Body Work (16 page)

I packed up the guns and the empties and pillowcase and called a messenger to carry them to Cheviot labs. “There may be nothing here,” I wrote in my cover letter, “but please check to see whether anything besides beer was in these cans. And see if you can trace the purchase history on these guns.”

I didn’t include the magazines—I didn’t think I needed a comparative analysis of Arabic and British porn directed at U.S. servicemen. I put them into the Vishneski case file, to keep until the matter was resolved.

Once the messenger had left, I leaned back in my desk chair and studied my mother’s engraving of the Uffizi. Someone had gone through Nadia Guaman’s apartment. I didn’t trust her neighbor; he had Nadia’s keys, he’d helped himself to her cat. But he hadn’t needed to point out that her computer was missing. And he could have searched her place at his leisure, no need to turn it upside down. It was possible that she’d stiffed advances from him and that he’d murdered her himself and then trashed her apartment to finish off his fury—but even that meant Chad Vishneski wasn’t the killer.

The story was too complicated for me to follow without a chart. I drew one up on a big piece of newsprint and taped it to my wall. Rodney, the thug who had the run of Club Gouge, I needed his last name. I needed to know who he was, what hold he had on Olympia.

Then there were all the murky sleeping arrangements among the Body Artist, Nadia’s dead sister, Olympia, and the two women I’d met last night, Rivka and Vesta, whose last names I’d also need to get. Vesta, a black belt, had once been one of Karen Buckley’s lovers. When we’d spoken last night, she’d seemed calm, dispassionate even, in discussing the Body Artist. It was hard to believe she might have killed Nadia in a jealous frenzy.

Besides, according to the Artist, there’d been nothing in her relations with Nadia to make anyone jealous. I didn’t believe much of what Karen Buckley said, but her account of Nadia’s advances and retreats had a ring of truth to it.

The younger woman, Rivka, was a different story. She didn’t have much skin between her feelings and the world. Judging by last night’s behavior, she was jealous of everyone who captured the Artist’s attention. She could have believed there was more between Nadia and the Artist than ever really took place. And what about Alexandra? I needed more information about her, that was clear. If Nadia had known about the Artist’s private life, would the youngest sister, Clara, have known as well? Or would the two older girls have protected the baby of the family? I toyed with a fantasy in which the Guamans murdered their daughter so that her sexuality would remain a deeply buried secret.

Speculation is the detective’s enemy. Facts. I needed facts about the Guamans and about the Body Artist.

I tried to put together a list of questions about the Artist. Vesta and Rivka believed she’d run away from home as a teen. Maybe she’d changed her name to protect herself from a violent father/brother/lover. I looked for legal name changes to Karen Buckley during the past decade but drew another blank.

She seemed to think that her performances gave her power:
You can get this close, as close as my skin, but you can’t get inside me. I control the boundaries.
I imagined standing naked in front of an audience, and my skin crawled. It felt like a horrible kind of exposure. I flung my pen down. I couldn’t find anything out about Karen’s past, so I needed to concentrate on what I knew about her in the present.

Her relationship with Olympia, who had financial woes, that bore more exploration. Somehow, Olympia had established a modicum of control over the Body Artist. And the Artist was a woman who definitely liked to be in control of her relationships.

The biggest questions had to do with the outbursts Nadia, or Nadia’s paintings, had provoked in Chad Vishneski. And neither the Artist nor Nadia’s family was giving me any insight into what that was about. Maybe Chad had written his buddies or his parents explaining why Nadia’s paintings had gotten so deeply under his skin.

I called the client. John Vishneski was in the Mercurio office on Huron going over drawings; no one was out on a building in this weather, of course. I asked if Chad had said anything to him about Nadia or the Body Artist.

“I never heard of those two women until they came and arrested Chad. I guess he thought the idea of a club like that would shock me, or disgust me. Kids have such funny ideas about parents, don’t they? Like, we don’t have basic human feelings or needs or something. I expect I was the same way about my old man.”

I thought of my own mother, how painful I’d found it to think she might have the sexual impulses common to us all. Parents aren’t supposed to operate in the world of desire. Perhaps that’s the only way children can grow up feeling safe.

“What did Chad do for e-mail? His phone? A computer?”

