Sin in the Second City (40 page)

Call girls had always worked Michigan Avenue from 12th Street to 35th Street, taking clients to designated houses and disorderly hotels, but Harrison knew that this thoroughfare could not, under any circumstances, flower into another segregated district, a Little Levee. “It was far from my ideas,” he wrote, “that the more notorious, the more luxurious of the houses should conduct branch institutions, succor sales, in decent neighborhoods.”

So when his investigator discovered that a number of the older residences along Michigan Avenue had been purchased recently and converted into resorts, the mayor issued an order: Move all disreputable women from Michigan Avenue at once and close all disorderly flats. Brazen taunting of the respectable citizenry would not be tolerated, Harrison added, and solicitation by pimps must cease.

The Michigan Avenue offenders dutifully departed, and Harrison hoped the Levee madams would, from now on, stay in their own backyard.

M
inna didn’t recognize the policemen who appeared at her door on October 21. It wasn’t Bryant, who helped her thwart the Marshall Field Jr. plot, or the trusted officer who accompanied her to Vic Shaw’s during the Nathaniel Moore mess, or any of the number of rank-and-file cops she tipped now and again. A fist of panic curled inside her. Perhaps McWeeny had dispatched two new underlings to discuss graft payments? Or maybe another symbolic raid was planned, like the attack on Michigan Avenue, and these men had come to warn the sisters? Best to remain calm, avoid jumping to conclusions. Peculiar behavior only invited unwarranted suspicion.

She opened the door, welcoming inside the officers and the smoky breeze of Dearborn Street.

Without preamble, the men introduced themselves as detectives—no wonder they were unfamiliar—and explained the reason for their visit. Herbert Swift, son of the famous meatpacker and brother of Harold Swift (the latter a member of Clifford Roe’s Committee of Fifteen), had died the previous evening on a Chicago & Northwestern train en route to Milwaukee. The cause was yet unknown, and they’d heard that an Everleigh Club girl had planned an out-of-town excursion—perhaps she accompanied the heir. Would Madam Minna know anything about this?

The panic rapped at her chest. A wealthy packer’s son had been a frequent guest of the Club, memorable not only for the size of his tab, but for the inanity of his conversation. “Women have no minds,” he’d said once, after alcohol had impaired his own. “All they can do is dance.” Whether the imbecilic patron was the dead man or his reformer brother, Minna would never say. And one of the Everleigh butterflies
had
left Chicago for a “visit,” as she called it, although no one outside of the Club knew of this sabbatical. Minna didn’t believe her girl had anything to do with this unfortunate circumstance, but the last thing they needed was the ghost of another dead millionaire traipsing through the parlors.

Sorry, Minna said, but she knew nothing about this. It was both the proper—and truthful—response.

“Did one of your girls hit a guest with a champagne bottle?” the detective persisted. “Had a certain patron promised to take one of your inmates away with him? What’s been going on here that we don’t know about?”

Ada, summoned by a servant, now stood next to her.

“We do not know,” Minna said, “what you are talking about.”

His partner released a weary sigh. “Who were your prominent guests the last few nights?” he asked.

Minna’s thoughts came in a rush, and she felt Ada next to her, rigid and cold. This was their last chance to just give up and talk, to tell the detectives everything they didn’t know. But a simple admission of ignorance amounted to a betrayal of discretion, one that would count against the Club. And after eleven years, there would be no stains on this house.

“We do not know the names of our guests,” Minna said finally.

A moment passed, bulging with unissued threats. The two visitors turned and let themselves out.

O
n Sunday night, October 22, Ernest Bell boarded a train for Columbus, Ohio, host city for this year’s International Purity Congress. Already temperatures were plummeting, honeycombing the windows with frost. He was the lone delegate from the Midnight Mission, joining representatives from every temperance society, law and order league, and anti-vice group throughout the United States and Canada. Bell was slated to speak about the white slave traffic, as was his old comrade Clifford Roe. New York City’s underworld would have a few days’ respite from the prosecutor.

The most sensational topic was certain to be Iowa’s recent legislation. The Hawkeye State had passed the Red Light Injunction and Abatement Law that so far disproved the arguments against ending segregation. A Des Moines reformer, slotted to address the purity congress, wrote an essay about the law for Roe’s second book. Steep penalties against deed holders—even if they were merely renting property to madams—were vital, as was sending the message that the city was no longer complicit.

Bell had been arguing that same line of reasoning for years. Five years hence, most of the girls in Chicago brothels would be dead, and thousands more recruited to replace them. But if a law like Iowa’s passed in Illinois, if the Levee were closed and kept closed, then entire generations of girls would be saved to respectable lives. Bell was certain that the first mayor who took such a definitive stance against city-sponsored vice would be applauded by 90 percent of the voting population of Chicago.

The train groaned into motion and pulled out of Union Station. Bell stared through the scrim of ice, watching his city’s slow retreat.

W
ithin twenty-four hours, another member of Chicago’s finest rang the Everleigh Club’s bell. The new police chief himself, John McWeeny, stood at their threshold, coarse ginger eyebrows arched into tepees. A thin film of frost covered his dark wool coat, and a pale, meaty hand emerged from its sleeve, coming to rest on the door frame.

