A Death in Pilsen - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Robert Goldsborough (Chapter 23) #24

Chapter 23

The lunch crowd in the restaurant had thinned out, but Charlie didn’t notice. I signaled the waitress to bring more coffee and take our plates away.

“What did she want to talk about, Charlie?”

“She... sort of beat around the bush at first. Said she just wanted to see me again. Asked me how life was for me now, the job and all.”

“And you told her?”

“Well, I started to. I told her that Edwina and I were getting along just fine, and that I was working overtime to save up for a down payment on a house out in the suburbs somewhere.

“But she interrupted me. She said something like ‘If you’re getting along so well, then why is it that your wife is spending her nights sitting in a bar drinking and flirting with other men?’”

“She was hardly pulling her punches there, was she? How did you respond to that?”

“I tried to laugh it off, but Marge, she saw right through me — she always could, even way back. She told me I was being taken for a ride, and that I knew I was being taken for a ride, and that I ought to do something about it.”

“Did she have a suggestion?”

“She said I should think real hard about divorcing Edwina. But I told her I couldn’t do that because then she would be all alone in a new country without anyone.”

“What did Marge say then? Given her reported social activities at Horvath’s, it doesn’t sound like Edwina would have been all that much alone without you.” I was in no mood to spare my cousin’s feelings.

Charlie’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed hard. “Marge said... well, I’d rather not go into it, Stevie.”

I leaned forward, resting both elbows on the table. “Tell you what, cousin. I’ve always had a lively imagination — both of my wives have told me so. Almost from the beginning of my snooping into this business, I had a suspicion, although I suppressed it, which was my mistake. But this helped confirm that suspicion,” I said, pulling some folded sheets from the breast pocket of my suit coat. They were the copy I’d made in Fahey’s office of Marge’s full suicide note.

“What’s that?” Charlie asked.

“I know you’ve read the newspaper stories about the suicide.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, they mentioned a note that was found at the scene and touched on it briefly.”

Charlie nodded, mouth open.

“But there were a lot of details in that note that for reasons I won’t go into didn’t get into any of the papers, Charlie. Those details plus my own surmising helped me fit the pieces of the puzzle together.”

“What puzzle?”

I unfolded the sheets of paper. “Let’s see, here we are,” I said, smoothing one of the sheets on the tabletop. “Here’s what Marge said.”

I know I shouldn’t have called Charlie, but I couldn’t help myself, and when we met, I told him he should get a divorce, but he wouldn’t. I could tell that he still loved me, though. That was easy for anybody to see. I told him there might be another way for us. He didn’t ask me what I meant, but I think he must have guessed it from his reaction.

His hand jerked in a spasm, jarring his cup and spilling coffee into the saucer. “Now wait a minute, Stevie, that’s just not, not—”

“Not what?”

“Not how it happened.”

“Okay, how about telling me what did happen.”

He ran a hand across his brow. “She — Marge — said that Edwina was the wrong person for me and that we needed to think together about just what could be done.”

“Well, that sounds plenty ominous to me.”

“But Marge never said anything that night about... about killing her.”

“Then what did you think she meant at the time, given that you had already ruled out divorce as an option?”

He shrugged. “I guess I really didn’t know.”

“I think you did know, Charlie, and if I can continue sketching a scenario, you were willing to let Marge take the lead, even steering her in that direction. You said nothing at all to discourage her, right?”

He looked down at the table, silent.

“In fact, if I were to bet, I think you were hopeful that something like what really did happen would occur.” I began reading again.

When I went to her flat that night, I knew just what I was going to do. Eddie was surprised to see me there. I’d never been to their place before. I told her I was just passing by, and she invited me in. She showed me around, said the place was a dump, that’s the word she used, dump. But it seemed fine to me, just as nice as my apartment, maybe a little nicer.

Then she started talking about Charlie, what a bad provider he was, what a failure he was. It made me so angry, and it made what I was going to do easier. I had brought my own knife just in case, but when she got up to go to the bathroom, I went into the kitchen, got a sharp knife out of a drawer, with a blade maybe five inches long, and slipped it into my purse. This was my original plan — to use one of her own knives. That would make it look like a spur-of-the-moment thing, with the killer attacking her and her grabbing a knife from the kitchen to defend herself.

Eddie came back and wanted to sit on the sofa and talk, so we did. She asked me if I was going to Horvath’s later, and I said I was. Then she said she was glad she had that place to hang out in, that it was a lot better than being with Charlie, he was so dull and boring. She called him a shit, said she wished she’d never married him, that it was the biggest mistake of her life, and that she hated him.

That’s when I did it. I reached into my purse, took out the knife, and put it in her. She never knew what happened. She didn’t say a single word, not one. Just made a kind of sound like a cough and looked up at me, eyes wide, like she was shocked. I was surprised the knife went in so easy and so far, but it did. I wiped off the handle, leaving it still in her, real careful I was, and then I left.

Charlie still looked down at the table, his breath coming in short bursts. I pushed on.

“Marge had planned the visit for around 6:00 o’clock, when you would presumably still be at work on your overtime shift for several more hours,” I told him. “That way, she figured you would have an airtight alibi supplied by your gas company co-workers.

“Marge figured a lot of things pretty well, all right, but what she couldn’t possibly have known was that this was a rare evening when you weren’t working overtime, the reason being that, as you previously told me, construction of a new gas line down in Englewood had to be postponed because the pipe wasn’t delivered on time by the manufacturer. You probably came within a few minutes of running into her at your place that night.

“When I told her you hadn’t worked overtime that night, she seemed very surprised, which made me suspicious, but again, I suppressed the suspicion. Why would Marge even care what time you got home from work. Unless...”

