The Shining Girls

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-singlefemicide-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.