Body Work (50 page)

“Damn it,” MacLean said, “he was holding the gun. You made him drop it.”

“Still can’t help you,” I said. “Gilbert Scalia might have shot Cowles, the way he shot Nadia Guaman. He framed Chad Vishneski for Nadia’s death, and now he could be trying to frame Nadia’s father for shooting Rainier Cowles.”

That got Terry’s attention in a hurry. He had been prepared to let MacLean and Scalia rush off to their waiting limo, but he ordered me to repeat the accusation.

“What are you basing that on, Vic?” Terry asked. “Your woman’s intuition or actual evidence?”

I gave a tight smile. “Marty Jepson ID’d Scalia as a man who accosted Chad outside Plotzky’s bar the night Nadia Guaman was shot. And one of Mona Vishneski’s neighbors saw him and a second man escorting Chad home about half an hour later. The neighbor recognized Scalia’s Iraq service medal. Maybe he can pick Scalia out of a lineup.”

“I have major responsibilities in a war that the U.S. is waging against our most ferocious enemies,” Scalia said. “I can’t be bothered with this kind of crap.”

Terry’s eyes narrowed. “Murder is a kind of crap, Mr. Scalia, the worst kind. If you’ve shot someone in my city, then you’ll have to take time away from your heavy duties to answer my questions.”

Terry told Milkova to see that Scalia and MacLean were driven to his office at Thirty-fifth and Michigan. “Let Captain Mallory know what we’re doing. And, of course, let them call their lawyers. I gather their chief counsel is over at Northwestern getting his head sewn back together, but they must have other lawyers at their disposal.”

Finchley told me I could sit down until he was ready for me, and I retreated to the stool the Renaissance Raven had used. After that, I remembered things only episodically. Jepson and Radke smuggling the Raven out of the bar through the basement service door. Perhaps she was afraid a police inquiry might keep her from her European tour.

Petra shrieked at the blood from my left foot pooling on the floor. I hadn’t noticed it until then. “Vic! You’ve been shot!”

I pulled my foot up and looked at it under the spotlight. A piece of glass was embedded in the ball. I hadn’t even felt it when I walked away from Rainier Cowles.

“Don’t worry about that now. What I need is for you to make sure the Body Artist hasn’t left.”

Petra gulped. “Vic, you can’t just sit there with glass in your foot.”

“Then pull it out and go find the Body Artist.”

Petra disappeared into the crowd, which was sounding like the herd in one of those old John Wayne movies: low mooing, restless movement, prelude to a stampede. Now that I knew about the glass in my foot, I couldn’t bring myself to get up to look for the Artist. I tried to scan the crowd to see if I could spot her, but it was impossible with so many bodies crammed together.

I must have dropped off to sleep, because the next thing I remember was Lotty holding my foot while Vesta pointed a flashlight at it. “Yes, it is just glass, not a bullet. And Sal has a good first-aid kit. This will hurt: I don’t have any topicals with me—I don’t go to nightclubs expecting to need them. Vesta, a little lower and to the right.”

The pain as she pulled the glass out shot through me like an electric current. Lotty’s expert fingers probed the area, didn’t find any more fragments. She swabbed the wound with antiseptic, which jolted me again, and pieced the gaping pieces of flesh together with tape before wrapping the foot up.

“Thank you, Lotty,” I said weakly. “Sorry the evening’s entertainment took such a shocking turn.”

“Why would I expect otherwise when you’re in charge? God forbid that the Chicago Symphony ever hires you to run a program for them.”

The words were harsh, but her tone was affectionate. She squeezed my shoulder and ordered Petra, who’d hovered, white-faced, behind her, to bring me a hot, sweet drink. No alcohol! Lotty waited until Petra returned with some hot cider and stood over me while I drank it.

“You have to stay?” Lotty asked when I’d finished the cider. “I’m getting Max to take me home. You know, men in uniform. I think I’ve seen enough of them for the evening. You have someone to see you home when they let you go?”

“Plenty.” I got up to kiss her good night and ask her to take Mr. Contreras with her. He had been buzzing around the perimeter while I talked to Terry and while Lotty worked on me. It wasn’t just that I didn’t have the energy to talk to him right now, but I wanted to stay until I could see the Body Artist alone. I didn’t know if I could even keep her in the bar when the cops finished with her.