Charlie looked up at last, tears in his eyes, but he said nothing. I continued:

“When you saw Edwina sprawled on the living room sofa, you had to have known — or strongly suspected — that Marge was the one who drove that knife into her.

“She figured that Sulski or one of the other guys who panted after Edwina in Horvath’s would get tagged with the murder and that you and she could dance off into the sunset and live happily ever after.

“On paper, it was a decent enough plan, but it fell apart because you got home at seven or so. Poof went the alibi Marge had so carefully planned for you. She was initially devastated, but she found some hope because I wandered into the picture poking around for suspects. I was the unwitting answer to her prayers. Here’s what she said about that.”

“No more, Stevie, no more,” Charlie said in a shaky voice, holding up his hand and vigorously shaking his head.

“There’s plenty more in the note. You need to hear it.”

“But, Stevie, I—”

“I insist. Here goes.”

When his cousin, this Tribune newspaperman Steve, came into Horvath’s doing some investigating-type stuff about Eddie’s killing, I got to know him and told him about the guys in the bar who she had liked. I figured that maybe I could get him thinking about one of them as the killer. I felt bad deceiving him, because he seemed like he was a really nice guy, and someone who cared about his cousin.

“I have to say, Charlie, that she really had me going on that. She did indeed deceive me. I would have sworn at that point that one of those four joes had done the killing. She did everything she could to let me know how many men had been chasing after Edwina, and I’m sure she embellished the stories to make your wife sound like a floozy.”

“You mean, like even more of a floozy than she really was,” Charlie muttered with surprising bitterness.

“If you want to put it that way. I actually thought for a while that another guy, not Sulski, was a prime suspect. Surly fellow named Karl Voyczek, who apparently had spent at least a little time with Edwina outside of Horvath’s, as had Ben Barnstable, who was seen walking with her in the neighborhood. But none of that need concern us anymore.

“Moving right along, I was already a little leery on my last visit to the jail when I asked if you’d had any visitors other than McCafferty, and you hesitated too long before telling me you hadn’t. Then Marge’s note confirmed that suspicion.”

I went and visited Charlie in that terrible jail, and I told him everything. All of it. I said that I had killed Eddie so we could be together at last. I don’t think he was the least bit surprised. He seemed to know all along that something like this was going to happen. That’s when I told him I was working with his newspaperman cousin to try to get one of Eddie’s boyfriends arrested as the murderer.

“That’s how it happened, correct?”

Charlie nodded. “She kept saying she wanted for us to get married after this whole thing got cleared up, however that was going to happen. And I told her, right there in the jail, that I was never going to marry her. Never.”

“Yep. That squares with the note. To continue:”

That’s when he told me he could never love me anymore, not after what I did. I just gave up then. My life was at a dead end.

“Sounds pretty melodramatic, Charlie.”

“She started bawling right there in the jail, telling me that I was the only one she had ever loved. Ever. She got sort of hysterical. A guard finally came over and asked her to leave.”

“And knowing how tightly strung she was normally, you probably weren’t shocked when you learned that she killed herself.”

Tears formed in his eyes. “No, Stevie, I was shocked. Really I was, and very, very sad. That’s the truth, Stevie, the truth.”

“But you were not sad to learn that she had confessed,” I said. Charlie looked away.

“Something I’m curious about before we finish this,” I said, forcing him to meet my glare. “You couldn’t have known that Marge was going to visit you in the Bridewell. What if she had never shown up?”

He raised his shoulders slightly and let them drop. “I guess that...what I thought was going to happen all along was that there’d be a trial, and that I’d be...” He let it hang.

“Well, that’s one point in your favor, Charlie, although a small one. At least you were willing to take the fall for what was partly your doing anyway.” I turned to the final page of the note. “There’s just a little left,” I told him.

“No more, please,” he whined. “No more, Stevie.”

“You need to hear it all,” I spat. “Everything that was kept out of the papers — by me, goddammit! I want you to hear every word.”

I’m a sinner in so many ways, and what I’m going to do now, I know, is also a sin in the eyes of the church. But it’s what I deserve. I have an aching soul. To my dear cousin Gladys and your fine husband Herb, please give my love to your beautiful little girls, Mandie and Patsy. Tell them their Aunty Marge is going away on a long trip, but that she will always think of them and love them wherever she is.

“It’s as if you put that knife in Edwina yourself,” I said, bearing down on each word as if I were typing them in a frenzy. “And then pushed Marge into that train. You might as well have. You knew how unbalanced she was, probably even more so since her husband’s death. You knew she wanted you back, even though you didn’t want her yourself anymore. You probably even suspected she might kill herself after what you told her on her trip to the jail. What you didn’t know was that she would leave a note behind that got you off the hook — or rather, out of the electric chair. Must have been a wonderful surprise for you. Even in death, she gave you more than you deserved.”

“What are you going to do, Stevie?” my cousin asked. He had never seemed more pathetic to me than at that moment.

I shook my head and stood. “Not a damn thing, Charlie. Not one single damn, blessed thing. You’ve lost the two women closest to you in the world — after your mother, that is. That’s enough punishment for a lifetime, as far as I’m concerned.” I dropped a tip on the table and went to the front counter to pay the bill. I couldn’t stand to look at him any more.

“I’ll split it with you,” Charlie said, following after me.

“Nope, this one’s on me all the way,” I replied, unsmiling.

As we stepped out onto the sidewalk, Charlie held out a hand. “Well, Stevie... I guess I’ll be seeing you,” he said, giving me a tentative smile.

“No, Charlie, I don’t believe that you will,” I told him, ignoring the outstretched paw. I turned away and headed back south on State Street to Police Headquarters.