In June 1936, Chicago was in the midst of the Great Depression and a sweltering summer, and I was in the midst of Chicago. Specifically, on this Tuesday afternoon, the ninth to be exact, I was sitting on a sofa in the minuscule lobby of the Van Buren Hotel. The sofa had seen better days, and so had the hotel. The Van Buren was no flophouse, merely a moderately rundown residential hotel just west of the El tracks, near the LaSalle Street Station.
Divorce work wasn’t the bread and butter of the A-l Detective Agency, but we didn’t turn it away. I use the editorial “we,” but actually there was only one of us, me, Nathan Heller, “president” of the firm. And despite my high-flown title, I was just a down-at-the-heels dick reading a racing form in a seedy hotel’s seedy lobby, waiting to see if a certain husband showed up in the company of another woman.
Another woman, that is, than the one he was married to: the dumpy, dusky dame who’d come to my office yesterday.
“I’m not as good-looking as I was fourteen years ago,” she’d said, coyly, her voice honeyed by a Southern drawl, “but I’m a darn sight younger looking than some women I know.”
“You’re a very handsome woman, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, smiling, figuring she was fifty if she was a day, “and I’m sure there’s nothing to your suspicions.”
She had been a looker once, but she’d run to fat, and her badly hennaed hair and overdone makeup were no help; nor was the raccoon stole she wore over a faded floral print housedress. The stole looked a bit ratty and in any case was hardly called for in this weather.
“Mr. Heller, they are more than suspicions. My husband is a successful businessman, with an office in the financial district. He is easy prey to gold diggers.”
The strained formality of her tone made the raccoon stole make sense, somehow.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve suspected him of infidelity.”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“Are you hoping for reconciliation, or has a lawyer advised you to establish grounds for divorce?”
“At this point,” she said, calmly, the Southern drawl making her words seem more casual than they were, “I wish only to know. Can you understand that, Mr. Heller?”
“Certainly. I’m afraid I’ll need some details…”
She had them. Though they lived in Hyde Park, a quiet, quietly well-off residential area, Bolton was keeping a room at the Van Buren Hotel, a few blocks down the street from the very office in which we sat. Mrs. Bolton believed that he went to the hotel on assignations while pretending to leave town on business trips.
“How did you happen to find that out?” I asked her.
“His secretary told me,” she said, with a crinkly little smile, proud of herself.
“Are you sure you need a detective? You seem to be doing pretty well on your own…”
The smile disappeared and she seemed quite serious now, digging into her big black purse and coming back with a folded wad of cash. She thrust it across the desk toward me, as if daring me to take it.
I don’t take dares, but I do take money. And there was plenty of it: a hundred in tens and fives.
“My rate’s ten dollars a day and expenses,” I said, reluctantly, the notion of refusing money going against the grain. “A thirty-dollar retainer would be plenty…”
She nodded curtly. “I’d prefer you accept that. But it’s all I can afford, remember; when it’s gone, it’s gone.”
I wrote her out a receipt and told her I hoped to refund some of the money, though of course I hoped the opposite, and that I hoped to be able to dispel her fears about her husband’s fidelity, though there was little hope of that, either. Hope was in short supply in Chicago, these days.
Right now, she said, Joe was supposedly on a business trip; but the secretary had called to confide in Mrs. Bolton that her husband had been in the office all day.
I had to ask the usual questions. She gave me a complete description (and a photo she’d had foresight to bring), his business address, working hours, a list of places he was known to frequent.
And, so, I had staked out the hotel yesterday, starting late afternoon. I didn’t start in the lobby. The hotel was a walk-up, the lobby on the second floor; the first floor leased out to a saloon, in the window of which I sat nursing beers and watching people stroll by. One of them, finally, was Joseph Bolton, a tall, nattily attired businessman about ten years his wife’s junior; he was pleasant looking, but with his wire-rimmed glasses and receding brown hair was no Robert Taylor.
Nor was he enjoying feminine company, unless said company was already up in the hotel room before I’d arrived on the scene. I followed him up the stairs to the glorified landing of a lobby, where I paused at the desk while he went on up the next flight of stairs (there were no elevators in the Van Buren) and, after buying a newspaper from the desk clerk, went up to his floor, the third of the four-story hotel, and watched from around a corner as he entered his room.
Back down in the lobby, I approached the desk clerk, an older guy with rheumy eyes and a blue bow tie. I offered him a buck for the name of the guest in Room 3C.
“Bolton,” he said.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “Let me see the register.” I hadn’t bothered coming in earlier to bribe a look because I figured Bolton would be here under an assumed name.
“What it’s worth to you?” he asked.
“I already paid,” I said, and turned his register around and looked in it. Joseph Bolton it was. Using his own goddamn name. That was a first.
“Any women?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” he said.
“Regular customer?”
“He’s been living here a couple months.”
“Living here? He’s here every night?”
“I dunno. He pays his six bits a day, is all I know. I don’t tuck him in.”
I gave the guy half a buck to let me rent his threadbare sofa. Sat for another couple of hours and followed two women upstairs. Both seemed to be hookers; neither stopped at Bolton’s room.
At a little after eight, Bolton left the hotel and I followed him over to Adams Street, to the Berghoff, the best German restaurant for the money in the Loop. What the hell-I hadn’t eaten yet either. We both dined alone.
That night I phoned Mrs. Bolton with my report, such as it was.
“He has a woman in his room,” she insisted.
“It’s possible,” I allowed.
“Stay on the job,” she said, and hung up.
I stayed on the job. That is, the next afternoon I returned to the Van Buren Hotel, or anyway to the saloon underneath it, and drank beers and watched the world go by. Now and then the world would go up the hotel stairs. Men I ignored; women that looked like hookers I ignored. One woman, who showed up around four thirty, I did not ignore.
She was as slender and attractive a woman as Mildred Bolton was not, though she was only a few years younger. And her wardrobe was considerably more stylish than my client’s-high-collared white dress with a bright colorful figured print, white gloves, white shoes, a felt hat with a wide turned-down brim.
She did not look like the sort of woman who would be stopping in at the Van Buren Hotel, but stop in she did.
