A Death in Pilsen

Chapter 19

First, of course, I had to face the proverbial music at home. One of the many endearing things about Catherine, though, was that “I told you so” does not occupy a pigeonhole in her roll-top desk of phrases.

She was up in the bedroom reading Hershey’s “A Bell for Adano” when I got home. “Oh, Steve!” she said, jerking upright in bed as I walked in. “Lord, are you all right?”

“Just a scuffle,” I answered. “But you shoulda seen the other bum.”

Rather than asking for details, she hustled me into the bathroom and began ministering to the cut over my eye. “Fortunately, it’s not big enough to need stitches,” she said, “but still, we’re going to have to sterilize it. I’m afraid this is going to hurt just a little.”

I let out an “ouch” or two as she worked, cleaning off the dried blood, dabbing iodine on the wound, and finally finishing up with a small bandage from the first-aid box she kept in the medicine cabinet.

“Do I really need that thing?” I asked, gingerly running a finger over the bandage.

“Absolutely. We’ve got to keep the wound clean, and it very definitely is a wound. Do you want to go over what happened?”

So we talked, or rather I did. I gave her the literal blow-by-blow, not leaving anything out. Since she’d already seen the damage, why bother holding back?

“So now what?” she asked with a frown after I finished my narrative.

“I’m giving a lot of thought to Sulski right now,” I said. “A guy doesn’t act that way unless he’s got something to hide — something big.”

“But you didn’t exactly handle the situation tactfully,” she pointed out with irrefutable logic. “You just bore in on him like a bulldozer, which is hardly a way to get information. Based on what you’ve told me, I’m not surprised that he reacted the way he did.”

“It pains me to say it, my darling, but you are absolutely right. I was trying too hard, and I shot off my mouth. This business is getting to me.”

“With reason,” she conceded, smoothing the bandage gently with a hand. “You’ve been under a lot of pressure over this horrible business with Charlie.”

“Yeah, I guess. Dammit, I just know it has to be one of those four guys. And thanks to my bull-in-a-china-shop approach tonight, I never did find out whether Sulski has an alibi for the night Edwina was killed. Not that he would have told me anyway.”

“My advice, oh noble Lancelot, is to get a good night’s sleep,” Catherine said, continuing to stroke my brow with a pleasantly cool hand. “Then you can, as Oliver Goldsmith wrote, ‘live to fight another day’.”

“Oliver Goldsmith? Where do you find all this stuff?”

“Comes from working in a library for years and years,” she answered, wrinkling her brow. “You pick up all sorts of things.”

“I will have to take your word for it,” I said, yawning. “That ‘another day’ your friend Goldsmith wrote about will come plenty soon enough for me.”

The next morning, I had to endure the jibes of my colleagues in the pressroom when they saw my bandage and the eggplant-colored bruise that had developed above my eye.

“All right, Snap. Out with it,” Packy Farmer demanded. “Just what happened last night? I thought when you chose to tie the knot again, your carousing, brawling days were well behind you. Seems that I was mistaken.”

“Yeah, let’s hear it, Malek,” Eddie Metz said. “A bar fight? An angry husband? An angry wife — yours, maybe?”

I held up a hand. “I could regale you chaps with any number of exciting tales as to how I came to sport this wound. I will merely tell you that some things defy explanation and this, dear friends and colleagues, is one of them.”

“A pretty speech indeed,” Dirk O’Farrell snorted. “Is that the same oration you delivered to your wife last night?”

“Ah, Dirk, I am happy to report that said wife, wonderful helpmeet that she is, not only knows the full story of my battle scars, she also dressed my wounds in a manner worthy of the late, great Florence Nightingale.”

“We’re happy that you have pulled through,” Anson Masters rumbled, “and that you are still able to fulfill your duties here. Speaking of which, it is time for you, sir, indeed for all of us, to make our appointed rounds in search of news to feed the voracious appetites of our hundreds of thousands of readers.”

