicago fight there, after coming up here from Tennessee. God, that seems like a long time ago. Hey, you really know your boxing, don’tcha?” he said approvingly.

I shrugged and lit a Lucky. “Guess I got hooked after watching that big Dempsey-Tunney fight at Soldier Field back in the Twenties.”

“Damn, how I wished I’d seen that one,” Barnstable said in an awed tone. “Most famous fight ever. I was still back in Memphis then, fighting in little clubs for ten- and twenty-buck purses. I got twenty-five for a bout once and thought I was the luckiest guy in the whole state.”

“You could probably write a book about your boxing career,” I observed.

He laughed heartily. “Shoot, I can hardly even write at all, other than my name. But I been lucky. I seen me a lot of interesting places, all ’cause of the boxing. Been to Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Miami, Los Angeles, Detroit — even fought on the under card at the Garden in New York once, before a welterweight title bout in ’35 where Barney Ross beat Jimmy McLarnin. I won my bout that night, then went up into the stands, and watched the main event. I ’specially remember it because Jack Dempsey himself was the referee. How ’bout that, huh? Dempsey himself.”

“Great stories. What’re you doing nowadays, Ben?”

Barnstable leaned a meaty arm on the bar. “I help out in a gym up on Madison near Central. Work a lot with the young guys comin’ up — get ’em into shape for the Golden Gloves matches or maybe to help start their pro careers. There’s a lotta good young boxers around this town. One of our local boys just knocked out the fifth-ranked lightweight in Cleveland last week. He’s got a great future.”

“Sounds like you’re doing what you like to do.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I do love bein’ around that gym. The workouts, the punching bag, the three-rounders. Kenny Waters, the guy what owns the place, pays me a decent wage. Shoot, I ain’t really fit for much other kinds of work.”

“Well, you’re helping your own sport, and I’d say that’s pretty important. Say, Ben, can I talk to you about something else?”

“Sure, I guess. What’s on your mind?”

“Edwina Malek.”

His open, guileless face darkened. “Eddie. Oh, Eddie. Terrible.”

“Yes, it was. She was married to my cousin Charlie.”

Barnstable jerked upright and turned to me, squinting. “The guy what killed her?”

“That has yet to be proven,” I replied.

“From what I been hearing, the cops think it was him,” he stated.

“That’s what I understand, but I don’t believe it, and not just because he’s my cousin. He’s the farthest thing from violent.”

The former boxer contemplated his drink. “She was a great gal,” he said in a husky voice. “I liked her... I liked her a real lot.”

“I understand she was very popular with everybody in here. Can I buy you a drink?”

He nodded, expressionless. I signaled Maury and pointed to the nearly empty highball glass. After the new drink was delivered, I suggested to Barnstable that we go to a booth and talk about Edwina. He didn’t seem enthused by the idea, but he got up silently and followed me to the other side of the room.

“I didn’t really know her all that well,” I told him when we were seated. “My wife and I had them over to our place in Oak Park for dinner a couple of times, and that was really it. I’d like to learn more about what she was like.”

Barnstable looked like he was going to start crying, but he controlled himself. “I think maybe... maybe I loved her,” he muttered.

“You two spend much time together?”

He blushed. “That’s the funny part. We never had us what you’d call a real date or anything like that. Just about everything was in here.” He made a sweeping gesture, encompassing the room. “A lot of the time, it wasn’t just Eddie and me talking. It was a whole bunch of us with her.”

“What made her so special to you?”

He ran a thick hand through his mop of dense black hair flecked with gray. “She made me feel like I was special. Always asking me about my life and my boxing and everything. I was married once, and my wife was never like that, never. She married me ’cause it looked like I was goin’ places back in them days. She figured she’d be the wife of a champ sometime, but then when things didn’t go so well for me in the ring, she was gone. Just up and left one day. Eddie, now, she was different.”

“She was also married.”

Barnstable nodded glumly. “Yeah.”

“Did she talk much about her husband?”

He screwed up his face. “Hey, I don’t wanna go and say bad things about your cousin.”

“It wouldn’t be you saying them, Ben. They would be Edwina’s words. Besides, I have at least some idea of what their relationship was like.”

He still looked uncomfortable. “Well, I do know she was mad because he was always workin’, always overtime, every night it seemed. She wanted to go places, like movies, dancing, restaurants, stuff like that. She was full of life, full of fun, and she loved to sing.”

“Did you ever hear her talk about getting a divorce?”

“Uh, sorta. She said life over here — in the U.S., I mean — wasn’t quite how she thought it was gonna be.”

“Meaning it was not as much fun?”

“Partly, I think. From what she told me a few times, it seemed like she had thought maybe she was gonna be living a lot better than she really was, you know?”

“Yeah. I think that a lot of the war brides feel just the same way, Ben. When you’re away from this country, like I was for awhile right at the end of the war, you realize that a lot of people in Europe believe that we’re all millionaires, all living the kinds of lives they associate with royalty.”

