Body Work (15 page)

“It’s a natural reaction to murder,” Rivka protested. “I’m scared, too. It’s me who told her to bring Vesta.”

“Nice try, Rivulet,” the Body Artist said, “but it was my idea to add Vesta to the entourage.”

Vesta frowned. “Your entourage? Don’t put yourself on so high a pedestal you break your neck falling off, Buckley.”

I left, but Vesta followed me into the hall to ask if I thought Karen’s life was in actual danger.

I shook my head. “Right now, I’m so bewildered I don’t know which way to look let alone what I think. This is the first I heard of a connection between Nadia and the Artist, at least a connection through Nadia’s dead sister. Now I’m having to reorganize my ideas. Maybe Nadia was looking for everyone her sister slept with. Maybe she tracked down some prominent woman who didn’t want her sexuality coming to light. Maybe this unknown mystery woman murdered Allie, and then Nadia and all the fuss with Rodney and Chad and the Body Artist belongs to a completely different story, not the story of Nadia’s death.”

Vesta’s face showed warmth, trouble, intelligent concern. “Karen lives a life of great secrecy. Even though she has to be the center of attention, she almost never says anything personal about her past. The most I’ve ever heard her say was that she ran away from home when she was a teenager, but I don’t even know where her home was. When Chad Vishneski first started acting up, I thought maybe he was part of her childhood, coming after Karen, but she says she never saw him before.”

“And you believe her?”

Vesta’s wide mouth twisted. “I don’t know if I believe her when she says there’s ice on the lake, but she’s a lonely scared girl under all that paint. I know she’s maddening—at least, she maddens me—but I still don’t want to see her get hurt.”

“What about her relations with Alexandra Guaman? Do you think she genuinely forgot Alexandra’s name?”

Vesta smiled sadly. “Buckley’s universe pretty much begins and ends with her own self. The affair was brief. It ended with Buckley being angry with Guaman for not being willing to come out of the closet. And it all happened a long time ago. In another place.”

I smacked the wall in frustration. “Who else can I talk to? Who can tell me how Nadia Guaman found the Artist? Or what the two of them talked about or who else Alexandra might have slept with?”

“Perhaps she’s confided in Rivka, but I wouldn’t think so. She guards herself very carefully.” Vesta turned back to the dressing room but paused, her hand on the doorknob. “If someone is really trying to hurt Karen, what should we do?”

“Get a real bodyguard,” I said. “And, even so, she’s putting herself out in public. She’d be just about impossible to protect.”

Vesta’s worried gaze followed me back up the corridor. As I made my way through the crowd to the main exit, I saw Olympia had joined Rainier Cowles and his friends. She had her head flung back, laughing at something they were saying, putting all her considerable energy into wooing the group. If she was in financial trouble, as the scrap of conversation I’d overheard before the show indicated, maybe she thought this quartet of wealth could rescue her from Rodney.

I wondered again about Rodney’s codes. Billable hours, one of Cowles’s friends had suggested, but the numbers were too long for a single dollar transaction. Back before the lottery put the numbers racket out of business, I would have thought they had something to do with running numbers. Maybe it was something else just as simple. Although nothing around Olympia and Karen Buckley was simple.

15

Clueless in Chicago

L
ater, that January came back to me only as a blur of ice and darkness. Short nights trying to keep pace with people in the entertainment world, long days stumbling through snowdrifts with the dogs before blearing my sleep-deprived eyes in front of the computer. Every now and then, I’d connect with Jake Thibaut or Lotty and feel a moment of warmth and sanity, but all I really remember was my alarm calling me an hour before dawn to start the whole routine all over again.

It had been almost one a.m. before I got to bed the night I saw Rainier Cowles at Club Gouge. When my radio woke me a scant five hours later, it was with the cheery report that we were in the middle of a new snowstorm. And it was seventeen degrees at the lakefront.

If only I could have brought myself to stay married to Richard Yarborough, I could have huddled under the blankets in his Oak Brook mansion until the spring thaw. Of course, he would have wanted to huddle there with me, at least when he got back at midnight from entertaining his wallet-wielding clients. That thought got me to my feet and into the bathroom, surly but mobile.

