The Shining Girls

Harper ^{16 OCTOBER 1954}

He goes back too soon is what lands him in trouble. The day after Willie Rose. Of course it doesn’t feel like that for him. For Harper, it has been weeks.

He’s killed twice since: Bartek in the hall (a joyless obligation) and the Jew girl with the crazy hair. But he is feeling unsettled. He had hoped when he lured her into the bird sanctuary that she would have the pony he gave her as a child, to complete the circle. The way killing Bartek and returning the coat to the woman in the Hooverville completed a circle. The toy is a loose thread apt to snag on something. He doesn’t like it.

He rubs at his bandaged arm where the goddamn dog bit him. Like mistress, like mongrel. Another lesson. He was sloppy. He will have to go back to check that she’s dead. He will have to buy another knife.

There is something else jangling his nerves. He would swear there are trinkets missing from the House. A pair of candlesticks gone from above the fireplace. Spoons from the drawer.

Reassurance. That’s all he needs. Killing the architect was perfect. He wants to revisit it. An act of faith. He feels a flush of anticipation. He is confident no-one will recognize him. His jaw is all healed up and he’s grown a beard over the scars left by the wire. He leaves his crutch behind. It’s not enough.

Harper tips his hat at the black doorman of the Fisher Building and takes the stairs up to the third floor. He’s thrilled to see that they have not been able to get all the blood out of the glassy tiles outside the door of the architecture firm. It makes him achingly hard and he grips himself through his pants, stifling a little moan of pleasure. He leans against the wall, pulling his coat around him to obscure the unmistakable jerky movements of his hand, remembering what she was wearing, how red her lipstick was. Brighter than blood.

The door of Crake & Mendelson crashes open, and a bear of a man with thinning hair and red eyes confronts him. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘Excuse me,’ Harper covers, reading one of the names off the doors opposite. ‘I’m looking for the Chicago Dentistry Society.’

But the doorman has followed him upstairs and is pointing his finger at him. ‘That’s the one! That’s the bastard! I saw him leaving the building covered in Miss Rose’s blood!’

Harper is interrogated for seven hours at the police station by a rangy flyweight of a cop, who punches out of his class, and a rotund detective with a bald patch, who sits and smokes. They alternate between talking and hitting. It does not help that he has no appointment to see the Chicago Dentistry Society and that the Stevens Hotel, where he claims to be a registered guest, has not been called that for years.

‘I’m from out of town, fellas,’ he tries, smiling, before a fist slams into the side of his head, making his ears ring and his teeth ache, threatening to pop his jaw out all over again. ‘I told you. I’m a traveling salesman.’ Another punch, this time below his sternum, driving the breath out of him. ‘Dental hygiene products.’ The next blow knocks him to the floor. ‘I left my sample case on the El. How about it, fellas? If you would let me file a lost baggage report—’ The paunchy balding officer kicks him in the kidney, a glancing blow. He should leave the violence to his more qualified friend, Harper thinks, still grinning.

‘Is this amusing to you? What’s so funny, shitbird?’ The thin cop leans down and exhales his cigarette in Harper’s face. How does he explain that he knows this is just something he has to endure? He knows he will make it back to the House because there are still girls’ names on the wall, their destinies unfulfilled. But he has made a mistake and this is his punishment for it.

‘Only that you got the wrong guy,’ he huffs through his teeth.

They take his fingerprints. They make him stand against the wall, holding a number for a mug shot. ‘Don’t you fucking smile, or I will wipe it right off your face. A girl is dead, and we know you’re the one who did it.’

But they don’t have enough evidence to keep him. The doorman is not the only witness who saw him come out the building, but they all swear that yesterday he was clean-shaven with a wire contraption round his mouth. And now he has two weeks’ worth of beard that they’ve yanked at with their fat policemen’s fingers to make sure it’s not glued on. Add to this that there is not a spot of blood on him and no sign of the murder weapon – which would normally be in his pocket – because it is buried in the neck of a dead dog thirty-five years from now.

He has made the dog bite part of his alibi. A mutt attacked him when he was running for the train to retrieve his sample case. Right at the time this poor lady architect was getting murdered.

There is no doubt, the detectives agree, that he is some kind of degenerate pervert, but they do not have enough to prove that he is a danger to society or a real suspect in the death of Miss W. Rose. They charge him with public indecency, file the mug-shot and set him loose.

‘Don’t go too far,’ the detective warns him.

‘I won’t leave the city,’ Harper promises, limping worse than usual from the beating. It’s a promise he keeps, more or less. But he never comes back to 1954, and he loses beard.

After that he only revisits the scenes years later or before, skipping decades, to jerk off over the place a girl died. He likes the juxtaposition of memory and change. It makes the experience sharper.

There are at least two other photographs of him in police records from the last sixty years, although he gives a different name each time. Once for public indecency in 1960, touching himself obscenely at what will become a construction site, another in 1983, when he broke a cab driver’s nose for refusing to drive him to Englewood.

The one pleasure he is not prepared to surrender is reading the newspapers, reliving the murders from other perspectives. That has to be done in the days immediately after the killing. Which is how he finds out about Kirby.