The Shining Girls

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 fucking 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 fucking 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.’

Harper
28 December 1931

Chicago Star

GLOW GIRL CAUGHT IN DEATH’S DANCE

By Edwin Swanson

CHICAGO, IL. – At this writing, the police are scouring the city for the murderer of Miss Jeanette Klara, also known as the Glow Girl. The little French dancer gained a level of notoriety in the city for cavorting unclad behind feathered fans, diaphanous veils, over-sized balloons and other trifles. She was found in the early hours of Sunday morning, gruesomely dispatched in an alleyway at the back of Kansas Joe’s, one of several specialty theaters catering to patrons of dubious moral tastes.

Her untimely death might nonetheless be a mercy, compared to the inevitable alternative of a slow and painful one. Miss Klara was under observation by doctors who suspected that she was a victim of radium poisoning from the powder that lit her up like a firefly, anointed before every feature performance.

‘I am tired of hearing about zee radium girls,’ she said in an interview with the press conducted from her hospital bed last week, cheerfully dismissing the story she’s been regaled with scores of times, of the young women who were poisoned by radioactive substances while painting luminous undark watch dials in a New Jersey factory. Five young women who were destroyed by the irradiation infecting first their blood and then their bones sued US Radium for $1,250,000. They were paid out a settlement of $10,000 each and a $600 yearly pension. But they died, one by one, and there is no record to show that any of them considered that she was well paid for dying.

‘Razz-ber-eeees,’ sniffed Miss Klara, tapping her pearly whites with one red nail. ‘Do my teeth look like zey are falling out to you? I am not dyeeing. I am not even seeck.’

She did cop to getting ‘leetle bleesters’ that would come up on her arms and legs, and told her maid to hurry with her bath after every show, because of the sensation that her skin was ‘on fire’.

But she did not want to talk about ‘such theengs’ when I visited her in her private ward filled with bouquets of winter blooms, apparently from admirers. She’d paid for the best medical care (and, rumors in the ward persisted, some of the bouquets too) with her earnings from shimmying on stage.

Instead she showed me a pair of gossamer butterfly wings she had sewn with sequins and painted with radium as part of a new costume and a new routine she was working on.

To understand her, you must know her species. The ambition of every performer is to originate a specialty, something that is impregnable against the legions of imitators, or at least, that will be deferred to you as being the first of its kind. For Miss Klara, becoming the Glow Girl was a way of rising above the competitive mediocrity that confounds even the most lithe and harmonized of dancers. ‘And now I will be zee Glow Butterfly,’ she said.

She bemoaned the lack of a boyfriend. ‘Zey hear zees stories about ze paint and they theenk I will poison them. You tell zem, please, in your newspaper zat I am only intox-zicating, not poisonous.’

Despite being warned by doctors that the radiation had penetrated her blood and her bones and that she might even lose a leg, the petite provocateur who once performed at Folies Bergère in Paris and (somewhat more clothed) at the Windmill in London before coming to take America by storm, said she would ‘keep danceeng until the day I die’.

Her words proved miserably prophetic. The Glow Girl capered her last on Saturday night at Kansas Joe’s, returning for one encore. The last anyone saw of the unfortunate girl was when she blew her traditional farewell kiss to Ben Staples, the club’s bouncer, who guarded the back door against overly enthusiastic fans.

Her body was found in the early hours of Sunday morning by a machinist, Tammy Hirst, on her way home after the night shift, who said she was attracted by a strange glow in the alleyway. On seeing the mutilated corpse of the little dancer, still wearing her paint under her coat, Miss Hirst fled to the nearest police precinct, where she tearfully reported the body’s location.

There were plenty of witnesses who saw him at the bar that night. But Harper is not surprised at the fickleness of people. They were largely high society folk slumming it for the night. They had a bored off-duty cop with them, earning a little on the side to play minder, show them the sights, give them a taste of sin and debauchery in the Black and Tan belt. Funny how that didn’t make the papers.

It was easy for him to be unobtrusive in that crowd, but he left the crutch outside. He’d found it was a good prop. People’s eyes slid away from it. They underestimated him. But inside the bar, it would have been a detail to hang your memory on.

He stood at the back, nursing what passed for gin under the Volstead Act, served in a porcelain teacup so the bar could claim innocence in a raid.