So did I. I trailed her up to the third floor, where she was met at the door of Bolton’s room by a male figure. I just got a glimpse of the guy, but he didn’t seem to be Bolton. She went inside.
I used a pay phone in the saloon downstairs and called Mrs. Bolton in Hyde Park.
“I can be there in forty minutes,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I want to catch them together. I’m going to claw that hussy’s eyes out.”
“Mrs. Bolton, you don’t want to do that…”
“I most certainly do. You can go home, Mr. Heller. You’ve done your job, and nicely.”
And she had hung up.
I’d mentioned to her that the man in her husband’s room did not seem to be her husband, but that apparently didn’t matter. Now I had a choice: I could walk back up to my office and write Mrs. Bolton out a check refunding seventy of her hundred dollars, goddamnit (ten bucks a day, ten bucks expenses-she’d pay for my bribes and beers).
Or I could do the Christian thing and wait around and try to defuse this thing before it got even uglier.
I decided to do the latter. Not because it was the Christian thing-I wasn’t a Christian, after all-but because I might be able to convince Mrs. Bolton she needed a few more days’ work out of me, to figure out what was really going on here. It seemed to me she could use a little more substantial information, if a divorce was to come out of this. It also seemed to me I could use the money.
I don’t know how she arrived-whether by El or streetcar or bus or auto-but as fast as she was walking, it could’ve been on foot. She was red in the face, eyes hard and round as marbles, fists churning as she strode, her head floating above the incongruous raccoon stole.
I hopped off my bar stool and caught her at the sidewalk.
“Don’t go in there, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, taking her arm gently.
She swung it away from me, held her head back and, short as she was, looked down at me, nostrils flared. I felt like a matador who dropped his cape.
“You’ve been discharged for the day, Mr. Heller,” she said.
“You still need my help. You’re not going about this the right way.”
With indignation she began, “My husband…”
“Your husband isn’t in there. He doesn’t even get off work till six.”
She swallowed. The redness of her face seemed to fade some; I was quieting her down.
Then fucking fate stepped in, in the form of that swanky dame in the felt hat, who picked that very moment to come strolling out of the Van Buren Hotel like it was the goddamn Palmer House. On her arm was a young man, perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, in a cream-color seersucker suit and a gold tie, with a pale complexion and sky-blue eyes and corn-silk blond hair. He and the woman on his arm shared the same sensitive mouth.
“Whore!” somebody shouted.
Who else? My client.
I put my hand over my face and shook my head and wished I was dead, or at least in my office.
“Degenerate!” Mrs. Bolton sang out. She rushed toward the slender woman, who reared back, properly horrified. The young man gripped the woman’s arm tightly; whether to protect her or himself, it wasn’t quite clear.
Well, the sidewalks were filled with people who’d gotten off work, heading for the El or the LaSalle Street Station, so we had an audience. Yes we did.
And Mrs. Bolton was standing nose to nose with the startled woman, saying defiantly, “I am Mrs. Bolton-you’ve bup to see my husband!”
“Why, Mrs. Bolton,” the woman said, backing away as best she could. “Your husband is not in his room.”
“Liar!”
“If he were in the room, I wouldn’t have been in there myself, I assure you.”
“Lying whore…”
“Okay,” I said, wading in, taking Mrs. Bolton by the arm, less gently this time, “that’s enough.”
“Don’t talk to my mother that way,” the young man said to Mrs. Bolton.
“I’ll talk to her any way I like, you little degenerate.”
And the young man slapped my client. It was a loud, ringing slap, and drew blood from one corner of her wide mouth.
I pointed a finger at the kid’s nose. “That wasn’t nice. Back away.”
My client’s eyes were glittering; she was smiling, a blood-flecked smile that wasn’t the sanest thing I ever saw. Despite the gleeful expression, she began to scream things at the couple: “Whore! Degenerate!”
“Oh Christ,” I said, wishing I’d listened to my old man and finished college.
We were encircled by a crowd who watched all this with bemused interest, some people smiling, others frowning, others frankly amazed. In the street the clop-clop of an approaching mounted police officer, interrupted in the pursuit of parking violators, cut through the din. A tall, lanky officer, he climbed off his mount and pushed through the crowd.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
“This little degenerate hit me,” my client said, wearing her bloody mouth and her righteous indignation like medals, and she grabbed the kid by the tie and yanked the poor son of a bitch by it, jerking him silly.
It made me laugh. It was amusing only in a sick way, but I was sick enough to appreciate it.
“That’ll be all of that,” the officer said. “Now what happened here?”
I filled him in, in a general way, while my client interrupted with occasional non sequiturs; the mother and son just stood there looking chagrined about being the center of attention for perhaps a score of onlookers.
“I want that dirty little brute arrested,” Mrs. Bolton said, through an off-white picket fence of clenched teeth. “I’m a victim of assault!”
The poor shaken kid was hardly a brute, and he was cleaner than most, but he admitted having struck her, when the officer asked him.
“I’m going to have to take you in, son,” the officer said.
The boy looked like he might cry. Head bowed, he shrugged and his mother, eyes brimming with tears herself, hugged him.
The officer went to a call box and summoned a squad car and soon the boy was sent away, the mother waiting pitifully at the curb as the car pulled off, the boy’s pale face looking back, a sad cameo in the window.
I was at my client’s side.
“Let me help you get home, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, taking her arm again.
She smiled tightly, patronizingly, withdrew her arm. “I’m fine, Mr. Heller. I can take care of myself. I thank you for your assistance.”
And she rolled like a tank through what remained of the crowd, toward the El station.
I stood there a while, trying to gather my wits; it would have taken a better detective than yours truly to find them, however, so, finally, I approached the shattered woman who still stood at the curb. The crowd was gone. So was the mounted officer. All that remained were a few horse apples and me.
“I’m sorry about all that,” I told her.
She looked at me, her face smooth, her eyes sad; they were a darker blue than her son’s. “What’s your role in this?”
“I’m an investigator. Mrs. Bolton suspects her husband of infidelity.”
She laughed harshly-a very harsh laugh for such a refined woman. “My understanding is that Mrs. Bolton has suspected that for some fourteen years-and without foundation. But at this point, it would seem moot, one would think.”
