Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

  “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 conv
ict 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 am 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.

  In a garbage dump on East Ninth Street near Shore Drive, in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 17, 1938, a woman’s body was discovered by a cop walking his morning beat.

  I got there before anything much had been moved. Not that I was a plainclothes dick—I used to be, but not in Cleveland; I was just along for the ride. I’d been sitting in the office of Cleveland’s Public Safety Director, having coffee, when the call came through. The Safety Director was in charge of both the police and fire department, and one would think that a routine murder wouldn’t rate a call to such a high muckey-muck.

  One would be wrong.

  Because this was the latest in a series of anything-but-routine, brutal murders—the unlucky thirteenth, to be exact, not that the thirteenth victim would seem any more unlucky than the preceding twelve. The so-called “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” had been exercising his ghastly art sporadically since the fall of ’35, in Cleveland—or so I understood. I was an out-of-towner, myself.

  So was the woman.

  Or she used to be, before she became so many dismembered parts flung across this rock-and-garbage strewn dump. Her nude torso was slashed and the blood, splashed here, streaked there, was turning dark, almost black, though the sun caught scarlet glints and tossed them at us. Her head was gone, but maybe it would turn up. The Butcher wasn’t known for that, though. The twelve preceding victims had been found headless, and had stayed that way. Somewhere in Cleveland, perhaps, a guy had a collection in his attic. In this weather it wouldn’t smell too nice.

  It’s not a good sign when the Medical Examiner gets sick; and the half dozen cops, and the police photographer, were looking green around the gills themselves. Only my friend, the Safety Director, seemed in no danger of losing his breakfast. He was a ruddy-cheeked six-footer in a coat and tie and vest, despite the heat; hatless, his hair brushed back and pomaded, he still seemed—years after I’d met him—boyish. And he was only in his mid-thirties, just a few years older than me.

  I’d met him in Chicago, seven or eight years ago, when I wasn’t yet president (and everything else) of the A-I Detective Agency, but still a cop; and he was still a Prohibition Agent. Hell, the Prohibition agent. He’d considered me one of the more or less honest cops in Chicago—emphasis on the less, I guess—and I made a good contact for him, as a lot of the cops didn’t like him much. Honesty doesn’t go over real big in Chicago, you know.

  Eliot Ness said, “Despite the slashing, there’s a certain skill displayed, here.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “A regular ballet dancer did this.”

  “No, really,” he said, and bent over the headless torso, pointing. He seemed to be pointing at the gathering flies, but he wasn’t. “There’s an unmistakable precision about this. Maybe even indicating surgical training.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I think the doctor lost this patient.”

  He stood and glanced at me and smiled, just a little; he understood me: he knew my wise-guy remarks were just my way of holding onto my own breakfast.

  “You ought to come to Cleveland more often,” he said.

  “You know how to show a guy a good time, I’ll give you that, Eliot.”

  He walked over and glanced at a forearm, which seemed to reach for an empty soap box, fingers stretched toward the Gold Dust twins. He knelt and studied it.

  I wasn’t here on a vacation, by any means. Cleveland didn’t strike me as a vacation city, even before I heard about the Butcher of Kingsbury Run (so called because a number of the bodies, including the first several, were found in that Cleveland gully). This was strictly business. I was here trying to trace the missing daughter of a guy in Evanston who owned a dozen diners around Chicago. He was one of those self-made men, who started out in the greasy kitchen of his own first diner, fifteen or so years ago; and now he had a fancy brick house in Evanston and plenty of money, considering the times. But not much else. His wife had died four or five years ago, of consumption; and his daughter—who he claimed to be a good girl and by all other accounts was pretty wild—had wandered off a few months ago, with a taxi dancer from the North Side named Tony.

  Well, I’d found Tony in Toledo—he was doing a floor show in a roadhouse with a dark-haired girl named FiFi; he’d grown a little pencil mustache and they did an apache routine—he was calling himself Antoine now. And Tony/Antoine said Ginger (which was the Evanston restauranteur’s daughter’s nickname) had taken up with somebody named Ray, who owned (get this) a diner in Cleveland.

  I’d gotten here yesterday, and had talked to Ray, and without tipping I was looking for her, asked where was the pretty waitress, the one called Ginger, I think her name is. Ray, a skinny balding guy of about thirty with a silver front tooth, leered and winked and made it obvious that not only was Ginger working as a waitress here, she was also a side dish, where Ray was concerned. Further casual conversation revealed that it was Ginger’s night off—she was at the movies with some girl friends—and she’d be in tomorrow, around five.

  I didn’t push it further, figuring to catch up with her at the diner the next evening, after wasting a day seeing Cleveland and bothering my old friend Eliot. And now I was in a city dump with him, watching him study the severed forearm of a woman.

&nbs
p; “Look at this,” Eliot said, pointing at the outstretched fingers of the hand.

  I went over to him and it—not quickly, but I went over.

  “What, Eliot? Do you want to challenge my powers of deduction, or just make me sick?”

  “Just a lucky break,” he said. “Most of the victims have gone unidentified; too mutilated. And a lot of ’em have been prostitutes or vagrants. But we’ve got a break, here. Two breaks, actually.”

  He pointed to the hand’s little finger. To the small gold filigree band with a green stone.

  “A nice specific piece of jewelry to try to trace,” he said, with a dry smile. “And even better…”

  He pointed to a strawberry birthmark, the shape of a teardrop, just below the wrist.

  I took a close look; then stood. Put a hand on my stomach.

  Walked away and dropped to my knees and lost my breakfast.

  I felt Eliot’s hand patting my back.

  “Nate,” he said. “What’s the matter? You’ve seen homicides before…even grisly ones like this…brace up, boy.”

  He eased me to my feet.

  My tongue felt thick in my mouth, thick and restless.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “I think I just found my client’s daughter,” I said.

  Both the strawberry birthmark and the filigree ring with the green stone had been part of my basic description of the girl; the photographs I had showed her to be a pretty but average-looking young woman—slim, brunette—who resembled every third girl you saw on the street. So I was counting on those two specifics to help me identify her. I hadn’t counted on those specifics helping me in just this fashion.

  I sat in Eliot’s inner office in the Cleveland city hall; the mayor’s office was next door. We were having coffee with some rum in it—Eliot kept a bottle in a bottom drawer of his rolltop desk. I promised him not to tell Capone.

  “I think we should call the father,” Eliot said. “Ask him to come and make the identification.”

  I thought about it. “I’d like to argue with you, but I don’t see how I can. Maybe if we waited till…Christ. Till the head turns up…”