The rich folk clustered around the stage, thrilled to be rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi, as long as they didn’t rub too close, or not without express permission. That’s what the cop was for. They were whooping and hollering for the show to start already and only got more aggressive when, instead of Miss Jeanette Klara – Radiant Wonder Of The Night, Brightest Star In The Firmament, Luminous Mistress Of Delight, This Week Only, a small Chinese girl in modest embroidered silk pajamas stepped out from the wings and sat down, cross-legged on the edge of the stage, behind a wood and wire instrument. But when the lights dimmed, even the most drunk and boisterous of the fancy folk hushed up in anticipation.

The girl started plucking the strings of the instrument, creating a twanging oriental melody, sinister in its strangeness. A shadow slipped out among the coils of white fabric artfully arranged on the stage, dressed top-to-toe in black like an Arab. Her eyes glinted once briefly, catching the light from outside as a late arrival was grudgingly allowed entry by the thickset doorman. Cool and feral as an animal’s eyes caught in the headlights, Harper thought, like when he and Everett used to drive to Yankton before dawn to pick up farm supplies in the Red Baby.

Half the audience didn’t even realize anyone was there, until, cued by some undetectable shift in the music, the Glow Girl slid off one long glove, revealing an incandescent disembodied arm. The onlookers gasped and one woman near the front screamed in shrill delight, startling the cop, who craned his neck to see if there had been any impropriety.

The arm unfurled, the hand at the end twisting and turning in a sensual dance all its own. It teased its way around the black sack, exposing, briefly, a girlish shoulder, a curve of belly, a flash of painted lips, firefly bright. Then it moved to tug off the other glove and throw it into the crowd. Now there were two glowing arms, exposed from the elbow down, sensually contorting, beckoning the audience: Come closer. They obeyed, like children, clustering around the stage, jostling for the best view and tossing the glove up into the air, passing it hand-to-hand, like a party favor. It landed near Harper’s feet – a wrinkled thing, with radium paint streaks showing like innards.

‘Hey, now, no souvenirs,’ the huge doorman said, snatching it out of his hands. ‘Give it here. That’s Miss Klara’s property.’

On stage, the hands crept up to the veiled hood and unclasped it, letting loose a tumble of curls and revealing a sharp little face with a bow mouth and giant blue eyes under fluttering lashes, tipped with paint so they glowed too. A pretty decapitated head floating eerily above the stage.

Miss Klara rolled her hips, twisting her arms above her head, waiting for the suspense of a dip in the melody and the sharp clang of the cymbals she held between her fingers before she removed another piece of clothing, like a butterfly shrugging out of the folds of a black cocoon. But the movement reminded him more of a snake wriggling out of its skin.

She wore dainty wings underneath, and a costume beaded with insect-like segments. She fluttered her fingers and winked her big eyes, dropping into a contorted pose among the coils of fabric like a dying moth. When she re-emerged, she had slipped her arms into sleeves in the gauze and was swirling it around her. Above the bar, a projector flickered to life, casting the blurry silhouettes of butterflies on the gauzy cloth. Jeanette transformed into a swooping, diving creature among a whirlwind of illusory insects. It made him think of plague and infestation. He fingered the folding knife in his pocket.

‘Zank you! Zank you!’ she said at the end of it, in her little girl voice, standing on stage wearing only the paint and a pair of high heels, her arms crossed over her breasts, as if they hadn’t already seen all there was to see. She blew the audience a grateful kiss, in the process revealing her pink nipples to roaring approval. She widened her eyes and gave a coquettish giggle. She quickly covered up again, playing at modesty, and skipped off stage, kicking up her heels. She returned a moment later and wheeled round the stage, her arms held up high and wide in triumph, chin raised, eyes glittering, demanding that they look at her, take their fill.

All it cost him was a penny’s worth of caramels, the box slightly battered from being under his coat all night. The doorman was distracted, dealing with a society lady who was vomiting copiously on the front steps, while her husband and his friends jeered.

He was waiting for her when she emerged from the back door of the club, dragging her suitcase of props. She was hunched against the cold in a thick coat buttoned up over the spangled costume, her face streaked with sweat through the glow paint which she had only made a cursory attempt to wipe off. The light of it cast her features into sharp relief, hollowing out her cheekbones. She looked fraught and exhausted, with none of the verve she’d had on stage, and for a moment Harper doubted himself. But then she saw the treat he’d brought her and a brittle hungriness lit her up. She’d never been more naked, Harper thought.

