The Girls of Murder City Page 5
Maurine’s story may have been treated just as dispassionately by the Linotype operator as every other item going into the paper, but Maurine recognized that hers—and similar stories about Belva “Belle” Gaertner in the city’s other newspapers—was going to make a greater impact than anything else on the page. Every Chicago reporter knew that a gun-toting girl was a guaranteed public obsession, an instant celebrity, at least for a few days. Newspaper readers couldn’t get enough of them. The really interesting or beautiful girl gunners could spike circulation for weeks. Maurine was sure that Belva was a really interesting one. These initial tidbits laid out before readers undoubtedly would only pique interest; all of Chicago’s sob sisters and girl reporters were going to be after the story for days and perhaps weeks—right up until Belva Gaertner stood before a jury to hear her fate, if it came to that.
The thrill of it, the anticipation, gripped Maurine. Excited by making it onto page one, she now wanted to lead the way on the story. She wanted to best the sensationalist Hearst operation without faking anything. Maurine had pored over the Herald and Examiner and the American for weeks; she understood them and their readers. The Hearst papers knew how to do melodrama. Every crime story was instantly recognizable: the plot, the characters, the narrative arc and moral code. Tragedy was glamorized, ordinary individuals romanticized. Those ordinary individuals had to be remade into dramatic caricatures and easily identified by consistent phrases: Katherine Malm, whose trial in February had made all of the front pages, wasn’t a snuffling ex-waitress who’d fallen in with the wrong crowd. She was the “Two-Gat Girl”—the “Wolf Woman.” One of Malm’s cellmates, Sabella Nitti, likewise wasn’t a terrified illiterate immigrant who didn’t understand what was happening to her. She was “Senora Sabelle, alleged husband-killer.” Maurine had studied drama under George Pierce Baker. She got it. Life would be so much better, so much more alive, if it could be stripped down to its essentials, like in a play.
Maurine ended her first page-one story with a tantalizing question posed by Belva’s ex-husband, William—one that suggested there was much yet to be written about this woman.
Mr. Gaertner said last night at his home, 5227 Kimbark avenue, that he knew Mrs. Gaertner’s whereabouts and that he had seen her occasionally in the three years since their divorce. “What has happened to her now?” he inquired.
Set in type, it sounded like an accusation, a weary, dismissive retort by a bitter ex-mate. That was undoubtedly how Maurine meant it to sound. She knew she could create a page-one serial on “Belle Brown Overbeck Gaertner,” the wild former cabaret performer who’d wrecked a marriage to a wealthy man and now found herself in a much worse stew. But that wasn’t how William Gaertner had meant the question. He was a scared old man, woken in the middle of the night by a reporter. He wanted to know what had happened to his incident-prone ex-wife, who also happened to be the love of his life.
Maurine didn’t have a good answer for him. The last she had seen of her, Belva Gaertner was headed to a jail cell. “Call William,” Belva had pleaded to an officer. “William will know what to do.”
William Gaertner would have been surprised to hear his former wife say such a thing. When it came to Belva, he never knew what to do. Throughout their marriage, it seemed that nobody, and nothing, could make her happy. But William would keep trying. After the reporter disengaged the line, he hung up the phone, dressed, and headed down to the police station.
3
One-Gun Duel
The horses had almost made the marriage worthwhile for Belva. William maintained his own stables, which rivaled even those of the city’s most exclusive riding clubs. Belva, like William, loved to ride, and she did so effortlessly, moving her body to match her horse’s stride, a simple clench of her thighs goading the steed into a trot, another and she was racing across Washington Park’s expansive South Open Green. One observer noted that the “suppleness and litheness acquired in the dance added to her grace in the saddle,” a conclusion seconded by her husband. William gave her a present during their courtship, a handmade horsewhip with a fitted grip perfect for her long fingers. On almost every day of her marriage, she moseyed across Sixty-first Street on one of William’s black hunters and into the park, the cherished whip vibrating against her palm. With her trim torso and her penchant for opulent headwear, Belva cut a striking figure on the bridle path, galloping past the adjacent White City Amusement Park, with its screaming, happy children.
Belva Gaertner should have been happy, too. Hyde Park was a glorious place to call home in the years immediately after the war, when she was married to William. It was one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city. A lawyer named Paul Cornell had purchased three hundred acres of land in the 1850s and developed what was then a suburb, using the name of the elegant New York and London neighborhoods in hopes of creating the same atmosphere for his new burg. After the Civil War, he and a group of well-to-do men who’d bought lots in fledgling Hyde Park inveigled the Illinois legislature into forming a South Park Commission to sell bonds and levy taxes. Cornell and the commission had no small plans. They hired the country’s most acclaimed landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, to create a grand “aristocratic landscaping” design for what would become the 523 acres of Jackson and Washington parks, plus their connector, the Midway Plaisance Park. Olmsted’s original plan was never carried out, but nevertheless the area’s ugly prairie scrubland was quickly transformed. The parks, opined a visitor, were among the best in the world, with “broad drives and winding alleys, ornamental trees, banks and beds of flowers and flowering shrubs, lakes and ornamental bridges, and turf that cools the eye under the fiercest noon.” This attraction, along with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park and the launch of the University of Chicago a year earlier, began a new wave of fevered development, adding a commercial component and greater self-sufficiency to the area. It also became, in practical if not official terms, the southernmost point of the metropolitan area. Cable Court on South Lake Park Avenue was so named because it was the turnaround for cable cars heading to and from downtown. Later the city built an elevated line. Despite the college students and increased activity, the wealthy held tight, adding more large, elegant homes to the neighborhood. The parks, along with Lake Michigan, made Hyde Park wonderfully insular, hemming it in on three sides in a gorgeous parabola. Hyde Parkers—especially the wives, who didn’t have to trek downtown to work each day like their husbands—had good reason to believe they lived in their own exclusive world.
