The Shining Girls A Novel

Dan

10 FEBRUARY 1992

The Chicago Sun-Times’ typeface is ugly. So is the building it sits on, a low-rise eyesore that squats on the bank of the Chicago River on Wabash, surrounded by soaring towers. It is, in fact, a shithole. The desks are all still heavy old metal things from World War II with wells for typewriters that have been plugged with computers. There is aerated ink caked in the air vents from the printing presses that shake the whole building when they run. Some reporters have ink in their veins. The Sun-Times staff have ink in their lungs. Once in a while someone will complain to OSHA.

There’s a pride in the ugliness. Especially in comparison to the Tribune Tower across the way with its neo-Gothic turrets and buttresses, like some cathedral of news. The Sun-Times has an open sprawling office with all the desks butting up against one another, arranged around the city editor. Features and sports are shunted off to the side. It’s messy, it’s noisy. People are shouting over each other and the squawking police radio. There are televisions going and phones ringing and the fax machines bleeping as they churn out incoming stories. The Tribune has cubicles.

The Sun-Times is the working-class paper, the cop’s paper, the garbage collector’s paper. The Tribune is the broadsheet of millionaires and professors and the suburbs. It’s South Side vs. North Side, and never the twain shall meet – until the start of intern season, when the rich college brats with connections descend.

‘Incoming!’ Matt Harrison yells in a sing-song, marching between the desks with the bright-eyed young people following in his wake like baby ducks behind their momma. ‘Warm up the copy machine! Get your messy filing prepped! Have your coffee orders ready!’

Dan Velasquez grunts and slumps down deeper behind his computer, ignoring the little ducklings quack-quacking in excitement at being in a real live newsroom. He shouldn’t even be here. There is no reason for him to come into the office. Ever.

But his editor wants a face-to-face about plans for covering the coming season, before he jets off to Arizona for spring training. Like that’s going to make a difference. Being a Cubs fan is about being an optimist against all odds or rationale. True believer stuff. Maybe he can say that. Get away with a bit of editorializing. He’s been nagging for Harrison to let him write a column instead of gamers all the time. That’s where great writing is: opinion pieces. You can use sports (or, heck, movies) as an allegory for the state of the world. You can add meaningful insight to the cultural discourse. Dan searches himself for meaningful insight. Or at least an opinion. He finds himself lacking.

‘Yo, Velasquez, I’m talking to you,’ Harrison says. ‘You got your coffee order ready?’

‘What?’ He peers over his glasses, new bifocals that confound him as much as the new word processor does. What was wrong with Atex? He liked Atex. Hell, he liked his Olivetti typewriter. And his old f*cking glasses.

‘For your intern,’ Harrison makes a ta-da gesture at a girl barely out of kindergarten, surely, with crazy kindergarten hair sticking up all over the place, a multicolored striped scarf looped around her neck with matching fingerless gloves, a black jacket with more zips than is conceivably practical, and worse, an earring in her nose. She irritates him on principle.

‘Oh no. Nuh-uh. I don’t do interns.’

‘She asked for you. By name.’

‘All the more reason not to. Look at her, she doesn’t even like sports.’

‘It’s a real pleasure to meet you,’ says the girl. ‘I’m Kirby.’

‘That’s not relevant to me because I’m never going to talk to you again. I’m not even supposed to be here. Pretend I’m not.’

‘Nice try, Velasquez.’ Harrison winks. ‘She’s all yours. Don’t do anything litigiously offensive.’ He walks away to drop off the other interns with various reporters eminently more qualified and willing to have them.

‘Sadist!’ Dan yells after him and then turns grudgingly to the girl. ‘Great. Welcome. Pull up a chair, I guess. I don’t suppose you happen to have an opinion on the Cubs line-up this year?’

‘Sorry. I don’t really do sports. No offense.’

‘I knew it.’ Velasquez glares at the blinking cursor on his screen. It’s mocking him. At least with paper you could doodle on it or write notes or crumple it up and toss it at your editor’s head. His computer screen is unassailable. So is his editor’s head.

‘I’m much more interested in crime.’

He spins slowly in his wheelie chair to face her. ‘Is that so? Well, I got real bad news for you. I cover baseball.’

‘But you used to be on homicide,’ the girl insists.

‘Yeah, like I used to be able to smoke and drink and eat bacon and not have a f*cking stent in my chest. All a direct result of working the homicide beat. You should forget about it. It’s no place for a nice wannabe hardcore punk girl like you.’

‘They don’t offer internship positions on homicide.’

‘For a very good reason. Can you imagine you kids running around a crime scene? Christ!’

‘So you’re the closest I can get.’ She shrugs. ‘Besides. You covered my murder.’

He is thrown, but only for a moment. ‘All right, kid, if you’re serious about covering crime, the first thing you gotta do is get the terminology right. You would have been an “attempted murder”. As in, not successful. Right?’

‘That’s not the way it feels.’

‘Qué cruz.’ He mimes pulling out his hair. Not that he has much left. ‘Remind me again which of Chicago’s very many homicides you’re supposed to be?’

‘Kirby Mazrachi,’ she replies, and it all comes back to him, even as she’s unwinding her scarf to reveal the raw ridge across her throat where the maniac cut her, nicking the carotid, but not severing it, if he recalls the ME’s report.

‘With the dog,’ he says. He’d interviewed the witness, a Cuban fisherman whose hands shook the whole way through the interview, although, Dan thought cynically, he pulled himself together by the time the TV news people got to him.

He described how he saw her stumble out of the woods with blood pulsing from her throat, a loop of gray-pink intestine protruding under the ripped remains of her T-shirt, carrying her dog in her arms. Everyone thought she was going to die for sure. Some of the papers even reported it that way.

‘Huh,’ he says, impressed. ‘So, you want to crack the case? Bring the killer to justice? You want a sneak peek at your files?’

‘No. I want to see the others.’

He leans back, his chair creaking precariously, very impressed. And not a little intrigued.

‘Tell you what, kiddo. You phone Jim Lefebvre for a quote about these rumors that they’re going to fly Bell from the Cubs line-up, and I’ll see what I can do about these others.’