Body Work (4 page)

“Does she have a name?” I asked.

“Of course she does, but she likes to be called the Body Artist, so we all respect that. So what did you think of her, if you can say it without being a total snot?”

“You’re right, I was a snot. Sorry. I found it disquieting to watch her. The way she talks, the way she holds herself, she seems contemptuous of her audience, or at least of people like me. Maybe she’s bold and heroic, turning stereotypes on their heads, and I only was uncomfortable because I’m not liberated enough. But maybe—”

“Liberated?” Mr. Contreras exploded. “Sitting stark stone naked in front of an audience? I’m ashamed of the both of you. Victoria, you’re a grown woman. You shouldn’t sit back while the kid gets into bad company. And Petra, this isn’t healthy, watching a woman take off her clothes in public.”

He was seriously upset, using our real names like that, instead of “Cookie” and “Peewee.” Petra made her pouty face, and went to put her arms around him. She danced him back down the stairs, hoping to coax him back to his more usual good humor, or perhaps to persuade him that the Body Artist wasn’t degenerate. As I was shutting the door behind them, I heard her say, “But, really, Uncle Sal, you can’t tell me you didn’t look at girlie magazines when you were in the Army. Why is someone nude onstage any worse?”

When I was alone, I felt hollow, restless. I didn’t want to be with Mr. Contreras and Petra and their argument, I wanted a relaxing evening with good friends. I could hear Jake across the hall playing with a group of students or colleagues, maybe girlfriends, and tried to suppress a sense of jealous exclusion. At the end of January, he was leaving for a European tour. Between rehearsals and the run-up to Christmas—the busiest season for a musician—most of his life was spent away from me these days.

I cleaned the week’s dishes out of the kitchen sink, and then, inspired by Jake’s group, did a few breathy vocal exercises. Finally, out of nervous irritability, I looked up the Body Artist’s website.

It was an odd site. She had a blog, which was mostly a series of ramblings on women in the arts, but the bulk of the site was dedicated to her body painting. You could actually buy “pieces of flesh,” as she called them—photographs of the various images we’d seen last night at Club Gouge. Each picture—priced from a hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on size, format, and content—had the number of buyers clocked under it. The most popular were the lilies growing out of her vagina and the winking blue eye.

Looking at her site added to my rumpled feelings. Who was exploiter, who was exploited? I finally went down to Mr. Contreras’s place and collected the dogs. Petra was curled up on the couch, Mitch at her side, but she was still arguing her case with my neighbor. I took the dogs and fled before the combatants could drag me back into battle.

The December night was cold but clear. We ran east, all the way to the lakefront. By the time we returned home, Petra had left. I gave the dogs back to Mr. Contreras but refused to let him reopen his grievance over the Body Artist and Club Gouge.

“Pitchers and catchers report to Mesa in two weeks,” I said. “Everything will get better after that.”

“Except Cubs fans. Don’t go trying no fake smiles on me, doll. I’m not in the mood. Spring training means lowlifes getting ready to piss on the grass.”

Mr. Contreras was a Sox fan. He’d grown up west of old Comiskey, and he hated being here in Wrigleyville during the baseball season. At least loutish Cubs fans meant a change of grievance for him, but I didn’t feel like listening to that, either.

The year was winding down, and my own workload was heavy. Hard times meant a big upswing in fraud. Even though my clients were slower in paying their bills and negotiating reduced fees for big inquiries, I still had more business than I could comfortably handle.

The only times I saw Jake were when I could make it to one of his concerts; now and then, I’d go out for a late supper with him and some of his fellow musicians. We spent Christmas Day together, and then he left to visit his mother and sister in Seattle.

Lotty and Max flew to Morocco over Christmas; Petra went skiing in Utah with her mother and sisters. Even Mr. Contreras left, although it was only to drive to Hoffman Estates, near O’Hare, where he spent a few days with his unhappy daughter and her two sons. I didn’t like the feeling of isolation, home alone in Chicago. I put the dogs in a kennel and flew down to Mexico City for a week of art, music, and warmth.

