The Girls of Murder City Read online

  For years Maurine thought she wanted the same things for herself that her father did. She had been a dedicated, obedient student throughout her life, with a particular facility for languages and a deep devotion to the study of the Bible. From a young age she envisioned a quiet life of academic and religious accomplishment. She had headed back north after her junior year, to be closer to home, and in 1919 graduated first in her class from Butler University in Indianapolis.

  That fall Maurine moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to do graduate work in the classics at Radcliffe College. Greek, the language of the New Testament, would be her focus. “If more people knew the Greek, they wouldn’t misinterpret the Bible,” she told her cousin, Dorotha Watkins. Maurine intended to get an advanced degree at the well-regarded women’s college and then move to Greece to commit herself to research work. But it took only a matter of days in Cambridge before the plan’s foundation cracked and started to crumble. Walking to and from classes on Radcliffe’s verdant campus, she “began looking at some of the people who had their Ph.D.s and decided I wasn’t as keen about it as I had imagined.” Her course work barely under way, she had a sinking feeling that she’d committed herself to the wrong path.

  The spark for this abrupt change in attitude came from one simple administrative action: her acceptance into George Pierce Baker’s prestigious playwriting workshop. Baker, a professor in the English department at Harvard University, was Eugene O’Neill’s mentor and the best-known drama teacher in the country. Maurine had held out little hope of acceptance when she applied for the workshop. She dared not dream of a life as a writer. During her high school years and into college, she enjoyed writing short stories and plays, but the activity’s most powerful draw was simply that it was something she could do alone. Maurine had always felt easily overwhelmed in social situations. Even now, in her twenties, she was happiest when holed up in her room at her parents’ house, lost in thought, writing down high-minded stories about morality and personal responsibility in perfect, looping script. When she found out she was one of Baker’s chosen few, she could only have viewed it as a sign—a belated turning point in her life. Baker brought her into a workshop where some of the students had already had plays professionally produced, and all of them had dedicated themselves to serious writing.

  George Pierce Baker’s passion for the theater, for its power and social purpose, thrilled her. Through dramatic interpretation, Baker said, writers made the world better. Nothing could have focused Maurine’s interest more. It spoke to her evangelizing background. Living on the East Coast for the first time, she found herself wondering, “What on earth has happened to religion!” The country had become godless and corrupt. She was convinced “the only thing that will cure the present condition is a real application of Christianity.” Suddenly her quiet writing avocation, for years a sideline to her academic pursuits, seemed not just a legitimate ambition, but an urgent one. Art was an obligation, Baker told her. The fifty-four-year-old professor warned his students against bogging down in academic theories. He advocated finding out about “your great, bustling, crowded American life of the present day.”

  Maurine took this as a literal call to action. Baker was encouraging her to get out of her own head, to experience life, but for Maurine, her professor’s exhortations also acted as a spur to engage evil—the real thing, out in the real world. It was a relief for her finally to be given permission to do what she’d always felt called to do. Baker likely suggested newspaper work. He believed it was excellent training for a serious writer. (His prize student, O’Neill, had worked as a reporter.) Once that seed had been planted, Maurine knew where she had to go. Chicago was Bedlam: debauched, violent, unimaginable—and full of exciting opportunities. It was a city, Theodore Dreiser wrote in his 1923 memoir, A Book About Myself, “which had no traditions but which was making them, and this was the very thing which everyone seemed to understand and rejoice in. Chicago was like no other city in the world—so said they all.”

  So Maurine went to Chicago. She withdrew from her classics program, packed up her small wardrobe, and left, just like that. Scared but determined to overcome her fears, she arrived in her new city knowing not a soul, a true missionary for God and for art. She picked out an apartment to rent on the North Side, across the street from St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church on North Dearborn. It wasn’t her church, but the proximity to a holy place surely eased her anxiety at settling in such a large, dangerous city. St. Chrysostom’s was a gem, with its stone courtyard, its low-slung Gothic cathedral, and its triangular stained-glass windows. Lying in bed on the morning of her first day as a police reporter, listening to the bell clang with sonorous vitality from the top of the church’s tower, Maurine could have been back in Crawfordsville, her mother a moment from bursting through the door to roust her in excited anticipation of the day’s sermon. Except now Maurine knew that when she sat in church on Sunday, she wouldn’t be a passive receptacle. She would be an avenging angel. Or she could be, if given the chance by her editors. She needed a murder—one good murder.

