Chicago Lightning

by Max Allan Collins

  “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 do
esn’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.