A Death in Pilsen

Chapter 21

On Monday morning, just as I got to the Headquarters pressroom a few minutes before nine, my phone began ringing. “All right, all right, give a guy a chance to at least sit down, will ya?” I yapped at the nagging machine.

The voice on the other end belonged to Elsie Dugo Cascio. “Good morning, sir,” she said in an uncharacteristically formal tone. “The chief would like to see you as soon as possible, preferably right now. I’ve been calling your number every five minutes for the last half hour.”

“Hmm. Any idea what he wants?”

“No, he did not choose to share that information with me, but he seemed extremely anxious to see you.”

“I am on my way,” I told her, trying to dope out what Fahey wanted so early in the workday. It was usually me who was anxious to see him. My first thought was that it had to do with my set-to with Johnny Sulski outside of Horvath’s last week. But no laws had been broken, unless someone termed our fight a public disturbance. No cops had been called, at least as far as I was aware.

Maybe it was the bartender, Maury, complaining that I had threatened him with city inspectors if he didn’t cooperate with me. No, that was not likely, either. Maury would hardly have risked even raising the subject, lest it would really bring some inspectors down upon him.

I walked into Elsie’s anteroom. “Reporting as requested,” I said, saluting smartly and clicking my heels together.

“Go right on in,” she replied. “A cup of Nurse Cascio’s black nectar soon will follow.”

I stepped into the office and Fahey looked up, wearing as grim an expression as I’d ever seen on his big, square, ruddy mug.

“Sit down, Snap,” he said gruffly. “Say, what happened to your face?”

“It’s a long story, and it can probably wait until you tell me why I’m in here so early in the day.”

He nodded and glanced at the sheets he held in his hand. “I’ve got a story for you and your so-called competitors upstairs. None of this has been released yet. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Appreciate it. I’m all ears.”

“Last night, or rather very early this morning, a few minutes past one o’clock, an individual jumped in front of a Santa Fe Railway freight train near the intersection of Loomis Avenue and 21st Street in Pilsen in an apparent suicide. Are you getting all this?”

I nodded, taking it down in my notebook.

“Good. The dead woman was identified later by a cousin as Marjorie Blazek Wilson, a war widow.” Fahey gave her address in Pilsen.

“Jesus Christ!”

“The dead woman left a note,” he continued, “in which she confessed to the murder of another woman, Mrs. Edwina Moreland Malek. In the detailed note, which was found in her purse alongside the railway tracks, she wrote that she had stabbed Mrs. Malek when the two of them argued over a man that they both knew. The handwriting in the note was verified to be Mrs. Wilson’s, about two hours ago, by her cousin, Mrs. Gladys Jahns of Lyons, who was the one identifying the body. The details about the killing in the note could only have been known by the murderer.”

He looked up at me over his reading glasses. “That’s the gist of it.”

“How was the cousin... able to identify her?”

“The train didn’t actually run over her, as is so often the case. It threw her off to one side,” Fahey said, consulting his notes. “According to the medical report, she was barely scarred, other than a large bruise on her head. Apparently the train struck a glancing blow and it was a concussion that killed her. She probably died instantly. Blessedly, she may not have felt much.”

“No question that it was suicide?”

“None whatever as far as we are concerned,” the chief said. “The locomotive engineer said that she was standing alongside the tracks and at the last moment jumped toward the train. If that isn’t enough, you can read the note, which I have here.”

I reached for the note, but Fahey pulled it back. “I can’t let you take it away — it’s evidence, of course, pending an investigation. However, you can read it and copy anything down you want to. But as you’ll see, it’s quite long. You may not want to... use everything in it.”

He carefully set three sheets of light blue, feminine notepaper on the blotter in front of me, as Elsie brought in a cup of coffee, placing it near my right arm.

“The handwriting. It’s so neat,” I said numbly.

The cop nodded as he lit a cigarette. “That struck me, too. Amazing, isn’t it? Here she was, in the last hours of her life, maybe even down to the last minutes, very calmly setting all this out in a hand that surely would have made her old grade school penmanship teacher proud. And filling both sides of all three sheets, almost like an autobiography.”

