Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

She gave me a gray-eyed glare. “I ask my lawyer for the shiftiest private eye around, and you’re what he comes up with? A goody two-shoes?”

“This isn’t about right or wrong. This is about me not being stupid. Scratch that-it’s about me not liking being taken for stupid. You and George and Leo have been knocking over little shops since, when? April, May?”

She just shrugged.

“The clothes I found under Mrs. Minneci’s bed were strictly fall and winter items.”

Her eyebrows went up. “If I wanted to frame her, and had thnch of stolen summer frocks of my own, why didn’t I just have that dope Tony stick some of those under that bitch’s bed?”

“Because you girls don’t wear the same size. She’s tall and skinny, you’re short and curvy. You had to frame her with clothing that would fit her-and that dope Tony, as you accurately put it, went out and bought new things…fall and winter items that just hit the stores.”

“You said you found a blonde wig and a blackjack.”

“Yeah. The wig was new, but the blackjack wasn’t. You really did go around terrorizing small merchants with that thing, didn’t you?”

She sighed and her face softened. She unfolded her arms and put her hands on the scarred table and leaned forward. “Listen, Heller-dumbbell Tina wouldn’t’ve served any time. That was just to muddy the waters and help get me off-when the cops looked into it, she’d probably have alibis for some of those robberies, maybe including the Hoeh thing.”

“Probably. Maybe.”

“And as for waving around that blackjack? That was just theater. I never slugged anybody, I never kicked anybody. These are hard times, as you may have noticed, and these hands…” She held them up; they were cracked and almost arthritic-looking, fifty-year-old hands on a woman not thirty. “…these hands had done all the laundry they could take.”

“But the cops wanted to make themselves look good, and the papers went along, turning you into a Tigress.”

She smiled. “Hey, fella, I was a tigress, but that was part of the show. Scare ’em, rattle ’em, and get them to give up their money. And we lived pretty darn good these last few months.”

“Until Gustav Hoeh didn’t cooperate.”

Her smile faded. “I hate that. You can believe me or not believe me, I don’t give a damn. But the truth is, I never wanted anybody hurt. This was just about some fast, easy cash.”

“That gun you hauled around in your bag for George-you never thought he’d use it?”

“No. He’s a coward at heart.”

“Hell, Eleanor. Don’t you know? That’s who uses guns.”

Some of the details I never got. I was only on the case for two days, so I never found out exactly what hold Eleanor Jarman had over Tony Minneci, and I have no idea what became of Tina and her two boys after I sent the thirty-bucks rent money.

On the witness stand, Eleanor wore a pretty blue frock (where had she picked that up, I wondered?) and told her sad tale of being an orphan and waiting tables and doing laundry. She denied knowing that Hoeh’s store was going to be robbed, while Dale had changed his story to put the blame on Minneci, who told a similar story with Dale cast as the heavy. Assistant State’s Attorney Crowley went after the death sentence for all three, but only George Dale got the chair; his last act, in April of 1934, was to write Eleanor a love letter.

As for Eleanor, she Leo each got 199 years, a sentence designed to beat any reasonable chance of parole-and the longest stretch ever assigned a woman in Illinois.

That should be the end of the story, but the Blonde Tigress had other ideas. For seven years Eleanor served her time at Joliet as (to quote the warden) “an industrious, obedient, and model prisoner in every respect.” Then, on the morning of August 8, 1940, she wore a guard’s dress stolen from a locker and used a rope fashioned from sheets to go over the ten-foot wall.

Supposedly she had heard her youngest son had threatened to run away from home. The story goes that Eleanor Jarman returned to Sioux City, spent some time with her two boys, and then disappeared, not turning up till she met with family members briefly in 1975 before vanishing again.

No one, except perhaps her blood relatives, knows how Eleanor spent the rest of her life or where. My take on it was that she was neither the Tigress of the press nor the victim she pretended to be. And maybe seven years was enough time for her to serve, though numerous attempts by her family to get her pardoned went nowhere.

Anyway, the part I liked best was how she got out of prison.

By stealing a dress.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction based on an actual murder, and many real names are used. “Tony Minneci” is a composite of Leo Minneci’s real brother and several other peripheral figures in the case, none of whom were shown to have anything to do with the robberies or murder. My longtime research associate George Hagenauer wrote about the Blonde Tigress in The Big Book of Little Criminals (1996). Newspaper accounts, including retrospective ones, were consulted as well as several articles in vintage “true detective” magazines, notably “Smashing the Terror Reign of Chicago’s Blonde Gun Girl” by Robert Faherty in Detective Tabloid , February 1935. Mark Gribben’s internet article, “Eleanor Jarman Please Phone Home,” was also useful.

I grabbed the Lake Street El and got off at Garfield Park; it was a short walk from there to the “Death Clinic” at 3406 West Monroe Street. That’s what the papers, some of them anyway, were calling the Wynekoop mansion. To me it was just another big old stone building on the West Side, one of many, though of a burnt-reddish stone rather than typical Chicago gray. And, I’ll grant you, the three-story structure was planted on a wealthier residential stretch than the one I’d grown up on, twelve blocks south.

Still, this was the West Side, and more or less my old stamping grounds, and that was no doubt part of why I’d been asked to drop by the Wynekoop place this sunny Saturday afternoon. The family had most likely asked around, heard about the ex-cop from nearby Douglas Park who now had a little private agency in the Loop.

And my reputation on the West Side-and in the Loop-was of being just honest enough, and just crooked enough, to get most jobs done.

But part of why I’d been called, I would guess, was Earle Wynekoop himself. I knew Earle a little, from a distance. We’d both worked at the World’s Fair down on the lakefront last summer and fall. I was working pickpocket duty, and Earle was in the front office, doing whatever front-office people do. We were both about the same age-I was twenty-seven-but he seemed like a kid to me.

Earle mostly chased skirts, except at the Streets of Paris exhibition, where the girls didn’t wear skirts. Tall, handsome, wavy-haired Earle, with his white teeth and pencil-line mustache, had pursued the fan dancers with the eagerness of a plucked bird trying to get its feathers back. Funny thing was, nobody-including me-knew Earle was a married man, till November, when the papers were full of his wife. His wife’s murder, that is.

Now it was a sunny, almost-warm afternoon in December, and I had been in business just under a year. And like most small businessmen, I’d had less than a prosperous 1933. A retainer from a family with the Wynekoop’s dough would be a nice way to ring out the old and ring in the new.

Right now, I was ringing the doorbell. I was up at the top of the first-floor landing; Dr. Alice Wynekoop’s office was in an English basement below. I was expecting a maid or butler to answer, considering the size of this place. But Earle is what I got.