The Shining Girls

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.

‘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.