Murray Ryerson phoned just as I returned from floundering through the drifts with the dogs.

“You lead an exciting life, Warshawski, but you’re too selfish to include your friends in your adventures.”

“Yep, it’s a round of nonstop thrills. You want to walk the dogs for me? Eat dinner with Mr. Contreras?”

“I take it back, I take it back,” he said hastily. “You’re not selfish; you’re noble. But you still could’ve called me after Nadia Guaman died. Now I’m picking up third-hand that the perp’s mom hired you.”

Murray is an investigative reporter for the
Herald-Star,
which used to be a great newspaper until, like papers all over America, they began cutting staff and pages to keep Wall Street happy. These days, the paper looks more like
My Weekly Reader
than a serious daily.

Murray is still a good reporter, but he has less and less incentive to keep digging since so many of his stories get killed. He has a TV gig through the
Star’s
Global Entertainment news channel, so I never worry about his starving to death, but he’s depressed a lot of the time and turns to me way too much for news.

“Your sources are as lazy as you are these days, Murray.” I was too tired to be tactful. “A: Chad Vishneski is not the perp. And B: It was his father who hired me.”

“I know I’m late to the party, but I hear you held the dying woman outside a strip club. Doesn’t seem like your kind of venue.”

“Go there yourself,” I said. “It’s a great show. I’m surprised you haven’t caught it yet.”

“Truth is, I’ve been on vacation. Buenos Aires in January beats Chicago to hell. I got home last night and saw that the Girl Detective had been super-busy in my absence. Can I buy you a drink tonight and hear all about it?”

“Golden Glow at eight, Murray, if you’ll do one little thing for me first.”

“Not the dogs or the old man . . .”

“You still have friends in the DMV and I don’t. If I give you a license plate, will you tell me who owns it?” I read off the number from the sedan that Rodney had driven last night.

It was a relief to off-load even one of my chores. When I finished changing for work and went back outside, I wished I’d given him something more challenging, like cleaning off my car and shoveling a path for it. It took twenty minutes to dig it out, but there wasn’t an easy way to take public transit to Nadia Guaman’s apartment. And if Nadia had managed to track down her dead sister’s lovers, then I needed to go through her apartment to see who else she might have been targeting.

Nadia had lived about a mile from my office. In the snow, it was a quiet neighborhood, but the telltale gang graffiti were present on the bus stops and overpasses.

Nadia’s apartment was in a well-kept courtyard building on one of the side streets just north of North Avenue. People were leaving for work, and I didn’t have to stand on the sidewalk long before a woman emerged. She held the door for me, her eyes on the weather outside, not on the face of a stranger entering.

In the entryway, away from the wind and blowing snow, the quiet fell on me like a blessing. I brushed the snow from my pant legs, stomped my feet clean, and climbed up to the third floor. Nadia had respectable locks but nothing out of the ordinary; even with my hands stiff from cold, I worked the tumblers in under ten minutes. I was lucky: I was just opening the door when a man came out of the apartment across the landing.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Miss Nadia isn’t at home, and she doesn’t live with anyone.”

“I’m a detective. You know Miss Nadia is dead—her family buried her yesterday. I want to look for evidence in her apartment.”

He shook his head. “You’re too late. Someone else was in here yesterday, and they said the same thing, that they were detectives looking for evidence. I saw them going in, and when I asked them for identification, they showed me their guns instead.”

“Did you call 911?”

“Why, when everyone knows the police themselves are operating burglary rings in this neighborhood? And you? Are you also a detective whose identification is a gun?”

I fished my wallet out of my briefcase and showed him the laminated copy of my PI license. “I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to uncover the reason for Miss Nadia’s murder.”

“They made an arrest. I saw it was some lovers’ quarrel.”

“They make wrongful arrests every day,” I said.

The neighbor nodded, and started an involved story about his sister’s second son. I went into Nadia’s place and found a light switch. The neighbor, still talking, followed me in, but he fell silent when he saw the chaos created by yesterday’s “detectives.” Whoever had been searching, whatever they’d been looking for, they’d done a thorough job of tossing books from shelves and DVDs from their cases.

