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She’s the one. One of the ones. His shining girls.
Kirby Mazrachi.
He’d been up and down the whole goddamn country, chasing after the work like a bitch in heat. Until he found the House.
Rachel lifts the pillow off her face and looks at her daughter
Bartek, he thinks, recalling the name the blind woman had said before he choked her.
The houses across the way change. The paint strips away, recolors itself, strips away again through snow and sun and trash tangled with leaves blowing down the street. Windows are broken, boarded over, spruced up with a vase of flowers that turn brown and fall away. The empty lot becomes overgrown, fills over with cement, grass grows through the cracks in wild tufts, rubbish congeals, the rubbish is removed, it comes back, along with aggressive snarls of writing on the walls in vicious colors.
There are names scrawled beside them. Jinsuk. Zora. Willy. Kirby. Margo. Julia. Catherine. Alice. Misha. Strange names of women he doesn’t know. Except that the names are written in Harper’s own handwriting.
Fred Tucker, Gracie’s older brother by a year and a half, trying to put his penis inside her. “It won’t fit,” he gasps, his thin chest heaving. “Well, try harder,” Kirby hisses.
Julia Madrigal. She was twenty-one. She was studying at Northwestern. Economics.
Moved by the experience, he takes Julia’s death as a sign that he has been wasting his life studying business science. He joins the anti-apartheid student movement, has sex with anti-apartheid girls. His tragic past clings to him like pheromones that women find impossible to resist. It even has a theme song: Janis Joplin’s “Get It While You Can.”
best friend lies awake at night feeling guilty because, even through her shock and grief, she has worked out that the statistical significance of Julia’s murder is that she is 88 percent less likely to be murdered herself.
And five years later, it will be Kirby’s turn.
There was a fluster of attention around the attack.
“And it’s not that much, really, for a private investigator.”
sure. Some of the papers even reported it that way.
the murderer of Miss Jeanette Klara, also known as the Glow Girl.
Then he went to hang the wings on the bedpost. Where the wings were already hanging on the bedpost.
But when he flips open the heavy metal lid, there is a corpse already in there. The face is swollen and purple from strangulation,
The doctor from Mercy Hospital. This should surprise him. But there are limits to his imagination. The man’s body is here because it’s supposed to be, and that is enough.
But his head is so full of her, Zora-Zora-Zora-Zora, that he makes a mistake and opens the House to find the goddamn corpse back in the hallway, the blood wet on the floorboards and the turkey still frozen. He stares at it, shocked. And then ducks back over the threshold, under the wooden X of the planks and pulls the door shut.
Second of January 1932.
bendito,
like BTK—who is still on the loose,
They’re usually white, male. Lack of empathy, which can manifest as antisocial behavior or extremely egotistical charm.
Zora Ellis Jordan
Not with four kids at home to feed and a husband who is never coming home from the war, his ship blown out of the water by a skulking U-boat.
They didn’t issue him with a medal, because he was black, but they did include a letter from the government expressing their deepest condolences and praising his valor for dying in the service of his country as ship’s electrician.
she dislocates his jaw and breaks three of her fingers, the knuckles crunching like popped corn on the stove.
“Historical in-jokes. I like it. They punched through an old coal tunnel by accident, right?” “Brought the whole river gushing in. If you believe that. But Mr. Brown here,” he indicates the dressed-to-the-nines old man, “has a different take on it and I was hoping you might be willing to interview him about it. If you have the time.”
The old man chews on his lip and gives a heavy sigh, then he leans forward across the desk and hisses: “Aliens.”
Fighting American: Don’t Laugh—They’re not funny! POISON IVAN and HOTSKY TROTSKI. A superhero dressed in the American flag and a golden boy sidekick prepare to take on the hideous weirdo pinko mutants creeping out of a tunnel below. On the cover of the other comic, a handsome secret agent wrestles a gun-wielding dame in a red dress while a Russki soldier with a big beard bleeds to death on the carpet. There’s a snowy landscape hanging above the fireplace with a streaked red sky and the silhouette of distinctive minarets visible through the window. Admiral Zacharias’ Secret Missions: Menace!
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ease with which she can smuggle a beautiful girl up the stairs.
She can see now how that might be seen as being pro-worker, pro-union. Pro-commie. She should have just shut up about it.
It’s the way Stewart keeps darting her little wounded looks. She’s made a dreadful mistake, she realizes. He’ll be the first to put her up against the wall. Because that’s what people do now.
know it was you.” “Huh?” “The comics. It’s stupid and it’s not fair.” To her fury, her eyes are welling up. She keeps them wide, refusing to blink. “Those things? They’ve been circling the office for days. Why you so wound up about it?”
“The school board is talking about putting us all on scrips. We gotta get paid in vouchers now instead of real money?”
He is drunk and gripping a frozen turkey by one goose-pimpled pink leg. The last time Harper saw him, he was dead.
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.
the Jew girl with the crazy hair.
The way killing Bartek and returning the coat to the woman in the Hooverville completed a circle.
“That’s the one! That’s the bastard! I saw him leaving the building covered in Miss Rose’s blood!”
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.
“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?”
Trembling, Alice peels off the dress, lets it slip to the floor, revealing her flat chest, the elaborate bondage of tape and elastic around her genitals. Joey’s eyebrows furrow. She has fought against this her whole life. Against Lucas Ziegenfeus, who lives inside her. Or she lives inside him, resenting his physical body, the despicable hateful thing dangling between her legs that she straps down but doesn’t have the courage to cut off.
My name is Nella Owusu, nee Jordan. My father and mother were both killed during World War Two, he abroad in the course of duty, she in Seneca, in a horrifying unsolved murder in the winter of 1943.
“artifacts” included a baseball card.
Several handguns were recovered from the apartment of Toneel Roberts, a known drug dealer, as well as $600 in expired currency dating back to 1950, originally called Silver Certificates.
He last saw him, Harper recalls, staring up sightlessly from a dumpster in
“Hang on, I convinced the woman in the front office to make a copy for me.” There is the sound of paper being dug out of a bag. “Here. Jackie Robinson. Brooklyn Dodgers.” “Impossible,” he says automatically. “That’s what it says.” She’s defensive. “And she died in 1943?”
“You probably don’t, and that’s too bad. The most famous one is a guy called Lou Proctor. He was a Cleveland telegraph operator who inserted his own name into the Indians’ box score in 1912.” “But he didn’t exist.” “As a real person, but not as a ballplayer. It was a hoax.