“Hey, Antsy, that’s your best bit of morning cheerleading yet,” Farmer said. “Almost wants to make a fellow go to work, but not quite.”

However, we all did disperse to our respective beats.

“Good morning, mother-in-waiting,” I told the comely Elsie as I entered her two-by-four office. “Is the lord of the manor present this fine morning?”

“Before I inquire about your face, I’ll remind you that today is Good Friday,” she said sweetly. “You will recall that the chief always takes this day off to spend with his family, and to attend mass.”

“Right — I should have remembered, especially since my son is coming home from college today for the Easter weekend.”

“But do not think that because Mr. F.S. Fahey is away from his office today, he’s not working,” Elsie cautioned. “He has already phoned and dictated three letters to me in the last hour, and I expect several more calls from him. Now, what’s the story with your face?”

“’Tis indeed a sad tale and one that I’ll not burden you with, save to say that it has nothing whatever to do with domestic strife. In fact, it was my good wife who bandaged me up.”

“The warrior home from the battle, licking his wounds, eh? That Catherine of yours sure has to put up with a lot.”

“She bears it well. Next time the old gentleman calls in, say that I asked after him and wished him a Happy Easter. And the same to you, young damsel,” I said, turning to leave.

“Not so fast, hotshot reporter. Not only is my boss firing off dictation to me from home, he also wants to talk to you.”

“This very day? This holy day?”

“Yes, today. In fact, I was about to phone you in the pressroom when you came down to grace me with your presence. The Chief’s orders were that you could go into his office and call him at home. Highly irregular, I must say.”

“Irregular indeed,” I replied, taking the sheet from her on which she had written his home phone number. Sitting at one of the guest chairs in his office, I lit up a Lucky — force of habit in that environment — and dialed. Fahey answered on the second ring.

“Elsie said it was okay to get you on the line,” I said by way of apology.

“Yeah, yeah. My wife always wants me home on Good Friday, but somehow my work doesn’t also take the day off.”

“There are those who might say that you just miss being here where the action is, Fergus.”

He grunted. “Interesting crowd you’re hanging out with in that Pilsen saloon, Snap. Or at least a couple of them are.”

“How so?”

“You asked me to have Records run a check on these guys, as you may recall.”

“I thought maybe you’d forgotten, or else just ignored me like you sometimes do.”

“Well, I wasn’t keen on the idea, I’ll say that. But the boys upstairs came up with stuff. You interested in what they got, or are you just on the line to make smart-assed cracks?”

“Fergus, I’m interested, very interested, and I promise, no more cracks.”

He cleared his throat. “That’ll be the day. First, Len Rollins.”

“Yeah, the drunk,” I said.

“His imbibing habits aren’t mentioned in what I’ve got,” Fahey said testily. “On October 7, 1939, he was involved in a fight during a craps game in a warehouse along the Stetson Canal at 23rd and Loomis. He and one Jock ‘Squirrel’ Lenzi got into it during the game, and he stuck Lenzi.”

“With a knife?”

“That’s usually what you stick someone with,” Fahey commented. “Rollins got six months at Stateville for assault with a deadly weapon. It probably would have been longer, but witnesses said that Lenzi actually was the one who started the fight. By the way, once they patched the Squirrel up — the wound was minor — Lenzi got three months himself, for assault.”

“Interesting indeed. Anything else worth noting in the report?”

“No, it was just another gambling brawl. We’ve been getting several of them every weekend for years.”

“Any other arrests for our boy Rollins?”

“Nope, that’s it. Then there’s this Voyczek character.”

“Karl the sullen?”

“I’ll have to take your word for that. In March 1941, your Mr. Voyczek is supposed to have attacked a 22-year-old legal secretary as she was walking to her home one evening after getting off a streetcar near 16th and Kedvale. He allegedly pushed her into an alley, knocked her down, and tore off most of her clothes. She started screaming, which was heard by some neighbors, and Voyczek ran away before a police cruiser got to the scene.”