Like every artist I’ve known, Nadia covered her walls with pictures, masks, unusual found objects. Most of these had been flung to the floor, the hooks and the dust outlines on the walls showing where they’d once hung.

“Have you been in here before?” I asked the neighbor.

“I didn’t take anything,” he said. “You can’t accuse me of that.”

I looked at him closely. “So you have been in here. That was you in here yesterday, not people pretending to be detectives.”

“That isn’t true!” he cried. “They really came. I only wondered why. And they hadn’t locked the door when they left.”

“So you locked up behind them? How did you have a key to Ms. Guaman’s dead bolt?”

“She gave it to me. In case there was an emergency. Or to feed her cat when she was out of town.”

I had a hard time picturing the shy, intense Nadia with a life that took her out of town. Although maybe she’d gone around the country hunting for her dead sister’s lovers. People do odd things when they’re gripped by an obsession.

I walked through the apartment’s three rooms. In the bedroom, I found the one piece of art left on the walls: a crucifix, where the head of Jesus had been replaced by the head of a girl taken from an old doll. The hair had been pulled from the doll’s head and wrapped around the hands of the crucified Christ. The image was profoundly disturbing, not what I would want to wake to.

I realized there were no signs of a cat, no litter box, no food or water dishes. “Where is the cat?”

“In my home. When I learned Miss Nadia was dead, I took in the cat. She called it Ixcuina, after some old goddess. A strange name for an animal, but it is a strange animal.”

I looked from the dismantled apartment to his flushed face. I didn’t believe that he hadn’t been here yesterday, but I also didn’t think he would have destroyed the apartment if he’d been inside surreptitiously.

“So, Mr.—?”

“Urbanke,” he muttered, defensive.

“So, Mr. Urbanke, as a frequent visitor to Ms. Guaman’s, can you tell me what yesterday’s fake detectives might have taken with them? Can you tell if any of her art is missing?”

He looked around slowly but shook his head. “It—I can’t tell, with everything on the floor like this. Maybe if I put the pictures back on the wall . . .”

We spent the next hour or so matching artwork to dim outlines. We worked our way through the apartment’s three rooms, but at the end, even though there were still some gaps on the walls, Urbanke couldn’t tell what was gone.

“Besides,” he added, “she was always bringing in something new, taking down something she was tired of. It was like a museum, her private museum, where the exhibits were always changing. The one thing I don’t see is her computer. She kept it here.”

He pointed at a worktable in the corner of the apartment’s big front room. The table was built for artists or drafters; one half could be lifted up and down at different angles, depending on how the person liked to work, while the other half remained flat. The flat space, Nadia’s office worktop, held bills and a scattered pile of sketches. The charger for the computer was still plugged into the wall, but of the computer itself there was no trace.

Urbanke stood next to me looking through Nadia’s sketches. “Who knows if this artwork is valuable. Those detectives didn’t take it, but her computer, definitely you could sell it for drugs.”

We walked out together. I left Mr. Urbanke to lock Nadia’s door since he had a key, no matter how he’d gotten hold of it. I wanted to know what he’d taken besides the cat Ixcuina. I wondered, too, why Lazar and Cristina Guaman hadn’t come, but maybe collecting their daughter’s belongings was too much for them right now. In the entryway, I stopped to look at the mailboxes. Urbanke’s first name was Julian.

I bumped across the slush-packed roads to my office. My leasemate and I contribute to a service that shovels the walks on our street, along with the parking area that we share with the other two buildings abutting it. I thankfully abandoned my car in the small lot and went into my office to catch up with my messages.

Now I felt bewildered, almost split in half, by the two lives I was looking at. Did Chad Vishneski and Nadia Guaman have anything at all in common? Had her killer trashed her apartment? And if her killer wasn’t Chad, why was he being brought into her story at all?

All I could do was plod forward with what little I had to go on. The beer cans, pillowcase, and guns I’d collected from Mona Vishneski’s were still in my car, and I had Chad’s girlie magazines in my briefcase.

I had taken these things yesterday for no good reason except trying to put on a show for the client and his ex-wife—the ghost of Sherlock Holmes dictates that the detective sees something in the detritus of everyday life overlooked by ordinary mortals.