Body Work (9 page)

“You don’t think it’s a risk being naked on a stage, letting strangers put paint on you?”

“I think it’s an extreme form of self-indulgence,” Tessa said. “Every time you put paint on canvas, or flesh, you’re taking a risk, but your Body Artist isn’t doing that. Come to think of it, I’m surprised she isn’t cutting herself onstage. I don’t like the performance art of people like Lucia Balinoff, but she works along the same themes: the savaging of the female body. Your performance artist isn’t doing anything new and she’s not taking any risks. She’s exposing herself, but not her
self.”

Tessa left on that stern note. A moment later, I heard her blowtorch fire up again.

9

The Dead—Before They Got That Way

I
tried to map out a course of action. The most important thing seemed to me to get the client’s son better care. That meant I needed sophisticated medical as well as first-class legal help. I started with Freeman Carter. He had been in court all day and wanted to get away; he had tickets to the opera and wasn’t going to miss the curtain on my account. I gave him a thirty-second rundown and told him I wanted a court order ASAP so we could move Chad—I hoped to Beth Israel, Lotty’s hospital.

“I’ll get a doctor over to Cermak tomorrow morning if you can organize the legal side.”

“Are you being Donna Quixote,” Freeman asked, “or do you really have evidence that the wrong person is in custody? From everything I’ve read, this was a PTSD vet who lost control. Not that it matters, you understand. I’m used to the odd alignment you make between the law and facts.”

“Vishneski is a PTSD vet, but I’m beginning to think he was framed. I’ll tell you why when you have more time.”

“And is this on your tab, or can your client pay?”

Freeman’s bill is one of the things that keeps me from ever getting ahead of the game financially. But the alignment between the law and me is such that I need the best defense lawyer in town. Even though my outstanding balance right now was close to sixty thousand, I assured Freeman that if the client couldn’t pay him, I’d take care of it. I hung up knowing that the phone consult itself had just added a hundred dollars to my bill.

I called Lotty, who was also going to the opera, but who gave me a little more attention.

“Eve Rafael is a very fine surgeon, new to our practice, but she has a lot of experience with head trauma and coma. I’ll see if she’s free. But the billing is going to be complicated, you know. And it would help if I could tell her what your young friend had ingested.”

“I won’t know that for a few days, but Chad’s been at Cermak since Saturday morning. I hope it’s not too late for a world-class neurosurgeon to rescue his brain.”

“Medicine, Victoria—not a science, not an art, somewhere in between. How badly Chad Vishneski wants to recover will also play a role in this. But I’ll talk to Eve on my way to the opera.”

“As long as someone else is driving, Lotty!”

Lotty’s driving, on a sunny day and with no one else on the road, was still a fine test of anyone’s nerve endings. In the snow, with a cell phone in her ear, I wouldn’t want my life to depend on her.

“You worry too much about trivialities, Victoria: that will shorten your life as much as fried food.”

As she hung up on that crisp note, I realized I should have talked to the client first before making all these arrangements for his son. Fortunately, when I reached John Vishneski, he was so grateful for my arrangements that he didn’t question my protocol. I gave him Freeman’s number.

“Call him first thing in the morning. He’s going to get a court order to allow him to move your son, and either Dr. Herschel or Dr. Rafael will be on hand to oversee his care.”

“I have to be at a jobsite at seven,” Vishneski said.

“It’ll be best if you let someone else take care of that. You told me yesterday that Chad depended on you to look after him, and this is one place where you can do that. Even if he’s unconscious, your voice in his ear will reassure him.”

He agreed after a moment of rambling talk—how he’d have to talk to someone named Derek, how Mona needed to know—should he call her or would I? Before we hung up, I told him I was sending him a form to sign that would give his and his ex-wife’s consent to my talking to Chad’s doctors, and he agreed to that as well.

As a courtesy, I called Terry Finchley to let him know what I was doing. Like most sensible people, he’d gone home for the day, so I left a detailed message with the officer who answered his phone. By now, I was too hungry to think clearly: I hadn’t eaten since grabbing a sandwich in the Loop at two, and it was after eight now. I drove back downtown, to the south Loop, and went into the Golden Glow, Sal Barthele’s bar in the financial district.

