Poison Girls Read online

  “Maybe you could give us a ride downtown?” Anna asked.

  “Maybe. Sometime.” Was she trying to rope me into one of their adventures? I closed the cardboard cover of my reporter’s notebook, slid it into my purse, and lit a cigarette. “Off the record—what counts as fun these days?”

  They looked at each other, their eyes seeking permission.

  “You’re not gonna write this down?” Libby asked.

  I shook my head and exhaled a long string of smoke, pretending I was one of the cool girls from my high school.

  “When my dad goes to work, we go out,” Libby said. Her voice was proud, yet confessional quiet. “We go downtown, see bands and stuff. You know…we meet people. We go to these parties in warehouses where people…dress up.”

  “One time we got this guy to take us to Six Flags. He paid for everything,” Anna bragged. “And last night we met up with these guys in the park—”

  Libby swatted her cousin. The two looked at me with strained smiles.

  One thing I’d learned as a reporter was that people wore their stories like skin. If you paid attention, you could tell which narratives mattered. There was a certain vibe, an energy that came through when people talked about their lives. While some stories dropped like stones in water, others formed huge ripples, stirring everything in their wake. Talking to Anna and Libby, I could sense a growing undertow.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to wind up like the girls in that house?” They followed my eyes to the coroner’s men carrying out the first black body bag.

  Libby pulled at her cousin’s shirt. “C’mon, Anna. Let’s go. We gotta go.”

  Anna jerked free of her cousin’s grasp and stood within inches of my face, sucking on her bottom lip as if she were debating whether to tell me something.

  “So you really want to know what girls are into, huh?” Her cheeks were flushed and a flicker in her eyes made me feel as if she were teasing me, as if she knew something about me I didn’t. “Maybe we can hang out sometime, give you a little show, if you’re not too scared.”

  Libby shook her head and protested, “No way! She’s too old.”

  I stepped toward Anna, my nose nearly touching her chin. “I’m game, girlfriend. Bring it on.”

  Libby grabbed Anna by the arm and pulled her. Anna walked sideways, looked back at me, and grinned, as if she realized the value of the secret she possessed. Then the two girls reached the corner and disappeared.

  Chapter Two

  June 13, 2008

  * * *

  POISON HEROIN HURTS PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

  HYDE PARK SENATOR VOWS TO FIGHT DRUGS

  Chicago Sentinel

  * * *

  Two hours later, I was still thinking of Anna. It was what she didn’t say that nagged at me. I wondered if it was all a ploy, whether she really knew anything about white girls doing heroin, whether she’d really follow through on her vague invitation. Most likely it was just talk. But something, call it street intuition, told me we’d meet again. Her kind—the clever, gaming sort—always showed up, often when I least expected it.

  I parked in the bowels of Michigan Avenue’s lower level, the cavernous highway that runs beneath the city’s downtown streets. I stepped around manhole covers that reeked of waste then climbed the stairs to the crowds above on the glittery Magnificent Mile. Pushing through the rotating doors, I emerged into the coolness of the Times’s stone lobby. Chiseled in the walls were pithy quotes from famous white men, with the exception of Flannery O’Connor. Hers, etched over an elevator, was my favorite: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

  When the elevator doors opened to the newsroom on the fourth floor—symbolizing the Fourth Estate—an air of expectation greeted me. A hum of anxiety hung over the sweep of cubicles where reporters wore headsets and looked like telemarketers, their eyes fixed on their computer terminals, their fingers tap-tap-tapping at plastic keyboards. Any moment one of us might be asked to write an obituary or race out to O’Hare to cover a plane crash. The unpredictability interspersed with the routine made us a little edgy, the rhythm of our daily lives beating to the metronome of a looming deadline.

  Lately a new kind of stress had infiltrated the newsroom, whispers of bankruptcy and more layoffs. The real estate under our feet was worth more than what we produced; all we had to do was look out our windows at Donald Trump’s shimmering turquoise skyscraper rising from the foundation of another newspaper that leased space in a hotel to save money. Meanwhile, the Times’s gothic tower, with its beady-eyed gargoyles and its façade embedded with stones collected by its reporters all over the world—the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid—resembled a medieval fortress, outdated and antiquated, a historic artifact amid the city’s burgeoning skyline of sleek blue metal and glass. That summer it was well-known in the newsroom that the Times’s publisher was considering an offer to turn our ornamental tower into luxury condos with an Olympic-size swimming pool amid its flying buttresses.

