Body Work (29 page)

“She’s only done it for six months. How can you—”

“Six months!” Leander flung up his arms. “That is beyond stale, it’s rotting!”

“Right,” I said. “Where does Karen live?”

Kevin’s wide mouth gave an exaggerated grimace of contempt. “We weren’t
dating
the chick. We worked with her on her act.”

“Did you rehearse the act outside the club?”

Leander explained that one of his ballet teachers was on the faculty at Columbia College and let him and Piuma use one of the practice studios when they were in town.

“If you want to call the Body Artist, what number do you use?”

“E-mail. She didn’t give us a number.”

I looked at Rivka. “What about you?”

She bit her lips. She wanted to claim some special inside knowledge of Karen Buckley but couldn’t. The Body Artist always phoned Rivka, but she blocked her own number.

Vesta nodded agreement. “Girlfriend liked her secrets.”

Vesta had met Karen at the dojo where she trained. “She wanted to study self-defense. She took about four months of classes. That’s when we . . .”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but I assumed from Rivka’s scowl that Vesta meant when she and Karen had been lovers.

“What about Olympia?” I asked. “How did all that get started, the act at the club and so on?”

“Karen goes to all the clubs,” Vesta said. “She studies other people’s acts. She had this thing she wanted to do with body art; she pitched it to Olympia, who thought it was enough of a novelty to bring in a crowd. Nothing happened for a few months, and then suddenly, around Thanksgiving, the act took off.”

“Why?”

“People realized they had the chance to see an extraordinary artist for free,” Rivka said.

Vesta said, “It was more that people took video footage with their cell phones and put it out on the Net.”

“When did Rodney start taking part?” I asked.

Leander and Kevin looked at each other again as if they could only think in tandem, but it was Leander who spoke. “Rodney’s the big thugly guy, right? We’d been doing the act for about six weeks, maybe two months. At first, it was all about Karen painting on herself and we’d hold mirrors for her, but that was way too hard. Then she started this public art idea. About a week after that, Rodney the Rod Man arrived. Raw sex. Not a nice man.”

The last phrase hung in the air for a moment, allowing us all to wonder if he’d had raw sex with Rodney or if that was just his way of describing a brutish person.

“I’m assuming it was Anton Kystarnik who was at the club last night,” I said. “If he’s not the person blocking her website, who is? And why?”

The four of them looked at one another and then at Petra, obediently quiet in her corner of the couch. None of them had any ideas.

“Rivka,” I asked, “do you have a picture of Karen? Do any of you?”

“She hated being photographed except when she had her full body art on,” Rivka said. “The one time I took her picture, she grabbed my camera and erased it.”

“You’re a good artist,” I said. “Can you draw her from memory? I’m going to need a picture if I’m going to canvas for her.”

“She won’t like it if I do.” Rivka’s face was flushed.

“There’s no point to my asking around about her if I don’t have a picture. This is the last discussion we’ll have on the subject. Either draw a picture of Buckley for me or go home and don’t bother me again.”

Rivka started another protest, but Vesta shook her head at her. “You’re the only one who pulled the detective into this. Do like she says—put Buckley’s face onto a piece of paper or go on home.”

30

Deserted Home—or Whatever

V
esta and the dancers left while Rivka was working on the Body Artist’s portrait. Whatever Rivka’s more tiresome qualities, she was a skillful artist. In less than an hour, she put together a couple of sketches that captured the Artist’s elusive quality. Working only in ink, Rivka showed the transparent, expressionless eyes and the sternness around the mouth that kept people at a distance.

“Where are you going to search?” Rivka asked.

“Maybe I’ll throw a dart at the map.” I pointed to a big map of the city that hangs in my main workroom. “They say if you pick stocks that way, they perform as well or better than a financial adviser’s portfolio. Maybe it will lead me to the Artist as well.”

“I’m staying with you.”

“No, you’re not. Not unless you’ve been lying and know where the woman is. Or what name she might be hiding behind.”

Rivka started to argue the point, but I shut her up without finesse. “You want to find Karen Buckley, but you’re wasting my time. Which I bill at a hundred fifty dollars an hour.”

