Sin in the Second City (18 page)

A male voice was on the line, strange and muffled. He identified himself as Pony Moore and told Nellie she knew the deal. After she and another harlot named Phyllis made it to his place, and after they’d enjoyed a little party with him and his friend, they’d go to the police station and Nellie would tell the sergeant that she saw Minna Everleigh shoot Marshall Field Jr. And she thought making money on her back was easy….

“Come right over,” Pony Moore slurred. “Bring along Phyllis and the $20,000 is yours.”

Minna listened to the pair exchange vulgar good-byes and hang up. Her mind was a tangle and she worked to unknot it, thought by thought. Within minutes Nellie and Phyllis approached, asking to be excused for an hour.

Minna pushed her lips into a smile. Sure, she said. Take the time out. The butler swung open one side of the double doors, letting in the wind’s mournful whine, and the girls were gone.

Alone, panic conquered composure. Minna scrambled, as fast as heels would allow, to the phone and dialed Bryant, a sergeant and friend at the 22nd Street police station. Vic Shaw was behind this, she just knew it. The officer came on the line. Minna’s words shot out in a dry rasp: Meet her on the corner of Dearborn…. Yes, now. Hurry—she was about to be framed for murder.

Dollops of icy slush covered the street. Cold seeped through her shoes, bit her toes, and the wind shoved her to one side. She skidded, catching herself. Bryant’s arm slung around her, and for once in her life she let herself be led.

The officer opened the Turf Exchange’s door for Minna, and she was greeted by a belch of stale air. Bottle shards covered the floor, broken chairs tilted against walls. Positively horrid. They made their way to a closed room at the back of the bar. Bryant gave no warning—just raised his boot, launched his leg, and kicked open the door.

Four of them—Pony, a strange black man, Nellie, and Phyllis—sprawled across a worn sofa. Nellie straddled Pony and Phyllis his friend, gowns and petticoats bunched at their waists, the men sorting through layers of ruffles and fluff.

Pony finally noticed Minna and stared, but his eyes couldn’t seem to focus. She recognized him, that sadly comic face that looked like a mushroom gone half-rotten, and he stood up, pushing Nellie aside and yanking at his pants.

“What do you want, you murderer?” he asked Minna.

His wagging, bejeweled finger caught a shaft of sunlight.

Minna would not dignify Pony with a response, and she held out a hand
—Don’t you dare—
when Nellie tried to force an embrace. The courtesan caught the madam’s furious gaze and couldn’t look again. When she spoke she addressed the floor.

“We didn’t do anything, Miss Minna,” she said. “Honestly, we didn’t do anything. Pony said he would give us $20,000 if we said you did it.”

Minna didn’t respond, and Nellie couldn’t lift her face. The madam could see the harlot rummaging through her junk drawer of a mind, discarding this excuse and considering that.

“I owe you some money,” Nellie said finally, “and I thought this would be the easiest way to get it. I’m sorry, Miss Minna. I’m sorry. Take us home, please take us home.”

Phyllis and Nellie were both forgiven and welcomed back into the Club. The Everleighs had always believed in second chances, having benefited from a few themselves. Besides, a madam had to expect a whore to be seasoned with a dash of liar and a sprinkle of thief; the job, after all, required flattering a man until his money became hers. If they took a hard line on all Club rules all the time, the Everleigh butterfly would be an endangered species.

Vic Shaw was another matter, however. The sisters knew she had concocted the scheme with Pony Moore; the Levee was already electric with talk of consequences. Again, Minna and Ada let their silence suffice. It occurred to them that Shaw’s rancor was provoked not only by the ways the sisters catered to their boys, but by how they pampered their girls.

A prostitute in other houses, including Vic Shaw’s, never entertained celebrities and princes, but wrestled in the nude and was disciplined by a whipper. A girl at Madam Shaw’s did not always get an honest examination from an honest doctor, and could never forget that the body that earned her a living might one day cause her death. She did not get to move with grace and dignity from parlor to parlor, talking and flattering as if those were her sole obligations, but instead was ordered into line, told to stand straight and look pretty while the men sifted through them all, one by one, like secondhand suits on a rack.

And Vic Shaw realized that no matter how fine her girls’ faces or trim their figures, how elaborate their gowns or skilled their technique, the harlots in her house would never have or be the best. Madam Shaw’s girls considered a slot on the Everleigh Club’s waiting list a superior position to the one they currently held, and right now, for Minna and Ada, that was revenge enough.

T
he Custom House Place vice lords did not surrender their space quietly. Debts were forgiven, insults retracted, drinks poured on the house in every saloon. The Cadets’ Protective Association met with the Friendly Friends. The procurers sat down with thieves. Crooked real estate agents lunched with unscrupulous lawyers. Dive keepers chatted from their doorways with the gaming room bosses. Pickpockets sifted through their loot to see what they might contribute. During the daytime hours there was a terrifying calm.

With $50,000 in hand, the vice lords approached Mayor Dunne and asked to stay in Custom House Place until September 1906, four months past the official deadline. Chief Collins unequivocally declined, and the strongest resorts of that district settled along the blocks around the Everleigh Club.