“Fine, upstanding citizen. And they caught him?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Fahey growled. “A passerby had seen him running a block or two from the scene, and the young woman who was attacked later identified him in a lineup, then changed her mind, saying that she couldn’t really be sure it was him.”

“Sounds fishy.”

“Of course it does! Our men surmised that she had been threatened by Voyczek or one of his brothers — he’s got three, and they’re a mean bunch. Karl himself is the only one without a record, unless you count this travesty. In fact, one of the Voyczek brothers is in Joliet right now for armed robbery. Knocked over a bank in Berwyn in ’42.”

“Anything turn up on either Barnstable or Sulski?”

“No, not a thing. And, Snap, the fact that these other two guys are more than just a little shady does nothing to change your cousin’s situation, as I’m sure you know.”

“Is that so? Let’s see, on the one hand we have ourselves a case where a woman was stabbed to death, very possibly by someone with the intent of assaulting her. And on the other hand, we have one man who went to jail for stabbing someone and another man who, by all accounts, assaulted a woman, never mind that he was never brought to trial. One of those might have been a coincidence, but both, Fergus? Aren’t you just a wee bit suspicious?”

He grumbled something unintelligible and wished me a Happy Easter.

After my phone conversation with Fahey, I thought about calling Liam McCafferty to fill him in, but put it off for the time being. I then took advantage of Fahey’s absence from his office and the overall lack of newsworthy material from other departments in the building to go out to the Bridewell and see Cousin Charlie.

“How are you bearing up today?” I asked when we were seated on either side of the screen in the drab visitors’ room.

He bit his lip. “’Bout the same as before. That lawyer came to see me again, said he’s working on my case and that you are, too. Hey, what happened to your face, Stevie?”

“I ran into a guy who didn’t like some things I said to him. Actually, he’s someone who knew Edwina from that bar, Horvath’s.”

“Stevie, I don’t want you getting into trouble on my account,” he said with a frown.

“Well, if I don’t poke my nose into this business, who’s going to, Charlie? Obviously not the police. This is all part of what McCafferty meant, that I’m working on your case every bit as much as he is, in my own way.”

“I just don’t want you getting hurt, Stevie,” he whined.

“I’ll worry about myself. Did Edwina ever talk about the people she met in Horvath’s?”

“Not hardly at all, probably because she knew I didn’t like her spending so much time in there.”

“Can you remember any names?”

He furrowed his brow. “Let’s see... there was a guy named Ben, I think. She mentioned him a couple of times. Called him ‘Big Ben,’ like that famous old clock in London, you know? I think she said he’d been a professional boxer at one time some years back.”

“Anybody else?”

“No. She mainly talked about how friendly everybody in the place was. Told me that going there kept her from being lonesome in the evenings.”

“Uh-huh. Anything else you remember about Horvath’s, anything at all?”

“That’s about it, Stevie. Sorry.”

“How’re you passing the time in here?”

“It’s pretty boring. They do bring us the papers to read, and there are a few magazines.”

“Any of the other prisoners bothering you?”

“No, everybody pretty much stays to themselves, except at meals. We do a little talking to each other then, but not too much. And as I told you before, I’m in a cell by myself.”

“How about visitors? You had anybody, other than McCafferty, of course?”

Charlie paused a beat before answering. “No, nobody.”

“Catherine said to tell you that she’s thinking about you and praying about you every day — that is, if you’ll accept a prayer from a Universalist.”

He made a feeble attempt at a smile. “Oh, that’s really nice to hear. Please tell her hi, and that I appreciate it.”

“Anything I can bring you next time I come?”

“I can’t think of a thing, Stevie. Thanks for asking.”

I left him and walked out of the great, gray building, glad to be outside, even though the skies also were gray. As I tried to flag a cab back to Headquarters, I figured that if I ever had to spend time inside those walls, I’d be depressed too. But it seemed to me that Charlie Malek was beyond depressed; he continued to behave like a man who simply did not care what happened to him.