The Girls of Murder City (23 page)

They heard. By now the neckers had disengaged and wiped their mouths, the girls adjusting themselves on their boyfriends’ laps. Wine was quietly swallowed and glasses put down. The music from the phonograph scratched abruptly to nothing. The best party all year in Greenwich Village had taken an unexpected turn.

Wanda clenched her fists at her sides and pivoted on tiny feet. She had made the decision: She was going back to Chicago, for the first time in four months, to face him. Her white skin tingled. She had been a perfect hostess until now. After all, these were the friends who excited her, the kind of smart, challenging,
free
people who for most of her twenty-three years she couldn’t imagine really existed. She could be her own person here, utterly removed from the suffocating expectations forced on women in Chicago’s Little Poland. Wanda had been busy during her short time in New York, meeting fellow bohemians, attracting attention at every stop on her exploration of the Village, an enchanted world so much truer, better, than the “sham Bohemia” she’d left in Chicago.

Wanda was a natural in Greenwich Village. For starters, she looked exquisite in artists’ rags, somehow both hungry and ripe as she scuffed down slick, dirty streets, going nowhere in particular. She luxuriated in the area’s damp, nonelectrified ateliers, never bothered by old-fashioned plumbing or cockroaches or the lumps of candle wax that congealed on the floor. Her only flaw—and make no mistake, it was a doozy—was her determined refusal of all sexual advances. She was hung up on a man.

It didn’t seem to matter that the man, Mr. Yeremya Kenley Smith of Chicago and Palos Park, Illinois, a thirty-seven-year-old advertising executive and self-described patron of the arts, didn’t return her ardor. Encouraging Kenley to leave his wife, Wanda had written to him that, when he did, “Once a week I will go to your little house, put it in order, bring your laundry, which I will have sent, look over your clothes and mend as may be necessary, and replace them in their proper drawers. . . . At no time during the week except on Saturday, when I shall change your linen and clean house for you, will I intrude on you. I promise, however, to hold myself in readiness to come to you whenever you may wish me, outside of working hours. You may have me when you want me.”

That letter would have disappointed her new friends if they’d known about it. They were all “Feminists” in New York City. They believed in equality, in free love, in the destruction of all traditions. They believed that marriage was “just a scrap of paper.” Wanda had to write desperate letters to Kenley; she couldn’t help it. But the groveling disappointed her, too. It was exactly how a lovesick girl from Little Poland was expected to act. So she sent her man a box of poisoned candy. He didn’t eat it, though, and neither did his wife. And still she couldn’t stop writing to him. “When I get you back I am never going to leave you go,” she wrote. And: “Your absence is so looming and dark that it takes all my interest in other things away.”

None of this—this quivering, childish dependence—made sense, not coming from Wanda. Any girl except Wanda. This was the girl that friends in Chicago called “The Light” and “The Fire,” and those names weren’t a joke—not to her group of admirers. Wanda Elaine Stopa was that brilliant. Boy, could she talk! About cubism and Freud and sex—and the future, the beautiful future. In conversational flight, Wanda’s whole body practically vibrated with excitement. Her eyes jumped, her right hand slapped the arm of the chair or the top of the table. She smiled—suddenly, brilliantly—at the apex of a peroration, her whole being blooming when she saw she’d made an impact on her audience. She’d even reach out and squeeze your knee, encouraging you, physically guiding you over to her point of view. This “pleasing little wisp of a girl” surely would have made a great lawyer, a groundbreaker for her sex, if she’d stuck with it. She’d been the first “girl lawyer” ever to work for the state’s attorney and the U.S. district attorney in Chicago. One of her law professors said he’d never had a student of greater promise. Her career, for a woman, was limitless.

But those were just words now. Her family regretted ever sending her to law school and out into the world. The last time Wanda was back home, on Augusta Street in Little Poland, her widowed mother noticed how pale and thin she had become, how her hand shook when she held a fork. Mrs. Stopa knew what was going on. Even on Augusta Street they had heard about narcotics. Wanda didn’t deny it, didn’t even want to. “Oh, mother, it’s such a good feeling,” she said.

