The Girls of Murder City (15 page)

They sat there and drank and listened to the record player. That was fine for a while, the wine sweet and warm, the jazz more so, but when she and Harry drank and kept their clothes on, they only wanted to make each other mad. It never took much drinking. Sure enough, that dollar she’d given him started to grate on her. She looked at the flowered paper on the walls, the sawdust-stuffed furniture. Everything in her life was cheap. She sat up and accused Harry of lying about having money to spend on her. He always said he was going to take her places, throw some money around, but he never did. Harry was awfully tight with a dollar.

When he didn’t respond to her, just took another drink, Beulah became furious. She was certain he had other girlfriends. Why else would he never have any money?
There’s another man,
she said suddenly, the only thing that came to her mind to say. A real Southern gentleman, a man who knew how to act, who took her out dancing. Johnny was his name.

Now Harry sat up.
Johnny?
Who was this Johnny? He glared at her. He wanted to know what she had been doing with this other man. Had she been with Johnny on the bed in the next room—the bed where she had lain down for
him
so many times? Harry never asked her that question about Al. Maybe he assumed she never did it with Al anymore. “If that’s the kind of a woman you are,” he said, spitting out the words. He called her a vile name.

“Well, you’re nothing!” she yelled, her face filling with heat, her beautiful eyes cut into deep, angry slits.

“To hell with you!” he barked.

Beulah screamed louder:
You’re nothing but a dirty goddam jailbird!
Harry’s eyes jumped and he got up. Even in the big city, that was an insult that burned like hot coals.

Something’s going to happen, Beulah thought. She bit her lip. Maybe he would take her now, right here on the couch. Yank her underthings off and split her open, with the breeze from the window rolling over them and her husband soon to come home from work. Her chest felt tight, the heart desperate to get out. Harry stepped forward, “with a look in his eyes.” Beulah turned toward the bedroom.

At 4:10 she decided to call the laundry. It had been more than two hours since her fight with Harry. She turned down the volume on the Victrola.
Hula Lou . . . she’s got a pretty form, it’s pretty every place, you never get a chance to look her in the face.
Her boss, the head bookkeeper, answered the phone. “Hello, Betty,” she chirped, “what are you doing?”

Betty Bergman sighed. It was Beulah. “I’m awfully busy,” she said.

“Is Billy there?” Beulah thought it’d be good to talk to Harry’s brother-in-law, just for a minute.

Betty cocked her head to hold the phone in place against her shoulder. He’s been in and out, she said.

There was a pause, then a small voice: “Is Moo there?” Beulah held her breath: Why’d she use one of her pet names for Harry?

Betty sighed again. Stupid, silly girl. “You know he hasn’t been here all day long,” she said.

Beulah gripped the receiver until her hand hurt. “That’s funny,” she said. “I had an appointment with him for a quarter after twelve and he hasn’t shown up!” She was triumphant.

“What’s the matter, Red? You sound kinda stewed.”

“No, I haven’t had a drink all day,” Beulah insisted. “I talk queerly because I’m trying to talk to you and read the telephone directory at the same time.”

Beulah hung up. She wandered to the window and looked over the ledge. Schoolgirls had been playing out there earlier, but they were gone now. Beulah slowly rotated her hips to the music, waggled her knee. She’d been dancing around the room for an hour before she called Betty, and now she was exhausted. Tears suddenly sprang from her eyes and she buckled, almost retching.

The record scratched to its end, and she started it over again, for maybe the hundredth time:
Her name was Hula Lou, the kind of gal who never could be true
. The room spun into focus. Beulah stopped dancing. Harry—Moo—was still on the floor. The trickle of blood from his back had grown to a pool that now threatened to consume him, like a sinkhole after a spring deluge. It was nearly five o’clock.

Why, you’re nothing but a dirty goddam jailbird!

Yes, she’d said that. She remembered saying it now. That was when everything changed. Men didn’t like to be reminded of who they were. She’d looked up, right into the hatred burning out from him. It sucked the breath out of her. She couldn’t be blamed for what happened next. She just wanted him to treat her right. Nobody ever did. Nobody who mattered. She picked up the phone again. This time she called her husband at the garage where he worked.

“Come home, I’ve shot a man,” she cried when Al came on the line. “He’s been trying to make love to me.”

“Where is the gun?” the officer asked when the door opened.

Al Annan offered up the revolver. The policeman gave Beulah the once-over. She hadn’t put on a wrap or anything, though she knew the police were coming. You could see the full outline of her body through the slight fabric of her camisole; the sling of her thigh wavered into view like a dream. “Hula Lou” was still playing on the Victrola.

