Body Work (11 page)

I moved slowly to my Mustang. This was its third winter in Chicago, and it didn’t look sleek at all. It looked like me, tired and even confused, since the front and rear axles seemed to be pointing in opposite directions.

11

The Mama and the Papa, in Concert

B
ack in my office, I found messages from Lotty and Freeman Carter. Lotty had called to say that her neurosurgeon, Dr. Rafael, had visited Chad at Cermak Hospital. Rafael had insisted on his removal to Beth Israel. Freeman’s message let me know he’d provided the court order to expedite Chad’s move—he should be at Beth Israel already.

I called Freeman to thank him, and tried to reach Lotty, both to thank her and to try to get an idea about Chad’s health. Unfortunately, she wasn’t available, and the charge nurse had a scrupulous sense of protocol: I wasn’t part of the family or one of the lawyers; I didn’t get any news. John Vishneski’s phone was turned off; that probably meant he was with his son in the ICU. I asked him to call me and opened the case file I’d started on Chad.

I added Rainier Cowles’s name to the Vishneski file, but the name sounded so bogus I did a LexisNexis check on him. He was a partner at Palmer & Statten, one of the globe’s megafirms whose Chicago presence occupied eight floors of a Wacker Drive high-rise.

Cowles had grown up in the northwest suburbs and was respectably educated, with a BA from Michigan and his JD/MBA from Penn. He’d joined Palmer & Statten right after passing the bar, and during the next twenty years had moved steadily up the path to partner. The Palmer & Statten website listed his particular expertise as corporate litigation, with a specialty in multinationals.

I didn’t find a record of a name change, but it still seemed incredible that parents had burdened their child with such a name. “Prince Rainier,” I murmured to the computer. He’d probably been called that a ton in his subdivision growing up. Maybe it’s why he’d put on the carapace of corporate success. Imposing trial presence, important car. But he must have a soft center, or he wouldn’t be involved with the hard-luck Guamans. Or maybe he’d represented them in litigation over Ernie’s injuries.

None of this speculation was helping me look at Chad’s relationship with Nadia.

“The client is the boss. His son is innocent. Get to work proving it,” I said aloud in my sternest voice and phoned Mona Vishneski.

Mona had left her mother’s as soon as she learned of her son’s arrest, and was now back in Chicago. She was staying with her ex-husband in Wrigleyville, which John hadn’t bothered to tell me. She agreed to meet me for a cup of tea at Lilith’s, a little café on Southport near John’s apartment, around five.

The snow had started again. Lilith’s was six blocks from my apartment. With the ice and snow packed along the curbs making street parking a challenge, it was better to put my car in my building’s alley garage and walk. I carried my laptop with me in a waterproof case.

It was already dark by the time I got to the café. The warmth and lights inside seemed feeble against the wind whipping snow pellets against the windows. I ordered a double macchiato and found a table as far from the door as possible.

While I waited for Mona, I started to download the reports LifeStory and the Monitor Project had given me on Olympia, Karen Buckley, and on Chad himself. I was especially curious about Karen, after her performance at Nadia’s funeral.

The most important question—who had known whom and how—wasn’t one the computer could answer reliably, although I took a stab at the question through MySpace and Facebook. Olympia had a Facebook page, but you had to have her permission to see any details, such as her cyberfriends. Chad had a MySpace page, but none of the women were among his “friends.” I couldn’t find Karen Buckley on any of the social networks.

Fishing around to see where Karen’s and Nadia’s lives might have intersected, I checked to see if they had gone to art school together. I already had looked up Nadia’s details—her training at Columbia College in the south Loop, her job at a big design firm, followed by precarious freelancing after she was laid off—but I couldn’t find any information on Karen Buckley. A quick search revealed hundreds of Karen Buckleys—singers, quilters, doctors, lawyers—across the country, but only four dozen Karen Buckleys or K. Buckleys in our four-state area. About six of those seemed to match the Body Artist’s race and age. None of them had a findable history as an artist.

Unlike most artists, who are at pains to tell you where they’ve trained, where they’ve held shows, what museums own their work, Karen’s history wasn’t just sketchy, it was missing altogether. She didn’t list her education or her shows on the
embodiedart.com
website. She didn’t offer any personal information at all.

