A Death in Pilsen

Chapter 7

I drove east to Pilsen for the second time in the last few days. I had passed Horvath’s Tap many times on visits back to the old neighborhood to see my folks, but had never set foot inside. Turns out I hadn’t missed much.

The corner tavern fronted on 18th Street, occupying the first floor of a three-story brick walkup, with what I assumed were apartments on the upper floors. The wooden sign over the door proclaiming its name was hand-lettered and faded, the paint peeling.

The small horizontal window next to the door was filled with a red-and-blue neon Pabst Blue Ribbon emblem. Inside, the joint was dark and stale-smelling, a beery, all-too-familiar saloon odor.

A half dozen men and a couple of women sat at the bar, which must have been about forty feet long, and a few couples were scattered through the booths. The jukebox was playing “To Each His Own” by Eddie Howard as I dropped onto a stool near the left end, three seats from the nearest other patron.

“What’ll it be?” the tall, bony bartender muttered listlessly.

“A Schlitz on draught and a minute of your time.”

“The Schlitz you can have,” he grunted, walking along the bar to the pull. He drew a glass of the beer with just the right amount of foam and shuffled back, banging it down in front of me. “That’ll be four bits, or do you want to run a tab?”

I dropped two quarters on the worn and nicked mahogany surface. “I’ve got some questions,” I told him.

“Well, I ain’t got any answers,” he sneered. “In case you didn’t notice, I’m at work.”

I leaned forward on my stool. “Yeah, and really exerting yourself, by the way. How’d you like to keep working, Mac,” I mouthed quietly, but in the most belligerent tone I could muster.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean? You pickin’ a fight with me, Mac?”

“Not if you drop that surly attitude of yours and listen for a minute.”

He put his hands on his hips and considered me through heavy-lidded eyes. “You a cop?”

“Nope. I’m a newspaper reporter — Tribune — working out of Police Headquarters.” I flashed my press card. “I’ve got some questions about Edwina Malek, the woman who was killed last—”

“That didn’t have nothin’ at all to do with this place,” the bartender growled. “Cops have already been in here asking questions, and I don’t need to waste my time talking to any damned reporters.”

“Oh, I think you do,” I said, still keeping my voice low enough not to be heard over the music. “You own this fine establishment?”

“Part owner,” he huffed, sticking out his long, thin jaw. “What’s it to you?”

“I may not be a cop, but I’ve got lots of friends on the force. More important where you’re concerned, I’ve also got friends — some very important, very powerful friends in... the... Building... Department. Got it?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I made a slicing motion with my hand to cut him off. “They owe me some favors, if you get my drift. I wonder if your wiring is up to code,” I said, looking around. “They’ve been getting a lot tougher on that sort of thing, as you may be aware. What about your plumbing? An inspector been around lately?”

“Few months back,” he mumbled, running his rag absently over the surface of the bar.

“Seems like they’re probably due to come back real soon, huh? You should know that there’s a really tough new inspector on the plumbing side. Talk is that he’s closed down two bars in Austin and another one up Lakeview way until they fix their problems. Nailed the doors closed.

“I can get you the names of the places if you’re interested. Be a shame to have this joint shuttered. Looks like a nice spot for neighborhood folks to gather. But, well, the law’s the law, right? And there’s also a mean bird who does the electrical inspections now...”

The barkeep — I soon learned that his name was Maury — made a face and let out air. “Okay, okay, what is it that you’re after?”

“Names. Names of people in here who’d been friendly with Edwina. And, by the way, nobody else who hangs around this place needs to know that I’m with a newspaper, got it? If I find out you’ve told anybody, you can be damned sure some city inspectors will start showing up real soon. Now, what about some names?”

“I gave the cop who came in here a few, but he didn’t seem to care,” Maury said. “He was just going all around the neighborhood talking to people. After all, it was the husband what did it, right?”

“Maybe. But I happen to be the curious sort,” I said, pulling out my reporter’s notebook. “Let’s start.”