These red-light refugees weren’t the only—or most troubling—new arrivals. Every night but Monday, a group marched slowly, deliberately, through the Levee, as if it could be uprooted, an inch at a time, by the movement of their feet. The sisters recognized the leader as the Reverend Ernest Albert Bell. They’d heard he cost madams in Custom House Place $250 per night, telling passersby that Chicago, with each passing day, exchanged a pint of morality for a quart of wicked.

There he was now, Minna saw, making his way down Dearborn Street, his followers streaming behind him. She pressed her face against the parlor window to get a better look.

Bell sliced the air with a hand, and the group halted as one in front of the Everleigh Club.

His alpaca coat was a bit tattered at the hem, but his wide mustache was neatly groomed, its upturned ends like quotation marks framing his lips. He began waving his arms, as if he could gather and hold the air, and his mouth moved, wrapped itself around silent words.

Minna wanted—needed—to know what they were.

She opened one door just enough to let in a sliver of the night. Behind her the parlor was alive with the rush of bodies and music and innuendo, but she focused her ear toward the street and let the message come to her.

“Throw out the lifeline to danger-fraught men,” Bell called, shouting above the clamor, “sinking in anguish where you’ve never been.”

His voice circled and cornered. Men scattered or dropped to their knees, hiding behind splayed hands.

After a long moment, Minna turned to greet another customer, another of her boys. Bell and his Bible brothers might have pressured the mayor and the police chief to close Custom House Place, but the Levee would never surrender and fall. Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John had too much invested in the district—especially in the Everleigh Club, now as famous as Chicago itself.

PART TWO

F
LESH AND
B
ONE,
B
ODY AND
S
OUL

1906–1909

MIDNIGHT TOIL AND PERIL

Ernest Bell, preaching in the Levee.

The ministers thundered at them. Those Scarlet Sisters got more mention than the other
4,998
women of ill fame in the whole city.

—
RETIRED
C
HICAGO POLICE CAPTAIN
, 1936

T
he demise of the historic Custom House Place district seemed quick and decisive, a simple matter of God lowering a finger and extinguishing the district with one touch. But Ernest Bell knew that impression was a trick of time; since the Midnight Mission’s inception, they’d spent nearly every night kneeling before Custom House Place brothels, praying for darkest Chicago.

Bell knew politics, too, had played a part in the fall of Custom House Place. Mayor Edward Dunne was well aware that his predecessor, fellow Democrat Carter Harrison II, had faltered during the 1905 election over allegations of bribes and graft. Chicagoans were still fuming over the deadly Iroquois Theater fire of December 30, 1903, caused by unenforced codes. Harrison appointed a special graft committee in an attempt to salvage his reputation, but when reports surfaced that the mayor had ordered the committee to whitewash the investigation, he was forced, after eight years in City Hall, to step aside for Dunne.

Dunne, eager to avoid the same fate so early in his own administration, told his men to decline the brothel owners’ offer of $50,000 cash for permission to operate past May 1906.

“Mr. Bell,” Chief Collins said later, looping a pale forearm around the reverend’s neck, “I told them, ‘If you had Marshall Field’s money you
cannot
stay here after the first of May, as I am Chief of Police, so help me God!’”

If the Midnight Mission’s next goal was the destruction of the South Side Levee, it made sense to focus on its world-famous icon. Bell had heard plenty about the Everleigh Club’s bacchanalian parlors and perfumed fountains, its bitter, spinster-sister madams. Behind those grand mahogany doors women lost their husbands, mothers lost their sons, girls lost their innocence and freedom—and men lost their lives. Those rumors that spread across Chicago and beyond had passed, too, through Bell’s ears: Marshall Field Jr., the son of the city’s merchant prince, a family man and father of three, was shot dead there. A personal tragedy, an international disgrace. Bell could harness and diffuse that attention so that Chicago, the second largest city in America, no longer made room for the sinners who were destroying it.

He himself had yet to step inside the Everleigh Club. But he knew for certain that his prayer vigils were not going unnoticed, that every night but Monday, Madam Minna broke away from her clientele long enough to peel back a heavy swag and stare directly at him, her lips pursed in a beguiling half smile that seemed at once a dare and a tacit suggestion that they were in on the same joke.

Early one morning, on the train ride home, Bell fished his little leather diary from his pocket. At the top of page thirty-eight, in between scrawled addresses and entreaties to the Lord, he printed two words: “ADA, MINNA.”

D
onations were increasing. Victor Lawson, publisher of the
Chicago Daily News
and a godly man, gave $50 to the Midnight Mission, and Bell promptly sent a note. “Many thanks,” he wrote. “Nothing I saw in India so nauseated me as the abominations of that street. A repentant man told me that he had seen enough there to make the stones vomit.” Lawson contributed another $400.

After their usual warm-up, reciting prayers and reading scripture, Bell and his saints gathered their Bibles and pamphlets. One, titled “Sin Gone to Seed,” featured a photograph of a man suffering from advanced syphilitic infection. His head—hairless, bearing footprint-shaped holes that sank deep into his skull—looked like a well-traveled patch of wet sand. Such a jarring image might succeed where words and prayers failed. The study of social hygiene was advancing rapidly; recently, a German scientist had developed a test to detect
Treponema pallidum,
the bacterium that caused syphilis. Bell believed it was every reformer’s job to push beyond foolish Victorian conventions, to make sexual diseases an acceptable topic for polite society. Men must understand that harlots were responsible for more than 25 percent of surgical operations on good women, for the blindness of hundreds of babies.