Sara Paretsky - Body Work

“We just finished rehearsing, and I saw your light,” he said. “You interested in a nightcap?”

“I’m interested in someone with long, delicate fingers and a surgeon’s deft touch.”

I held out my hand, which was bleeding pretty heavily from my bungled probing.

“Vic! Blood makes me throw up.”

I thought he was joking, but his face actually did have a greenish sheen.

“I’ll rinse it off,” I said, “if you’ll take this splinter out for me. Please! I’ll even open my last bottle of Torgiano for you.”

He made a face but took the tweezers from me.

“You go rinse this off until it’s not bleeding,” he said, “or you’ll be removing lasagna from it along with the blood.”

When I got myself cleaned up, he clamped my hand between his knees as if it were a cello. He was sweating, but he had the chip out fairly fast. He turned his head while I wrapped the hand in a towel.

“What is this?” He held the chip under the light.

“A metal fragment. A palette knife exploded in my hand.”

“A palette… No, don’t explain. I’m happier not knowing. And I don’t know about you, but I need something stronger than red wine right now.”

I got out a bottle of Longrow. It was a small-batch single malt that my most important client, Darraugh Graham, had brought me from Edinburgh. It went down like liquid gold. By the time I’d had my second glass and followed Jake into my bedroom, I’d almost forgotten the throbbing in my hand.

When my cell phone rang four hours later, at first I incorporated it into my sleep. I was in Kiev, and the Body Artist, painted like a Russian Easter egg, was madly pulling ropes to ring church bells all across the city. The ringing stopped, then started again almost at once.

“I know the Bottesini,” Jake muttered. “I don’t have to rehearse it.”

“Neither do I,” I said, but I got up and found my phone, in the pocket of the jeans I’d dropped on the floor last night.

My call log showed the same person had called three times. The phone was chirruping to tell me I had new voice mail, new text messages. r u there? ansir!

My head was too blurry from a short night on top of a gun battle to call back. I stumbled, shivering, down the hall to the bathroom. Seven in the morning, still dark. I didn’t think winter would ever end.

I stood under the shower, washing sleep out of my face, while my phone rang again from the towel shelf. On the caller’s fifth try, I answered before it rolled over to voice mail.

“Who is this?” It was a husky whisper.

My least favorite conversational gambit. “V. I. Warshawski. Who is this?”

“I… Clara. I’m supposed to be at mass in fifteen minutes. I need to see you. There’s a coffee shop on Blue Island a block from the school.”

A truck or bus roaring by made it hard to hear her; I shouted over the noise that I’d be there in twenty minutes. Jake didn’t wake up as I banged drawers and doors open and shut, pulling on sweaters, jeans, my practical heavy boots. For a perverse moment, I wanted to yank the blankets off, freeze his toes, force him to wake up, but he’d done surgery on me that turned him green, he’d spent the night, he’d made me feel less alone and more beautiful than I usually do.

My right hand was swollen, the palm a purply brown. When I couldn’t get a glove over it, I stuffed it into an oven mitt, grabbed my coat and gun, and ran down the back stairs to the alley, where I’d parked last night. Once I was in the car, I put the Smith & Wesson on the seat, under my coat, wondering how well I’d aim if I had to shoot left-handed.

Lake Shore Drive is a parking lot this time of day, but the side streets weren’t much better-parents dropping kids off at school blocked most of the roads. It took half an hour to reach the coffee shop, a franchise of one of the big chains, on Blue Island. I didn’t see Clara Guaman at first and thought she’d gotten fed up with waiting. However, while I stood in line for the espresso I urgently needed, Clara emerged from the shadows at the back.

“I thought you’d never get here. I have to get to class before they miss me.”

“I’ll walk up with you. We can talk on the way.”

“No! I don’t want anyone to see you with me. Come over here where it’s dark.”

She headed toward the back, to an alcove near the doors to the toilets. I collected my drink and joined her. This was the only coffee shop close to her school, and it was filled with kids on their way to class, so I didn’t think she’d be particularly anonymous. At least so far no one had called out to her.

Once we were in the alcove, she couldn’t seem to get to the point. She fiddled with her phone and kept peering around the corner to see who was standing in line.

“What’s going on, Clara?” I tried to keep irritability out of my voice, but my short night made me not only foggy but grumpy.

“Did you go to-did you ask-were you talking about Allie with Prince Rainier?”

“No,” I said. “I went up to Tintrey’s headquarters in Northfield yesterday. Did Rainier come around?”

Like so many chains, this place had overheated the milk for the cappuccino, which ruins the taste. Caffeine is caffeine, though. I poured some into the lid to cool and swallowed it, wincing at the bitterness.

“Did you go up there to spy on Allie? Why can’t you let her and Nadia rest in peace?”

“The soldier who’s accused of shooting Nadia lost his whole unit in Iraq. I was trying to find out if Alexandra had died in the same attack.”

“Why do you care?” she said in a fierce whisper.

“I’m trying to understand where Nadia and Chad Vishneski’s lives connected. It seemed to me that Iraq was a place-”

“Leave Allie alone. What don’t you understand about that?”

“Everything. Why can’t I talk about Alexandra?”

“Because we’re not supposed to.” Clara peered around again. “She did something awful in Iraq. The company won’t publish it as long as we don’t talk about her. But if we do, they’ll put it online. They’ll put it everywhere.”

“The company? Tintrey?” When she nodded, I asked, “What did she do?”

“I don’t know! Mamá and Papi won’t tell me. Ernest, he knew, but look at him now. He doesn’t remember, he just starts waving his arms and saying Allie is a dove with Jesus when I ask him.”

“This doesn’t make sense.” I tried to force my sleep-deprived brain to work. “What difference does it make if anyone knows?”

“The company paid us her insurance,” Clara muttered. “Even though they shouldn’t have-at least, that’s what Mamá says-because Allie had gone off on her own. Whatever she was doing when she got killed, it wasn’t part of her job.”

“That shouldn’t affect her life insurance. Maybe it was workers’ comp?”

“What difference does it make?” Clara cried, and then looked around again, afraid her outburst had attracted attention.

Someone asked if we were waiting for the bathroom and pushed past us to use it. We moved deeper into the alcove, farther from the noise at the front of the shop.

“It doesn’t. You’re right, it doesn’t matter. At least, from a legal standpoint. The insurance company could demand their money back if they thought they’d paid a fraudulent claim. Is that how Rainier Cowles got involved?”

“I hate him.” Clara’s voice was savage. “Mamá and Papi were beside themselves when Allie died. They wanted to sue. They said the company was to blame for not taking care of Allie, but then he started showing up.”

“Cowles?”

She nodded.

“And what did he tell your folks?”