It’s what the self-defense instructor told them, after her psychiatrist insisted she go, to take back control. ‘All you’re aiming for is to give yourself enough time to get away. Get him down and run.’ Always a ‘him’, these perpetrators of terrible violence upon women. As if women were incapable of evil. The instructor demonstrated various methods. Gouge the eyes, hit him under his nose or in the throat with the palm of your hand, smash his instep with your heel, rip off his ear (cartilage tears easy) and throw it at his feet. Never go for the balls, it’s the one attack men anticipate and guard against. They practiced throws and strikes and how to get out of a hold. But everyone in the class treated her as if she would break. She was too real for them.
Downstairs she can hear a man struggling to get in the door. ‘Co za wkurwiajqce gówno!’ Polish maybe. He sounds drunk.
It’s not him, she thinks and she’s not sure if what she’s feeling is giddy relief or disappointment. She hears the man stumble inside, towards the kitchen, from the sound of ice clattering into a tumbler. He stomps into the parlor and fumbles around. A moment later music starts playing, scratchy and tender-sweet.
She hears the front door open again, furtive this time. But even though he’s drunk, the Pole has heard it too.
The wardrobe smells of mothballs and maybe the faintest trace of his sweat. The possibility makes her feel sick. She picks at the paint on the back of the door. All the old nervous habits come back. For a while, after it happened, she used to pick at the skin around her nails until they bled. But she’s bled enough for him. Enough for a lifetime. The door can take it though, especially if it’ll keep her from doing something rash like bursting out, because the darkness in here has a weight and a pressure like being in the deep end of the swimming pool.
‘Hej!’ the Pole shouts at the person entering the house. ‘Cos´ ty za jeden?’ He clomps through to the hallway. She can hear the pitches and falls of a conversation, but she can’t make out the words. Wheedling. Abrupt responses. Is it his voice? She can’t tell. There is a meaty smack. A cow being staple-gunned in the head. Squealing, high-pitched and undignified. There is another abattoir smack. And another. Kirby can’t contain it any more. A low animal sound wrenches through her, and she clutches her jaw with both hands pressed over her mouth.
Downstairs, the squealing cuts off suddenly. She strains to hear, biting her palm to keep from crying out. A muffled thump. A one-sided struggle, heaving and swearing. And then the sound of someone coming up the stairs, swinging a crutch that goes tok-tok on every step.
Harper
22 NOVEMBER 1931
The door swings open into the past and Harper hobbles through carrying a filthy tennis ball, but without his knife, practically into the arms of a bear of a man in the hallway. He is drunk and gripping a frozen turkey by one goose-pimpled pink leg. The last time Harper saw him, he was dead.
The man lurches towards him, bellowing and waving the bird around like a cudgel. ‘Hej! Cos´ ty za jeden? Co ty tu kurwa robisz? Mys´ lisz, z˙e moz˙esz tak sobie wejs´´c do mojego domu?’
‘Hello,’ Harper says, friendly, already knowing the outcome. ‘If I was a betting man, I would gamble on you being Mr Bartek.’
The man turns shifty and breaks into English. ‘Did Louis send you? I have explained this. There is no cheating, my friend! I am an engineer. Luck has mechanics just like anything else. You can calculate it. Even horses and faro games.’
‘I believe it.’
‘I can help you, if you like. Place a bet. My method is foolproof, my friend. Guaranteed.’ He looks hopefully at Harper. ‘You are a drinking man? Have a drink with me! I have whiskey. And champagne! And I was going to cook this turkey. There is more than enough for two. We can be congenial together. No one needs to get hurt. Am I right?’
‘I’m afraid not. Take off your coat, please.’
The man considers this. He realizes that Harper is wearing the same coat. Or a future variation of it. His bluster sags and puckers like a cow’s stomach when you punch a knife through it. ‘You are not from Louis Cowen, are you?’
‘No.’ He recognizes the gangster’s name even if he’s never had any truck with him. ‘But I am grateful. For all of this.’ Harper gestures at the hallway with his crutch and as Bartek involuntarily follows the motion, he brings it singing down onto the back of his neck. The Polack drops, squealing, and Harper leans against the wall for balance and smashes the crutch down on his head. Again and again. With practiced ease.
It takes him a long time to tug off the coat. Harper wipes his face with the back of his hand and it comes away bloody. He will need to take a shower before he goes to do what is required, setting the gears in motion for something that has already happened.
Harper
20 NOVEMBER 1931
It’s the first time he has been back to the Hooverville since he left, returning before he left. It is diminished by his experience. The people are meaner and lower. Gray skin sacks swung around by a numbed puppeteer.
He has to remind himself that no one is looking for him. Not yet. But he avoids his old haunts and takes a different route through the park, clinging to the water’s edge. He finds the woman’s shack easily. She is taking down the washing outside, her blind fingers feeling down the wire to pluck away the stained petticoat, the blanket infested with lice that resist being washed away in cold water. She deftly folds each garment and hands it to the boy standing beside her.
‘Mami. Someone. Someone is here.’
The woman turns her face towards him, full of trepidation. He guesses she has always been blind, oblivious to the need to arrange the muscles in guile. It makes the task at hand all the more tiresome. There is no game here. He has no interest in this dull woman who is already dead.
‘Begging your pardon, ma’am, for disturbing you this fine evening.’
‘I ain’t got no money,’ the woman says, ‘if you’ve come to rob me. You ain’t the first, you know.’
‘The opposite, ma’am. I have a favor to ask. No big thing, but I can pay you for it.’
‘How much?’
Harper laughs at the nakedness of her need. ‘Straight to haggling? You don’t even want to know what I want you to do.’
‘You’ll be wanting the same as the others. Don’t worry. I’ll send the boy to beg at the station. He won’t get in the way of your taste of cunny.’
He crushes the bills into her hand. She flinches. ‘A friend of mine will be passing by here in an hour or so. I need you to give him a message and this coat.’ He drapes it over her shoulders. ‘You need to wear it. That’s how he will know you. His name is Bartek. Will you remember that?’
‘Bartek,’ she repeats. ‘And what’s the message?’
‘That’ll be enough, I think. There’ll be a commotion. You’ll hear it. You only need to say his name. And don’t think of taking anything from the pockets. I know what’s in there, and I’ll come back to kill you.’
‘You needn’t say such things in front of the boy.’
‘He’ll be my witness,’ Harper says, pleased by the truth of it.
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 disa
ppears 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 – fuck!’
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.
The Shining Girls Page 16