I began reading, and scribbling notes. The longer I read, the colder I became. Marge’s tone was very dispassionate, as though she were writing about someone else.

I never thought I’d see a letter that began “To whom it may concern,” but there it was, even with the date neatly written in the upper right-hand corner.

I continued reading and taking notes as Fergus shuffled through his ever-present paperwork, looking down and saying nothing. Whenever he stopped the shuffling, the only sound in his office was the ticking of the wall clock, and the occasional rattling of an El train as it passed by outside his grimy window.

Marge was far from literary in her style, but her phrases were poignant: “life at a dead-end,” “an aching soul,” “the final lie.”

I kept reading, and kept being drawn deeper into Marge Blazek’s private hell, a hell that ended up taking her own life as well as that of her supposed friend, Edwina Malek. “Part of me really, truly, liked Eddie,” Marge wrote in the note, “but another part of me could barely stand the sight of her.”

I wrote down everything in the note, word for word, then pushed Margie’s handwritten sheets across the desk to Fergus. “I’ve got everything,” I told him.

“Everything?”

“As you said, it’s very long. Probably too long to use it all, huh?”

“Far too long to use it all. By the way, this completely clears your cousin, of course. He’ll probably get the word at the Bridewell this morning. Great news for him, huh?”

“Yeah. Great news for him.”

I took my notes and went back up to the pressroom, where the morning bull session was still in full swing. “I’ve got some information that I think you’ll all be interested in,” I told the assemblage. “A woman has confessed to the murder of Edwina Malek, in a suicide note.”

“Wow! That’s terrific for your cousin. Congratulations!” Packy Farmer boomed, with the others joining in. After that, everybody began talking at once, but I silenced them by slapping a palm down hard on my desk. “Here’s the police report and the meat of the suicide note. I’ll be happy to read it to you.”

They liked that idea — the less work for them, the better, in the fine tradition of Chicago police reporting. Then each of them could fashion his own story. I read the police report and those portions of the suicide note that I chose to select, and they all took notes, with both Farmer and Metz asking me several times, “Slow down, Snap, slow down. For Pete’s sake, slow down... we’re not goddamn stenographers!”

The process took me about twenty-five minutes, with several interruptions and requests that I repeat some detail or other, and then everybody was on the phone, dictating to their respective city desks.

Because of the timing, the three afternoon papers were out first with the story, and because of the suicide angle, it got bigger play than Edwina’s murder had. Both the Times and the Herald American used it as their banner headline, while the Daily News, always more conservative in its coverage of crime news, played the story under a two-column headline on Page 5. The Trib and the Sun didn’t hit the streets with the news until the next morning, in each case running it at the bottom of the front page.

Here, for the record, is what I wrote for the Trib:

The afternoon papers had barely been on the streets with the story when I got a call in the pressroom from Liam McCafferty.

“Ah, Mr. Malek,” he said in his practiced brogue. “I see that your cousin has been cleared.”

“Yes, I was planning to call you, but as you can understand, it has been pretty hectic over here.”

“Of course, of course, deadlines must be met. Well, sir, I cannot tell you how happy I am to hear the news. Had this tragic event not occurred, I would without question have been able in court to have your cousin found innocent.”

“Of that I have no doubt whatsoever, Mr. McCafferty,” I said, humoring the attorney.

“As it is, I’m sure you will understand, I have expended a considerable amount of time and effort in preparing Mr. Charles Malek’s defense.”

“Yes, I understand.” I didn’t understand, of course, but I was not the least bit interested in prolonging the conversation.

“I thought you would agree with me, sir. Indeed, I knew that you would. Shall I have the bill for my services sent to you?”

“By all means.” I gave him my home address.

“You must be very pleased and very happy, Mr. Malek,” he said.

“Oh, I am indeed, Mr. McCafferty,” I told him, cradling the phone and reveling in the knowledge that my conversations with a lawyer I never met had come to an end.