The Girls Of Murder City Part 3

Following Walter Howey's imperative to "hype this up," the American and the Herald and Examiner further goosed their story packages about Belva with bulging headlines and captions that sported purple prose, all seeking to get the reader emotionally involved in the ongoing drama. The Herald and Examiner warned that poisonous alcohol had accounted for more than two hundred deaths in Cook County in 1923. Worse, the fusel oil and industrial solvents in the bootleggers' "reckless mixtures has created a new type of alcoholism and insanity." Could this be the reason Belva shot? The Herald and Examiner's sister paper took the possibility seriously, or at least half seriously. The American re-created the gin-soaked events leading up to the shooting in a series of cartoon panels. This kind of strip, popular for girl-crime stories, promoted moral behavior-modesty, abstemiousness, familial love-while at the same time wallowing in its opposite. It always featured drawings of a wild-eyed, scantily clad woman holding a smoking gun and an empty bottle of liquor. The typical murderess, one panel exclaimed, "like all girls, faced the old problem of whether to follow the conventions of the world or her own desires." Belva Gaertner, the reader was told, had had plenty of fun, but now she regretted it.

The Tribune officially remained above such sensational treatment of the news, but Maurine felt confident she had the ability to match Hearst anyway. Even without imaginative photo retouchers and headline writers helping her, she could still break out of the standard Tribune style and be creative on her own. Her colleague at the paper, Genevieve Forbes, was already stretching the boundaries of newspaper form-"for an editor may give you your a.s.signment, but you give yourself your style," the veteran newswoman said. Forbes's style was often clumsy, but at her best she expertly combined the hang-'em-now att.i.tude the Tribune took with all accused killers and the sob-sister sentimentality of the Hearst papers. With her report on the Law inquest, the intense, insecure Forbes, who had started out at the Tribune as an editorial a.s.sistant, showed Maurine how it was done. Her story focused not on the inquest itself, like Maurine's report, but on Freda Law's reaction to the cool, smirking woman who'd killed her husband. She wrote: When they talked of gin and blood, Mrs. Law trembled as if she might faint, huddled close to her father-in-law, and tried to keep from crying. It was her grief for her dead husband, she indicated. When they spoke of the divorcee's nocturnal visits with Law to south side cabarets . . . Mrs. Law pushed herself forward and sneered across the table at the older, more vivacious woman with the seven diamond rings. It was her hatred for her husband's alleged slayer, she admitted.

Forbes, whose stories about Kitty Malm and Sabella Nitti helped lead to convictions, went on to describe how Belva was plainly dressed at the inquest because her "best caracul coat, her chic white hat and her modish green dress are ruined with blood. So she wears a brown sport dress, a plain black coat with a fur collar and a brown sport hat. Seven diamond rings and a wrist.w.a.tch have been washed clean of Walter Law's blood. They sparkle more brightly from that cleaning, as she uses her hands to gesture."

Maurine understood the lesson: If a girl reporter wanted to compete for the front page of the Tribune, she had to write tough, hard-hitting prose while also being as entertaining as the "sensation sheets," even if that meant taking occasional liberties to make a strong case. (Belva, for example, wasn't wearing the wrist.w.a.tch from the night of the killing at the inquest. Its faceplate had been cracked, and it no longer worked.) As it turned out, in both temperament and experience, Maurine was ideally suited to this approach. Her companion inquest article, straightforward and factual, paled in comparison with Forbes's, but she wasn't cowed by having a veteran reporter encroach on her story. The next day, with her third piece on Belva in as many days, Maurine found her voice. Having sat with Belva in her cell for much of the evening, she let the alleged murderess tell her own story, while the omniscient and unseen reporter narrated. Instead of going for pathos, like the Journal and the Hearst newspapers, Maurine allowed Belva's unconscious self-absorption to take center stage. She slyly poked fun at-and holes in-everything her subject said. "No sweetheart in the world is worth killing-especially when you've had a flock of them-and the world knows it," Maurine began in the Friday, March 14, edition.