Minna elbowed her sister. Finally—the chief had dispensed with the bravado and bluster and sat down with Ike Bloom. He was making the rounds, letting madams and dive keepers know of any changes in graft fees or payment schedules. He would set things right, and the thrum of panic that was quavering through the Levee air would at last subside.

Chief McWeeny cleared his throat. He had come to inquire, he said, about “an unpleasant happening,” bloating those last three words in a way that told Minna this was not yet over, that he needed to fill his pockets with power for just a bit longer before turning them out to Ike Bloom. Her own panic returned, restless inside her, but a slow anger pooled around it.

Ada nudged her back, expressing agreement without saying a word, and then stepped forward.

“Mind your own business,” she said, and Minna had to look, check if that arctic voice, that cocksure inflection, truly belonged to her sister.

It did. Ada’s expression was at once wild and immobile.

Minna remembered what this heartless louse had said about the five prostitutes he’d arrested on the West Side.

“Jump into the river,” she told McWeeny, and closed the door in his face.

The locks clicked into place. Minna turned to her sister, watched as Ada’s anger gave way to humor. It was a palpable switch, a weak light thrown on just behind her eyes.

“Pretty flimsy threat, this one,” Ada said lightly, making it sound like a question.

The whisper of the perfume fountain was deafening behind them. Minna knew it was up to her to voice the answer neither of them wanted to hear. She could craft the prettiest lies in the world, but never for Ada.

“I’m afraid,” she said, “they mean business.”

F
or weeks, Mayor Harrison had been hearing about this brochure. When visiting associates asked about the city’s greatest attractions, he mentioned the soaring mosaic Tiffany ceiling inside Marshall Field’s, the virtuosic performances of the Chicago Grand Opera Company, the mercurial blues of Lake Michigan. But he was forgetting something, they said, laughing—what about the Everleigh Club?

Even when the mayor left town it followed him. At one recent banquet, a young man approached, pumped Harrison’s hand, and observed, “Pretty snappy town yours, isn’t it?,” a hard wink in his voice. The mayor heard that thousands of brochures had been mailed far and wide to every state in the Union, an ironic postscript following the delivery of 1,800 vice commission reports. Chief McWeeny had called upon “the terrible pair of sisters” two days ago in a halfhearted attempt to back them down, only to retreat himself. Now, finally, Harrison’s own copy of “The Everleigh Club, Illustrated” lay open on his desk.

He couldn’t close the entire Levee district, despite the reformers’ constant rallies and phone calls, but he could no longer let inaction serve as official policy. Harrison decided to buy some time, using the brochure on his desk as currency. He was the first native of Chicago to be elected mayor, and during this, his fifth term, he would defend his city. Those “painted, peroxided, bedizened” sisters, he would announce, would not be permitted to raise its skirts, shame it for prurient thrills.

Shortly before noon on October 24, 1911, Harrison took out a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote this “truly historic” order in longhand, unwilling to trust even his stenographer. After tucking it into an envelope, the mayor called for a special messenger, who carried it immediately to the armory station and delivered it into the police chief ’s hands.

“Close the Everleigh Club,” the paper read. Effective immediately.

YOU GET EVERYTHING
IN A LIFETIME

The Everleigh Club, 2131–2133 South Dearborn Street.

How dear to my heart is the old-fashioned harlot,
When fond recollections present her to view;
The madam, the whore house, the beer by the car lot,
And e’en the delights of the old fashioned—
Here a rhyme is needed to rhyme with the word “view.”

—E
DGAR
L
EE
M
ASTERS

H
arrison’s order shouted itself across Chicago. Hinky Dink Kenna burst in, face grave atop his pipe cleaner of a neck. Out of breath, slight shoulders heaving, he did not so much speak his words as exhale them.

“On the square, does this go? For keeps?”

“As long as I am mayor,” Harrison said.

“Okay!”

And he rushed out.

Murray Keller, champagne salesman and Vogelsang’s lunch companion, rang Harrison’s phone. Won’t the mayor reconsider? he asked. The Everleigh sisters were two of his best customers, and they would hold him in great favor if he convinced his friend in City Hall to change his mind.

Harrison demurred—politely, at first—and finally used “rather sharp language” to silence Keller’s pleas.

The tornado of rumors began its inevitable twist. How could this happen to the Everleigh Club, pillar of vice, immune from the law? This was Vic Shaw’s doing, no question; she had sent a copy of the Club’s advertising brochure to the mayor. Perhaps an Everleigh girl did end Herbert Swift’s life on a train outside of Milwaukee. Obviously, Marshall Field Jr. was still haunting South Dearborn Street. “The most persistent gossip,” Harrison said, “associated it with the death by gunshot wound of the only son of a famous millionaire merchant prince.” But the reason, the mayor insisted, was the Everleigh Club’s “infamy, the audacious advertising of it” “it was as well known as Chicago itself and therefore a disgrace to the city.”