A Death in Pilsen (A Snap Malek Mystery) Read online

  Praise for Robert Goldsborough

  SHADOW OF THE BOMB

  "The author's own secret weapon is the way he stirs in just enough period detail to make you believe it really happened this way."

  –Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune

  "Featuring great characters and wonderful dialog… Goldsborough's description of Chicago has the quality of Max Allan Collins' fiction and Erik Larson's factual The Devil in the White City."

  –August P. Aleksy, Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore,

  Forest Park, IL

  "In 1942 most of the newspaper coverage is on the war, but Steve Malek covers the local police beat for the Tribune. Readers obtain a glimpse of how the war impacted Chicago and how careful everyone is not to reveal anything on weapons development. Malek is more interested in solving the homicides than in uncovering top-secret weapons that could harm his nation if revealed. His investigation is realistic and engrossing as he works his crime beat to the delight of fans of historical mysteries. Robert Goldsborough is a fantastic storyteller."

  –Midwest Book Reviews on Shadow of the Bomb

  THREE STRIKES YOU'RE DEAD

  "Goldsborough, best known as the heir to Rex Stout via his half-dozen Nero Wolfe novels, creates a prewar Chicago that is at once sinister and appealing. He also weaves an engaging subplot involving Dizzy Dean and the Chicago Cubs' drive to the 1938 World Series. An enormously entertaining caper."

  –Wes Lukowsky, Booklist 100th Anniversary Issue

  "Robert Goldsborough, the man who so brilliantly brought Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin back to literary life, has returned with a new detective, all his own–and that's cause for any mystery fan to rejoice! Goldsborough is a master storyteller, providing crackling dialogue and plot twists around every corner–readers are in for a real treat!"

  –Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Purgatory

  "You don't have to be a fan of the city of Chicago, or '30's-era gangsters, or baseball's Chicago Cubs, or suspense to enjoy Three Strikes You're Dead but if you are, you will love this book! Three Strikes You're Dead is a very well developed and written story. Mr. Goldsborough clearly knows and loves Chicago, and provides a delightful tour! Of course, even in fiction the Cubs can't win the series. Move this one higher on your to-be-read pile."

  –Sandi Loper-Herzog

  MURDER IN E MINOR

  "Goldsborough has not only written a first-rate mystery that stands on its own merits, he has faithfully re-created the round detective and his milieu."

  –Philadelphia Enquirer

  "Mr. Goldsborough has all of the late writer's stylistic mannerisms down pat."

  –The New York Times on Murder in E Minor

  "A smashing success…"

  –Chicago Sun-Times

  "A half dozen other writers have attempted it, but Goldsborough's is the only one that feels authentic, the only one able to get into Rex's psyche. If I hadn't known otherwise, I might have been fooled into thinking this was the genius Stout myself."

  –John McAleer, Rex Stout's official biographer

  and editor of The Stout Journal

  Also by Robert Goldsborough

  Snap Malek Mysteries From Echelon Press

  Three Strikes You're Dead

  Shadow of the Bomb

  Nero Wolfe Mysteries from Bantam Books

  Murder in E Minor

  Death on Deadline

  Fade to Black

  The Bloodied Ivy

  The Last Coincidence

  Silver Spire

  The Missing Chapter

  Robert Goldsborough

  A Death in Pilsen

  A Snap Malek Mystery

  Echelon Press, LLC

  A DEATH IN PILSEN

  A Snap Malek Mystery

  Book Three

  An Echelon Press Book

  First Echelon Press paperback printing / November 2007

  All rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 2007 by Robert Goldsborough

  Cover illustration © Nathalie Moore

  Echelon Press, LLC

  9735 Country

  Meadows Lane 1-D Laurel, MD 20723

  www.echelonpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Echelon Press, LLC.

  ISBN 978-1-59080-531-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007933586

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Janet,

  for reasons that would far more than fill this page

  And a warm thank-you to Karen Syed, Betsy Baird, and Kat Thompson, three great ladies from Echelon Press who keep me focused and on track–not always an easy task!

  Pilsen: A neighborhood on the near southwest side of Chicago. During the late 19th Century, the area was settled by Czech immigrants, those hailing from the Bohemian and Moravian provinces of what was then called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They named this new home after Plzen, the fourth-largest city in what is now the Czech Republic.

  Although other nationalities, including Germans, Poles, Slovaks, and Lithuanians, moved into the area, Pilsen remained a solidly Bohemian enclave until the middle of the 1950s, when Mexican immigrants began settling there. Today, Pilsen's population of about 45,000 is nearly 90% Hispanic.

  "On January 26, 1946, the first official war bride contingent boarded the S.S. Argentina, a 20,600-ton Moore-McCormick liner which had transported over 200,000 troops during wartime. There were 452 brides, thirty of them pregnant; 173 children…The women had husbands in forty-five of the forty-eight states."

  –Description of a historic sailing out of Southampton, England, from the book "War Brides."

