The Girls of Murder City (7 page)

The
Tribune,
at least, wanted a true “feminine perspective” on women criminals. It sought strong, unsentimental women who could write crime stories “with a high moral tone.” To no one’s surprise, the paper had had limited success so far. One of its first hires was a young woman not long out of the University of Chicago. On her first assignment, Fanny Butcher interviewed a woman whose son had attempted to kill her. The fledgling reporter was so shaken by the events the woman described that she barely made it back to the local room without collapsing. Next, Butcher spent a week in the morals court, watching as men and women were arraigned on prostitution and related charges. She had to listen, she said, “to the intimate details of sexual intercourse, abnormal as well as normal, of amounts paid and demanded as refund by dissatisfied customers, of friskings during lovemaking, and of young girls hounded by procurers. I went home every night and promptly lost whatever dinner I had been able to get down (I weighed ninety-eight pounds when it was over).” Butcher wasn’t able to take it, just as the
Tribune
’s managing editor, Teddy Beck, had foreseen. He sent her to women’s features to save her from having to write any more “tales of depravity.”

Maurine was certainly aware of the widespread doubts about her gender’s ability to cut it under pressure, but she didn’t have time to worry about perceptions. Knowing that a replate would be necessary for a final street edition, she began to write as soon as she had the bare-bones facts. She was so rushed that she didn’t even get all of those facts right. She called Belva by her popular nickname, her old stage name, and misspelled her first husband’s surname. She called the dead man Robert, instead of Walter. She misnamed the café where Belva and Walter had sat drinking. Nevertheless, she had a feel for the story. She knew it was leading somewhere good. She wrote:

Mrs. Belle Brown Overbeck Gaertner, a handsome divorcee of numerous experiences with divorce publicity, was arrested at an early hour this morning after the police had found the dead body of Robert Law, an automobile salesman, in her automobile.

Law had been shot through the head. His body was found slumped down at the steering wheel of Mrs. Gaertner’s Nash sedan, a short distance from the entrance to Mrs. Gaertner’s home, 4809 Forrestville avenue. On the floor of the automobile was found an automatic pistol from which three shots had been fired, and a bottle of gin. . . .

From the license number of the automobile Mrs. Gaertner’s name and address were found. The police went to her apartment at 4809 Forrestville avenue and found Mrs. Gaertner hysterically pacing the floor. She readily admitted she had been with Law, but steadfastly denied she knew anything of the manner of his death. . . . She finally admitted the gun was hers, saying she always carried it, because of her fear of robbers. When pressed concerning the actual shooting, she answered all queries with:

“I don’t know, I was drunk.”

Maurine, probably nervous about how her first big story would be received by the copyreaders, reined in her personality, sticking to the facts at hand. There was nothing special about the finished product, nothing like what the
Herald and Examiner
would surely come up with, though Maurine did linger on the infidelity that caused Belva’s divorce back in 1920. The story had the feel of being rushed. Considering the late hour when Belva arrived at the police station, it’s possible Maurine called the story in, with a copyboy running to the “morgue,” the paper’s archives, to pull information on Belva’s divorce for her. But the young reporter knew she’d done a competent job. It was a start. The typewritten pages, pounded out by her or a rewrite man, were sent down to the composing room in a basket. The story had been designated for a page-one position in place of another item already on the presses; once the story was ready, the remade pages would be cast, the presses shut down, the new plates inserted and the presses sent flying again, all within minutes. All Maurine could do now was wait. In the composing room, a copyboy took the pages over to the copy cutter’s desk. The cutter sliced the story into sections for the copyreaders and marked each “take” with a number to keep it in order. Everybody worked quickly, and soon the Linotype operator began to knock away at his keyboard, transferring Maurine’s words into hot type.

The
Tribune
was a massive operation, a city institution, and any reporter was just one very small part of it. This fact was represented perfectly by the Linotype, which differentiated not a whit between sports or crime, star columnist or suburban reporter. The machine operator read every word of every story that was dropped onto his holding plate, but he didn’t comprehend any of it—there wasn’t time. He simply shoveled it into the mechanical maw.

The Linotype, or line-casting, machine was part typewriter, part foundry. The machine had revolutionized newspaper publishing late in the previous century, allowing a small team to swiftly set page after page of metal type, resulting in casts that could be used on multiple presses at the same time. With this innovation, along with the electric-powered rotary press, newspapers suddenly could be far more than a handful of pages each day. They could cover the whole world, with as many pages per edition and copies every day as readers and advertisers made economically feasible. The
Tribune
’s maximum capacity for a forty-page edition was well over one million copies. Yet there was nothing glamorous about the technological triumph that made this possible. An operator sat before a ninety-character keyboard, the rest of the Linotype machine rearing up before him at close range, making him look like a disobedient child being forced to face the wall. A pot of molten metal was attached to the back of the machine, providing the source material for the lines typed out by the operator. The Linotype was, quite simply, a large, dangerous beast, with various safety mechanisms built in to keep the 550-degree liquid metal from spraying through gaps between the letter molds. As the operator typed, little mechanical arms swung just above eye level, releasing matrices—small pieces of metal—on which letters were stamped and then arranged into completed lines of hot type, spitting them out one by one with a satisfying
tick-tick-tick
and then distributing the letter molds back to their magazines for the next line. On the fourth floor of the Tribune Plant Building, dozens of these machines stood side-by-side, clicking and humming in unison as deadline approached, the operators one with their Linotypes.

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.