‘For me?’ she said, so charmed that she forgot the French accent. She recovered quickly, glossing over the broad Boston vowels. ‘Iz zat not so sweet? Did you zee ze show? Did you like eet?’

‘It wasn’t to my taste,’ he replied, just to see the disappointment flicker before the pain and surprise took over.

It was no great thing to break her. And if she screamed – he wasn’t sure because the world had narrowed to this, like looking through the lens of a peepshow – no one came running to see.

Afterwards, when he bent to wipe his knife on her coat, his hands shaking with excitement, he noticed that tiny blisters had already formed on the soft skin under her eyes and around her mouth, her wrists and thighs. Remember this, he told himself through the buzzing in his head. All the details. Everything.

He left the money, the pathetic ream of her takings, all in one- and two-dollar bills, but he took the butterfly wings, wrapped in a chemise, before limping away to retrieve his crutch where he had stashed it behind the trash cans.

Back at the House, he showered upstairs for a long time, washing his hands again and again until they were pink and raw, afraid of the contamination. He left the coat soaking in the bathtub, grateful that it was dark enough for the blood not to show.

Then he went to hang the wings on the bedpost. Where the wings were already hanging on the bedpost.

Signs and symbols. Like the flashing green man that gives you permission to cross the street.

No time but the present.

Kirby
2 March 1992

The axles of corruption are greased with donut glaze. Or that’s what it costs Kirby to get access to files she really doesn’t have any good excuse to be looking at.

She’s already exhausted the microfiche at the Chicago Library, ratcheting the machine’s whirring shutter through twenty years’ worth of newspapers, all the spools individually boxed and cataloged in drawers.

But the Sun-Times archive library goes back deeper and is staffed by people with lateral skills for finding information that borders on the arcane. Marissa, with her cat’s-eye glasses and swishy skirts and secret fondness for the Grateful Dead, Donna, who avoids eye contact at all cost, and Anwar Chetty, also known as Chet, who has stringy dark hair flopping over his face, a silver bird’s-skull ring that covers half his hand, a wardrobe built on shades of black and a comic book always close at hand.

They’re all misfits, but she gets on best with Chet, because he is so utterly unsuited to his aspirations. He is short and slightly tubby and his Indian complexion is never going to be the fishbelly white of his chosen pop-culture tribe. She can’t help wondering how tough the gay goth scene must be.

‘This isn’t sports.’ Chet points out the obvious, lolling with both elbows on the counter.

‘Yeah, but donuts …’ Kirby says, flipping the box and turning it to face him. ‘And Dan said I could.’

‘Whatever,’ he says, picking one out. ‘I’m doing it for the challenge. Don’t tell Marissa I took the chocolate.’

He goes into the back and returns a few minutes later with clippings in brown envelopes. ‘As requested. All of Dan’s stories. The every-single-femicide-that-involved-a-stabbing-in-the-last-thirty-years is gonna take me a little longer.’

‘I’ll wait,’ Kirby says.

‘As in it’s going to take me a few days. It’s a big ask. But I pulled the most obvious stuff. Here.’

‘Thanks, Chet.’ She shoves the donut box towards him and he helps himself to another. Due tribute. She takes the envelopes and disappears into one of the meeting-rooms. There’s nothing scheduled on the whiteboard by the door, so she should have some privacy to go through her haul. And she does for half an hour, until Harrison walks in and finds her perched cross-legged in the middle of the desk, the clippings spread out around her in all directions.

‘Hey there,’ the editor says, unfazed. ‘Feet off the table, intern. Hate to break it to you, but your man Dan’s not in today.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘He asked me to come in and look something up for him.’

‘He’s got you doing actual research? That’s not what interns are for.’

‘I thought I could scrape the mold off of these files and use it in the coffee machine. Can’t taste worse than the stuff they have in the cafeteria.’

‘Welcome to the glamorous world of print journalism. So what’s the old blowhard got you digging up?’ He glances over the files and envelopes spiraling around her. ‘Denny’s Waitress Found Dead’, ‘Girl Witnesses Mother’s Stabbing’, ‘Gang Link to Co-Ed Killing’, ‘Grisly Find in Harbor’ …

‘Little morbid, don’t you think?’ He frowns. ‘Not exactly your beat. Unless they’re playing baseball very differently to how I remember.’