Besides, dope helped her survive without Kenley; it helped her plot how to get him for her very own. She knew she wasn’t supposed to care about such things, about trapping a man and tending to his every need. Wanda hated Augusta Street, the squat women in boudoir caps sitting on the stoops, trudging to market and back, always with mewling babies in their arms. The men who looked at their wives with dead stares every evening, exhausted by their lives, completely unthinking and uncommunicative. Wanda shivered at the thought of them. It was an instinctive hatred, a restlessness that she had no ability to control. That was why she had studied so hard—to avoid the same fate as all those girls she grew up with. That was why she went to law school, time and again the only girl in a classroom full of boys. That was why Kenley Smith’s exhortations for the unconventional life,
real
life, resonated. That was why she went to bed with him.

She never recovered. Their night together blasted the precepts of free love to pieces, right there. Wanda’s bohemian attitudes, to her own horror, had been exposed as a hoax. She had never truly felt free among the artists of Chicago’s North Side, she realized. The discovery sent her into a hopeless spiral. At first Kenley responded to her constant letters seeking reassurance and love. “I looked in the shop windows today for something you would like but I didn’t see anything,” he wrote in one missive. “One hat was possible, but how could I confirm it without the little Polish bean to check up by? Polka, I hope you have been a little easier these last few days. I pray that I may yet be the springboard from which you dive into the lake of song, laughter and happiness.” But soon Kenley was backpedaling, then running for the hills. “Oh, Toots, I love you, I love you, I love you,” Wanda wrote to him. “I know you dislike to have me write things on paper, but I do not seem to be able to discuss things with you any more without becoming excessively emotional. . . . I feel that my attachment for you is becoming a sort of millstone around your neck; that you never intended it to reach the hectic stage it has. But I am intensely romantic and you are Romance to me!”

Romance. Wanda actually used that word—and meant it. Even though bohemia had no room for such sentiment. Free booze and food and sex were enough for this lot. She gazed at a girl in green who just moments before had been flinging herself about in a fevered dance, large metallic earrings swinging in rhythm with her body. Wanda turned and stared down a hulking young man, the same one who had climbed onto her kitchen table earlier and belted out a song. It all seemed so stupid now, these people, bohemia, art, New York City.

“I’m going to kill her, do you hear?” Wanda shouted. “Shoot her because she refused to give up the man I love.” She felt herself sweating, a stinging prickle along her brow and under her arms. But it felt good to say it out loud. To acknowledge that she was in love and that there was no hope.

“You talk about life, about freedom,” she continued, her voice hoarse. “You make me tired with your synthetic emotions and your words. God, you’re naïve! You think you’re sophisticated, but you’re just shallow children . . .”

Wanda stopped. She glared at these men and women she’d invited to her apartment. She wasn’t getting through to them. They thought she was giving a performance; that was what you did in the Village. She looked down at herself, as if surprised by her body. She was wearing the best gown she owned, a sleek semibackless dress that teased out the delightful curves in her frame. Her bronze hair shimmered under the light. She had a gorgeous orange shawl wrapped around her shoulders and waist and thighs, setting her alight, a beautiful girl on a pyre. She didn’t know it, but just the day before, Easter Monday, three women accused of killing their men—Belva Gaertner, Beulah Annan, and Sabella Nitti—had appeared in court together in her hometown. They’d created a bit of a happening. If Wanda had stayed in Chicago, if she’d still been working as a court stenographer for the state’s attorney, she’d have witnessed the scene up close. She could have told her brothers and mother about it, enthralled them the way she used to do after spending the day at the library gathering knowledge. Instead she was in a strange city, surrounded by strangers, people whom, just an hour before, she’d been desperate to have like her. Wanda yanked a bracelet off her arm. Then another. “Here,” she called out, “take these to remember me by.”

Her arms were packed with bracelets, her own unique style, and she slid them off one by one and threw them at her guests. Next came her necklaces, tossed to the ceiling. They clinked on the floor, where scrabbling hands quickly scooped them up. Finally she tore off her rings and flicked them away. She stood there in the center of it all, jewel-less and barefoot amid silence. Her guests stared at her, waiting for more.

