Sin in the Second City (35 page)

A new branch within the U.S. Department of Justice called the Bureau of Investigation—the “Federal” to be added later—would be charged with tracking down Mann Act violations. The Bureau, at this point, employed only twenty-three agents, but James Mann’s law launched its transformation from a small office concerned with miscellaneous minor crimes to the government’s most recognizable and powerful legal arm.

The congressman took all the credit for his eponymous act, but Edwin Sims, still the master organizer, was its true author. A longtime friend of Mann’s, Sims drafted the bill in the fall, advising that persons found guilty of transporting in interstate or foreign commerce any woman or girl for the “purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose” be fined a maximum of $5,000 and spend up to five years in prison.

Neither Sims nor Mann explained exactly what sort of behavior might constitute “any other immoral purpose.”

On December 6, as the Mann Act was making its legislative debut, Sims contacted Ernest Bell:

“Personally I feel that, having drafted the bill, the matter of securing its passage devolves upon workers like yourself,” Sims wrote. “I firmly believe that if the associations and individuals interested in the suppression of the White Slave Traffic organize some sort of effective campaign, they can speedily secure the passage of the proposed law.”

Bell was delighted to receive the letter. When it was going well, this battle against the Levee moved like high tide, pushing in farther each day, eroding, claiming fresh ground before it crested back. The Gypsy Smith parade left a mark. The victory against the First Ward Ball surpassed it and left another. His book, on its way to selling seventy thousand copies in seven months, drew the boldest yet, and the Mann Act was right behind it, gathering force, waiting to advance.

And then the Lord called a troubled young man home one night, leaving a mark in the Levee of His own.

PART THREE

F
IGHTING FOR
THE
P
ROTECTION
OF
O
UR
G
IRLS

1910–1912

MILLIONAIRE
PLAYBOY DEAD—
MORPHINE OR MADAM?

Madam Vic Shaw, 1910.

I was the pet of Chicago…now, if they’d only bring back the good old days.

—M
ADAM
V
IC
S
HAW

T
he young man listed through the Everleigh Club parlors, steadying only when his hand found the curve of a girl’s shoulder, a boat tethered momentarily to its dock. Minna watched him, wondered how much champagne he’d drunk. There he went, unmoored again, sliding along the wall for support, raising his empty glass to signal for another. He was handsome, pretty almost, with fine, elegant features; only his ears, protruding like teacup handles, marred the symmetry of his face. The high collar of his white shirt grazed his chin, and a matching tie, cinched tight, disappeared down a black double-breasted sack coat. A gray bowler hat, the latest style, perched atop short blond curls.

He was Nathaniel Ford Moore, only son and heir of James Hobart Moore and a frequent guest of the Club. The elder Moore, a close friend to J. P. Morgan, was a capitalist with a controlling interest in National Biscuit (the forerunner to Nabisco), Continental Can, Diamond Match, and the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad. The younger Moore inherited his father’s money but not his ambition. Only at the age of twenty-six did Nat, as he was called, deign to consider working for a living.

“I know it will mean getting up pretty early in the morning and a lot of other inconvenient things,” he’d said, “but I’m ready to stand for all of them. Loafing makes one very tired, you know.”

But on this night, January 8, 1910, Nat Moore appeared to have dismissed his resolution. The boy was a drunk and an addict, known to inject morphine into his arm with a solid gold syringe, but his money and willingness to spend it compensated for such unseemly habits. On his twenty-first birthday in 1905, he came down to breakfast to find a check for $100,000 tucked under his plate. Two years later, he threw a legendary dinner at Rector’s in New York for thirty couples. It was Nat’s birthday again, but his friends opened the gifts—diamond sleeve buttons for the men and specially made pearl necklaces for the ladies. For his next party, he instructed servants to spread a cache of $20 gold pieces across a bed of ice. One by one, Nat, a married man, stood behind the chair of each female guest, dangled a chilled coin before her face, and dropped it into her décolletage.

Watching him now, Minna wondered if he’d indulged in anything besides champagne. Earlier in the evening, a Levee morphine salesman had asked at the door for a courtesan named Katie. The harlot spoke with the visitor in the alcove for a few hushed minutes and then proceeded to tail Nat Moore around the Levee parlors, hoping to entice him upstairs. Katie, before becoming an Everleigh butterfly, had been a common pickpocket and thief, so adept at snatching watches and wallets that she could have done it full-time. But she was beautiful and stately, possessing an eloquent grace that belied her trashy mouth and scheming mind. The Club’s clientele loved her.

Katie certainly wasn’t above rolling the young scion, dropping some poison into his glass. And after the Diamond Bertha tragedy, the sisters wanted to be especially vigilant, with clients and courtesans alike.

The harlot named Diamond Bertha was equal parts lady and bruiser: She had no problem crashing a bottle of champagne over a man’s head if that’s what the moment called for. She draped diamonds on every available inch of her body, even outjeweling Minna. The sisters loved her dearly but had to let her go. They weren’t bothered by her use of bubbly as a weapon, but her necklaces and bracelets and rings were attracting a bad element—violent robbers.