“Petra needs to go home,” I said to my neighbor when he started to reject Lotty’s offer of a ride. “She’s seen way too much violence tonight.”

That suggestion brightened his face: looking after Petra was a pleasure as well as a duty. As soon as he left with Lotty and Petra, I turned to Vesta. “If Karen is still in the bar, if the cops don’t send her down to Thirty-fifth and Michigan, will you hold on to her for me? I want to talk to her alone and may never find her again if she gets away tonight.”

Vesta’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “You’re half dead where you’re sitting, you know. But if it’ll cheer you up to talk to Buckley, or whatever her name is, I’ll sit on her chest until you’re done here.”

When Terry finally finished with me—“I saved the worst till last, Warshawski”—and the last of the cops disappeared, Vesta stepped out of the shadows inside the mahogany horseshoe and brought the Body Artist over to me. Marty Jepson and Tim Radke followed. I wondered where Rivka was, but Vesta told me she’d made Rivka leave an hour or so earlier while the cops were interviewing the Artist.

“We’ll go down to the basement and talk while I clean up and change,” I said to the Artist. “Vesta, can you escort her down? And Tim, Marty, why don’t you hang around up here? If she decides to run up the stairs, I’ve got this gimpy foot—I can’t stop her.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” the Body Artist said, “so you might as well let me go now.” Her chin was high, defiant, Joan of Arc confronting her Burgundian jailers.

“Then you can sit in lofty silence, while I clean up and dress. And I’ll talk to you.”

54

The Body Artist’s Tale

T
he concrete floor and walls were just about at the freezing mark. I turned on a space heater full blast, but I was still shivering. I began rubbing cold cream on my legs. Vesta retreated into the back, sitting on a crate of beer bottles. She stayed so quiet during our conversation that, after a few minutes, both the Artist and I forgot she was there.

“Let’s see,” I started, “you were born Francine Pindero, you and Zina Kystarnik sold drugs to the rich kids on the North Shore until you and she overdosed. She died but you survived. I guess that proves how ignorant I am because I always thought dealers were too smart to use their own dope.”

“How did you know my name?” she demanded.

“I’m a detective. I detect things.”

“Then how did you detect I’d given roofies to your tame soldier?”

“That was a guess.”

I ran a facecloth under the tap in a sink that stood in one corner of the basement and soaped my breasts. It felt wonderful, like being newborn, to see my own skin again.

“You guessed wrong. Like you guessed wrong about Anton and me.” Her arms were folded across her chest, her mouth a thin uncompromising line.

I dried off and pulled on a T-shirt and a sweater. My hair, stiff with the hair spray Rivka had used to hold the Barbie dolls in place, felt heavy and filthy, but I’d wash it at home.

“You let Rodney Treffer use your ass as a billboard for Anton Kystarnik.”

“Wrong,” she said.

“Okay, what’s the right version?”

“Why should I tell you one damned thing?”

“No reason,” I said. “My version is the one that will go out in the
Herald-Star,
and then it will be all over the blogosphere. But if you’re cool with that—”

“You can’t be putting out lies about me,” she interrupted. “I’ll sue you.”

“And then you’ll have to tell the truth in court, and everyone will know your real name. So why not do it here and now?”

She looked around the cold basement as if hunting for an escape route. The service door to the stairs leading up to the street was behind me. The stairs going up to the bar were behind her, but she knew Marty Jepson and Tim Radke were waiting there.

“Let me tell you a version,” I suggested, “and you tell me where I’m wrong. You recovered from your overdose all those years ago and knew Anton was out for your blood because his kid had died, so you took refuge in a second identity. Leaving your dad with a basement full of drugs.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!” The last “wrong” came out as a scream, and her transparent eyes flooded with color as violent emotion swept through her. “My dad—I would never have done that to him. It was Anton. Where do you think Zina and I got the drugs? Anton thought it would be good fun for us to sell them to our friends, and their parents. Why do you think we got away with it for two years? Because he was covering for us!”

She began to pace the small basement, frenzied, a panther in a cage. “I got out of the hospital, and cops were waiting to talk to me, and Dad, he was shaking, he looked like an old man. I see him in my nightmares to this day—not just how afraid he was for me, whether I’d ever recover, but because he hadn’t known what Zina and I were doing. He was so disappointed in me. He had big hopes for me, I was going to go to college, I was going to be a painter—I was going to be his special success in the world! And then the cops got a tip, probably from Anton, and suddenly this whole pharmacy appeared in our basement.”