It wasn’t enough for Belva. She had dreamed her whole life of being among the idle rich, but it turned out she bored easily. Not just in the depths of winter, when she found herself shut inside. She was bored in June. She was bored in July. In the great rooms and hallways of the Gaertner household, boredom trailed her like an annoying corgi, always there, underfoot.
Her husband’s wealth and position offered diversions, without question. William, who’d founded his Wm. Gaertner & Co. in 1896, regularly bought her beautiful clothes, the best in the city. And Belva did her own shopping, too, with open accounts at Marshall Field and the most exclusive couturiers. Every day gorgeous accessories hung from her ears and fanned out across her collarbone. Her rings could slice watermelons, and she wore a lot of them, sometimes one on every finger. The glittery rocks caused the other society ladies of Hyde Park to gape. Belva enjoyed the gewgaws and quickly expected only the best, but unlike so many of the wives of wealthy industrialists and bankers, she couldn’t squeeze forth much passion for acquiring things. Passion was to be had, Belva Gaertner knew, but not in Hyde Park and not out in the open. Its time was late, very late. Only late at night would strangers put away their stifling formalities and inhibitions, come together, and do things with other strangers they’d never dare do with their loved ones. Belva had found a place for herself in the late-night cabarets and roadhouses of Chicago. She’d created an identity for herself in them, years before she ever met her husband. She wasn�
��t Mrs. William Gaertner to these men and women. She wasn’t even Belva. She was Belle . . . oh, how she missed Belle!
That was the name she had been using when she met William, back in 1911. William was forty-six at the time and one of Chicago’s most eligible bachelors, not that this designation influenced his actions. Despite excellent manners, he mostly steered clear of the society ladies and lawn parties of his Hyde Park circle, preferring instead the dancing girls in the down-market Loop cabarets that promised “revelations of the female form divine and the portrayals of passion.” Here, wearing molded breastplates and a feathered headdress, Belva, at twenty-five, stood out. She was far from the most beautiful girl in the cabaret, yet all of the regulars seemed to be in love with her. It helped that she was admirably built, with a broad chest and long legs, but she really won men over with her personality. Belva would approach a table after one of her performances and take over the conversation. She dazzled men with her dancing eyes, the roar of her laughter, her windmilling limbs as she told a story—she always had a story. Only when she was caught in repose, a still life, might an admirer recognize that she was really quite an ugly duckling. William Gaertner never did recognize it.
Not long after making her acquaintance, William commissioned a full-length portrait of Belva in cabaret dress and gave it prominent wall space at his residence. It was the image seared into his mind, the moment he first saw her on stage, her body turning with erotic languor beneath her clothes, arms rising up like a succulent baby’s. She’d introduced herself as Belle Brown that night, but William hadn’t been fooled. He soon discovered her given name, Belva Boosinger, and that she also answered to Mrs. Ernest Oberbeck. She was a married woman. That wasn’t all. Outside the cabaret, some men called her Eleanor Peppol. Sometimes, when settling delinquent accounts, they also called her Sweet Baby or other, dirtier names. The array of monikers, along with frequent address changes, should have sent up a red flag for a man of William Gaertner’s means. But by the time this information came in, it was too late. He had to have her.
Belva, it turned out, was easy to have—one quick divorce was all it took. She just wasn’t easy to control. This would prove to be a problem, especially after they married in 1917. William, who’d come to Chicago in his twenties from his native Germany, ran his business however he wanted. He ran his household however he wanted. He expected to be in control. He controlled the universe, in a sense. In 1907 he’d accomplished a singular and acclaimed breakthrough, successfully building a giant “gun camera” that could photograph the canals and polar caps of the planet Mars. So why couldn’t he control his own wife? She lived her own life. She made her own plans. She snubbed him when it suited her. It infuriated William, and it excited him too. He had a basset-hound face that turned beet red at the slightest provocation, the face of a small-time carnival barker. It must have been red all the time around Belva. He was caught in a miserable, unbreakable circle: Lust. Desperation. Hatred. Love.
Belva never seemed to get caught in that cycle herself. After the first flush of marriage had worn off, William often would come home from work and find the house empty. Sometimes Belva simply would be out riding. She’d come in at a gallop with a broad grin on her face. After a couple of hours in the saddle, her thighs and buttocks glowed, radiating from the inside out like a clay pot right out of the fire—a beautiful soreness that would leave her short of breath all evening, desperate to go out on the town. William, exhausted from a full day in the lab and the boardroom, rarely wanted to join her, and so she’d set off into the night on her own or with a young man who came to the door. Belva always invited William along, but he would demur. He had to get up early. “You go, dear,” he’d say. “Enjoy yourself.”
