A Death in Pilsen

Chapter 16

I knew that I was rapidly wearing out my welcome at Horvath’s Tap, if I even had one to begin with, but I had resolved to push on and decided to alter the pattern. That is, I would just show up at the saloon tonight and not make any prearrangements with Marge Blazek. I didn’t want it to look like she and I were working together. If she happened to be in there, fine, if not, also fine. I’d figure out how to meet Len Rollins and Johnny Sulski all by myself.

At just after seven-thirty, I stepped into the haze and headed across the rarely used dance floor to an empty stool at the left end of the bar. One or two men turned to look in my direction as I walked across the room, and Ben Barnstable once again grinned and gave me a nod before turning back to his drink. Neither Marge nor Karl Voyczek were in attendance.

Maury, who seemed to be the only bartender on the payroll, scowled in my direction, clearly wishing that I’d chosen some other watering hole. “Schlitz on draught, as usual,” I said with a grin.

“If I remember from your description the other night, that’s Rollins down at the far end of the bar, right?” I asked when he set the chilled glass of lager on a coaster in front of me.

He scowled some more. “Yeah, that’s him with a plaid jacket on,” he said in a voice just above a whisper. “Are you plannin’ to cause any trouble in here tonight?”

“Me, trouble? Not at all, Maury, and I’m surprised you would ask. I’m the peace-loving type all the way. Buy Mr. Rollins a drink, whatever his pleasure is, and tell him that it’s on me. Put it on my tab, of course.”

He shrugged and walked down to the far end of the bar. I nursed my Schlitz, waiting. I was half finished with it before Maury came back.

“He says thanks for the drink and wants to know why you bought it for him.”

“Fair question. Ask him if he minds coming down here so that we can talk. Then he can find out for himself why I’m so generous.”

“I ain’t used to being anybody’s messenger boy,” the barkeep huffed.

“But it’s all part of your role as a gracious host, Maury.” He grimly stomped off, shaking his head and muttering, presumably to give Rollins my message.

About five minutes later, a short, watery-eyed specimen of about forty-five with Dagwood Bumstead-style black hair and wearing a plaid woolen jacket shuffled over to me, highball in hand.

“You the guy who bought me the drink?” he asked, his voice slightly slurred.

“I’m the one,” I told him. “Pull up a stool and join me.”

“I don’t know you, do I?” he said, squinting at me as he sat down.

“Nope. I’m fairly new around here. You been a customer of Maury’s for a long time?”

He nodded, contemplating what was left of his drink. “Yeah, buncha years now. Nice place, huh?”

“Sure seems to be. Good folks. I imagine that you must know a lot of them after all this time, eh?”

“Oh, yeah, a lot of ’em. Good guys, good guys.”

“It’s Len, right? I’m Steve.”

“Yeah, Len Rollins. Nice to meetcha, Steve.” He cast another glance at his disappearing drink.

“Two more down here, Maury,” I called out to be heard over the din of conversation and jukebox. “We’re getting kind of dry at this end.”

I turned to Rollins. “What do you do for a living, Len?”

“I work the day shift on the loading docks south of here, near the canals,” he said in a deprecatory tone. “Just a job.”

“Honest work,” I commented. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Guess not,” he replied as Maury placed fresh drinks in front of us. “Been doin’ it for years, ever since I was a kid just outta high school.”

“Did you know the woman from in here who got killed?” I asked off-handedly.

“Eddie? Yeah. Sure did.” His voice got husky.

“Really sad.”

“Husband killed her. Bastard.”

“So I’ve been told. Do they know it was him that did it for sure?”

“Cops think so. They got him in the cooler, so I heard and read in the papers.”

“Why would he have done it?”

“Beats the shit outta me. Eddie was a real doll, a honey. We called her Eddie, but her real name was Edwina. She was from England. I loved to hear her talk, and I loved to hear her sing, too. Did she ever have a voice? Knew all kinds of songs.”

“Sounds as if you liked her a lot.”

Rollins nudged his glass around on the bar with an index finger. “I sure did. She cheered me up, even made me laugh sometimes, and I ain’t what you’d exactly call a laugher. She came over here to be with... him, after the war. One of them war brides, you know? God damn, she moves all the way to our good ol’ U.S.A. to find a new life and look how she ends up.” I thought he was going to start crying.

“Doesn’t seem fair.”

“Damn right it doesn’t.”

“Pardon me for repeating my question, but why would her husband want to kill her, do you think?”

He turned in my direction, trying to bring me into focus. “Okay, you want my opinion? I think he was jealous of her, that’s what I think.”

“Jealous, huh? Why?”

“Because she had all these friends in here. All these people who liked to be around her. She was the best thing that ever happened to this here joint.”

“Men? Women? Who were these friends?”

Rollins chewed his lower lip, as if trying to think. I figured I had about ten, maybe fifteen minutes before his brain ceased to function in any logical fashion.

“Most everybody in the place. They all liked her, all of ’em, all of ’em.”

“Anybody special come to mind for you, Len?”

