‘So you’re the closest I can get.’ She shrugs. ‘Besides. You covered my murder.’
He is thrown, but only for a moment. ‘All right, kid, if you’re serious about covering crime, the first thing you gotta do is get the terminology right. You would have been an “attempted murder”. As in, not successful. Right?’
‘That’s not the way it feels.’
‘Qué cruz.’ He mimes pulling out his hair. Not that he has much left. ‘Remind me again which of Chicago’s very many homicides you’re supposed to be?’
‘Kirby Mazrachi,’ she replies, and it all comes back to him, even as she’s unwinding her scarf to reveal the raw ridge across her throat where the maniac cut her, nicking the carotid, but not severing it, if he recalls the ME’s report.
‘With the dog,’ he says. He’d interviewed the witness, a Cuban fisherman whose hands shook the whole way through the interview, although, Dan thought cynically, he pulled himself together by the time the TV news people got to him.
He described how he saw her stumble out of the woods with blood pulsing from her throat, a loop of gray-pink intestine protruding under the ripped remains of her T-shirt, carrying her dog in her arms. Everyone thought she was going to die for sure. Some of the papers even reported it that way.
‘Huh,’ he says, impressed. ‘So, you want to crack the case? Bring the killer to justice? You want a sneak peek at your files?’
‘No. I want to see the others.’
He leans back, his chair creaking precariously, very impressed. And not a little intrigued.
‘Tell you what, kiddo. You phone Jim Lefebvre for a quote about these rumors that they’re going to fly Bell from the Cubs line-up, and I’ll see what I can do about these others.’
Harper
28 December 1931
Chicago Star
GLOW GIRL CAUGHT IN DEATH’S DANCE
By Edwin Swanson
CHICAGO, IL. – At this writing, the police are scouring the city for the murderer of Miss Jeanette Klara, also known as the Glow Girl. The little French dancer gained a level of notoriety in the city for cavorting unclad behind feathered fans, diaphanous veils, over-sized balloons and other trifles. She was found in the early hours of Sunday morning, gruesomely dispatched in an alleyway at the back of Kansas Joe’s, one of several specialty theaters catering to patrons of dubious moral tastes.
Her untimely death might nonetheless be a mercy, compared to the inevitable alternative of a slow and painful one. Miss Klara was under observation by doctors who suspected that she was a victim of radium poisoning from the powder that lit her up like a firefly, anointed before every feature performance.
‘I am tired of hearing about zee radium girls,’ she said in an interview with the press conducted from her hospital bed last week, cheerfully dismissing the story she’s been regaled with scores of times, of the young women who were poisoned by radioactive substances while painting luminous undark watch dials in a New Jersey factory. Five young women who were destroyed by the irradiation infecting first their blood and then their bones sued US Radium for $1,250,000. They were paid out a settlement of $10,000 each and a $600 yearly pension. But they died, one by one, and there is no record to show that any of them considered that she was well paid for dying.
‘Razz-ber-eeees,’ sniffed Miss Klara, tapping her pearly whites with one red nail. ‘Do my teeth look like zey are falling out to you? I am not dyeeing. I am not even seeck.’
She did cop to getting ‘leetle bleesters’ that would come up on her arms and legs, and told her maid to hurry with her bath after every show, because of the sensation that her skin was ‘on fire’.
But she did not want to talk about ‘such theengs’ when I visited her in her private ward filled with bouquets of winter blooms, apparently from admirers. She’d paid for the best medical care (and, rumors in the ward persisted, some of the bouquets too) with her earnings from shimmying on stage.
Instead she showed me a pair of gossamer butterfly wings she had sewn with sequins and painted with radium as part of a new costume and a new routine she was working on.
To understand her, you must know her species. The ambition of every performer is to originate a specialty, something that is impregnable against the legions of imitators, or at least, that will be deferred to you as being the first of its kind. For Miss Klara, becoming the Glow Girl was a way of rising above the competitive mediocrity that confounds even the most lithe and harmonized of dancers. ‘And now I will be zee Glow Butterfly,’ she said.
She bemoaned the lack of a boyfriend. ‘Zey hear zees stories about ze paint and they theenk I will poison them. You tell zem, please, in your newspaper zat I am only intox-zicating, not poisonous.’
Despite being warned by doctors that the radiation had penetrated her blood and her bones and that she might even lose a leg, the petite provocateur who once performed at Folies Bergère in Paris and (somewhat more clothed) at the Windmill in London before coming to take America by storm, said she would ‘keep danceeng until the day I die’.
Her words proved miserably prophetic. The Glow Girl capered her last on Saturday night at Kansas Joe’s, returning for one encore. The last anyone saw of the unfortunate girl was when she blew her traditional farewell kiss to Ben Staples, the club’s bouncer, who guarded the back door against overly enthusiastic fans.
Her body was found in the early hours of Sunday morning by a machinist, Tammy Hirst, on her way home after the night shift, who said she was attracted by a strange glow in the alleyway. On seeing the mutilated corpse of the little dancer, still wearing her paint under her coat, Miss Hirst fled to the nearest police precinct, where she tearfully reported the body’s location.
There were plenty of witnesses who saw him at the bar that night. But Harper is not surprised at the fickleness of people. They were largely high society folk slumming it for the night. They had a bored off-duty cop with them, earning a little on the side to play minder, show them the sights, give them a taste of sin and debauchery in the Black and Tan belt. Funny how that didn’t make the papers.
It was easy for him to be unobtrusive in that crowd, but he left the crutch outside. He’d found it was a good prop. People’s eyes slid away from it. They underestimated him. But inside the bar, it would have been a detail to hang your memory on.
He stood at the back, nursing what passed for gin under the Volstead Act, served in a porcelain teacup so the bar could claim innocence in a raid.
The rich folk clustered around the stage, thrilled to be rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi, as long as they didn’t rub too close, or not without express permission. That’s what the cop was for. They were whooping and hollering for the show to start already and only got more aggressive when, instead of Miss Jeanette Klara – Radiant Wonder Of The Night, Brightest Star In The Firmament, Luminous Mistress Of Delight, This Week Only, a small Chinese girl in modest embroidered silk pajamas stepped out from the wings and sat down, cross-legged on the edge of the stage, behind a wood and wire instrument. But when the lights dimmed, even the most drunk and boisterous of the fancy folk hushed up in anticipation.
The girl started plucking the strings of the instrument, creating a twanging oriental melody, sinister in its strangeness. A shadow slipped out among the coils of white fabric artfully arranged on the stage, dressed top-to-toe in black like an Arab. Her eyes glinted once briefly, catching the light from outside as a late arrival was grudgingly allowed entry by the thickset doorman. Cool and feral as an animal’s eyes caught in the headlights, Harper