  PROLOGUE

  "Five Minutes More," by Frank Sinatra of course, came from the jukebox in the hallway leading to the dank restrooms, although you could barely hear Frank's voice above the din.

  She sat halfway down the long, scarred mahogany bar, a bottle of Bohemian and a glass on a coaster in front of her. The brown bottle was empty, the clear glass half full. She crossed her right leg saucily over her left, showing all calf and almost as much thigh. Good legs, enhanced by what were probably rayon stockings, given the scarcity of nylons in these early postwar days. The stool to her left was empty. He slid in.

  "Mind if I take this seat?"

  "I cannot honestly claim ownership of it," she sniffed, taking a drag on her cigarette and tossing her blonde hair in a gesture of indifference.

  "You sound foreign. Like maybe…English?" He gave her what he had been told was an engaging grin.

  "Well now, aren't you ever the clever one," she snapped, smirking. "Did you manage to work that out all by yourself?"

  "I…" He didn't expect such a reaction, especially in a neighborhood bar where a besotted conviviality was supposed to be the norm. But he had gotten rebuffed in saloons before, and he shifted to what had been successful in the past–the humble approach. "I'm sorry; I certainly didn't mean to be insulting. I really like your…your accent, whatever it is."

  She raised an eyebrow. "I'm glad to hear that, yes I am. One very soon gets tired of people thinking that you're different." The trace of a smile creased a mouth generously coated with fiery red lipstick.

  "But different can be good," he said with a deprecating nod, waving to the bartender. "Can I buy you a drink?"

  "Only if it would make you feel good," she responded woodenly as "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" kicked in on the jukebox.

  "Yes, it would make me feel good," he
told her as he felt the sweat begin to percolate under his arms. He had entered territory where he didn't hold the high ground.

  "The beer in this country is truly wretched," she pronounced, wrinkling her nose. "We wouldn't so much as touch this bilge back home."

  He started to ask about "back home," but checked himself. One rebuff was enough for now. "What would you like?" he asked. "Name it."

  "Scotch, a good Scotch–if they even have one here." She mashed her cigarette butt in a metal ashtray.

  "What's your best Scotch?" he asked the bony, sallow-faced bartender, who smoothly pivoted to the back of the bar, pulled down a bottle, and held it out for inspection.

  She shrugged. "Suppose it will have to do. One can't be choosy now, can one?"

  He ordered Scotch on the rocks for both of them and held out his pack of Chesterfields. She took one and he lit it, noting the thin silver band on her ring finger.

  "Married?"

  She nodded. "Sorry to say."

  "Really? Why?"

  "You don't want to hear my life story."

  "Try me–I'm a good listener."

  She took a sip of her drink. "Life doesn't always work out the way you think it will."

  "Huh! I could write a book on that subject."

  "You're married?"

  "Divorced," he said, torching his own Chesterfield.

  "At least you're free now, which is more than I can say for myself."

  "What's stopping you…from getting divorced yourself, that is? There's all that red tape to go through, of course, but it's not illegal to split up. Or are you Catholic?"

  She shook her head. "It's like admitting defeat. I came all the way across the bloody Atlantic for this." She turned her palms up and spread her arms, as if this gritty little bar on

  West 18th Street in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood were the root of all her problems. "What about your husband?"

  She made a snorting sound. "What about him?"

  "Is he treating you badly?"

  "If you mean is he pinching every stinking penny we have until it squeals, yes, he damned well is. I haven't had a new pair of shoes since I came across the pond."

  "Hey, Eddie, I gotta go now. See you tomorrow night, okay?" The speaker was a slender, chestnut-haired young woman with light blue eyes who was sitting on the other side of the blonde. He hadn't noticed her.

  "Okay, I'll be here as usual, love," the blonde said.

  "Friend of yours?" he asked after the brunette had clicked out into the night on her high heels.

  "Marge? Yes, we both are here often. She's truly a good sort."

  "What did she call you–Eddie?"

  She laughed dryly. "Don't you go worrying yourself now, mate, I'm not a chap in ladies' togs. The name's Edwina. Not a common label here, but it is where I come from."

  "It sounds much better than Eddie. So, what does your husband do?"

  The song on the jukebox had ended, and before she could answer the question, one of the men along the bar called out to her: "Hey, Eddie, how 'bout you give us a song?"

  She waved the request away. "Aw, you've heard me enough in here, Len."

  "No, no," he persisted. "Give us just one. How 'bout that 'White Cliffs of Dover' you do so well?" That brought cries of "Yes! Yes!" and applause from the saloon's denizens.

  Eddie smiled and said, "Okay. Only the one song, though." She stood and started in with the familiar strains of the patriotic British World War II tune made famous by Vera Lynn:

  There'll be blue birds over the White Cliffs of Dover;

  Tomorrow just you wait and see…

  When she had finished the full lyrics, the bar exploded in cheers. Eddie blew kisses all around and went back to her stool.

  "That was wonderful," the visitor told her, meaning it. "You sound like a professional singer."

