Sara Paretsky - Body Work

She began to pace the small basement, frenzied, a panther in a cage. “I got out of the hospital, and cops were waiting to talk to me, and Dad, he was shaking, he looked like an old man. I see him in my nightmares to this day-not just how afraid he was for me, whether I’d ever recover, but because he hadn’t known what Zina and I were doing. He was so disappointed in me. He had big hopes for me, I was going to go to college, I was going to be a painter-I was going to be his special success in the world! And then the cops got a tip, probably from Anton, and suddenly this whole pharmacy appeared in our basement.”

She gulped back hysterical laughter. “And then Anton showed up. He waited till Dad had left for work, then he beat me up and said I was lucky he didn’t kill me. He said it should’ve been me who died, not Zina, and if I told anyone where we got the drugs, he’d see that my dad was arrested, not him.

“I didn’t know what to do. But-my mom was dead. Her name-before she married, she was Karen Buckley, and my dad still had her old high school yearbook and her old high school ID. I took them and ran away, and called myself Karen Buckley.”

She’d spent so many years with her story locked inside her that once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. I sat quietly on the stool in front of the space heater.

“I couldn’t even tell my dad what I’d done because I was afraid he’d try to go after Anton, and Anton would have killed him, like swatting a fly. So I disappeared. I bummed around the country just living on what I could live on. I cleaned houses, I did some carpentry-I learned how, working with my dad in the summers-but I couldn’t get a regular job, I couldn’t do anything where they needed a Social Security number because then Anton would know where to find me, and I didn’t want to ever see him or hear from him again. I took some painting classes at local community colleges and worked on my art, but nothing was right in my life.

“Then I came back to Chicago and started this body art gig. I thought, I can be anonymous here behind all this paint, so I started doing it in public.”

“How did Anton find you?” I asked when she paused.

“Because my life is crap and nothing turns out right! It was that idiot bitch, Olympia. If I’d known she’d borrowed money from him, I never would have set foot in her goddamned bar! But she always did these kind of edgy acts, music and performance both, and when I pitched my body-painting idea she thought it would work because it was novel. That’s what you need in the club business, something new all the time. And it was starting to work, except Rodney came around. By now, he was Anton’s enforcer, but he’d been strictly junior grade when I was in high school. He recognized me from the sex parties.”

“Sex parties?”

“Oh, you know, Anton liked Zina and me to help entertain his friends. His wife was usually pretty stoned by the time night rolled around, and we thought at first it was fun. We made so much money, you can’t imagine-for a teenager to have a thousand dollars in cash-but sex with those guys-it’s why Zina and me, why we started using. Had to be high to get through the night. Anton, he had pictures, that’s why I couldn’t move without being afraid of him and blackmail.” She began chipping at her fingernails, tearing off little pieces and throwing them to the floor.

“So it must have been horrible when you saw Rodney at Club Gouge,” I said.

She looked up. “I’ll tell you what was really horrible. He knew me before I knew him on account of he’d put on about a hundred pounds. Anton had been sending him to Club Gouge just to keep the heat on Olympia about the money she owed. But when he recognized me, it all started again. Anton had this idea, he thought it was so damned funny-”

“Yes, to use you as his message center. I got that much. And that’s why you were so angry the night they came in and started beating on you.”

“I wanted to kill you,” she said. “If Anton thought I’d ratted him out to a cop, even a private one, my life was worth less than the paint covering me. So I ran home and grabbed my stuff and hid out. But then I saw your ads on the Net and I couldn’t stay away-I needed to see what you were doing in my name. I guess you were counting on that, weren’t you?”

She looked at me in surprise, as if startled to think I could be that clever.

“Hoping for it,” I said, “not counting on it. I didn’t know what would happen tonight. I wanted the cops to see an alternate version of the story of Nadia’s murder. I thought if you were here, you could fill in some critical blanks.”

The Artist began fiddling with the paintbrushes I’d left out on the counter.

“Yes, poor Nadia. I thought she was full of drama-self-drama-over her sister. Poor Allie, too. Is that really what happened to her? Raped and murdered in Iraq?”

“It’s what really happened to her. The wrong guy got shot tonight. Just my opinion, but the corporate guys, MacLean and Scalia-nothing will happen to them. Once the Guamans threatened legal action over Alexandra’s death, they must have talked to her boss in Iraq, that guy Mossbach. Scalia and MacLean are the ones who got Cowles to pay off the family. In my book, that makes them accessories to Alexandra’s rape and murder. Well, maybe Finchley will get enough evidence to arrest Scalia for Nadia’s death, but I don’t see a murder charge sticking. Meanwhile, Scalia and MacLean are responsible for hundreds of American dead because they substituted sand for gallium in their body armor.”

The Artist had limited interest in any life other than her own, certainly not in Tintrey, or unknown soldiers overseas. She flung the brushes down and walked over to the stairs leading up to the club.

“Not quite yet, Ms. Pindero. I need to know how Tintrey and Anton came together. Tintrey was blocking your website, I’m pretty sure of that, and Anton didn’t know it the night he came to Club Gouge to try to force you to bring the site back online. Yet two days later, Anton was providing MacLean backup at the Guaman house.”

“Anton will kill anyone for no reason,” she said. “Or break their necks just for fun, if he’s in the mood.” Her voice had gone flat again, and all expression had left her face.

“Yes,” I said, “that’s pretty much how I have him pegged, too. That’s why I figured you needed an insurance policy after you ran away. You were scared, that was obvious from the way you’d recklessly jumped through the back window of your apartment-”

“You found my home?” She came back into the main part of the room, her face white. “How?”

“I’m ignorant about a lot of stuff, Ms. Pindero,” I said, “but I’ve been tracking missing people for a long time. When I saw the frenzied way you’d come and gone, I thought you might call Anton, keep him happy by telling him that it was Tintrey blocking the site.”

She stood perfectly still, not even seeming to breathe. There was a piece I was missing, a piece she didn’t want me to figure out. I tried to relax, to let go of my anxious thinking, to recall what had happened the different times I’d seen her perform in the club. The night of the memorial for Nadia Guaman, I’d seen Vesta and Rivka. And the boys from Tintrey had been there.

“Rainier Cowles was in the club when you did your memorial,” I said slowly. “You denied knowing him.”

“I’d never seen or heard of him.” Her eyes were wary.

“No. But Vesta looked at him through the curtains, and you asked her to point him out to you. A day or two later, you went to his office. You didn’t know if he could be useful to you or not, but he was an important lawyer. And he had a connection to the Guaman sisters.”