Her jaw dropped. “I don’t have that kind of money!”

“Then you’d better get out of my way before I decide to start charging you, hadn’t you.”

She scurried out the door so fast that Petra burst out laughing.

“But why aren’t you charging her?” my cousin asked when I’d made sure Rivka had gone out the front door.

“Because I want to find the Body Artist myself. And these pictures may help us.”

“Where are you going to start? At the club?”

“If Vesta and Rivka don’t know where she hangs out, no one at the club will, either. Nope. We’re going up to Irving and the Kennedy, where Karen abandoned that SUV. I’m going to assume she raced home, picked up what she thought she needed to survive on the run, and hopped on the L.”

“Then you won’t find her up there,” Petra objected.

“If we can discover where she’s been living, we may find the name of someone who knows her well enough to tell us where she might go next,” I explained. “She is a remarkably invisible person, considering how much she exposes herself. And considering how hard it is to hide your life in the age of the Internet. You make copies of these sketches while I get my maps out.”

I’ve got those apps on my cell phone that guide you around the streets, but I still prefer seeing the big picture—How many blocks did we have to cover? And how long might it take?—although the apps would come in handy when we needed to find a bathroom.

The first challenge was to make sure no one was after us. If Anton was trying to find the Body Artist, he could get Rodney or one of his other minions to stake me out, knowing I might be looking for her, too. I made Petra pull a wool cap over her halo of hair—it was far too recognizable. Her height I couldn’t do much about.

We went by L, changing trains and directions four times at less-used stops to make sure the same people weren’t getting on or off with us. Finally, we picked up the O’Hare train and rode to Irving Park. The L runs alongside the Kennedy Expressway here, and traffic was heavy.

The Irving Park stop served K-Town, so-called because it’s a corridor where all the street names begin with
K.
We would treat the search like all canvassing, going door-to-door, looking at the names on the buzzers if there were any, seeing who was home, showing a picture of Karen, seeing if anyone recognized her.

We started at the L ticket booth. The woman in the booth shook her head over the two sketches: the customers who stood out were the ones who complained or who chatted with the agent on duty.

“I see so many people,” she apologized. “I’m real sorry you’re having trouble finding your sis. If I see her around here, you want me to call you?”

Our story was that our sister was developmentally disabled and that she’d wandered off. She’d last been seen here two nights ago, and the police said that was too soon to file a missing person report, so if anyone knew who was giving her shelter, we’d be grateful.

We gave the ticket agent Petra’s cell phone number and moved on to the local laundries, a deli, a grocery store, a coffee bar. If Karen lived up here, she did so as invisibly as she did everything else. The manager at the Laundromat thought she recognized the picture but wasn’t a hundred percent certain. I even asked the homeless guys sleeping under the expressway.

That was the easy or, at least, less hard part. When we’d exhausted the public places, we moved on to the grim business of going door-to-door. I decided arbitrarily to limit the search to a half-mile radius around the L stop. Petra went east, and I took the west stretch.

It was a long, cold day. By the time I’d covered Karlov and Kedvale, I’d found two German shepherds, five terriers, three Labs, two Rottweilers. Petra and I met briefly to warm up at one of the coffee shops near the L. She wasn’t as discouraged as I because it was her first real detecting job. And also because she herself has the eager personality of a Labrador.

The area was mostly a collection of houses and two- or three-flats, which at least meant we weren’t trying to get into the lobby of big apartment complexes. Even so, we faced a lot of doorbells, with no guarantee that we were even in the right neighborhood.

By midafternoon, as snow began to fall again, I was so tired and so numb that I almost overlooked the name on the bell. It was a workman’s cottage on the west side of Kildare, divided into a two-flat. I was halfway down the walk before the second-floor name registered with me: F. Pindero.

F. Pindero. When I’d been in the coffee shop in Roehampton and the regulars had been talking about Kystarnik’s daughter, someone said Steve Pindero had been a good guy and it broke his heart when his Frannie OD’d along with Zina Kystarnik. I’d assumed Frannie was dead, too. But maybe she’d survived, and resurrected herself as the Body Artist.