That is one of the musings of Mrs. Belva Gaertner in her county jail cell and it is why-so she says-a "broad minded" jury is all that is needed to free her of the charge of murdering Walter Law.

The latest alleged lady murderess of Cook county, in whose car young Law was found shot to death as a finale to three months of wild gin parties with Belva while his wife sat at home unsuspecting, isn't a bit worried over the case.

"Why, it's silly to say I murdered Walter," she said during a lengthy discourse on love, gin, guns, sweeties, wives, and husbands. "I liked him and he loved me-but no woman can love a man enough to kill him. They aren't worth it, because there are always plenty more. Walter was just a kid-29 and I'm 38. Why should I have worried whether he loved me or whether he left me?"

Then the double divorcee of frequent newspaper notoriety turned to the question of juries.

"Now, that coroner's jury that held me for murder," she said. "That was b.u.m. They were narrow-minded old birds-bet they never heard a jazz band in their lives. Now, if I'm tried, I want worldly men, broad-minded men, men who know what it is to get out a bit. Why, no one like that would convict me."

It was a breakout performance for Maurine-incisive and brutally effective, an exemplar of the Tribune's executioner's style. Most of all, the story proved to Robert Lee that his instincts about Maurine had been right. Everyone wanted to confide in her and help her out, including a high-profile murder suspect. Belva had revealed herself to the young Tribune scribe in a way she hadn't to anyone else, providing the most beautiful quotes any crime reporter could hope for.

"I wish I could remember just what happened," she said to Maurine, just as she had to so many other reporters when pressed for details of the b.l.o.o.d.y night. Except then she offered something more: "We got drunk and he got killed with my gun in my car. But gin and guns-either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a d.i.c.kens of a mess, don't they? Now, if I hadn't had a gun, or if Walter hadn't had the gin . . ." Belva let the thought go unfinished. "Of course," she added, "it's too bad for Walter's wife, but husbands always cause women trouble."

Belva must have been surprised when she read the story the next morning. She thought she'd been careful, and she no doubt thought she and Maurine had had an understanding. But the sweet-faced little reporter showed her subject no consideration in exchange for opening up to her; Maurine made clear to her newspaper's tens of thousands of readers that Belva caused as much trouble as the worst possible husband. She highlighted Belva's gay laughter during the interview-how she "chortled in jail, [while] plans were completed for young Law's funeral today." More than that, Maurine purposely did not acknowledge that Belva actually made a decent point in the interview. Walter Law was married and almost a decade younger than Belva. Why should she have worried whether he loved her or not? Belva surely knew Walter wasn't going to leave his wife and son for her. And if her history proved anything, it was that she knew there was always another man waiting down at the end of the bar.

It made for a compelling argument, and Belva's lawyers-and the Hearst papers-were giving it a good, hard look. But that simply didn't matter to Maurine. She worked for the paper that was "out for conviction always," and she believed in her mission. Belva Gaertner, one way or another, had led a man to his moral destruction and death. Whatsoever a woman soweth, that shall she also reap.

Maurine stuck mostly to the courthouse, the jail, and the police stations on her beat. This was the established, safe way for a woman to cover crime, and it served her strengths. She wasn't really a reporter, after all-she'd never been trained. She was a writer. The problem was that Belva Gaertner and the world in which the stylish divorcee lived existed almost entirely in Maurine's head. Maurine took in what Belva said, studied her while she said it, and then used her imagination to fill in the details.

