SO ATTUNED WERE OUR EARS to the minimalist music of spare change dropped into our coffee-jar coffer that we barely noticed the murders at first. Daily news was, for the most part, inapplicable to our social station: stocks we could not buy, fashion we could not afford, events we could not attend. Freed of his false face, Church became a better man and found better work, and our rent, believe it or not, began to be paid on schedule. This left him little time for current events.
He’d instead narrowed his interest to celebrity gossip. Once a month he’d scrape together the change to buy Photoplay and read it front to back, responding to every article with adolescent credulity. “Wow!” he’d cry. “Mary Pickford really is just a regular girl at heart!” The glum irony was that we were smack in the middle of the age of the movie palace—lavish, air-conditioned, Egyptian-styled temples designed to give proper deference to the new wave of “talkies” starring the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Joan Crawford, Tom Mix, and Bridey Valentine—and we could ne’er afford two tickets!
For me, the dull diversion of fact-addled newspapers had been superseded by the squawking fluff coming from our secondhand Radiola. It mattered little if the program was morning calisthenics, sonorous scripture readings, malefic weather reports, musical showcases, children’s prattle, or even Betty Crocker’s Gold Medal Flour Home Service. If it babbled, I was there to clap my hands in moppet delight.
Only when coppers began raiding our scurvy saloons, not to arrest us for illicit imbibing but to pat us down for weapons, did we hear rumors about a killer. Forthwith I found a newspaper slicked with gin to a tabletop and flapped it about so that it might dry. On the walk home that night I read my first account of the Bird Hunter.
The New York Herald Tribune had an edge over the Times, the Sun, the Evening World, the whole inky glut, for the Herald Tribune had on the case one Kip McKenzie, soon to be known as my favorite writer. It was McKenzie who’d nicknamed the killer. After the third murder, each of them young women returning home from speakeasies, he wrote, “If ‘flappers’ are so named for chicks yet lacking the adult feathers to leave the nest, this executioner might well be called ‘the Bird Hunter,’ so intent is he to clip those wings.”
Even when the killer went underground for months at a time, not one week passed without McKenzie boasting “exclusive scoops” from “top-secret sources” on one of these variants: a) The indomitable police had a suspect and were about to make the collar; b) There were additional unpublicized victims and the police were bungling boobs; or c) An eyewitness had surfaced to describe the killer as a very tall man, or a very short woman, or perhaps a circus-trained gorilla.
It was a lurid decade, you understand, and print outlets strove to outdo one another in both the size of their hollering headlines and the carnality of their content. We readers expected fresh, frequent, hot plates of sex and death, and shivered in delectation when McKenzie held back the goriest details to instead repeat his simple, teasing refrain:
“This girl, too, was gutted.”
The affair offended Church’s Midwestern decency, and so, feeling like a Judas, I stole away so that I might enjoy exchanging wild hypotheses with strangers on the street. The Bird Hunter was a moralistic madman out to punish our reckless youth. No, he was a Dry delivering atonement to those who dared to draught the Devil’s drink. Any madness was possible in the world of Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. Even yours truly, typically dazzled by wanton bloodshed, had disfavored February’s execution-style St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago. Truly, could things get any worse?
Hah! Funny rhetorical, that.
Appreciate the caustic couplets of that drunk poet, Gød. On October 24, 1929, Kip McKenzie was back on the front page with the slaying of another young flapper. But his story had been booted below the fold to make way for the only thing worse than bloody murder—the bloodying of one’s own pocketbook. The entire country was shaken on “Black Thursday,” a frightening enough label were it not for the Black Monday and Black Tuesday that quickly overshadowed it. No, it was not a spate of solar eclipses but the implosion of the anything-goes stock market. Boring stuff, yes, unless it was you who had your entire fortune dashed in a matter of hours.
The initial impact upon Church and me was minimal. The Dream of the Cotton Club remained just that; what little money we had fit into our wallets. But, oh, how the city moaned. We opened the windows to the mournful music while our Radiola supplied the numerical lyrics: American Telephone & Telegraph down 106 and 3/4 points, General Motors down 36 and 3/4 points, the whole market drained of billions of dollars, ninety percent of its total value. The imagery conjured was of tycoons in three-piece suits standing amid loops of ticker tape as tangled as battlefield entrails before opening their fiftieth-floor office windows and taking the plunge.
“There won’t be any jobs,” said Church. “Finch, what’ll we do?”
I thought of the bottles of fallacious promises once sold by the Barker.
“This is what happens,” said I, “when one trusts in false prophets.”
The United States reeled as if socked by a Jack Dempsey roundhouse. New York City in particular hit the ropes, but at least we had a hero, the intrepid Kip McKenzie, and over the next two months he assaulted his clackety Underwood with the single-minded mission of elevating the moods of we millions of sad-sack suckers. Behold, his latest mobilization:
MARKET PLUNGE SQUELCHES SERIAL MURDERS
“Bird Hunter” Threat May Be Over, Says Our Reporter
Leading theories regarding the Bird Hunter had suggested that he was doling punishment for declining American ethics. The breaking waves of the crash, wrote McKenzie, had tossed the Roaring Twenties against the cliffs; give it a year, two at most, and necklines would rise and hemlines would fall and liquor would stop pouring in such volume. The Bird Hunter, in short, would have no more cause to kill. Wasn’t it wonderful?
It was! It really was! I know that McKenzie’s millions of readers took solace that, as bad as things were, there were worse things that had been sated. Too bad, then, that, beginning with the very first day of 1930, girls once again began to die, quite a lot of them.