The Girls of Murder City (8 page)

It wasn’t enough for Belva. She had dreamed her whole life of being among the idle rich, but it turned out she bored easily. Not just in the depths of winter, when she found herself shut inside. She was bored in June. She was bored in July. In the great rooms and hallways of the Gaertner household, boredom trailed her like an annoying corgi, always there, underfoot.

Her husband’s wealth and position offered diversions, without question. William, who’d founded his Wm. Gaertner & Co. in 1896, regularly bought her beautiful clothes, the best in the city. And Belva did her own shopping, too, with open accounts at Marshall Field and the most exclusive couturiers. Every day gorgeous accessories hung from her ears and fanned out across her collarbone. Her rings could slice watermelons, and she wore a lot of them, sometimes one on every finger. The glittery rocks caused the other society ladies of Hyde Park to gape. Belva enjoyed the gewgaws and quickly expected only the best, but unlike so many of the wives of wealthy industrialists and bankers, she couldn’t squeeze forth much passion for acquiring things. Passion was to be had, Belva Gaertner knew, but not in Hyde Park and not out in the open. Its time was late, very late. Only late at night would strangers put away their stifling formalities and inhibitions, come together, and do things with other strangers they’d never dare do with their loved ones. Belva had found a place for herself in the late-night cabarets and roadhouses of Chicago. She’d created an identity for herself in them, years before she ever met her husband. She wasn’t Mrs. William Gaertner to these men and women. She wasn’t even Belva. She was Belle . . . oh, how she missed Belle!

That was the name she had been using when she met William, back in 1911. William was forty-six at the time and one of Chicago’s most eligible bachelors, not that this designation influenced his actions. Despite excellent manners, he mostly steered clear of the society ladies and lawn parties of his Hyde Park circle, preferring instead the dancing girls in the down-market Loop cabarets that promised “revelations of the female form divine and the portrayals of passion.” Here, wearing molded breastplates and a feathered headdress, Belva, at twenty-five, stood out. She was far from the most beautiful girl in the cabaret, yet all of the regulars seemed to be in love with her. It helped that she was admirably built, with a broad chest and long legs, but she really won men over with her personality. Belva would approach a table after one of her performances and take over the conversation. She dazzled men with her dancing eyes, the roar of her laughter, her windmilling limbs as she told a story—she always had a story. Only when she was caught in repose, a still life, might an admirer recognize that she was really quite an ugly duckling. William Gaertner never did recognize it.

Not long after making her acquaintance, William commissioned a full-length portrait of Belva in cabaret dress and gave it prominent wall space at his residence. It was the image seared into his mind, the moment he first saw her on stage, her body turning with erotic languor beneath her clothes, arms rising up like a succulent baby’s. She’d introduced herself as Belle Brown that night, but William hadn’t been fooled. He soon discovered her given name, Belva Boosinger, and that she also answered to Mrs. Ernest Oberbeck. She was a married woman. That wasn’t all. Outside the cabaret, some men called her Eleanor Peppol. Sometimes, when settling delinquent accounts, they also called her Sweet Baby or other, dirtier names. The array of monikers, along with frequent address changes, should have sent up a red flag for a man of William Gaertner’s means. But by the time this information came in, it was too late. He had to have her.

Belva, it turned out, was easy to have—one quick divorce was all it took. She just wasn’t easy to control. This would prove to be a problem, especially after they married in 1917. William, who’d come to Chicago in his twenties from his native Germany, ran his business however he wanted. He ran his household however he wanted. He expected to be in control. He controlled the universe, in a sense. In 1907 he’d accomplished a singular and acclaimed breakthrough, successfully building a giant “gun camera” that could photograph the canals and polar caps of the planet Mars. So why couldn’t he control his own wife? She lived her own life. She made her own plans. She snubbed him when it suited her. It infuriated William, and it excited him too. He had a basset-hound face that turned beet red at the slightest provocation, the face of a small-time carnival barker. It must have been red all the time around Belva. He was caught in a miserable, unbreakable circle: Lust. Desperation. Hatred. Love.