“Moot? What are you talking about?”
“The Boltons have been separated for months. Mr. Bolton is suing her for divorce.”
“What? Since when?”
“Why, since January.”
“Then Bolton does live at the Van Buren Hotel, here?”
“Yes. My brother and I have known Mr. Bolton for years. My son Charles came up to Chicago recently, to find work, and Joe-Mr. Bolton-is helping him find a job.”
“You’re, uh, not from Chicago?”
“I live in Woodstock. I’m a widow. Have you any other questions?”
“Excuse me, ma’am. I’m sorry about this. Really. My client misled me about a few things.” I tipped my hat to her.
She warmed up a bit; gave me a smile. Tentative, but a smile. “Your apology is accepted, mister…?”
“Heller,” I said. “Nathan. And your name?”
“Marie Winston,” she said, and extended her gloved hand.
I grasped it, smiled.
“Well,” I said, shrugged, smiled, tipped my hat again, and headed back for my office.
It wasn’t the first time a client had lied to me, and it sure wouldn’t be the last. But I’d never been lied to in quite this way. For one thing, I wasn’t sure Mildred Bolton knew she was lying. This lady clearly did not have all her marbles.
I put the hundred bucks in the bank and the matter out of my mind, until I received a phone call, on the afternoon of June 14.
“This himrie Winston, Mr. Heller. Do you remember me?”
At first, frankly, I didn’t; but I said, “Certainly. What can I do for you, Mrs. Winston?”
“That…incident out in front of the Van Buren Hotel last Wednesday, which you witnessed…”
“Oh yes. What about it?”
“Mrs. Bolton has insisted on pressing charges. I wonder if you could appear in police court tomorrow morning, and explain what happened?”
“Well…”
“Mr. Heller, I would greatly appreciate it.”
I don’t like turning down attractive women, even on the telephone; but there was more to it than that: the emotion in her voice got to me.
“Well, sure,” I said.
So the next morning I headed over to the south Loop police court and spoke my piece. I kept to the facts, which I felt would pretty much exonerate all concerned. The circumstances were, as they say, extenuating.
Mildred Bolton, who glared at me as if I’d betrayed her, approached the bench and spoke of the young man’s “unprovoked assault.” She claimed to be suffering physically and mentally from the blow she’d received. The latter, at least, was believable. Her eyes were round and wild as she answered the judge’s questions.
When the judge fined young Winston one hundred dollars, Mrs. Bolton stood in her place in the gallery and began to clap. Loudly. The judge looked at her, too startled to rap his gavel and demand order; then she flounced out of the courtroom very girlishly, tossing her raccoon stole over her shoulder, exulting in her victory.
An embarrassed silence fell across the room. And it’s hard to embarrass hookers, a brace of which were awaiting their turn at the docket.
Then the judge pounded his gavel and said, “The court vacates this young man’s fine.”
Winston, who’d been hangdog throughout the proceedings, brightened like his switch had been turned on. He pumped his lawyer’s hand and turned to his mother, seated behind him just beyond the railing, and they hugged.
On the way out Marie Winston, smiling gently, touched my arm and said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Heller.”
“I don’t think I made much difference.”
“I think you did. The judge vacated the fine, after all.”
“Hell, I had nothing to do with that. Mildred was your star witness.”
“In a way I guess she was.”
“I notice her husband wasn’t here.”
Son Charles spoke up. “No, he’s at work. He…well, he thought it was better he not be here. We figured that woman would be here, after all.”
“That woman is sick.”
“In the head,” Charles said bitterly.
“That’s right. You or I couldbe sick that way, too. Somebody ought to help her.”
Marie Winston, straining to find some compassion for Mildred Bolton, said, “Who would you suggest?”
“Damnit,” I said, “the husband. He’s been with her fourteen years. She didn’t get this way overnight. The way I see it, he’s got a responsibility to get her some goddamn help before he dumps her by the side of the road.”
Mrs. Winston smiled at that, some compassion coming through after all. “You have a very modern point of view, Mr. Heller.”
“Not really. I’m not even used to talkies yet. Anyway, I’ll see you, Mrs. Winston. Charles.”
And I left the graystone building and climbed in my ’32 Auburn and drove back to my office. I parked in the alley, in my space, and walked over to the Berghoff for lunch. I think I hoped to find Bolton there. But he wasn’t.
I went back to the office and puttered a while; I had a pile of retail credit-risk checks to whittle away at.
Hell with it, I thought, and walked over to Bolton’s office building, a narrow, fifteen-story, white granite structure just behind the Federal Reserve on West Jackson, next to the El. Bolton was doing all right-better than me, certainly-but as a broker he was in the financial district only by a hair. No doubt he was a relatively small-time insurance broker, making twenty or twenty-five grand a year. Big money by my standards, but a lot of guys over at the Board of Trade spilled more than that.
There was no lobby really, just a wide hall between facing rows of shops-newsstand, travel agency, cigar store. The uniformed elevator operator, a skinny, pockmarked guy about my age, was waiting for a passenger. I was it.
“Tenth floor,” I told him, and he took me up.
He was pulling open the cage doors when we heard the air crack, three times.
“What the hell was that?” he said.
“It wasn’t a car backfiring,” I said. “You better stay here.”
I moved cautiously out into the hall. The elevators came up a central shaft, with a squared-off “c” of offices all about. I glanced quickly at the names on the pebbled glass in the wood-partition walls, and finally lit upon BOLTON AND SCHMIDT, INSURANCE BROKERS. I swallowed and moved cautiously in that direction as the door flew open and a young woman flew out-a dark-haired dish of maybe twenty with wide eyes and a face drained of blood, her silk stockings flashing as she rushed my way.
She fell into my arms and I said, “Are you wounded?”
“No,” she swallowed, “but somebody is.”
The poor kid was gasping for air; I hauled her toward the bank of elevators. Even under the strain, I was enjoying the feel and smell of her.
“You wouldn’t be Joseph Bolton’s secretary, by any chance?” I asked, helping her onto the elevator.
She nodded, eyes still huge.
“Take her down,” I told the operator.