“Computer, I guess. His phone—he’s like all the kids his age—mostly he texts. He has a Lenovo ThinkPad; I bought it for him when he first shipped out. He took it all over Iraq with him. He even kept a blog, the way so many folks do these days.”

“The computer isn’t at your wife’s place . . . your ex-wife’s. Do you have it?”

I knew the answer would be no before he gave it. Mona hadn’t imagined seeing her son’s cell phone; someone had been in the apartment ahead of us the previous afternoon. Someone had helped themselves to Chad’s phone and his laptop.

I hung up. I was starting to feel as if I were in one of those dreams where you are running from some menace you can’t see and the whole time the menace is shutting every door you turn to. Someone with a lot of organizational talent was running faster than me, cutting in ahead of me at every exit.

I looked at my hands. “I am a street fighter,” I said. “No one can stop me.” Trouble was, I didn’t really believe it.

16

Nada About Nadia

I
had to go downtown for a meeting, a routine inquiry where I’d been able to do all the work without any shadowy menaces blocking my path. I pulled my documents together, put on some makeup and my dressy boots, and went back out into the bracing winter air. The snow had stopped after a mere four inches—nothing, really, to a third-degree street fighter.

As I rode the L down to the Loop, I knew I needed to talk to the Guamans. I’d only been on the case for two days, but it had been five days since Nadia had died. It was strange that they hadn’t sought me out, the woman who’d been with their daughter when she died. I decided to go over to Pilsen to try to speak with Cristina Guaman at the hardware store where LifeStory told me she worked.

As soon as my Loop meeting ended, I took the L west and south to Damen and Cermak and walked the three blocks to the hardware store (
¡Sopladores de nieve! ¡Palas! ¡Todo para el invierno! ¡Se habla inglés!
).

The placard in the window had advertised “Everything for Winter,” but the store really had everything period. Snow shovels, ice melt, mittens, space heaters, fans, kitchen utensils, TVs, microwaves, coloring books. It was a small space, but not only was every surface covered, long hooks dangling from the ceiling held dried tomatoes and garlic, DVDs, dog collars, trusses.

The place wasn’t well lit, and I didn’t see Cristina Guaman at first, but after stumbling against a rack full of hard hats I found her near the back at a computer. Someone was talking to her in Spanish, but the conversation was apparently desultory because Cristina only nodded her head while she typed.

I stood next to the woman who was speaking to her, waiting for a lull, but the woman saw I was a stranger, perhaps a customer, and asked in Spanish if I needed help.

“I need a word with Ms. Guaman,” I said, hoping she really did know English. My Spanish is pretty rudimentary.

The woman moved away from the counter, and Cristina Guaman stopped typing to look at me. “Yes?” she said. “What do you need?”

I pulled one of my cards out of my bag.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you at work, Ms. Guaman, but I’m the woman who was with your daughter when she died. Is there a place where we could talk?”

“We can talk here.”

She folded her hands on top of the keyboard, not the gesture of a woman at ease, but to create a barrier between herself and me.

“I don’t want to broadcast your family’s business to the whole store. Isn’t there someplace private?”

“My family has no business that the whole world cannot attend to. Are you the owner of that terrible place, that club where women take off their clothes so men can draw nasty pictures on their bodies?”

I wondered if family ties would make her unbend, so I explained my role as Petra’s cousin, my desire to protect her, my observation of Nadia and Nadia’s anguish or anger. “She kept drawing a face, the face of a beautiful young woman with short curly hair, and then she would slash a line through it. I’m wondering if that might have been her sister.”

“Clara’s hair is long and it is almost blond.” Cristina Guaman’s eyes were wary.

“Alexandra. Do you have a photograph of her? It was her name Nadia was calling as she died.”

At that, Cristina sucked in a breath. “Alexandra has been dead a long time. Nadia couldn’t let her rest in peace.”

“So she was painting Alexandra’s face?”

“I have no desire to know what pictures Nadia might be painting on a woman’s body. She knew how strongly I felt—her father, too—about her going to that place.”

“When did you last talk to her?”