She gulped back hysterical laughter. “And then Anton showed up. He waited till Dad had left for work, then he beat me up and said I was lucky he didn’t kill me. He said it should’ve been me who died, not Zina, and if I told anyone where we got the drugs, he’d see that my dad was arrested, not him.

“I didn’t know what to do. But—my mom was dead. Her name—before she married, she was Karen Buckley, and my dad still had her old high school yearbook and her old high school ID. I took them and ran away, and called myself Karen Buckley.”

She’d spent so many years with her story locked inside her that once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. I sat quietly on the stool in front of the space heater.

“I couldn’t even tell my dad what I’d done because I was afraid he’d try to go after Anton, and Anton would have killed him, like swatting a fly. So I disappeared. I bummed around the country just living on what I could live on. I cleaned houses, I did some carpentry—I learned how, working with my dad in the summers—but I couldn’t get a regular job, I couldn’t do anything where they needed a Social Security number because then Anton would know where to find me, and I didn’t want to ever see him or hear from him again. I took some painting classes at local community colleges and worked on my art, but nothing was right in my life.

“Then I came back to Chicago and started this body art gig. I thought, I can be anonymous here behind all this paint, so I started doing it in public.”

“How did Anton find you?” I asked when she paused.

“Because my life is crap and nothing turns out right! It was that idiot bitch, Olympia. If I’d known she’d borrowed money from him, I never would have set foot in her goddamned bar! But she always did these kind of edgy acts, music and performance both, and when I pitched my body-painting idea she thought it would work because it was novel. That’s what you need in the club business, something new all the time. And it was starting to work, except Rodney came around. By now, he was Anton’s enforcer, but he’d been strictly junior grade when I was in high school. He recognized me from the sex parties.”

“Sex parties?”

“Oh, you know, Anton liked Zina and me to help entertain his friends. His wife was usually pretty stoned by the time night rolled around, and we thought at first it was fun. We made so much money, you can’t imagine—for a teenager to have a thousand dollars in cash—but sex with those guys—it’s why Zina and me, why we started using. Had to be high to get through the night. Anton, he had pictures, that’s why I couldn’t move without being afraid of him and blackmail.” She began chipping at her fingernails, tearing off little pieces and throwing them to the floor.

“So it must have been horrible when you saw Rodney at Club Gouge,” I said.

She looked up. “I’ll tell you what was really horrible. He knew me before I knew him on account of he’d put on about a hundred pounds. Anton had been sending him to Club Gouge just to keep the heat on Olympia about the money she owed. But when he recognized me, it all started again. Anton had this idea, he thought it was so damned funny—”

“Yes, to use you as his message center. I got that much. And that’s why you were so angry the night they came in and started beating on you.”

“I wanted to kill you,” she said. “If Anton thought I’d ratted him out to a cop, even a private one, my life was worth less than the paint covering me. So I ran home and grabbed my stuff and hid out. But then I saw your ads on the Net and I couldn’t stay away—I needed to see what you were doing in my name. I guess you were counting on that, weren’t you?”

She looked at me in surprise, as if startled to think I could be that clever.

“Hoping for it,” I said, “not counting on it. I didn’t know what would happen tonight. I wanted the cops to see an alternate version of the story of Nadia’s murder. I thought if you were here, you could fill in some critical blanks.”

The Artist began fiddling with the paintbrushes I’d left out on the counter.

“Yes, poor Nadia. I thought she was full of drama—self-drama—over her sister. Poor Allie, too. Is that really what happened to her? Raped and murdered in Iraq?”

“It’s what really happened to her. The wrong guy got shot tonight. Just my opinion, but the corporate guys, MacLean and Scalia—nothing will happen to them. Once the Guamans threatened legal action over Alexandra’s death, they must have talked to her boss in Iraq, that guy Mossbach. Scalia and MacLean are the ones who got Cowles to pay off the family. In my book, that makes them accessories to Alexandra’s rape and murder. Well, maybe Finchley will get enough evidence to arrest Scalia for Nadia’s death, but I don’t see a murder charge sticking. Meanwhile, Scalia and MacLean are responsible for hundreds of American dead because they substituted sand for gallium in their body armor.”