  “Being a conscientious person, I never prayed for a murder,” she later said. “But I hoped that if there was one I’d be assigned to it.”

  She wouldn’t have to hope for long. This was Chicago.

  2

  The Variable Feminine Mechanism

  In the first hour of Wednesday, March 12, a new Nash sedan rumbled down Cottage Grove Avenue on Chicago’s South Side. It was the only car on the road. Belva Gaertner slouched low in the passenger seat and pulled her knees up toward the glove box. She wanted Walter Law to have a glimpse of her calves. Belva was thirty-eight years old, nearly ten years older than Walter, and twice a divorcée, but she still had beautiful legs. She would allow Walter to reach out and massage them. In fact, she would allow him to do anything he wanted to do. But he didn’t stroke her leg. Instead, he gripped the steering wheel and refused to look at her.

  The headlights blurred into blackness as the car hurtled through the night. They could have been anywhere. Not just anywhere in the city, but anywhere in the world. They swung onto Forrestville Avenue, the sedan shaking as if being turned by a can opener. This was the Grand Boulevard neighborhood sleeping around them. The men and women here had to get up in just a couple of hours; many of them worked in the Stockyards. But the neighborhood was far enough east—past Back of the Yards, Canaryville, and Gage Park—that these people had dreams. You couldn’t smell the slaughterhouses out here, at least not all the time. The car stopped at the curb, the engine heaving. Walter heaved, too. He and Belva were both drunk, lost in a thick fog. Belva should have known better. The bootlegger had been out of pints by the time they got to him, at midnight; he only had the larger bottles, the quarts. They’d already been drinking for hours, but they bought a bottle anyway.

  Walter still wouldn’t look at her, though she begged him to. Later, she realized the quart might have been a bad batch, cut too heavily with fusel oil and coal tar dyes. Walter couldn’t hold his liquor very well, but this bottle hit him harder than usual. Belva got out of the car in a mood, slamming the door and stomping away. But she came back; she always came back. She climbed into the machine and leaned over the gearbox. She wanted to make up. Walter still didn’t. Booze—and Belva—made him crazy, suspicious. The orchestra had been playing “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else” when they left the Gingham Inn, and Walter was especially susceptible to suggestion. He finally turned to her. He told her she had to mind herself better when they went out. Belva didn’t like the sound of that. She pulled out her pistol.

  “I bet I’m a better shooter than you are,” she said.

  Walter laughed at her, slapping his hand on the steering wheel. He told her that of course he was the better shot. He may be an automobile salesman—he’d sold her this sedan—but he knew how to handle a gun. Belva’s mind focused as he was laughing. Walter didn’t know that she carried the gun with her everywhere. Sometimes she’d sit with it at her vanity in the
morning. She’d grip the handle, stretching out her long fingers to manage its weight and then extending her arm and squinting, taking aim. But she never went to a shooting range to practice. She knew it didn’t matter how good a shot she was—or how good a shot Walter was. You couldn’t compete with the gangs. They were on the front page of the newspaper every day. They roamed the streets like madmen. Nothing scared them—not even the police. Especially not the police. That was a good reason, she thought, for the two of them to go up to her room.

  “Think of it,” she told Walter. “What if some bandit stopped and robbed us and maybe tried to get rough with me, what would we do?”

  More than an hour later, Belva still didn’t have an answer to that question. She sat naked on a couch in her apartment, thinking about it. She stared at the blood-soaked clothes steaming on the floor in front of her. Her coat, dress, shoes, and hat were laid out as if she couldn’t decide what to wear. The caracul coat bothered her the most.