And I headed back for that office. I was nearly there when I met Joseph Bolton, as he lurched down the hall. He had a gun in his hand. His light brown suitcoat was splotched with blood in several places; so was his right arm. He wasn’t wearing his eyeglasses, which made his face seem naked somehow. His expression seemed at once frightened, pained, and sorrowful.
He staggered toward me like a child taking its first steps, and I held my arms out to him like daddy. But they were more likely his last steps: he fell to the marble floor and began to writhe, tracing abstract designs in his own blood on the smooth surface.
I moved toward him and he pointed the gun at me, a little .32 revolver. “Stay away! Stay away!”
“Okay, bud, okay,” I said.
I heard someone laughing.
A woman.
I looked up and in the office doorway, feet planted like a giant surveying a puny world, was dumpy little Mildred, in her floral housedress and raccoon stole. Her mug was split in a big goofy smile.
“Don’t pay any attention to him, Mr. Heller,” she said, lightly. “He’s just faking.”
“He’s shot to shit, lady!” I said.
Keeping their distance out of respect and fear were various tenth-floor tenants, standing near their various offices, as if witnessing some strange performance.
“Keep her away from me!” Bolton managed to shout. His mouth was bubbling with blood. His body moved slowly across the marble floor like a slug, leaving a slimy red trail.
I moved to Mrs. Bolton, stood between her and Bolton. “You just take it easy…”
Mrs. Bolton, giggling, peeked out from in back of me. “Look at him, fooling everybody.”
“You behave,” I told her. Then I called out to a businessman of about fifty near the elevators. I asked him if there were any doctors in the building, and he said yes, and I said then for Christsake go get one.
“Why don’t you get up and stop faking?” she said teasingly to her fallen husband, the Southern drawl dripping off her words. She craned her neck around me to see him, like she couldn’t bear to miss a moment of the show.
“Keep her away! Keep her away!”
Bolton continued to writhe like a wounded snake, but he kept clutching that gun, and wouldn’t let anyone near him. He would cry out that he couldn’t breathe, beating his legs against the floor, but he seemed always conscious of his wife’s presence. He would move his head so as to keep my body between him and her round cold glittering eyes.
“Don’t you mind Joe, Mr. Heller. He’s just putting on an act.”
If so, I had a hunch it was his final performance.
And now he began to scream in agony.
I approached him and he looked at me with tears in his eyes, eyes that bore the confusion of a child in pain, and he relented, allowed me to come close, handed me the gun, like he was offering a gift. I accepted it, by the nose of the thingdropped it in my pocket.
“Did you shoot yourself, Mr. Bolton?” I asked him.
“Keep that woman away from me,” he managed, lips bloody.
“He’s not really hurt,” his wife said, mincingly, from the office doorway.
“Did your wife shoot you?”
“Just keep her away…”
Two people in white came rushing toward us-a doctor and a nurse-and I stepped aside, but the doctor, a middle-aged, rather heavyset man with glasses, asked if I’d give him a hand. I said sure and pitched in.
Bolton was a big man, nearly two hundred pounds I’d say, and pretty much dead weight; we staggered toward the elevator like drunks. Like Bolton himself had staggered toward me, actually. The nurse tagged along.
So did Mrs. Bolton.
The nurse, young, blond, slender, did her best to keep Mrs. Bolton out of the elevator, but Mrs. Bolton pushed her way through like a fullback. The doctor and I, bracing Bolton, couldn’t help the young nurse.
Bolton, barely conscious, said, “Please…please, keep her away.”
“Now, now,” Mrs. Bolton said, the violence of her entry into the elevator forgotten (by her), standing almost primly, hands folded over the big black purse, “everything will be all right, dear. You’ll see.”
Bolton began to moan; the pain it suggested wasn’t entirely physical.
On the thirteenth floor, a second doctor met us and took my place hauling Bolton, and I went ahead and opened the door onto a waiting room where patients, having witnessed the doctor and nurse race madly out of the office, were milling about expectantly. The nurse guided the doctors and their burden down a hall into an X-ray room. The nurse shut the door on them and faced Mrs. Bolton with a firm look.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bolton, you’ll have to wait.”
“Is that so?” she said.
“Mrs. Bolton,” I said, touching her arm.
She glared at me. “Who invited you?”
I resisted the urge to say, you did, you fucking cow, and just stood back while she moved up and down the narrow corridor between the offices and examining rooms, searching for a door that would lead her to her beloved husband. She trundled up and down, grunting, talking to herself, and the nurse looked at me helplessly.
“She is the wife,” I said, with a facial shrug.
The nurse sighed heavily and went to a door adjacent to the X-ray room and called out to Mrs. Bolton; Mrs. Bolton whirled and looked at her fiercely.
“You can view your husband’s treatment from in here,” the nurse said.
Mrs. Bolton smiled in tight triumph and drove her taxicab of a body into the room. I followed her. Don’t ask me why.
A wide glass panel looked in on the X-ray room. Mrs. Bolton climbed onto an xamination table, got up on her knees, and watched the flurry of activity beyond the glass, as her husband lay on a table being attended by the pair of frantic doctors.
“Did you shoot him, Mrs. Bolton?” I asked her.
She frowned but did not look at me. “Are you still here?”
“You lied to me, Mrs. Bolton.”
“No, I didn’t. And I didn’t shoot him, either.”
“What happened in there?”
“I never touched that gun.” She was moving her head side to side, like somebody in the bleachers trying to see past the person sitting in front.
“Did your husband shoot himself?”
She made a childishly smug face. “Joe’s just faking to get everybody’s sympathy. He’s not really hurt.”
The door opened behind me and I turned to see a police officer step in.
The officer frowned at us, and shook his head as if to say “Oh, no.” It was an understandable response: it was the same cop, the mounted officer, who’d come upon the disturbance outside the Van Buren Hotel. Not surprising, really-this part of the Loop was his beat, or anyway his horse’s.
He crooked his finger for me to step out in the hall and I did.
“I heard a murder was being committed up on the tenth floor of 166,” he explained, meaning 166 West Jackson. “Do you know what happened? Did you see it?”
