“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
“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.”
“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
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
