A Death in Pilsen

Chapter 14

The first thing I did in the pressroom at Headquarters Tuesday morning was to call Marge Blazek at the dress shop.

“I thought I would hear from you yesterday,” she said, sounding puzzled.

“You would have, except that I got called away to cover that train collision out in Naperville.”

“Oh yes, they were talking about the wreck at Horvath’s last night, and I heard more about it on the radio this morning. So many people killed.”

“Yeah, it was truly dreadful. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before, or ever want to see again.”

“Do you think that they suffered a lot — the ones who died?”

“Most of them probably didn’t feel much, it all happened so quickly,” I said, if only to make both of us feel better.

“Well, that’s good anyway. Trains have always sort of scared me. Are you coming to Horvath’s tonight?”

“Yes. You’ll be there?”

“Like before, I’ll wait across the street and let you know which ones are inside.”

“Is it really necessary to go through this elaborate charade?”

“These are... my friends. At least all but one of them is. And I don’t want them to know I’m being — I don’t know, disloyal, I suppose.”

“But after all, to do otherwise would be disloyal to Edwina and her memory, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, but I just don’t want to be in there when you’re questioning these guys. Hey, I never asked you how it went with Ben Barnstable.”

“Okay. He seems like a good guy, very open. You don’t have to be with him very long to see that he had it bad for Edwina.”

“I know. They all did, every one of them. And Ben is an especially nice guy.”

We set seven-thirty once again as the time to meet. It was a few minutes before that when I pulled the coupe up to the curb across the street from Horvath’s. Like before, Marge was waiting under the streetlight, her head wrapped in a blue babushka. I felt like I was an actor in a Grade B espionage film. All we needed was fog swirling around the streetlight and church bells tolling the hour.

“Aren’t the folks in there getting suspicious of the way you come in for a little while and then duck out for the rest of the evening?” I asked.

“Not really. Like any bar, people are always coming and going. Nobody pays much attention to who’s there and who isn’t at any given time.”

“Who’s in there tonight?”

“Ben Barnstable again, but you’ve already talked to him. And Karl Voyczek.”

“The one who works over at Western Electric and is always grumbling about something or other, right?”

“That’s one way to describe him,” she said with a tight smile. “He’s there right now, sitting at the bar by himself as usual. He’s husky, has dark hair cut short, and is wearing a black leather jacket. I talked to him a few minutes ago, and he was in his usual mood. Griping about the weather just as I left.”

“Okay, I think I’ll do some griping of my own,” I said. I crossed the street and entered a joint that was becoming all too familiar to me. Two or three of the denizens turned as I walked in, and Ben Barnstable grinned, nodding his recognition. Voyczek was hunched over the bar, an empty stool on either side of him. Clearly, he was not the most popular joe in the place.

“Mind if I sit here, or are you saving it for someone?” I asked him.

He threw a scowl in my direction. “Like they say, it’s a free country,” he muttered. “Suit yourself.”

“And a damned messed up country, too,” I countered in my crabbiest tone, signaling Maury and ordering a Schlitz on tap. “Government’s all screwed up. And they’re treating the returning servicemen like dirt, if you ask me.”

Voyczek shot me a brief glance but said nothing, turning back to his own beer, Blue Ribbon from a bottle.

I went on. “Then there’s Truman, who’s supposed to be such a great friend of labor. Hah, that’s a joke! If he’s such a big buddy of the workingman, why are there so many strikes right now? Steel, meatpacking, the glass industry, and so forth. Everywhere you look. And the miners figure to be next, the way that bushy eyebrowed union boss of theirs, John L. Lewis, is acting. Why isn’t the White House standing up for the unions and helping them get what they’re asking?” I was on a roll.

“These are the same people who worked their fannies off in the plants and mills during the war so that our soldiers and sailors and marines could have what they needed to beat the Japs and the Krauts. And this is the thanks they get from their government.

“You know what our President said the other day? Claimed the big unions have too much power.” (I neglected to mention that, in the same quote, Truman said that big business had too much power as well.) “Yeah, it’s a messed up country right now,” I snarled, taking a healthy swig of Schlitz and then lighting a Lucky.

