Body Work (2 page)

I looked down and saw Nadia’s blood on my jeans and sweater, on my hands. My scalp crawled: maybe her blood was in my hair.

“Someone shot a woman as she left the club,” I said.

“Was it—who was it?”

“I heard her called ‘Nadia,’” I said slowly, fixing Petra with a hard stare. “I don’t know if that’s her name, and I don’t know her last name. If the cops, or a reporter, ask you questions about what happened tonight, you can answer only truthfully about things you actually know and saw. You shouldn’t answer questions about things that are just guesses, because that could mislead the cops.”

“It would be best if you don’t consult the other witnesses,” a voice said.

A female officer had fought through the shouting, texting, Twittering chaos to appear at my side.

Under the club lights, I could see her face, narrow, with pronounced cheekbones, and lank black hair cut so short the ends only just appeared below her cap rim. I read her badge: E. Milkova. E. Milkova didn’t look much older than my cousin, too young to be a cop, too young to be telling me what to do. But—she had the badge. I let her guide me to the small stage at the back of the club, which the police had roped off with crime scene tape so they could use it for interrogations. She lifted the tape so I could crawl under, then dragged a couple of chairs from the nearest table. I reached a hand out and took one of them from her.

I was in that numb place you inhabit after you’ve been part of violence and death. It was hard to focus on Milkova’s questions. I gave her my name. I told her I’d heard gunshots and run to see what the problem was. I told her I didn’t know the dead woman.

“But you knew her name,” Milkova said.

“That was just from hearing someone call her ‘Nadia.’ I don’t know her last name.”

“Most people run away from gunshots.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You ran toward them.”

I still didn’t say anything, and she frowned at me. “Why?”

“Why, which?” I said.

“Why did you run toward danger?”

When I was younger and more insouciant, I would have quoted the great Philip Marlowe and said, “Trouble is my business,” but tonight I was cold and apprehensive. “I don’t know.”

“Did you see anyone in the club threaten Nadia tonight?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t seen anyone threaten her tonight. Earlier, that was another story, but my years as a public defender had taught me to answer only the question asked.

“Did you come here tonight because you thought there would be an attack on someone?”

“It’s a club. I came because I wanted to see the acts.”

“You’re a private investigator. They tell me you’ve been involved in a lot of high-profile investigations.”

Someone had ID’d me to the police. I wondered if it was the club’s owner, out of malice. “Thank you,” I said.

Milkova pushed her short hair back behind her ears, a nervous gesture—she wasn’t sure how to proceed. “But don’t you think it’s a strange coincidence, you being here the night someone got shot?”

“Cops have days off. Even doctors. And PIs have been known to take them, too.” I didn’t want to throw Petra to the wolves, and that’s what would happen if I said anything about wanting to keep an eye on my cousin’s workplace.

No one had bothered to turn off the Body Artist’s computer, and the plasma screens on the stage kept flashing images of flowers and jungle animals. It made a disturbing backdrop to the interrogation.

“Vic, what are you doing here?”

I looked around and saw Terry Finchley, a detective I’ve known for a long time. “Terry! I might ask you the same question.”

Finchley’s been out of the field for five or six years now, on the personal staff of my dad’s old protégé, Captain Bobby Mallory. I was surprised to see the Finch at an active homicide investigation.

He gave a wry smile. “Captain thought it was time I got my hands dirty again. And if you’re anything to judge by, they’re going to get mighty dirty indeed on this investigation.”

I looked again at my stained hands. I was beginning to feel twitchy, covered in Nadia’s blood. Terry climbed the shallow step to the stage and told Milkova to get him a chair.

“What have you learned, Liz?” Finchley asked Officer Milkova. So the
E
stood for Elizabeth.

“She’s not cooperating, sir. She won’t say how she knew the vic or why she was here, or anything.”

“Officer Milkova, I’ve told you I didn’t know the victim,” I said. “It makes me cranky when people don’t listen to me.”

“Pretty much any damn thing makes you cranky, Warshawski,” Finchley said. “But, out of curiosity, how did you get involved?”