  Belva stood up and began to pace. A coat like that sold for a couple of grand at the fine downtown stores. Belva fired up a cigarette and paced some more. She didn’t know how this could have happened. She had gotten drunk early in the day, before Walter had called on her. Just pleasantly buzzed, as usual, the kind of tingling warmth that held you like a new mother. Usually that worked in her favor. No one took her too seriously when she was sloshed. Being passed out at her flat or at the Gingham Inn meant she couldn’t get in trouble. Usually.

  There was a knock on the door. Belva looked toward the back of the apartment. Her mother stayed in her bedroom. Belva had never been able to count on her mother, not once in her whole life, so she didn’t expect tonight to be any different. She managed to stay hopeful as she put on a robe. Maybe William had come to check on her. That was possible. Her ex-husband would have been waiting for her to telephone. She called him every night when she got home; it was their ritual. He’d certainly be worried by now. William didn’t go out to the cabarets anymore. Their last couple of years of marriage, she couldn’t get him to go anywhere. But now he wanted her back. He bought her expensive clothes and diamonds. He’d just bought her that Nash sedan. All so she’d come back.

  Belva couldn’t decide if she should marry him again. A lot had changed since their divorce. William was more successful than ever: He had just won the Franklin Institute Gold Medal for designing a serum-injection system that made blood transfusions safer. But he was an old man now. Soon he would be sixty, and he looked a decade older. It wasn’t difficult to picture him being carried off on a stretcher, never to return. Of course, a lot had changed for her, too. She sometimes felt like she was sixty. She hated looking in the mirror in the morning, watching gravity slowly taking her away, back to the earth.

  Belva opened the door and found two policemen staring at her. They stepped inside at her invitation, but they didn’t know where to stand. The room was stuffed to the gunwales. Belva had gotten most of the furniture in the divorce, so the little apartment was stacked with couches and chairs, dressers and tables and love seats. She always had somewhere to sit. The policemen checked the place out; they checked her out, the large diamond rings on her fingers, the watch on her wrist that was set with precious stones. Belva realized the watch face was shattered and the time had stopped at 1:15.

  The policemen asked her if she had a gun. Yes, she said. She always carried a gun. She added that it was a present from her husband—William Gaertner, the scientific-instruments manufacturer. She figured they would know the name. “He gave me that coat, too,” she said. She pointed with her toes to the wet heap on the floor: a green velvet dress, a white butterfly hat, a lamb’s-wool coat, scuffed-up silver slippers.

  The policemen told her they’d found a dead man in her car, an automobile salesman named Walter Law. Belva nodded. They said she’d been seen leaving the car and then returning. They asked if she had gone to her flat to get a gun. She denied it. Then she amended the answer: “I don’t know,” she said. “I was drunk.”

  Belva’s head had begun to clear by this point. She realized these policemen were real, and that Walter really was dead. The officers took her to the Fiftieth Street station house. They sat her down, offered her a cup of coffee, and began to interview her. She and Mr. Law had spent the evening drinking, she told them. They’d been seeing each other for a couple of months and had developed a sort of routine. His wife didn’t seem to mind that he’d go out with another woman a few times a week. Tonight, around midnight, they were saying good-bye when something happened—a gunshot, she didn’t know from where. Belva remembered calling out “Walter! Walter!” and receiving no response. Naturally, she was scared. It might have been stick-up men. Walter had fallen against the steering wheel, and Belva tried to move him. Panicked, she fumbled for the door handle, stumbled out of the car, and ran—ran for her life.

  Assistant State’s Attorney Stanley Klarkowski introduced himself. Belva smiled up at the prosecutor. She appreciated a courteous man. He was also a good-looking man, young and tall. But then Klarkowski began talking, and Belva sighed. More questions.

