Read The Girls of Murder City for Free Online Page B

tricking them, threatening violence. Jailers let them into cells, where for hours they would play cards with accused murderers, jotting down quotes between games and phoning them in to rewrite men. The toilet was right there in the cell, and interviews and card games would continue while one of them sat on the can.
    Boorish behavior may have been tolerated at the other papers, but the Madhouse enthusiastically encouraged it. Hearst’s women police reporters covered only women criminals, and they sat in their own isolated area of the newsroom. This was for their own good, for Howey believed that drinking put men in the best frame of mind to produce superior copy. Everyone drank on the job—the newsroom frequently reeked of vomit. Howey’s most memorable physical characteristic was a glass left eye, which supposedly was necessitated after he drank too much during a breaking story, blacked out at his desk, and impaled the orb on a copy spike. Maybe that useless eye was one of the reasons the papers’ headline type got so big on the front page—often a whopping six inches high. But that was doubtful. The heads also got consistently racy. Howey trained headline writers to boil down a story to a single shocking phrase. If he didn’t find it in the story, the headline writer went to the rewrite man and pressed him: “What do you mean, the man was shot dead in the street? That happens daily. What makes this shooting differ from all others?”
    Howey roamed the newsroom, looking over the shoulders of his rewrite men, constantly reminding them that he didn’t want a rundown of facts—that was the job of the “leg man” who called in the story. The rewrite specialist at a Hearst paper provided the emotional context, the bang that forced a reader at a newsstand to pick out the American or the Herald and Examiner instead of the Tribune, Daily News, Evening Post, or Daily Journal. “Hype this up!” the editor would demand, over and over. “Hype this up!”

    It wasn’t easy for the Tribune to match the sometimes questionable details that poured daily out of the rewrite bank at the Madhouse on Madison. “A newspaper man need have only a spoonful of brains to dip his journal in blood and wave it before a morbid mob,” Robert Lee said defensively, when comparing the Tribune ’s “steady hand” to the Hearst papers’ sensation. But Lee was happy to wave blood around too, if only a little more decorously, and on a Tuesday night in the middle of March, a report came in that wouldn’t need to be hyped up to attract the morbid. Maurine Watkins learned that a man had been found shot dead in a car over on Forrestville Avenue. Possible suicide. She set out for the Fiftieth Street police station. It was after one in the morning—more than three hours after deadline for the earliest edition.
    In the station’s booking room, reporters from the various newspapers waited for more information. No one thought the dead man in the car was a suicide. The new widow, Freda Law, came through, stunned and shuffling, a pretty young thing. Not long after, two officers brought in a middle-aged woman from the back room—the woman who’d been with the dead man. She was wide-eyed drunk, scared into some semblance of clarity. Her hair was twisted into origami; her hands trembled. She’d been crying. Maurine, on the job for only a few weeks, already understood what this was all about. A drunken fight that went too far—you got them every night.
    The woman listed in her seat as detectives waited on a cell assignment for her. Maurine hovered, hoping for a chance to get in some questions. There was something about the woman, something that didn’t quite fit with an address on the wrong side of Washington Park and a domestic dispute ending in gunshots. The woman stank, but she was wearing beautiful jewelry—huge hunks of diamonds—and she had a way of holding herself that got your attention. None of the founders of the Anti-Saloon League, which