Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

“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.

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.