Sara Paretsky - Body Work

Speculation is the detective’s enemy. Facts. I needed facts about the Guamans and about the Body Artist.

I tried to put together a list of questions about the Artist. Vesta and Rivka believed she’d run away from home as a teen. Maybe she’d changed her name to protect herself from a violent father/brother/lover. I looked for legal name changes to Karen Buckley during the past decade but drew another blank.

She seemed to think that her performances gave her power: You can get this close, as close as my skin, but you can’t get inside me. I control the boundaries. I imagined standing naked in front of an audience, and my skin crawled. It felt like a horrible kind of exposure. I flung my pen down. I couldn’t find anything out about Karen’s past, so I needed to concentrate on what I knew about her in the present.

Her relationship with Olympia, who had financial woes, that bore more exploration. Somehow, Olympia had established a modicum of control over the Body Artist. And the Artist was a woman who definitely liked to be in control of her relationships.

The biggest questions had to do with the outbursts Nadia, or Nadia’s paintings, had provoked in Chad Vishneski. And neither the Artist nor Nadia’s family was giving me any insight into what that was about. Maybe Chad had written his buddies or his parents explaining why Nadia’s paintings had gotten so deeply under his skin.

I called the client. John Vishneski was in the Mercurio office on Huron going over drawings; no one was out on a building in this weather, of course. I asked if Chad had said anything to him about Nadia or the Body Artist.

“I never heard of those two women until they came and arrested Chad. I guess he thought the idea of a club like that would shock me, or disgust me. Kids have such funny ideas about parents, don’t they? Like, we don’t have basic human feelings or needs or something. I expect I was the same way about my old man.”

I thought of my own mother, how painful I’d found it to think she might have the sexual impulses common to us all. Parents aren’t supposed to operate in the world of desire. Perhaps that’s the only way children can grow up feeling safe.

“What did Chad do for e-mail? His phone? A computer?”

“Computer, I guess. His phone-he’s like all the kids his age-mostly he texts. He has a Lenovo ThinkPad; I bought it for him when he first shipped out. He took it all over Iraq with him. He even kept a blog, the way so many folks do these days.”

“The computer isn’t at your wife’s place… your ex-wife’s. Do you have it?”

I knew the answer would be no before he gave it. Mona hadn’t imagined seeing her son’s cell phone; someone had been in the apartment ahead of us the previous afternoon. Someone had helped themselves to Chad’s phone and his laptop.

I hung up. I was starting to feel as if I were in one of those dreams where you are running from some menace you can’t see and the whole time the menace is shutting every door you turn to. Someone with a lot of organizational talent was running faster than me, cutting in ahead of me at every exit.

I looked at my hands. “I am a street fighter,” I said. “No one can stop me.” Trouble was, I didn’t really believe it.

Ihad to go downtown for a meeting, a routine inquiry where I’d been able to do all the work without any shadowy menaces blocking my path. I pulled my documents together, put on some makeup and my dressy boots, and went back out into the bracing winter air. The snow had stopped after a mere four inches-nothing, really, to a third-degree street fighter.

As I rode the L down to the Loop, I knew I needed to talk to the Guamans. I’d only been on the case for two days, but it had been five days since Nadia had died. It was strange that they hadn’t sought me out, the woman who’d been with their daughter when she died. I decided to go over to Pilsen to try to speak with Cristina Guaman at the hardware store where LifeStory told me she worked.

As soon as my Loop meeting ended, I took the L west and south to Damen and Cermak and walked the three blocks to the hardware store ( ¡Sopladores de nieve! ¡Palas! ¡Todo para el invierno! ¡Se habla inglés! ).

The placard in the window had advertised “Everything for Winter,” but the store really had everything period. Snow shovels, ice melt, mittens, space heaters, fans, kitchen utensils, TVs, microwaves, coloring books. It was a small space, but not only was every surface covered, long hooks dangling from the ceiling held dried tomatoes and garlic, DVDs, dog collars, trusses.

The place wasn’t well lit, and I didn’t see Cristina Guaman at first, but after stumbling against a rack full of hard hats I found her near the back at a computer. Someone was talking to her in Spanish, but the conversation was apparently desultory because Cristina only nodded her head while she typed.

I stood next to the woman who was speaking to her, waiting for a lull, but the woman saw I was a stranger, perhaps a customer, and asked in Spanish if I needed help.

“I need a word with Ms. Guaman,” I said, hoping she really did know English. My Spanish is pretty rudimentary.

The woman moved away from the counter, and Cristina Guaman stopped typing to look at me. “Yes?” she said. “What do you need?”

I pulled one of my cards out of my bag.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you at work, Ms. Guaman, but I’m the woman who was with your daughter when she died. Is there a place where we could talk?”

“We can talk here.”

She folded her hands on top of the keyboard, not the gesture of a woman at ease, but to create a barrier between herself and me.

“I don’t want to broadcast your family’s business to the whole store. Isn’t there someplace private?”

“My family has no business that the whole world cannot attend to. Are you the owner of that terrible place, that club where women take off their clothes so men can draw nasty pictures on their bodies?”

I wondered if family ties would make her unbend, so I explained my role as Petra’s cousin, my desire to protect her, my observation of Nadia and Nadia’s anguish or anger. “She kept drawing a face, the face of a beautiful young woman with short curly hair, and then she would slash a line through it. I’m wondering if that might have been her sister.”

“Clara’s hair is long and it is almost blond.” Cristina Guaman’s eyes were wary.

“Alexandra. Do you have a photograph of her? It was her name Nadia was calling as she died.”

At that, Cristina sucked in a breath. “Alexandra has been dead a long time. Nadia couldn’t let her rest in peace.”

“So she was painting Alexandra’s face?”

“I have no desire to know what pictures Nadia might be painting on a woman’s body. She knew how strongly I felt-her father, too-about her going to that place.”

“When did you last talk to her?”

Cristina Guaman looked around to see if anyone was in earshot. “Many months went by. Nadia was angry, always, for the last two years, so angry she would not speak to her father or me. My heart is broken at her death, but she cut herself away from her family. She moved into that apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, she stayed away from mass. Even though I knew she would pay no attention to my words, I had to call her when she started making a spectacle of herself in that degenerate club.”

I asked how she had learned Nadia was painting on the Body Artist, but of course people had been using their phones to take video footage of the performances. These inevitably ended up skipping around the World Wide Web, where more than one neighbor had shown them to the Guamans.

“The picture was poor, the light was bad, but everyone could see that woman sitting there naked, showing off her breasts, and people could easily see Nadia’s face. Can you imagine how you would feel when your daughter has flaunted herself in public for the whole world to see? I had to call her. I had to try to tell her how very worried I was to see her in such a corrupt place.”