A Death in Pilsen

Chapter 15

After the usual spirited chatter in the pressroom to kick off Wednesday morning, I made my way, also as usual, down one flight to the office of Detective Chief Fergus Fahey. “And how are you this fine morning, Mr. Malek?” Elsie Dugo Cascio bubbled as I strode into her minuscule anteroom.

“Just what gives you the right to be so cheerful so early in the day?” I muttered with mock grumpiness.

“Oh dear, did we have ourselves a long night?” she said, putting on her most sympathetic face. “And in answer to your question, I’m always cheerful when I see you. You brighten my little corner of the world just by showing up every day.”

“You take all the fun out of being a grouch,” I replied, trying without success to stifle a smile.

“That’s what I’m here for — to take the grouchiness out of grouches.”

“Well, you’ve got your hands full with the man in there,” I said, gesturing to the closed door. “He’s a prime candidate for the Grouches’ Hall of Fame.”

“Speaking of the man in there, he said you were to just go right in when you got here.”

“Without even knocking?”

“Without even knocking.”

“I’ll be damned. Is the fine old gentleman getting mellow in his twilight years?”

“Don’t let him hear the words ‘twilight years’,” she said. “He’s sensitive enough about his age as it is.”

“As well he should be. But those words shall not pass my lips again,” I told her as I opened the door to Fahey’s cluttered office.

“Reporting on time,” I told him, dropping into one of his guest chairs.

“Morning, Snap,” he said, looking up from an official-looking sheet he was holding. “I’ve got some good news for you, of a sort.”

“What sort?” I asked as we both lit up Luckies from the pack I had tossed onto his blotter. Just then, Elsie entered with a steaming mug of coffee, which she set down on the corner of the desk in front of me. Fahey waited until she left and had closed the door behind her.

“Your cousin has been cleared of the Degnan murder,” he said. “It has been substantiated that he was at work during the time when she was abducted.”

“Well, I guess that’s something,” I remarked, “although as far as I’m concerned, the Degnan thing was never in question as far as Charlie was concerned.”

“Right now, you ought to be happy with small favors,” Fahey observed.

“Maybe. Fergus, as I think I mentioned earlier, I’ve been visiting that bar in Pilsen, Horvath’s by name, where Edwina Malek spent a lot of evenings while her husband was working overtime for the gas company. As I also mentioned to you before, it seems there were a lot of guys there interested in her, and it also seems from what I’ve been able to ascertain that she didn’t exactly discourage them.”

“Your point being?”

“My point being that she apparently was something of a tease, and that she may well have been leading one or more of these guys on. One of them might just have gotten the idea that she was easy and tried something at their apartment while Charlie was out earning time-and-a-half. She held this guy off and maybe ran to the kitchen to get a knife. They fought with it and...” I turned a palm up.

Fahey ground out the cigarette in his ashtray. “Ever thought of writing detective fiction, Snap?” he asked. “That is one of the most convoluted, improbable scenarios that I’ve ever heard. You’re really, really reaching now.”

“Hey, I don’t think that’s such a reach.”

“And just how do you propose to get one of these lounge lizards to confess?” he snorted.

“I haven’t figured that out,” I conceded. “Besides, I’ve only talked to two of the four gents who supposedly had the hots for Edwina.”

“Snap, the very fact that the dead woman was apparently a flirt who led guys on actually works against your cousin’s case. What better incentive to get violent with a wife than to learn she’s cheating on you — or at least acting as if she’s cheating? Besides, you know damn well I don’t like the idea of your conducting your own investigation.”

“Hey, please feel free to send some of your men to Horvath’s to start really questioning these guys. I can supply their names. Shit, why don’t you send that hotshot dick of yours, Jack Prentiss, over there to hammer away at them? He’s tough as nails, right? Maybe he can pry something out of one of them. I know somebody from the department was in there right after the murder, but whoever it was — maybe Prentiss himself — just asked a few questions and left. That’s hardly what I’d term a thorough investigation.”

“Actually, that was Prentiss,” Fahey fired back. “The reason he went in there was because a neighbor suggested it was something of a hangout for the dead woman. He found out from the bartender that she was a regular — and the most popular person in the joint to boot.”