“I was leaving the club, I heard gunshots. I ran across the parking lot and saw a woman on the ground. She was bleeding; I tried to block the wounds, so I didn’t take time to follow the shooters. But on the principle that no good deed is left unpunished, I’m being treated as though I had something to do with the dead woman’s murder.” My voice had risen to a shout.

“Vic, you’re exhausted. And I don’t blame you.” Terry’s tone was unusually gentle, the sharp planes in his ebony cheeks softening with empathy. He’d felt angry with me for a lot of years—maybe I was finally forgiven. His voice sharpened. “The techs are annoyed because you took evidence from the crime scene. And, for that, I not only don’t blame them but need you to turn it over to them.”

Okay, not forgiven. He was just doing good-bad cop all in one paragraph.

“It wasn’t evidence: these were my personal belongings that I dropped when I tried to administer first aid. I picked them up when Officer Milkova told me to leave the scene. I think your techs would be grateful to have extraneous items removed. Although I did abandon my coat.”

My throat contracted, and I looked involuntarily at my hand, my right hand, which had been pushing my coat against Nadia’s bleeding back. “You can keep the coat. I’ll never wear it again.”

Finchley paused briefly, and decided to let my handbag ride.

“Did you know the dead woman?”

“No.”

“Why were you here?”

“It’s a club. You can come in if you want a drink and want to see the show. I was doing both those things.”

Finchley sighed. “You know, anyone else in this town, I’d nod and take your name and phone number and urge you to wash the blood off and try to forget the horrors you witnessed. But V. I. Warshawski chooses to come to a club the one night in the year a woman gets murdered at their back door? You know what the captain’s going to ask when he hears that. Why were you here tonight?”

2

Performing Artist

W
hy had I been at Club Gouge the night Nadia Guaman took two bullets? Terry’s question kept running through my head as I drove home. The simple answer had to do with my cousin Petra. Except Petra had been in my life less than a year, and I was rapidly learning that there are no simple answers where she’s concerned.

In a way, that was unfair. It was really Jake Thibaut who first took me to Club Gouge, right after Thanksgiving. Jake’s a bass player who moved into my building last spring; we’ve been dating for a few months now. He plays with a contemporary chamber group, as well as the early-music group High Plainsong. Trish Walsh, a friend of his from High Plainsong, was doing a strange blend of medieval music with heavy metal lyrics, accompanying herself on electric hurdy-gurdy and lute.

When Trish Walsh, singing as the Raving Renaissance Raven, got a gig at Club Gouge, Jake put together a party to hear her. A number of his musician friends joined us, but he also invited Lotty Herschel and Max Loewenthal, along with my downstairs neighbor, Mr. Contreras.

My cousin Petra wheedled her way into the invitation. “The Raving Renaissance Raven!” Petra’s eyes glowed. “Jake, I didn’t realize how totally cool you are. I have the Raven’s Ravings on my iPod, but I’ve never caught her act!”

Club Gouge itself was one of a string of new nightspots that had taken over the abandoned warehouses under the Lake Street L, just west of downtown. Somehow, it had become the hippest scene on the strip, mostly because the owner, Olympia Koilada, apparently had a sixth sense for knowing when to book performers right before they became big.

The Raven, who was opening for an act billed as the Body Artist, sang and played for about forty minutes. Max was intrigued by her hurdy-gurdy, which was handmade of beautiful woods. The Raven had attached an amplifier to it, and the sound filled the club.

Jake and his musician friends didn’t like the distortion that the amp brought to the musical line. Between sets, they argued about whether their friend could have achieved a better effect with a local mike. Petra and Mr. Contreras argued about the lyrics: she thought the Raven’s songs were
awesome,
he found them disgusting.

It was Max who put my own reaction into words. “She perhaps never has had a wide audience in her early-music performance. Now she can show a young generation that even a gifted musician can shock, and thus build a market for herself.”

“That’s so
cynical,
” Petra protested. “She’s just being brave enough to put herself out there.”

“Where art and commerce intersect,” Jake said. “You make art, you sell it—to make a living, to get some validation—you make compromises with your art to make a living—why not go the whole way? Which isn’t to say she doesn’t believe as deeply in heavy metal as she does in early music.”

We had planned to leave before the Body Artist came onstage, but the lively arguments in our party—accompanied by the amount of beer and wine everyone was putting away—went on until the houselights were dimmed again for the evening’s main event.