The moment was broken, inevitably, by a drunkard. The man lurched forward, wrapped Wanda in his arms. “Atta girl, that’s the way to talk,” he said. The two of them swooned, and everything hung there for a few seconds, right on the edge, the grinning lout and the grim-faced hostess staring at each other. Then the room burst into laughter and cheers, and the party jerked haltingly back into motion. A dancer swung past them. The drunk continued to hold Wanda. “But listen, kid,” he said, leaning in close. “When you shoot, shoot straight, because dead ones don’t tell tales.”

Wanda filed the advice away. She stepped from him and walked out of the room. She didn’t return. The party cranked up to full volume again.

Some hours later, alone at last, Wanda took stock. There were overturned chairs, empty bottles, sandwich detritus. Wine blotched the carpet. Wanda slipped her gown off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. She used to enjoy being naked. It was a sign of her freedom, her maturity. She picked up the phone and put through a long-distance call. When her man came on the line, Wanda said, “I am coming to see you for a final show-down.” He hung up on her. Wanda went into the back of the apartment. She washed, climbed into a clean skirt and blouse, added rouge to her cheeks so she wouldn’t scare any children. She eased a revolver into her bag. Hefting on a coat, she headed out to buy a train ticket to Chicago.

The city was in a panic. News from Palos Park, picked up by radio stations, had spread with surprising rapidity. Reports warned that Wanda Stopa, gun in hand, “had disappeared as quickly and completely as though the earth had opened up and swallowed her.” Towertown, the North Side bohemian enclave near the old water tower, flooded with policemen, both uniformed and plainclothes, all on the lookout for the woman. Police wired descriptions of Wanda and the man driving the cab to authorities across the country. The initial assumption was that the driver was Vladimir “Ted” Glaskoff, who, police had learned, was Wanda’s estranged husband. Wanda had married him two years ago because he promised to take her into the heart of bohemian life, but within weeks, he had left her and skipped town. Glaskoff, who claimed to be a Russian count displaced by the Bolshevik Revolution, got married frequently; it was the easiest way to get the naive girls into bed.

“Spurned Portia Forgets Law,” a
Chicago American
teaser announced just hours after Wanda had fled Palos Park. The banner headline across the front page read: “Girl Lawyer Shoots at Wife of ‘Friend,’ Kills Old Man.” The paper breathlessly related that “Police squads were sent in pursuit of the Stopa girl’s taxicab and a special detail was sent to guard the offices of the John H. Dunham & Co. advertising agency, room 1916, Wrigley Building, where [Y. Kenley] Smith is employed.”

“What were her thoughts as she strode up the gravel path to his home?” the
American
wondered. “What drove her there, she, a woman with a law training, who would not be expected to take justice in her hands?”

Less than an hour after the shooting, Kenley Smith walked into the state’s attorney’s office in the Loop and asked for protection. He had been at a dentist’s office when his wife called and warned him that Wanda Stopa was headed his way. “That woman has been after me for two years,” Smith told the prosecutors. “She was disillusioned about my physical attractions. She wanted me to divorce my wife and marry her, and I refused. I was her warm friend.”

Prosecutors quizzed him about the nature of their relationship. Smith said that he had been taken by Wanda’s “amazing intelligence.” He admitted to giving her money and sending her to New York City, adding that he wanted to help “get her away from the ne’er-do-well husband she had married, emotionally.” A year before, Wanda had needed a place to live, and the Smiths’ apartment in the city was available, so he and his wife rented it to her. The Smiths had a history of giving shelter to young artists, including Ernest Hemingway, who was a friend of Kenley’s younger siblings. (Hemingway claimed that Doodles, whom he found repulsive, made sexual advances toward him during his stay at the apartment in 1920.) Grudgingly, as the questions continued, Kenley Smith confessed that, even after Wanda had moved in, he would still sleep at the flat on nights when he had to stay late at the office. “But,” he insisted, “it was all very platonic.” The prosecutors, who knew Wanda from her days as an assistant in the office, expressed surprise, which got Smith’s back up. “Now, get this straight,” he huffed. “I’ll draw you a diagram to show you the living room that separated my room from Miss Stopa’s studio.”