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.”