“Damn right,” Voyczek said, turning back toward me and nodding vigorously. He had a broad, high-cheeked Slavic face and squinty eyes with pupils that seemed as black as his hair. He looked more like a boxer than Ben Barnstable did. I put him at about forty, which would make him three years younger than me.

“You seem like somebody who knows what I’m talking about,” I said with an approving nod.

“I know what it’s like to be screwed around with,” he growled. “I was an assistant foreman for awhile, but the brass took that away from me, because I fought for the guys on the line. They didn’t like that, the bastards.”

“Where do you work?”

“Western Electric. Hawthorne Works. Cicero.”

“That’s one big plant.”

“Yeah. Too damn big, if you ask me. You can get lost in the place, in more ways than one.”

“Ever thought about going someplace else?”

Voyczek drank beer and stared at the liquor bottles lining the mirrored back bar. “Christ, I’d have to start over then. Besides, with all those veterans coming back now, the market is tight, really tight.”

“Well, it could be worse. You could be one of those poor guys coming back from the war without a job — or a home. I read that there’s thousands of them getting mustered out who have no place to live in this town. There’s even been talk of hauling old streetcars out of the scrap yard and turning them into homes for the GIs. Imagine having to live in a rusty old red rattler. That’s a real crime.”

He shook his head. “Pathetic.”

“I agree. I suppose I should introduce myself. Steve Malek.”

“Karl Voyczek. Say, I never seen you around here before, have I?”

“I been in a few times, must have been nights you were someplace else. Maury, how about a couple more for us?” I yelled down the bar. If looks could kill, the bartender’s glare would have struck me stone dead on the spot, but he managed to contain himself and placed our respective brands in front of us. “This one’s on me,” I said.

Voyczek started to object. “Hey, there’s no need to do—”

I waved his objection aside. “Happy to buy one for a fellow workingman. You were as important to the war effort as our boys in Europe and the Pacific.”

He clearly was not the talkative type, but my comment all but demanded a question from him. It came.

“What do you do for a living?” he asked.

“I’m sort of like an insurance investigator.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Which company?”

“Freelance.”

“So you try to keep people from collecting what they’re entitled to, huh?”

“Not really. I’d say that at least half the time, the policyholders get exactly what they asked for,” I improvised.

He grunted, which I took to be agreement. It was time for me to shift gears.

“Did you know that murdered woman, the one that used to come in here?”

“Why are you askin’? Because of some life insurance policy on her?”

“No, not at all. My interest here is entirely different. So, you knew her?”

Voyczek took a deep breath, letting the air out slowly. “Yeah. I did.”

“So did I. In fact, we were actually related. She was my first cousin’s wife.”

“That son of a bitch? No shit. Well, I guess he’ll go to the chair now, huh?”

“That’s assuming he did it,” I said quietly.

“Who the hell else would’a done it?” he demanded as he stuck out his chin and turned to face me.

“Good question. That’s exactly what I’ve been wondering for the last several days, because my cousin is the last guy in the world who would kill anyone. He’s so passive he walks around ants on the sidewalk rather than step on them.”

Voyczek seemed unimpressed. “It’s those shy, quiet ones you gotta watch,” he spat. “They keep stuff bottled up, and then they explode. Why anybody would want to hurt Eddie beats the hell out of me.”

“Sounds like you knew her pretty well.”

He hunched his shoulders, then let them drop. “’Bout as much as anybody in here. We all liked her. She was lots of fun, and a great singer.”

“Did she ever talk about her husband?”

“Once in awhile,” he said, his tone guarded.

“I got the impression myself that they were having some problems.”

“Could be. That wasn’t none of my business.”

“Of course not. I do know the guy was working a lot of overtime.”

“Leaving her alone in an empty flat every night,” Voyczek remarked. “No wonder she came in here so often. The radio is only so much company.”

“Yeah. Empty homes can be damned lonely. I know, I’ve had that experience. How about you?”

“Mine might as well be empty,” he said without feeling, making circles on the bar with a fingertip.

“Sorry to hear that.”

Another shrug. “My problem, nobody else’s. I’ll keep living with it. Have for years.”

