“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.