Kirby doesn’t flinch. ‘It’s linked to a piece on how sport is a useful outlet for youths in the projects who might otherwise turn to drugs and gangsterism.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Harrison says. ‘And some of Dan’s old stuff too, I see.’ He taps the story on ‘Cop Shooting Cover-up’.

That does make her squirm a little. Dan probably wasn’t counting on her digging up the details on the story of how he made his name mud with the cops. Turns out the police don’t like it when you report on one of their own who accidentally discharges his weapon into a hooker’s face while coked up to the eyeballs. Chet said the officer got early retirement. Dan got his tires slashed every time he parked at the precinct. Kirby is happy to discover she’s not the only one with the ability to alienate the whole of the Chicago PD.

‘It wasn’t this that finished him, you know.’ Harrison sits down on the table next to her, his previous injunction forgotten. ‘Or even the torture story.’

‘Chet didn’t give me anything on that.’

‘That’s because he never filed it. Got three months into investigating it in 1988. Heavy stuff. Murder suspects making pitch-perfect confessions, only they’re coming out of this one particular Violent Crimes interrogation room with electric-shock burns on their genitals. Reportedly. Which, by the way, is the most important word in a journalist’s vocabulary.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

‘There’s a long tradition of roughing up suspects a little. The cops are under pressure to get results. And they’re scumbags anyway, is the attitude. Must be guilty of something. It seems like the Department is going to turn a blind eye. But Dan keeps at it, trying to get more than “reportedly”. And hey, what do you know? He’s making inroads, got a good cop willing to talk about it, on the record and everything. And then his phone starts ringing late at night. First it’s silence. Which most people would understand. But Dan’s stubborn. He needs to be told to back off. When that doesn’t work, they move to death threats. Not him, though, his wife.’

‘I didn’t know he was married.’

‘Well, he’s not any more. It had nothing to do with the phone calls. Reportedly. Dan doesn’t want to let it go, but it’s not only him they’ve been threatening. One of the suspects who says he was burned and beaten changes his mind. He was high, he says now. Dan’s cop buddy doesn’t just have a wife, he’s got kids too and he can’t handle the thought of something happening to them. All the doors are slamming in Dan’s face and we can’t run a story without credible sources. He doesn’t want to drop it, but there’s no other choice. Then his wife leaves him anyway and he has that heart thing. Stress. Disappointment. I tried to reassign him after he came out of hospital, but he wanted to stay on the corpse count. Funnily, enough, I think you were the last straw.’

‘He shouldn’t have given up,’ Kirby says, and the ferocity in her voice surprises both of them.

‘He didn’t give up. He got burned out. Justice is high-concept. It’s a good theory, but the real world’s all practicality. When you see that every day …’ He shrugs.

‘Telling stories out of class again, Harrison?’ Victoria, the pictures editor, is leaning against the doorframe, arms folded across her chest. She’s wearing her usual uniform of a button-up men’s shirt and jeans with heels, a little bit shlumfy, a little bit fuck-you.

The editor hunches guiltily. ‘You know me, Vicky.’

‘Boring people to tears with your long stories and deep insights? Oh yes.’ But the glint in her eye says something else and Kirby suddenly realizes that the blinds are closed in here for a reason.

‘We were done here, anyway, right, intern?’

‘Yeah,’ Kirby says. ‘I’ll get out of your way. Let me just pack up this stuff.’ She starts shuffling the files together. ‘Sorry,’ she mutters, which is probably the worst thing she could say because it acknowledges that there is something to be sorry about.

Victoria frowns. ‘It’s all right, I have a mountain of layouts to check anyway. We can reschedule for later.’ She makes a smooth but swift exit. They both watch her go.

Harrison sniffs. ‘You know you should really pitch me before you go to all this trouble researching a story.’

‘Okay. So, can this be my pitch?’

‘Keep it on ice. When you’ve got a little more experience under your belt? Then we can talk. In the meantime, you know what the other most important word in journalism is? Discretion. Meaning, don’t tell Dan I said anything.’

Or mention that you’re screwing the pictures editor, she thinks.

‘Gotta run. Keep it up, worker bee.’ He skips out, no doubt hoping to catch up to Victoria.

‘Sure thing,’ Kirby says under her breath as she slides several files into her backpack.