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
“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.
“His desk was four feet from mine,” she said. “But I never went out with him. There was no social contact whatsoever, but Mrs. Bolton didn’t believe that. She came into the office and accused me of-well, called me a ‘dirty hussy,’ if you must know. I asked her to step out into the hall where we wouldn’t attract so much attention, and she did-and proceeded to tear my clothes off me. She tore the clothes off my body, scratched my neck, my face, kicked me, it was horrible. The attention it attracted…oh, dear. Several hundred people witnessed the sight-two nice men pulled her off of me. I was badly bruised and out of the office a week. When I came back, Mr. Bolton had been discharged.”
A pattern was forming here, one I’d seen before; but usually it was the wife who was battered and yet somehow endured and even encouraged the twisted union. Only Bolton was a battered husband, a strapping man who never turned physically on his abusing wife; his only punishment had been to withhold that money from her, dole it out a few bucks at a time. That was the only satisfaction, the only revenge, he’d been able to extract.
At the Van Buren Hotel I knocked on the door of what had been Bolton’s room. 3C.
Young Charles Winston answered. He looked terrible. Pale as milk, only not near as healthy. Eyes bloodshot. He was in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. The other times I’d seen him he’d been fully and even nattily attired.
“Put some clothes on,” I said. “We have to talk.”
In the saloon below the hotel we did that very thing.
“Joe was a great guy,” he said, eyes brimming with tears. He would have cried into his beer, only he was having a mixed drink. I was picking up the tab, so Mildred Bolton was buying it.
“Is your mother still in town?”
He looked up with sharp curiosity. “No. She’s back in Woodstock. Why?”
“She was up at the office shortly before Bolton was killed.”
“I know. I was there, too.”
“Oh?” Now, that was news.
“We went right over, after the hearing.”
“To tell him how it came out?”
“Yes, and to thank him. You see, after that incident out in front, last Wednesday, when they took me off to jail, Mother went to see Joe. They met at the Twelfth Street Bus Depot. She asked him if he would take care of my bail-she could have had her brother do it, in the morning, but I’d have had to spend the night in jail first.” He smiled fondly. “Joe went right over to the police station with the money and got me out.”
“That was white of him.”
“Sure was. Then we met Mother over at the taproom of the Auditorium Hotel.”
Very posh digs; interesting place for folks who lived at the Van Buren to be hanging out.
“Unfortunately, I’d taken time to stop back at the hotel to pick up some packages my mother had left behind. Mrs. Bolton must’ve been waiting here for me. She followed me to the Auditorium tap-room, where she attacked