  The assistant state’s attorney knew how to get answers out of people. Soon Belva admitted she and “Mr. Law” had been fighting. At the Gingham Inn she’d snuck a dance with another admirer while Walter was away from their table, and she worried he’d seen them. She didn’t want another scene like one they’d had a few nights before. “I was frightened,” she said. “Last Sunday night when he took me home he wouldn’t talk to me all the way home, just sneered and said, ‘If I ever see you with anybody else I’ll wring your neck.’ ”

  Klarkowski pushed her for specifics about the evening and the shooting, but Belva had nothing more to offer. Her mind was a muddy hole. “Oh, Mr. Attorney,” she finally cried out, her eyes wild, “I can’t remember anything—not if I have to hang for it.”

  “Did you shoot Law?” he asked.

  Belva chewed at the inside of her cheek, tears dropping from her face like boulders. “I don’t see how I could,” she said. “I thought so much of him.”

  So far, Maurine Watkins felt like a flunky. In her first few weeks at the paper, she had mostly stood around at suburban police stations miles from the action, calling in brief reports on petty burglaries and car crashes. Her name appeared nowhere in the Tribune. Bylines were reserved for the top reporters, and you had to land a big story—and successfully milk it for days or weeks—to qualify. After only a few days on the job, Maurine tried to show initiative by jumping into a taxi with Al Jennings, the famed outlaw turned politician.2 She got the interview, but nothing came of it in the paper. If she were lucky, she might be assigned an innocuous soft feature about “bobbed wigs” or a theater reopening and see her work manhandled by copyreaders who had an aversion to modifiers or any phrase they could identify as possibly being an original thought. It hardly helped to know that all the cub reporters got the same treatment, including the Tribune’s coeditor in chief, Joseph Medill Patterson, back when he was a young hack.

  Maurine didn’t dare complain. The Tribune local room had a faintly militaristic air about it. Robert Lee’s predecessor had been a cavalry officer during the Spanish-American War and insisted on being called Captain Stott. The newsroom’s majordomo was a profane, hulking, middle-aged man-child by the name of Jimmie Durkin, who would answer the phone and then order a reporter to hop to it: “Shake a leg! Take them dogs off that desk and give ’em a workout. You ain’t doin’ nothin.’ ” Lee, like the captain before him, wanted only team players on his staff. “The prima donna is one who will not understand that a newspaper is bounded by steel hoops—literally, not just speculatively,” the city editor told a group of Northwestern University students, referring to the huge metal molds used to print mass-circulation newspapers. “It is surprising what little elasticity there is in the metal page of type. And yet the prima donna will weep bitter tears, resign, curse the editor and classify him among the most unspeakable of blundering upstarts because the sacred brainchild of
the prima donna has been trimmed to fit.”

  These were just words, the kind of scare-’em-straight words a newspaper editor was expected to drop on impressionable journalism students, but the family-run paper’s two editors in chief, Patterson and his cousin, Robert McCormick, strove to have the Tribune live up to them. Teamwork, not individual star reporters, would make their newspaper great. For the most part, it was working. By the middle of the century’s second decade, the Tribune had become the undisputed top dog in the city, having broken the back of the old Chicago Record-Herald with want-ad innovations that made the Tribune, in its own words, the “world’s greatest advertising medium.” By the early 1920s, the Tribune’s daily circulation topped five hundred thousand. On Sunday, it was well over eight hundred thousand. This was double the newspaper’s circulation just a decade before. As a result, William Randolph Hearst’s Herald and Examiner was now the Tribune’s only morning competitor.

  McCormick and Patterson were Ivy League boys, grandsons of Joseph Medill, the man who made the Tribune a powerful player in the city and state by helping put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. They took their stewardship of the paper seriously. They were determined that it be the best. When the country committed to the World War, for example, the Tribune Company, with a full recognition that it would lose money, launched a Paris-based edition of the newspaper. It debuted, appropriately and not at all coincidentally, on July 4, 1917. Throughout the rest of the war, soldiers at the front often found out what had happened to other units nearby not from the army but from the Chicago Tribune.