The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry Read Free Book Online

had driven the dry movement for twenty years before it took hold, could have foreseen that someone like this, a woman of means and sophistication, would be a victim of their efforts. That was what Prohibition did—it pulled everyone down into the pit.
    She and Walter were so drunk, they’d gotten giddy, the woman was telling the policemen minding her. She had been worried about their safety, going home so late. It was very dark out, she said. Even drunk, the woman knew how to tell a story, how to build suspense. She propped her elbows on shaky knees, made eye contact. “On our way to my home we began talking about stick-up men,” she said. “I jokingly remarked, ‘I’ll bet I’m a better shooter than you are.’ Mr. Law said I was mistaken. ‘I’m a wonderful marksman—I never miss,’ he said, laughing out loud and patting me on the shoulder. I suggested, jokingly, that we toss up a coin and that the winner shoot the loser. I said if the winner missed the loser, the latter would get a chance to shoot, and vice versa, until one of us was shot. There were nine bullets in the pistol. And then—oh, I don’t know just what did happen. I was too drunk.”
    A group of reporters had gathered around, as if the woman were a scout leader sitting in front of a crackling fire. In the days ahead, the papers would refer to her as the Flip-Coin Murderess. A veteran officer at the station, a Lieutenant Egan, pressed her to continue, to try to remember. “Mr. Law said something about hold-up men . . . said he was afraid of them,” the woman insisted. Her nose, too big for her face in the best of circumstances, had been engorged by drink. It looked like a deformity. Her eyes bulged. “I remember seeing him collapse over the wheel, but I had no idea what was the matter,” she continued. “I looked at Wallie closer and saw blood streaming down his face. I put up my hand to stop the flow, but I couldn’t. ‘Walter, Walter,’ I called. But he did not move or answer me. Then I tried to pull him out of the driver’s seat so I could drive the car home, but I couldn’t budge him; he was so limp. His head fell on my arms and that is how my clothing came to be spattered with blood. I became frightened and ran home.” Tears had started during the story, and they rolled down the woman’s cheeks and hung from her jowls. She sat back. She seemed to cave in on herself in exhaustion, her mottled face sliding into her neck.
    It was quite a performance. Reporters were left wondering what to make of it—and what to make of her, this drunken rich woman who carried a pistol. She was a mess, a grotesquerie, but everyone seemed to recognize there was something special about her, something . . . appealing. Was she a gangster’s mistress? A bit old for that, maybe, but when first brought in she had the same look that all the gangster girls had, the ones who stood around outside the central police station waiting for their men to come out. It was the vacant, bemused look of someone watching a rinky-dink neighborhood parade go by.
    Finally somebody recognized her: She was Belle Gaertner, a popular cabaret dancer before the war. She’d left the stage to marry William Gaertner, one of the country’s leading manufacturers of scientific instruments. There’d been a scandalous divorce—Mrs. Gaertner had been caught committing adultery. That was all before Maurine’s time, but the young reporter liked what she was hearing. She had a big story.

    Maurine had page-one material, there was no doubt about it. But there was a problem. “Girl reporters”—that was what everyone called women hacks—almost never made it to the front page. The biggest, most challenging assignments went to the best reporters, and that meant men. A girl reporter simply couldn’t be counted on—even many women in the newsroom believed that. “On the big story her vision is apt to be [too] close and her factual grasp inadequate,” insisted New York Herald Tribune