Cristina Guaman looked around to see if anyone was in earshot. “Many months went by. Nadia was angry, always, for the last two years, so angry she would not speak to her father or me. My heart is broken at her death, but she cut herself away from her family. She moved into that apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, she stayed away from mass. Even though I knew she would pay no attention to my words, I had to call her when she started making a spectacle of herself in that degenerate club.”

I asked how she had learned Nadia was painting on the Body Artist, but of course people had been using their phones to take video footage of the performances. These inevitably ended up skipping around the World Wide Web, where more than one neighbor had shown them to the Guamans.

“The picture was poor, the light was bad, but everyone could see that woman sitting there naked, showing off her breasts, and people could easily see Nadia’s face. Can you imagine how you would feel when your daughter has flaunted herself in public for the whole world to see? I had to call her. I had to try to tell her how very worried I was to see her in such a corrupt place.”

“And was it Alexandra’s face she was painting?”

Cristina’s nose twitched as if she were smelling something bad. “It was enough to see Nadia together with a naked woman. If she was involving her sainted sister, then I am thankful to God that I was spared that sight.”

“How did Alexandra die?”

Cristina backed away from me. “In a painful, hard way that I prefer not to discuss.”

“Did she have a boyfriend, a girlfriend, anyone I could talk to?”

“What are you trying to ask?” Cristina hissed.

So she knew her daughter had women as lovers. Alexandra wouldn’t come out of the closet for fear her mother would learn, and her mother had known all along. Had Alexandra committed suicide because of the pressure? Had Nadia known and moved out after fighting with her mother over Allie’s sexuality?

I couldn’t think of any good way to ask these questions, so I asked in a bad way. “Who told you that Alexandra was sleeping with women?”

Cristina gasped. “If you came here to slander my saint, my angel, I will call the police. Leave!”

“I’m not trying to upset you, Ms. Guaman, just to figure out who killed your beloved daughter Nadia.”

“They arrested a man. It’s enough, enough that we’re dragged through the dirt by Nadia, without you coming to me and pouring it over me.”

“I went to Nadia’s apartment this morning,” I said. “Someone had broken in, had stolen her computer and all her discs. All her artwork is missing.”

At that, she became very quiet. She shook her head slowly as if unhappy at whatever she was thinking, but even though I tried several different gambits, she wouldn’t share her private thoughts with me. I told her about Nadia’s conviction that someone was spying on her.

“Who would that have been, do you think?” I asked. “The person who murdered her?”

Cristina shook her head again. “Nadia had many unhappy ideas, and not very many of them are—were—true. Was it she who told you those filthy lies about Alexandra? Nadia believed them and wouldn’t accept my word that her sister was pure, a good Christian, not capable of such acts. But enough anger. Nadia is with her sister now, in the arms of the Blessed Mother. I thank God that she has no more pain on this earth.”

That was all I was going to learn from her: Nada about Nadia. I walked unhappily from the store, wondering just what it was Cristina Guaman didn’t want me to know about her daughter. Daughters.

I stopped in a taquería across the street for a bowl of rice and beans. Ernie couldn’t tell me anything. Even if I could get past security at O’Hare to reach Lazar Guaman, it was hard to convince myself that such a gray and beaten man would talk to me. That left the surviving daughter, poor young Clara. It was two-thirty—with luck, I’d make it to her school before she left.

17

Vow of Silence

I
rode the Green Line to Halsted and walked the few blocks to St. Teresa of Avila Prep. School got out at three, and the city buses were already lined up. Unless the Guamans’ self-appointed protector could leave his La Salle Street practice to collect Clara, the easiest route home for her was on the Number 60 bus down Blue Island Avenue.

I reached the school about ten minutes ahead of the exodus. I shivered in the bus stop catty-corner to the school until the tall doors opened and the students poured out.

They seemed to arrive in one giant wave of screaming, jostling teens, but as they passed me they broke into little clots—groups of high-spirited boys, or girls laughing and kidding together, or couples in that adolescent embrace that doesn’t allow a single molecule of air between their bodies. A number were walking alone, shoulders hunched to avoid the glances of a pitying world. Most were bent under their giant backpacks, looking much as their peasant forebears must have, lugging cotton or corn or wood. And all, it seemed, were madly reconnecting to their cell phones and music players after a day of forced withdrawal.