Sara Paretsky - Body Work

“I remember who came to my own sister’s funeral.”

“What did Nadia tell you about Alexandra’s death?”

At that question, Clara definitely looked more frightened than angry.

“I told you we can’t talk about Allie, so butt out!”

“All right, if we can’t talk about Allie, let’s talk about the Body Artist. How did Nadia find her?”

Clara looked at me but didn’t speak. One of the boys near her left the bus. I took his place.

“The club was full last night for the Artist’s program in your sister’s memory. Rainier Cowles brought a party; one of the men-”

Clara bounced to her feet and bent to stick her head in my face. “If you’re a pal of Rainier’s, you can leave me alone. Go back to Prince Rainier and suck his dick.”

The raw language was meant to shock. She stared at me for a few seconds, hoping for some sign that she’d hit home. When I only smiled sadly because her youth and pain were so poignant, she marched to the front of the bus, deliberately shoving people, as if vicariously punching me.

Her friends gave me the kind of frigid looks I remembered from my own adolescence. They sniffed as if smelling garbage and pointedly turned away from me, then started giggling loudly.

“It would be more to the point if you’d help Clara,” I said. “She’s frightened and lonely.”

This made them laugh more loudly.

The bus was stopped for the light at Nineteenth Street. I pulled out one of my business cards and scribbled on the back, “Rainier Cowles is not a friend or business associate of mine, and I would never repeat anything you told me. Call or text me when you feel up to talking.”

Enough kids had left the bus that it was easy for me to walk to the front and stand next to Clara. Her rigid posture, despite the weight of her backpack, told me she was very aware of my presence. I tucked the card into her parka pocket, but she refused to turn her head. I got off at the next stop and crossed the street to pick up a northbound bus.

As the winter twilight closed in on me, I rode buses and trains back to my office. My leasemate Tessa was hard at work, her half of the building flooded with spotlights and the flame of her blowtorch.

My own half was dark. I didn’t bother turning on a light, just took off my boots and sat with my feet curled up under me on the sofa to warm them, trying to decode Clara Guaman’s response to my questions.

Allie’s name is sacred.

Clara had been told never to discuss her sister. But why? Because the family was afraid Alexandra’s sexuality would leak out? It was hard to accept that a parent still thought of homosexuality as so shameful, but of course many people do.

Clara thought, or feared, I was connected to Rainier Cowles. Last night at Club Gouge, he had claimed he was there to make sure the club respected Nadia, but he and his friends had definitely felt they were on a boys’ night out and not at a wake.

Nor did I place any credence in Cowles’s casting himself as an honorary uncle; lawyers like him bill themselves at five hundred dollars an hour or more. They don’t waste their time on the families of baggage handlers. But if he wasn’t protecting the Guamans, what was he doing hanging around their lives? He was certainly protecting something, and that something had to be himself, or possibly a high-flying client.

Allie, Nadia had cried. She wanted her sister, not her mother, as she was dying. Or she knew she was dying and hoped Alexandra would be there to greet her in the country of the dead.

At length, I turned on a light and walked over to my computer.

“Find me Alexandra Guaman. Fetch, boy!”

The floor was numbingly cold underneath my panty hose. I rummaged in my back storeroom and found an old pair of running shoes to wear as slippers.

While LifeStory was searching out Alexandra Guaman’s details, I logged on to embodiedart.com, the Body Artist’s website. I wanted to look again at the paintings Nadia Guaman had made on the Artist to see if I could understand why they had roused Chad Vishneski so thoroughly.

Instead of the slide show I’d found on my previous visit to the site, the screen was blank except for the message “Out of respect for the dead, we have temporarily taken the site off-line.” I somehow had not expected so much sensitivity on Karen Buckley’s part. It forced me to think of her as less completely self-centered than she’d seemed.

I made myself a coffee and opened the report I’d ordered on Olympia, which had been sitting in my computer’s pending folder since the previous afternoon. The details of Olympia’s life were sketchy, as were her financials. She owned a loft apartment on the near North Side, in the stretch made newly hot by the destruction of the old Cabrini Green high-rises. She didn’t actually own it; she was paying a mortgage on it, as she was on a summer place near Michigan City. The debt on the two properties was around half a million.

Olympia didn’t own the building where she ran the club; that was held by a blind consortium managed through the Fort Dearborn Trust. I whistled through my teeth, trying to pick apart what I could of the club’s finances.

Olympia had been running Club Gouge for almost three years. Her background had been in restaurants and entertainment; she’d managed a restaurant at one of the metro-area casinos, then opened a nightclub of her own in west suburban Aurora. The Aurora Borealis proved so successful that she’d apparently decided she was ready for the big city. Three years ago, she’d sold her Aurora place and opened Club Gouge.

Olympia’s first two years at Club Gouge, even during the boom economy, had been disastrous. She’d run through almost a million dollars, maxed out her credit cards, and overdrawn her line of credit. And then, as the bottom fell out of the economy, just as everyone else in the country was losing their jobs and their homes, Olympia’s bills were wiped clean. There was no way of seeing who her godfather had been, but someone had put a million dollars in cash into her account.

Santa Claus. Rodney Claus. He was the person Olympia was trying to keep happy. He was the one she’d called her “insecurity.” But he wasn’t Olympia’s savior; he was the foot soldier sent to keep an eye on the investment.

Nadia had sought out the Body Artist because Buckley had known Allie. I couldn’t get away from that. But how had Nadia found out that her sister had known the Artist? If murder happened because of the Guaman family’s sensitivity over Allie’s sexuality, why was Nadia dead and not Karen Buckley?

I was making myself crazy with all these unprovable scenarios. It was close to five p.m. now. I’d planned on going home to walk the dogs and eat a bowl of pasta before meeting Murray, but I was too exhausted from my day in the snow. I called Mr. Contreras and asked him to let the dogs out. I was heading to the daybed in my back room, when my computer pinged to tell me one of my requested reports had arrived.

Alexandra Guaman. The file on her wasn’t very big, but when I opened it the first thing I saw was her high school yearbook picture. Her face, framed by curly dark hair, didn’t have a knife slash across the middle. Other than that, she looked like the portrait Nadia had drawn on the Body Artist’s back. That didn’t particularly startle me; I’d been expecting it. What jumped out at me was where she died. Alexandra Guaman had been working for a private security firm in Iraq. She’d been driving a truck on a supposedly safe route when an IED exploded and killed her.

Iprinted out the files on Alexandra Guaman and took them with me into the back room to read while I stretched out on my daybed. An hour later when I came to, the pages were strewn across me and the floor like dead leaves.