He wasn’t happy, but that was hardly my concern. “Well, first off, there’s a woman, but I haven’t seen her tonight,” he said, scanning the room. “She’s a regular, nice lady named Marge. She and Edwina were pretty chummy.”

“Her last name?”

“Don’t know for sure that I’ve ever even heard it,” Maury said, stepping away to fill a drink order at the other end of the bar.

“Does this Marge come in here most nights?” I asked when he returned.

“Pretty much. She’s a war widow. I think her husband caught it in the D-Day invasion.”

“Attractive?”

He nodded. “And lively, too, at least sometimes, when she’s not thinkin’ about her dead husband. She and Edwina liked to sit at the bar. Marge and the guys were always after Edwina to sing. She had a real good voice, said she wanted to be a nightclub singer some day. I’d rather listen to her than most of this stuff on the jukebox,” he added, jerking a thumb in the direction of the brightly lit music machine in the corner.

“So she could really liven the place up, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. And the two women, they both laughed a lot, but I think Marge, she forced herself to be cheerful sometimes. Anyway, the guys enjoyed hanging around them.”

“Is that all that the guys enjoyed?”

“Look, Mister, I don’t go snoopin’ around into the lives of my customers. That ain’t my way. I figure a tavern is a place where people are entitled to their personal privacy. Lot of ’em come in here to get away from their troubles.”

“I totally agree about the privacy thing, except that this happens to be a murder case, and murder is hardly a private issue. Who were these guys that liked to hang around the ladies?”

“You didn’t get any of their names from me, see?” he said, leaning toward me. “I don’t want no trouble.”

“Okay. It’s a deal. Go ahead.”

“Well, there’s Karl, last name’s Bohemian, begins with a ‘V.’ Something like Vocek.” He spelled it.

“A regular?”

“Pretty much, although he hasn’t been in tonight, either. Not yet, anyway.” Maury left again to serve another beer to a loud guy down the bar who was telling Negro and Jewish jokes. “So there’s this rabbi, see, and—”

Mercifully, I didn’t hear the rest of the joke because a new song on the jukebox drowned out the loudmouth.

“Any idea where this Karl lives?” I asked when Maury came back.

“Someplace close by. I think he walks here.”

“What does he do?”

“Works as a foreman at that big Western Electric plant out in Cicero.”

“Making telephones, eh?”

Maury nodded. “I guess. That’s what they do there. I never asked him.”

“He married?”

“No business of mine.”

“That’s not an answer to the question.”

He gritted his teeth. “Yeah, he’s got a wife. Never met her, though.”

“What’s he like?”

“Tough customer. Seems to be grumbling about something whenever he comes in. His job, or his wife, or the White Sox, or the weather. It’s always something, that’s just the way he is. I think Edwina and Marge both saw him as a challenge. They teased him a lot to loosen him up, and he got so he liked it. They actually got him laughing quite a bit, and he loved to hear Edwina sing, particularly that one from the war, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.’ He musta asked for it almost every time she came in.”

“And she’d always sing it?”

“Hell, yes. She loved being asked. She sang quite a bit in here. Said she wanted to do it professionally some day. Just like some English singer, name was Vera Lynn, I think. I never heard of her.”

“Your loss,” I said scribbling some notes. “Who else liked Edwina?”

Maury looked uncomfortable. He clearly wasn’t enjoying the conversation. “Len, last name of Rollins. And before you ask, he lives in the neighborhood, smokes like a chimney, is single, and works on the loading dock of a furniture warehouse over on Loomis down near the canals.”

“Hey, you’re getting very good at anticipating my questions, Maury. Rollins a regular in here?”

“Yeah, pretty much. He’s down at the other end of the bar now,” the barkeep said, lowering his voice unnecessarily, given the noise level in the room. “He’s the short guy in the brown jacket, wearing a flat cap.”

