Sin in the Second City (36 page)

Minna would call a trusted lieutenant, walk down the street, and make sure Vic Shaw understood that this battle had been decided long ago, and it was the Everleighs who had won.

C
hez Shaw was half the size of the Everleigh Club; a double-decker bay window dominated its left side. One plane of glass on the bottom was broken out. An ornate basket-weave molding curved over the front entrance, dropping down into two Corinthian-style columns that flanked a mahogany door. A rectangular window on the second floor was topped by a long, arched one on the third that curved like a fingertip; at a distance, it appeared Vic Shaw’s brothel was flipping off Dearborn Street.

Minna and her friend climbed the seven steps to the front door and barreled in. Shards of glass glittered across the wood floor; the window had just been broken. The front parlor was a vortex of waving arms and screeching voices, Vic Shaw positioned at its eye.

“What’s going on here?” the Everleigh lieutenant called.

Bodies unlocked, fists unclenched. A harlot released her grip on another’s hair. Two plump arms, sheathed in black silk, pushed forward through the mob, separating it, and the madam of the house emerged. A black feathered hat sat cockeyed atop dark hair. Balled fists disappeared into the folds of her waist.

“None of your goddamn business,” Vic Shaw said, taking her time with each word.

It had been a while since Minna had seen her rival up close. Vic Shaw had gained at least seventy pounds since the sisters came to town, the weight distributing itself cruelly around her midsection, its circumference now equaling that of her breasts. Three chins drooped over a neck as thick as a bear’s. Heavy powder settled in the deep lines around her mouth, and her eyes were two dead things lost amid streaks of paint. She lied about her age, too, Minna knew, shaving off at least a decade, turning middle age into relative youth. But Shaw’s body, having earned her a living for most of her life, had tired of the ruse. It was claiming its due now, with interest.

“Nix on that,” Minna’s friend said. “What’s up? Who’s the victim—murder, eh? I can see it written all over you.”

The harlots, nervous and weeping, let the story come tumbling out. Vic Shaw announced that her place was closed for now. All the inmates should scram—“to China,” she suggested. There was nothing left for the madam to do but call the police, so she did, glaring at Minna while she dialed.

N
at Moore’s body was collected and dressed, at the request of his young widow, in a long purple robe, then laid out in a darkened room of their apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Officers from the 22nd Street station arrived around 5:00 p.m. to question Vic Shaw. The madam, hysterical, at first denied the whole incident, rambling one flailing excuse after another.

“I was at the Studebaker Theater last night,” she insisted. “I arrived home at 3 o’clock this morning, and I have been here ever since. I know Mr. Moore well. He was a fine fellow. The last time I saw him was the other night at the College Inn. He had not been at my house for over a month.

“No body was taken from my house today or any other time. Nobody has died in my house.” She was crying now. “I have been trying to get out of this business for a month. I want to lead a better life.”

Roy Jones corroborated her story.

“I have been here since 4 o’clock this afternoon myself,” he said. “The police must have some wrong information. My wife doesn’t have to lie and I don’t believe she has lied. We have been wanting to quit this business. There is nothing doing anyhow under this administration.”

The inquest was held Monday, January 10. An autopsy determined that the official cause of death was acute dilation of the heart, endocarditis, persistent thymus, chronic interstitial nephritis, and chronic gastritis. No morphine was found in his system.

Vic Shaw also testified, speaking this time with more candor. “In the afternoon I was told Nat was dead,” she said. “I consulted my husband, Mr. Jones, and he advised me to call the police.” She didn’t mention the Everleigh sisters at all but threw a tacit barb in their direction, suggesting that Nat Moore was “apparently under the influence of more than a spree” by the time he arrived at her door.

The papers kept the sisters’ name from the reports, too. But as with Marshall Field, rumors about the death rippled through the Levee, and the city, and beyond. The sisters were staying one step ahead of trouble but never quite outrunning it—“bound to be blamed sooner or later,” Charles Washburn wrote, “for almost anything.”

GIRLS
GOING WRONG

Many a working girl at the end of the day is so hysterical and overwrought that her mental balance is plainly disturbed.

—J
ANE
A
DDAMS

O
n January 27, two weeks after Nathaniel Moore was buried, four hundred Chicago society women met at the corner of Monroe and LaSalle streets, ankle-deep in snowdrifts. Scarves looped over heads and beneath chins, holding hats in place. Mrs. Emily Hill, president of the Cook County chapter of the WCTU, reminded the ladies that they were to be quiet, not demonstrative, clapped her hands, and watched with approval as the crowd whittled into a long stream of pairs. Bookended by police officers, they marched along the sidewalk, stopping traffic at each corner, “determination,” one witness noted, “in every face.”