  The newsroom was relatively quiet that Friday afternoon. Many reporters had taken off early. Others were hurriedly filing stories so they could slip out for happy hour. As I walked down the cluttered aisles, only a few heads turned. Reporters rarely talked to one another, preferring instead to send emails.

  Passing the editor-in-chief’s glass office, I could hear Odis grilling some assistant editor. They both looked up as I walked by, the assistant’s eyes pleading me to interrupt. Odis’s gaze rose only to my breasts before he went back to questioning the junior editor. I knew well how it felt to be under his intense scrutiny, curt words firing off his tongue, his spit showering his victims with invectives.

  Across the room Amy Jarvis, the metro editor, yelled: “Delaney!”

  Amy’s looks had once turned heads. But her sagging backside and drooping double chin made her look like a melted wax version of her former self. That didn’t stop her from flirting as if she were still a perky young blonde. The paper tolerated Amy’s behavior in the same way it tolerated guys who made sexist jokes. If you could write or edit a great story, no one cared if you bathed or beat your wife. Amy’s advantage was that she was the only woman among the paper’s top white male editors; she provided the appearance of diversity.

  I cleared newspapers off a chair in her office and heard her door latch behind me.

  “I want to show you something,” she whispered in a conspiratorial tone. She flicked off the top of a silvery department store box, ruffled through its stiff tissue paper and raised a black lacy bodice with dangling garters. “This is what I bought over lunch. What do you think?” Her face beamed.

  I could feel my cheeks burning, and I had to swallow a tickle in my mouth. “Well…”

  “It’s okay to look, Delaney. It’s just underwear.” She held the lingerie to her chest and twisted from side to side, admiring her image reflected from a glass frame on the wall. “I try not to show it at work, but sometimes you can’t hide a Playboy body. Lingerie makes me feel so—powerful.” Her eyes danced with narcotic ecstasy.

  I looked down at the carpet and coughed. “Hey, I met a couple of girls today near the Chinatown homicides. I think they know something.”

  “Hmm…” Amy continued to prance before the makeshift mirror. “What do you think he’d do if I just showed up in his office wearing this under a raincoat?”

  “Your husband?”

  She gave me an annoyed look. Though it was widely rumored that Amy and Odis were having an affair, I preferred not to imagine the two together.

  “Amy…I think these girls could be into heroin.”

  Her face darkened. “So find out.”

  I got up to leave. Amy pulled on my arm.

  “Stay objective this time, Nat, okay? Don’t get attached. Remember: you’re a reporter, not a social worker.”

  We both knew what she was referring to—my failed attempts at intervening in the lives of people I’d met on the street. The latest was a homeless woman who claimed her identity had been stolen and she had lost her house in the process. I’d spent weeks trying to line her up with temporary housing, pleading with various nonprofits to give her a job, only to find out after my stories hit the paper that she was a schizophrenic who had multiple identities. There’d been a string of others, but none as public or as embarrassing. Odis called them “lapses in judgment.” Amy just said I had a girly heart.

  I smiled and patted Amy’s arm. Her black lace bodice lay crumpled in her lap.

  “Go for it.” Hearing Anna’s voice in my head, I parroted her mantra: “A girl’s gotta try everything. You only live once.”

  • • •

  At my desk, I buried my forehead into my palms, trying to think of a lead that would land my story on Page One. The smell of leatherwood piqued my nose, and I looked up into strange, black eyes. He was leaning over my cubicle, his face hovering near my own, his trendy narrow glasses magnifying his intensity. His ink black hair was swept back from his face, accentuating contrasting features: ecru skin, charcoal eyebrows, and a speckled goatee. He looked vaguely Italian, but his suspicious demeanor suggested something Eastern European, setting him apart in a newsroom of mostly pale Irish. Julian was the paper’s enigmatic business editor, known for his acerbic remarks. He had worked at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and reporters admired and feared him. He was not one to make small talk, and his dismissive nature hadn’t earned him friends among the editor ranks.