Belva never seemed to get caught in that cycle herself. After the first flush of marriage had worn off, William often would come home from work and find the house empty. Sometimes Belva simply would be out riding. She’d come in at a gallop with a broad grin on her face. After a couple of hours in the saddle, her thighs and buttocks glowed, radiating from the inside out like a clay pot right out of the fire—a beautiful soreness that would leave her short of breath all evening, desperate to go out on the town. William, exhausted from a full day in the lab and the boardroom, rarely wanted to join her, and so she’d set off into the night on her own or with a young man who came to the door. Belva always invited William along, but he would demur. He had to get up early. “You go, dear,” he’d say. “Enjoy yourself.”

“You are one husband in a million,” an escort supposedly told him one night as the man and Belva headed for the door.

William didn’t believe the man. Surely a larger percentage of husbands were getting the shaft, not that confirmation of this hypothesis would have appeased him. There was no way he could ever understand Belva’s generation. The rules he grew up with had all been rubbed away. Even the good girls now danced close, oblivious to chaperones. Young women—proper, well-raised young women—encouraged party diversions like Sardines, a hide-and-seek game in which the whole point wasn’t actually to hide or seek but for everyone to end up mashed tantalizingly close together in a tight space. On top of such frivolities, girls now revealed flesh in public—bare ankles and arms and, worse, the unfettered outlines of much more through thin summer clothing. In his deepest heart, William probably never truly expected fidelity from Belva. She was more than twenty years his junior and came from the lower classes. She had a temperament wilder than any stallion he’d ever had. She had to run. He surely did expect something, however. Some discretion, for one thing. And frankly, some taste in lovers. Men of means, like him. Men of talent and accomplishment. Men with ambition beyond bagging a society lady. More important, he hoped that, in time, Belva would settle down and settle in, become a companion.

When it didn’t happen, he had no idea how to handle it. He would reprove Belva when she came in at three A.M. smelling of alcohol, pointing out that he had to be up early every morning and didn’t appreciate being woken. He’d lecture her when she would collapse in bed, half paralyzed before her head touched the pillow. “Thanks for the advice,” she’d answer groggily. She’d then come home later the next night and playfully pinch and slap her husband as he tried to sleep. She was no longer just a social drinker—or, at the very least, she was doing entirely too much socializing. Time and again she came home drunk. William became so frustrated that he’d try to simply blot her out. “It wasn’t unusual for him to get angry at me and refuse to speak for weeks at a time,” she later complained.

Being a scientific-minded man, William Gaertner chose scientific methods to solve the problem. He hired celebrated detective W. C. Dannenberg, the city’s former Morals Squad director, to track and chart her progress through the days. Almost immediately, this approach showed results, for Belva didn’t have to go far to find fun. The neighborhoods to the west of Hyde Park had filled up with rail-yard workers and clerks and shoe salesmen, and with them came a burgeoning entertainment district that was beginning to suck the life out of the Loop’s nights. In Plaisance Park, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Midway Gardens originally featured elegant music and dancing for the South Side’s finest, but now it catered to the masses. It held more than a thousand dancers at a time and was often packed. Outside there were three raised dance floors, each separated by tables that allowed men on their own to sit and survey the night’s female offerings. Inside, built along Japanese architectural lines, a maze of nooks allowed philandering men and women to hide themselves away just blocks from home. Next door to the Midway Gardens was the Sans Souci Amusement Park, with its always-crowded beer garden rolling out from a band shell where musicians filled the air with popular tunes night after night. The White City Amusement Park also had a ballroom, this one popular with residents of the nearby “honeymoon flats” along the western border of Washington Park.

It was along this stretch of small residential houses facing the park that Belva got caught. On March 30, 1920, Dannenberg asked William to come along on his wife’s trail. The detective and his men had been tracking her for a while. They’d watched her cozy up inside Midway Gardens and rub bellies on the dance floor at Dreamland Café. She had an established routine; Dannenberg knew full well that this outing would prove to his client beyond any doubt that Mrs. Gaertner was no good. They pulled up to 5345 Prairie Avenue, two blocks west of Belva’s favorite bridle path in the park, barely a mile from the Gaertner home. Dannenberg made clear to William that they should approach quietly, as silent as Indians. The redheaded detective, who’d made his name a decade earlier by arresting the white slavers Maurice and Julia Van Bever, took the lead. Once he got the front door open, he burst in and rushed into the bedroom. Belva shrieked and dived for the floor, where she’d left her clothes. Another naked body skittered in the opposite direction. William, trailing in behind the detectives, didn’t have the heart for a scene in this strange house. He turned and ran out.

