Sara Paretsky - Body Work

When I reached my office, a car was parked in front, engine running. My first thought was the cops, but this was a grime-crusted Corolla with a lot of years under its hood. As I typed in the code on my door keypad, the driver turned off the engine and climbed out of the car. All he had on against the cold was a worn khaki field jacket, unzipped.

“You the detective?” He pitched a cigarette butt into the gutter as he limped across the sidewalk.

“I’m V. I. Warshawski. And, yes, I’m a detective. What can I do for you, Mr.-?”

“Vishneski. I’m John Vishneski.” His face was lined and scarred, and his voice was a soft, tired rumble.

I paused, with my hand on the doorknob. “You’re related to Chad Vishneski?”

“His dad.” He shook his head, as if the relationship were new, or surprising to him. “Yes, I’m his dad.”

I shoved the door open-it always sticks more in the winter-and held it for Chad’s father. When he got inside, Vishneski carefully wiped his boots on the hallway mat three or four times, the gesture of a man who wasn’t sure he was welcome and wanted to minimize any evidence he’d been there.

I directed Vishneski to the couch in the client alcove and switched on the coffee machine in the back. While I turned on lights and put my coat and case away, Vishneski sat completely still, looking at nothing in particular. The cold didn’t seem to bother him, even though my office was barely sixty degrees. It’s such a barn of a place, I keep the thermostat turned low on weekends. I brought a space heater over from my desk, and sat down myself.

“I’m sorry for the trouble you’re going through, Mr. Vishneski.”

“Yep. It’s a hard time.” He made it a statement, not a complaint.

A minute or so went by when he didn’t say anything else. A lot of people have trouble getting to the point when they’re in the detective’s office. Like visiting the doctor: you have this lump in your breast, but now you’re in the office, you don’t want to ask, you don’t want to be told.

“Is Chad your only child?” I asked, just as a way to prod him into speaking.

“My only one, and I didn’t even know he was in trouble, not until one of the gals in the office called me Saturday night. My own boy, and I didn’t know. That’s what that I -raq war did, turned him into a boy who couldn’t call his old man when he was in trouble.”

“Would he have, before the war?”

He nodded. “We used to talk every day, even when he was off at Grand Valley State. Even when he first deployed. But then the war got to him. The violence. He saw his whole unit die around him during his third deployment, and that did him in. It was like he blamed me, in a way.”

“Blamed you?”

“I thought a lot about this,” he said. “I think he felt I should have protected him. I was his dad, see, and he always, oh, looked up to me. At least when he was small. I worked construction my whole life, although I’m a project manager now, for Mercurio. I was stronger than most guys, and Chad, he thought I could always take care of trouble around him, or me, and I always thought so, too. Until he went off to I-raq, where no one could protect him. It’s in my dreams all the time, that I should have saved him from seeing what he had to see. I couldn’t save him, and he couldn’t talk to me anymore.”

He stuck a hand reflexively inside his jacket pocket, then looked a question.

“You’re right,” I said. “This is a no-smoking zone.”

“Smoking in the cold outdoors-don’t know why pneumonia hasn’t carried me off by now.” He ran his fingers through his graying hair. “They’re holding my boy in a prison hospital ward. Do you know it?”

“Cermak Hospital. I’ve been there.”

“Terrible place. Terrible, terrible place. Just getting in to see my own boy, they searched me. I had to take off all my clothes just to see my son.”

Strip searching, it’s so humiliating. When you’re worried about your child, the violation is even more acute.

“My boy is in intensive care,” Vishneski was continuing. “He’s unconscious, but they got him chained to the bed. How can anyone get well if they’re chained to the bed like that? I begged them, Let me move him to a real hospital where he can get real care, but the judge, he set the bail at seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. If I can’t pay the bail, Chad has to stay there in the jail hospital.”

I could hear my office phone begin to ring behind the partition. Monday morning: everyone wanted me faster than yesterday.

“Why did you come to me, Mr. Vishneski?”

He rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “They told me you were at this nightclub, this Club Gouge. They told me maybe you saw what happened. Maybe you can explain what that dead gal did to Chad to get him so upset.”

“Who’s ‘they,’ Mr. Vishneski?”

“Oh. Secretary in the office, the gal who called to tell me about Chad. She read the whole story, going back to before Christmas, she came up with your name. She says you were in the club the first time Chad, well, started carrying on. She looked you up on the computer, read about your work. She told me you have a good reputation, you’re honest, you do a good job.”

“I do my best, but I’m not sure I can explain what happened between your son and Nadia Guaman. Was there something specific you wanted to know?” I sat quietly, hands easy at my sides, letting the calls roll over to my answering service.

“The woman who owns the club, she’s kind of a hard case, isn’t she? She says Chad kept attacking this Nadia whenever she showed up. Is this true?”

“You talked to Olympia?” I was puzzled. Surely she wouldn’t have been in bond court or at the prison hospital.

“I went over to her club yesterday afternoon after I went to see Chad. I wanted to see what kind of a place it was. The cops shut it down while they did their investigating, if that’s what you call it, but she was there, working on accounts or something. Like I said, I’m a project manager, at least I was until this economy destroyed the construction industry. You meet tough women in construction-well, they have to be to survive in that world-but this Olympia, she’d chew up my crew chief for dinner and spit him out and not think twice about it! She claims Chad tried to assault the dead gal. She says after someone broke it up, Chad must’ve lain in wait so he could shoot her. Is any of that true?”

I hate it when people ask questions for which there’s no happy answer. “I was at the club two times when both Chad and Nadia were there, and I’m afraid that both times Chad boiled over when Nadia did her drawings. The first time, he tried to jump her onstage, and the bouncer did throw him out. I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Vishneski: I heard a snippet of a conversation between your son and Nadia in the parking lot. Each was accusing the other of spying. My first reaction was that it was an ugly divorce case. But if they weren’t lovers, if they hadn’t met outside the club, what was that about?”

“I don’t know.” He stuck his hand inside his jacket pocket again and then remembered we weren’t smoking in here. “One of his buddies called me, says at the time that gal was being murdered, Chad and them were all in a bar watching a Hawks game, and when it ended, Chad announced he didn’t feel well, he was going home. Going back to my ex’s, that meant.”

“Did any of them actually see him go home?”

Vishneski hunched a shoulder. “This one friend, he dropped Chad off. But when I told the cops that, they said even if Chad watched the game, it ended an hour before that woman was shot, plenty of time for him to pretend to be sick and get over to the club to lie in wait for her.”