Right after the closing bell, the Glow is packed with hysterical traders. This time of night, the atmosphere is mellower. Business travelers mingle with regulars from the high-rises and converted lofts along Printers Row, and everyone relaxes more in the light of Sal’s Tiffany table lamps.

Sal stood inside the mahogany horseshoe bar where most of her clients like to sit. Sal is tall, majestic in build, and her wardrobe doubles her impact. Like Olympia, Sal knows her business depends on showmanship. Showwomanship. Tonight she was eye-stopping in a shimmery black sweater and pants topped by a silver vest that hung to her calves. Her Afro was cropped close to her head, and earrings the size of chandeliers swept her shoulders.

She patted the hand of the man she’d been talking to and moved across the horseshoe to the empty side where I was sitting. “That was quite a to-do at Olympia’s place. I saw on the news that some stressed-out vet went off the rails and killed a woman.”

“That’s the word on the street.”

Sal brought out the Black Label bottle. “And you don’t agree?”

I shrugged. “The evidence, such as it is, points to the guy. His father says PTSD had seriously damaged him, but that it wasn’t in his nature to lie in wait for a woman he barely knew just to shoot her.”

“So you think he didn’t do it?”

She cocked her head, catching the earring on her left ear in her sweater. I reached over and untangled the metal from the threads.

“You should wear football pads with these. I am committed to a client who believes Chad didn’t do it. He hired me just to get the facts, but, underneath it all, he wants the facts to prove Chad’s innocent. So I’m working on that assumption.”

“You practice for half an hour a day, like the White Queen, so you can learn to believe in the impossible? What’s Olympia saying?”

“Olympia is behaving oddly. Do you know her?”

Sal shook her head. “We’re not old pals, or even lovers, if that’s what you want to know. I know her because we belong to an organization of women restaurateurs, and that’s a small group in Chicago. Olympia can be good fun, but she’s definitely pushed herself to the top by having the sharpest elbows in the heap. I mean, so have we all, in a way, but some of us, we put on velvet elbow pads so the suckers along the way don’t realize they’ve been hit until they get home and study their bruises.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I said, thinking of the pushing I’d had to do to get taken seriously as a detective.

I gave Sal a précis of my nights at the Club Gouge, my encounters with Nadia and Karen Buckley, and Olympia’s insistence that nothing was going on. Sal left me several times to check on other customers, but she sent a minion to the restaurant across the foyer—she supplies their liquor, they feed her customers—to get me some broiled halibut. When I’d finished the story, she shook her head.

“If Petra were working here and she brought you in without my permission, I’d be seeing red, white, and blue. I’d fire her ass and probably shoot yours, if I could get you in my sights. Your cousin is lucky Olympia hasn’t let her go.”

“But if someone in here were injured the way Karen Buckley was when she cut herself with that glass in her paintbrush, would you refuse to bring in the cops?”

“Devil’s advocate, Vic, but—Olympia’s got a naked woman onstage. Cops could get her written up for a million violations if they thought it was a dyke scene and they wanted to be ugly.”

I thought of Detective Finchley’s reaction to the Body Artist’s act and pulled a face. “When you put it that way, it’s hard to argue with you. But there are other things. This guy Rodney: Olympia pretended she didn’t know his name when Detective Finchley was talking to us. But he is there most nights. And he threatened me with violence. I’m wondering if the club is a front for him to run drugs.”

Sal’s brows contracted. “If—and that’s a mighty big if—Olympia is doing or dealing, get your cousin out of there ASAP. It’s a big chance to take, though. I wouldn’t think Olympia would risk her license and her property by letting a dealer operate so blatantly.”

“Maybe so, but there’s something going on there. You stop by one of these nights and you’ll see what I mean.” I picked at a loose corner of the label on the Scotch bottle. “You said you and Olympia weren’t old lovers, but what about her and Nadia Guaman? Or her and Karen Buckley? Were Nadia and Karen around the club scene, at least as far as you know?”

“I never heard of this Nadia, Vic. Karen Buckley, I’ve caught her act. It’s a startling piece of performance art for this town, the kind of thing you expect in San Francisco or New York, but not conservative Chitown. Gal like that could sleep with anyone for any reason. I mean, maybe she’s having an affair with Olympia, maybe she slept with the dead woman, but I’m guessing Buckley’s not a dyke. I wouldn’t even say she was bisexual. She just does what she wants when she wants with whoever she wants.”