I called Petra to tell her where I was, and went back up the steps to ring the bell again. A terrier, number nine for the day, began hurling itself at the ground-floor door, but no humans answered either bell. A curtain shifted in the house across the street. I walked over and rang the bell.

A woman about my own age came to the door and opened it the length of a chain. Fortunately, I hadn’t worked the east side of Kildare yet, so I could switch my story from the developmentally disabled sister to one who was married to an abusive husband.

“She thought she was safe here,” I said, “but he tracked her down somehow, and she called me about two this morning really scared. Have you seen her today?”

“You mean the gal across the street? If she acted as stuck-up around her man as she does to the neighbors on the street, no wonder he hit her. I wanted to myself.”

“No woman deserves to be beaten. Surely you believe that! Have you seen her today?”

“I believe a woman’s duty is to make a good home for her man. If she acts like a person who says hello to her on the street is dirt beneath her feet, then maybe she earned a black eye or two.”

“Are you always this warmhearted or does the cold weather bring out the best in you?”

“I can see how you’re related. You’re just as stuck-up as her. I hope you’ve got a man like hers waiting for you at home!”

She slammed the door in my face.

I walked back across the street, seething. So what if my story was fictitious? To believe any woman deserved a beating—I serve on the board of a domestic violence shelter, and it hurt to know there were women in the community who believed their battered sisters got what was coming to them.

My hands were shaking with anger and stiff with cold, so by the time I worked the picklocks into the cylinders and got inside Pindero’s house, Petra had joined me. I could feel the woman across the street watching. If she called the cops, I’d—I broke the ugly thought off mid-sentence. I was as bad as she was, thinking of beating her up.

The terrier barked hysterically as Petra and I climbed the stairs to the second floor. The stairwell was dark, but it was warm and out of the wind. I leaned against the wall, rubbing the circulation back into my fingers. Petra also seemed glad of the chance to catch her breath. Finally, as I knelt to pick the lock on Pindero’s door, I explained how I’d learned her name.

“Why would Karen use a fake name?” Petra asked.

“I don’t know. But if she was Zina Kystarnik’s friend, maybe she was scared Anton would be after her for letting Zina OD.”

“I guess,” Petra said doubtfully. “Karen doesn’t do drugs, you know. I mean, she never acted like she was getting high, and she didn’t have stuff in her dressing room.”

“If she was Frannie Pindero, she OD’d ten or fifteen years ago. Could have been her wake-up call to sobriety. Here, hold my phone so the light shines on the lock. Let’s see if we’ve found the Body Artist before we speculate too much. It will be embarrassing if it turns this place belongs to Felicity Pindero, a sober bookkeeper.”

The door opened directly into a small square room. It was impossible to see any details in the gray light coming through the window. When I found a light switch, a spartan industrial fixture with a single bulb gave some meager light. The room was bare except for two large exercise balls.

A cold draft was blowing into the room from our left. We followed it down a short corridor to the kitchen. Karen, or Frannie, or maybe a burglar, had hurled a brick through a window and climbed in over the kitchen sink. Glass and puddles of congealed blood covered the floor. The brick had landed in the sink.

Petra peered over my shoulder. “Gosh! Looks like there was a bar fight in here.”

The back door boasted an array of bolts and chains, but it wasn’t locked. I walked out onto a narrow platform that served as a back porch. Stairs had been built onto the house when it was converted to a two-flat; they were made of rough, unfinished wood and probably didn’t meet city code. Several large Rorschachs of blood stained the ice on the porch and stairs, but the snow, now falling more furiously, was covering the trail.

“She left her keys in the dressing room, Finch said last night,” I told Petra. “So she picked up a brick—you can see where they’re stacked by the back gate—came up these stairs, came in through the kitchen window. She had on her coat and her boots, but she was probably so wound up she flailed around and cut herself. There’s blood in the sink besides what’s on the floor and the stairs. She parked in the alley, came here to collect who knows what, and fled again, leaving the door unlocked because she didn’t have her keys.”