Sara Paretsky - Body Work

“The slashing, for sure,” Petra said. “But the animal surgery-it’s, like, being free to decide about your own body. How it looks, I mean. And how you want people to react. Do you know what it’s like to be me? Guys always saying, ‘How’s the air up there,’ and then they laugh like they’ve made the funniest joke anyone ever heard. And being blond-”

“It’s a burden, but you carry it well,” I suggested.

“See? That’s just it! Even you, mega-feminist, you’re laughing at me because I’m young and blond. If I put one of these horns on my head, people would think twice before they treated me like I have the brain of a two-year-old.” She flipped through the pages to a picture of a woman who’d had something resembling a rhino horn grafted onto her forehead.

I squeezed her shoulder. “Petra, I apologize, you’re right. If I promise to take you seriously, will you promise not to mutilate your face?”

“It’d be worth it just to see Uncle Sal’s expression, you know. Or when Daddy is on trial, it could freak out the jury, confuse them into acquitting him.” She bit her lip and looked determinedly through the book. “I don’t see anything about Karen in here, but you know, her stuff looks pretty tame compared to this.”

Petra was right. It made me wonder about the slitter blades in the living room. Had Karen decided she had to up the stakes in her act so she could grab more attention? A woman with a hidden identity and a thirst for attention. Strange combo. Unstable combo.

“She’s gone, don’t you think?” I said to my cousin. “No toothbrush, and although she’s obsessionally tidy, the drawers are open in here-she snatched socks and underwear, and whatever else she needed, on the fly. I’m guessing she took the discs she wanted and left the others thrown every which way. And there isn’t a piece of paper in the place. If she owns a bank card or any document with a name or a picture on it, she’s taken them with her.”

“To where?” Petra asked.

“I’m hoping she’ll go to her father. I’m going to drive up to Roehampton after we get back to the office and see if I can find him.”

“All that blood, you don’t think she got shot, do you?”

“I think it was from coming through the window. She didn’t have her jeans on when she left the club-maybe she was too rattled to put them on before diving into the kitchen. But we’ll check with hospitals, see if she might have gone in for an expert patch-up.” I grinned at Petra. “I’m so glad to have my high-rise assistant to off-load these tasks to. You’re going to have a fun afternoon on the phone.”

We walked back to the L stop. The snow wasn’t heavy, but we could see the traffic on the Kennedy going about ten miles an hour. Petra wasn’t the only one with a fun afternoon in front of her: I was going to have a great time on the Kennedy myself.

“I don’t get it,” Petra said as we got on the train. “If Frannie Pindero knew Anton Kystarnik, why didn’t she say something last night when those guys were beating her up?”

“Hard to say without talking to her. The other big question is, if Kystarnik isn’t blocking her website, who is? You any use as a hacker?” I asked my cousin.

“Sheesh, Vic, I’m not a geek!”

“You can be a fashionista and still know how to hack,” I objected. “What about your friends or lovers? Did you completely waste your time in college?”

She pulled a face. “You’re the crime expert. Don’t you know anyone?”

“Tim Radke,” I finally said. “He told me he was a systems something in the Army but hasn’t been able to find civilian work using his training-right now, he’s installing consumer electronics.”

I called his cell phone and asked if he’d be interested in a freelance systems job, something that might help prove Chad’s innocence.

He was out in the western suburbs again today, but he said he could make it to my office by eight-thirty or so.

At my office, I left Petra with a list of five or six hundred Chicago-area hospitals and picked up my car for the drive to Roehampton. It was after five p.m. when I got to the little coffee bar I’d visited the previous week. The couple behind the counter were cleaning their machines while a trio of women sat slumped at a table, drinking coffee. Their clothes and general fatigue suggested they were maids warming themselves before their long bus ride home. The two baristas were exhausted, too, but tried to pretend pleasure at seeing a customer.

“I don’t need anything,” I said, “and I won’t keep you from locking up. I was up here last week, and a guy named Clive was talking about Steve Pindero and his daughter, Frannie. I need to find Steve Pindero. If you don’t know him, maybe you can tell me how to reach Clive.”

The baristas looked at each other and slowly shook their heads.

“I remember you,” the male barista said. “You were asking about Melanie Kystarnik. We can’t share information about our customers with you.”

I shut my eyes and thought for a longish moment: it was time to put some cards on the table.

“Everyone is tired and wants to go home after a hard day’s work,” I said. “Including me. My hard day’s work yesterday ended at three this morning after I fought a bunch of thugs who were beating up two women in a nightclub. It began again four hours later with a call from a terrified teenager whose family is being harassed by these same thugs.”

The three maids were looking alert. Someone else’s troubles, danger faced by a remote party, good news all the way round. The young man behind the counter kept rubbing a cloth over the steaming spout for the big cappuccino machine, but he was paying attention. The young woman had stopped rinsing milk pitchers.

“My name is V. I. Warshawski, I’m a private investigator, and I’m trying to find out who shot and killed a young woman outside a nightclub right after New Year’s.” I took out the laminated copy of my license, and the couple behind the bar gave it a cursory look.

“Oh my, yes,” one of the maids said softly. “I read about that shooting. It was some crazy vet, wasn’t it, some poor boy who got his mind taken to bits fighting over there in Iraq.”

“That’s who the police arrested,” I agreed, “but I don’t believe he killed Nadia Guaman. I had never heard of Steve Pindero before I came in here the other day, but either his daughter, or someone using Frannie’s name has been performing as Karen Buckley at the nightclub where Nadia was murdered. Whoever she really is, she vanished last night. I’m hoping you can give me some ideas on how to trace Frannie, or maybe her dad. I looked up Steve Pindero online, but I couldn’t find him listed anywhere.”

The maids murmured among themselves, and then the oldest of the trio said, “Oh, no, miss, you wouldn’t find him. He died years ago. After his girl had the overdose and Zina died, it took the stuffing out of him. He was a cabinetmaker, see, living over in Highwood. His wife died when Frannie was a child, and he loved that girl like he was her mother and father both. Francine, her name was, but they called her Frannie, see. Steve, he used to take her with him in the summer when he was working on a job. She was so cute, tagging after him with her own little hard hat. Hard to remember now what a bright little girl she was after everything that happened later.”

“You knew her pretty well, then?” I suggested.

“Not to say I knew her well, but we’re a small community up here. Everybody knows everybody else’s business, and people talk. I work for a family called Gordon, and, a long time back, maybe twenty years, Steve did a big job for them. Little Miss Frannie, she used to stand on a ladder next to him handing him nails. It was a pretty picture.”