Reaching City Hall, the women filed inside the building, still holding their silence. Mayor Busse received them with a mixture of amusement and dread. For the past two weeks there had been a number of preliminary meetings, newspaper reports, and general blather about women’s disgust with city officials and women taking charge of the anti-vice battle and how there would be no Levee district at all if only women could vote and be elected and so on and so forth.

Politically, Busse knew, it was risky to disparage or dismiss them outright. The suffrage movement was gaining traction not only in Chicago, but throughout the state and country. Segregation was the most practical approach to vice, but one had to be cautious these days about expressing that opinion. Women could take his plain common sense and twist it into an “open endorsement of immorality” or something equally incendiary, and his Republican Party, never a popular ticket locally, would suffer at the polls. At the same time, it was difficult to listen to their ridiculous pronouncements—“Let the men take the children and care for them,” ranted one female, “and permit the women to go out and enforce the laws”—without wanting to, well, bolt to the nearest saloon for a stiff drink.

The ladies packed tight into Busse’s office, breast to back, curving in crescents around his desk. The spillover had to wait in the hallways, where they clasped hands and prayed in fervent whispers.

Mrs. Emily Hill faced the mayor, cleared her throat, and read from a prepared statement for two calm minutes. But toward the end of the third, her eyes moistened, her cheeks flushed, the studied composure abandoned her voice. She dropped her palms on Busse’s desk and leaned in, so close that he could feel the winter on her skin.

“Mr. Busse,” she cried, “you are the mayor, and you must abide by the laws. There is a city law which forbids the operation of one of these—these houses of ill fame. Obey that law and carry it out!…Oh, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor, pray for divine guidance and you will conquer all!”

Their police officer escorts stood off to the side, shaking in silent laughter.

“I may pray,” Busse replied tartly, “but I’m not going to do it here…I’ll consult my advisers,” he added, waving them away, “and see what can be done.”

Busse took slightly more than a month to “consult,” but on March 5, 1910, the mayor held a press conference. Stressing that Chicago’s “vice problem is exactly like that of any American city,” he announced the formation of the Chicago Vice Commission. Thirty members—among them such prominent citizens as Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Co.; Alexander Robinson, vice president of the Continental National Bank; Edward Skinner of the Association of Commerce; and Louis Kohtz of the Aetna Fire Insurance Company—would explore every facet of the social evil in Chicago.

Bell and his inner circle didn’t expect to be appointed; they were too controversial. Edwin Sims was a fine choice for secretary, but Graham Taylor’s inclusion could be problematic; the head of the Chicago Commons adamantly endorsed segregation. Dean Sumner was elected chairman. With his cathedral near the West Side Levee and as a witness to past First Ward Balls, Sumner was well acquainted with the evils of vice. Still, he questioned the wisdom of ridding Chicago entirely of its districts.

At night, while Mary slept, Bell knelt on the floor, his face pressed against their bed.

“Now Lord,” he prayed, “make that commission work. Fill Dean Sumner full of facts till he vomits!”

C
lifford Roe was no longer “not a marrying man,” as he’d once told the
Tribune.
On March 7, he would wed Miss Elsie Martha Hercock of Chicago at Christ Reformed Episcopal Church and then depart for New Orleans. Roe recognized his good fortune—what other woman would understand her husband’s desire to tour the Storyville district and lecture on pandering during their honeymoon? They would return to the house that had been his mother’s and make it their own.

The
Tribune
learned of Roe’s wedding, but the loquacious reformer was uncharacteristically quiet about the details. He did not discuss how he met Elsie, the circumstances of their courtship, who would serve as witnesses. The society pages printed nothing about the length of the bride’s train or the brilliance of her bouquet. It was as if the prosecutor who equated negotiating with failure had at last found a deal he was willing to make: He would keep life with Elsie private, and the world couldn’t take her away.

In the weeks before the big event, Roe busied himself with work, finishing an article about white slavery for his college fraternity’s magazine. An accompanying profile of Roe would mention the imminent publication of his first book,
Panders and Their White Slaves.
Hopefully, the advance notice would boost sales. So far, Roe knew, more than four hundred thousand people had bought Ernest Bell’s anthology, earning the reverend a small fortune.

Most important, he needed to write to John D. Rockefeller Jr. The son of the Standard Oil baron was thrust into the white slavery debate last fall when George Kibbe Turner, the muckraking
McClure’s
writer who first exposed conditions in Chicago, similarly scrutinized New York. On the eve of the 1909 elections, Turner accused Tammany Hall of running the city’s prostitution business and exporting white slaves to urban centers across the country. City officials, pressured to act, convened a grand jury to investigate traffic in girls.