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.
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.
Kirby
11 AUGUST 1992
She is sitting in the waiting room of Delgado, Richmond & Associates, a firm which only sounds impressive, flipping through a three-yearold Time magazine that screams ‘Death By Gun’ on the cover. She felt compelled to pick it up given that her other choices are ‘The New USSR’ or ‘Arsenio Hall’, even though her field of interest is actually ‘death by knife’ and firearms are not much use to her.
The magazines are not the only things out of date. The leather couch has seen better decades. The plastic rubber tree has a fine coating of dust on its leaves and more than one cigarette has been stubbed out in its base. Even the receptionist’s hairstyle is unfashionably eighties. Kirby wishes she had dressed up a bit more for the occasion. She is pushing the limit even by slovenly newsroom standards with a Fugazi T-shirt under a checked shirt and a wool-lined brown leather bomber jacket that she picked up for cheap down on Maxwell Street.
The lawyer, Elaine Richmond, comes to collect her personally, a soft-spoken middle-aged woman in black pants and a blazer, with sharp eyes and a bobbed weave. ‘Sun-Times?’ she smiles and pumps Kirby’s hand with too much enthusiasm, like a lonely maiden aunt in an old folks’ home glomming on to other people’s visitors. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’
Kirby follows her down the passage into a boardroom cramped with cardboard boxes nudging out the legal books on the shelves and making incursions across the floorspace. She thunks down an assortment of pink and blue folders stuffed with paperwork, but doesn’t actually open them.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘you’re a little late to the party, you know.’
‘Uh?’ Kirby manages.
‘Where were you a year ago when Jamel tried to kill himself? We sure could have done with a little press back then.’ She laughs ruefully.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kirby says, wondering if she’s in the wrong law firm altogether.
?
??Tell that to his family.’
‘I’m just an intern, I thought this would make a good story on, uh,’ she ad-libs, ‘miscarriages of justice and the terrible after-effects? Human interest stuff. But actually I’m a little bit out of the loop with the latest developments.’
‘There aren’t any. As far as the district attorney is concerned, that’s a wrap! But see here. Do these boys look like the murdering type to you?’ She flips open the file and spreads out the pages to show her the mug shots of four young men staring sulkily into the lens with flat eyes. It’s amazing, Kirby thinks, how easily ‘teen apathy’ can translate into ‘stone-cold killer’.
‘Marcus Davies, fifteen at the time they were arrested. Deshawn Ingram, nineteen. Eddie Pierce, twenty-two and Jamel Pelletier, seventeen years old. Accused of the murder of Julia Madrigal. Found guilty on 30 June 1987. Sentenced to death row, apart from Marcus, who went down to juvenile detention. Jamel attempted suicide on…’ she peers at the date, ‘September 8 last year, on hearing that the latest appeal had been overturned. He was a volatile kid anyway, but it just crushed the soul of him. Did it straight after we got back from court. He twisted his pants into a noose and tried to hang himself in his cell.’
‘I didn’t know about that.’
‘It got some press. Usually buried on page three, if we were lucky. A lot of the papers didn’t report it at all. I think most people believe they’re guilty as the devil’s own.’
‘But you don’t.’
‘My clients were not very nice young men.’ Elaine shrugs. ‘They sold drugs. They broke into cars. Deshawn had an assault rap for beating up his drunk father when he was thirteen years old. Eddie’s had several charges dropped against him, from rape to breaking and entering. They were joyriding in a stolen car in Wilmette, which makes them stupid because a bunch of black boys in a nice ride in the lily-white burbs draws the wrong kind of attention. But they didn’t kill that girl.’
Kirby feels a shot of ice go down her spine hearing her say it. ‘That’s what I think too.’
‘It was a high-pressure case. Sweet white college girl with top marks is horribly murdered. It becomes a community issue. The whole ward gets up in arms. Parents are upset, talking about campus security, getting blue-light phones installed or pulling their daughters out of school altogether.’
‘Any ideas on who did do it?’
‘Not Satanists. The police were ringing on the crazy-town doorbell with that one. Took them three weeks to stop chasing that wild goose, though.’
‘A serial killer?’
‘Sure. We couldn’t pull anything to corroborate the theory in court. You want to tell me what you’re thinking? If you have a lead on something that could help these boys, you need to tell me right now.’
Kirby squirms, not quite ready to lay it all out. ‘I thought you said they weren’t good people.’
‘I’d say that about eighty per cent of the clients I represent. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do right by them.’
‘Can you put me in touch with them?’
‘If they want to talk with you. I might advise them not to. It depends what you’re going to do with it.’
‘I don’t know yet.’
Harper
24 MARCH 1989
He is still bruised from the beating by the zealous detectives when he goes back to 1989 to buy a full set of papers from a newsagent to cheer himself up. He sits in the window of the Greek diner on 53rd Street. It’s cheap and bustling, serving up food from the counter, with a line that sometimes snakes round the corner. As close to a routine as he comes.
He makes a point of making eye contact with the chef, a man with a thick mustache that varies between solid black and shot through with gray, depending on whether he is the son or the father or the granddad this go-around. If the man ever recognizes him, he makes no show of it.
