Sara Paretsky - Body Work

“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.