“Oh yeah, I see him,” I said after I’d leaned back and peered around the backs of several others hunched on their stools. Rollins, who looked to be short, was puffing on a cigarette and looking straight ahead with glazed eyes. “What’s he like?”

“Solemn sort, hits the bottle pretty hard, but don’t quote me on that,” Maury answered. “Hard to get more than a sentence at a time out of him. Funny thing, though: He’s another one what loosened up around Edwina. She could really bring those guys out of their shells. She was good for this place, too,” he added in a melancholy tone.

“Now she could be kinda sarcastic when you first met her, but once she got to know you, she was very friendly. Loved to joke, too. She had a sort of English sense of humor that really got the boys going.”

“Didn’t care much for her husband, though, did she?”

“Never met him,” Maury huffed.

“She talk much about him?”

“Enough so you knew she wasn’t very happy at home, I’ll say that much.”

“What was her beef?”

“Said all he ever did was work, day and night. Weekends. Never gave her any money, never wanted to go out anywhere. Guy sounds like he’s a real stick-in-the-mud as well as a goddamn murderer. But I guess you think somebody else did it, huh?” he spat, daring me to contradict him.

“Maybe. I just like to be sure.”

“Why’re you so interested, anyway? What do you know that the coppers don’t know?”

“I happen to know Edwina’s husband, and he’s just about the last person in the world capable of committing murder,” I said quietly.

“So you’re conducting your own investigation, huh? Cops ain’t hardly gonna like that,” Maury said without hostility.

“Like I told you before, they know me. We get along. So that’s two guys so far who liked to spend time around Edwina when she dropped in here. Anybody else?”

He wrinkled up his face and stroked his oversized chin. “Mmm, well, there’s Johnny Sulski, of course, and Big Ben Barnstable.”

“Barnstable? The old light heavyweight, right?”

“Yep, that’s him. Doesn’t box any more these days, of course. Says he took his share of punches over the years, and that was more than enough.”

“I seem to recall that he gave as good as he got, though. What’s he doing now?”

“Works in some gym out around Madison and Central. Even helps manage the place, far as I know, and works with the young fighters.”

“What’s he like?”

A shrug. “Easygoing. You might think that he’d be one rough customer, given his old line of work, but he’s as gentle as a lamb, always in good humor. Loved to spend time around Edwina. She asked him all about prize fighting and was fascinated by his stories of life in the ring and all those characters he fought. Sometime back in the thirties, they say he went six rounds with Braddock once, and was still on his feet at the end — this against a heavyweight, no less, and a one-time champ to boot.”

“He married?”

“Divorced, far as I know. Comes in here three, maybe four times a week. He’s not here now, though.”

“And that other joe you mentioned?”

Maury went away to pour another drink, this one for Rollins, and came back to the quieter end of the room. “Johnny Sulski? He was here earlier, just for one beer. Said he had to be someplace else.”

“And he’s a regular?”

“’Bout as much as anybody. He’s here most nights.”

“And he liked Edwina?”

“A lot, I would say. He’s the most tight-lipped one of the bunch, even more than Rollins down there,” he said, motioning his head toward the other end of the bar. “But like with the others, that Edwina, she had a way of amusing Johnny. She could make him laugh, loosen him up.”

“What’s Sulski’s story?”

Maury clearly was uncomfortable with the grilling I was giving him, but he took a deep breath and went on. “Really can’t tell you much about him at all. Couldn’t even say if he’s married, but if I was to guess, I’d say no. I know he does some kind of construction work, but that’s about all I can tell you. Like I said, he pretty much keeps to himself.”

“And you really don’t know this Marge’s last name?” He wrinkled up his already lined face again, which didn’t flatter him. “I know she said one time awhile ago that, after her husband got killed, she took back her maiden name. It was another one of those there Czech names, or maybe Polish — begins with a ‘B.’” He gave a sudden start and nodded toward the door. “There she is now. Why don’t you ask her yourself?”