Young men at tables around us gave catcalls and stomped their feet in anticipation. During the intermission, I’d been watching a table in the middle of the room. The five young men sitting there were all drinking heavily, but two in particular had been banging their beer bottles on the tabletop, demanding that the Body Artist get going. When the lights went down, theirs were the shrillest whistles in a noisy room.

We sat in the dark for perhaps thirty seconds. When the lights came back up, the Body Artist had appeared onstage.

She sat on a high stool, very still. She was naked except for an electron-sized thong, but cream-colored foundation covered her body, including her face. Only her brown hair, swept up from her neck in a jeweled clip, belonged to the world of the living.

The Artist was completely at ease, her bare legs crossed yoga style, her palms pressed together in front of her breasts. It was the audience that was disturbed: little rustlings, as people crossed and uncrossed legs or fiddled with zippers. Explosions of whispered laughter.

Behind the woman, photographs of body art appeared on a series of screens: a field of lilies grew out of a vagina, with the flowers blooming across the breasts. A face painted like a tiger, magnified so that each whisker, each stripe around the muzzle, was visible. The tiger was replaced by a jungle scene that covered the back: elephants trumpeted on the shoulder blades, a giraffe straddled the spinal column. The jungle was followed by a giant blue eye, lid lowered, on an abdomen, seeming to wink at the vulva below.

The slides changed in time to a sound track of Middle Eastern music. At the front of the stage, two figures clad in burkas gyrated in time to the music. I hadn’t noticed them at first, but the burkas somehow exaggerated the eroticism of the dancers’ movements and made them almost as disturbing as the body art itself.

I was as uncomfortable as the rest of the audience. The spotlight on the Artist’s breasts, the sense that this was a mannequin sitting there, not a woman, was both arousing and unpleasant, and I resented my body for responding to what my mind rejected. Jake Thibaut shifted away from me involuntarily, while Mr. Contreras said in a loud whisper, “This ain’t right. It just ain’t right!”

The Artist let the tension build until we were all ready to claw at each other, and then she lowered her hands, palms open toward us, in seeming invitation. “Art is in the hands of the maker, it’s in the eyes of the beholder, it’s in the air we breathe, the sunsets we admire, the dead bodies we wash and wrap in linens for burial. My body is my canvas, but tonight it’s yours as well. Tonight is a night to let your imagination run free and to paint, the way you used to paint in kindergarten before you started worrying what someone might say about your work, your art. I’m your canvas, your—bare—canvas.”

The five guys who’d been pounding their table, demanding the start of the Artist’s act, now whistled and called out. One of them shouted, “Take it all off, girl, take off that thong thing. Let’s see some pussy!”

I half turned to look at them. One of them was trying to signal for another round. All five were big guys, and the one shouting for the Body Artist to take off her thong had the kind of muscles you get from lifting heavy stuff all day long. The room was lit dimly, but I could make out a thicket of tattoos along his arms.

The woman on the stool smiled. Maybe she was used to drunken vulgarity. Maybe she enjoyed it.

“Can’t we get a drink here?” the tattooed man cried, slapping the table.

“Cool it, Chad,” one of his tablemates said.

I looked around for the bouncer and saw him at the back of the room, talking to the owner. They had their eye on the table and seemed to think the quintet didn’t need professional attention just yet, but as I watched, I saw the owner shake her head at the waitstaff: No drinks right now, at least not in Chad’s part of the room.

The Body Artist held out her arms to the tattooed man so that her breasts drooped forward, hanging like fruit above her thighs. “You and I both like body art, don’t we? Come on up, I won’t bite. Draw your heart’s desire on my body.”

“Go on, Chad,” his buddies urged him, “go for it, do it. Like the lady says, she don’t bite. Or at least not in front of all these other people she won’t.”

The group began to laugh and pound each other, and the tension eased out of the room.

The Body Artist picked up a brush from a tray of open paint cans on a cart beside her and began painting on her leg. For a moment, we forgot the strangeness of her nudity and watched as she picked up different brushes. She worked quickly, talking the whole time, about the body art convention she’d just attended, about gallery shows around town, about her childhood cat, Basta.