Belva munched on a sandwich as she waited in a corridor at the Wabash Avenue police station. Reporters stood around her, jockeying for position. Someone asked what happened the previous night, and she sighed.

“I tell you I can’t recall what happened,” she said. “Somebody must have shot him, but I can’t remember how it was done.” Belva shifted in her seat. She sat with her legs crossed, face regally impassive. She’d gotten some sleep, and William had brought her fresh clothes, so she was beginning to feel like herself again. Watching her, some of the hacks began to wonder if the whole thing was a big mistake, if this well-bred woman simply had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Belva took a swig of milk and looked up.

“I think I can get my coat cleaned so it will look all right again,” she said to no one in particular. The strange comment hung in the air. A reporter asked what she meant, and she described the beautiful caracul coat that now had blood all over it. The police took it, she said. “It’s an expensive coat, you know. Sometimes a coat like that is worth as much as $2,800.”

Nearly three thousand dollars for a coat? Her ex-husband really was loaded. The reporters scribbled furiously.

Nearby, Walter Law’s wife—widow—also waited on this cool Wednesday afternoon. She sat with her father-in-law and other family members. “Walter died at his work,” Freda Law told a
Chicago Daily News
man, who’d asked about her husband being out so late with another woman. She stared at the reporter. She was in shock; it had only been a few hours since she’d heard about her husband’s death. “He had sold Mrs. Gaertner that car, and he was demonstrating to her how to drive it,” she said. “He did that with almost all his customers. I never heard of the Gaertner woman until I read about Walter’s death in the papers. I do not believe she killed him. The bullet that caused his death came from the outside, and probably never was meant for him. Walter was devoted to me. I never suspected him of doing anything that might give me cause to be jealous, and I don’t suspect him now.”

A policeman stepped into the hall. “All ready now,” he said. The inquest was about to start. Belva rose and took a last drag from a cigarette she’d bummed from her guard. The
Chicago Daily Journal
reporter noted the casual way she smoked in front of them. “There was nothing brazen about it, nothing defiant,” he related in wonderment. It was one thing to see your typical girl pickpocket sucking on a cigarette in public, but a classy lady like Belva Gaertner—that was something to talk about. Belva pulled a powder puff from her handbag and buffed her face, then stepped purposefully into the room. Mrs. Law was already inside and sitting.

Maurine Watkins also found a seat. She may have been the
Tribune
reporter on the scene last night, but she was going to have to fight to keep the story. Genevieve Forbes had been sent out to the inquest, too. Robert Lee had realized he had a potentially big story and a rookie reporter covering it. Maurine took no mind of Forbes; they didn’t sit together.

Belva, sitting with Tom Reilly and Marshall Solberg, two of the lawyers provided by her ex-husband, looked gorgeous. It was a remarkable transformation. When William was allowed to visit with her in the morning, he must have been shocked by what he saw. Belva, his beautiful Belle, seemed to have aged dramatically in the week since he’d last seen her. Her face, always so pleasantly plump, had gone slack. Those alluring, sleepy eyes that had captivated him were fogged up and rimmed in red. And yet here she was now, just a few hours later, fully restored. William, managing to think things through, had brought her a conservative outfit: a brown full-length dress, a simple black coat with a fur collar, a brown hat. He’d also brought her seven rings to choose from, but she didn’t bother making up her mind; she wore them all. With the hat and the fur collar cropping her face in a perfect box frame, with makeup expertly applied and her naturally unabashed smile back in place, she was young again, a vamp. She pulled the hat down over her forehead, the brim edging toward one brow, giving her eye a dashing glint. William Gaertner couldn’t help it: He was besotted anew. “I hope for a reconciliation just as soon as possible,” he told reporters.