Maurine's (and Genevieve Forbes's) chief compet.i.tion on the girl-crime beat, on the other hand, had no qualms about getting out on the street. Ione Quinby of the Evening Post was a familiar face in the Levee, the vice district in the near South Side's First Ward. There'd been hundreds of brothels, saloons, and opium dens operating in the district at its height, before the war, when Quinby started her journalism career. A young woman walking in the Levee always had to worry about being thumped on the head by a white slaver, but Quinby did it anyway. The upside was too big. The 1911 Vice Commission calculated that "Chicago's vice annually destroys the souls of 5,000 young women." Some of those five thousand souls each year became Quinby's most t.i.tillating stories. The reporter even embraced the entrepreneurial spirit of the Levee. In her purse, unknown to her employer, Quinby kept mimeographs of a legal doc.u.ment. Coming upon a newly arrested girl at the Wabash Avenue or Harrison Street police station, she'd place the contract before the suspect and ask her to sign. It gave Quinby permission to write and sell the woman's life story. Most suspects, uneducated and scared, would sign without realizing they had a choice. A couple of months later a "My Life in Crime" story-often written in the first person-would appear in True Detective or Master Detective magazine. The story was always a cracker. Quinby had a way, a colleague said, "of prying the details of unhappy marriages, unrequited love, and secret s.e.x experiences out of the most non-communicative murderesses; they would confide facts to her which they had withheld even from their own attorneys."

Maurine must have been surprised-and heartened-upon meeting her compet.i.tor. The thirty-two-year-old Quinby was Chicago's foremost chronicler of "murderesses," rivaled only by Forbes. But like Maurine, there was nothing imposing about her. "The Post's little bob-haired reporter," as Quinby's paper promoted her, stood barely five feet tall and had a chubby, little boy's face, with crinkling eyes and a grin that split her mouth like a gorge. She reveled in police sergeants and competing reporters underestimating her. She'd march through the Post's newsroom when she had a good story going, pumping herself up by repeating over and over to herself: "Hoo-boy, hoo-boy!" One fellow scribe remarked that there "is a certain little toss of her head when she talks and a tiny little compression of her lips that denote a strength that one might not suspect in one so small."

Despite Quinby's pleasant, open-faced personality, Maurine didn't try to befriend her. The two reporters recognized each other as budding rivals, particularly on the Belva Gaertner story. Quinby had become friendly with Belva during the suspected murderess's divorce case in 1920, a big advantage for the Post hack. Indeed, back then, just before woman suffrage became law, Quinby saw "Mrs. Belle Gaertner" as a kind of feminist heroine. When her divorce from William was finalized that spring, leaving her with a paltry settlement, Belva didn't go in search of another millionaire husband, as would be expected. Instead, she undertook a new career: taxi driver. It was a novel-to some, a scandalous-choice for a woman. Motor cars were booming in popularity, but many people still couldn't fathom driving one. They were terrifying, futuristic machines. Driving a car was certainly unladylike. But Belva, always cheerful and stubborn, took no mind of such fuddy-duddy thinking. A taxi was a grand idea, she thought, especially as she was the rare woman who had a bead on her true nature. "Well, I just can't take orders from anyone," she said. "Therefore I can't hold a job. I must be my own boss. So I decided that as a taxi driver I'd be my own boss, make enough to live on, and still have the pleasure of the car."

A woman who couldn't take orders-that was a story. Quinby spent a day with Belva soon after she got her livery license. Any man walking by the taxi stand where Belva stood beside her machine, "clad in a trim chauffeur's suit of green," had to stop and stare, the reporter wrote. "What else could he do, under the combined barrage of two impelling dimples, a row of perfect pearly teeth in their cherry-lined frame and two laughing, l.u.s.trous eyes?" In the spring of 1920, Belva was a symbol of a daring, new, "modern" way of life-one in which automobiles whisked girls out of their neighborhoods, out of their parents' orbit, and into the world; one where jazz pounded and thumped in clubs every night, working people into a dangerous, animal state. Almost everything about this modern life seemed to be fast-breathtakingly fast, sometimes scary fast-and that included young city girls like Quinby herself, the "flappers." They talked fast; they walked fast. They smoked furiously and flirted constantly. They wore rouge and lipstick-their "cherry-lined frames"-and skirts that showed their legs. They went out to the dance halls on their own. None of them wore corsets. It was, said one commentator, "s.e.x o'clock in America."