I told him what I knew, which for somebody on the scene was damned little.
“Did she do it?” the officer asked.
“The gun was in the husband’s hand,” I shrugged. “Speaking of which…”
And I took the little revolver out of my pocket, holding the gun by its nose again.
“What make is this?” the officer said, taking it.
“I don’t recognize it.”
He read off the side: “Narizmande Eibar Spair. Thirty-two caliber.”
“It got the job done.”
He held the gun so that his hand avoided the grip; tried to break it open, but couldn’t.
“What’s wrong with this thing?” he said.
“The trigger’s been snapped on empty shells, I’d say. After six slugs were gone, the shooter kept shooting. Just once around wouldn’t drive the shells into the barrel like that.”
“Judas,” the officer said.
The X-ray room’s door opened and the doctor I’d shared the elevator and Bolton’s dead weight with stepped into the hall, bloody and bowed.
“He’s dead,” the doctor said, wearily. “Choked to death on his own blood, poor bastard.”
I said nothin; just glanced at the cop, who shrugged.
“The wife’s in there,” I said, pointing.
But I was pointing to Mrs. Bolton, who had stepped out into the hall. She was smiling pleasantly.
She said, “You’re not going to frighten me about Joe. He’s a great big man and as strong as a horse. Of course, I begin to think he ought to go to the hospital this time-for a while.”
“Mrs. Bolton,” the doctor said, flatly, with no sympathy whatsoever, “your husband is dead.”
Like a spiteful brat, she stuck out her tongue. “Liar,” she said.
The doctor sighed, turned to the cop. “Shall I call the morgue, or would you like the honor?”
“You should make the call, Doctor,” the officer said.
Mrs. Bolton moved slowly toward the door to the X-ray room, from which the other doctor, his smock blood-spattered, emerged. She seemed to lose her footing, then, and I took her arm yet again. This time she accepted the help. I walked her into the room and she approached the body, stroked its brow with stubby fingers.
“I can’t believe he’d go,” she said.
From behind me, the doctor said, “He’s dead, Mrs. Bolton. Please leave the room.”
Still stroking her late husband’s brow, she said, “He feels cold. So cold.”
She kissed his cheek.
Then she smiled down at the body and patted its head, as one might a sleeping child, and said, “He’s got a beautiful head, hasn’t he?”
The officer stepped into the room and said, “You’d better come along with me, Mrs. Bolton. Captain Stege wants to talk to you.”
“You’re making a terrible mistake. I didn’t shoot him.”
He took her arm; she assumed a regal posture. He asked her if she would like him to notify any relatives or friends.
“I have no relatives or friends,” she said, proudly. “I never had anybody or wanted anybody except Joe.”
A crowd was waiting on the street. Damn near a mob, and at the forefront were the newshounds, legmen and cameramen alike. Cameras were clicking away as Davis of the News and a couple of others blocked the car waiting at the curb to take Mrs. Bolton to the Homicide Bureau. The mounted cop, with her in tow, brushed them and their questions aside and soon the car, with her in it, was inching into the late afternoon traffic. The reporters and photogs began flagging cabs to take quick pursuit, but snide, boyish Davis lingered to ask me a question.
“What were you doing here, Heller?”
“Getting a hangnail looked at up at the doctor’s office.”
“Fuck, Heller, you got blood all over you!”
I shrugged, lifted my middle finger. “Hell of a hangnail.”
He smirked and I smirked and pushed through the cowd and hoofed it back to my office.
I was sitting at my desk, about an hour later, when the phone rang.
“Get your ass over here!”
“Captain Stege?”
“No, Walter Winchell. You were an eyewitness to a homicide, Heller! Get your ass over here!”
The phone clicked in my ear and I shrugged to nobody and got my hat and went over to the First District Station, entering off Eleventh. It was a new, modern, nondescript high rise; if this was the future, who needed it.
In Stege’s clean little office, from behind his desk, the clean little cop looked out his black-rimmed, round-lensed glasses at me and said, “Did you see her do it?”
“I told the officer at the scene all about it, Captain.”
“You didn’t make a statement.”
“Get a stenographer in here and I will.”
He did and I did.
That seemed to cool the stocky little cop down. He and I had been adversaries once, though were getting along better these days. But there was still a strain.
Thought gripped his doughy, owlish countenance. “How do you read it, Heller?”
“I don’t know. He had the gun. Maybe it was suicide.”
“Everybody in that building agrees with you. Bolton’s been having a lot of trouble with his better half. They think she drove him to suicide, finally. But there’s a hitch.”
“Yeah?”
“Suicides don’t usually shoot themselves five times, two of ’em in the back.”
I had to give him that.
“You think she’s nuts?” Stege asked.
“Nuttier than a fruitcake.”
“Maybe. But that was murder-premeditated.”
“Oh, I doubt that, Captain. Don’t you know a crime of passion when you see it? Doesn’t the unwritten law apply to women as well as men?”
“The answer to your question is yes to the first, and no to the second. You want to see something?”
“Sure.”
From his desk he handed me a small slip of paper.
It was a receipt for a gun sold on June 11 by the Hammond Loan Company of Hammond, Indiana, to a Mrs. Sarah Weston.
“That was in her purse,” Stege said, smugly. “Along with a powder puff, a hanky, and some prayer leaflets.”
“And you think Sarah Weston is just a name Mrs. Bolton used to buy the .32 from the pawn shop?”
“Certainly. And that slip-found in a narrow side pocket in the lining of her purse-proves premeditation.”
“Does it, Captain?” I said,smiling, standing, hat in hand. “It seems to me premeditation would have warned her to get rid of that receipt. But then, what do I know? I’m not a cop.” From the doorway I said, “Just a detective.”
And I left him there to mull that over.
In the corridor, on my way out, Sam Backus buttonholed me.
“Got a minute for a pal, Nate?”
“Sam, if we were pals, I’d see you someplace besides court.”
Sam was with the Public Defender’s office, and I’d bumped into him from time to time, dating back to my cop days. He was a conscientious and skillful attorney who, in better times, might have had a lucrative private practice; in times like these, he was glad to have a job. Sam’s sharp features and receding hairline gave the smallish man a ferretlike appearance; he was similarly intense, too.