Barnstable chewed on his lower lip. “It was funny. Sometimes she’d be teasing, joking, telling all sorts of funny stories about England, getting everybody in here to laugh and even sing songs along with her, like that ‘Berkeley Square.’ Other times, she’d walk in all sad and blue, not wanting to hardly talk to anyone at all.”

“Sounds like she might have been manic-depressive.”

“I wouldn’t know nothin’ about that, but it seemed like she could be two different people sometimes.”

“But you liked her a lot anyway?”

He nodded vigorously. “Heck, yes. I woulda done just about anything for Eddie. If she hadn’t been married, I’d have asked her to go out with me, on a real date. Maybe to the movies or a restaurant. I woulda been proud to be seen with her.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s say that my cousin Charlie was not her killer. Who do you think might have done it?”

He sat for a half-minute, resting his chin on his hands. “I just wouldn’t know that. Not at all. Sorry.”

“You indicated she was very popular in here. I assume that means several of the guys who hang around Horvath’s liked her, right?”

“Uh-huh. It was sort of a competition as to who would sit next to her at the bar.”

“Did you usually win that competition?”

“No, not always.”

“You could have pushed everybody else aside.”

“Nah. I’m not like that. Since I quit the ring, and that’s, let’s see... ’bout seven, eight years ago, I’ve never been in a fight, never used my fists. And I’m never gonna.”

“That speaks well for you, Ben. Who else liked to sit with Edwina?”

He laughed dryly. “Better question is, who didn’t? Johnny Sulski usually beat everybody else to it. Made sure he got here early, and he saved Eddie a stool right next to him.”

“Didn’t that piss you — and the other guys — off?”

“Me, I’m pretty easygoing, like I said before. But I think Len Rollins and Karl Voyczek, they got pretty hot sometimes about the way Johnny was trying to keep her to himself.”

“Both of them liked Edwina a lot, too?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. They was sweet on her. Of course, so was Johnny.”

“What about one of those three as the murder candidate, Ben?”

He shook his head vigorously. “Nah, they all liked her too much to ever hurt her.”

“Let’s say one of them went to her apartment and tried to make a pass at her. Let’s also say she didn’t like that. She could have gotten a knife from a kitchen drawer and then wrestled around with him, whoever it was, and the knife went into her chest — an accident, of course. What do you think, Ben?”

“I don’t think none of these guys woulda made a pass at her like that,” Barnstable said, but he sounded uncertain.

“Anybody else who came in here show a lot of interest in Edwina?”

“Oh, maybe a few. She was easy to like, at least when she was in a playful mood. But I’d say it was mainly the four of us who we’ve been talking about.”

“How ’bout anybody else who might have wandered in? Somebody who wasn’t a regular?”

“I seen that a few times, and Eddie usually wasn’t so friendly with them as she was with us. In fact... there was some guy who came in here a few weeks back, I remember now. He tried to make time with her, but she threw cold water on him. Not really, but you know what I mean. She did let him buy her a drink, though. I was a couple of stools away and could hear them.

“She started complaining about her husband — your cousin — and how he was never around, always at work. And just before the guy left, she said she’d like to ‘kill the bloody bastard.’ I remember them words exactly.” He shook his head and looked down.

“Did she mean the guy at the bar?”

“No, not him!” Barnstable said as though I were dense. “She meant her husband. After she was killed, I remember thinking maybe he killed her because he was afraid she was gonna kill him. ’Cept that I can’t hardly imagine Eddie ever killin’ nobody.”

“Hmm, interesting. Ben, think back to last Wednesday night, around 6:30 or 7:00, which was when Edwina was stabbed. Were any of those three — Sulski, Rollins, Voyczek — in here at the time?” I purposely avoided asking Barnstable about himself, at least for the moment, figuring it might come out in the conversation. It did.

“I couldn’t tell you that, ’cause I wasn’t here myself until later in the evening.”

“Probably working late at the gym, eh?”

“No, I been puttin’ on weight these last few years,” he said, patting his outsized stomach, “so I been doin’ a lot of fast walking after work, several miles maybe two, maybe three times a week. Wednesday was one of them nights.”

“I would have thought that you’d get plenty of exercise at the gym.”

“Yeah, you’d think so,” he said, seemingly unaware that he was being questioned, “but in there I spend all my time working with the young boxers, so I’m not doin’ anything to take care of this.” He rubbed his tummy again. “Say, here I been talkin’ away all about myself. I’m good at that.” He laughed at himself. “I never even asked what you do.”

“I do some investigating.”

His face registered modest surprise. “Really? You mean like a cop?”

“Sort of,” I said. “In this situation, though, it’s a family thing rather than work.”

“Well, I wish I coulda helped you, and I sure hope for your sake it ain’t your cousin what done it. But if he did, he’ll have to pay, of course.”

I nodded and said goodbye, heading for the door. My plan was to return the next night and meet one or more of Edwina’s other ‘friends.’ But plans have a way of getting altered.