Maurine, growing up in her small Midwestern town and going to school in the South and in Indianapolis (Chicagoans derided the Indiana capital as Nap Town), experienced almost none of this churning change that so thrilled Belva Gaertner and Ione Quinby. Maurine could have stayed in Crawfordsville and avoided it almost altogether. Proponents of the old ways, after all, weren't simply giving up. Doctors warned that the "flapper lifestyle"-such as wearing makeup and spending late nights dancing and petting-threatened "severe internal derangement and general ill-health." School boards across the country put the hammer down on female teachers, with contracts that required them to be in bed by eight P.M. and prohibited them from wearing skirts above the ankle, bobbing their hair, or smoking cigarettes. The Evening American reported that the "faculty at Northwestern University has decided that for a pretty coed to display a pretty knee in a picture is 'unfavorable publicity.' "

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 ident.i.ties-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 pa.s.sing 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 a.s.signments 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 att.i.tude. She liked nerve. Chicagoans certainly had that. On the East Coast, t.i.tled 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 'b.u.mped off.' "4 The gangster's matter-of-fact att.i.tude 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-G.o.d 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, h.e.l.lo, 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 doork.n.o.b 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 divorcee now let her lawyer do the talking for her. The others were even worse. Kitty Malm, defeated and scared, had put away her bl.u.s.ter 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 gla.s.ses 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.

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 a.s.sumed 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 h.e.l.l with you!" he barked.

Beulah screamed louder: You're nothing but a dirty G.o.ddam 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. "h.e.l.lo, 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 c.o.c.ked 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 G.o.ddam 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. n.o.body ever did. n.o.body 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. Ma.s.s violence had broken out that summer following news that a Negro boy drowned after sunbathers wouldn't allow him to come ash.o.r.e 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, prost.i.tutes 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 l.u.s.t 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.

Conscious thought-perception of the world-began to return. There were men in her apartment-she could hear them talking. Some seemed to be talking to her. Beulah looked through a doorway and saw shoes-polished shoes, gleaming in the light from the kitchen.

a.s.sistant State's Attorney Roy Woods introduced himself. "Don't you know me?" he asked, hovering over her.

Beulah realized she looked a mess: her cheeks splotchy from crying, her nose red, b.r.e.a.s.t.s like crashed dirigibles. "No," she said.

"I am Roy C. Woods." He added that he knew Mr. Wilc.o.x and was a customer of Tennant's Laundry.

Mr. Wilc.o.x? This man knew Harry's brother-in-law? Had he come into the laundry when she was cashiering? Her confusion must have shown on her face, for Woods told her not to be afraid. You shot a man, an intruder, he said. Was that correct?

Beulah liked the sound of that. It was no crime to shoot a trespa.s.ser in your own home. She peered up at Mr. Woods. He was still wearing his coat and hat. Could they "frame it" to look like an accident? she asked.

Woods took a step back, shocked. The woman was hysterical. That was obvious. Still. "You don't 'frame' anything with me," he told her.

Albert Allen, the stenographer there to record what was said by witnesses and possible suspects, asked her why she had done it. Beulah turned to him, her eyes pleading. Her body shook, tears dripped down her face again. She said she didn't know why.

She put her face in her hands and, for the first time in her life, wished all the men would go away.

7.

A Modern Salome Al Annan couldn't keep control of his emotions anymore. "I've been a sucker, that's all! Simply a meal ticket!" He held his head, clutched at it. What had happened that afternoon, and what it meant, had finally sunk in. He was distraught. "I've worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day and took home every cent of my money," he raged in the Hyde Park police station. "We'd bought our furniture for the little apartment on time and it was all paid off but a hundred dollars. I thought she was happy. I didn't know . . ."

Maurine Watkins, there at the station with a handful of other reporters, wrote down what Al said to the police officers, to the walls, to himself, but she apparently didn't approach him for an interview. Such naked emotion from a man may have unnerved or embarra.s.sed her. The Daily Journal's reporter stepped up to Al and asked a question. Al turned to him suddenly, as if jerking awake. "I guess I was too slow for her," he replied. "I don't get any kick out of cabarets, dancing and rotten liquor. I like quiet home life. Beulah wanted excitement all the time."