“My client says she employed you to do some work for her,” he said, in a rush. “She’d like you to continue-”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute-your client? Not Mrs. Mildred Bolton?”
“Yes.”
“She’s poison. You’re on your own.”
“She tells me you were given a hundred-dollar retainer.”
“Well, that’s true, but I figured I earned it.”
“She figures you owe her some work, or some dough.”
“Sam, she lied to me. She misrepresented herself and her intentions.” I was walking out the building and he was staying right with me.
“She’s a disturbed individual. And she’s maintaining she didn’t kill her husband.”
“They got her cold.” I told him about Stege’s evidence.
“It could’ve been planted,” he said, meaning the receipt. “Look, Bolton’s secretary was up there, and Mrs. Bolton says he and the girl-an Angela something, sounds like ‘who-you’-were having an affair.”
“I thought the affair was supposed to be with Marie Winston.”
“Her, too. Bolton must’ve been a real ladies’ man. And the Winston woman was up there at that office this afternoon, too, before the shooting.”
“Was she there during the shooting, though?”
“I don’t know. I need to find out. The Public Defender’s office doesn’t have an investigative staff, you know that, Nate. And I can’t afford to hire anybody, and I don’t have the time to do the legwork myself. You owe her some days. Deliver.”
He had a point.
I gathered some names from Sam, and the next morning I began to interview the participants.
“An affair with Joe?” Angela Houyoux said. “Why, that’s nonsense.”
We were in the outer office of Bolton and midt. She’d given me the nickel tour of the place: one outer office, and two inner ones, the one to the south having been Bolton’s. The crime scene told me nothing. Angela, the sweet-smelling dark-haired beauty who’d tumbled into my arms and the elevator yesterday, did.
“I was rather shaken by Mrs. Bolton’s behavior at first-and his. But then it became rather routine to come to the office and find the glass in the door broken, or Mr. Bolton with his hands cut from taking a knife away from Mrs. Bolton. After a few weeks, I grew quite accustomed to having dictation interrupted while Mr. and Mrs. Bolton scuffled and fought and yelled. Lately they argued about Mrs. Winston a lot.”
“How was your relationship with Mrs. Bolton?”
“Spotty, I guess you’d call it. Sometimes she’d seem to think I was interested in her husband. Other times she’d confide in me like a sister. I never said much to her. I’d just shrug my shoulders or just look at her kind of sympathetic. I had the feeling she didn’t have anybody else to talk to about this. She’d cry and say her husband was unfaithful-I didn’t dare point out they’d been separated for months and that Mr. Bolton had filed for divorce and all. One time…well, maybe I shouldn’t say it.”
“Say it.”
“One time she said she ‘just might kill’ her husband. She said they never convict a woman for murder in Cook County.”
Others in the building at West Jackson told similar tales. Bolton’s business partner, Schmidt, wondered why Bolton bothered to get an injunction to keep his wife out of the office, but then refused to mail her her temporary alimony, giving her a reason to come to the office all the time.
“He would dole out the money, two or three dollars at a time,” Schmidt said. “He could have paid her what she had coming for a month, or at least a week-Joe made decent money. It would’ve got rid of her. Why parcel it out?”
The elevator operator I’d met yesterday had a particularly wild yarn.
“Yesterday, early afternoon, Mr. Bolton got on at the ninth floor. He seemed in an awful hurry and said, ‘Shoot me up to eleven.’ I had a signal to stop at ten, so I made the stop and Mrs. Bolton came charging aboard. Mr. Bolton was right next to me. He kind of hid behind me and said, ‘For God’s sake, she’ll kill us both!’ I sort of forced the door closed on her, and she stood there in the corridor and raised her fist and said, ‘Goddamnit, I’ll fix you!’ I guess she meant Bolton, not me.”
“Apparently.”
“Anyway, I took him up to eleven and he kind of sighed and as he got off he said, ‘It’s just hell, isn’t it?’ I said it was a damn shame he couldn’t do anything about it.”
“This was yesterday.”
“Yes, sir. Not long before he was killed.”
“Did it occur to you, at the time, it might lead to that?”
“No, sir. It was pretty typical, actually. I helped him escape from her before. And I kept her from getting on the elevator downstairs, sometimes. After all, he had an injunction to keep her from ‘molesting him at his place of business,’ he said.”
Even the heavyset doctor up on thirteen found time for me.
“I think they were both sick,” he said, rather bitterly I thought.
“What do you mean, Doctor?”
“I mean that I’ve administered more first aid to that man than a battlefield physician. That woman has beaten her husband, cut him with a knife, with a razor, created commotions and scenes with such regularity that the patrol wagon coming for Mildred is a common-place occurrence on West Jackson.”
“How well did you know Bolton?”
“We were friendly. God knows I spent enough time with him, patching him up. He should’ve been a much more successful man than he was, you know. She drove him out of one job and another. I never understood him.”
“Oh?”
“Well, they live, or lived, in Hyde Park. That’s a university neighborhood. Fairly refined, very intellectual, really.”
“Was Bolton a scholar?”
“He had bookish interests. He liked having the University of Chicago handy. Now why would a man of his sensibilities endure a violent harridan like Mildred Bolton?”
“In my trade, Doc,” I said, “we call that a mystery.”
I talked to more people. I talked to a pretty blond legal secretary named Peggy O’Reilly who, in 1933, had been employed by Ocean Accident and Guarantee Company. Joseph Bolton, Jr., had been a business associate there.
“His desk was four feet from mine,” she said. “But I never went out with him. There was no social contact whatsoever, but Mrs. Bolton didn’t believe that. She came into the office and accused me of-well, called me a ‘dirty hussy,’ if you must know. I asked her to step out into the hall where we wouldn’t attract so much attention, and she did-and proceeded to tear my clothes off me. She tore the clothes off my body, scratched my neck, my face, kicked me, it was horrible. The attention it attracted…oh, dear. Several hundred people witnessed the sight-two nice men pulled her off of me. I was badly bruised and out of the office a week. When I came back, Mr. Bolton had been discharged.”