  “Busy?” He offered a strained smile.

  “You could say that. On deadline.” I banged at my keyboard.

  “I’ll make it quick. We got an anonymous tip back in business that one of the big Olympic donor’s kids was arrested a few days ago. Then the cops dropped the charges.”

  “Yeah? I’m not on the celebrity beat.”

  He ignored my sarcasm. “The cops searched his car and found prescription drugs and syringes.”

  I sat up straighter. “I’m listening.”

  “Think you could ask your cop buddies to slip you the arrest report?” He pumped his eyebrows.

  “Why are you asking me and not those guys?” I glanced at the row of senior crime reporters, yakking as they leaned back in their chairs, tossing a football back and forth, clearly not on deadline.

  Julian narrowed his eyes at the men. “You know why. You have the best police sources. Don’t know how you do it—”

  “Are you intimating that I sleep with my sources?”

  “That’s not what I meant. You’re…dogged. That’s all. Those guys,” he nodded toward my male counterparts, “might get to it next week, if at all.”

  I took out my reporter’s notebook and a pen. “Your Daddy Warbucks kid got a name?”

  Julian leaned away from my cubicle. “The story’s kind of sensitive.”

  “Forget it then. I’m not a fucking gofer.” I swiveled around to face my computer. It didn’t matter that his good looks made me jittery. I’d learned the hard way not to do grunt work for guys who grinned and paid me back in compliments.

  Julian cleared his throat, leaned over my terminal, and whispered near my ear. “It’s like this: we heard he’s a Kennan.” His lips twitched as he stifled a grin.

  While most people associated the political Kennan clan with Boston, a spur of the family had for decades owned and run the Merchandise Mart, the monolithic art deco building that took up two city blocks.

  “Be pretty ironic to have a Kennan peddling drugs, don’t you think?” His black-pea eyes widened at the suggestion of scandal.

  “If the arrest angle has legs, I want in.”

  “That’s why I’m talking to you.” He slapped his palm against the top of the cubicle, signaling the end of our conversation.

  As I watched Julian walk away, I wondered how it was that he got the tip and not me. A sharp whistle rose above the keyboard clacking and the hum of computers. I turned around to see Ben, a columnist who shared a cubicle wall with me, shaking his head.

  “He sure is a beauty,” he said, fluttering his eyes.

  “Ben, he has kids and lives in the suburbs. Not your type.”

  “Oh honey, I wasn’t talking about for me.” He clasped a hand on each side of his face in mock surprise. “I meant for you. A real looker, that one. From what I hear, he’s not attached.”

  Ben was an eccentric little man who’d started working at the paper when the newsroom was filled with white men in suits who wrote their stories on typewriters and smoked at their desks. From his photos, he’d once had a head of dark hair. Now he wore expensive fedoras to hide his wispy white comb over. I guessed Ben was in his sixties, but it was hard to tell with the unlined boyish face and high forehead reminiscent of Truman Capote. Ben agonized over his columns, his half-moon glasses riding low on his nose as he chewed on the end of a pen. He wrote everything longhand on yellow legal pads before scrupulously typing his columns at the computer with his index fingers.

  Ben had taken a liking to me when I arrived at the Times. Dazed and awestruck at our first meeting, I’d told him that I’d grown up reading his stories, studying them to understand the writing craft. He rarely fielded genuine compliments about his bons mots and greedily lapped up my praise. When a cubicle opened up next to his, Ben advised me to claim it. He’d been giving me advice, personal and professional, ever since.

  “He’s married,” I protested a little too quickly.

  “Not so. I heard the ex is an attorney. I think the term is amicable divorce. He’s one of those every-other weekend daddies. That leaves two weekends a month for someone very special.” He winked.

  “C’mon, Ben. You know I don’t have time for a boyfriend.”

  “Oh honey. You’re getting a little too mature to be dating men just for their aesthetics.” He licked his lips. “You need a real man. One who is going to provide you a future and sire you some children. You don’t want to end up having to work at my age in a dump like this. If it weren’t for my sick desire to get a paycheck, I’d be living the high life, eating tuna from a can and watching soap operas on a television with bunny ears. But you, you have your whole life ahead of you. You don’t have to spend it chasing thugs. Though I know you love those bad boys with their tattoos and their big biceps and their guns.”