The murder has been pushed out by a ship running aground and pouring oil into a bay somewhere in remote Alaska. Exxon Valdez, the name of the tanker is in huge capitals on every front page. He eventually finds two columns in the metro section. ‘Brutal attack’, it reads. ‘Saved by her dog.’ ‘Little hope of survival’ says one. ‘Not expected to live out the week.’
The words are not right. He reads them again, willing them to jitter and shift like the ones on his wall to spell out the truth. Dead. Murdered. Gone.
He’s become adept at navigating wonders. The phone directory, for example. He looks up the hospital where she is either in intensive care or the morgue, depending on which paper you read, and calls from the payphone at the back of the diner, near the restrooms. But the doctors are occupied and the woman he speaks to is ‘unable to give out personal information about a patient, sir’.
He smarts for hours, until he realizes that he has no choice. He has to go see for himself. And finish it if need be.
He buys flowers at the gift shop downstairs, and, because he still feels empty-handed (it burns him that he does not have his knife), a purple teddy bear with a balloon that says ‘Get Well Beary Soon!’
‘For a little one?’ asks the shop assistant, a big warm woman with an air of permanent sadness. ‘They always like the toys.’
‘It’s for the girl who was murdered.’ He corrects himself. ‘Attacked.’
‘Oh, that was so awful. Just terrible. There have been a lot of people sending her flowers. Total strangers. It’s the dog. It was so brave. Such an amazing story. I’ve been praying for her.’
‘How is she doing, do you know?’
The woman tightens her lips and shakes her head.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ says the nurse at the front desk. ‘Visiting hours are over. And the family has requested that no one should disturb them.’
‘I’m a relative,’ Harper says. ‘Her uncle. Her mother’s brother. I came as soon as I could.’
There is a stripe of sun across the floor like yellow paint, a woman’s shadow across it as she stares out over the parking lot. There are flowers everywhere, like another hospital room from another time, Harper remembers. But the bed is empty.
‘Excuse me,’ he says and the woman at the window looks over her shoulder, guilty, fanning the cigarette smoke out. He recognizes the resemblance to her daughter, the jut of her chin, the wide eyes, even if her hair is dark and smooth, held back by an orange scarf. She’s wearing dark jeans and a chocolate brown turtleneck, with a necklace made of mismatched buttons that click together as she fiddles with them. Her eyes are glittering from crying. She exhales a puff of smoke and waves, irritated. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘I’m looking for Kirby Mazrachi,’ Harper says, holding up the flowers and the bear. ‘I was told she was here.’
‘Another one?’ She gives a bitter laugh. ‘What bullshit story did you spin them to get in? Fucking useless nurses.’ She crushes the cigarette against the windowsill, harder than necessary.
‘I wanted to see if she was all right.’
‘Well, she’s not.’
He waits, while she glares at him. ‘Do I have the wrong room? Is she somewhere else?’
She flies across the room, furious, and jabs him in the chest with her finger. ‘You have the wrong everything. Fuck you, mister!’
He falls back under her wrath, holding up his offerings in innocent protest. His heel clips against one of the buckets of flowers. Water sloshes onto the floor. ‘You’re upset.’
‘Of course I’m upset!’ Kirby’s mother screams. ‘She’s dead. All right? So just fucking leave us alone. There’s no story here, you vulture. She’s dead. Will that make you happy?’
‘I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am.’ This is a lie. He’s overwhelmed with relief.
‘And tell the others too. Especially that Dan prick who can’t be bothered to call me back. Tell them to fuck right off.’
Alice
4 JULY 1940
‘Will you sit your toches down?’ Luella says through the hairpin clenched between her teeth. But Alice is too excited to keep still, prancing
up from her seat at the mirror every two minutes to peek through the caravan door at the rubes pouring into the fairground, grinning and happy, already arming themselves with popcorn and cheap beer in paper cups.
Crowds gather in pockets of interest; at the hoop toss and the tractor show or to gawp at the rooster who plays tic-tac-toe. (Alice lost two out of three games to that chicken this morning, but she has it figured now, just you wait.)
The women veer towards the pitchmen reciting the merits of domestic wares that will ‘transform your kitchen and your life’. Rich men in stetson hats and expensive boots that have never set heel on a range amble over towards the auction to bid on steers. A young mother dangles a baby over the fence to see the enormous prize sow, Black Rosie, with a white snub nose and a low-hanging spotted belly and nipples like pinky fingers.
A pair of teenagers, a girl and a boy, are standing admiring the butter cow, which is supposed to have taken three days to carve. It is already suffering in the sun, and Alice can detect a whiff of rancid dairy among the tumult of hay bales and sawdust and tractor smoke and cotton candy and sweat and animal dung.
The boy makes a joke about the butter cow, something everyone else would have said already, Alice imagines, about the number of flapjacks you could eat with that, and the girl giggles and responds with something equally clichéd, maybe that he’s just trying to butter her up. And he takes her words as his cue to dart forward to kiss her, and she pushes his face away with one hand, teasing, only to reconsider and dip back to peck him on the lips. Then she slips away, towards the Ferris wheel, laughing and looking back for him. And it’s so lovely, Alice could just die.
Luella lowers the brush and tuts, irritated: ‘You want to do your own damn hair?’
‘Sorry, sorry!’ Alice says, and flings herself back into the chair so that Luella can resume the unenviable task of trying to iron and pin her mousy blonde hair, which is too short and too unruly to do what it is told. ‘Very modern,’ is what Joey said at her audition.