Maybe that’s why Ruth Peacock was so convinced of her husband’s loyalty, despite the mysterious circumstances of his death.
She was pregnant with his child at the time.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Research materials consulted for this fact-based story include “The Peacock Case” by LeRoy F. McHugh in
MARBLE MILDRED
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
“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.