“You are one husband in a million,” an escort supposedly told him one night as the man and Belva headed for the door.
William didn’t believe the man. Surely a larger percentage of husbands were getting the shaft, not that confirmation of this hypothesis would have appeased him. There was no way he could ever understand Belva’s generation. The rules he grew up with had all been rubbed away. Even the good girls now danced close, oblivious to chaperones. Young women—proper, well-raised young women—encouraged party diversions like Sardines, a hide-and-seek game in which the whole point wasn’t actually to hide or seek but for everyone to end up mashed tantalizingly close together in a tight space. On top of such frivolities, girls now revealed flesh in public—bare ankles and arms and, worse, the unfettered outlines of much more through thin summer clothing. In his deepest heart, William probably never truly expected fidelity from Belva. She was more than twenty years his junior and came from the lower classes. She had a temperament wilder than any stallion he’d ever had. She had to run. He surely did expect something, however. Some discretion, for one thing. And frankly, some taste in lovers. Men of means, like him. Men of talent and accomplishment. Men with ambition beyond bagging a society lady. More important, he hoped that, in time, Belva would settle down and settle in, become a companion.
When it didn’t happen, he had no idea how to handle it. He would reprove Belva when she came in at three A.M. smelling of alcohol, pointing out that he had to be up early every morning and didn’t appreciate being woken. He’d lecture her when she would collapse in bed, half paralyzed before her head touched the pillow. “Thanks for the advice,” she’d answer groggily. She’d then come home later the next night and playfully pinch and slap her husband as he tried to sleep. She was no longer just a social drinker—or, at the very least, she was doing entirely too much socializing. Time and again she came home drunk. William became so frustrated that he’d try to simply blot her out. “It wasn’t unusual for him to get angry at me and refuse to speak for weeks at a time,” she later complained.
Being a scientific-minded man, William Gaertner chose scientific methods to solve the problem. He hired celebrated detective W. C. Dannenberg, the city’s former Morals Squad director, to track and chart her progress through the days. Almost immediately, this approach showed results, for Belva didn’t have to go far to find fun. The neighborhoods to the west of Hyde Park had filled up with rail-yard workers and clerks and shoe salesmen, and with them came a burgeoning entertainment district that was beginning to suck the life out of the Loop’s nights. In Plaisance Park, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Midway Gardens originally featured elegant music and dancing for the South Side’s finest, but now it catered to the masses. It held more than a thousand dancers at a time and was often packed. Outside there were three raised dance floors, each separated by tables that allowed men on their own to sit and survey the night’s female offerings. Inside, built along Japanese architectural lines, a maze of nooks allowed philandering men and women to hide themselves away just blocks from home. Next door to the Midway Gardens was the Sans Souci Amusement Park, with its always-crowded beer garden rolling out from a band shell where musicians filled the air with popular tunes night after night. The White City Amusement Park also had a ballroom, this one popular with residents of the nearby “honeymoon flats” along the western border of Washington Park.
It was along this stretch of small residential houses facing the park that Belva got caught. On March 30, 1920, Dannenberg asked William to come along on his wife’s trail. The detective and his men had been tracking her for a while. They’d watched her cozy up inside Midway Gardens and rub bellies on the dance floor at Dreamland Café. She had an established routine; Dannenberg knew full well that this outing would prove to his client beyond any doubt that Mrs. Gaertner was no good. They pulled up to 5345 Prairie Avenue, two blocks west of Belva’s favorite bridle path in the park, barely a mile from the Gaertner home. Dannenberg made clear to William that they should approach quietly, as silent as Indians. The redheaded detective, who’d made his name a decade earlier by arresting the white slavers Maurice and Julia Van Bever, took the lead. Once he got the front door open, he burst in and rushed into the bedroom. Belva shrieked and dived for the floor, where she’d left her c
lothes. Another naked body skittered in the opposite direction. William, trailing in behind the detectives, didn’t have the heart for a scene in this strange house. He turned and ran out.
Belva munched on a sandwich as she waited in a corridor at the Wabash Avenue police station. Reporters stood around her, jockeying for position. Someone asked what happened the previous night, and she sighed.
“I tell you I can’t recall what happened,” she said. “Somebody must have shot him, but I can’t remember how it was done.” Belva shifted in her seat. She sat with her legs crossed, face regally impassive. She’d gotten some sleep, and William had brought her fresh clothes, so she was beginning to feel like herself again. Watching her, some of the hacks began to wonder if the whole thing was a big mistake, if this well-bred woman simply had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Belva took a swig of milk and looked up.
“I think I can get my coat cleaned so it will look all right again,” she said to no one in particular. The strange comment hung in the air. A reporter asked what she meant, and she described the beautiful caracul coat that now had blood all over it. The police took it, she said. “It’s an expensive coat, you know. Sometimes a coat like that is worth as much as $2,800.”