The Shining Girls A Novel

Kirby

2 AUGUST 1992

Dan and Kirby walk up the driveway past the neatly clipped lawn, which sports a yard sign: ‘Vote Bill Clinton’. Rachel used to put up signs for all of the political parties, just to be difficult. She also used to tell campaigners that she was voting for the lunatic fringe. But when she busted Kirby making prank calls to an old lady, convincing her to wrap all her appliances in tinfoil to stop the radiation from the satellites penetrating the house, she told her to stop being childish.

There is the muffled sound of kids shouting inside the house. It could do with a fresh lick of paint, but there are orange geraniums in flowerpots on the porch. Detective Michael Williams’s widow opens the door, smiling but harried.

‘Hi, sorry, the boys…’ There is a scream behind her.

‘Moo-ooom! He’s using hot water.’

‘Excuse me one second.’ She disappears into the house and comes back, hauling two kids with water pistols by the arms. Six or seven, Kirby’s not great at judging children’s ages. ‘Say hello, boys.’

‘’Lo,’ they mutter, staring at their feet, although the younger one sneaks a look up at her through crazily long lashes, which makes Kirby glad she wore a neck scarf today.

‘Good enough. Outside, please, thank you. And use the garden hose.’ Their mother thrusts them into the yard. They gain momentum like loosed missiles, whooping and hollering.

‘Come in. I just made ice tea. You must be Kirby? I’m Charmaine Williams.’ They shake hands.

‘Thanks for this,’ Kirby starts, as Charmaine leads them into a house as neatly kept up as the garden. It’s an act of defiance, Kirby thinks. Because this is the problem with death, be it murder or heart attacks or car accidents: life continues.

‘Oh, I don’t know if it will be any use, but it’s lying around taking up space, and the guys at the station don’t want it. You’re doing me a favor, honestly. The boys will be glad to have their own rooms.’

She opens the door onto a small study with a window overlooking the alley behind the house. It’s been colonized by cardboard boxes that creep across the floor and pile up against the walls. Opposite the window is a felt bulletin board pinned with family photos and a Bulls pennant and a blue ribbon for Chicago PD Bowling League Championships 1988 and a collection of old lottery tickets framing the edge; a bad-luck border.

‘Played his badge number?’ Dan says, examining the board. He does not comment on the photograph of the dead man lying sprawled in a flowerbed with his arms thrown out like Christ, or the Polaroid of a bag of housebreaking tools, or the Tribune article ‘Prostitute Found Dead’ that are pinned up, disturbingly, among the happy domestic memorabilia.

‘You know it,’ Charmaine says, frowning at the desk, a K-Mart kit job, which is barely visible underneath the spread of papers, and specifically at the striped coffee mug that’s grown a fine fuzz of mould in the bottom.

‘I’ll just get you that iced tea,’ she says, sweeping up the mug.

‘This is weird,’ Kirby says, looking around the room at the painfully exposed detritus of investigations past. ‘It feels haunted.’ She picks up a glass paperweight with a hologram of a soaring eagle and puts it down again. ‘I guess it is.’

‘You said you wanted access. This is access. Mike investigated a lot of femicides and he kept all his old case notes.’

‘Don’t they normally go into evidence?’

‘The critical investigative stuff does: the bloody knife, witness testimony. It’s like math, you have to show all your workings, but there’s a lot of messing around before you get there; interviews that don’t seem to go anywhere, evidence that seems irrelevant at the time.’

‘You’re killing whatever remaining faith I had left in the justice system, Dan.’

‘Mike was one of the cops campaigning to get the system changed. To force detectives to file absolutely everything. There was a lot he thought needed revamping in the police department.’

‘Harrison told me about your torture investigation.’

‘Big mouth. Yeah, this guy Mike was the whistleblower on that until they started threatening Charmaine and the boys. I don’t blame him for backing down. He took a transfer to Niles, stayed out of their way. But in the meantime he kept every piece of paper that crossed his desk from every murder he worked, and any others he could lay his hands on. There was a damp problem at one of the precincts. He rescued a lot of files, brought them here. Some of the stuff is impossible to identify. I think he had this idea that he was going to retire and sort through it and solve cold cases. Maybe write a book. Then the car crash.’

‘No foul play?’

‘It was a drunk driver. Hit him head-on, killed them both pretty much instantly. Sometimes bad shit happens. Anyway, he was a bit of a homicide hoarder, Mike. There’ll be stuff in here that you won’t find in the Sun-Times archives or at the library. Probably nothing. But you know, like you said. Wide net.’

‘Just call me Pandora,’ Kirby says, trying not to be daunted by the sheer number of boxes, every single one packed tight with grief. This would be the moment to call it quits.

Like hell.





Dan

2 AUGUST 1992

It takes them ten trips to haul twenty-eight boxes of old case files up the three flights of stairs to Kirby’s apartment above the German bakery.

‘You couldn’t live somewhere with an elevator?’ Dan complains, nudging open the door with his foot and heaving a box on to an old door set up on trestles that’s doing a shoddy impression of a desk.

