Sara Paretsky: Body Work

“What, shoot him?” I asked when she broke off.

That made her laugh.

“If you could do it and not get caught, I’d be your slave for life! No, but could you check him out, do you think, see who he is, see if there’s something you could do to make him stop?”

“Do you have his name?” I asked.

“Olympia calls him Rodney. I’m not sure what his last name is-Stranger-Danger, maybe.” She scrolled through her cell phone and held it out to me. “This is what he looks like.”

She’d taken his picture from above, when she was passing his table. It wasn’t a good likeness, but it didn’t surprise me to see it was the guy I’d pegged as an off-duty cop. Petra wasn’t working tonight, but she said she’d be at the club the next night. I promised to stop in, although it bugged me that my cousin insisted on staying on at the joint.

Petra zipped up her ski jacket, her face brighter now that she’d unburdened herself and gotten a promise of help. Even her hair, matted down by her ear warmer, seemed to be springing up.

“Vic-don’t tell Uncle Sal, okay? He’s already on me about the club being so degenerate and all, and-”

“Sweet Pea, I’m not so sure he’s wrong. If I see coke or ecstasy or some damned thing passing between Olympia and Mr. Stranger-Danger, you are quitting on the spot, you hear?”

“Sure, Vic, I promise.” She held up three fingers in the Girl Scout salute and danced out the door.

I finished my number crunching for Ajax Insurance. The claims manager seemed to have the intelligence of an eggplant. He should have been able to generate the report himself, but a hundred fifty an hour-I wouldn’t complain.

Ireturned to the club the following night. The Body Artist was appearing, and the joint was alive, practically shaking with twenty- and thirtysomethings. Rodney was there, and so were Chad and his friends. I didn’t see Nadia.

I took a table near the back, but Olympia swept over as I was pulling out a chair at one of the rear tables. Tonight she was wearing a black sweater with a deep cleavage over black velvet pants; her touch of white was a corsage of feathers that brushed the swell of her breasts.

“That table’s reserved, Warshawski. I don’t have a free seat in the house. You’ll have to stand.”

“Not a problem, Olympia.”

I got up and moved to the railing that created a kind of foyer between the audience space and the club entrance. I wasn’t going to give her an excuse to throw me out by losing my temper.

“And there’s a twenty-dollar cover on the night the Body Artist appears. All drinks are six dollars, more for name brands.”

I stuck a hand inside my sweater and pretended to be fumbling with my bra. “Want the money now?”

She frowned. “A private eye is bad for business, Warshawski. If you interrupt the show or harass the Artist, I’ll see that you’re thrown out.”

“I’ll tell you what’s bad for business, Ms. Koilada: you dealing drugs, or laundering money, or whatever you and Rodney are up to. I want you to know that my cousin Petra’s safety is very important to me.”

She flicked her eyes across the room again. “Petra is safe here. No one will hurt her. She’s popular with my customers and with the staff. She has the kind of good-natured high spirits that make a server popular. Some of our customers may get overenthusiastic in their reaction to her, but she seems levelheaded. I’d be surprised to know she was blowing up something trivial into something major.”

“Me, too. That’s why I took her reaction seriously. Olympia, even if I’m not a good-natured, high-spirited kind of gal, you could do worse than trust me with your problems. If this guy Rodney is posing a threat-”

“Maybe being a detective makes you think you can pry into people’s affairs, whether they want it or not, but my club is my business, not yours.”

“Who is Rodney?” I asked. “Is he a cop?”

“Are you deaf? I told you to mind your own business.”

She turned on her heel. The club needed too much supervising on a packed night like tonight for her to waste more time arguing with me.

I didn’t see her stop to talk to Rodney, but she must have because he got up from his table and came over to me.

“Girlie, you put one foot wrong here, and I’ll personally stuff your body in a snowbank.”

“‘Girlie’? You sound like a bad movie script, Rodney.”

His lips curved into something like a sneer. “Maybe, but you could look like part of a bad movie yourself if you try to mess with me. Got it?”

I leaned against the railing and yawned. “Go put on a sheet and dance around a cross if you want to scare people. That how you got Olympia so rattled?”

He pulled his hand back as if he were going to hit me but thought better of it in the nick of time.

“No one messes with me, girlie. Not you, and not that smart-mouthed cousin of yours, either.”

“People who mess with me or my cousin tend to spend a lot of years in Stateville, Rodney, when they aren’t picking themselves out of gutters-or snowbanks. Ask around, anyone will tell you the same. Now, go back to your chair. The band is packing up, the Artist will be onstage soon, and the rest of the audience will be peevish if you block their view.”

His face scrunched together in ugly lines like a thwarted toddler’s. He flipped his coat open so I could see the outsize gun in his shoulder holster, but I pretended to be looking at the stage.

He finally hissed, “Just watch yourself, girlie,” and swaggered back to his seat a few seconds before the houselights went down.

I made a face in the dark. Maybe I hadn’t changed so much from those days of trailing around South Chicago with Boom-Boom, looking for fights.

The lights came back up, and the routine followed its usual course, with the Artist appearing magically on her stool. The audience reacted in their usual way, gasping with amazement at the intricacy of the work on the plasma screens, shifting nervously with sexual excitement at the more graphic imagery.

Rodney, at his central table, was staring moodily at his sixth bottle of beer. He didn’t seem to be in the mood to paint tonight. Nadia had appeared without my noticing, perhaps when the lights were down, or maybe when Rodney was threatening me. She was at a table near the front, twirling her hair around her fingers. She didn’t wait, as she had the first time I’d seen her, for the rest of the room to paint. I studied Chad while Nadia painted, but he seemed to have himself under control. Maybe he was getting used to her. Or maybe his friends had persuaded him to stay calm. He seemed to be more intent on Nadia’s drawings than on Nadia herself-he was watching the screens onstage where the webcams were broadcasting her work.

Again, she was creating her intricate design. I’d remembered them as pink hats, but they were pink-and-gray scrolls. When she finished covering the Artist’s back with them, she began drawing a woman’s face, a beautiful young woman with dark curly hair, and then she took a palette knife and slashed it.

I looked over at Chad. He was sweating, and his tattooed arms were shaking. His buddies were holding him, but he didn’t make any effort to get out of his chair.

As soon as Nadia had finished, she went back to her table and gathered her coat and backpack from the floor. She skirted the back of the stage and disappeared. Chad suddenly broke away from his friends and followed her.

Most of the club, including the waitstaff, was focused on the Artist, who was stretching and preening to make Nadia’s work as visible as possible. Those who saw Chad might have assumed he was heading for the men’s room, since the toilets were along a narrow corridor that also led backstage. I pushed my way through the crowd at the back as fast as I could.