She did not look like the sort of woman who would be stopping in at the Van Buren Hotel, but stop in she did.
So did I. I trailed her up to the third floor, where she was met at the door of Bolton’s room by a male figure. I just got a glimpse of the guy, but he didn’t seem to be Bolton. She went inside.
I used a pay phone in the saloon downstairs and called Mrs. Bolton in Hyde Park.
“I can be there in forty minutes,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I want to catch them together. I’m going to claw that hussy’s eyes out.”
“Mrs. Bolton, you don’t want to do that…”
“I most certainly do. You can go home, Mr. Heller. You’ve done your job, and nicely.”
And she had hung up.
I’d mentioned to her that the man in her husband’s room did not seem to be her husband, but that apparently didn’t matter. Now I had a choice: I could walk back up to my office and write Mrs. Bolton out a check refunding seventy of her hundred dollars, goddamnit (ten bucks a day, ten bucks expenses-she’d pay for my bribes and beers).
Or I could do the Christian thing and wait around and try to defuse this thing before it got even uglier.
I decided to do the latter. Not because it was the Christian thing-I wasn’t a Christian, after all-but because I might be able to convince Mrs. Bolton she needed a few more days’ work out of me, to figure out what was really going on here. It seemed to me she could use a little more substantial information, if a divorce was to come out of this. It also seemed to me I could use the money.
I don’t know how she arrived-whether by El or streetcar or bus or auto-but as fast as she was walking, it could’ve been on foot. She was red in the face, eyes hard and round as marbles, fists churning as she strode, her head floating above the incongruous raccoon stole.
I hopped off my bar stool and caught her at the sidewalk.
“Don’t go in there, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, taking her arm gently.
She swung it away from me, held her head back and, short as she was, looked down at me, nostrils flared. I felt like a matador who dropped his cape.
“You’ve been discharged for the day, Mr. Heller,” she said.
“You still need my help. You’re not going about this the right way.”
With indignation she began, “My husband…”
“Your husband isn’t in there. He doesn’t even get off work till six.”
She swallowed. The redness of her face seemed to fade some; I was quieting her down.
Then fucking fate stepped in, in the form of that swanky dame in the felt hat, who picked that very moment to come strolling out of the Van Buren Hotel like it was the goddamn Palmer House. On her arm was a young man, perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, in a cream-color seersucker suit and a gold tie, with a pale complexion and sky-blue eyes and corn-silk blond hair. He and the woman on his arm shared the same sensitive mouth.
“Whore!” somebody shouted.
Who else? My client.
I put my hand over my face and shook my head and wished I was dead, or at least in my office.
“Degenerate!” Mrs. Bolton sang out. She rushed toward the slender woman, who reared back, properly horrified. The young man gripped the woman’s arm tightly; whether to protect her or himself, it wasn’t quite clear.
Well, the sidewalks were filled with people who’d gotten off work, heading for the El or the LaSalle Street Station, so we had an audience. Yes we did.
And Mrs. Bolton was standing nose to nose with the startled woman, saying defiantly, “I am
“Why, Mrs. Bolton,” the woman said, backing away as best she could. “Your husband is not in his room.”
“Liar!”
“If he were in the room, I wouldn’t have been in there myself, I assure you.”
“Lying whore…”
“Okay,” I said, wading in, taking Mrs. Bolton by the arm, less gently this time, “that’s enough.”
“Don’t talk to my mother that way,” the young man said to Mrs. Bolton.
“I’ll talk to her any way I like, you little degenerate.”
And the young man slapped my client. It was a loud, ringing slap, and drew blood from one corner of her wide mouth.
I pointed a finger at the kid’s nose. “That wasn’t nice. Back away.”
My client’s eyes were glittering; she was smiling, a blood-flecked smile that wasn’t the sanest thing I ever saw. Despite the gleeful expression, she began to scream things at the couple: “Whore! Degenerate!”
“Oh Christ,” I said, wishing I’d listened to my old man and finished college.
We were encircled by a crowd who watched all this with bemused interest, some people smiling, others frowning, others frankly amazed. In the street the clop-clop of an approaching mounted police officer, interrupted in the pursuit of parking violators, cut through the din. A tall, lanky officer, he climbed off his mount and pushed through the crowd.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
“This little degenerate hit me,” my client said, wearing her bloody mouth and her righteous indignation like medals, and she grabbed the kid by the tie and yanked the poor son of a bitch by it, jerking him silly.
It made me laugh. It was amusing only in a sick way, but I was sick enough to appreciate it.
“That’ll be all of that,” the officer said. “Now what happened here?”
I filled him in, in a general way, while my client interrupted with occasional non sequiturs; the mother and son just stood there looking chagrined about being the center of attention for perhaps a score of onlookers.
“I want that dirty little brute arrested,” Mrs. Bolton said, through an off-white picket fence of clenched teeth. “I’m a victim of assault!”
The poor shaken kid was hardly a brute, and he was cleaner than most, but he admitted having struck her, when the officer asked him.
“I’m going to have to take you in, son,” the officer said.
The boy looked like he might cry. Head bowed, he shrugged and his mother, eyes brimming with tears herself, hugged him.
The officer went to a call box and summoned a squad car and soon the boy was sent away, the mother waiting pitifully at the curb as the car pulled off, the boy’s pale face looking back, a sad cameo in the window.
I was at my client’s side.
“Let me help you get home, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, taking her arm again.
She smiled tightly, patronizingly, withdrew her arm. “I’m fine, Mr. Heller. I can take care of myself. I thank you for your assistance.”
And she rolled like a tank through what remained of the crowd, toward the El station.
I stood there a while, trying to gather my wits; it would have taken a better detective than yours truly to find them, however, so, finally, I approached the shattered woman who still stood at the curb. The crowd was gone. So was the mounted officer. All that remained were a few horse apples and me.
“I’m sorry about all that,” I told her.
She looked at me, her face smooth, her eyes sad; they were a darker blue than her son’s. “What’s your role in this?”
“I’m an investigator. Mrs. Bolton suspects her husband of infidelity.”
She laughed harshly-a very harsh laugh for such a refined woman. “My understanding is that Mrs. Bolton has suspected that for some fourteen years-and without foundation. But at this point, it would seem moot, one would think.”
“Moot? What are you talking about?”
“The Boltons have been separated for months. Mr. Bolton is suing her for divorce.”
“What? Since when?”
“Why, since January.”