A pattern was forming here, one I’d seen before; but usually it was the wife who was battered and yet somehow endured and even encouraged the twisted union. Only Bolton was a battered husband, a strapping man who never turned physically on his abusing wife; his only punishment had been to withhold that money from her, dole it out a few bucks at a time. That was the only satisfaction, the only revenge, he’d been able to extract.
At the Van Buren Hotel I knocked on the door of what had been Bolton’s room. 3C.
Young Charles Winston answered. He looked terrible. Pale as milk, only not near as healthy. Eyes bloodshot. He was in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. The other times I’d seen him he’d been fully and even nattily attired.
“Put some clothes on,” I said. “We have to talk.”
In the saloon below the hotel we did that very thing.
“Joe was a great guy,” he said, eyes brimming with tears. He would have cried into his beer, only he was having a mixed drink. I was picking up the tab, so Mildred Bolton was buying it.
“Is your mother still in town?”
He looked up with sharp curiosity. “No. She’s back in Woodstock. Why?”
“She was up at the office shortly before Bolton was killed.”
“I know. I was there, too.”
“Oh?” Now, that was news.
“We went right over, after the hearing.”
“To tell him how it came out?”
“Yes, and to thank him. You see, after that incident out in front, last Wednesday, when they took me off to jail, Mother went to see Joe. They met at the Twelfth Street Bus Depot. She asked him if he would take care of my bail-she could have had her brother do it, in the morning, but I’d have had to spend the night in jail first.” He smiled fondly. “Joe went right over to the police station with the money and got me out.”
“That was white of him.”
“Sure was. Then we met Mother over at the taproom of the Auditorium Hotel.”
Very posh digs; interesting place for folks who lived at the Van Buren to be hanging out.
“Unfortunately, I’d taken time to stop back at the hotel to pick up some packages my mother had left behind. Mrs. Bolton must’ve been waiting here for me. She followed me to the Auditorium tap-room, where she attacked me with her fists, and told the crowd in no uncertain terms, and in a voice to wake the dead, that my mother was”-he shook his head-“‘nothing but a whore’ and such. Finally the management ejected her.”
“Was your mother in love with Joe?”
He looked at me sharply. “Of course not. They were friendly. That’s the extent of it.”
“When did you and your mother leave Bolton’s office?”
“Yesterday? About one thirty. Mrs. Bolton was announced as being in the outer office, and we just got the hell out.”
“Neither of you lingered.”
“No. Are you going to talk to my mother?”
“Probably.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he said glumly.
I drank my beer, studying the kid.
“Maybe I won’t have to,” I said, smiled at him, patted his shoulder, and left.
I met with public defender Backus in a small interrogation room at the First District Station.
“Your client is guilty,” I said.
I was sitting. He was standing. Pacing.
“The secretary was in te outer office at all times,” I said. “In view of other witnesses. The Winstons left around one thirty. They were seen leaving by the elevator operator on duty.”
“One of them could have sneaked back up the stairs…”
“I don’t think so. Anyway, this meeting ends my participation, other than a report I’ll type up for you. I’ve used up the hundred.”
From my notes I read off summaries of the various interviews I’d conducted. He finally sat, sweat beading his brow, eyes slitted behind the glasses.
“She says she didn’t do it,” he said.
“She says a lot of things. I think you can get her off, anyway.”
He smirked. “Are you a lawyer now?”
“No. Just a guy who’s been in the thick of this bizarre fucking case since day one.”
“I bow to your experience if not expertise.”
“You can plead her insane, Sam.”
“A very tough defense to pull off, and besides, she won’t hear of it. She wants no psychiatrists, no alienists involved.”
“You can still get her off.”
“How in hell?”
I let some air out. “I’m going to have to talk to her before I say any more. It’s going to have to be up to her.”
“You can’t tell me?”
“You’re not my client.”
Mildred Bolton was.
And she was ushered into the interrogation room by a matron who then waited outside the door. She wore the same floral print dress, but the raccoon stole was gone. She smiled faintly upon seeing me, sat across from me.
“You been having fun with the press, Mildred, haven’t you?”
“I sure have. They call me ‘Marble Mildred.’ They think I’m cold.”
“They think it’s unusual for a widow to joke about her dead husband.”
“They’re silly people. They asked me the name of my attorney and I said, ‘Horsefeathers.’” She laughed. That struck her very funny; she was proud of herself over that witty remark.
“I’m glad you can find something to smile about.”
“I’m getting hundreds of letters, you know. Fan mail! They say, ‘You should have killed him whether you did or not.’ I’m not the only woman wronged in Chicago, you know.”
“They’ve got you dead bang, Mildred. I’ve seen some of the evidence. I’ve talked to the witnesses.”
“Did you talk to Mrs. Winston? It was her fault, you know. Her and that…that boy.”
“You went to see Joe after the boy was fined in court.”
“Yes! I called him and told him that the little degenerate had been convicted and fined. Then I asked Joe, did he have any money, because I didn’t have anything to eat, and he said yes. So I went to the office and when I got there he tried to give me a check for ten dollars. I said, ‘I guess you’re going to pay that boy’s fine and that’s why you haven’t any money for me.’ He said, ‘That’s all you’re going to get.’ And I said, ‘Do you mean for a whole week? To pay rent out of and eat on?’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s all you get.’”
“He was punishing you.”
“I suppose. We argued for about an hour and then he said he had business on another floor-that boy’s lawyer is on the ninth floor, you know-and I followed him, chased him to the elevator, but he got away. I went back and said to Miss Houyoux, ‘He ran away from me.’ I waited in his office and in about an hour he came back. I said, ‘Joe, I have been your wife for fourteen years and I think I deserve more respect and better treatment than that.’ He just leaned back in his chair so cocky and said, ‘You know what you are?’ And then he said it.”
“Said it?”
She swallowed; for the first time, those marble eyes filled with tears. “He said, ‘You’re just a dirty old bitch.’ Then he said it again. Then I said, ‘Just a dirty old bitch for fourteen years?’ And I pointed the gun at him.”
“Where was it?”
“It was on his desk where I put it. It was in a blue box I carried in with me.”
“What did you do with it, Mildred?”
“The box?”
