A Death in Pilsen

Chapter 22

The next morning at my desk, I reread my piece in the Trib, noting that the editors had not changed a single word of my copy. There was no byline, of course, by mutual agreement between me and my bosses. The brass were more than happy to have me write about my own cousin. They just didn’t want to broadcast the fact, and for once I totally agreed with a management decision.

I guessed that the gas company wouldn’t insist on Charlie returning to work right away, after all that he’d been through. I called him at home and found that I had figured it right.

“Yeah, they said I could take a few days,” he said in a tired voice. “Well, I guess it’s all over now, isn’t it, Stevie?”

“Uh-huh. Hardly a pretty ending though.”

“No. Sure isn’t.”

“How about lunch? Can you come down here around noon? There’s a little joint about a block down the street from Headquarters where I usually grab a sandwich.” I gave him the address.

“Uh, okay, see you then,” he said without enthusiasm.

Marty’s Burger Barn was filled with the usual noisy crowd of cops, lawyers, bondsmen, bailiffs, grifters, and myriad other characters who, by choice or otherwise, found occasion to visit the law enforcement hub of the second-largest city in the land. I had already staked claim to a booth about halfway back along the wall when Charlie pushed in, his eyes scanning the room until he spotted me.

“Quite the busy hangout,” he said as he slid in on the opposite side of the table.

“Yeah, you come in here often enough, you’ll see everything from assistant state’s attorneys to ambulance chasers to pimps to prostitutes to accused axe murderers out on bond. It’s a never-ending cavalcade of lawyers and lowlifes — and quite a number of the people in here fall into both those categories.”

He nodded, although his thoughts seemed to be far away.

“How are you, Charlie?”

“Okay, I guess,” he said listlessly as the waitress came to take our order. We each opted for a burger and coffee.

“She was willing to do anything for you, wasn’t she?”

“Huh? Who?”

“Marge, of course.”

He knitted his brow. “I guess I don’t get you, Stevie.”

“Oh, I think you do, Charlie. How long had you known her?”

Small beads of perspiration began to materialize on his upper lip. “You mean Marge?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Well, we did grow up near each other.”

“That’s what I figured, although I don’t remember her from the neighborhood, probably because she was so much younger than me — almost a full generation. When I introduced myself to her in Horvath’s as your cousin, her first concern seemed to be how you were. She barely mentioned your just-deceased wife, even though they were supposed to be such good pals, at least at the bar. She was what, two or three years younger than you?”

“Something like that.”

“Very nice-looking woman.”

Charlie nodded vaguely and sipped his coffee. His hand shook.

“As I got to know her, when I was snooping around at Horvath’s, it was obvious she wanted me to believe that one of the guys in there did it, probably Johnny Sulski. He’s the one who left me this little souvenir,” I said, indicating the healing bruise over my eye.

“Geez, I’m sorry about that,” he said. “Does it still hurt?”

I told him no, as the burgers were put down in front of us.

“What did you tell her, Charlie?”

He picked up a pickle slice, contemplated it, then set it back on the plate, pulling in air and letting it out slowly. “We, Marge and me, we started going out just about the time that she graduated from high school. You’re right; she was two years younger than me. My mother never liked her, thought she was too wild, too temperamental. You know how my mother could be.”

I did indeed. As I had mentioned earlier, Charlie’s late mother, my Aunt Edna, was a stern, humorless, controlling sort, and she essentially ran the lives of both her quiet and confrontation-avoiding husband, my now-deceased Uncle Frank, and her only offspring. If she didn’t like a friend of Charlie’s, she wasn’t shy about saying so. Charlie, being something of a milquetoast, wouldn’t be likely to defy her, at least openly.

“So, what was the result?”

He shook his head. “We pretty much went out on the sly for a year or so, which was a heckuva way to do things.”

“And then...?”

“And then Marge wanted for us to get married.”

“How did you feel about that?”

“Stevie, it just wasn’t going to happen.”

“Go on.”

Charlie stared down at his untouched hamburger. “I told Marge I loved her, but that as long as my mother was around...”

“She must have been overjoyed to hear that.”

He smiled ruefully. “Yeah, she was on the high-strung side to begin with, and she got really hot. Told me I was a momma’s boy, tied to her apron strings. You know that she was right about that, Stevie.”

“Then what?”

He took a nibble on his hamburger. I said nothing, waiting him out.

“She started yelling. She told me that we were all through, that she had wasted more than a year on me and wanted to move ahead.”

“As in... find somebody else to marry?”

“That’s what I figured. And I knew Marge wouldn’t have any trouble with that, as attractive and lively as she... was. Within six months, maybe even less, she was engaged to a jerk named Wilson, a pipefitter from somewhere up on the north side — Rogers Park, I think. She ran into him at some dance hall up that way, or so I heard.”

“Ever meet him?”

Charlie reddened. “No. I understand what you’re saying, Stevie. I shouldn’t talk that way about somebody if I didn’t even know him. By then, we were in the war, of course, and I got drafted, as you know. I was already overseas in the army when they got married.”

“But their marriage didn’t last all that long?”

“No, it didn’t. Wilson enlisted just a few months after they got married and got killed in the D-Day invasion in June of ’44, the very same week that my mother died of cancer. Marge sent me a letter with the news about him and condolences about my mom. She had heard about Mom from one of her relatives in the old neighborhood.