“As my old Czech grandmother used to say, ‘nobody ever promised that life was going to be a stroll in the park with violins playing.’”

That brought the trace of a smile from Voyczek. “And my old Czech grandmother, who we lived with for years over on Sacramento when I was growing up, used to get all dramatic and say ‘Well, that’s it; we’re all going to the poor house’ whenever the mailman delivered a bill. Yet when she died, we found out she had over thirty grand stashed in about six different accounts in the building and loans along Cermak Road. Nobody in the family ever figured out where she got it all, but nobody in the family objected when they got a piece of it, either.”

“Maybe she robbed banks on the side.”

“Or building and loans along Cermak Road,” he responded, again with the hint of a grin.

“I’ve got a question,” I said. “Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that my cousin Charlie did not kill his wife. Do you have any idea who might have?”

“Why ask me? She was related to you.”

“That’s true, at least by marriage, but I really didn’t know her very well, not nearly as well as all of you in here. I only saw her a couple of times, when my wife and I had them over for dinner.”

He rubbed his chin with a calloused hand. “’Fraid I got no idea. Sounds like you’re desperate to find somebody that the law can finger.”

“Maybe so,” I conceded. “All I know is that Charlie Malek is no killer.”

“Seems from what I’ve read and heard, the cops think he is.”

“Yeah, I’ve talked to a few cops about it myself. I know ’em from my line of work with the insurance companies.”

“What do they tell you?”

“That they think maybe they’ve got their man. But there’s a lot of heat on them right now, what with the Degnan murder and all.”

He made a face. “They trying to pin that one on your cousin, too?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Hey, you were probably in here last Wednesday night, the night Edwina was killed. See anything that seemed — I don’t know — different? Or anybody who was acting funny?”

Voyczek screwed up his square face in thought. “Wednesday, let’s see... Oh yeah, that was the night I had to mend a leak in the water heater in the basement of our six-flat. I’m the only guy in the building that knows how to fix anything. The landlord, he’s worthless. Anything tougher than changing light bulbs, and he’s out of his depth.”

“So you didn’t stop by here at all that night?”

“Nope. The damned water heater took me until close to eleven-thirty to fix. By then, I was too damned beat to feel like going any place.”

“Can somebody vouch for you all that time?”

“I don’t — hey, what the hell is that supposed to mean?” he snapped, lifting off his stool.

“Just a question.”

“Well, I don’t like the question, Malek. Who do you think you are, accusing me of...” He didn’t finish the sentence, but he did keep glowering at me, his fists clenched on the bar.

I held up a palm. “Hey, I didn’t accuse you of anything, but you might want to think about whether anybody saw you that night, particularly in the early part of the evening, say around six to seven-thirty or so. The police may very well start rethinking Edwina’s murder.”

“Damn you! You’re willing to do anything to save your pathetic cousin’s ass, aren’t you? Eddie thought he was...”

“Was what?”

The increasing heat of our dialogue caused heads to turn in our direction. “Everything all right here?” Maury asked.

“Fine, just fine. We’re having ourselves a little discussion,” I told him.

“Well, we have always prided ourselves on running a peaceful, friendly establishment, Mister Malek,” the bartender and part owner said pointedly. “And we would all like it to stay that way.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” I responded as the bartender pivoted, answering a bellow for bourbon from the far end of the bar.

“Now, what were you saying about Edwina?” I quietly asked Voyczek.

“Nothin’. Forget it.”

“She didn’t much like her husband, did she?”

“Look, Malek, I said all that I’m going to say to you.”

“No, you haven’t. I’m not done yet. I think you were in love with Edwina.”

He generated a new glower in my direction. “That’s really none of your damn business.”

“I suppose not. But finding who killed Edwina — now that I happen to have made my business. And if you were passionate about her, who’s to say that passion didn’t take a wrong turn last Wednesday night?”

Voyczek scowled. “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this crap.”

“No, and since you were here first, I’ll go and leave you in peace. However, you might keep thinking about what I said. You had better find witnesses who can swear that you were somewhere on Wednesday night other than the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Malek. Good night.”