So Bertha packed up and set off not for Vic Shaw’s dive, thankfully, but for New Orleans. Within six months of her arrival in the Storyville district, she was killed, found in an alleyway, her hands, adorned with every bracelet and ring she owned, sliced off at the wrists. The sisters were questioned—the harlot had “Calumet 412” scribbled all over her notebook and calling cards—and they told the police the truth: They knew the thieves in Chicago, but not in the South. If only Bertha had called for help before whatever was threatening her touched down.

Just to be safe, Minna decided to cut him off. If Nat couldn’t drink, he couldn’t be drugged.

She gave word to Edmund: No more champagne for Nat Moore. Katie realized the edict had been issued as a preemptive measure on her behalf. Cheeks pinking, mouth pursed into a button, the girl stomped around the dancing couples and bowing servants. She clasped Minna’s arm, spinning the madam around.

“So damned suspicious,” Katie spat. “You and your holy manners. Who the hell are you to tell any of us what is right and what is wrong?”

Minna kept her voice low, her words smooth. “I want no stains on this house.”

“As though it hasn’t got plenty already,” Katie said, moving in closer. “To hell with you and your lily white bunk.”

Minna returned the girl’s stare, the two of them resolutely still inside the Saturday night chaos. Then Katie whirled on her heel and stormed out.

The girl walked north, shivering, mounds of blackening snow crunching beneath her heels. She knocked on the door of 2014 South Dearborn Street, Vic Shaw’s place.

A half hour later, at 1:00 in the morning, Minna bade good night to her boy and made sure Nat Moore was escorted to a cab. But he did not go home.

V
ic Shaw made it her business to know when any man of prominence stepped inside the Levee. Saloon keepers on her payroll called her with sightings, and drivers delivered them to her door. Nat Moore, as fallible as he was wealthy, always lurked on the periphery of her senses. She knew he was in the district ten days ago and nearly overdosed in a resort—whether it was hers, she’d never say—and that a team of doctors pounded his chest and drugged him back to life. She knew he was in the district four days before that, and collected from him a $1,500 check that he owed toward his account. And she knew he was in there tonight. Katie, the girl who’d stormed down from the Everleigh Club begging for a job, confirmed it.

A saloon keeper friend of Vic Shaw’s found Nat Moore at a bar on Wabash Avenue and brought the playboy to her brothel at 1:30 a.m. Shaw’s friend was wearing Nat Moore like a cape, the playboy’s lifeless arms slung over his shoulders, hands clasped beneath his chin, the tips of his black loafers flung out behind him, grating along the ground. Vic Shaw welcomed them inside and took some of the burden from her friend, letting Nat Moore’s face come to rest on her pillowy bosom.

Three of her best girls, including Pearl Dorset (yet another Everleigh Club defector), swarmed around Nat Moore, jockeying for position, whispering in his ears. Their attention revived him a bit. He straightened up, snapped his fingers, and ordered a round of champagne. When the Shaw housekeeper, Hattie Harris, came across him, his eyes were weighted, his lips slack.

“Nat was the biggest baby who ever visited this place,” she said later. “He seemed to care more about being petted and talked to than anything else.”

“I’m tired,” he told Hattie, “and I want to go to bed and rest.”

He turned toward the three harlots. “Come, talk to me until I get to sleep.”

The four of them climbed the stairs together and splayed out across a bed, limbs twining. Hours later, at 9:00 a.m., Hattie Harris walked by the room and still heard the murmur of disparate voices through the closed door. He called out for her, and she peeked in.

“Hattie,” he said, “you’re tired and need rest, but before you go to sleep please bring me a cold glass of beer.”

Hattie did as he asked, and by the time she came back upstairs the four of them were asleep. She left the beer on the nightstand, and shut the door behind her.

At 3:00 in the afternoon, the velvet curtains backlit by a willful winter sun, Pearl Dorset stirred. The other two girls and Nat Moore were still. She leaned across the bed, fit her mouth by his ear, and asked the playboy if he wanted some coffee. No answer.

She laid her hand on his face; his skin felt thick and chilled beneath her fingers. She shook him, then shook him again. She moved his head from side to side, something he couldn’t seem to do on his own, and spread open one empty eye.

Pearl’s scream was louder than any ever induced by Vic Shaw’s disciplinarian, Lill the Whipper.

O
ne hour later, the phone rang inside the Everleigh Club. It took Minna a moment to distinguish the voice on the other end, words choppy with rage, each syllable an exclamation.

Katie.

“They’re framing you,” the harlot whisper-screamed. “They’ve got a dead body at Shaw’s and they’re going to plant it in your furnace. It’s Nat Moore. Yes, he’s the one. They’ve got it all fixed. You must stop ’em. It’s a dirty trick and I won’t let ’em do that to you.”

The line went dead.

Minna accessed that pocket of her brain where her thoughts were calculated and stripped of impulse, where she was most like Ada. This was Vic Shaw, she reminded herself—jealous, inept Vic Shaw, who had already tried to frame her for murder and failed. A pathetic, mediocre madam who couldn’t influence the mayor, or turn Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink against her and Ada, or whip the entire country into such a religious frenzy that it lost all ability to reason. A madam doomed to remain relevant only to herself.