At some point, the hacks left Al and walked down the corridor to the small matron's room where women suspects were held. Beulah sat alone, a guard near the door. The reporters introduced themselves to Chicago's latest girl gunner.

This one wasn't at all like Belva Gaertner, or even Kitty Malm-Maurine could tell that right away. The young, slender woman, with "wide blue eyes and a halo of auburn curls, freshly marcelled," wore an open, light-colored coat over a low-cut nightdress, the curve of a nearly naked breast heaving tantalizingly in full view. Beulah sat before the reporters without shame, seemingly oblivious to her disrobement. She tilted her head slightly, and a wan, b.u.t.tery smile spread over her lips.5 She launched into her story. "He came into my apartment this afternoon and made himself at home," she said. "Although I scarcely knew him, he tried to make me love him. I told him I would shoot. He kept coming anyway, and I-I did shoot him." Beulah looked longingly at her audience, tears stippling the corners of her eyes. "I didn't know-I didn't realize-I-I . . ." She stopped, collected herself. I had to do it, she finally said. I didn't have a choice.

The reporters didn't believe the woman's story any more than her husband did. Neither did the police, but getting her to break wasn't as easy as they'd expected. She said the same thing over and over: Harry Kalstedt was advancing on her, and when he wouldn't stop, she shot to "save her honor." Finally, late in the evening, after most of the reporters had called in their stories, Captain Edward Murname, along with a.s.sistant state's attorneys Bert Cronson and William McLaughlin, took her back to the apartment so she could change clothes. Then they walked her through the events of the afternoon again, step-by-step. They pounded her with questions, made her look at the blood pooled in the corner, where Harry had lain for hours, and asked her to point out what had happened where.

Why, they asked, were there wine bottles and empty gla.s.ses if she didn't know Harry Kalstedt or invite him in? Why was he shot in the back if he had rushed at her? Why had she waited for hours after the shooting before calling police?

Beulah couldn't stand it. Reliving it again, right there in the apartment where it happened, was too much. She began to sob as it all came back to her. Harry's voice hung in the air: "My G.o.d, you've shot me!" he'd called out when she pulled the trigger. It wasn't the grunt of pain that was so horrifying. It was the shock in his voice at the realization that she would do such a thing, that she would actually shoot him. Because he loved her. He really loved her. Beulah had realized that as soon as she'd shot, and she tried to take it back. "No, you're all right-you're not shot," she said, as Harry twisted, reached out for nothing, and fell against the wall.

"You are right, I haven't been telling the truth," Beulah told the three men, not even trying to control the sobbing anymore. "I'd been fooling around with Harry for two months. This morning, as soon as my husband left for work, Harry called me up. I told him I wouldn't be home, but he came over anyway. We sat in the flat for quite a time, drinking. Then I said in a joking way that I was going to quit him. He said he was through with me and began to put on his coat. When I saw he meant what he said, my mind went into a whirl and I shot him. Then I started playing the record. I was nervous, you see."

Beulah said she sat next to Harry on the floor and washed his face and kissed him. After the shooting, she became "distracted and started to cry. I was afraid the neighbors would hear me. So I put on the record and took Harry in my arms, and cried and cried." In time she was cried out, which led her back to the phonograph. "I went to it and started it over again. I couldn't stand the quiet." She danced mindlessly and tried not to cry and didn't look at Harry anymore. After a couple of hours, she realized she had to do something about him, so she decided to call her husband. "I kept calling numbers but I couldn't seem to remember his," she said. A voice over the line, unbidden, told her to try directory a.s.sistance. She finally got Al on the phone and told him to come home.

Beulah was worn out. They took a break, and then the prosecutors and the police captain made her go over it again, as if for the first time. She had calmed down by this late hour; she seemed to have settled something in her mind.