The return to Chicago the day after New Year’s felt in some ways like the descent to the Underworld. No sun, bitter cold, sick friends, and a dozen messages from unhappy clients who wanted to know if I really cared about their business or if I was just living it up on their money. Within twenty-four hours, sun and dancing seemed as remote as the end of the galaxy.

The Thursday after I came home, I left a client meeting in the Loop that had run until almost nine. I was walking east, toward the Dearborn L, imagining dinner, a drink, and a bath, when Petra texted me:
rgent biz cll @ 1s—urgent business, call at once
. I felt young and hip when I realized I had translated it effortlessly.

“Vic, you have to come over right now!” she cried when I phoned.

“Over where?” I demanded.

“The club! Someone just tried to kill the Body Artist.”

I ducked into a building entrance so I could speak to her away from the street noise and the cold. “When? Have you called the cops?”

“She won’t let us. She says it’s nothing. Can you
please
come?”

“
Let you
? You don’t need her per—”

Petra cut me off with a hasty, “Gotta go, table 11 is screaming for their drinks,” and hung up. I thought wistfully of my bath, and my bottle of Johnnie Walker, but hopped around the slushy curbs on Dearborn and continued east to Wabash and the Lake Street L.

This time of night, the L is full, with students getting out of night school and weary late workers like me heading home. Most of my companions had little white wires snaking from pockets to ears, making them look as though their heads were being transfused. A number of them were texting at the same time or listening to their earclips. They looked like the descendants of
Alien Nation
getting commands from the mother ship.

I got off the train at Ashland and hurried to Club Gouge as fast as I could on the icy sidewalk. Even though it was a weeknight, the parking lot was almost full. The people coming and going through the club’s doors seemed to be chattering normally, not with the hushed excitement they’d show around a crime scene.

The bouncer was inspecting people’s bags and backpacks before letting them in. That was the only sign that something unusual had happened. No one protested—we’re all inured these days to being searched. Pretty soon, we’ll have to get undressed before we walk into our apartment buildings at night, and we’ll probably submit to that without a murmur.

When I reached the front of the line, I showed the bouncer my PI license and explained that Petra had summoned me. The bouncer, Mark, looked me up and down but nodded me into the club.

“I don’t know if the Artist’ll talk to you,” he said, “but she’s in the back. Her performance starts in about twenty minutes—I’ll get Petra to take you to her.”

“What happened?”

Mark shuffled his feet.

“She’ll tell you herself. I’m not a hundred percent sure.”

I looked at him narrowly, wondering what he didn’t want to reveal, but went into the club. Olympia was behind the bar, helping the two bartenders keep up with the orders. As the Body Artist’s performance time was drawing near, the club was filling, and drink orders were piling up.

Olympia was striking, with her dyed black hair and the thick streak of white over her left eye. She was dressed in black and white, too, as if she, like the Body Artist, were a canvas on display. Tonight she was wearing a pantsuit that shimmered like oilcloth under the lights. The jacket was open to her breastbone, where you could see the fringed top of a white camisole.

My cousin was easy to find. At five-eleven, with her halo of spiky hair adding another three inches, she towered over most of the room. When I tapped her arm, she finished delivering drinks to four tables without missing an order and then waltzed me behind the stage to the small changing room set aside for performers.

She knocked perfunctorily on the door but opened it without waiting for an answer. The Body Artist was sitting in the lotus position, eyes shut, breathing slowly. She was already naked except for her thong, which was covered with the same kind of cream foundation paint as her body. Close up, she looked more like a mannequin than before, which was somehow more disturbing than her nudity.

Petra cleared her throat uncertainly. “Uh, this is my cousin, the detective, you know. I told you I was calling her when you said you didn’t want the police here. Vic, Body Artist. Body Artist, Vic. I’ve got to get back to my station.”

She backed out of the room, the feathery ends of her hair brushing against the top of the door frame.

The Artist looked up at me. “I don’t want to be disturbed before my performance. Come back later.”

“Nope,” I said. “Later, I’m going to be home. I’ve been working since eight this morning and I’m beat. Who attacked you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did it happen?”

“Here, in my dressing room.”