“I was in a military hospital up in the north of England by then, in a part of the country called Yorkshire, almost to Scotland. I think you know I got some leg wounds from shrapnel in the invasion of Italy. God, those were rough times for me. I thought sure I’d be walking with a limp for life, but they fixed me up real good.”

“Yes, I knew about all of that from your dad. Nice that you recovered so well. Did Marge say anything else in that letter?”

This time, Charlie took even longer to answer. “Well... she said she’d be waiting for me. The meaning was...”

“Obvious?”

He nodded. “Funny how life is. Now Marge was free and, with my mom gone, so was I. Except that by this time, I had met Edwina. She was volunteering at the hospital where I was laid up, and took a special interest in me, you might say. And do you know, only about three days before I got Marge’s letter, I had asked Edwina to marry me.”

“I gather that she said yes?”

“She almost jumped into the damn hospital bed with me. I never saw anybody so happy. I thought it was because of me, of course, but eventually I came to figure things out, slow as I am. She wanted a ticket to the U.S., and good old Charlie the Chump Malek was it.”

I drank coffee, not wanting to interrupt him now that he was on a roll.

“We got married over there, civil ceremony in the town hall of this little northern English burg, not long after I got out of the hospital. Just a couple of witnesses were present, that was it. I can’t even remember the name of the town, although it’s probably on the marriage certificate, wherever that is. Everything seemed fine with us until I got discharged a few months later and we came to the States — first me on a troop ship and then Edwina a couple of weeks later on an old passenger liner with a lot of other war brides from all over the place — England, France, Italy, Holland, and so on — hundreds of ’em, so she told me.

“We got settled in the apartment in Pilsen, and almost from the start it seemed like nothing I did was right as far as she was concerned. She didn’t like the flat, didn’t like the neighborhood, didn’t think I had a good enough job, didn’t like much of anything. I’m sure you and Catherine saw that pretty quickly when we were all together those few times.”

“Hard not to, Charlie.”

“Yeah. Then, as you know now, Edwina started going out nights when I was working overtime. Said she felt lonesome and wanted to meet people.”

“At Horvath’s.”

“That’s the place. I told her that might not be proper behavior, but she laughed at me and said that in England, the local bars — pubs they’re called, as you know — are perfectly respectable places where almost everybody goes to socialize. Or so she said... I never spent much time in the saloons when I was over there, so I don’t know if that’s really true.”

“From what little I saw during my time in London, I’d have to say she was probably right. The few places I visited seemed very friendly.”

“Well, anyway, it got so that when I came home from work, usually between nine and ten, Edwina wouldn’t even be there most nights. She’d leave me some supper in a pot or two on the stove that I’d have to heat up. Sometimes, she wouldn’t get in ’til midnight or even later, sometimes all boozed up and giggly.”

“Not a very healthy situation.”

“Then one night she comes in, wakes me up, and tells me how she met this really nice gal there — at Horvath’s, that is — who knew me.”

“Which would, of course, be the newly widowed Marge Blazek.”

He took another small bite of his hamburger. “Sure, and they hit it off from the start, so Edwina told me.”

“How did they happen to meet?”

“Edwina said that Marge had sat down next to her at the bar and started a conversation.”

“Just like that, eh?”

“Yeah, just like that,” Charlie agreed. “Some coincidence, wasn’t it?”

“If that’s what you choose to think, Charlie. But isn’t it just possible that Marge knew who Edwina was and who she was married to? Especially since your wife wasn’t exactly reticent when it came to talking about herself and her life.”

“Well, I guess I never thought about it that way.”

“And then you and Marge saw each other again, right?”

He flushed. “It wasn’t me that made the first move, Stevie, it was her. About a week after the two of them had met, I’m at home alone — as usual — around ten-thirty at night eating my heated-up supper, and the telephone rings.

“It’s Marge, saying that she’s calling from the pay phone at Horvath’s. I can hear all the noise in the background, the talking and the jukebox. She knows I’m alone, see, because Edwina is sitting at the bar, not thirty feet away from her.”

“Yes, I see. From all my recent visits, I know right where that phone is.”

“Anyway, Marge says she needs to see me — doesn’t say why, but she makes it sound real important.”

“Go on.”

“So what was I going to do, Stevie?” he asked, his hand shaking again as he picked up his coffee cup and drank.

When I didn’t answer, he plunged on.

“So anyway, she says she wants to meet me the next night, at another bar a few blocks west of Horvath’s, when I get off work. A place called Stahlek’s. I start to say ‘no,’ but change my mind before I can get the word out and we agree to meet at this joint the next night at ten.” Charlie took a deep breath and looked questioningly at me.

“You’re telling the story — go on,” I told him.

He sucked in more air, and let it out slowly. “When I got to Stahlek’s, it was almost empty. She was sitting at a booth in the corner, the darkest spot in the room, wearing a yellow dress. I’ll never forget that yellow dress. She looked terrific, exactly like I remembered her. Not a bit older.”

“Cosmetics can work all sorts of magic,” I observed dryly.

“Yeah, well, maybe so. But it sure felt funny to see her after all that time. I felt like I was in some sort of a dream.”