The Girls of Murder City (14 page)

This was the side Maurine’s parents were on, and Maurine never contradicted her parents. She certainly never considered bobbing her hair or displaying a pretty knee. She didn’t like to think of herself as beautiful. Beauty was for the Divine, and Maurine, a devout girl, a minister’s daughter, could never think of herself as Divine. Young Crawfordsville ladies strove to be respectable, not beautiful. Maurine went to church every Sunday and prayed for guidance. Her parents could be proud of her.

And yet . . . here she was in Chicago—the Jazz Capital, the “abattoir by the lake.” The city had a way of overwhelming the individual, of breaking down his or her opposition. Young men and women arrived in Chicago from across the world and promptly lost their identities—or reforged them into tougher, more vital versions of themselves. There was little use in resisting. Already Maurine had decided that she would make an awful wife and so told suitors she “would not do that to anyone.” In Chicago, she found she could be freer than she ever thought possible, more open-minded and outgoing. Soon after starting at the
Tribune,
she wrote a glowing profile of Aletta Jacobs, a radical doctor from Holland who vigorously supported birth control, something Maurine’s church just as vigorously opposed. Maurine knew all about how birth control was “race suicide”—it had been one of Theodore Roosevelt’s pet issues—but she now appeared unconcerned. She also attended a conference for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where the fervor of the socialist group’s members impressed her, especially a “smiling blonde with brilliant blue eyes” who told her of the “beautifully moral pacifistic resistance of the laborers.”

The foundation on which Maurine had been raised seemed to shake with every passing day, more so than her parents back in Crawfordsville possibly could have imagined. The fledgling reporter wasn’t just exposed to controversial reformers like Aletta Jacobs and socialists. She had swiftly developed a new, wholly unexpected interest: murder. It was a fascination that would have horrified everyone she grew up with. Just a few weeks earlier, it would have horrified Maurine, too. It still did, in fact, but now she tamped down that horror with the kind of twinkling bravado all of her fellow reporters seemed to sport so easily. She didn’t have it in her to demand information from battered victims or grief-stricken family members as if it were owed to her, but she could pretend to be unmoved by the bloody events she wrote about. And sometimes—after hours of standing around at police stations and battling for the phone to call in reports—she actually was. She became numb, and it was liberating. Maurine decided that murder was more accepted in Chicago than anywhere else in the country. Gun-toting gangsters—Johnny Torrio, Dean O’Banion, the Capone brothers—were among the biggest celebrities in the city. Chicagoans rejected the notion, common in Crawfordsville, that a man had to be a sociopath or brain-damaged to kill another person. Instead, violence could simply be a necessary response to the environment. One of Maurine’s early assignments was the case of fifteen-year-old Dominick Galluzzo, a “sober, earnest-eyed” boy who’d been pushed to his limit by an abusive father and so shot him down. The coroner’s jury determined the shooting a justifiable homicide. So did Maurine, who enthusiastically listed the dead man’s transgressions, such as calling his wife “an ugly old thing” in front of her coworkers at a candy factory. In Chicago, the young reporter had noticed, murder “doesn’t put anyone in a flurry.” Thanks to the newspapers, it was a part of daily conversation, and as often as not, that conversation included an approving nod or laugh.

Maurine nodded and laughed, too. She couldn’t help it. She liked the Chicago attitude. She liked nerve. Chicagoans certainly had that. On the East Coast, titled Europeans and wealthy industrialists still dominated the public eye. But in this wild city, democracy ruled. To get star treatment in “Murder City,” Maurine noted, all you had to do was pull a gun, for “Chicago, bless her heart, will swallow anything with enough gore and action.” Maurine herself eagerly gorged on as much as she could. Being a reporter in a big city, a city where no one knew her, gave her courage. She would even develop a kind of crush on a gangster, later saying that the “nicest man I met during the time I was doing newspaper work was supposed to be the toughest gunman in Chicago’s West Side. He was like something you read about, such a charming, courteous man. . . . I might add that he was the only man I ever met in the newspaper world who, when he swore, apologized for it.” Maurine interviewed the gangster in a hospital room after he’d been shot three times, noting that he got out of bed to greet her “with as much casual grace as any continental actor in lavender pajamas.”

“I had to ask him a lot of questions that were none of my business,” she said. “He acted so sorry not to be able to answer them that I felt like weeping. I asked him who shot him, but the only way we could ever have found out was by watching to see who was the next man ‘bumped off.’ ”
⁴

The gangster’s matter-of-fact attitude toward violence was awful, and she knew it, but at the same time there was something in Maurine—in her need to idealize, to glamorize—that found it immensely appealing. Gangsters thrilled her. Chivalry and romanticism, those forgotten Victorian ideals, weren’t dead; they simply belonged to the underworld now. “Gunmen are just divine,” Maurine took to saying. “They have such lovely, quaint, old-fashioned ideas about women being on pedestals. My idea of something pleasant is to be surrounded by gunmen.”

Maurine couldn’t say the same about gun girls. She would never find Belva Gaertner interesting in the same way Quinby did. Despite setting off on her own path, despite eschewing marriage, Maurine’s feminism remained inchoate. Gangsters like Dean O’Banion could be romantic figures, but not violent women. More than that, she found murderous women—God forgive her—funny. Standing around at the Criminal Courts Building, she could get her fellow reporters laughing about the city’s latest murderess going down in history as “a little sister of Lady Macbeth, Salome and Lucrezia Borgia,” further ingratiating herself with the men and putting off the women scribes.