“The first time I was here, some big guy with tattoos tried to attack you. Was it him?”

“It was . . . an indirect assault. Not a mugging.”

“Were you attacked at all?” I asked. “Or is this a publicity stunt—will I see a paragraph in tomorrow’s paper that I repelled yet another customer infuriated by your nudity?”

The Artist’s eyes were hard to read inside the mask of paint. “It was a real assault.”

She rose, with the fluid motion of a dancer, and showed me her left leg. Beneath the foundation paint, I could just make out the long line of a cut.

“A piece of glass was hidden in one of my brushes. It’s in the garbage now.”

I put on my gloves and extracted the brush from the pile of tissues and sponges that was filling the can. It was soft, made of sable, the bristles about an inch wide and two inches long. A glass shard had been attached to the bristle head with a piece of wire painted the same color as the handle. Even so, it was easy to spot.

“How come you didn’t see the glass?” I asked.

“I’ve done this so many times, I don’t think about it,” she said. “I unroll my brushes, stick them in the paint containers ready to take onstage, and apply my foundation.”

“So your brush was rigged before you got here tonight?”

“Maybe. But I dropped everything off here this afternoon so that I could run some errands, and I don’t lock the case.” She waved a hand at a large metal suitcase under the dressing table.

“You need to give this to the cops. If there’s poison on it, or tetanus—”

“I’ll get a tetanus shot tomorrow morning. But I don’t want the police here.” For the first time, she sounded agitated, even angry.

“Why not? Someone injured you.”

“I don’t want police in here slobbering over me, and I don’t want to put clothes on over my foundation. Period, end of story.”

Olympia had appeared in the doorway without my noticing. “Who are you? Oh, right, Warshawski, the detective who craves anonymity. The Artist has to go onstage in five minutes, and you’re going to hurt her performance, badgering her like this. You need to leave.”

I asked Olympia the same question I’d put to the Body Artist about the tattooed guy at the table of drunks who’d tried to jump the Artist the night I came with Jake and his friends. “Chad, I think I heard his pals call him.”

“Drunks don’t have the subtlety for something like this,” the Artist said.

She was staring at Olympia when she spoke. The heavy foundation made it impossible to read her expression, but it flashed through my mind that Olympia had rigged the brush, or at least that the Artist thought she had.

“Get out now, Warshawski,” Olympia said. “Go sit at a table in the back—we’ll treat you to a drink.”

“Thanks, Olympia, but I’m way past my limit tonight.”

Over objections from both women, I put the brush into a plastic bag the Body Artist had used to hold cotton balls, wrote down the date and place I’d found it, and tucked it into a pocket of my handbag. On my way out of the club, I scanned the crowd. I didn’t see Chad or his friends, but the heavyset man who looked like a cop was there again. He was nursing a drink at a table by himself. Morose, off-duty policeman without friends, the kind who makes headlines by using his weapon in a crowded bar.

Another person, sitting close to the front, also looked familiar. I studied her for a moment and then decided she was the painter whose work had provoked Chad. Her thin shoulders were hunched up around her ears. Her hands were on the table, tensed so tightly that I could see the tendons raised across the back. She, too, seemed to be alone.

4

Individual of Interest

I
t was a week later that Petra dropped by my office on her way home from her day job. She was drooping. Even her spiky hair had collapsed, and she looked less like a radiant Valkyrie than a houseplant in need of water.

I was in the middle of a complicated transaction with an Ajax Insurance auditor, trying to unravel a fraud committed by one of their claims adjustors, but I gave my cousin an extra-bright smile to show that I loved her and was delighted to see her.

While I talked the accountant through the entries I’d made in my audit software, Petra wandered around my office. She fiddled with stacks of documents, studied her teeth in the glass over my Antonella Mason painting, and then spun a crystal paperweight, a gift from a grateful client, on its edge. She was so distracting that I finally beckoned her over and told her to go across the street for a couple of espressos. By the time she’d returned, her hair damp from the snow that was starting to fall, I’d finished my phone call with Ajax.

I sat her down in the alcove reserved for clients, the sole clutter-free place in my office. “What’s up, babe?”