  "I'd like to be," she said, flushed from the adulation. "Vera Lynn, the English star, she's my idol. I want to be able to sing that song like she does."

  "Well, it sounds absolutely swell to me. Say, before you got up to sing, I started to ask about your husband. What does he do?"

  She glared at the drink on the bar in front of her. "He mainly works, works, works. Always talking about overtime, and how we need money for a down payment on a house. Never mind me sitting at home alone every miserable night with nothing except the wireless–or the radio, as you Yanks like to call it–to keep me company. But that was before I started coming in here. You might call this my freedom," she said, spreading her arms to encompass the bar.

  She had seemed attractive to him when he strode into the bar, but the longer they talked, the less appealing and the more hard-boiled she appeared to become. He figured the scowl she wore had become frozen on her face.

  "Well," he said, rising to leave, "I hope that everything works out between you and your husband."

  "Not likely, Mate," she said over her shoulder as he turned toward the door. "I'd like to kill that bloody bastard."

  CHAPTER 1

  April 1946

  "Seems like every day now there's another story about a ship loaded with war brides coming over here," Dirk O'Farrell of the Chicago Sun observed between slurps of coffee as he paged through his paper's final edition. "Wonder how all the good old American girls feel about these English and French and Dutch honeys, and even some frauleins, of all things, taking GIs off the marriage market. It doesn't seem quite right to me, somehow."

  "And just how would you have stopped it, Dirk?" asked Packy Farmer of the Herald American, contemplating one of his misshapen little hand-rolled cigarettes before he lit it. "Put blinders on our soldiers when they're not on duty? Or maybe lock them in their barracks at night? You'd have had a full-scale revolt on your hands, I'll wager."

  "True enough," O'Farrell answered. "There's no way of keeping nature from…well, from taking its course, shall we say. Not that all of our boys over there were exactly honest with the young ladies of Europe. You may remember a story a few weeks back–it was in your very own Tribune, Malek–about this girl over there, England I think, who fell for this soldier from North Carolina.

  "He fed her this line about how he had a plantation back home. When she got there, she learned it was nothing but a shack deep in the backwoods, miles from civilization. She took one look, got the hell out of there, and grabbed the very next train up to New York. They found her later holed up in some Manhattan hotel, mad as hell."

  "She ever go back to the guy?" Farmer asked.

  "Story didn't say," O'Farrell answered, "but I'd lay eight to five that she ended up on a boat back to where she came from."

  "What do you think, Snap?" Farmer posed, swiveling to face me. "You were over there toward the end. You must have seen lots of romances blooming between our boys and the local sweeties."

  "Yeah, Malek," the sawed-off Eddie Metz of the Times piped up, after blowing his pathetic version of a smoke ring. "Even though you're married, I'll bet you had all kinds of chances to…you know."

  "No, Eddie, I don't know," I shot back. "I wasn't there in uniform, as you damn well are aware; I was a correspondent for the Tribune. And my editors back here in Chicago didn't leave me a whole lot of time to go out on the town. They labored under some quaint theory that I was there to grind out copy, lots of it. I worked harder than I ever have."

  "If that's your story, by all means, stick with it, Snap," O'Farrell said with a smirk. He leaned back and contemplated the peeling paint of indeterminate color on the ceiling. "No one on this side of the drink will ever be the wiser. What puzzles me, though, is why, after the paper brought you home from Europe, you actually asked to have your old beat back. I mean, you had all those bylines from England and Germany, and then you want to park yourself in this grimy dump with us again."

  "It was just that I couldn't bear to be away from you fine fellows any longer," I deadpanned as they guffawed and groaned.

  But Dirk O'Farrell had a point. For years, I had toiled as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune, bi
ggest of the city's five daily newspapers, in the pressroom at Police Headquarters,

  1121 S. State St., Chicago, USA. Beginning shortly after Pearl Harbor, I had nagged various of the Trib editors to make me a foreign correspondent. Early in '45, not long after Catherine and I were married, they finally got tired of hearing me whine and sent me off to the paper's London bureau, where there was a temporary opening. Catherine stayed home, as it was clear I wouldn't be there for more than a few months. It was an exciting, energizing time to be in England, along with all the other newspaper correspondents from across the country and around the world, to say nothing of the likes of Eric Sevareid and Edward R. Murrow. I even met Eisenhower twice and went to Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference where Truman, Stalin, and Churchill decided, for good or ill, on the shape postwar Europe would take. It was there, in mid-conference, that Clement Attlee, the Labor Party candidate who had defeated Churchill as prime minister in the summer election, took over Britain's seat at the table.

  When I returned to Chicago late in '45, my stock at the paper was high, and I almost surely could have landed a spot as a general assignment reporter. But now that I was married again, I found I liked keeping regular hours, and the editors were happy to have me back in the Headquarters Press Room on the day shift.

  I replaced a guy who was both lazy and incompetent, and who now works in public relations, writing florid press releases that extol, among other things, the gastronomic delights of dining at a chain of cut-rate steak houses in the city.