I heard someone laughing.
A woman.
I looked up and in the office doorway, feet planted like a giant surveying a puny world, was dumpy little Mildred, in her floral housedress and raccoon stole. Her mug was split in a big goofy smile.
“Don’t pay any attention to him, Mr. Heller,” she said, lightly. “He’s just faking.”
“He’s shot to shit, lady!” I said.
Keeping their distance out of respect and fear were various tenth-floor tenants, standing near their various offices, as if witnessing some strange performance.
“Keep her away from me!” Bolton managed to shout. His mouth was bubbling with blood. His body moved slowly across the marble floor like a slug, leaving a slimy red trail.
I moved to Mrs. Bolton, stood between her and Bolton. “You just take it easy…”
Mrs. Bolton, giggling, peeked out from in back of me. “Look at him, fooling everybody.”
“You behave,” I told her. Then I called out to a businessman of about fifty near the elevators. I asked him if there were any doctors in the building, and he said yes, and I said then for Christsake go get one.
“Why don’t you get up and stop faking?” she said teasingly to her fallen husband, the Southern drawl dripping off her words. She craned her neck around me to see him, like she couldn’t bear to miss a moment of the show.
“Keep her away! Keep her away!”
Bolton continued to writhe like a wounded snake, but he kept clutching that gun, and wouldn’t let anyone near him. He would cry out that he couldn’t breathe, beating his legs against the floor, but he seemed always conscious of his wife’s presence. He would move his head so as to keep my body between him and her round cold glittering eyes.
“Don’t you mind Joe, Mr. Heller. He’s just putting on an act.”
If so, I had a hunch it was his final performance.
And now he began to scream in agony.
I approached him and he looked at me with tears in his eyes, eyes that bore the confusion of a child in pain, and he relented, allowed me to come close, handed me the gun, like he was offering a gift. I accepted it, by the nose of the thingdropped it in my pocket.
“Did you shoot yourself, Mr. Bolton?” I asked him.
“Keep that woman away from me,” he managed, lips bloody.
“He’s not really hurt,” his wife said, mincingly, from the office doorway.
“Did your wife shoot you?”
“Just keep her away…”
Two people in white came rushing toward us-a doctor and a nurse-and I stepped aside, but the doctor, a middle-aged, rather heavyset man with glasses, asked if I’d give him a hand. I said sure and pitched in.
Bolton was a big man, nearly two hundred pounds I’d say, and pretty much dead weight; we staggered toward the elevator like drunks. Like Bolton himself had staggered toward me, actually. The nurse tagged along.
So did Mrs. Bolton.
The nurse, young, blond, slender, did her best to keep Mrs. Bolton out of the elevator, but Mrs. Bolton pushed her way through like a fullback. The doctor and I, bracing Bolton, couldn’t help the young nurse.
Bolton, barely conscious, said, “Please…please, keep her away.”
“Now, now,” Mrs. Bolton said, the violence of her entry into the elevator forgotten (by her), standing almost primly, hands folded over the big black purse, “everything will be all right, dear. You’ll see.”
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,
“She
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 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.