The zingers that Maurine tossed out when talking about Belva (or Kitty Malm or Sabella Nitti) undoubtedly were a means of coping with what she was experiencing. Underneath the snide remarks about “charming murderesses” pulsed a deep-seated fear of what it all meant. The British war hero Ian Hay Beith, just landed in the United States for a speaking tour, worried that “the privileges that young women have enjoyed since the war have reduced the happiness that life holds for them, and men today lack the old-fashioned reverence for women that was the most sacred thing in life.”

Maurine, cynical jokes and her own liberation aside, agreed. Freedom came with responsibilities, and too many of the women in Chicago were being overwhelmed by their choices. That much she understood very well.

6

The Kind of Gal Who Never Could Be True

On Thursday, April 3, Beulah Annan heard a rap on the screen door at the back of her apartment. She pushed aside the newspaper, padded barefoot through the little kitchen, and opened the inner door. She found Harry Kalstedt standing there, as she knew she would. He was smiling that laconic smile of his.

“Oh, hello, Anne,” Harry said. “You all alone?” He always called her Anne. Not Beulah. Not May, her middle name. It made a nice sound in his mouth: Anne. Sweet, but also teasing, damp, seductive. She’d told him on the phone just an hour ago that she wouldn’t be around today, but he came over anyway, and here she was ready for him, wearing only her camisole. Harry Kalstedt’s smile widened. He said she looked like she could use a drink. Beulah smiled back at him. She said she reckoned she could.

Harry stepped into the kitchen. “I hate to do this, but I need money,” he said, spoiling the mood they had going. He had a good job delivering for Tennant’s Laundry, but Beulah had noticed that he never seemed to have any money. She twisted the doorknob back and forth in her hand. Harry smelled like he’d already been drinking. He hadn’t saved her a drop.

“How much do you need?”

“Six dollars.”

Beulah frowned. “I can’t let you have that much; I haven’t got it.”

Harry said he’d take whatever she had, and Beulah tramped into the bedroom to retrieve her pocketbook. Harry took a dollar and was gone, the screen door clattering as punctuation. It was a little after twelve.

Beulah drifted into the living room, leaving the newspaper on the table. There was no news from Murderess’ Row again. She followed coverage of Belva Gaertner closely in the papers, but the last couple of days hadn’t offered much. It seemed Belva, after nearly three weeks without booze or boyfriends, had lost some of her joie de vivre. The fancy divorcée now let her lawyer do the talking for her. The others were even worse. Kitty Malm, defeated and scared, had put away her bluster for good and didn’t bother with reporters anymore. Sabella Nitti waited for the hangman with mindless stoicism. Boring, boring, and boring.

The men, fortunately, had picked up the slack. The
Tribune
that morning carried a death notice for Frank Capone, “beloved son of Theresa and the late Gabriel, brother of James, Ralph, Alphonse, Erminio, Humbert, Amadea, and Mafalda. Funeral Saturday at 9 A.M. from late residence, 7244 Prairie Avenue.” The April Fool’s Day shootout in suburban Cicero that had killed the bootlegger was on the city’s front pages for a second straight day. The Capone family home, a few blocks south of Washington Park, wasn’t far from Beulah’s building. Already, truckloads of flowers overwhelmed the house, covering the terrace and hanging from trees in the front yard. Many of Beulah’s neighbors, reading the notice, planned to walk over on Saturday to watch the funeral procession glide slowly toward Mt. Olivet Cemetery. That was the kind of thing Beulah liked to do, too, but right now she wasn’t thinking about the funeral or the exciting gangland events that precipitated it. She wasn’t thinking about Belva Gaertner or the other girls at Cook County Jail, either. The newspaper was forgotten. Now that she’d seen Harry Kalstedt, now that she’d smelled him, Beulah’s thoughts were entirely in the moment. She couldn’t stand how long it was going to take him to get back to the apartment.

She put on her favorite record: “Hula Lou.”
Her name was Hula Lou, the kind of gal who never could be true.
Beulah got so lonesome being in the flat by herself when her husband, Al, was at work. That was why she took a job at Tennant’s Laundry. What else was she going to do? It wasn’t as though she’d get more housework done if she were home every day. She hated doing housework. She much preferred sitting around dreaming about Harry.

It had been six months since she and Harry Kalstedt met, and Beulah remembered the very moment of it. His eyes had lingered a long time, drawing a smile out of her. She knew how she looked. The women in the newspaper ads had the same large, enchanting eyes, the same perfectly marcelled hair, the same curvy torsos dropping into tight little hips. Beulah was a thing of beauty in every way. She took pride in it. And not just in her looks. Her mother had taught her how to act around a man: the gaze always so soft and clinging, the mouth always bowed into deep interest as he talked of the weather or the stock tables or hats. She would sometimes take Harry’s hand and hold the back of it against her breast and sigh.

Harry returned with two quarts of wine. Back in October, when Beulah had a bad reaction to booze, she wrote in her diary, “No more moonshine for me.” But she didn’t mean it. Whenever she got really sick from drinking, she’d just skip work for a couple of days. She knew a doctor who’d give her morphine to get her through the worst of it. How alcohol felt as it spread through her—her head light and fizzy, her extremities tingling—always made the possible fallout later worthwhile. She and Harry settled in on the couch, filled the glasses she’d set out. Beulah snuggled into his chest. She knew she ought to feel ashamed when she was with Harry, kissing and loving him in the middle of the day, her day off from work, but she never did. She felt it was a woman’s prerogative “to keep a card up her sleeve,” especially a card as strong and good-looking as Harry Kalstedt.