Her place is a dump. The parquet floors are faded and scratched. There are clothes scattered all over the room. And not like sexy underwear either. T-shirts, turned inside out, and jeans and sweatpants and one big black boot lying on its side in a tangle of laces half-under the couch, no sign of its partner. Dan recognizes the bleak symptoms of don’t-give-a-damn-single life. He was hoping to get some hint of whether or not she’d taken that idiot boy Fred to bed last weekend, or if she had started seeing him again, but there’s too much mess to infer anything about possible sexual encounters, let alone the hidden routings of her heart.

The mismatched furniture speaks to a demented DIY ingenuity, crap that’s been recycled off the street and repurposed, and not just your average student-pad milk-crate bookshelves either. The coffee table in the tiny space in front of the couch that does for a living-room, for example, is an old gerbil cage with a round glass top balanced on it.

He shrugs off his jacket and throws it over the couch, where it instantly blends with an orange sweater and a pair of cut-off shorts, and bends down to see the diorama she’s created inside with dinosaur toys and fake flowers.

‘Oh, never mind that. I was bored,’ she squirms.

‘It’s … interesting.’

The wooden stool next to the kitchen counter, which cants at an alarming angle, has been hand-painted with tropical flowers. There are plastic goldfish stuck to the bathroom door and fairy lights strung up above the kitchen curtains, blinking like Christmas.

‘No elevator, sorry. Not for this price. And I’d go for the smell of fresh bread over that any day. I get a discount on yesterday’s donuts.’

‘I wondered where you got the cash to spread them around like that.’

‘Spreading my waistline!’ She lifts up her T-shirt to pinch at her belly.

‘You’ll work it off on the stairs,’ Dan says, not looking, definitely not, at the way her waist curves in from the hard knob of her hip above her jeans.

‘The evidence workout. We’ll need more boxes. You got any more dead cop friends?’ She sees his face. ‘Sorry, I guess that was too dark, even for me. You want to stick around for a bit? Help me sort through some of this?’

‘I got somewhere better to be?’

Kirby opens up the first box and starts spreading it out on the table. Michael Williams has been anything but systematic. It seems to be three decades’ worth of assorted crap. Photographs of cars, clearly from the seventies, from the golds and beiges and the heavy boxy shapes. Mug-shots of creeps, various, all sporting a case number, a date. Front, side-on, left, right. A guy with huge glasses oozing cool, Mr Handsome with his hair slicked up, a man with jowls so deep you could use them to smuggle drugs in.

‘How old was this cop friend?’ she raises an eyebrow.

‘Forty-eight? Fifty? Been in the force since forever. Old-school police. Charmaine’s his second wife. Divorce rates among cops are higher than the national average. But they were doing okay. I think they might even have lasted, if not for the accident.’

He nudges the boxes on the floor with his boot. ‘I’m thinking we should separate out the ancient stuff. Anything before … 1970? Gets filed in the not helpful pile.’

‘Okey-dokey,’ she agrees, opening up one of the boxes marked 1987– 1988, while Dan starts shoving aside the boxes with dates that are too early.

‘What’s this?’ she says, holding up a Polaroid of a row of men with bushy beards and tiny red shorts. ‘A bowling alley?’

Dan squints at the picture. ‘Police shooting range. That’s how the cops used to do identity line-ups, with a spotlight shining in the guys’ eyes so they couldn’t see the person ID-ing them. Little uncomfortable, I’d guess. The whole one-way glass set-up is strictly for the movies and police departments with an actual budget.’

‘Wow,’ Kirby says, studying the men’s hairy legs. ‘History isn’t kind to fashion.’

‘You hoping to see your guy?’

‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’ The mix of wistfulness and bitterness in her voice kills him. He’s setting her up on a hiding to nothing. It’s busy work to keep her occupied, because the reality is that she has no chance of catching the psycho. Certainly not by digging through boxes. But it makes her happy, and he felt sorry for Charmaine, and he thought maybe they could help each other out and get it out of their systems.

Poison shared is poison halved. Or maybe it just poisons everyone equally.

‘Listen,’ he says, hardly knowing what he’s saying. ‘I don’t think you should do this. It was a stupid idea. You don’t want to see all this shit, and it’s not going to go anywhere and – f*ck!’

He nearly kisses her, then. A way of shutting his own darn fool mouth and because she’s so close. So here. Looking at him with all that bright hungry curiosity beaming out of her face.

He stops himself in time. Being relative. In time to save himself from being a deluded idiot. From her rebuffing him like a pinball bumper, with the same automatic elastic snap. In time that she didn’t even notice. Christ, what was he thinking? He’s already standing up, making for the door, in such a rush to get out of there that he forgets his jacket.

‘Shit. Sorry, it’s late. I gotta get up early. I’ve got copy due. I’ll see you. Soon.’

‘Dan,’ she says, half laughing in surprise and confusion.

But he’s already closed the door, too hard, behind him.

And the mug shot labeled ‘Curtis Harper 13 CHGO PD IR 136230 16 October 1954’ stays where it is, buried in a box that has been set aside.