Sara Paretsky - Body Work

“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.

Later, 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.