“So after this so-called in-depth interview with the barkeep, he left satisfied that Charlie Malek must have been the one to kill this personable, charming woman.”

“Ease off, Snap. Hellfire, you’ve already done your cousin one good turn by hiring the best damn defense lawyer in town for him. Let McCafferty deal with this. That’s his business, for God’s sake.”

“Even with McCafferty in Charlie’s corner, it’s a crap shoot, Fergus. It’s too chancy.”

Fahey leaned back and took a drag on his cigarette. “So, what are you going to do next?”

“I’ve identified four of the Horvath habitués who were particularly fond, shall we say, of Edwina Malek. I’ve already talked to two of them, and I plan to visit with the other two, one at a time.”

“I don’t like it.”

“As I said, you’re welcome to send somebody else over there, even Prentiss again, although I’m going to talk to these others myself anyway.”

“Listen, with the murders of the Degnan girl and those two women, my manpower is already stretched so thin that I’ve got dicks working double shifts.”

“So what choice do I have, if I want to get my cousin out of this goddamn mess he’s in? Fergus, you really think he’s guilty, don’t you?”

The grizzled copper fixed his light blue eyes on me.

“Have you ever known me to work against the best interests of the department, or the public?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Have you ever known me to bullshit you?”

“No, again.”

“Well, I’m not about to start now. To answer your question... yes, from everything I’ve read in the reports and heard, I believe that your cousin killed his wife. But that’s not for me — or you — to decide, as you know very well. That’s why we’ve got courts. Now, I can’t stop you from going out and conducting your own rogue investigation, although I strongly advise against it.

“For some strange reason that I’ve never bothered analyzing, I like you, Snap. I haven’t said that to very many other newspapermen over the years — none, that I can recall. But you’ve grown on me like a barnacle on the hull of a ship. And there’s enough trouble in your family now without you going out and mixing it up with a bunch in some second-rate Pilsen saloon. I’ve seen enough of bar fights to know how tough some of these guys can be — I had to break up a few of those set-tos in my days on the street. I took a few punches, but I gave as good as I got.” He leaned back and put his arms behind his head, a signal that he was about to reminisce.

“I remember once, my partner Mulroy and I had to put down a brawl in a gin mill in Englewood, on Halsted a few blocks south of 63rd, it was. I can still remember it like yesterday — place called Herlihy’s.

“This miserable excuse for a saloon was always giving the precinct headaches — slugfests two, three nights a week. The lieutenant was fed up to here. Well, this one time, we decided we’d had enough. We walked in there in the middle of a melee and Mulroy, he was a big, burly former wrestler, picked up one of the scrappers over his head and threw him through the air against the back bar.

“At least ten bottles, some of them the best whiskey in the place, ended up broken, as well as the big plate glass mirror behind them. And the guy who got tossed, a mean little bastard, was pretty well cut up and got himself a broken arm out of it. The barkeep went wild, said that we were destroying his establishment.”

“Which you were, of course.”

Fahey allowed himself a slight smile. “Not really. We dared him to make a stink about it, telling him that if he tried to claim we’d done it, we’d just say that’s the way we found the place when we walked in. We knew damn well that the lieutenant would back us all the way. The upshot was that we never had to go back in there to break up another fight. It became a nice, peaceful corner bar after that.”

“That must have been way back when, in the dark ages before Prohibition,” I said with a grin.

“Okay, so I’m no spring chicken. Yep, that was just before the Volstead Act kicked in, back in ’19, but bar life isn’t all that different today. There’s always somebody in a dive who’s spoiling for a fight. We still see it all the time.”

“But in all the years I hung out at Kilkenny’s up on North Clark, I never once saw so much as a scuffle. Well, except for the time back in ’38 when Dizzy Dean bailed me out of a tight spot by bouncing a fastball off the noggins of a couple of hoods. Don’t believe I ever told you about that episode.”

“No, as a matter of fact you didn’t. But you’re making my very point for me,” Fahey said. “Wherever you go, trouble has a way of following close behind. You could walk into the most peaceful bar in the whole damn state, and before long there’d be a brawl or, at the very least, a shoving match.”