I needed her Social Security number, but I couldn’t find a home address for her, let alone a credit history that might yield information on her background. I went back to
embodiedart.com
. If you had to pay her for her work, she must have a bank account or a credit card somewhere, but she took payment only through PayPal, which meant she could be collecting the money under another name, maybe even in another state.

I sat back in my chair. Here was a woman who was aggressive in exposing herself before audiences and yet she’d left no trail in our hyper-documented age. I could imagine a fear of stalkers might require total anonymity in her life these days, but it was strange that someone so purposefully self-exposing left no public trace of her private life.

I transferred addresses for the handful of K. Buckleys who might be the Body Artist. I could do old-fashioned legwork, see if any of them had a home studio, but I wasn’t expecting to find her.

I was so lost in thought, and files, that I didn’t notice Mona Vishneski until she appeared at my table and hesitantly said my name.

“Ms. Vishneski!” I sprang to my feet.

She was a lost-looking woman around my age, her clothes hanging on her, as if worry over her son had made her lose a dress size overnight. Close up, I could see how rough her skin was; she didn’t seem to have washed her face or combed her hair since Chad’s arrest. She took off her gloves and then looked at them puzzled, trying to figure out what they were. She was carrying a scuffed leather handbag, big enough to hold a computer and a change of clothes. She finally stuck her gloves into one of its side pockets.

“John told me he hired you to clear Chad’s name. I used to work with detectives back when I was managing a building for Mercurio. We’d hire them to find out where people had skipped off to without paying their rent, but I don’t remember we ever hired you.”

I agreed that I’d never worked for Mercurio. Companies that size tend to use big agencies, not solo ops like me.

“But, Ms. Vishneski, your husband—ex-husband—hired me to find out what happened Friday night at Club Gouge. You both need to understand, however painful it is to think about, that the evidence points to your son having shot Nadia Guaman.”

“If you think he’s guilty, then I don’t think we should be working with you.” Her eyes were bright with emotion.

I kept my voice level. “I’m committed to approaching this situation with an open mind. But I can’t ignore evidence, and the evidence is that the murder weapon was found next to Chad. Another thing: I was present myself for two extremely angry encounters between your son and Nadia Guaman. I plan to look into their relationship, to see what lay behind his rage. But if you’d be more comfortable working with one of the detectives you used to know at Mercurio, I can respect that. If Mr. Vishneski agrees, then we’ll void the contract he signed yesterday and return his retainer. I would ask you to pay the fee my lawyer is charging for providing the court order we needed to move Chad from the prison hospital to Beth Israel.”

Mona Vishneski shifted her weight from foot to foot, uncomfortable at being put on the spot.

“Do you want to think about it overnight?” I suggested.

“Oh, I guess we should go ahead, if we’re going to do anything at all.” Her shoulders sagged again as the anger went out of her. “John said you’ve done criminal work and that you come highly recommended. It’s not that I’m not grateful for you getting a real hospital and good doctors for Chad. Just don’t expect me to agree that my son shot a woman, when I know he never could have.”

Clients who blow hot and cold, they’re always the most annoying to work with. One day they want evidence at any cost, the next, they don’t think you’re up to the job. Maybe a smart detective would have voided the contract just to keep from being squeezed between a divorced couple. Instead, I bought Mona Vishneski a drink—ginseng peppermint tea—and ordered another macchiato for myself.

“Tell me about Chad’s guns,” I said when we were finally both sitting. “John says you wouldn’t let him keep them in your apartment, but he did, anyway, didn’t he?”

For a moment, her anger spurted up again, but then she made a little fluttery gesture like a butterfly settling down. “I didn’t like it, but where else could he keep them? He had two, which I hated, even though everyone in construction carries, even John. But you look at guns and you think of death. I asked Chad how he could stand having a gun anywhere near him after all the death he’d seen in Iraq, and he’d just say, ‘No one’s ever going to sneak up on me again.’ Like the way suicide attackers and them sneak up on our troops in Iraq. Chad lost so many buddies there. It was just a miracle he didn’t get killed himself that time his whole unit died around him.” Like her ex-husband, she pronounced the country
I
-raq.

