This story is reconstructed based on FBI records.
The afternoon paper sat folded on the counter when I came back from lunch, and I didn't need to open it to know what was inside. Everyone in the clerk's office had heard by ten o'clock that morning. A federal jury downtown had convicted Harold Conn, and the word moving through Cook County that day wasn't surprise so much as a kind of flinch, like a draft under a door you'd forgotten was unsealed.
I worked the civil records counter on the third floor, a job I'd held for six years, long enough to know which judges wanted their orders stapled and which wanted them clipped. I read about the conviction standing up, coat still on, half-listening for my name at the window. Recorded conversations had been used as evidence. Behind me, someone called for another file, and I folded the paper back.
"You'd think people would stop acting surprised," Celia Grant said, setting a stack of folders on my side of the counter. She ran our unit the way she ran everything, briskly, without much patience for feeling. "They've been circling Conn for a year."
"Doesn't make it easier to watch," I said. "People already think we're all alike down here."
"Some of them have reason to," she said, and didn't elaborate. Then, more practically: "I need to talk to you about the acting training slot. Pay grade's a full step up. The first assignment period runs through June; we'd review any continuation then."
I set the paper down. A full step was real money, not abstract money — it was the difference between making the shop's quarterly tax payment on time and not making it at all. "What would it mean day to day?"
"Overseeing the new clerks on intake and complaint processing," she said. "You'd need a clean six months behind you. No open corrections, no outstanding complaint items in your section." She said it like a formality, the way you'd mention a form needed a signature.
I told her I'd think about it, though I already knew what six months clean looked like on paper, or believed I did. That evening I walked home past the courthouse steps where two reporters were still filming for the six o'clock broadcast, their lights harsh against the gray stone, and I didn't stop to watch.
Dean had the shop's ledger open on the kitchen table when I got home, a cup of coffee gone cold beside it. The upholstery business had been slow since January, two large accounts moved to a cheaper outfit on Western Avenue, and the number at the bottom of the page was not a number either of us wanted to say aloud.
"Landlord called again," he said, not looking up. "Said March is the last month he can carry us on the old rate."
I told him about the acting assignment, the extra pay, the timeline. He nodded slowly, the way he did when he was doing arithmetic in his head rather than listening to me. "That would help," he said. "That would really help, Marlene."
I didn't tell him what the assignment required. I didn't yet know, myself, that it would require anything beyond showing up and doing good work. That night I lay awake going over my section in my mind, counting backward through the months, assuring myself there was nothing in it that could not survive a look. I believed that. I wanted to believe that enough that I didn't check.