“But Fergus, I am the most peace-loving of men,” I told him, holding up my hands in innocence.

“Right, and I am just a humble parish priest, ministering to my flock. Snap, far be it from me to suggest you’re a troublemaker by nature, but you have to admit that you seem to find ways to get yourself into scrapes.”

“All in the line of duty and in the pursuit of the forces of evil,” I said in my best radio-announcer voice.

“Or in the pursuit of scoops,” the chief remarked dryly.

“Normally, I would agree with you on that point, Fergus, but that’s not what’s driving me this time around, as I think you know.”

“Yeah, blood relations count for a lot, as I’m aware. You just have to be careful that they don’t blind you to realities.”

“If I didn’t think Charlie was clean on this, I wouldn’t be making such a big deal out of it, Fergus. You know me well enough to realize that.”

“I just don’t know what else to tell you,” Fahey said, throwing his hands up in a gesture of futility. “You’re going to do whatever you want to anyway. All I can say is, for God’s sake be careful, will you?”

“Fergus, I promise to proceed with all due caution. I’ve grown increasingly fond of myself over the years, and I would like to hang around for a few more decades.”

“Well, that’s more time than I’ll be allotted,” the chief grumbled, putting his head down and leafing through a stack of reports as the signal that I had been dismissed.

“Wait a minute,” I said as I started to get up. “There’s something you can do that won’t put much of a strain on your overburdened staff.”

“Yeah?” He looked at me, dubious.

“I’ll give you the names of these four guys from the bar, and you can get somebody in Records to run a check on them. That way, we’ll at least know something more about their backgrounds. Might bring some interesting stuff to light.”

“Sounds to me like a fishing expedition,” Fahey snorted.

“As an old fisherman, you know that you can’t catch anything without dropping your line into the water,” I replied.

“Okay, Snap, I’ll humor you on this one,” he said, “but only because we go back a long way.”

“That we do,” I agreed, writing down the names of the four on a sheet from my notebook. I tore it out and handed it to Fergus.

He took it from me and went back to studying the top report on his stack of paperwork.

I had not been back at my desk in the pressroom for more than five minutes when I got a call from Liam McCafferty.

“Mr. Malek, I believe that I have some felicitous news for you,” he said in the melodic brogue that had mesmerized so many juries through the years. “It pleases me to tell you that your cousin is no longer under suspicion regarding the tragic murder of Suzanne Degnan.”

“Thanks for the call. In fact, I just heard the same news myself here.”

“Ah! You would, of course, given the place where you toil. Well, it was a ridiculous suspicion in the first place. Totally ridiculous, but as we both know, the police are under a great strain over that poor girl’s killing. In any event, this is one less particular we need to concern ourselves about at this time.”

“Well and good, and I thank you for the call. I’m more interested, however, in your thoughts about the murder that he is charged with, counselor.”

“As am I, obviously. I have nothing new and, in fact, I was telephoning you to see if you had discovered anything in your own investigations.”

“Not really. I have talked to two of the four men who regularly frequent Horvath’s and who were known to have had more than a passing interest in the late Mrs. Malek. You’ll be interested to learn that neither one has an alibi for the period when she was killed. I still plan on seeing the other two in the next few days, with luck. Have you been to see Charlie again?”

“No. For the moment, I believe I am in possession of all the information that he is able to supply me. Or, I should say, that he deems able to supply me.”

“I want an honest answer: Assuming the case were to be tried today, what do you think Charlie’s chances would be?”

A pause followed, then McCafferty cleared his throat. “A great deal would depend upon the composition of the jury,” he intoned somberly.

“But you have a great deal of influence on that composition, right, counselor?”

“I do what I can, given my modest talents.”

“Well, then let’s assume for the sake of discussion that you get precisely the jury you want.”

“If that were the case — and it can be a big ‘if’ — I believe it is fair to say that I would feel considerable confidence about the outcome.”

I didn’t believe him, of course, dismissing his comment as the perpetual optimism of a defense attorney. I thanked him, however, saying I would let him know about my further investigations, then hung up and mused on the ability of lawyers to spout fine phrases and say almost nothing in the process.