  I tried to hold back a smile. Ben was a keen observer. More times than I could count, he’d correctly predicted a suspect’s character. He was like my own personal criminal profiler.

  “The only things I’m chasing are dead bodies and a phantom drug dealer.”

  Ben moved toward our shared partition, decorated with tchotchkes he’d scavenged from colleagues’ desks after they were unceremoniously escorted from the building. Marching across our ledge was a dinosaur, a black Corvette, a red caboose, the Michelin man, a Democratic donkey, a Star Wars storm trooper, and a family of trolls with bright purple synthetic hair. Ben liked to think that hanging on to these worthless knickknacks somehow preserved the memory of their former owners. He poked his nose between the purple-haired trolls and spoke in an eerie whisper, as if we were sharing ghost stories over a campfire.

  “Your killer is someone who has a love-hate relationship with rich girls. You watch. It’ll be some guy who never really fit in, someone with a grudge acting out some private rage. I think he’s targeting these girls.”

  • • •

  I spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone, cobbling together details: the Dead Angels were all on the honor roll; one was class president, another had her daddy’s gold Amex card in her wallet. Apparently, the killer wasn’t motivated by money.

  I dialed Detective Mobley’s pager. Michael Mobley—Mo, for short—was a homicide detective I had cultivated as a source, although he didn’t like that word. He preferred to see himself as a government censor trying to make sure I got my stories straight. Mo claimed he liked me because I “didn’t take shit” and my articles were “mostly okay”—a ringing endorsement from a third-generation cop and decorated Marine from the Iraq War.

  Mo and I usually met at Sullivan’s, a touristy downtown steakhouse with an upstairs cigar lounge. Mo had expensive tastes in cigars, and he liked to smoke on my tab. Occasionally he asked about the men in my life, but he never made a pass. Maybe he’d heard the rumor floating around the police station that I was a lesbian. Cops always assume tough women are gay.

  Mo’s cover story, in case we were ever caught together, was that we were lovers. Mo might get a few attaboys for sleeping with a reporter—but he’d definitely get fired for providing information to one. Institutional racism weighed in our favor too, since few would automatically link a white reporter with a black cop. We were careful, and no one suspected—or so we thought.

  The red light lit up on my phone. The number was blocked. I suspected it was Mo.

  “Yeah?” I answered.

  “National Inquirer, please.”

  “Sure, if you give me Internal Affairs. There’s this crooked cop…”

  “Ha, ha,” he trilled like a girl.

  “I need some advice.”

  “Don’t marry him.”

  Chapter Three

  June 13, 2008

  * * *

  DEAD ANGELS WERE CELEBRATING START OF SUMMER

  FRIENDS SAY GIRLS WERE NOT DRUG USERS

  Chicago Times

  * * *

  Sullivan’s was packed. The wait-list ran two pages long. I squeezed between women in slippery, low-cut dresses and slid behind men in suits, steeped in peppery cologne. Then I climbed the back stairs to the cigar lounge. A few men were seated at the bar, others were scattered among leather couches. Most were puffing on cigars and staring at overhead televisions. There was no sign of the short, burly man whose uniform consisted of dark blazers and tan pants with buffed wingtips.

  I settled on a couch, its cool leather sticking to my skin. A waitress passed, and I yelled my order: a dirty martini with bleu cheese-stuffed olives. “Please,” I added with a smile. She and I were the only women in the room. The men clustered together, laughing in low tones. The cigar smoke made the air smell like tobacco and baked cherries. I rummaged through my big black bag that carried my life—cell phone, reporter’s notebooks, tape recorder, wallet, makeup, metal flask, and wet wipes—looking for my cloves. I felt the waxed paper that contained the fifty-five-dollar Arturo Fuente Opux X BBMF cigar I’d bought earlier. The brand was Mo’s favorite, probably because the initials officially stood for “Big Bad Mother Fucker.” Eventually I found my own smokes. I lit one, closed my eyes, and inhaled the sweetness.