“I used to go to mass every week, thanking God for sparing me what so many other mothers had to bear, their sons dead or missing arms and legs. But watching how Chad’s been since he got home—and now this—maybe I’m not so lucky. Maybe we’d all be better off if he had lost his legs instead of his mind.”

“Mona!” a voice said. “How can you talk like that?”

It was John Vishneski. Mona and I had been so intent on each other that we hadn’t noticed him come into the café.

“John!” Mona cried. “I told you I wanted to see this detective of yours for myself.”

John gave the smile that seemed to crack his cheeks. I looked away, it was so painful to watch.

“I got too lonely sitting around the hospital,” he said, “looking at Chad hooked up to all those machines. That Dr. Herschel, she’s something, isn’t she? The way she made those county so-and-sos stand up and salute, it’s the one good thing I’ve seen this week. Mona, you want more tea? Do I order at the counter?”

“The Glock,” I said to Mona while John was ordering drinks. “Was that one of Chad’s guns?”

“How should I know? I told you, I hate them, I don’t know one from another. You should ask those Army friends of his. They probably know.”

“Ask his Army buddies what?” John Vishneski said, pulling up a chair. “About his guns? Chad didn’t own—”

“John, what’s the point in lying?” Mona asked. “When it’s you who used to take him to target practice?”

“It’s not a crime, is it, to teach your own son how to handle a gun?” Vishneski cried.

“You know the Glock is his, and you can’t bring yourself to acknowledge it,” I said in a flat voice.

Vishneski reached for his cigarettes, as he seemed to do any time he didn’t want to talk about something. Studying the pack, not me, he said, “Not know, not for sure. Before he shipped out, he had two, a Beretta and a Smith and Wesson. I kept them while he was overseas, but when he came home and I saw how . . . how . . . well, how he was, I worried he might hurt himself, so I told him there’d been a break-in, someone had stole those guns out of my place. But I’m pretty sure he went down to Indiana, picked up something down there. You can, you know—no one even wants to see your driver’s license. So maybe he does own a Baby Glock, how do I know?”

The hair at the nape of my neck prickled. “Mr. Vishneski, everything you’re saying makes Chad sound unstable. Why do you think he didn’t kill Nadia Guaman?”

Vishneski sucked in a breath as if it were a lungful of smoke. “Shit, Ms. Warshawski—sorry, ladies—you have to know Chad. He might have put a bullet through his own self to put an end to his nightmares, but he wouldn’t go out killing some girl in an alley. Or anywhere else. He just wouldn’t. He wasn’t that kind of boy.”

Mona nodded vigorously: Chad wasn’t that kind of boy.

None of us spoke. I listened to the espresso machine hiss and to the snow sting the window. The bad weather, the awful economy, they had already pushed my spirits low without adding an unstable Iraq vet to the mix. I wanted to get up and walk away, but the Vishneskis were both looking at me as if I were all that tethered them to the planet.

“Okay,” I finally summoned the energy to speak. “Chad’s friends that he hung around with since getting home, how do I get in touch with them? Mr. Vishneski said there’s one called Marty, another one named Tim something.”

“Tim Radke,” Mona said. “Marty, I don’t know what his last name is. Probably they’re on the speed dial on Chad’s phone.”

Chad’s phone was still at her apartment. When the cops rushed him to the hospital Saturday morning, they’d left everything behind—phone, wallet—everything but his Army dog tags and his field jacket. He’d been wearing those.

“That’s why I went to stay at John’s,” Mona said. “It got me down too much, all his stuff, and then the police, they broke down the door when they came to get him. Why did they have to do that? And it’s me that has to pay to repair it. The city sure won’t! I should have been here instead of in Arizona. My ma, she’s got nurses around her, she only made me come down so she could run me around. I should have been here taking care of Chad. Shouldn’t have expected that John would know how to keep him out of trouble.”

“Mona!” Vishneski expostulated.

I interrupted before they could get into the kind of argument that probably led to their divorce all those years ago: she said, he didn’t do, back and forth. We agreed, all three of us, to go to her apartment, where I could collect the phone and study Chad’s habitat to see if he’d left any clues about his life that could prove his innocence.