An omnisexual. I wondered what that felt like, to do what you wanted when you wanted. Buckley hadn’t struck me as a very contented person, despite her yoga poses and deep breathing.

“That paintbrush with the glass—at the time, I wondered if the Artist or Olympia did it as a publicity stunt. I’m still not convinced they didn’t. But Nadia could have sabotaged it, or even Chad, I suppose.”

“Could be. Olympia’s been hurting along with the rest of the economy. If she thought it would bring in business, she’d cut her own wrists in front of a webcam.”

“Would you?”

Sal laughed. “Hell, no. I’m quite attached to my own good looks, thank you very much.”

I looked at her seriously. “You’re tough, Sal, and one of the strongest people I know. But you’re sane. What you just said about Olympia, you may have meant it as a joke but the very fact that such an image came to your mind means you feel what I’m talking about, that edgy, danger-daring quality.”

“You’d be the expert on that particular bit of human nature, Warshawski. You going to drink that whisky or just play spin the bottle all night?”

“Neither.” I handed Sal my AmEx card. She used to run a tab for me when she and I first opened our businesses twenty years ago, but those days have disappeared with the rest of the economy.

I took side streets going home. I was tired, and whisky at the end of a long day hadn’t been the smartest move before getting behind the wheel. Sal’s response to my questions about Olympia hadn’t done anything to dampen my enthusiasm for my case. That was because my enthusiasm level had been low to begin with. Chad with a Glock on the pillow next to him was a high hill to climb over, and I didn’t think I’d find an easy path on the other side.

I hadn’t actually seen any ballistic or forensic evidence in the case. In the morning, I’d check with the ME on that. In the meantime, before going to bed, I turned on my laptop and logged on to my subscription databases; they could spend the night hunting for information about Nadia Guaman. For good measure, I also asked about Olympia, Karen Buckley, and Chad Vishneski.

When the alarm woke me at six, I wanted to shoot it or scream, or something. I’ve never been much for early mornings, and when it is pitch-black, with the kind of cold that makes you feel your head is strapped inside iron bands, it takes every ounce of will not to pull the covers over your head and wait for spring.

“Bunter!” I cried. “Bunter, get that cappuccino machine fired up. And look smart about it!”

What a strange fantasy, to imagine someone who was dressed and ready to do your bidding at whatever hour it pleased you to bid him. So very obviously politically and socially incorrect, and yet how much I longed for my own Bunter. I flung the covers back and ran across the cold floor to the kitchen, where I put on my espresso maker, before tiptoeing to the bathroom.

I turned the thermostat up to sixty-eight before collecting the dogs from Mr. Contreras.

When I got home and thawed out, I sat at my laptop with my second espresso. LifeStory, an innocuous-sounding outfit, for whose detailed searches into everyone’s lives I pay eight grand a year, had sent me a profile of Nadia Guaman.

Guaman had gone to Columbia College in the south Loop after a childhood in Pilsen and high school at St. Teresa of Avila. Her father, Lazar, worked as a baggage handler up at O’Hare; her mother, Cristina, was a cashier at a Pilsen hardware store. They still lived in the bungalow on Twenty-first Place where Nadia had grown up.

Nadia had been the oldest of Lazar and Cristina’s three surviving children; another daughter, Alexandra, had died three years ago. The youngest, Clara, a high school senior, was also at St. Teresa. Their only son, Ernest, had been training as an electrical engineer when his motorcycle flipped him onto Cermak Road two years ago. His brain injuries left him unable to work.

I squeezed my eyes shut. The pain the Guamans lived with every day, one child already dead, their son terribly disabled, and now a daughter murdered—I couldn’t imagine how you survived such losses and kept any vestige of your sanity or humanity.

I returned to the screen and studied the financial details another of my subscription databases, the Monitor Project, had dredged up. Nadia’s bank account was modest; she had earned about forty thousand in a good year. Her rent on the one-bedroom on the fringe of Humboldt Park—the part where gangs and gentrifiers lived in uneasy proximity—ran just under nine hundred a month. She didn’t own a car. The computer hadn’t come upon any financial instruments, if such things still existed, in her name.