“The gun.”
“Oh. That. I fired it at him.”
I gave her a handkerchief and she dabbed her eyes with it.
“How many times did you fire the gun, Mildred?”
“I don’t know. He fell over in his chair and then he got up and came toward me and he said, ‘Give me that gun, give me that gun.’ I said, ‘No, I’m going to finish myself now. Let go of me because my hand is on the trigger!’” Her teeth were clenched. “He struggled with me, and his glasses got knocked off, but he got the gun from my hand and he went out in the hall with it. I followed him, but then I turned and went back in his office. I was going to jump out of the window, but I heard him scream in the hall and I ran to him. The gun was lying beside him and I reached for it, but he reached and got it first. I went back in the office.”
“Why?”
“To jump out the window, I told you. But I just couldn’t leave him. I started to go back out and when I opened the door some people were around. You were one of them, Mr. Heller.”
“Where did you get that gun, Mildred?”
“At a pawn shop in Hammond, Indiana.”
“To kill Joe?”
“To kill myself.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t. I had plenty of time to do it at home, but I wanted to do it in his office. I wanted to embarrass him.”
“He was shot in the back, Mildred. Twice.”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe his body turned when I was firing. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“You know that the prosecution will not buy your suicide claims.”
“They are not claims!”
“I know they aren’t. But they won’t buy them. They’ll tell the judge and the jury that all your talk of suicide is just a clever excuse to get around planning Joe’s murder. In other words, that you premeditated the killing and supplied yourself with a gun-and a reason for having a gun.”
“I don’t know about those things.”
“Would you like to walk away from this?”
“Well, of course. I’m not crazy.”
Right.
“You can, I think. But it’s going to be hard on you. They’re going to paint you as a shrew. As a brutal woman who battered her husband. They’ll suggest that Bolton was too much of a gentleman for his own good, that he should have struck back at you, physically.”
She giggled. “He wasn’t such a gentleman.”
“Really?”
“He wasn’t what you think at all. Not at all.”
“What do you mean, Mildred?”
“We were married for fourteen years before he tried to get rid of me. That’s a long time.”
“It sure is. What is it about your husband that we’re getting wrong?”
“I haven’t said.”
“I know that. Tell me.”
“I won’t tell you. I’ve never told a living soul. I never will.”
“I think you should. I think you need to.”
“I won’t. I won’t now. I won’t ever.”
“There were no other women, were there, Mildred?”
“There were countless women, countless!”
“Like Marie Winston.”
“She was the worst!”
“What about her son?”
“That little…” She stopped herself.
“That little degenerate? That’s what you seem to always call him.”
She nodded, pursing her thin wide lips.
“Joe was living in a fleabag hotel,” I said. “A guy with his money. Why?”
“It was close to his work.”
“Relatively. I think it had to do with who he was living with. A young man.”
“A lot of men room together.”
“There were no other women, were there, Mildred? Your husband used you to hide behind, didn’t he, for many years.”
She was crying now. The marble woman was crying now. “I loved him. I loved him.”
“I know you did. And I don’t know when you discovered it. Maybe you never did, really. Maybe you just suspected, and couldn’t bring yourself to admit it. Then, after he left you, after he moved out of the house, you finally decided to find out, really find out. You hired me, springing for a hundred precious bucks you’d scrimped and saved, knowing I might find things out you’d want kept quiet. Knowing I might confirm the suspicions that drove you bughouse for years.”
“Stop it…please stop it…”
“Your refined husband who liked to be near a college campus. You knew there were affairs. And there were. But not with women.”
She stood, squeezing my hanky in one fist. “I don’t have to listen to this!”
“You do if you want to be a free woman. The unwritten law doesn’t seem to apply to women as equally as it does to men. But if you tell the truth about your husband-about just who it was he was seeing behind your back-I guarantee you no jury will convict you.”
Her mouth was trembling.
I stood. “It’s up to you, Mildred.”
“Are you going to tell Mr. Backus?”
“No. You’re my client. I’ll respect your wishes.”
“I wish you would just go. Just go, Mr. Heller.”
I went.
I told Backus nothing except that I would suggest he introduce expert testimony from an alienist. He didn’t. His client wouldn’t hear of it.
The papers continued to have a great time with Marble Mildred. She got to know the boys of the press, became bosom buddies with the sob sisters, warned cameramen not to take a profile pic or she’d break their lens, shouted greetings and wisecracks to one and all. She laughed and talked; being on trial for murder was a lark to her.
Of course, as the trial wore on, she grew less boisterous, even became sullen at times. On the stand she told her story more or less straight, but minus any hint her husband was bent. The prosecution, as I had told her they would, ridiculed her statement that she’d bought the .32 to do herself in. The prosecutor extolled “motherhood and wifehood,” but expressed “the utmost comtempt for Mildred Bolton.” She was described as “dirt,” “filth,” “vicious,” and more. She was sentenced to die in the electric chair.
She didn’t want an appeal, a new trial.
“As far as I am concerned,” she told the stunned judge, “I a perfectly satisfied with things as they now stand.”
But Cook County was squeamish about electrocuting a woman; just half an hour before the execution was to take place, hair shaved above one ear, wearing special females-only electrocution shorts, Mildred was spared by Governor Horner.
Mildred, who’d been strangely blissful in contemplation of her electrocution, was less pleased with her new sentence of 199 years. Nonetheless she was a model prisoner, until August 29, 1943, when she was found slumped in her cell, wrists slashed. She had managed to smuggle some scissors in. It took her hours to die. Sitting in the darkness, waiting for the blood to empty out of her.
She left a note, stuck to one wall:
To whom it may concern. In the event of my death do not notify anybody or try to get in touch with family or friends. I wish to die as I have lived, completely alone.
What she said was true, but I wondered if I was the only person alive who knew that it hadn’t been by choice.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I wish to acknowledge the true-crime article “Joseph Bolton, the Almost Indestructible Husband” by Nellise Child. Also helpful was the Mildred Bolton entry in Find the Woman by Jay Robert Nash. Most names in the preceding fact-based story have been changed or at least altered (exceptions include the Boltons and Captain Stege); fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed therein.