“The big guy for one, he’s down that way.” He gestured vaguely toward the other end of the bar, where Barnstable had parked himself.

“Who’s that?”

“Ben. Big Ben, they call him. The ol’ boxer. Good fella, heart o’ gold. Great guy. You’d like him. Yeah, really great guy.”

“Who else, Len?”

He frowned, working to concentrate. “Ya got ol’ Karl, he woulda killed for her, I think. God, he really liked her.”

“Would you say that he loved her, Len?”

“Loved her? Geez, I dunno, maybe. Sure.”

“And you think he actually would have killed for her?”

“I didn’t really mean that,” he said, as flustered as someone in his condition could be.

“No, I didn’t think you meant it. You were just using an expression. Besides the boxer fellow and this Karl, was there anybody else particularly who was friendly with the lady?”

“Well, yeah, there was Sulski, for sure. He was really interested in her.”

“Romantically interested?”

He raised his shoulders and let them drop. “I just know that he liked her a lot. Sulski, he was sort of jealous of anybody else who talked to her. He always tried to sit next to her when she came in. Even reserved a stool for her and wouldn’t let anybody else sit on it.”

“Did that make the rest of you angry?”

“Aw, I dunno. None of us is really the fightin’ type, I guess, not even Big Ben, and hell, that’s what he used to do for a living,” he said, taking a healthy swig of his drink. “He could prob’ly knock any of us out with one punch, but like he says now, he quit using his fists the very day he left the ring.”

I hadn’t told Rollins what my relationship to Edwina was and didn’t plan to unless he got curious, which seemed unlikely, given his current state. “So Barnstable, Voyczek, and Sulski all were cozy with the lady — or wanted to get cozy with her. Did she have any other friends in here?”

“Well, she was always joking with Maury, of course, but then we’re all pals with him. Good ol’ Maury. Best bartender in Chicago. Great guy, great guy. Then there’s Marge, she and Eddie used to sit together a lot, talking and laughing.”

“Marge?”

“Yeah, she comes in here a lot. Haven’t seen her yet tonight, though.”

“What’s she like?”

“Nice gal, real nice. Lost her husband in the war, in that big D-Day battle it was. Sometimes, she gets real sad, anybody could tell it. Hard to blame her though, huh?”

“Yes, it is hard to blame her. Good looking woman, is she?”

“Yeah, I’ll say, a real peach. She’s got a great figure, too.”

“Then I suppose that some of the guys were pretty sweet on her as well as on Eddie, eh?”

“Well, they woulda been — me, too, I guess — except Marge, she just don’t act like she’s all that interested in goin’ out with guys right now. Still probably in a period of mourning, leastways that’s how I see it.”

“So it probably didn’t bother her that all of you paid so much attention to Eddie, right?”

Rollins waved my question away. “Nah, she wasn’t the jealous kind. She wouldn’t care even if we’d been drooling all over Eddie. And sometimes it damn near seemed like Sulski was. Drooling, I mean.”

He let out a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh, then stiffened up, and shook his head. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be talking like that about somebody who’s dead. That ain’t decent.”

“That’s okay, Len. I know that you meant no disrespect.”

“Nah, not for Eddie. I’d never say anything bad about her. She was always real nice to me. God, I’m so sad.” He sniffled and dabbed at his eyes with an index finger, turning away from me.

“Well, I know it’s got to be a bad time for everybody who knew her. She must have died just about this time a week ago. Were you in here when you found out about it?”

“In here?” He screwed up his face. “No... no I wasn’t. That night, I didn’t come in here till later. Guy I work with named McMannis bought me a drink and a steak sandwich at a diner over on Loomis near where our loading dock is. He was payin’ off a bet we made on the Zale-Hughes fight down Texas way. Mac, he really thought that palooka Hughes would win, but Tony knocked him out in the second round. For me, the bet was like takin’ candy from a baby.”

“That must be quite a walk back here from Loomis, huh?”

“Not so bad, maybe forty-five minutes or so,” he muttered, unaware that he was being cross-examined. “When I got back here, I sorta wondered why Eddie wasn’t around. None of us in here, we didn’t find out till the next day what had happened to her.” He started to sniffle again.

I tried to think of something solicitous to say, but before anything came out, the door opened and the guys at the bar turned to acknowledge the new arrival. “Hey, there she is,” Len Rollins told me. “The one I was talking about. That’s Marge.”

“Oh, yes, I recognize her from when I was in here before,” I told him. “Hi, there,” I said, dipping my chin in her direction. “Nice to see you again.”

She picked up on my line like a good actress. “Oh, hello, how are you?” she said with just the proper amount of disinterest. She found a spot at the other end of the bar while I turned back to Rollins.

“Well, I’d better be going. I’ve got a long day tomorrow,” I told him as I settled up my tab with Maury, who clearly was happy to see me go.

“Thanks for the drinks. ’Preciate it, fella,” Rollins slurred.

“My pleasure,” I replied, as happy as I’d ever been to have a good job and a loving wife to go home to.