Al didn’t have any choice but to let the man look. Nothing was private now. He hadn’t really heard what his wife said on the phone; he’d only registered the fear and panic in her voice and rushed out. He started to think about the possibilities during the mad dash home in the taxi. When he came in the door, the first thing he saw was another man’s coat and hat on the chair. He knocked them to the floor with the back of his hand. He wanted to do the same to his wife next. Then he saw the body crumpled on the bedroom floor—and his wife, sobbing, hysterical. She told her story again, quickly, between dried-out retches. This man had come in and tried to make love to her. She’d fought him off and shot him with the gun. She’d then waited for a while, hoping he’d get up and leave, before calling the garage. Al looked into his wife’s eyes and wobbled. He believed her. Why else would a man be lying dead in their apartment? Al rang up the police. Beulah clawed at him, begging him to put down the phone. When a voice tweeted over the line—Sergeant John O’Grady sitting behind the front desk at the Wabash Avenue station—Beulah heaved the receiver away from Al and shrieked, “I’ve just killed my husband!”

The patrolman kneeled beside the dead body. More officers arrived at the small apartment at 817 East Forty-sixth Street, just five blocks north of the Washington Park bridle path that had been Belva Gaertner’s favorite. To the residents of Beulah and Al’s South Side neighborhood, known as Grand Boulevard, the city’s elite didn’t seem a mere half-dozen blocks away. The nearness of wealthy Hyde Park and Kenwood was a geographic reality but an abstract one; the park system provided an excellent barrier. Instead of being insulated by greenery, as Hyde Park was, the Grand Boulevard neighborhood was crisscrossed by streetcars and intersected by an elevated line that made the Stockyards seem closer. Rickety wooden houses and chunky three-story brick apartment buildings populated the neighborhood, and they were filled with workers from the Michigan Southern Railroad yards to the west. Grand Boulevard had been a Catholic community for years, with St. Elizabeth’s parish accommodating hundreds at its peak, before the area began turning Jewish in the early 1900s. The Sinai Temple, Chicago’s first reform synagogue, stood at Forty-sixth and Grand, a short walk from Al and Beulah’s apartment.

Beulah didn’t think anything of the Catholic exodus; she’d grown up in the Baptist faith and didn’t bother with church anymore. The growing numbers of blacks, however, worried everyone. Memories and stories of the 1919 race riots percolated thickly in every South Sider’s mind. Mass violence had broken out that summer following news that a Negro boy drowned after sunbathers wouldn’t allow him to come ashore on the white area of a beach. Fighting raged for days on the South Side, with white gangs sweeping through black neighborhoods, setting houses on fire, and beating anyone who was on the street. The newspapers pecked away at the story from the periphery, fearful of sending reporters directly into the black areas that had become a war zone. After a couple of days, the
Herald and Examiner,
whose editors believed they’d given the Negro a fair shake in their pages, decided to get a firsthand account. One of the paper’s circulation enforcers mounted a motorcycle while a reporter climbed into the sidecar. The driver jammed a
Herald and Examiner
placard in the windscreen. “This will get us by,” he said. “The paper’s been giving the jigaboos all the best of it. They won’t pop off at us.” The two men made it less than a block into “Darkie Town” before explosions crackled in the sky. There were men with rifles on the roofs of the buildings. The driver pulled out a revolver and fired off a few rounds as he tried to steer the motorcycle around the corner and back out of the neighborhood. The papers stayed out. After more than two dozen people had been killed and hundreds injured—mostly blacks—Governor Frank Lowden sent six thousand National Guard soldiers to calm everyone down.

Despite the whupping, the “jigaboos” didn’t go away. South State Street had become the “Mecca for Pleasure” for the black community, with hot jazz pouring out of nightclubs every night. “Midnight was like day,” the writer Langston Hughes recalled after visiting the entertainment strip. “The street was full of workers and gamblers, prostitutes and pimps, church folk and sinners.” The black Ebenezer Baptist Church had taken root at Forty-fifth and Vincennes, which loomed in Beulah’s walk home from the streetcar each day. She was sure the Negro boys looked at her with the same baleful lust as the white boys, and everyone knew the blacks had less capacity for restraint. That was a good enough reason to keep a revolver in the house—the revolver that now resided in a policeman’s pocket.

Officers worked their way through the apartment, noting the position of furniture and rooms, surveying the placement of the body from every angle. One of the officers, Sergeant Malachi Murphy, asked Al where the gun was kept. Al told him the bureau drawer. Beulah’s husband looked down at the dead man, at all that blood soaked into his floor, and he began to believe
he
had done it. “I came home and found this guy going after her,” he said, as much to himself as to the sergeant. “It was me that shot him.” When another policeman turned to him, Al started to tell more, stumbling, falling over himself, saving his darling Beulah. She hadn’t stopped crying since the police arrived; he couldn’t take it. He looked at her. She was helpless, the tears squirting out of her in a fury.

“No!” Beulah said. The police now swiveled to her. She said it again: No. Harry belonged to her, not to Al. He was all hers. She wouldn’t give Harry up for anything. “I am going to quit you,” Harry had said to her, and she couldn’t have that. No way. Then she’d only have Al.

“I told him I would shoot,” she said in a whisper. “He kept coming toward me anyway, so there was nothing else for me to do but shoot him.”

“In the back?” one of the officers asked.

Beulah didn’t seem to hear him. She stood still, a tuning fork whanging in her head. Then she bent slightly at the knees, and her head tipped back, as if she were taking a drink after a long trek through the desert. She dropped—a dead-away faint. No one caught her.